A good mantra to have “know what works but accept that it isn’t permanent”.
Just because a solution works today, doesn’t mean it will tomorrow, or next year.
And vice versa, what doesn’t work today, may work next year.
Holding this mantra true keeps you proactive, receptive to new ideas & opportunities but most of all creating a habit of questioning everything. And that’s not too shabby a habit to have.
Risk Homeostasis is a theory that humans have a certain level of acceptable risk and we will seek to keep that in equilibrium.
If we take high risk in one part of our life we will seek to minimise it in another part.
For example, in a Munich Case Study two groups of taxis were monitored for accidents. One group had ABS brakes installed, the others stayed with the regular breaks. You would think then that the ABS guys had less accidents right?
Wrong. What they found was the accident rate was about the same, the group with ABS having gained better braking would take other risks (ie braking late).
Have a read over at WikiPedia. Watch my video below on RadioWammo discussing it:
It has interesting implications for all change, innovation and risk when you think about it.
Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell for the inspiration in his latest book What the Dog Saw.
One offs are expensive, focus on ongoing relationships where you can work together, get to know one another, take a dance.
For the continual ongoing growing relationship is made up of thousands of small steps, each compounding the previous. It’s this approach which creates tremendous change.
I was quite a curious kid, always asking questions, the ever curious question of WHY? My first job was classic of this, it was assisting the local fire wood producer, chop up and distribute firewood.
My boss was an aging man, putting in the last few years before retirement, and it was his little one man band. Our first job was to go out and collect the firewood, he would use the chainsaw to cut trees brought down by flooding. Firstly he would cut the trees into rounds, my job was to then grab the rounds, put them in a pile.
We would then split the rounds in half, load them on the back of the flatbed truck and take them back to his wood yard. Back at the yard, unload all the wood, put it in a pile. The next step was to cut the wood with a log splitter, stack in another pile.
Finally we were ready for orders! Orders were by the cubic metre, and so a certain amount of barrow loads was a cubic metre. We would then load the truck up an order at a time and deliver it.
It took me all of one day to speak up and go, hang on we are double, triple handling this wood. Why don’t we split the back of the flatdeck truck in half, then into little stalls, the horizontal sides of the stall being such we could pull them out.
Then we could cut the firewood, split it on location, throw it into the stalls (which could be measured out on a cubic metre basis) then deliver straight to the customer. We could save sooo much time. ”No Ben, this is the way I do it”.
This frustrated me to no end, but hey I got $10 for a mornings work and that bought me basketball cards. I hung in there annoyed at partaking in such an inefficient process, as soon as the opportunity came up I quit my job and moved on.
What I rapidly learned was the concept of idea development, failing fast, modifying and moving on. It’s no big secret, smart people understand it and embrace it. Fail fast. However whilst there is understanding – we fall short of having a mechanism for it.
That’s what the 12 Hour Startup (my first idea in The Best Ideas are Free) is about – formalising a mechanism that allows for remarkable ideas to be shared, tested, proven and ultimately to create significant change.
Naturally we shy away from pain. However there are times when we should push through it and others where we should just quit.
You probably have heard someone say if it’s not coming easy, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it and to back off let it happen naturally. (ie if you ought to be doing it it should be easy).
OR
You are doing something completely new and it’s painful because you haven’t experienced it before – you should push through.
So which is it?
There is no strict answer, you learn through experience.
However in the meantime pick up The Dip and have a read, helps you learn when to stick and when to quit.