Bull shit estimates that help.

Faced with an odd problem yesterday. Was chatting an old old friend about his project situation. Seemed like he was working in a foreign country but doing some good work. Problem: He didn’t want to be there and wanted to be home. Bigger Problem: I didn’t know what to tell him.

Often times the remedies for disgruntled employees are in form of reminders. They are either performed by ourselves or then our friends, families and colleagues. The reminders are simple. “Your time will come, just wait it out.” “Hang in there buddy” “Well at least you are not doing …… kinda crap work” “Don’t lose sight of the goal” “Everybody goes through this, you are not the only one” “What other option do you have any way?” So reminders go from infusing positives about better things to come, to updates on current status to threat about the “what ifs” and “what else”.

As much as we don’t embrace these ideologids wholeheartedly and feel we need to constantly try to find a better life - no matter what, point is simple: they work.

However, this time I engaged in another form of pacification for the soul: Bullshit estimates or guesstimates (academic lingo, may be) or rational streamlined assumptions from varying pieces of information (consulting jargon, has to be).

I told him there are two things to be considered here. A) Happy Personal Life B) Successful Career. Now you can’t have both all the time. So either you are happy with both A and B which makes you part of 10% of the population at given point of time. Or you happy with either A or B which makes you part of the 70% of the population. Or then you are the sorry remaining 20% and you better do something about A or B.

My Source: I have no freaking idea. But it worked! He realized what I was talking about and made a choice and with that ended his two day depressing period. I told him there is nothing to worry about, if you feel you have a good personal life, be happy about it and seek a better job. If you have sucky personal life, then seek to improve it with job, heibus corpus.

This leads me to believe that bull shit estimates really help, I would say 3 out of 10 times :)