I want to share two analogies from the natural world that make profound points about business and life. Each was shared with me by a mentor sometime over the last two years and had an immediate impact on my thinking about change.
“Sometimes you have to climb a mountain before you can see the summit”
Often times the paths and destinations we should be walking on and moving towards aren’t obvious when we start our journey. It’s only through taking the time to move towards some goals that we can discover what goals really are worth moving towards. In mountaineering they have a name for this: a false summit. Once you reach a false summit the main summit and the path to it come clearly into view.
There’s no shame in this discovery. There’s no shame in changing course. It’s damn near impossible to plan your entire life on a piece of loose leaf paper so stop trying and start doing. Discovering a clever course correction, pivot, reorientation — whatever you want to call it — is a blessing and should be celebrated. Keep leveling up and don’t stop at a local maxima because it’s “what you always wanted” — that too can change.
“Some forest fires should not be put out”
Forest fires are a natural part of life. So are ideas that don’t work, relationships which fall apart, companies that fail, and beliefs that are substituted for newer editions. Progress is only ever made in human endeavors when things change. Resisting inevitable change does not pay off in the long run.
This means cut your losses, but it’s really more than that. If you don’t let the forest burn to the ground you never get to start over. When faced with overwhelming adversity many entrepreneurs pull back and go into survival mode. They put all their energy into keeping a small part of the forest from burning down and loose sight of everything else. In doing so they forgo many opportunities for growth, both in their businesses and personal lives.
Some lessons can not be learned without perspective. For most of us that means getting removed from the past both temporally and physically. We need to stop doing the things that kept the fire at bay so that we can stop rationalizing them to ourselves. It’s only then that we can begin to think critically about our behavior and make meaningful changes.
If the fire needs to burn, let it burn. Do not deny yourself or your organization the opportunity to make fundamental changes. It’s easy to become busy with yourself and spend all your effort keeping the fire at bay, but the longer you do it, the harder it is to learn the lesson you most need to learn.
“The future is dead, long live the future”
This last one I plagiarized from the French. They used to announce the death of a monarch and the subsequent appointment of the next one with the phrase “Le roi est mort, vive le roi!” or in English “The kind is dead. Long live the king!”.
I’ve found it useful to think about the future in this way. You can close as many doors as you want and there will always be another that gets propped open. Celebrate the journey, and make each future the best one yet. Whenever you make a big change remind yourself that this future is dead, but now you’re living in another.