Innovate yourself out of the problem
If you are here, reading this blog, you have a complaint about life… something you’d like to fix. Even if you are pretending that you are “just” curious… all humans living on Planet Earth have something they don’t like and they’d like to fix it.
That is the first inclination of everyone. You have an itch: scratch it. Have a problem? Find a solution.
Solution is a code word for fixing.
But we all face a problem, like the dog who scratched his skin so now it is raw and is going to get infected.
The solution is the next problem, usually bigger than the original problem.
So what can you do?
If Tai Lopez is any indication, Sir Richard Branson said: “Innovate yourself out of the problem”.
Sounds nice, maybe even sexy, but how do you do it?
Instead of reading everything anyone has written about it, I am going to access it through thinking…
Let’s hope that I have enough knowledge, so the strategy will be based on something real, and not my own arrogance. I’ll know… by the way. Arrogance is my soul correction, so I always have the antenna up, looking for signals of arrogance… so I can kill it.
So, inside what I teach, looking at things as a problem invites the fixing knee jerk reaction, so we’ll go and see if there is another way of looking at things.
We are going to use the technique of widening and narrowing our cone of vision… so we don’t miss anything.
Let me look at a current “problem” I am having: the hot water pipe froze between the lower apartment and my apartment. The downstairs apartment has been empty for two years. The landlord turned off the heat.
The pipe goes through a wall, that goes between an enclosed porch and the kitchen.
Let’s see how we normally want to fix this problem: yell at the landlord. Curse. Call everyone we can think of to complain.
I used to do that.
So, what did I do that I avoided any excitement, any anger, and any victimhood?
Instead, I looked at it as a challenge, fun, entertaining, that I will feel good about myself solving.
Truth be told, it doesn’t come naturally to me, so I needed to look for it. I found that I don’t even care about the hot water, I can just care about the process. So as I was going up and down the steps, stepping up and down from the chair, pulling extension cords, I decided that if I could have this exercise every day, I would be much healthier.
What I actually have done to warm up the approximately 2-3 feet long section of the hot water pipe that is going through, uncovered, from the water heater to the ceiling in the basement, where the temperature was 1 degree Fahrenheit, minus 17 Celsius… is not important.
The solution, the innovation happens on the mindset, the attitude level, not in physical reality.
Issues in physical reality, unless you make them problems, aren’t…
The moment you stop saying: this shouldn’t be, you get out of the fixing mode.
In reality nothing is really without cause… and it is often your job to find the cause and effect, so you can disable the cause, when something work counter to what you thought it would.
Like in my case, like in my situation, it is my job to deal with it, because I live here, and my landlord doesn’t.
Now, am I going to communicate to my landlord? I doubt it.
Why? Because he is not agreeable… in effect he is a moron who doesn’t take care of his property.
You can’t reason with a man like that.
And no matter how much I like the view from my office, no matter how much I like the quiet, I will find another house to live in. And then fall in love with what that house has to offer.
PS: the question: how does this jive with the Einstein saying: no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it?
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