I just read this and found it fascinating. A little long and worth reading. Abbreviated I watched Werner Erhard on YouTube speaking to an audience at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Business (video). He gives an hour-plus talk asking the question ‘What is the source of performance?’ Being a typically Erhard lecture, you really have to sit with it, because this is as far from ‘The Secret Simple Seven Steps to Success!’ as you can imagine. And then towards the end, having developed pretty much a single idea for 50 minutes plus, it’s as if Werner suddenly decides to throw in a few quick other ideas before his close. It’s a funny change of gear and not what I was expecting, and maybe it was that change of gear throwing me off guard, as it were, that allowed me to hear a sentence that has wrapped itself around the ‘fleshy contours of my heart’ (as my coach’s coach says). Which means that it has changed my life. A concept that I thought I got before I now realize I have really got. As in Got Got. Got not like “Oh yes, I understand what you are saying, how fascinating!” but got as in ‘Got it like a joke’. Meaning straight inside, no filters, everything shifted. The sentence is: WHALES DO NOT HAVE TOO MUCH TO DO. Because they don’t. And this is not because they are whales and we are human beings and all whales have to do is be a whale and/or swim and/or eat whilst we as humans have considerably more to do on any given day, just take a look at my in box. No. It’s nothing to do with that difference at all. We are talking about language here – pretty much the only thing we have (try taking any action without it being formulated and then captured in language). And right now I’m going to use another form of language – written English – to point to where I’m going with this. So I’m going to write the sentence again with some punctuation: WHALES DO NOT HAVE ‘TOO MUCH TO DO’ That is the key phrase – ‘too much to do’ – as in: ‘How are you doing?’ ‘Oh, OK thanks, but I’ve got too much to do’ Or its sister phrases, such as: ‘I’m really busy’ or ‘Actually, I’m overwhelmed!’ And the reason that WHALES DO NOT HAVE ‘TOO MUCH TO DO’ is once again NOT because they are whales and we are human beings and all whales have to do is be a whale and/or swim and/or eat whilst we as humans have considerably more to do on any given day, just take a look at my in box. No. No. It’s because whales do not have language. Whales can’t think ‘I have too much to do’ and they can’t say ‘I have too much to do’, so ‘too much to do’ doesn’t show up in their life. Whales NEVER have ‘too much to do’ showing up in their lives. And the reason you have ‘too much to do’ is because you do think and say it. And so it does show up for you. Consistently. Every day. Just like everything else in your life. Everything else shows up in your life as a function of how you language it. ‘Too much to do’ doesn’t exist out there. It ONLY exists in here (David points to his head). And in our speaking. And the first, critical step in addressing your sense of overwhelm is to simply excise language like that in your life. Cut it out. Stop it. I’ve given up on the word ‘busy’ – try me, it doesn’t pass my lips any more. Why have I done that? One of the reasons is because I realized that most of the time when I was saying the word, it was a lie. Not a lie because I had nothing to do. Not at all. Just like you, in my life there’s always ‘a list of things to do and be done and some come unexpectedly and all have varying degrees of urgency and importance with them’. So I have lots to do and so do you. Let’s not get into a contest here about whose list of things to do is the longest. That’s really not the point. The reason it was a lie was because most of the time I didn’t mean ‘I’m busy’ but (especially to my clients): ‘I’m feeling really needy right now so I need you to know that just because I don’t work in a Big Organization I don’t sit around twiddling my thumbs all day’ or (especially to other consultants): ‘I see you as a competitor in a Universe of scarce clients and so I need you to know that my business is successful’ or, unfortunately, often I really meant (to lots of people): ‘I may indeed have just said Yes to your request but I’ll probably let you down and not deliver on time and in full and I hope the code word ‘busy’ we’ve just used will encourage you to be complicit with me in forgiving me for letting you down…’ Or more positively, sometimes when I said ‘I’m busy’ I actually meant: ‘I’m not at all ‘busy’. My life is full of amazing things I get to do, things that are in my circle of influence because of the sort of work I do and how I’ve chosen to lead my life. I’m not ‘busy’. I’m abundant in things to do! I love that these are mine to do!! How lucky am I?!’ But I used to chicken out and say ‘I’m busy’ instead. Everyone else was saying it, and I wanted to be cool like them, and fit in. But not any more. Complete your own personal translations of the word ‘busy’. Be curious about what’s going on for you when you want to say ‘I’m busy’. And experiment with telling the truth instead.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 08:10:26 +0000
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