adminZachary Aldwin Milkshake in the boardroom
Iam an avid reader of blogs, books, magazines, fiction and non-fiction. My passion for reading is influenced by my search for new titbits to tantalise my literary tastebuds. One of the greatest features Amazon has unleashed on the planet is the rabbit warren of ‘‘Recommended’’ titles that can lead you on a journey of discovery of your love for books.
I discovered some of my favourite authors this way (the other great thing Amazon have is the option to download a sample before you choose to buy the full paper or electronic version).
My find for this week was a quote snuggled in the pages of a Men’s Health Magazine (Zach likes to stay healthy).
The quote was “Be like Homer!” This was in apparent reference to the yellow cartoon character of Homer Simpson in the American adult animated sitcom, the Simpson.
Homer loves doughnuts, he raves about them and consumes them in vast quantities. He focuses on the doughnut and not the hole in them.
The hole represents the negativity we can dwell on, the doughnut the positive, and daily we face the choice to choose what we can see.
It becomes easy to dwell on problems, to become ‘‘problem-locked’’. I struggle with this, because part of what I do is analyse stuff to work out what is not working and how it can be done better.
A doctor will focus on finding a diagnosis (the negative problem), a technician is looking for a fault.
It is easy to degenerate into a problem oriented mentality if we are not careful. It takes effort to lift up ones head and find the solution, the cure. It takes even more effort to take in what is working right in the system and celebrate its effectiveness (our training often has us give a menial glance at what is working correctly as it is not the source of the problem).
Breeding a problem focused mentality outside of work will have you correcting my punctuation as you read this article, criticising the perfectly presented dish served at the restaurant, and forgetting to compliment your wife. In short no one will want to be around you.
One of the reasons that you need to keep a wide, positive viewpoint is that if all you do is focus on a problem you may miss the opportunities that come your way.
In some cases the opportunities are not even ‘‘coming’’, they have already arrived and are waiting patiently to be taken and used.
Opportunities need to be taken. It is no good walking around them, over analysing them, thinking about how to lever them to your advantage and writing about them. Go ahead and take them.
Sure you need to plan a little, make sure it is a genuine opportunity, but at some point you need to actually do something. There is a Facebook mantra that goes ‘‘Done is better than Perfect’’. At first glance this phrase gives me nightmares as they conjure up images of substandard products in my mind.
When taken as part of a continual cycle of improvement and development it glows with wisdom. Keep a standard of excellence, but please, please, please ship. Ship your product, deliver, publish, sign off, graduate; whatever is needed to complete the task, do it.
You can argue about an idea all you like, you can refine a product as much as you want but know that somewhere in the world someone has had the same idea as you and the only thing that will stop him beating you to the market is you actually doing something and getting it out there.
There are over 6 billion thinking humans in the world, there is more thought happening than ever before, the chances of someone else having your idea are higher than ever. A few years ago I had a brief idea for a fantasy novel, not the whole plot but a ‘‘that could be an interested concept’’.
I made a note of it but because I was busy on another project at the time I did nothing to develop it. A few months ago I came across a novel that included the same idea that had wandered across my neural pathways.
Someone else, who I have never met, had done something with it, and made money off it, and there is nothing at all that I could do about it.
The other version of ‘‘problem-lock’’ we get is when our solution creates another problem. You have an idea, draw up a business plan. The snag is that your plan requires about half a million dollars in initial funding.
Your new problem becomes getting the funding and you totally lock onto the problem of capital.
What if you took a step back rethought your plan and worked it so that you could bootstrap it (the biggest long-term advantage here is that you do not need to sell off equity to get your funding).
You can then start things off sooner, the scale may be smaller but you are shipping, you are delivering.
Right now our country needs more doers. Enough talking about problems and more of fixing them.
Enough vacillation and more stepping out, yes we may make mistakes but those can be corrected. I have worked a lot on a goal-setting course, but if all we do is set goals and never actually achieve them we are wasting a lot of brain power.
It is time to move, to work hard, to get our hands dirty building something. I want to end this article with the mantra that I use at the end of the course “Go. Be. Do!”
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