UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING BLOG

The hardest thing about learning how to fly a plane is learning how to fly with instruments. And what makes that so challenging is that you have to abandon all of your instincts, forgo everything you have been taught to do to that point, and trust the invisible.

There you are flying through fog, through dense clouds, you can’t see up, down or straight ahead. Nothing but white out. And it feels, almost for certain, that the plane is tilted wrong, or pointed earthward or upside down. And you want to steer through it, to correct what feels wrong, to get back on course, but the rub is that the instruments say all is fine. You are flying right. All is well.

And although you can’t see a damn thing, you have to trust the instruments and stay the course even though its feels as if you are nosediving toward disaster.

People spend their entire lives seeking to avoid this sense of uncertainty. Of refusing to trust what they can’t see. Of staying planted on the ground, out of the skies, nowhere near the clouds. They believe the choice is simple: know precisely where you are at all times, that you are flying right, straight and true — or never let the wheels leave the ground.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could be a more devastating deception they play on themselves.

The fact is, we are all pilots in fog at times. Some embrace this as part of the adventure of life. And as a state of adrenalin rush that is the difference between watching the evening weather report on TV and falling in love. Or starting a business with your own money. Or reinvesting in one that’s clawing its way through a rough patch.

Let’s take the romance part. Recently, I heard someone say that they didn’t want to fall in love because “It might not work out.” And then they said, “If I fall in love and it doesn’t work out, well that would be like a car accident. ”

The message was, stay out of the fog. Well, excuse me, that means stay out of one of the best things life can possibly offer us.

LOVE.

Here’s what I see as the point: there is no point. Just life livers and life pretenders.

I wish the best for the latter but they bore me to tears. They leave the earth no better than when they inherited their space in it. They take up space. There are no medical centers named for them. They have never built an enterprise. They did not write Imagine. They don’t know how to collaborate on an opus like that. They may be sweet and kind and brush their teeth and iron their clothes and send Hallmark cards and be politically correct and pass the social litmus test invented by liars and hidden atheists, but. But. But.

They have never had a snowball fight in fog. They need order, and there is no order in that.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 11:04 am and is filed under Business, Public Relations, Sales, Unconventional Thinking . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.