Bliss K.I.S.S.

One of Queen Sass' favorite car activities is to try to guess the name of a song playing without having it revealed on the screen. She starts by the power of deduction and figuring out who the singer is. As 80% of her playlist is Taylor Swift, she usually gets that first guess pretty easily and then starts asking for hints about which album the song is from (I'm not especially well versed on all the Eras, so, this exercise usually doesn't go that smoothly without me peeking). The funny thing is, most of the time, I have to remind her that this isn't like song titles in the 80s that didn't have anything to do with the song and that she should just listen to the song more carefully as the title is usually somewhere in the chorus and repeated several times. But always Queen Sass, she prefers her own methodology in charting her own path forward even if the efficiency and effectiveness of it all drives Mama nuts.

I'll be honest, I pride myself on my efficiency and productivity. I love crossing things off my list to do and seeing a high number of boxes checked gives me a sad but funny sense of joy. But lately in my work and trying to figure out how to be impactful and solve problems, I've been noticing that sometimes, it's become unnecessarily complicated.

I generally subscribe to Adam Grant's "If knowledge is power, knowing what we don't know is wisdom" and Simon Sinek's "the game of business has no finish line." But what if we're leaning too far one way or the other? What if we're trying to chart a new pathway when there's a simpler path?

What triggered all this was a conversation about the personality assessments that companies frequently push employees to take and what those scores mean. I've taken at least a dozen of these and I love these tests. I feel like they provide the context for me to understand people and problems so much better. But the thing is, I can remember the detailed scores of maybe 2-3 of these assessments and it got me thinking that the constant switching to the next assessment was missing the part that actually mattered most, the application and development of those particular strengths and style of work. What if we could actually name those details the same way we could rattle off our other personal stats like height, DOB, eye color, dominant hand usage? If we knew how to always use those strengths like we know how we'd do better grabbing something with our right hand instead of left, would we be better off?

Ignorance may not always be bliss...but what if there's a certain balance in bliss' K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid)? It's quite possible I'm overthinking this and yes, I get the irony of that but these are things running through my head this week with memories of my sisters' old C+C Music Factory CD bopping "things that make you go hmmmmmm......"