Chapter 13 - DO
What is doing?
1. No idea is of any real value until it gets used. If an idea never gets used, why even know about it?
2. There's a huge gap between knowing and doing. I have called this gap - The Impossible Barrier - and written at length about this in NewSell. The reason for this is because, so often, knowing something prevents doing it.
3. We have something repeated to us and we say "Yes, I already know that!" and we turn our attention away. Yet it is the repetition of things we already know that gets us closer to doing it. It has been said that too often the knowers are not the doers and the doers are not the knowers.
4. Once we move from thought into action we immediately create feedback. Our actions have consequences and it is these consequences that enable us to evaluate the effectiveness of our behaviour. Thinking is not an escape from action it is the simply the basis for it. When in doubt, do something. Anything.
The Quest - Seek and Ye Shall Find
5. You may already have noticed that the recurring themes running though all this cognetics training about human information-handling is ESCAPE and MOVEMENT. To the thinker, a creative approach to life means a questioning approach.
6. Questing, was the kind of adventurous modus operandi of the knight of chivalry. Whether the "impossible dream", the crusade, or the search for the Holy Grail, the true knight went out seeking challenges and embracing problems. He was a knight, a man of action, a doer, doing what knights do.
7. Today's knights are no different. Whether a man or woman, the knight of today has the same spirit of questing only the weapons are different. In cyberia, the keyboard is mightier than the sword.
8. Today's cyberknights, like their ancient brothers, are the great questers of the information age. They use search engines rather than siege engines. They don't use chain mail but they do use email. They surf cyberia on their laptop instead of sailing to Outremer on their warships. But, they're out there, and this is just the beginning.
Questions are the Answer
9. The skilled thinker, the thinker of action, is a skilled questioner.
10. Who? What? When? Where? How? Why? Why? Why? The only silly question is the question you don't ask. But what is a question? According to Rochelle Myers, who runs the now-famous Stamford University Graduate School of Management course, Creativity in Business, questions are the following:
Questions Help You Do
11. If you can develop your questioning skills you will immediately begin to expand your options, you will have more alternatives, you will generate extra possibilities, you will have more choices. All these things will lead you into action, to DO things.
12. Your new questioning skills will enable you to become less of a knower and more of a doer. You will annoy authorities and astound your friends. This alone, can be a good enough reason to ask more questions.
Do it bad!
12. My friend, Leslie Buckland, was President of Caribiner Inc. in New York, the world's largest producer of business meetings. Leslie often used to say, "If something is worth doing it's worth doing badly." Why? Doesn't this seem a contradiction for a man that was known internationally for setting the standards of quality in business meetings?
13. Caribiner can go into a hotel ballroom anywhere in the world, turn it into a circus or a theatre in 24 hours, stage, for one performance only, the business equivalent of a Broadway show - original music, dancers, actors, fireworks etc - and then strike the set leaving it as they found it 24 hours later. They stage multi-million dollar productions all over the world for companies like IBM, McDonald's, and Mercedes-Benz where quality is the absolute key. Yet Les often says "If something is worth doing it's worth doing badly". Why?
Bad Can Lead to Good
14. This is the paradox of action, of decision-making, of getting things done. The mistake-phobiacs are so afraid of a doing something badly they get nothing done at all! "Our doubts", said William Shakespeare, "are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt."
15. Very often there's no "right way" to do things. Les, and other people of action, like trauma surgeons or astronauts, know that one has to get started and do something, get the process moving.
16. Even if you make a mistake or do it badly, get going. You can always change things, make adjustments and corrections. You can make it work and make it work well, but first you have to get it up and running. Bad can always be changed to good. Sitting back and waiting for perfection often means inertia and failure.
Using Questions
17. For an experiment (that is, to try out and see what happens) try asking questions like these:
One Question Two Question
18. If you were given the opportunity to ask anyone in the world today just one question:
1. what would be the question? and
2. of whom would you ask it?
19. If you were given the opportunity to ask anyone in history who ever lived just one question:
1. what would be the question? and
2. of whom, in all of history, would you ask your question?
Click here for Index to go to the next Chapter
The purpose of this training is to help us to become skilled thinkers through daily practice, which we do live and interactively in Internet Conference Rooms... for details contact An Ever Better World Internet Academy.... To further explore this subject, consult the Internet site by the author of this book available at http://www.schoolofthinking.org/... How to get these is explained during the daily practice sessions is provided to active participants with the Ideal Network...
This document hosted at http://www.libertyzone.com