Feb 3
Seth Godin chooses the same metaphor as I did in a recent post.
Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn’t particularly effective either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills.
via Seth Godin
It’s all about the hills…
I’ve never bought a case for any of my personal electronic devices. One time a few years ago our IT manager required screen protectors for all of the phone we had recently purchased. I immediately took mine off (oh yes, quite the rebel here). The protectors were supposed to stop the screens from getting scratched up in our pockets, but the immediate result was a dark, scratched looking screen, the exact problem the plastic slip was trying to avoid in the first place.
I’ve had a few good sports injuries over the last few years, and sometimes the road to recovery can look similar. We avoid doing things that hurt because we are afraid it’ll set back our recovery, when sometimes we need to embrace the hurt and push through the limits to force our body to adapt to normal movement patterns instead of our injured ones. My trying to protect against injury leaves us more injured than we should be.
In a business setting, when trying to build resilience in a business model we sometimes build too much diversity in our plans. “If market A doesn’t work out, we can try B or C or D”. Havig a plan B is a good thing, unless you end up sacrificing your top priority in order to keep your backup plans alive.
This is a really common problem. Sometimes when trying to protect ourselves we actually sabotage ourselves. Seth Godin says entrepenuers sometimes succeed because “There are no life boats”. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/11/surviving-google.html
Sometimes we need to burn the lifeboats, risk a little reinjury to prevent the long term decline, and risk scratching the shiny glass back of that brand new cell phone.
image via singlefin
Not enough bits in this byte 