Ichak Kalderon Adizes's Blog: Insights Blog, page 29

No One is an Angel

It is nothing new if I say no one is perfect. There is no ideal executive, no ideal spouse, no ideal parent.  Not even an ideal child.

If someone appears to be ideal, perfect, we should not hold our breath. With time, as the situation changes, some deficiencies will emerge. The weaknesses will show up because no one is perfect, ideal, in all situations forever.

If the above is true, it follows that if someone exhibits perfect values, he or she still must have sinned sometime in the past; or will in the future. Or at least on one occasion was tempted into thoughts of sinning.

With the same argument, I would say no one is a complete devil either. Hitler must have had his moments of tenderness, of being human. Watch him caress children’s faces. Granted only Aryan faces, but nevertheless he shows emotion. Love. Respect.

Cruel murderers, I would guess, are tender to their dog.

Since no one is a perfect devil or a perfect angel, we are all angels AND devils, each of us with a different ratio of the two characteristics. Even an angel can become a devil if you step on his most sensitive toe. And the devil can change his skin and become angelic under certain conditions.

How did this combination of angel/devil develop in all of us?

I think that we are created as a mirror of someone else. Thus, if I am, say, 80 percent devil and 20 percent angel, there must have been someone in my life, one or more people, who were 80 percent devil and 20 percent angel. My mirror image.

It is like die-casting. Who “die-casts” us is a person who has had a major impact on our life. For example, a parent we have depended on emotionally and economically for survival; or a teacher, a classmate, a supervisor at work. They have all in different ways “die-cast” us.

In analyzing myself, who I am, I realize I was die-cast by my father — I did not want to be like him; by a teacher — I definitely wanted to be like him; and by a bullying classmate — who came close to making me want to die.

The challenge all of us have, I think, is to control the devil in ourselves. And since the devil and the angel are mirroring each other, we need to find ways to control the angel within us too. A pure angel is too trusting, too naïve. It can make mistakes. You need the devil to come and check reality, to respect but at the same time to suspect1 and thus protect you from the devilish quality your counterpart is exhibiting at the time.

And when we are confronted with the devil’s qualities in another person — if the arguments I constructed hold water — we should look as well for the angel in the other person. There is goodness in all people. Cultivate it. Do not condemn the devil. Bless the angel. What is so bad in the other person we may possess too.

So who are we to judge?

Just thinking.

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

 

1Respect and suspect “kabdehu ve hashdehu” is an instruction an ancient Jewish sage has given. Respect everyone but at the same time, in negotiations, watch for their self-interest.

What Gets My Blood Boiling

This blog post was featured in the Huffington Post on September 30, 2015.

I can get annoyed a lot. But there is one thing that pushes me beyond being annoyed. It gets me so upset that I become aggressive. I lose my head.

What is it?

That people are late. Especially if they are late habitually.

So, I have been thinking about why being late is so upsetting to me.

Here is my insight.

We have a fixed number of seconds to live on this planet. (I am ignoring life after death for this blog.) Life is a fixed quantity and with unpredictable volume.

When people are late, they are literally robbing me of my life.

This is a robbery because it is against my wishes and it is worse than robbing me of my money or jewelry. Money and jewels, over time, I can replenish, but those moments that were taken from my life, waiting for someone to show up, can never be replenished. They are gone forever.

It is not only waiting for someone.  I hate going to Moscow. I get paid a fortune to work there but if I can avoid it I will. Why? Because the traffic is horrendous. From the airport to my hotel, at rush hour, eighteen kilometers, almost ten miles, an hour and a half in a car…with my blood boiling.

And the same is true for Los Angeles which, as far as I am concerned, has a rush hour twenty-four hours a day.

And have you driven in Caracas, Venezuela? Or how about Tel Aviv?

If you add all the hours people waste in cars driving at the speed of almost walking, how many life times would you find have been wasted?

We created the car to save time walking. We are ending up spending, or better said, wasting, more time than before driving or being driven in cars.

