Many people have asked me repeatedly which ones of my Daily Thoughts are my best or favourites. Hard to say. There are 727 Daily Thoughts in the website www.leandroherrero.com [1] all around people and organizations. Most, but not all, are also posted in Linkedin Pulse but their visibility there depends exclusively on LinkedIn algorithms (and perhaps humans). What gets super-noticed does not seem to correlate 100% with my own views of importance!
This is one of about a year ago that I still refer to and find constant relevance. So one of my top, yes. Let me share it again.
Winston Churchill said, referring to the Houses of Parliament in the UK, ‘We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us’.
For building, read our companies, not just the walls (or lack of) and the physical environment, but also that beast of elusive presence called culture. We are sophisticated copying machines (Homo Imitans [2]) and, whether we like it or not, we are incredibly influenced by what is around us, what happens around us, and the airtime given to things. Big deal? Yes, it is a big deal. Because we don’t like it. We, arrogant Homo Sapiens, can’t accept Homo Imitans that easily. We say, not me! I know what I am doing. I am not going with the pack. I am different.
Then routine kicks in, inertia kicks in, we have a mundane and predictable day, and hope that the next one, some sort of divine miracle will occur and all will be just fantastic.
The ‘Change From Within Preachers’ must have an unconditional faith in the human condition but, for every Road of Damascus conversion and internal epiphanies that gear us into some direction, there are hundreds of day to day mundane circumstances that shape that thing in front of us called ‘tomorrow’.
Tuesdays carry a high dose of probability of being shaped by Mondays. Routine, inertia, default position, mood contamination, repetition, extrapolation, they all are bad friends waiting to be invited to dinner.
If you are stuck on a Wednesday, declare the next day a Friday, don’t get up on Thursday mode and wait for things to happen. Shape them. No, this is not New Age, self-help stuff (which comes in all sort of shapes, good and bad by the way), it is plain and simple behavioural-take-charge.
It may or may not be possible but there is a repertoire of possibilities to bypass Wednesdays (or Thursdays or Fridays…): take (deliberately) a wrong train, wear Sunday clothes, miss a meeting on purpose, have a haircut, meet somebody scheduled for the following week, have that meeting with your team all standing and in an unpredictable place, bring in your birthday cake (only if it’s not your birthday), disappear for a few hours and don’t tell anybody, combinations.
Warning: you may think this is a bit of a joke. I’ve never been more serious. Nothing of the above is a joke. Message is, do not let the day be a consequence of yesterday, intellectually or emotionally. Reject life as a constant extrapolation.
You don’t need to intellectualise this too much. Change the scenery and the scenario. Fast forward. You’ll live much longer