Survival Is Insufficient

“Survival,” as was once noted by one of TV’s best ever characters, Seven Of Nine, in the second episode of the sixth season of Star Trek: Voyager and which was subsequently uttered throughout the brilliant sci-fi referencing post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, “is insufficient.” If, like many people, you spend your working days wondering when your next tea break is or whether to have chips or mashed potato with your chicken nuggets for dinner, it is likely that you not only don’t share Seven Of Nine’s endless quest for both personal improvement and the answers to the big questions that the universe poses us but also that you would be in line for the former Borg’s most contemptuous stare (if you’ve seen ST:V, you will know what this looks like!) should you and her ever bump into each other while you were spending another lost afternoon mindlessly rummaging around the cheap underwear section of Primark. If we are ever to reach our potential, either as individuals or as a greater collective species (of individuals, not necessarily as a Borg-like hive mind), then we need to dare to be a little different and to move away from the mindset of just getting by, of simply minding the shop until it’s no longer our turn to do so. Getting past the idea that we are simply here to survive requires us to take occasional calculated risks with our lives, both from a personal and a professional perspective, rather than to just to count off the days on our calendars until they finally form a fence-like design of moments that we will never get back but which we could possibly have done a lot more with, had we realised that the key to unlocking our potential lay simply with our willingness to improve. Although ambition in its blindest form can, as Radiohead noted one of the finest albums ever in 1997, “make you look pretty ugly”, especially when it causes people to trample over others in pursuit of their intended gains, its existence in our lives is necessary if we are ever going to be better versions of ourselves from day to week to month to year; to be quite happy to stay the same throughout our lives and to never really learn anything or to make any effort to evolve, whatever our current situation, is perhaps the greatest self-imposed barrier that we could ever face and very frequently our greatest competition isn’t other people but rather our own procrastination or unwillingness to try.

 

A desire to improve, as a person or as a professional (or as both, the two aren’t always completely distinct!), is key to improvements being made over time; without this wish to actually reach a better state than is currently occupied it is very unlikely indeed that even the first footstep on a journey of development will be made. Learning, of course, is a lifelong process that is often forced upon us through exposure to difficult moments, but sometimes the issue needs to be pushed through a genuine desire to grow and reach the heights that we aspire to. In his most recent autobiography, My Life In Football, Kevin Keegan recalls a conversation with one of the greatest influences upon his own very successful career, his former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly: “’A man should always do his best, whatever he attempts’, he used to tell me. ‘If you’re going to sweep the street then make sure your street is always the cleanest in town.’” Quite often, in order to make improvements to ourselves, we need to be certain about which areas we need to improve in, and to do this we must be students of our own existences and reach levels of self-reflection and self-awareness that enable the process to begin; without knowing where to improve ourselves, any attempts to progress could simply be building upon skills that already exist rather than targeting areas that remain underdeveloped. Self-awareness must always be in place before self-improvement can begin, as quite often changes in our lives come from the simple acts of transforming our own habits. In his seminal 1970 book, Motivation And Personality, the psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote how all individuals have an in-built need for personal development which occurs through a process that he termed self-actualisation, which exists atop a pyramid structure (his oft-quoted hierarchy of needs) above other human needs, ranging from the basic psychological needs such as food, water, oxygen, shelter, temperature regulation, sleep and relaxation, activity and exercise and sex at the base, through safety needs, love and belongingness, esteem needs, cognitive needs and finally, before the final piece, the aesthetic needs of beauty and order, creativity, design and art. Self-actualisation, he noted, is about reaching full potential and becoming everything that an individual is capable of becoming. What is clear from the pages of the book is that Maslow believed that each person not only has limitless room for growth but also that in order to reach full potential and to become self-actualised an individual must be in touch with their feelings, experiencing life fully and with total concentration and absolute focus upon making the improvements that they know are what are necessary for them. If survival rather than reaching potential is our focus, then we never really get much higher up than the second step of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with only psychological needs and safety being of any worth to us in our daily lives; from this perspective, survival really is, surely, insufficient. The problem is, of course, that simply existing and not really pushing oneself to greater heights can sometimes be quite a comfortable existence, regardless of how it may seem from the outside. Not having to think too much or face a great deal of challenges can to many people appear like a very attractive prospect, but the reality is that real growth tends only to occur when comfort zones are left behind and more difficult moments are tackled intentionally. Becoming self-actualised and making improvements to oneself are not achieved quickly or at the flick of a switch and often require much commitment, desire and discomfort. It is also possible to overcome many of the instinctual elements that can keep us wallowing in the bottom reaches of the human existence that is described by Maslow’s pyramidal diagram, as noted by Max Tegmark in his book Life 3.0: “Our brains are way smarter than our genes, and now we understand the goal of our genes (replication), we find it rather banal and easy to ignore. People might realise why their genes make them feel lust, yet have little desire to raise fifteen children, and therefore choose to hack their genetic programming by combining rewards of intimacy with birth control.” To make improvements, we need to know who we currently are, who we want to be, what improvements we need to make and how we are to go about making them, as well as being determined to succeed upon the journey of personal development that we set out on.