The other day I had to go to an ear doctor. I showed up on time. I was made to wait two hours to see him.

To maximize the utilization of their time some doctors over schedule, just to be sure if someone does not show up, God forbid, the doctor will be not be sitting with nothing to do.  It is better for them that you wait so they can have zero wasted time. Their wasted time??!!! What about my wasted life?

To waste time is to waste life.

Will I go back to that doctor? Not in my lifetime if I can help it.

In meetings I have made a rule: whoever is late has to pay a penalty. You can evaluate how much the penalty should be by computing how much is the total cost of those waiting for the person to show up. The cost should be a multiple of their hourly rate. And it should be much, much more. How much is life worth?

Time is not only money. Time is life. Honor it.

Just thinking.

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Converting Excuses Into Learning Experiences

This blog post was featured in the Huffington Post on September 22, 2015.

In reviewing performance, actual versus budget results, or the accomplishments of a new project, when there is a deviation from the desired, i.e. when then there is mistake, people give you an explanation why it happened and believe they are off the hook.

I consider such explanations excuses: “Here is why it could not have been done…Here are the reasons…Sorry.” Etc.

And you, as the leader, are left to either believe their explanation, or if not, hold the person guilty of non-performance and find a way to punish or not reward the person(s).

All wrong. A problem, a mistake that we did not learn from will be repeated.

All deviations from the desired, all so called problems, should be invitations to learn.

So ask yourself the question:

What did we or I not do, either right or not at all, that caused the problem? How can we avoid having this problem repeat itself?

Do this exercise as a team project. You will be surprised how many good ideas will emerge and the more serious the problem was, the more valuable the results of the exercise will be.

In other words, instead of asking the question why we had the deviation, why the problem was born, which will cause people to give an explanation and thus excuses, ask what for did we have this problem, what can we learn from the problem so it does not get repeated? When you do that, the problem becomes an opportunity. For learning. For improving.

You do not learn from success. You learn from failures if you are willing to analyze where you went wrong, and why, and what can you do better next time.

Admitting you can do better next time, that you have learned from your past mistakes, takes courage. It also requires an organizational culture where mistakes are considered an opportunity for learning and not an opportunity for punishing.

Take an athlete. His or her goal is to shave ten seconds from his past record in a hundred yard dash.

They did not succeed; someone else won first place. What should a good coach do?

Scream and punish the athlete for not succeeding? (This is not as rare as it might seem. I know of a coach who actually went and hit the athlete for failing to get to first place).

A good coach would have videotaped the race and subsequently analyzed what can be learned from the experience. What his or her athlete should do better next time. That is how you improve.

Success is not how little you fall. It is how fast you get up. And how much you learned from falling so you do not repeat it.

In other words, it is OK to fail once and learn from it. Just do not repeat the same mistake again because, if you do, it means you did not learn from the first experience and now we wonder if you are capable of learning. And you are only as good as you are able to learn and improve.

In my hiring experience I look for people with experience. What does that mean?

They have had a lot of failures and came out of it winners. Not ones who had failures and remained failures. Those are the ones who did not learn.

Just thinking.

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

On Feeling Bad

This blog post was featured in the Huffington Post on September 15, 2015.

Everybody, at some time or other in their life, feels bad for failing to achieve something that they wanted badly or for handling a situation not as well as they believed they should have.

Some feel bad more frequently. Some less, but no one escapes the feeling.

You can see that in sports. In soccer when the player misses the goal, he starts pulling on his hair or hitting the ground with fists. And tennis players smash their racket on the ground.

Some people feel bad in solitude and do not show how they feel. Or deny it is their fault or that it happened at all.

And some become aggressive. Usually with those closest to them, those that they love or are loved by.

And some of those in executive positions “pass the buck” and shift the blame.

You probably know someone that is never wrong. Never failed. Or at least that is what they claim.

Why this universal phenomena of feeling bad? Or why do some, in order to avoid feeling bad, deny the event or shift the blame?

Is there a rule that determines who will feel bad more frequently than others?

