Don't Blame Gravity

Picture this: A light plane goes down in the Arizona desert. A team from the NTSB descends on the scene to investigate what happened. After three months of rigorous study and analysis, they're ready to report. They call a news conference.

The NTSB administrator approaches the podium. You've seen this guy. He's wearing gray, double-knit pants with brown, crepe-sole shoes and a short-sleeved white shirt with a mustard stain. Yes, he also sports a pocket protector. His horned-rimmed glasses are held together at the nose bridge with masking tape. He fumbles through some papers and begins, "After our three month investigation, we reached the conclusion that this plane would not have crashed if it hadn't been for … GRAVITY!"

He said "GRAVITY!"

I guess he's right. At some level, if there was no gravity, there'd be no plane crashes. My point is, however, that you never hear people blame or complain about gravity. It just IS! You have to deal with it, so you just do! You don't complain about it; you don't blame anyone for it or anything ON it!

Many of the problems we whine about are gravity. Competition is too brisk; customers want higher quality and lower cost; macro-economic conditions change like the weather; your boss is over-bearing; HR doesn't have all of the training programs you need; manufacturing doesn't produce uniform quality.

It's all GRAVITY! You have to accommodate all of this stuff in your planning and execution, but whining about it doesn't do any good. It isn't going to go away to suit you or to make your life easier.

In life and business, lots of gravity issues impede our success. Differentiating those phenomena from those things you can control, or at least influence, will help you maintain your sanity while increasing your effectiveness.

Copyright 2015 Rand Golletz. All rights reserved.