Gobsmacked! Everything is Obvious (once you know it)
A senior partner, furious with a mistake made by a young lawyer, screamed, “Aren’t there some things I’m entitled to assume you just know?”
No, the young lawyer wasn’t me. And I was certainly glad of it that day. But the answer to senior partner’s question isn’t all that obvious. Or at least it wasn’t obvious to that gobsmacked young lawyer on the receiving end of the tirade.
“Gobsmacked” is a British colloquialism meaning “absolutely astounded.” The first time I heard it, I was, well gobsmacked. And it’s such a perfect word for the reaction we have when an actor playing us might slap the heel of his hand against his forehead and say, “Duh!”
Except the senior partner wasn’t just gobsmacked. He was really angry. He felt cheated. He felt disrespected. He believed that a law school education, a certain level of maturity, and a significant salary warranted a young lawyer with abilities the senior partner was entitled to receive. When the young lawyer didn’t deliver minimum quality, well the senior lawyer was far from happy.
The junior lawyer wasn’t simply gobsmacked, either. Nor was he stupid, uneducated, or uncaring about his work. He believed that his good intentions coupled with the best he could do on the project should have been not only good enough, but received with praise and appreciation. When he got an abusive dressing down instead, well the junior lawyer was far from happy, too.
These were men of good faith. They wanted to work well together toward the client’s common goal. Neither consciously demanded unreasonable performance. What went wrong here? Isn’t it obvious?
Although the framers famously wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” never forget that they actually had to write these truths down and conduct a revolution to obtain them. How self-evident could their truths actually have been? Not that self-evident to the King of England, to be sure. Not that self-evident to all of their countrymen, either, since thousands of citizens in the new colonies were not on board for that revolution.
So what’s the point?
We’re all life-long learners. What works is to embrace our continual learning.
No one knows everything every time. Even dictionaries and encyclopedias are routinely updated. Knowledge and skills are not static and neither is the world. Everything is obvious only once you’ve learned it and then only until it changes. You can’t be expected to know what someone else knows or feels unless you exchange that specific knowledge before you react.
When you’re not getting the results you expect, always ask yourself: what am I missing?
When you’re gobsmacked by another’s behavior the tendency is to assume it’s the other guy who has the problem, but that’s almost never the case in the absence of mental illness (his or yours). Something you’ve done has triggered the response you’ve received, even if the response is completely irrational. What did you do or not do that led you here? Knowing exactly what you’re involved with — rather than what you think you’re involved with — gives you options and alternatives you won’t have otherwise.
Its Secret #9 again: Experience is the best teacher, but the best teacher is only obvious once you know what the right experience is.
We often learn more from our mistakes than our achievements. We need to be sure we learn as much about what our mistakes and our achievements have to teach us as we can before we move on. We certainly don’t want to repeat our mistakes and we do want to build upon our achievements.
Only one thing should be learned through being cheated, disrespected, unappreciated or abused. From such experiences you learn to change something so that you never have that experience again, certainly. But the real lesson is this: Everything is obvious only after you know it.
The next time you’re gobsmacked:
Ask yourself, now that you know something obvious to you, what will you do with that experience?
