What Are “Ducks”, Anyway?
I had a sweet little conversation with a passionate young woman in the dim relaxing lighting of my office. The canine cacophony of the vet clinic vibrated the walls and although I’m not yet able to ignore those auditory staccato intrusions, there was a kind of quiet in my mind. She was leaning against the wall, the excitement and exhaustion of working towards her vision blazing from her never- settled eyes.
She had talked with a friend, one of those marathon conversations where rumination is acceptable, it’s the thread that draws the conversation along. The topic was business success. Her friend was lamenting her lack of progress. Then my wild-eyed friend said something very wise to me regarding her conversation, “She’s so organized, she always has to have all her ducks in a neat little line.” This brought us around to a very important conversation; accepting chaos while you strive towards your vision without missing vital details along the way.
I would like to say that while I’m building my business that my house is neat and clean, that I have control of my money every moment of every day, and that I feel happy and relaxed. But I can’t say these things. While I’m building my business my house is trashed; dishes piled in the sink, mounds of clothing heaped next to my bed, my dogs begging for a walk. I didn’t balance my books for an entire month, I never get enough sleep, and relaxation is an enigma as I push to create products and courses that my clients seek.
But even in the midst of this there is a deep pulse, the rhythm of my vision, alive like a being of its own, pushing to break free and becoming an independent living organism. I am its tool, the mechanism through which it will come to life, and I feel that with everything I do. At each junction during the day I have a choice to make; succumb to the uncomfortable chaos and return it to order or continue to work towards the vision. I always make the choice for the vision. When it’s grown it will sustain me, sustain others, and at its foundation make the world a better place. How do I make this choice every time? Sometimes I wonder myself. I think it’s that the reward in the end is so motivating that it’s worth any little suffering I might have to endure today.
Interestingly, the lesson about making right choices came storming down on me this week. One of the things I do with my wild-eyed friend is apply my knowledge-base to her vision. By combining our visions we are doing something very different; we are creating an elite physical training system for humans and their four-legged companions. For months we have been training her dog on this system and we ran into a snag. For some reason, the system we created stopped working. We reached a learning plateau. We discussed the entire history of our method, when it had worked, when it hadn’t. We talked about psychology learning theory and motor learning theory. Then we talked about motivation and drive and this is where the eureka moment lit up my mind.
If we set up goals and we simply run with all our might towards those goals, will we be successful? In my own life, putting all I have towards my vision with blind motivation has not made me successful. What’s lacking in this method is SKILL. For each new task – building a business or training for a world competition – the psychological and motor skills required must be LEARNED. Without learning we struggle blindly towards our target, missing our marks and giving up our success for speed.
On the other hand, moving meticulously towards our vision bogs us down. Details are arduous, time-consuming, and they act like a dam which holds back the powerful current of a vision. To keep a vision alive, the creator needs to build momentum and excitement in others so they will be drawn to the vision. Attending to details is something entrepreneurs should hire other people to do. To an entrepreneurial spirit herding ducks is just plain silly (what the hell are ‘ducks’, anyway?).
I’m laughing now as I write this because actually learning skills is very difficult in the midst of chaos; but, it’s not impossible. What makes it possible is this: 1) the vision is the driver, the motivator, the heart of everything that happens – anyone who believes in your vision, including your ducks and their hired herder, will be carried along by the current; 2) there are thousands of tiny little steps that must be successfully completed before the vision will come to fruition – running the steps will trample the vital details; 3) learning which steps can be skipped and which steps cannot is a SKILL and learning this skill is something that takes BRAVERY, EFFORT, and TENACITY – getting knocked on your ass is required and quite helpful in the bravery department; 4) requiring yourself to take every step is a meticulous and ridiculous method – ducks do not like to be in a row, go to the zoo and check it out – it will demonstrate clearly why someone else should do this job; 5) understand that it appears the steps to success are linear, but this is an optical illusion – like an Escher lithograph there are redundancies and these provide the opportunity to modify the course.
Accepting chaos while not missing vitals details on the undulating sometimes rocky sometimes grassy path towards your vision requires surrendering unconditionally to the unknown; if you are a soul that is uncomfortable without organization, you may need to go back and unlearn a few terrible habits like I had to do. Because, you see, chaos is the way of the world – entropy is a natural law. And scientists have found there is a mysterious organization to it all. So let go of trying to figure it out; any inkling of control is an illusion, a method for avoiding the big picture, a way to snuff out the vision in your mind.
A vision’s emotions are like the sky; it doesn’t give a damn if the dishes are done and it knows nothing of computers and accounting. It simply IS. You can have the IS without the entropy on a yoga retreat. But if you’d like to come down from the mountain and into the chaos to create something larger than yourself simply because it’s so damn fun, you can have the IS while chatting with a fiery soul in an office you manifested from a dream you had last year while in your mind the duck swim peacefully, bobbing and wiggling their curled little tails contentedly.
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