Is it correlated to how many mistakes people make and/or how severe the mistake is?

Is it related to one’s ego? To one’s upbringing?

I believe it is caused by a hidden assumption that we are or should be perfect. Thus, when something less than perfect occurs – a mistake – we fall apart.

If you accepted that you are not perfect, and cannot be perfect, that making a mistake is normal, there would be no reason to feel bad, right?

It is this EXPECTATION of perfection that is the source of our pain. The more we expect to be perfect, the more pain we will experience.

Where is this expectation coming from?

Maybe it is the result of our parents punishing us for failing. We learned that to fail is a bad thing and if others do not punish us, the error should not go unpunishable, so we punish ourselves.

Or maybe there is a religious explanation.

To whom do we pray? Whom do we hold in an exalted position?

God. God is all powerful. Knows it all. Has no beginning and no end. Has no fault.

Do we aim to be like HIM not realizing that even God makes mistakes and admits to them? (Bringing the flood. Killing everyone except those in Noah’s ark. When it was raining hard, creating the rainbow to remind Him that the total destroying flood was a mistake, not to be repeated.)

So if God is human-like, why do we aim to be God-like?

Accept with humility your limitations, your imperfections. And accept those of others…especially of those that remind you so much of yourself, consciously or subconsciously.

Stop expecting perfection and life will be filled with less regrets and less bad feelings.

Just thinking.

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Dysfunctional Participation

This blog post was featured in the Huffington Post on September 9, 2015.

It is not the first time I’ve encountered this corporate practice: workers invited to participate in the management of a corporation. In my experience, instead of this tactic increasing productivity and morale, it only increases expenses and paralyzes the company.

What is going on?

The company is attempting to solve a problem. Namely, by bringing the workers into the decision-making process, the company intends to improve morale and increase productivity, which in turn will reduce losses and/or increase profits.

It backfires because it is half a solution, and half a solution is worse than no solution; or to put it another way, half ignorance is worse than total ignorance.

With a half solution, you tend to believe you have solved the problem and can relax. Meanwhile the company’s problem continues and probably is getting worse. It is like taking less than the full dose of antibiotics.  

What actually happens with worker participation? Elected worker representatives are invited to be on the Board. In Israel, the trade union of the Electricity company even has the right to approve who the VPs will be.

What is wrong?

There is sharing of power but not of rewards.

To increase productivity and higher morale, people who are interdependent organizationally need to share power. But they also expect to share the rewards the interdependence produces. If they only share power but not rewards, it leads to a dysfunctional power shift: workers use the power to improve their interests and fight reductions in employment or any other decision they believe attacks their interests.

I attribute this mistake to decisions that are made for political purpose, or are based on good intentions but lack a solid theory to support it.

To increase productivity and morale, the four PAEI subsystems must be aligned and that is what I would call a “full solution” like we do with the Adizes program.

Just thinking.

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

 

Love, Fear, and Uncertainty

This blog post was featured in the Huffington Post on September 1, 2015.

Why is love so painful? Because it is so rewarding.

It is the withdrawal of the pleasure that makes it painful.

If it were not rewarding it would not be so painful.

And it is the pain that makes people fear love. Just the way someone who was badly burned will not get close to a fire.

What to do?

We can remove the pain by removing the pleasure. That is what some people do. They refuse to love. Period. By denying themselves pleasure, they avoid the painful experience of it being withdrawn.

But that should not be the solution, to never experience love or being loved. What a miserable life…

What then?

I do not have to explain why and how love is rewarding. Pleasurable. Thousands of poems have been written about love and how wonderful it is.

But where does the withdrawal of the pleasure and thus the pain come from?

The pain comes from…you guessed it, that’s right: from…change.

Nothing is permanent. Life is full of surprises. And a fair share are not pleasurable. They upset us. As time passes, needs change, expectations change, and the feelings are not the same anymore. In extreme cases the withdrawal of love is permanent. And the more intense the love was, the more intense is the pain caused by change.

