Pages

Sunday 6 May 2012

Fork it!

I can´t tell you how much time and energy I have wasted over the years trying to persuade people to look at things differently or do them differently. It used to eat me up that some people, even people you would think were quite bright, just couldn´t or wouldn´t see something that was staring them in the face.
Being a basically reasonable person, I assumed that most people out there were also basically reasonable. This is the mistake we all make. We all think that everyone else thinks the way we think. We reinvent the universe in our own image  and then wonder why it doesn´t seem to make sense. I found out the hard way that some people are incredibly unreasonable, often wilfully so, but more than this, the more you try to reason with them, the more unreasonable they become. This might actually be a good working definition of what being unreasonable means.
So the question is: what do you do about your opposition? What do you do when you just KNOW that you have a great idea, a great plan, a great design, a great book, or whatever, but all you get is the brick wall?
Forget about persuasion. There is no known force in the universe that can persuade an idiot not to be an idiot. If you could persuade an idiot not to be an idiot, they wouldn´t be an idiot. It´s that simple.
This is where the fork comes in. It has two prongs, but to be effective, it´s aimed at delivering success, not at eliminating the opposition. The more you oppose your opposition, the more you feed it, and the more you starve yourself.
Forget about the opposition. Ignore it, it´s wallpaper. If you are right, then your time and energy should be spent delivering the better alternative. It´s a fork motion. One prong is to ignore the opposition, the other is to blow it out of the water with something better. That´s what they are really afraid of.

No comments:

Post a Comment