As a rule, I think people take themselves and the value of what they do too seriously. Heart surgery? Sure, that’s serious business. Making sure prisoners don’t escape from jail, yep, I’ll sign off on that one too. Airline pilot? You guessed it, another example of serious work requiring people to be serious. Sitting in a nice cushy office tweaking version twelve of a PowerPoint presentation somehow fails to rise to the level of seriousness that justifies having an inflated sense of self importance. Lord knows you couldn’t tell that from looking around at a room full average bureaucrats, though.

To me, the only really serious issues are the once that involve life and death. Almost everything else falls into the category of nice to have/do. Some of the other stuff is important enough, I guess, but is it really “serious as a heart attack?” If you have to stop and think about it, the answer is almost certainly no… And that’s ok, because when everything is a priority, nothing ends up being a priority.

What I’m saying is I’m going to need everyone to take an operational pause, suck in a deep breath, and just relax for a minute. I promise that no matter how important you think that PowerPoint slide is, 200 years from now it’s not going to be under glass at the National Archives laying alongside the Charters of Freedom in the rotunda. It’s not even going to be stored in the Library of Congress with your Twitter feed, so take a minute, collect your thoughts, and remember that history isn’t going to give a rat’s ass who we are or what we happened to be doing on a random Friday in May.

Most people seem to find that thought a little disturbing. It disturbed me for a long time until I realized what a gift it was. Once you embrace it, being an anonymous face in the crowd gives you a remarkable sense of freedom.