But in many cases the change is temporary and, unless treated right, is a source of unnecessary pain.

People are moody. Some more so, some less. And when the mood is on the wrong side of the moon, or we find ourselves in some passing conflict with the one we love, what happens? The one we love is not as loving and giving and attentive. It often feels like rejection. A withdrawal of love.

What is going on?

Change means uncertainty. We cannot predict for sure when love will feel as though it were being withheld. Or removed. Or abolished.

To love, one must live with uncertainty. It comes with the territory, which we call life, that there will be ups and downs in the relationship.

Anyone who expects ongoing love, that is, the presence of a permanent soul-mate who only loves, and where the feeling is only up, up, and up — is living in a dreamland. Because reality is CHANGE. And change is life. And life is filled with uncertainty.

Someone once told me that if you are ever upset with your beloved, just wait a day. Or two. Nothing more. Just let time pass. The situation changes, the mood changes, and all at once, what gave you so much pain two days ago, what looked as if it were the most painful thing in the world, now feels ridiculously irrelevant. If you do not treat it this way and you reciprocate by withdrawing your love, the pain more than doubles; you accentuate the pain rather than ameliorate it.

By the same token, if you are deeply in love and hope, pray, believe, this feeling is going to last forever, you will be disappointed. Perhaps disillusioned. That feeling will not last forever. What is up will come down. And the higher it rises, the lower it will descend. And lead to despair.

Can you handle change? Can you handle uncertainty? Can you tolerate a temporary rejection? If yes, good for you. If not, you have much to learn…and a lot of growing to do.

Just thinking.

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

The Need to Serve

This blog post was featured in the Huffington Post on August 26, 2015.

I feel sorry for people in an old age home. Or is it called a retirement home? Sitting, waiting for life to end. Rooms defined by pathos. Sad.

Yes, there are retirement communities which are active, going to the theater, going on trips, having parties, but still…the residents are in a waiting mode: waiting for death to come.

But think of it, we are dying the moment we are born, but as we grow, as we marry and reproduce and raise a family, not for a second are we in a waiting mode for death.  

What is the difference?

The difference is in doing something for others.

By contributing, by serving others, we feel alive. In a retirement home the residents serve no one.

And it does not need to be that way. Some seniors are active, still able to contribute as much as their health allows at what we refer to as the sunset of their life. They volunteer. You can see them in the lobby of hospitals. Old men or women directing you where to go. Or you can see them at some airports welcoming people off the plane and answering questions.  Volunteering. Serving others is what makes them feel that they are still needed and thus alive. They are volunteering as much for their own needs as they are to satisfy the needs of others.

Who dies the fastest? Those who feel life ended for them. And when does life end? When they believe that no one needs them anymore.

In an extended family where multiple generations live together, grandparents feel more alive.  The grandchildren need them.

As long as you have children to take care of, or to take care of each other, or you are volunteering and sensing you are contributing, life is still very much present.

This need to serve is not only reserved for those who have retired. I was talking to a woman in her twenties. She was eager to get married.

“Why?” I asked her. “I want to take care of someone,” she said.

I know people who are clinically depressed. They take drugs to survive. Their behavior changed drastically to functioning normally and without drugs when their child was born. Someone needed them now; they had to be there for the child.

Another clinically depressed person I know well got off anti-depressant drugs when he acquired a dog he had to take care of.

This need to serve is deeply ingrained in us and is what keeps us alive. And the more and better we serve others, the more and better we serve ourselves: we live longer.

It seems to me that there is no such thing as altruistic behavior. The claim that altruistic behavior has no rewards is not true.  The altruist receive plenty: his is the reward of being alive. More alive than if not serving others.

This need to serve is what makes people choose the teaching and social work professions. Even the businessmen who appear to be exploiting the market rather than serving it will claim that they perform a helpful function. Even if it is not true. They need to make that explanation to themselves to feel alive. It is a very potent need that we all have.

How about criminals, murderers? How does that work?

I wonder if they believe they are doing something helpful or in their mind have a justification? Sick as it may be.

