by Adam
For this post, we’ll be focusing on Episode 2, Season 9 ("Roy's Wedding") and Episode 3, Season 9 ("Andy's Ancestry").
We left off our last post in this series by highlighting the multifaceted-ness of Jim’s shaky new career direction. He had just, without any consultation with his wife, accepted a role in a high-risk start-up company located more than 100 miles away from where they currently live.
Which is… a perfectly normal thing to do… nothing to see here… right?
Wrong.
In fact, before continuing on with the narrative of the story, or my thoughts on how it links back to mentorship concepts we’ve developed on this blog, I’m going to ask you to do a little reflection.
Can you think of a time in your life where you’ve overcommitted? It doesn’t have to be on the scale of Jim’s promissory blunder. What about something small? Surely, you have before.
Many highly driven individuals face a certain kind of tough choice on a daily or weekly basis: reconciling their aspirations with the constraints of being a human being. Those constraints may include:
- Only having 24 hours in one day, and needing to sleep, eat, and attend to your personal hygiene
- Pursuing goals without sacrificing character
- Maintaining healthy balance between different goals and self-care requirements
- Reconciling aspirations with the wants and needs of family
While Jim’s actions fit more neatly into some of those buckets than others, I think it’s important to point out that his experience is thematic of the larger phenomenon. Human beings are constantly facing trade-offs in pursuit of their goals. In fact, successfully navigating these trade-offs, and optimizing your decisions in light of your mission and goals, constitute the blocking and tackling of following the mentorship program.
It’s great to lay out a good plan, but that can’t distract you from the very real need to execute on that plan! Good intentions are immeasurably better than meandering through life with no intentions at all. But, good intentions alone won’t get you where you want to go.
So, back to Jim. First, he provides us a little more context for that telephone call we heard in the last episode:
Jim: “I started a new business with my college friend. But, Pam doesn’t know....umm… actually, I did tell Pam, and we decided “no.” But then I decided yes anyway, so, I’m thinking there’s another conversation coming, and it’s hard to know when that will be.”
And, later on, we hear another phone call that has Jim digging himself ever deeper into a hole:
Jim: “Right, and did you show them the market, yeah, and what’d they say, that's awesome, oh my god, wow! … its not even real yet, and I’m not going to tell her until its real”
Despite Jim’s secrecy, Pam suspects something:
Pam: “I think maybe there actually is something I don’t know about Jim”
And, finally, in a conversation with Darryl about their current employment situation, Jim is faced with the truth of what he has (and hasn’t) been doing:
Jim: “You doin’ alright man?”
Darryl: “I’m done. I gotta get out of here.”
Jim: “Yeah, not the easiest day to be assistant regional manager.”
Darryl: “It’s not just today, it’s every day. Seems like the better title that I have, the stupider my job gets.”
Jim: “Come on, it can always get better, right?”
Darryl: “Yeah, right.”
Jim: “No, I’m serious, there’s always something better.”
Darryl: “Like what.”
Jim: “Like hypothetically, if I said that there was another job, that you and I could both have”
Darryl: “What kind of job”
Jim: “Something cool, like sports marketing, or…does that sound like something you’d be into?”
Darryl: “Hell yeah”
Jim: “Right?”
Darryl: “That sounds awesome”
Jim: “Ok but wait, what if I told you that it was in Philly, so you’d have to…”
Darryl: “I love Philly”
Jim: “Right?”
Darryl: “That’s not even a thought…”
Jim: “Not even a thought, its not even that far away, I could still commute, exactly. Exactly! Alright!”
Darryl: “Wait wait wait, so what, is this happening?”
Jim: “Oh its happening, lets just keep it between you and me for right now”
Darryl: “Ok, yeah yeah yeah..man, so Pam’s into it?”
Jim: “We haven’t talked about it but I think that she’s, I think she understands what this is…”
Darryl: “Oh, come on man, I thought you had something real”
Jim: “What, no no no, come on, this is real”
Darryl: “It’s not real until your wife is on board”
Darryl’s right: Jim’s order of operations is out of whack. On some level, Jim surely knows this. You can practically feel it in the conversation! Jim knows he shouldn’t be keeping this to himself, and uses Darryl as a psychological stand-in for a higher-stakes conversation with his wife.
Eventually, though, Jim does tell Pam. Unfortunately, it does not result in the resolution that Jim thinks it does:
Jim: “I don’t know what I was so worried about, I have the best wife in the world”
Jim is thrilled that his goal now seems newly attainable.
Pam: “I still can’t believe he didn’t tell me”
Pam is crushed by Jim’s out-of-character dishonesty.
There’s a lot here we could talk about. Jim is flailing in some impressively destructive ways. Luckily for our series of posts, he will continue to flail for several more episodes, providing ample time to cover more implications of the lack of consensus and communication with Pam.
But, in the context of the whole season, the most unique thing about this particular episode is Jim’s total lack of desire to reconcile the competing interests in his life.
Maybe it would have helped him to define those interests through a formal Mission Statement or explicit Goals.
But, I’m not so sure.
Even without having crystal clear goals, Jim is painfully aware of the inherent conflict between two of his most fundamental aspirations: an engaging, purpose-filled career and a happy, healthy marriage.
I hate to say it (because we all like Jim!) but, this one comes down to Character.
It can be hard to nail down exactly what Character is, or what it really means, but here’s a running start:
"So, what is character? Character can be defined as the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual. Not helpful? Well, maybe an exhaustive list of said qualities would do the job: integrity, honesty, loyalty, trustworthy, respectfulness, humility, compassion, fairness, forgiveness, authenticity, courage, generosity, perseverance, politeness, kindness, optimism, reliability, self-discipline, ambitious, encouraging, considerate, dependable, patience, grit, compassion, self-control, grateful, positive, proactive, hopeful, devoted, faithful, genuine...did that help?"
-Kevin from our post on Character
If your Goals answer the question “what?”....
….and your Mission Statement answers the question “why?”...
...then your Character answers the question “how?”
You get the sense that Jim was somehow hoping he could manage to play a foundational role in this non-local start-up without ever really coming clean to Pam. And, therein lies the cardinal sin of Jim’s conduct here. He was so focused on what he wanted, that he didn’t really care how it came into being.
Resolving a conflict like that requires a great deal of self-awareness. Effective goals are manifest in specific, objective language. Character, by its very nature, is much more abstract a measuring stick. As a result, it can be easy to rationalize prioritization of the former over the vague demands of the latter.
Luckily, in the following posts, we’ll see Jim beginning to up his game on the Character front. But as we’ll soon see, transgressions of Character are not so easy to atone for, and the ripple effects of Jim's conduct will follow him for many days to come.