Substance Over Style

I can be very charming when I want to be.

And I want to be almost all the time. I have always been an attention-seeker, right from childhood when my mom's friends would exclaim, "oh what a cutie" to yesterday when I made the pretty 17 year old Indian MacDonald's worker blush. (pushing the boundaries there I know)

Being a shameless attention seeker, I have discovered ways in which to attract, retain and feed on said attention. My personal style accounts for a large part of that process. Sanguine, open, friendly, dominates a room if I have to and yet can blend into the background waiting for the exact right moment to give a booming laugh and announce my presence to a hitherto unsuspecting public.

And all that affable personal style had absolutely no effect on the spreadsheet I had to work on today!

Spreadsheets are amazing tools. The vast amount of information you can package and present using a spreadsheet is nothing short of miraculous. A reporting analyst I work with swears that with the right commands, not only can you turn last year's dairy product volumes into a pretty graph, you can get Microsoft Excel to also make you a cup of coffee too...!

Four hours I spent collating, copying, pasting, cross-referencing, transferring, filtering, and proof reading this damn spreadsheet! 'Where's my bloody charm to help me get through this one now?' I muttered to myself intermittently. When I started seeing the figures and numbers start forming into battalions on their own accord and screaming lines from various Disney movies, I quickly got up and took a 15-min break.

But of course, when my manager met me at the coffee machine and asked how I was going, on went the charm switch and I smiled confidently and assured her it was all hunky-dory!

I knew a long time ago that I really didn't like detail work. Or routine work for that matter. Give me detailed routine work and expect hari-kari within a very short time! But if I have learned anything at all in this life, it is the fact that you CANNOT avoid the detail work. It usually is where the substance comes from.

Long have I admired those with flamboyant personal styles. But scratch most of them below the surface and you find very shallow individuals. When I call all that attention to myself, I don't stop people at the front door but like to invite them all the way into the vast recesses of my personal being. It galled when as an 18 year old, I was described as shallow. It is a moniker I have consciously tried to correct ever since. I mean, whats the point of inviting all that attention to yourself if there's not something for everyone to snack on?

So I have learned to love detail work... OK... love is a very strong word. But there is a certain kind of satisfaction in clicking on that send button with a well ordered spreadsheet attached complete with graphs and pivot tables and a little summary table in the corner. And when you have to give a presentation based on that spreadsheet, why right there is a lethal mix of substance and style. You kill all them doubters right dead I tell you!

I heard Warren Buffet makes a whole lot of intuitive and instinctive decisions. What they don't tell us is that he employs an army of statisticians and number crunchers who work on providing cold hard evidence on why the decision was a good one. And if there's no hard evidence forthcoming, the 'instinctive decision' is very quietly dumped and no one talks about it anymore!

Style will only take you so very far. Substance will take you much much further. And if you want to go far and have more fun doing it... then build up substance and hire me to coach you on the style!