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Never Waste A Good Crisis
The title of this episode is Never Waste a Good Crisis. How many times have you said to yourself, “How are we going to get out of this? What are we going to do?” You find yourself that you are truly in the middle of a storm. Something’s wrong with the kids, something’s wrong at work, something’s wrong at school and you feel like you’re staring hopelessness in the face. Then time goes by and not only do you get out of that jam or out of that storm but you look back and you grew tremendously. You even caught yourself saying to people, “I’m honestly glad that I went through that.” There’s a consulting phrase, “Never waste a good crisis.” How can a crisis be good? There are a few metaphors I want to launch at you. First of all, once you break your arm or your leg for that matter, did you know that you can’t break your arm or leg in that same place again? It’s almost impossible. The reason is when the bone comes back together in that spot, it’s almost like God put the best superglue in the world. It gets stronger. It’s the same with where they weld a piece of steel where they weld two pieces together is far stronger than a couple of feet on each side.
I love the analogy of professional glass blowers. They heat the glass over the flame and watching these artists bend glass was awesome. Thinking of two different colors of glass that have to get heated up so hot to the point that when you push the two colors together, they stick together. What’s interesting is no two colors of the glass have the same melting temperature. These artists have got to get this one piece of glass so hot, the other one piece of glass so hot and they got to come together at the right spot. Like this one particular artist that Kerri and I were looking at, it takes him six attempts on average to get the one to come together perfectly. The other analogy of a high-end vase or vase manufacturer, they’ve got to mold the clay and melt it. They’ve got to do it in a series of stages in the furnace. The concept is they have to gradually heat up that clay so it doesn’t crack, it doesn’t melt and it gets incredibly solid.
You're either in the storm, coming out of the storm, or about to go into one. Click To Tweet
What is the point of this? In the case of the two glasses coming together with two colors and the vase, what comes out of this incredible heat and pressure? It’s tremendous to the products’ friction, animosity and pressure, what comes out is art. What comes out is something incredibly beautiful. There is a direct correlation to those two colors of glass coming together, the heat, the friction and everything in a business result. There are many business comparisons that have been made to art, to pressure, to brick ovens. The reason is it’s fundamentally simple. If you take a business, it’s got all these moving parts and all these ingredients. It’s got people, it’s got a process and it’s got a managerial set of guidelines but only when they’re heated up via stress of market demands, customer demands, the investor wants and needs and desires. Only when all of the actual friction meets the business management process, only when the two collide is art created.
It’s not like launching a written business plan and you’re going to rub-a-dub your way to success. There’s not a single person that knows of one human being that wrote a simple business plan with a great idea, did it from no investment. They rubbed-dubbed their way and now they’re a multimillionaire. We’ve never met it. You have to have tremendous friction to come face-to-face with the business ingredients, the business plan and the managerial structure to make beautiful artwork. In fact, it’s only from the heat, the stress and the pressure that the beauty is created.
Here are my command and my marching orders from this episode. If you are not in a storm right now in life, if you come out of a storm or maybe you’re about to go into a storm or you’re right now coming out of a storm, you’re in one of those three spots. You’re either in the storm, coming out of the storm or you’re about to go into one. If you’re not sure, I’d like you to write down on a piece of paper the following, “The next time that I feel myself about to go into a storm or firmly gripped in the storm, I am going to create something beautiful because this storm came to me for a purpose or it didn’t come to me for a purpose, but I’m going to create a purpose and a change from it. The next time I feel myself in a storm, I am going to create something beautiful because what comes out of a storm in business is often great pieces of art.” I hope this helps. Take care.
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