Here is a true story. In my former life, I arranged food for 40-50 people every Sunday night. Imagine a dented plastic table decorated with rogue Sharpie scribbles, two-liters, pizza, and if everyone was kind to me, Little Debbie cakes. It was about as sexy and appetizing as it sounds.
At the beginning of the line was a cutlery tray. It looked like:
Some of you see this tray and your brain screams: THE UTENSILS ARE FACING OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS.
I know this because every week my adult volunteers dutifully fixed this fork crisis, ecstasy and satisfaction on their faces until the tray looked like:
Ah! Order restored. The Earth was off-axis, but we are returning to proper position and the apocalyptic freezing or frying of humanity is abated. Whew. Close call. Thank God for fork flippers.
This is also a true story. One day I said,Ā āSTOP FLIPPING THE FORKS.ā (They stopped. I rarely all-caps yell.)
Why stop these correctors of chaos?
What if I told you the 40-50 partakers of unflipped forks were mostly middle school boys? And then I asked the question: do you believe a single middle school boy cared about the direction of forks?
In 9 years of setting Sunday dinner forty-five times a year, they never did.
Here is truer story. Some of you are wasting time and emotional energy flipping forks for middle school boys. (If youāre thinking middle school boys might be a metaphor, youāre correct.)
Iāve taught fork flipping as it relates to time management and goal setting. (Iāve written about time management here.) But over the years, I applied the fork flipping theory to emotional investments too.
Hereās my best truth. People flip emotional forks for audiences that will never appreciate the effort. Iāve done it myself. Too many times to count.Ā
Here are four things Iāve learned.
If Iād been arranging dinner for a crowd of ladies in their twilight years (you know the onesāthey drive Cadillacās and kick ass at bridge), not only would I have flipped the forks, Iād have borrowed sterling silver. That audience cares about those details. So think about the recipient of your generous actions and ask, will this matter to them? Am I actually doing this for me? Is it emotionally efficient?
2. The problem is not your effort.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with flipping forks. The effort can be a beautiful offering of selflessness, but donāt forget that emotional energy is finite.
3. Identify those who deserve your best emotional efforts.
There are those who deserve flipped forks. Folks who will notice your efforts and appreciate them properly, but we often burn out giving emotional energy to those who wonāt appreciate us and deplete energy for those who will. I recently said to a friend, why would you punish someone who wants to help you to help someone who wants to punish you? Thatās the sentiment here as well.
4. Identify those who do not deserve your best emotional efforts.
There is a very good chance you have said of someone,Ā āI give and give and nothing ever satisfies him/her.ā Perhapsā¦and Iām just spitballing hereā¦you donāt owe that audience your spectacular efforts.
(Itās fine to choose another effort. My middle school boys didnāt notice forks, but when I invented a game called Blender Warsā¦well, that was a different story.)
*No middle school boys were injured in the writing of this post. **Some middle school boys threw up after Blender Wars.
