I keep seeing joyful odes on the wonders of pressure in my LinkedIn feed.
“Pressure can burst a pipe or make a diamond”. I say, let the pressure fuel your efforts. Let it put a flame to the spark within you so as to ignite your ambition to overcome any situation, be it big or small. Thoughts?
My thoughts: It depends. Some people perform best under pressure, or almost only under pressure because they constantly procrastinate. I plead GUILTY. For the last several years, work became one fire fight after another. The brief respites were times to recover. So yes, under pressure was the main time when I was productive.
But it also depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Are you grinding thru financials on a strict deadline? Or, are creating something beautiful and lasting? If the latter, what kind of paint job would the Sistine Chapel have if Michelangelo had been given a strict one year deadline instead of the four years taken?
When I hear of the joys of pressure my mind goes back again to James Hilton’s words in Lost Horizon:
“It is significant ….. that the English regard slackness as a vice. We, on the other hand, should vastly prefer it to tension. Is there not too much tension in the world at present, and might it not be better if more people were slackers?”
Pressure guided my life for decades. Now it feels so right to guide my own life. Adding pressure from within, but only on the right occasions, because after all … You’d be surprised there’s so much to be done. Count all the bees in the hive. Chase all the clouds from the sky…