BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

Nobody loves set-backs, well unless of course you have trained yourself to love them. We all love to try something and it works. We all love to plant and reap. We love to go to the ATM, punch the codes and walk out with cash.

In developing Life Signatures though, I have come to cherish the aspect of life having other plans contrary to ours. The human being always loves to be in control. We love to be in control of what we are getting, where our lives are going.

Failure Should not be the Undertaker

That scenario involves being in control of time. Many movies have been made espousing the concept of time travel. It just tells you how we wish we could control everything and thereby dictate the outcome of all our input.

The very fact that we are not in ultimate control of each and everything makes failure part and parcel of our lives. We do not know what weather will come out tomorrow...we do not know if the Bank Loan will come through, we do not know if the debtors will pay up. We do not know if the readers will read or the buyers will buy.

Here is the thing: The only way we can know is to do something about it. Life is structured in such a way to provide feedback against what action we take. We are seldom on point even after years of strategizing. We can always do better. That is how incapacitated we are as human beings.

And that is why I love going back to the drawing board, especially in our quest to develop our life signatures. Someone who wants to quit smoking might find themselves very many times back at the drawing board. The same applies to a visionary what it applies to an addict.

The point of the whole process is never to discourage us. We need to learn to be patient with ourselves and that small P word called process. Every time we find ourselves back at the drawing board, we are never without information of what happened last time we ventured out.

I need to salute every person out there who are back to the drawing board. Yes it is painful, but it is not empty. Some people are languishing at the drawing board thinking that it is the end of the world. No it is not! It is a punctuation. You went out the first time. Would you go back out there again?

Who knows? You might be back at the drawing board, or you might be headed all the way to the bank. There is only one way to be sure...embrace the drawing board whoever uncomfortable it is. Comfort, I have come to find out is the biggest enemy of success.

Pain, hard work, disappointments, setbacks, failure and all the negatives of our inspired actions towards success are the breeding grounds for life signatures. So you might just be in good company if you are going through one of this, albeit with the correct perspective of drawing board mechanisms.

What I am saying though is that we need to learn never to stay at that drawing board every time we either have been forced back there or we have taken ourselves willingly. We need to rise up once again...and again...and again. We might need to come back here many times...that is the mark of progress being made, of life signatures being structured.

Do not give up. Go!

TRY ABNORMAL...IT EVENTUALLY WORKS

Very many years back while a teenager, a certain guy in Kenya announced that he would be vying for the Presidency. Kenya had just legalized multi-party politics (an abnormal thing given the preceding decade of one party rule).

To very many people in Kenya, this candidate was abnormal to say the least. He was belligerent, represented war and revenge. According to one of the leading columnists at that time, Kwendo Opanga wrote in his column, 'The Week That Was', Raila Odinga 'is not even an orator'. 

Raila Odinga

At face value, the Odinga proposal was abnormal. Today...sometimes news is not complete in Kenya without the mention of that once abnormal name, Raila Odinga

I am learning that there is great value in what we deem 'abnormal', especially at face value. Very many people tell me that they are bored. I tell them that they are just too normal and plain predictable.

Nothing saps juice out of life like the known normal. That is why some relationships are on the rocks...there is no effort to delve into the abnormal. Of course the abnormal calls for effort...and for most people, the brain does not love that word effort.

To be honest, we love the predictable. We love the comfort zone. What we know, what we have always known. We seldom want to operate in the new.

Try going out today and jog if you have not done that for months. The results will be evident not only during your jog, but also after the jog. Your body has just registered the abnormal or out of the ordinary and is now complaining.

Try juggling some balls, even if they are two. That is cumbersome stuff if you have never done that. You give up in exasperation easily. Yet, juggling being an abnormal thing to do for someone who never has, is a very helpful exercise to the brain.

When everyone has the same tools, it might be the abnormal that might give you competitive advantage.

Indeed, as a visionary, I would bet that in building your life signatures, it is important that we find ourselves at least going out of the normal once in a while, sticking with the abnormal until we have mastered it. That way, the abnormal is not normal anymore.

Just ask Raila Odinga. Had he vied for the presidency before? No. Was it easy the first time? No. Was it cumbersome? Of course! Did he give up? No! He's still right there smack in the middle of the race. No doubt the man has grown.

That is what trying the abnormal will do for us. It will grow us. It is Maxwell who said that, "If we are growing, we are always operating outside of our comfort zones"...sometimes, we are our own 'Kwendo Opangas' if you will. Yet we have to grow this thick skin to insulate us from those who see us being weird when we engage the abnormal.

It was weird to drop out of Harvard in order to develop MS DOS to its full potential. Nobody is supposed to do that. It is abnormal to drop out of school. That abnormality made us Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Steve Jobs of Apple. Infact, the normal is so ordinary for anybody to notice you!

A great visionary always seeks to be in the face of that which scares them. That which is foreign to them. That which demands effort from them. That which is out of the normal and out of the ordinary. 

You might want to try the abnormal...chances are that with time, it will work, and you will grow.

Have a weird week, wont you?