“Make today a masterpiece” John Wooden
Why is it that successful people and businesses are typically the last to innovate and change?
I’ve been confronted with this dilemma recently. I’ve been doing well and my business is growing. I’ve had some successes over the years but I keep feeling the push to let go of some old thinking and reach out for something new. The problem is I know what has worked for me in the past. I know how to be successful doing what I’ve done before and the more things I have done the harder it is to try something I have never done before.
I had this funny moment of tension yesterday. I’m in the process of exploring new ways to connect to people in the “age of connection”, and for me there are a lot of unknowns. There is a huge amount of information and a million ways to build a system that works. The question just keeps coming back to me, “what do you want to do?” I found myself not wanting to make that decision. I found myself wanting to offload that choice and the responsibility of it to someone else. “Why can’t someone just tell me what to do?” This struck me as funny when I realized this is the same question my students used to pose to me. I would give them an assignment with an end in mind but they needed to build the proverbial mousetrap to get there. My students hated this. Especially the straight A students. They had become masters at regurgitating answers to someone else’s questions and when I refused to give them an answer the struggle with the uncertainty frustrated them. I loved being on the teaching end of that equation. I loved coaching students through the struggle and helping them unlock the creative genius I knew was there. I found the irony of the situation I was now in laughable. I’m sure my former students would get a kick out of watching me squirm with the ambiguity in front of me.
Once I realized the place I was in I was able to let go of the frustration and the search for the perfect answer and make a decision that I could act on. It might not work, and I may have to try something else but today I’m doing something instead of trying to offload the burden of my choice onto someone or something else.
If the last new thing you did or new thinking you did was over a year ago or worst yet five years ago you may be on the verge of extinction. In our fast paced world of bigger, better, cheaper, faster all at your finger tips the success that got you where you are will not keep you there. You will not be successful as a parent if you do the same things in the same way with your children when they are fifteen as you did when they were five. They are not the same people they were at five and I would contend neither are you. When we stop reinvesting in ourselves and the relationships we have, personal or work related, they get stale, old and they start to die.
People just like our world are new every day. If we want to keep our business and our relationships alive we have to be willing to let go of the old of yesterday and embrace what could be new every day. There is no road map because it hasn’t been done before. This day is an original, it is one of a kind. The person you are and the people you meet and see today are also one of a kind. The you, you are today will never be again. What would happen if you could actually let go of yesterday, the people and the problems and you saw today fresh. We may have similar situations as yesterday but it is not exactly the same because we are not exactly the same.
That is how we stay relevant, how we keep innovating and as John Wooden would say, “make every day a masterpiece.”
