Coaching Videos & Tips - July 5 2018 No. 565
STOP THINKING IN STRAIGHT LINES
Quick question: is where you are now in your career, business, relationships and life the result of careful planning or because of a chain of sometimes random events? Very few people plan to meet and fall in love with one particular person... and, if they do, they need serious help! If that's the case, why do we plan in straight lines and expect things to work out just as planned?
If you have an important decision to make or a difficult problem to solve, don't bother thinking it through. Equip yourself with all the available facts (bearing in mind that some important facts may be unavailable!) adn simply ingest them.
Then, sleep on it - let the part of your mind that is immune from linear thinking put all the proverbial ducks in a row. As the latest research on decision-making confirms, it's "always best to sleep on it".
Don't forget... you can browse all the previous videos, tips, articles and stories in The Archive
I want to clarify something regarding today's video, before I'm asked! Implicit in what I am saying with regard to linear thinking is that planning is a bad thing. I would like to make that claim explicitly... planning is a bad thing.
Yes, if I have a Workshop in Frankfurt, I need to make my arrangements to ensure that I'm there at the appropriate time. Yes, if my business produces millions of bottles of, say, eye-drops, I need to ensure that production is timely, planned in line with likely demand and that my supply chain ensures that what is produced gets to where it will be consumed. But this is not the planning I'm talking about.
I'm talking about how we plan our lives and careers and how a business that does manufacture eye-drops plans its big future. Normally, we plan using our normal way of thinking and analysing. The bad words in that last sentence are "normally" and "normal"! Normal businesses set themselves "challenging" targets for next year by adding 10% or 20% to this year's mediocre performance. Abnormal businesses change the way we communicate or even live our lives.
Normal thinking led Motorola (remember them?) to predict that the millions of customers who bought a new mobile or cell 'phone from them one year would buy another one and a half new 'phones the next year. Normal thinking enabled Kodak focus their continuing business attentions on celluloid film and photographic papers. Normal thinking traps most people in a rut that leads to stress and a lack of work/life balance and, as a result, normal thinking shortens their lives.
If you want to achieve anything in life, you need to let the part of your brain that doesn't do normal thinking out of its box.
I was asked a couple of weeks ago if, seeing as how we're now in holiday season, I had witnessed any new normal crazy behaviour! Well...
Had to drive up to the village we lived in when we first moved to France on Tuesday - to meet the Bank Manager - yes, that's normal but not necessarily crazy! What we saw on the drive up was.
Half-way up a series of hairpin bends in open Alpine pasture, in the middle of a line of slowly winding traffic, one car suddenly stopped and, as a result, ground the whole line to a standstill.
Out of the car popped the female driver. She opened the car's rear passenger door... to scream at a little child in a child seat and to give him or her (couldn't see) a couple of good hard slaps. Obviously she had been unable to reach back far enough whilst driving! Happy holidays!