Let me
ask you a question, is life a marathon or a sprint? I'm being serious.
What do you think? Is life like a sprint or a marathon? Please take a
minute and think about it. You probably don't need much time. I have
to imagine that you answered the question, in your mind, immediately
after you read it. But, perhaps, you waffled. Maybe you rethought the
question and began to come up with good arguments for either answers.
Let's talk about the answer. But first, let's take a step back.
Last
week I posted an idea from the book Good
to Great. Specifically, I
talked about something Jim Collins had named "The Stockdale Paradox." And this week, I figured I'd mention something from another of Collins' books, Built to
Last. If you have no idea
what I'm talking about go here: My Favorite Subject
As the title of this website suggests, I think and study a lot about paradoxes. And it's not because I'm a glutton for punishment. But rather it's because paradoxes are central to life. F. Scott Fitzgerald was essentially speaking about the paradox when he said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Now, I'm not saying I have a first-rate intelligence, but I am working on it. :)
Built
to Last is an excellent
book and I highly recommend it to you. I'll probably end up posting a
report about the entire book. Or, I might just take the concepts one
at a time. I haven't decided yet. But I have been fortunate enough to
work with Collins' co-author on some of the concepts in Built. One
concept, in particular, has been ringing in my head lately.
Built
to Last is a book about the
successful habits of visionary companies. In their research, what
Collins, and his co-author Jerry Porras, discovered was that
visionary companies do not oppress themselves with what the authors
call the “Tyranny of the OR." The "Tyranny of the OR"
is the rational view that cannot easily accept paradox, that cannot
live with two seemingly contradictory forces or ideas at the same
time. It pushes people to believe that things must be either A OR
B, but not both.
“It
makes such proclamations as: You can have change OR stability. You
can be conservative OR
bold. You can have low cost OR
high quality. You can have creative autonomy OR
consistency and control. You can invest for the future OR
do well in the short-term. You can create wealth for your
shareholders OR
do good for the world.” That last one is actually pretty popular
these days. It's the idea behind, “Doing well by doing good.” A
great example would be Yvon Chouinard and what he's doing with
Patagonia.
Collins
and Porras found that instead of being oppressed by the “Tyranny of
the OR,” highly visionary companies liberate themselves with the
“Genius of the AND.” This is the ability to embrace both extremes of a
number of dimensions at the same time. “Instead of choosing between
A OR
B, they figure out a way to have both A AND
B.”
This
isn't about greed but rather it's about wisdom. Automobile
manufacturers used to believe that you could either produce a
low-cost car OR
a high-quality car. And that's exactly what they did. But then one
company wondered if they could do both. Before long, Toyota had taken
over and was in first place. Today it's well accepted that we can
have low-cost AND
high-quality. In fact, in many ways, high-quality IS
low-cost. What we find is that higher quality goods actually cost
less. It's like my pappy used to say, “Anything worth doing is
worth doing right the first time.”
Let's
take it off business for a minute. Let me ask you this, would you
consider yourself Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde? By making the question personal,
I hope to have illustrated the point. The answer, that I imagine you
gave, was something like, “It depends.” And, yes, it does depend.
You're probably more Jekyll than Hyde but we all have the ability to
be both. We're good AND
we're bad. If you doubt me, or if you're in denial, I encourage you
to read the book The Lucifer
Effect by
Phil Zimbardo. The book
is about the famous Stanford prison experiment and it clearly illustrates
how each of us is part Jekyll and part Hyde. My friend, don't fight
it. It is what it is. Embrace the genius of AND.
Let's
finish back where we started. What was the question I first asked
you? Is life a marathon or a sprint? What is your answer now? Surely, your answer now is that life is both a sprint AND
a marathon, right? I believe that's true. I believe it's wise to view
life as a marathon of sprints. “Hurry up and wait,” right?
I do
think the marathon element is the more fundamental of the two. But
both are important. Grit and perseverance are critically important in
life. However, procrastination is also an ever present enemy. This is
where the sprint comes into play. Sometimes we need to get off our
butts and sprint. It's how great things get done. Of course, we can't
sustain a sprint indefinitely. So, sometimes you need to sprint and
sometimes it's okay to walk. New York psychologist, Nando Pelusi,
likes to use the word “Kurtosis” for this process. Dr. Pelusi
advocates a strategy of brief intervals of passionate, intense
activity dispersed among periods of conscious relaxation. Basically,
a marathon of sprints.
P.S. I
highly encourage you to read the book Built
to Last. It's quite
impressive and it launched Collins
into an extremely successful career. You've probably heard Jim's name
before. But, the name you definitely hear the most, on this blog, is
Peter Drucker. Here is what Collins had to say about Peter, “My
first encounter with Drucker's impact came at Stanford in the early
1990's, when Jerry Porras and I researched the great corporations of
the twentieth century. The more we dug into the formative stages and
inflection points of companies like General Electric, Johnson &
Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard, Merck and Motorola,
the more we saw Drucker's intellectual fingerprints. David Packard's
notes and speeches from the foundation years at HP so mirrored
Drucker's writings that I conjured an image of Packard giving
management sermons with a classic Drucker text in hand. When we
finished our research, Jerry and I struggled to name our book,
rejecting more than 100 titles. Finally in frustration I blurted,
"Why don't we just name it Drucker
Was Right, and we're done!"
(We later named the book Built
to Last.)” I'm just
sayin'.
