Could You Really Care Less? Try.

No matter how little you care, you can always care less. Perhaps few, if any, have ever plumbed the bottom of caring. It’s quite difficult to manage your level of caring. About anything.

We care about our welfare and those we love. We care about our careers, health, enjoyment, happiness and money. We care about our cars, our houses, our toys, our yard and our wardrobes. We care about our music, our TV shows, our movies, our teams and our news. We care about what the boss thinks, what our co-workers think, what our competitors think and what our customers think. We care about lots of things.

If, like this lazy squirrel, we could better manage our level of caring - think how nice life might be. What if we actually did care less?

Would it affect our success? Probably. Success is often the result of tons of caring. We grow competitive because we care - we hate to lose and we love to win. We get defensive and dig in to defend our turf. Caring plays some role in all that. If we didn’t care, we’d likely be at the bottom rung of the ladder. Happier perhaps, but certainly less successful as the world views success.

I’m beginning to think it’s possible to reach a level of success, remain there and make a conscious decision to stop caring so much. In fact, I confess that I’m working on that as a life project. I call it “Project Care Less.” I’m uncertain if I’ll ever complete it, but it’s an interesting exercise.

For instance, I once cared about turf at work. I’d defend, successfully, my turf. Now, I don’t much care if I have any turf - much less if I’m able to successfully defend it. It’s taken me a few years to reach this point and even still, I find myself experiencing moments of wanting to defend it. But I normally don’t even unsheathe my sword. I just move on, sometimes after a few moments of stewing about it. Soon enough, it passes and I find myself climbing ever lower toward caring less. It’s a successful exercise that I find liberating at work.

Caring less at work doesn’t mean I take no pride in what I do, or the contributions I make. That remains as high as ever, if not higher. My caring less is limited to defending turf, position and authority. I rarely, if ever, do that any more. Like limbo I’m wondering, “How low can you go?” I’m sure there’s an unhealthy point of caring less out there somewhere. I don’t fear that I’m close, but I’ll let you know if I get some sense of the bottom.

As I work hard to care less in one area I find myself embracing caring more about other things - the people in my life. My family means more now than ever. By caring more about them, I find myself caring less about things that should have been on a back-burner all along. I suspect that is at the root of my not wanting to fight battles that once seemed very important to me.

Caring less is a good thing, if it results in caring more about the things that matter the most.