You Have Everything You Need
Photo by Daniele Franchi on Unsplash
This week I’ve been thinking about the difference between “wisdom” and “shiny new ideas”. Are you influenced by the LATEST business thinking? Does your bookcase resemble a small branch of Waterstones, with cutting-edge thinking sitting unloved and un-thumbed on the shelf? Do you latch onto the newest trends to see how you can improve as a professional or a leader?
I think a lot of us do this. I have my own bias towards shiny ideas. This week was the first week of my ‘6 Weeks to Ninja’, during which I’m spending Thursday evenings walking a small group of lovely folk through the key habits from my book, How to be a Productivity Ninja. I was preparing the opening week’s slide deck, which goes through the 9 Characteristics of the Productivity Ninja. It suddenly hit me that several of the people on the group will have heard this stuff before. Some of them have even heard me give this talk before. It started to fill me with lizard brain-y, imposter syndrome-y anxiety. “Oh my god, what the hell do YOU have to say?!”. “This is the same stuff they’ve probably all heard before!”. “They’ll all be so BORED and they’ll HATE THIS!”.
Of course, my mistake was to be viewing my work through the lens of how new or shiny the ideas feel to me (and I’ve been basically talking about the same stuff here for 12 years), versus how useful I know these ideas can be when they hit home and are applied, whether that’s for the first time or the third. Now, without wanting to blow my own trumpet (because who does except, er… Trump?) I am regularly confronted with the objective feedback and evidence that suggests these ideas I’m worried aren’t shiny enough, are the same ideas that make a huge difference for people. But alas, the lizard brain part of our brain is anything by objective or logical.
Shiny ideas become un-shiny surprisingly quickly. Earlier this year (before, y’know..), I gave a workshop in the middle east. It had gone really well. Some of the best feedback I’d ever had. Afterwards, I was talking to my speaking agent there. She said “I know they loved it, but there’s a tendency here to say “well, we’ve had Graham, so what’s new?”. It seems completely illogical, doesn’t it? Let’s move on from what works, with the risk that something else may be better, but may also fall flat on its face. I mean, at least let me get back on the plane first.
I’ve realised this bias towards the new and shiny in myself and others more and more in recent years. I don’t know if it’s me getting older, or the flow of information speeding up as quickly as the years seem to be speeding up, but isn’t it funny how easily we all reject the things that have served us well, in search for more ‘cutting edge’ versions of enlightenment or support.
And do you know what? We often confuse the search for new advice with the process of acting on advice. It’s easier to scroll Instagram for some new shiny quotes, than to look inside ourselves and figure out what we actually need, or give ourselves the credit to assume that we might already know the answer. Searching for inspiration on the internet is just a sophisticated form of procrastination.
The philosopher Alain De Botton is an atheist, but talks with admiration about the function of religion in peoples’ lives, and how it creates a sort of rhythm for reminding us of what’s important at different times of the year. So at Christmas, Christians (and most of the rest of us, given the influence it has on our culture) reflect on the year’s end and our gratitude for family, at Easter we think about springtime and the gift of new beginnings, at Harvest festival we think about our connection to the food that we put in our bellies. The same themes come up again and again, whatever religion you choose to follow (or inherit).
I’ve found myself in recent years, because of my podcast, reading tonnes of business books, and in my view it’s rare that they genuinely break new ground. A lot of books (including most of the things I’ve done myself, to be honest) are simply stating existing or similar ideas in new and hopefully-more-practical ways than the ones that went before, or helpfully reminding us of things that are good to remember.
The best ideas aren’t the new and shiny ones. Instead, we should look to the dusty ones, buried deep at the back of our brains. Perhaps we need a life or business version of religious teachings, which follows the same six books, at the same points in the year. Year after year after year.
The final, uncomfortable truth here is that knowledge or wisdom or skills aren’t even what’s important at all. What’s important is the action we take with that knowledge. Sometimes, there’s a huge gap to bridge between knowledge and action. Between the occasional surge in enthusiasm and long-time, consistent habit. Actually, knowledge is worse than ignorance when it’s not being applied, because the gap between knowledge and action makes us feel guilty, or jealous of the folks who seem to have bridged the gap better than we have.
When I had a regular nutrition coach, Colette Heneghan, one of the things she stressed with me about food was that ‘consistency beats intensity’. You don’t need crazy fad diets that seem to be the turnkey solution but that require you to only drink lime juice for a week. You just need to consistently eat a varied rainbow of plants, plus a bit of protein and the right carbs. Do that consistently (which isn’t that hard) and you can even eat pizza and chocolate too.
You don’t have to be flashy to succeed. You don’t need the cutting edge ideas to do well. Doing the simple things that you know work, consistently and well, is ultimately what matters.
So this week, I invite you to pull a dusty old favourite book off the shelf and remind yourself why its ideas matter — and then implement some of them. If that means picking up your well-thumbed copy of How to be a Productivity Ninja or one of my other books and diving back in, then go ahead. If that means still not buying my book, and returning to an old favourite instead, then you know I fully approve of your choice.
Remember, you have everything you need.
Whether you choose to see that fact as empowering or terrifying is up to you.
(And I know which one I’d love you to choose this week).
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