by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n
As a manager, I once believed that life could not occur without my presence. I killed myself to be at everything. I learned that was false. This was a blow to my ego that I was around people who were competent enough to work without me. <\/strong><\/p>\n The biggest college basketball game of the year was played Monday night. And I didn’t watch a minute of it. The game happened without me.<\/p>\n I used to watch every NCAA basketball championship game. It didn’t matter how much sleep I lost and what was to happen the next day. The game couldn’t go on without me.<\/p>\n Then something strange happened: I missed a championship or two because of inattention or travel. The games went on anyway. How dare they play without me watching.<\/p>\n It was a big blow to my ego to realize that people could do big, important activities without me. As the years passed, I found more and more big, important activities occurring without me. One year, they played the Super Bowl without me watching! Imagine that.<\/p>\n Then I started noticing this at work. Critical meetings, tests, and milestones happened when I wasn’t present. The other people at work were smart enough and capable enough to do things when I wasn’t around. How could this be?<\/p>\n Well, it could be just fine. I could even leave a job, be replaced by someone else, (a nice someone else, but surely not as capable as me \ud83d\ude09 and the building would not collapse due to the vacuum of my absence. Amazing.<\/p>\n I learned – slowly, but I learned – to stop worrying about everything. I learned that my two eyes didn’t have to witness something for it to occur. I learned to trust other people to be competent and do a fine job.<\/p>\n I became much happier.<\/p>\n I would still like to watch the NCAA basketball championships. But I wake early in the morning and they play those games so late at night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Dwayne Phillips As a manager, I once believed that life could not occur without my presence. I killed myself to be at everything. I learned that was false. This was a blow to my ego that I was around people who were competent enough to work without me. The biggest college basketball game of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,6,10],"tags":[132,129,133],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-management","category-observation","category-people","tag-management","tag-observation","tag-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions\/86"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}