UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING BLOG

You come home and you find two objects before you: a Rubics Cube and a violin. You have never learned to master either and you decide this is the time to start. You will select one. Which shall it be?

Before you answer, let’s start by realizing that these are more than complex instruments: they are metaphors for many of the challenges we face in life.

Rubics Cube, difficult as it may be for most to understand its hidden code and assemble it correctly, is a task and a zero sum game. Once you master it, save the moment of self satisfaction, nothing is gained. You are truly bringing something to the sum of its parts. You have completed a thoughtful task but you cannot take it to a higher level. It is a crossword puzzle. A time killer. It may be fun to do, and that’s great, but it cannot take you to a higher plane.

The violin is a different matter by orders of magnitude. First and foremost because it cannot be mastered. It is an art form. The more you learn about it, you recognize that as you think you master it, it evades mastery, driving the player to stretch to ever greater heights to make even more beautiful music. To make the wood and the strings do the zillion things they can do, and then the zillion more when they are in the hands of a person who understands and revels in the poetry of nuance.

Rubics Cube is black and white. The violin is a rainbow.

As we move through our lives, we can complete puzzles engineered by others to have a beginning and an end. Or we can pursue the challenges that lead to twists and turns, to invisible complexities, to paths that require us not to complete tasks but to invent our own. To keep raising the bar and experimenting with color combinations because in doing so it is always possible to achieve breakthroughs that come from our own curiousity and our drive to put the tasks aside and make the violins sing.

I am working on a book proposal that is exciting me. Yesterday, I gave my agent a heads up that it is almost complete. He responded to put it aside, let it marinate, and then read it again before I send it in for submission to publishers.

He was telling me, in his inimitable way, that it shouldn’t be “complete,” it should be great. That there is always opportunity to take a task and play it like a violin. Given that there is always so much stuff to do in our lives, there is a tendency to rush through what we do, chalking it up to just so many meetings we attended, documents we wrote. Emails we answered.

But the goal in a well lived life, a life of meaning, a life of discovery and creation, is to ride the magic carpet of discovery. To soar, in at least part of our time, above the bric a brac and find a way to get lost, like a sculptor in the midst of a major work, in the finer points of his work so that he can take his original vision to an exponentially higher goal.

Sometimes I ask people if they can perform what looks like a task. They give me back a violin concerto. Other times, I ask for a concerto and get back a Rubic’s Cube.

It has nothing to do with the instruments. It is all in the players.

It is a reality but also the best compass for leading my life. For driving myself.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 12:26 pm and is filed under 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.