Yesterday eve my beloved and I took the three kids to The Children’s Course, a short par-3 golf course that is little people friendly. Midway through the round my middle little one, who’s seven, got frustrated and gave up.
After walking a hole without playing, on the following hole she walked up to the tee, teed up a ball, and announced, “I’m going to hit it, but I’m not playing.”
She then proceeded to get one of her best shots of the day.
Excited by that, she then proceeded to tee up the shot she had in the fairway. Clearly the tactic of putting the ball up on the tee made it easier to hit, and so she did for the next shot, then the next, and the next, until she finally put the ball on the green.
Imagine our amusement when, after everyone had put their ball on the green, that we turned around to notice she’d teed up the putt she was about to hit, too!
How long do each of us keep doing the same thing, the thing that worked like a charm last time, before we notice that it’s not the right tactic anymore?
If life stood still, we’d figure it out, get our recipe dialed in, and not have to worry about it any more. We spend our youth fighting to change things to the way we want them, to our vision of how things should be. If we manage to get somewhere near accomplishing that, then we fight to keep things the same, to keep them from changing away from us. And if the first is a difficult, if not futile activity, the second is most certainly an impossibility.
We grow, we get profitable, we create value when we managed to build faster than entropy acts against us. Sitting still is an illusion. It is the first step toward death.
) consider myself beyond ‘
