“The deadline is tomorrow, we need to pull an all-nighter!” Sound all the alarm bells, we need to start sprinting. It’s now or never, are we gonna make it? This is urgent!
It’s very easy to confuse urgency for importance. It’s not. Just because it’s urgent, it doesn’t mean we have to drop everything and go go go! We have a choice, we can be civil and act professionally. We can say “No, this isn’t important.”
If it was so important, why didn’t anyone do anything long before the deadline is even in sight? Why did we wait until the last minute before panicking and finally taking action? We reap what we sow and sometimes, you just gotta be brave enough to accept it. Accept that it’s not really that important and let it go. It’s a mistake, we should’ve seen that coming.
Unless it’s both urgent and important, it shouldn’t justify asking someone to drop everything and go. Society likes to celebrate the heroes, the people who save us from certain doom. The team that worked tirelessly 24 hours a day, just to solve the power outage crisis at the power plant and prevent a city-wide blackout. We love to applaud people like those.
But we forget that there’s another group of heroes, the people who managed to prevent such a crisis in the first place. The people who were properly maintaining the power plant and made sure everything is in good working condition. The people who noticed and fixed the potential problems long before they have any time to grow into a crisis. The people who did the boring and unattractive job of attending to important things before they become urgent. These people deserve a lot more credit than you think, and yet, they are often forgotten by society.
The next time something urgent pops up, ask yourself, is this really important? What have I been neglecting for this issue to suddenly pop up? Is it worth paying the price of dropping everything just to attend this?
Ziel Translation 