Are You Tired of Living Through History?
Me too. It's exhausting
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, 1954
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of living through history.
Yes, yes — ironic, coming from a guy whose whole brand is associated with culling lessons from history to help leaders in the present.
But the regular drumbeat of catastrophes, crises, and calamities (or near ones, at least) is exhausting.
It all just seems so…uncertain. As if we’re constantly living on the edge, unsure of what happens next.
And you know humans: we despise uncertainty. It’s vague and amorphous. Uncontrollable.
Oh, but we’ll take risk over uncertainty any day — at least with risk, you’re exercising a choice, so it feels like there’s a level of precision .
“Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.” — William Jennings Bryant, 1899
So when we bemoan the tumultuous and uncertain times of our present, we’re looking back at history, thinking there was never this kind of turmoil — “It was so much simpler in my time,” we might tell someone from a younger generation.
And we couldn’t be more wrong.
Social media and smartphones are inflicting indelible harm on your children, as Jonathan Haidt would have you believe.1 That makes parenting more difficult today.
Economic volatility, rapid technological advances, talent acquisition and retention, disruption from agile startups, a fraught regulatory environment — all of these combine to make a CEO’s job as hard as it’s ever been.
Political turmoil that seems destined to set Americans on a course for a second Civil War.
While all of these may seem complex and unparalleled, with outcomes that are anything but certain, the reality is that parents, CEOs, and citizens have all struggled before.
“The less a man knows about the past and the present, the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.” — Sigmund Freud, 1927
Clarity Amid Uncertainty
What we might not realize, as we focus the lens of our present on the past, is that they were just as worried and uncertain as we are.
The stories of the past are already written. We know the endings. But for every hero, villain, and everyman of the past, they had no sense of the future.
There were moments when Abraham Lincoln was bereft, thinking that the Union might be defeated by the Confederacy. Henry Ford’s first two car companies failed before Ford Motor Company was founded.
What does that tell us?
It tells us that there is always a way through and that the leaders who have a clear and compelling vision and regularly articulate it, will succeed.
In a recent issue of Fortune CEO Daily Simon Freakley, CEO of Alix Partners wrote:
“This is a dramatic reminder that we are heading for a very challenging time, whoever wins the elections. CEOs have to be a voice of reason and stability, without being partisan. Employees will look to business leaders for reassurance.”
Faith vs. Grief
The constant drumbeat of uncertainty in the present may be giving people trauma, which manifests as grief. But not just any kind of grief. Anticipatory grief.
David Kessler, one of the foremost experts on grief, he explains in this Harvard Business Review article:
“Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. Usually it centers on death…Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined future. There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there.”
As with any challenge, if we meet it with confidence in ourselves, we can combat this grief. Even if we’ve never witnessed something personally before, there’s a kind of confidence that give us hope.
Precursive faith is a belief in ourselves, combining initial confidence and resilient confidence, that we believe in ourselves enough to accomplish something. Imagine instilling that kind of belief into those you’re trying to inspire.
The best thing we can do for each other in any crisis or moment of uncertainty is to provide reassurance through a commitment to staying true to who you are and what you stand for — this is what I do for clients — and what your vision is.
I have a lot of other thoughts on this topic to share with you, including a number of inspirational quotes and some essays from the Timeless & Timely archives, but its too much to include in this issue (I didn’t want you to be uncertain about when you’d reach the end).
Here’s one, just as a sampler:
If you’re feeling unmoored right now, here’s the follow-up essay to today’s to help you get through things:
Meanwhile, let’s end with Tolkien, just as we began, this time from The Two Towers:
“I can’t do this, Sam.”
“I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?
But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.”
“What are we holding on to, Sam?”
“That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”
There’s so much to learn,
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Johnathan Haidt, Penguin Press, 2024.
Brilliant, Scott. I recall a statement my wife said sometime ago, “If we forget our past, we are destined to repeat it.” She may have borrowed that but it’s true nonetheless.