I have trouble sitting on my hands, waiting to see what happens. Doing nothing until someone tells me what to do. I’d rather do it now and chill later. I don’t like to chill for two hours and cook down deadlines to the last minute then ask someone to bail me out because I have six jobs due in 17 minutes and I was holding five of them in my bag all afternoon. I’m an old man and I don’t need my dispatcher to tell me when my lunch break is over, to hold my hand all day. If I wanted close supervision and coddling I wouldn’t be a messenger. Proactive feels better than reactive. Learning from past mistakes, remembering what went wrong last time, making minor adjustments to prevent a repeat performance. Simple preparation that takes a minute but saves an hour. Taking an active approach. Taking responsibility. Doing it yourself. Not expecting someone else to do it for you. Awareness of past mistakes and no attempt to correct for them makes me queasy. It’s a tremendous waste of time. I don’t really care if you’re a slacker as long as I’m not picking it up for you. I’m no team player. I’d rather go solo than ask for help. If I know a little heads-up to a coworker will save them a big fucking hassle I’ll share some information with them. Looking down the road seeing two steps ahead, taking an educated guess about what’s going to happen, and making decisions accordingly. As opposed to staring at the ceiling and waiting for shit to blow and then looking for someone to blame.
Riding a bike in traffic in a purpose driven, proactive, even aggressive way is much safer than daydreaming along in traffic aimlessly reacting to outside forces. There is still plenty of reacting going on it’s just more subtle and happens faster, looking two steps ahead, making predictions, acting accordingly. Proactively reacting.
…the status quo sure is great…let’s just stay this way forever, said the small business man.
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