Clear thinking is your most valuable work. Period.
This means lots of things. But at it’s most basic, it means you must see things as they are, not as you wish them to be. Self-delusion makes life and business painful and frustrating.
And when deluded people are in power, they create pain and frustration for millions of others.
Yesterday a friend sent me an audio clip of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin issuing a prediction:
“The nightmare stories of the Likud are well known. After all, they promised Katyusha rockets from Gaza as well. For a year, Gaza has been largely under the rule of the Palestinian Authority. There has not been a single Katyusha rocket. Nor will there be any Katyushas.” – former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, July 24, 1995
Well, as you may know, since 2001, more than 13,000 mortars and rockets came screeching over the border from Gaza. Something no sane country would ever tolerate.
Another example:
Back when Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was toppled in early 2011, a colleague pronounced a prediction of her own. “The Muslim Brotherhood is not a force. Egypt is not in danger of becoming fundamentalist.”
Just over a year later, the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamic organization, is leading Egypt.
Why do people make these predictions – and with such confidence?
It’s because they confuse the way things are – Reality – with they way they’d like them to be.
And this line of thinking isn’t limited to politics and war. It applies to business just the same.
This is why the first principle of The Alchemist Entrepreneur is:
“Embrace Reality.”
Most people see only the superficial level of what’s going on – in business or in life.
A protester in California tells the TV reporter “If Israel isn’t the aggressor, then why are more Palestinians than Israelis dying?”
That’s taking a narrow, superficial look at things. The broadminded, open-minded thinker doesn’t look only at what is visible right now. He also looks to see what came before. And what forces are at play that may not be immediately visible.
To see Reality you need a few things:
1. You need to honestly want to. There was a time when I didn’t want to look at my bank account because I was afraid of what I’d see. That’s avoiding Reality. My account was at what it was at, whether I knew the numbers or not. That was delusional thinking and behavior.
2. You need structured thinking skills. When you go to a doctor, you expect he’s going to look to find the underlying cause of your symptoms.
In business, when you conclude “I can’t charge any more for my expertise” or “My customers don’t want to buy in this economy,” or “We don’t have enough money to run a proper marketing strategy,” you’re not seeing what’s really going on. You’re seeing prospects turn you down, but you’re not seeing the Real reason why.
And so when you don’t see Reality, you attribute the reasons for your problem to the wrong causes. This leads you to make poor decisions about how to use your time and money. And so you continue to get poor results.
It’s as simple as this: When you misdiagnose the illness, you’ll treat it with the wrong prescription. When you treat it with the wrong prescription, you suffer side effects even as the original illness progresses.
Just as a doctor learns a thought process that helps him make an accurate diagnosis, you, the entrepreneur, need to learn accurate thinking skills.
3. You need to master timeless wisdom.
King Solomon observed “The bird sees the net and thinks it’s there for naught.” And so he lands to eat the bait.
Haven’t we all been that bird one time or another? And doesn’t it help when you learn to spot the trap so next time you can avoid it?
Study the ways of the world, how people think and behave, the patterns that repeat themselves and you’ll be studying Reality.
I believe that Yitzhak Rabin meant well. He would not have knowingly put millions of people in harms way.
I know that my colleague, who predicted the Muslim Brotherhood would not win in Egypt, has a good heart. She very much wants the world to be a warm and loving place. And so she’s looking for evidence to prove that it is.
Both were wrong. Both were naive; choosing to believe things were one way when Reality was something else.
If your marketing plan isn’t working with $500, it’s not going to work with $50,000. It’s not the money. It’s the way you’re thinking about the whole project.
The first principle of The Alchemist Entrepreneur is “Embrace Reality” because until you know the truth about how things are, you can’t possibly hope to change them to the way you’d like them to be.
Where have you noticed people choose naivety over Reality – and what were the consequences? Please share below in the comments.
Dov Gordon
