Taking action - Jeff Bezos Video
I recently watched a clip of Jeff Bezos talking about stress. He makes the point that stress comes from not taking action over something you can control:
“Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over. So If I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress, that’s a warning flag for me. What it means is there’s something that I haven’t completely identified, perhaps in my conscious mind, that is bothering me, and I haven’t yet taken any action on it. I find as soon as I identify it and make the first phone call or send the first email message or whatever it is were going to do to start to address the situation even if it’s not solved. The mere fact that we’re addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it. So stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn’t be ignoring. Stress doesn’t come from hard work; for example, you can be working incredibly hard and loving it. And likewise, you could be out of work and incredibly stressed over that.”
I love this clip. If you go through the list of stresses that you currently have, how many can you take action on right now that will significantly decrease the amount of stress? For me, it’s practically all of them. On the other hand, if you can’t take action on any of your stressors — in other words, there is absolutely nothing you can do about the source of your stress, then it’s not worth stressing about to begin with.
If you are just feeling stressed, but you’re not sure why, then it’s important to really think about what it is that’s specifically causing that stress. Sometimes you might not be sure what’s causing it, but it’s always something. Then go and take action!
At the end of the video, Bezos makes a great point that hard work does not necessarily mean stress because you can be working really hard and enjoy it. On the flip side, if you are not working because you are out of a job, your stress increases drastically, but only if you are not taking enough action on it.
Put simply; stress is just a lack of taking some kind of action.