Don’t get attached to your work.

Buddhists speak of a Noble Truth – that life is suffering. Not necessarily physical suffering – like when you have a bad back – but the ordinary everyday suffering that comes with being human. Call it suffering or call it sadness, disease or discomfort. The fact of the matter is that we all die, we age, we divorce, we drift apart from those we love. Our teeth fall out, we get wiped out in the stock market. We don’t get what we want and it makes us sad. We do get what we want and it makes us sad.

This is not suffering. This is just pain. Suffering has a dimension beyond pain.

We label things as problems and react. When we identify problems in our lives and react to them, we generally create suffering.

The cause of this suffering is that we insist on forming permanent attachments to things which are not, by nature, permanent.

To understand this better, try to come up with one thing you have today that you can be absolutely sure you will have tomorrow.

Not your job. You could be fired or your company could lay you off.

Not your health. You could find out tomorrow you have cancer.

Not your family. Your spouse could divorce you; your kids could move away.

Not your house. It could be lost to fire, flood or weather.

Yet, these may be the most important things in your life today.

Does this mean that you shouldn’t cherish and appreciate the people and things that are precious to you? Far from it. We all gravitate towards pleasure and comfort and we all want nice things. Part of the intrinsic nature of being human is that we want good things to last and bad things to go away.

So, to acknowledge that all things fade and pass away in time doesn’t mean that you’ll never have great pleasure in life and that you’re doomed to be unhappy. But the inescapable fact is that everything, the good and the bad, goes away over time.

Nothing is permanent and everything is transitory. No feeling is ever final. It’s just that we don’t act as if this is the case. We live as if certain things are promised or owed to us. Then we’re surprised and hurt when life does what it does and these things are taken from us. We end up with something other than what we think we signed up for.

The obvious solution to this dilemma is to drop the attachments to what we already have and what we want and to accept our lack of control over the realities of life.

This is one of the more helpful little nuggets of advice a businessperson can take away from Buddhism. It seems counterintuitive, but in fact it’s perfectly logical when you think about it.

When I suggested to a CEO recently that his employees would be better served if they lost attachment to the outcome of their work he had a typical reaction.

Was I nuts? Where would their motivation come from? How could he suggest that they not work towards goals? Was I seriously suggesting that they should just stop trying?

But of course I wasn’t suggesting that they not try an do their absolute best to achieve a desired outcome.. They should know what they want and work as hard as they possibly could to get it with the knowledge that they didn’t have control over the outcome. So if things didn’t turn out they way they expecte they’d at least have the satisfaction of a job well done.

The idea of lack of control was another stumbling block for our CEO.

Wasn’t it true, I asked him, that he didn’t really have control over the outcomes of any of his projects anyway? He denied this. But he was open-minded and willing to go a little further down this road. And I had had too long a run as a business person myself not to know that deals sometimes go sour for the flimsiest of reasons.

“Haven’t you ever had a deal just crash and burn”, I asked?

“Sure” , he said.

“Why did you do that”, I asked?

“I had nothing to do with it,” he responded” the other guy got bought out by”… then he stopped and caught himself with a smile.

Okay, so there was one time he hadn’t had control over the outcome. And if he could find one example – then there were more.

In fact, unless you have 100% control over every detail which may affect your project including the weather, the economy, the exchange rate, not to mention the health, life and death of all participants – the outcome is never secure.

Our CEO then volunteered that his staff had been devastated when several months of hard work had gone down the tubes. I could sympathize. It’s hard to come back from a blow like that. It’s tough to have to walk into the office the next day and start all over.

“But what if”, I suggested, “your staff had still worked themselves to the bone and done all they possibly could to achieve their desired outcome with the knowledge that it may or may not happen?

What if they would have gotten intrinsic satisfaction from a job well done as they went along? What if they would have celebrated the quality of their work, the camaraderie, the small triumphs of teamwork and ingenuity along the way?”

He thought about this and nodded slowly.

“Sure, he said “if the outcome would have been successful that would have been gravy. But all they were focusing on was outcome, outcome, outcome – not the process of doing.

So when the outcome was whipped away from them they had nothing to take away from the experience but heartache”.

Loosening our death grip on “the way things should be.” is not surrendering to fatalism. Acknowledging that what we desperately want to have happen may not happen is not giving up.

We influence the future day by day, minute by minute by our present actions. We take productive action to move towards our purpose knowing that there’s no guarantee we will get there.

We do the very best we can. It’s all we can ask of ourselves and others.