Episode 4: The Pendulum

People are pretty notoriously terrible when you think about it at zooming out and evaluating the big picture.
Now, obviously, this is not it's sort of a matter of scale.
You know, there are plenty of people who are capable of zooming out from their current situation, looking at the big picture, making decisions strategically minded.
I'm not arguing that there aren't people that do this, but as a whole and even instance to instance, sometimes even if you're a great strategic minded thinker who really can think about the big picture.
Or sometimes when you get caught up in the details and it could be of anything, it could be of your personal life.
Perhaps you're going through some things that absorb a lot of your time and attention and it's hard to pull yourself out of that to look at where things might go in the long run.
Perhaps it's part of your professional life where things are proceeding at a, you know, an organization that you work for that you don't like.
And it's just hard to pull yourself and separate yourself to try to step back and look at everything, all of the information and figure out if things will shift, trend in a better direction, trend in a worse direction.
When I started my career, I had the fortune of having a friend and mentor who was there kind of with me when I was just getting started out.
I've never been entirely sure how – he's older than me, but I'm not really sure how old, much older.
I've never really asked that question, but he had been, you know, working in technology for quite a while, longer than me already.
I was just getting started out and it was a huge benefit to have him, you know, impart – there to impart some wisdom to me.
And aside from being – I mean he was kind of a good mixture, right, because I was beginning out as a developer at the time.
He was both a good technical and developer type of advisor and mentor.
He was also just a broad thinker about how organizations function, how careers progress, all that sort of thing.
One of the things that he introduced me to, among other things in the very beginning, was this idea of a pendulum.
And the idea goes like this, whatever – you know, time only moves in one direction, right?
So if you are proceeding – or if you're at a – let's say you're at a company and that company is currently trending in a given direction.
And you could look at this at different levels.
You could be looking at this at your individual work or a team level or a company level or a department level.
It just sort of depends where you want to apply this.
But once you start looking around for it, you can kind of see it all over the place.
But let's say your company is – the company you work for is moving in a particular direction.
Let's say they are – it's a company that is currently growing and exploding.
The idea behind the pendulum is that while it is swinging in that direction for the time being, at some point, that will hit sort of its end state as far as the pendulum can swing.
And then that pendulum will begin swinging in the other direction.
These phases can be long.
It can swing for quite a while in one direction before swinging back in the other.
They can be short.
And I find the metaphor really holds up because if it has been a long swing, if it has been a dramatic long swing in one direction, the swing back tends to be even more extreme.
And I found this to be very true throughout the course of my career, my personal life, all sorts of things.
And if you start looking for it, I think you find it to be much more accurate than not.
Accurate more of the time than not.
The overall piece of advice here being is that if you are in a place – again, apply it wherever you want, personal life, professional life, whatever.
If you are in a place that you want to be, if you think things are generally where you want them to be but there is something about it that is aggravating or you think it's treading in the wrong direction or whatever.
The general idea here being that if you are patient enough, eventually it will swing back in the other direction and you can catch that backswing.
But it's what it brings into the next question.
So let's say this is true.
Let's say you agree with this premise that things sort of swing from one side of a spectrum to another.
What do you do with that information?
And I think this is where the personal choice of things comes in because you could look at this from a number of different angles and it can become a bit of a brain-mind-twisting sort of experience.
On the one hand, if things are trending in the right direction, you might think to yourself, well, let me ride this as far as it can go.
That's one option.
On the other hand, if you think that that momentum is starting to slow or if you think you know where the end state of this is and if you think it's not too far away, perhaps the answer is to get out of that scenario and find something else that is only beginning to swing in that direction.
Perhaps that's a better piece of foresight.
If something is swinging in a direction that you don't like, if you are part of a situation where things are really trending poorly, can you judge how far is it until you hit the end state extreme?
Is that a state worth waiting for?
Because remember, when you hit the end state extreme, if you think of a pendulum swinging back and forth with the middle point being sort of neutral,
even once a – and let's say the pendulum is swinging to the right and then begins to swing to the left, there is still a bunch of time to go through between when it hits that extreme on, let's say, the right
And before it actually crosses back across that neutral point into whatever the other direction is.
Whenever I've leaned on this in my life, it has almost always come to fruition.
And it is – it does fall victim a little bit to – I forget what the – I think it's a logical fallacy.
But essentially, you can't really prove this wrong.
It's not disprovable in that you can always make the argument, well, you just didn't wait long enough for it to swing in the other direction.
So I think there are problems with this theory if you were trying to scientifically test it.
This is much more of a gut feeling sort of thing.
But when I have been patient and waited long enough, things do tend to eventually swing back in the other direction.
Things shift. Things move.
There have been other times that I have jumped off, you know, things that have been swinging in one direction.
To find that I either jumped off at a good time, that there was still much more of a swing to go, or a bad time where I jumped off and then things immediately swung back in the other direction.
I think no matter how you look at it, the key is to be at peace with your decision, of course.
You don't want to feel regretful on these things.
But the overall point of just keeping – I've always kept this in the back of my mind.
And it's just always been there, particularly when I feel like things are becoming very extreme, whether that's extremely good or extremely bad or unfavorable or whatever.
And trying to remind myself that this won't proceed forever in either direction.
So on the positive side, enjoy it while you can.
On the negative side, cut through it because you won't have to forever.
So I don't know.
What about you?
I don't know if you see places where this applies to your life.
I have found this to be very true in mine.
And it's a piece of wisdom that I picked up in my early part of my career and a younger part of my life that I feel has served me very well.
Something that when I remind myself of it or when I remember that this is a core piece of what I believe, it goes a long way towards providing me patience with any scenario, good, bad, or otherwise.