One of the unexpected benefits of hearing loss was that I spent a lot of time watching people. While everyone else seemed busy talking, I was often trying to work out what was actually happening.
Over the years, and after travelling through different countries and meeting people from every imaginable background, I kept noticing the same thing. The people who seemed to cope best with life weren't always the smartest, the richest or the most educated. More often than not, they were simply organised. Not colour-coded spreadsheet organised, but organised enough to know where they were supposed to be, what mattered, and how to follow through.
Back in the 1990s we somehow managed to arrange to meet someone two weeks later at six o'clock on a random street corner and, remarkably, both people usually arrived. There was no message five minutes beforehand explaining that someone was "running late", which often translated to "I've only just started getting ready." We simply knew where we were meant to be and organised ourselves accordingly. Looking back, I don't think that was remarkable at all. It was simply organisation.
For a long time I assumed that as society became more connected these habits would become even more common. Instead, something else happened. The internet arrived, followed by social media, and suddenly many of us became far more interested in managing how we appeared than managing ourselves. We learned how to present an image, build a personal brand and market ourselves long before we learned some of the quieter skills that make everyday life work well.
The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that organisational skills thrive in authentic environments. Reality has very little interest in appearances. Eventually it asks much simpler questions. Did you remember? Did you prepare? Did you follow through? Authentic environments expose weaknesses while they're still small enough to fix. Pretence often does the opposite, allowing confusion to masquerade as confidence and disorganisation to look like individuality - at least for a while.
One of the reasons I eventually wrote No, I Won't Buy You a Drink! was because many of the ideas I'd been carrying for years seemed to be becoming more relevant rather than less. The qualities that quietly help people navigate life well - attention, responsibility, preparation, honesty and organisation - rarely attract much attention, yet they still seem to shape who copes well when life becomes complicated.
Looking back, I kept returning to one surprisingly simple conclusion. Before we teach people how to market themselves, perhaps we should teach them how to manage themselves. The world already has plenty of packaging. It could probably use a little more organisation.
Topics:
#HumanBehaviour #Observation #Authenticity #Organisation #LifeLessons #AustralianAuthor #DJGifford #Memoir #HumanConnection #NoIWontBuyYouADrink