20190424.0430

I read yet another piece LinkedIn recommended for me: Michelle Gibbings's 14 April 2019 "The Upside of Bad Days." The piece is a fairly shallow rehash of traditional advice: shit happens, and you can either complain or do something about it.
A couple of points come to mind to discuss in relation to the article. It is important, certainly, to move ahead with things when possible, despite the events of a day going bad (though what Gibbings calls "going bad" and what I might call it differ; missing a meeting or losing a document is an annoyance, while having a house flood or having to take a sick child to the hospital on her birthday because she has pneumonia is a bad day). Wallowing in the annoyance does not help, and it does, as Gibbings usefully notes (in one of the few instances of her doing so in the article), tend to drag others down. Even amid it, things need doing, and not getting them done will only serve to make things worse than they already are, to increase the annoyance or make for a really bad day, after all.
More important, to my mind, is a tendency of which Gibbings seems representative. I've sat through a number of motivational talks, and I've read a number of pieces by motivational speakers. Every one of them has seemed insipid to me--and, worse, convinced of its own profundity. I know that the presentations have to believe their own hype; it's simple marketing, and they are in the business of selling themselves and their "services," as I probably ought to be. And I know I am not likely among the intended primary audiences for such things (which bespeaks yet another area in which social media platforms' algorithms need refinement); I do not think such presentations are actually looking at people who have read as I have read and who have had the time to sit and think about that reading--and how it reflects and fails to reflect those parts of life that can be observed from a good spot for reading--as I have had. So it should not be a surprise that they do not much register with me, that they come across as more annoyance, if not outright insult, than inspiration.
Then again, I do find myself writing about such things. I am using them as springboards for my own productivity, insofar as I can call the effort spent putting words into this webspace productive. So perhaps I am not so immune to them as I might like to think myself...