Fire Your Grudges

Over the last month or so I’ve been listening to the book Effortless by Greg McKeown. It’s excellent and has numerous actionable take aways for work and life. Some of the tips are painfully obvious but the reminder always helps (i.e. Get more sleep!).

One of the more novel ideas that has stuck with me is that we all hire grudges to do a job for us. It’s a bit of a stereotype that the Irish hold grudges like no one else. Sometimes they even span generations. If I were to guess at why the Irish stereotype exists it would come from the fact that the Irish were persecuted for centuries while living on an island. You have to be weary of people on such a small plot of land in the middle of the ocean. Between the Vikings and British, outsiders were dangerous and needed watching.

So, maybe holding grudges is in my blood, and if I’m honest I’ve hired grudges like a booming start up. I can think of people from college that might have done something so minuscule to me or a friend that if we crossed paths now I would remember it and would hold them at arms length. I’ll happily hate-watch a sporting event for a bit of schadenfreude (I’m talking about Kyrie and even Tom Brady). When I left my teaching job, I held onto grudges with parents who I butted heads with over grades, or discipline, or varsity soccer tryouts.

Grudges are exhausting, useless, and a waste of time. But we hire each of them for a reason, and none of those reasons are ever good enough to keep them in our life. I hire grudges, I think, to have something to push against. I can root against an athlete instead of rooting for one. I can give a cold shoulder to someone in order to show loyalty to someone else. In essence, I’m protecting my own little island, and I can be very good at finding reasons to hold grudges. I am very good at talking myself into why I should be bothered by someone or something and never like it.

While we can always hire grudges, we can also fire them. We can decide that our energy won’t be spent cooking up pretend arguments and boiling up negative energy that needs an outlet in some form that we might not have control over at some point (thankfully I run or chase a silly white ball around a field with a bag of sticks to burn off my steam).

What grudges have you held onto over the years? Why did you hire that grudge? What job is it doing for you? Is it feeding negative energy? Has the grudge completed it’s job so you can let it go?

Whether you’re Irish or not, I’m sure you have a couple grudges that you can identify pretty quickly. An ex-boyfriend/girlfriend, a friend, a classmate, a coach, a stranger, a family member. The beauty of firing a grudge is it might not even require any action aside from sitting the grudge down and saying, “You’re fired.” You probably don’t even need to talk to the other person because grudges are typically a one way street.

So this weekend, give it a try. Fire some grudges. You’ll feel better for it. Here’s a clip of Greg and Tim Ferriss talking about grudges and the energy they suck from all of us every day.