What do you think?

Just thinking.

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

 

The Age of Addiction

This blog post was featured in the Huffington Post on August 18, 2015.

Peter Drucker coined the term “the age of discontinuity,” implying that we are all experiencing some kind of discontinuity all the time.

He was right.

I would add another description of our age: “the age of addiction.”

I suggest we were never as addicted to as many agents of addiction as we are at present.

Why?

Because there are more “pushers” than ever who supply us with addictive “goods” and who are more sophisticated and skilled today than ever before in the history of mankind.

Who are these sophisticated “pushers”?

They are the multi-billion dollar companies with a staff that spends millions to study our behavior, locate our weaknesses and manipulate our needs. In effect they are geared to discover ways in which we are most prone to become addicted to their products…regardless of our well-being.

Consumer behavior, for example, is studied at business schools as well as within corporations. Millions are spent analyzing how we buy, when we buy, and how to make us come back again and again.

The products are designed to addict us. Take tobacco. The tobacco companies have been accused of adding chemicals to the tobacco itself with the end goal of making it addictive.

And how about the food processing companies? They specialize in developing food that is adjusted (read this as meaning corrupted) with chemicals so that it is tasty and we become dependent on it.

And of course the “pushers” have a vast network of sales channels to make their goods easily accessible. They spend millions on advertising, utilizing all forms of media so we can hardly miss the temptation.

Here are some common examples: We are vulnerable to addiction to tobacco, sugar-laced drinks and salty food. More recently we have become dependent on electronic gadgets like the iPhone and the computer with all of its applications. Meanwhile children are addicted to computer games and some housewives to TV. And some are exposed to alcohol addiction and sexual addiction and illegal drug addiction…

There is more to it.

Presumably the pharmaceutical companies are supposed to protect us. Instead they are some of the major corporations intent on addicting us. For example, many psychiatric medicines are addictive. You cannot stop taking them. Or consider the sleeping pill.

Where is this all coming from?

You know the answer. Money. Money.

We live in a world where profit, the search for material abundance is legitimized in economic theory and business school education. In the search for more and more profits companies will explore plans and strategies designed to increase revenue: innovate, promote, serve and secure repeat purchasing. Make the product as addictive as possible. Big Macs. Sugar-laced soda-pop. GMO adulterated wheat. These are only the tip of the iceberg.

What are the repercussions?

The more dependent we are, the less empowered we are.

And we are becoming increasingly powerless. We depend on so many products that we have to work very hard to obtain them. And since we are addicted, it is difficult to resist them.

Take the car. Could you live without one? Even if you use public transportation?

And what about the mobile phone? And computer? Can you live without them?

If I start counting my addictions — what I would suffer if I did not have them — the list is not insignificant: iPhone, computer, car, certain food products such as oil, flour, and salt all baked together.

And then there is work. Yes, I am addicted to work.

Vacation is a punishment. Taking a day off without my computer and iPhone is an invitation to suffer.

And food addiction? I have that one too. I am addicted to bread. A meal without bread is no meal, regardless of how incredibly well prepared it is.

When I visit developing nations I find that people are poor, but much more prone to smile. They seem to be free, or at least free in ways that we are not. And I think to myself, all we are trying to do is help them develop. But I wonder as they move closer to becoming a developed nation, will they stop smiling and be addicted like us to the “benefits” of being an advanced economy?

It seems that the higher the standard of living is, the lower the quality of life.

Just thinking.

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Organizational Heaven, Managerial Hell

This blog post was featured in the Huffington Post on August 12, 2015.

Let us start with heaven.

How would you like to work in an organization where you have a life time appointment? You can be fired only for some extreme violation of ethics. It must be very extreme.

You choose what to work on. If you do not like your assignment, you can refuse it until they give you something you want to do.

Any decision the organization makes you can challenge at the assembly of all the members.   You need to bring it to a vote and cause the decision to be reversed.

