Life is not an episode of Star Trek

When I was growing up I loved watching Star Trek. I knew every episode of the original series backwards and forwards and could readily quote obscure lines from the show. Maybe it’s because I grew up with a lot of drama around me, but the aspect of Star Trek that I loved the most was how the characters would put all pettiness and personal issues aside to focus on the mission.

In my own naïve way, I thought this concept was called “professionalism” and I assumed that all adults would behave in a similar manner…at least in the work place. [silly me!]

Eventually I grew up and found myself on the job wondering “when” my co-workers and bosses would start being professionals and behave like the characters in Star Trek.

It was a sad day when I realized that this would never happen. One day I had an epiphany that humans are melodramatic creatures who tend to bring their personal feelings into every situation and ultimately create messy situations that a Star Trek solution would not solve.

Although the Mr. Ruiz’s book wasn’t published yet, I had broken one of the Four Agreements: “Don’t make assumptions”.

Many of us make assumptions or have preconceived ideas about how our lives are supposed to turn out.

I have a friend who was having a difficult time managing his young employees. At first, I thought he was having a generational diversity issue, but ultimately it came down to an assumption he made a long time ago…about how his work life would be when he grew up. As a young person he assumed that when he grew up he would be the boss and have mini-versions of himself as employees (with identical values and work ethic). At 50 years old, he finally realized this would never happen and let it go. Once he let go of this preconceived idea – he no longer held his employees to an impossible standard and found a way to work with them.

In a more dramatic example, Victor Frankl was a famous therapist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor. Before he was sent to the camps, he conceived an idea called, “logotherapy” which is an existential therapeutic technique that encourages healing through reason. Mr. Frankl assumed logotherapy was his life’s work and gathered all his notes and hid them inside his coat so that after the war he could write his book. At one point in the camps Mr. Frankl lost his coat, the first draft of his book, all his notes…and fell into a deep depression.

But then he had an epiphany, "What kind of life would it be whose meaning depends entirely on whether a book gets published?"

Mr. Frankl was an intellectual who was given the rare opportunity to practice and experience his theories & philosophies - not just write about them as an intellectual exercise. In the end, Mr. Frankl compiled his experiences into a second draft entitled, “A Man’s Search for Meaning” and discovered his life’s work was much more than the invention of logotherapy.

As for me, after I discovered that life was not an episode of Star Trek, for a while I felt as if the rug was pulled out from under me. But, a new science fiction show was on the horizon called Babylon 5. This show was different because it had melodramatic characters that brought their personal feelings into every situation and ultimately created messy situations that only a Babylon 5 solution could resolve.

I felt better when I learned that even NASA understood that Star Trek solutions would not work for every situation. This sign was posted on a NASA bulletin board: "Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."


“Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.” William Saroyan

References

Frankl, V.E., Fabry, J. (2000). Recollections: An Autobiography. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing

Ruiz, D. M. (1997). The four agreements: A practical guide to personal freedom. San Rafael, CA: Amber-Allen Publishing.