 

The personal model of seeking continuous improvements can also be applied on a larger scale to communities or organisations. In Japanese culture, for example, a term that is often referred to in this sense, is Kaizen (改善), which is frequently now used elsewhere as a synonym for improvement but which actually is a compound word made up of two Japanese words, kai (change) and zen (good). The principle of Kaizen comes a 1986 book (Kaizen: The Key To Japan’s Competitive Success) by Masaaki Imai, an organisational theorist and management consultant, who identified that the keys to continuous improvements in any successful organisation were feedback, efficiency and evolution. For feedback, Imai wrote that a core principle of the Kaizen process is self-reflection, much as is noted earlier in this blog as an essential part of personal development; for efficiency, the importance of identifying and eliminating barriers to success was stated and for evolution, the author made it very clear that effective Kaizen is based around the idea of smaller incremental gains rather than the giant leaps forward that are often seen by some as a sign of true progress. Importantly, the process of Kaizen also insists upon ideas coming from all areas of an organisation instead of simply relying upon the great ideas of a powerful or inspirational leader; it is the caretakers and lesser paid employees as much as the CEO or other board members who are able to make specific contributions to the success of an effective team. The idea of people at all levels of an organisation contributing towards its success has existed for a long time, of course, and it is not difficult to find many anecdotes regarding this online, including the story of how John F. Kennedy visited the NASA headquarters in 1961 and, whilst touring the facility, introduced himself to a janitor who was mopping the floor and asked him what he did for the organisation; reportedly, the response was as follows: “I’m helping to put a man on the moon.” More concrete evidence upon how an over-dependence upon one individual being responsible for moving an organisation forward rather than accepting ideas from different areas can be found in Dr. Carol Dweck’s Mindset book, where she describes the story of Lee Iacocca, the former CEO of Chrysler and who she refers to as having had a rather bad dose of “CEO disease”, meaning that a leader prefers to be “reigning from atop a pedestal and wanting to be seen as perfect.” Aiming to always improve, as both a CEO leading an organisation and as an organisation itself, is something that is much more likely to lead to success, and Dr. Dweck goes on to note that “Not everyone catches CEO disease. Many great leaders confront their shortcomings on a regular basis. Darwin Smith, looking back on his extraordinary performance at Kimberley-Clark, declared, ‘I never stopped trying to be qualified for the job.’” Outstanding organisations, quite frankly, are made up of outstanding teams rather than simply having one single outstanding individual at the top, and where Kaizen or continuous improvements do happen it is often because the diversity of the team enable this to take place. In his book The Element, Sir Ken Robinson, writing about the successes over time enjoyed by The Beatles, writes that “For all that they had in common, culturally and musically, Lennon and McCartney were very different as people, and so too were George Harrison and Ringo Starr. It was their differences that made their creative work together greater than the sum of their individual parts.” From my own perspective as a teacher for almost a quarter of a century (yikes!) and a school leader for the best part of a decade, I have learned that the best schools are those where all individuals are committed to not only improving themselves but also making a positive difference to the life of the school. Sharing a school’s key improvement priorities and giving ownership of elements of the overall plan to professionals with areas of responsibility helps greatly in this regard, with progress being more likely once everyone understands what it is that they are all working for and what they can do to help the organisation to get there. If there are people who are not on board and who are not committed to either personal or organisational improvement and for whom survival is very much sufficient, then growth is always likely to be much more difficult to achieve. Just getting by, in any sense, is never going to be enough if potential is something that we want to reach; to begin on a journey of self-improvement we need to take the first and most important step, namely an understanding that survival really is insufficient.