Regardless of how productive you are, you get free of charge full education for your children, actually all expenses for your children are taken care off no matter their number, and when they become adults, your children can have the same rights you have. They have an assured future regardless of their capabilities.

The organization will also take care of your aging parents if needed. Moreover, your family gets full physical and mental health benefits free of charge, gets food at a serious discount, free housing, a car to drive whenever you need it and a nice monthly stipend for clothing, entertainment, and periodic travel abroad.

And I repeat. You cannot get fired even if you are not that productive or you refuse to undertake a role you do not want to perform for whatever reason.

Looks good, no?

Heaven, right?

Now hell.

How would you like to be a leader of an organization where your so-called subordinates can challenge any of your decisions at the general assembly of the organization and the assembly, comprised of the people you are supposedly managing, can overrule your decision?

How motivated will you be to work with subordinates who can quit on a moment’s notice if they do not like your decision? In a sense they de facto fire you because they choose if they want to work with you or not. But you, you cannot fire anyone. And you do not get more benefits whatsoever for being a manager. On the contrary, anytime you make a decision other people do not like, you might get criticized, even ostracized.  Since all members of this organization live in the same settlement, next to each other, and eat most of the time at the same dining hall, rendering an unpopular decision will make your social life very uncomfortable, to say the least.

It is hell, no?

The organizations I am describing above are one and the same.

They are called “the Kibbutz.”

A kibbutz is a communal settlement in Israel. Established on the socialist, communist ideology, following the anarchist stream of thought. In a kibbutz, no one individually owns anything. All assets are owned by all. If you leave the kibbutz there is no share of assets you can take with you. All members share the same benefits regardless of their role or performance level and all members have the same rights to decide — the kibbutz is managed by an assembly of all members. In the case I was involved with, it was eight hundred people.

A manager, or leader elected by the assembly, has to be responsive to the membership in total, and is rotated periodically regardless of his or her performance.

The result?

Few members, if any, are willing to serve as leaders of the kibbutz. Those who do are not necessarily the most qualified and the productivity of the membership is ever declining. Why would anyone knock himself out when there is no reward for performance?  You learn to do the least you can get away with. You get all the benefits like anybody else nevertheless.

What is a dream for the membership is a nightmare for their leaders.

Kibbutzim went bankrupt left and right. Most decided to split the assets among themselves; privatized the communal settlement. Only a few are still trying to survive. The ones that do, and I was asked to consult to some of them, usually have a business endeavor they manage. They hire labor they can manage, i.e. tell them what to do and fire them if necessary. Those business endeavors are managed like any market-based enterprise. Those kibbutzim today are de facto one large group of communal owners who use outsourced labor and resources for profit like any other enterprise.

Members of the kibbutz who are the managers of the business endeavor, being different from the managers of the kibbutz itself, have some additional rewards that others do not have – namely, travel abroad and a car. They are rewarded differentially; they have the power to hire and fire; and their decisions are rarely, if ever, challenged by the assembly that owns the enterprise.

What is happening here?

To survive, the anarchist communist ideology of equality in benefits, no exploitation of the working masses, no hierarchy, is being compromised.

What is keeping the kibbutz alive is giving up on equality and establishing a hierarchy like every other enterprise.

What did I learn?

Hierarchy is natural. If you have a system that formally forbids a hierarchy, a “black market” hierarchy will develop. The hierarchy is not only in roles and authority, but in rewards as well.

Organizations must by definition have a hierarchy in roles, authority, and rewards.  

Problems caused by change, which is to be expected, require decision-making and the undertaking of risk.

In this situation, not all decisions are necessarily a success. Someone must decide nevertheless and if the decision fails in a kibbutz, he or she will be criticized by those he or she is managing. In addition, in a kibbutz, criticism has social repercussions. You live with these people. You will be criticized by your immediate neighbors, by the parents of your children’s friends, by those you see daily at the dining hall…it is like a close family business where you have your brothers and cousins as your employees and at the same time they are your board of directors.

