It gets in the way of progress for Cleaning Up, Goals, and in general. Pause and engage in a different way of thinking about PERFECT…
After Cleaning Up and establishing reasonable Goals, what stands most in the way of progress in the New Year? PERFECT – the constant drone in your head of those negative notes in a minor key. You can’t, it isn’t good enough, etc… and sadly the volume of that soundtrack has the most dynamic range for most.
Looking for music that is far from PERFECT, yet transformative, I looked to the Blues – the soundtrack for negative thinking – sorta. There is something about the Blues that makes me at least feel better. And I am not alone – most of the music we listen to at least in America has roots back to this most primitive and most basic style of music. Invented in the deep south by outcasts from society, it has transformed music in a way that most of us never really understand.
Conveniently, PERFECT has 7 letters to match the 7 days of these articles. Taking one each day, I will offer a “different” view of what PERFECT could actually be for us – helping us to understand a different approach. I also will weave in the concepts of Design Thinking that models the “just try something” that started the Blues in the first place. And we will have a short introduction to how to apply that to your life, and the new practice I have used for myself and others, Designing Your Life.
So follow along for a conversation PERFECT – a letter at a time. A different way to define and think about your New Year.
“What you are reading is PERFECT!” You know that is Looney Tunes – and if I could get you to read that in my favorite character, Foghorn Leghorn, “It’s a joke son! You missed it!” it would be perfect. Early in life, I ran across many characters like this, and eventually came to be a student of them, adopting some of their best (and worst) mannerisms, including what people say about me all the time: “Often wrong, never in doubt”.
I had reached the point in the day’s interviews to meet with the Senior VP who would potentially be my manager. It was a large company, growing fast, and more than likely, you are reading this from a server that is hosted in their cloud. I asked: “How do you handle mistakes?” His confident reply – “The people we hire do not make mistakes”. I did not take the job…
Walking into our Executive’s office that afternoon, we were in big trouble, summoned by our boss to join him – NOW. As we came in, we were scolded that the Safety Engineer had turned us in with a memo. A large computer Terminal was on top of our bookcase – 6 feet in the air – and weighing nearly 60 lbs, had a coax cable wrapped around it that was about to be caught in the door, which could have killed us…
“Could you possibly finish a thought?”. If you know mathematics, you would observe my sentences involve a lot of “open parentheses” – the start of something, and then something else, and then something else. Closing parentheses, which allow thoughts to be processed and considered – those are not easy for me to do. What I look for in teams are people who observe that, and “help me” Focus … and be more PERFECT…
“Play the Simple Ball”. Standing on a field that cold March morning, it was my admonishment to the young men preparing to play the game they love and qualify for the Finals – if we could win this match. We had jelled well this season, but this last hurdle was to beat our archrival – the wonder of which were mostly our close friends, including the Coach of the other team…
“Johnny try harder!!” One of the shorter members of our team was not able to keep up with the boys as they were becoming young men. His parents were hoping their voices would “help” him to be a more PERFECT player… and I could Count on it making him execute worse. He knew that there was no way to catch these bigger kids, and eventually, he left the team. Having been short my whole life, I understood, but that didn’t make it easy for me…
Screaming from the back of our Team was the most passionate member of the team. The bad news is that he was from Peru, spoke very little English, so we rarely understood what he was saying. HOW he was saying it was CRYSTAL clear. His energy was contagious as he lectured us on the sideline at halftime, which I delegated that Time to him, and simply observed how he renewed the Team, words not really being needed…