Managers and leaders need to have the capability to withstand rejection. If the social climate encourages, even allows rejection, rare are the people who will take on the role.

If the system does not encourage the best and the brightest to lead, how can that system compete with those who do encourage the best and brightest to take leadership positions?

Performance is the key to success. There is no way around it. But to get high performance there must be a reward.  Since rewards are the same, superb performance is not encouraged.

The ideology looked so wonderful: all people are equal and managers and leaders are elected by those led. And to be a leader is a calling. There is no extra benefit for being a leader-servant.

The membership runs the company and everyone has the right to challenge a decision made; no one runs them without their acquiescence. A real grassroots democracy. Equality. Justice. Heaven.

On paper.

In reality, people turn against each other, and jealousy runs rampant. Productivity suffers, kibbutzim are going bankrupt and people who devoted their life, say thirty years of their life, now do not even have food to eat. Bankrupt.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Anarchy or communism is utopian. It looks good on paper. In reality, it is a disaster.

Just thinking.

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Anti-Aging Formula

This blog post was featured in the  Huffington Post on August 5, 2015.

In writing my book on corporate lifecycles, which discusses what causes organizations to age, i.e., become bureaucratized, and how to rejuvenate them, I wondered why growing systems, people, and organizations have lots of energy while aging systems have little to no energy.

The observations supported my hypothesis. But the cause still remained unknown. So I wondered to myself: if I can decipher the cause maybe I can figure out not only how to rejuvenate organizations, which I have proven I know how to do, but to retard the aging of people too.

It was a subject that became very relevant to me as I started to feel my age at 77.

I think I found an answer.

Look at a fetus. You can not distinguish between the nose and the toe. It is all one mass. Integrated.

Look at a budding flower. All leaves are still together.

What happens as the system starts growing? The leaves separate; and for a child the limbs grow…it starts to disintegrate.

But we disintegrate when we are old too.

What is the difference?

My formula of success, any way you define success, was helpful in answering the question.

          © Ichak Kalderon Adizes 1971 – 2015

 

Since energy is fixed at any point in time, the energy has to be allocated to both internal and external integration. Whatever is used by one of them is not available for the other one.

When we are young, we start by being very integrated and we stay integrated internally, and although growing, no energy is wasted on dealing with internal disintegration.  Thus, all available energy is spent on external integration. This is why when young, we appear very energetic.

Our body organs have a fixed life span. Like all material. With tear and wear they start functioning less effectively.

The problem is that each organ has a different life span. Because of that, with the passage of time the body as a system starts to disintegrate. Now the body needs to dedicate energy to deal with this disintegration, to make the system work in spite of it.

The energy which was spent externally now gets redirected internally and we appear less energetic. That is called AGING.

How do we retard aging?

You can not change your genetic determination. That is a given. It decides (and spells out) just how long in time you have for the life-span of your organs.  Maybe, maybe, with superb health care, I suppose you can add a year or two, or max three to the life span. It is like a car. Its engine has a life span of say xyz miles.  With care you can add another thousand miles or so, but that is it.

While you cannot extend your life, you can definitely shorten it.  How? With disintegration. Physical, mental or social disintegration. When that happens your externally dedicated energy goes to take care of this disintegration and you age.

The way then to retard aging is to watch for causes of disintegration. Like stress. That is a big energy consumer.

Like wear and tear due to travel and time zone changes, sleep deprivation, and a diet that is destructive to your organs.

What integrates?

Love.

Do you realize that people that are in love look younger, radiant? And people that hate look old. Washed up.

Love integrates. Hate disintegrates.

So the way to retard aging, not to prolong life but not to die younger than the genetic code provides you with, is to love.

Do you love your job? Your spouse? Your car? Your home, your city? Your country? Your parents? Your shoes? Everything counts. Everything either gives or takes away energy from you.

Stop stress.

Stop whatever offends your body organs; whatever offends you spiritually. Emotionally. Socially.

The more love in your life, the longer you will live and the younger you will feel.

Be well.

Just thinking.

Ichak Kalderon Adizes