Being human, it is inevitable that we compare our experiences and progress with others. Whether it is in our personal and professional lives or measuring our organization against others in our community or region, the grass is always greener elsewhere in some respect even if you are on top.
Coveting another’s success will often move you to examine how they obtained fame, fortune, life of ease, etc., in the hopes of replicating the ends by duplicating the path they took.
Some times this works, but many times it does not. There is a story Joseph Campbell tells in a number of his works about King Arthur and his knight’s search for the Holy Grail that has stuck in my head for years. As they begin the quest for the grail, they come to a forest
“‘They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the forest at the point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest, and there was no way or path.’
“No way or path! Because where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path.”
This always seemed like a potent bit of wisdom whether one is seeking personal enlightenment, examining one’s career path or running a business. Life is not like a marathon where the path is cleared and marked and progress is easy to measure and compare against others. It is more like that forest.
If you have ever pushed into a forest where a path is not, you often find to your surprise that once you are past the outer layer of entwined branches and brambles, the way through the forest is much clearer. Other times there is more of the same and a swamp to boot. Like the grail search, the distance, location and actual appearance of the goal is unknown.
It is hard to remember all this when you hear about the success others are having, the distance they are covering, the treasure they are finding. It is easy to think you should be using rope because the successful guys are using rope. But their forest passes over a mountain and yours is full with brambles where a machete is more useful. Even if your path takes you through a swamp where a rope might be helpful, you are going to use it in a different manner than those traversing mountains.
I use this lengthy metaphor to reinforce the advice I have issued before about carefully assessing technology tools rather than jumping on the bandwagon because everyone else seems to be doing so. The same goes with programming decisions, marketing plans, construction and pretty much every other choice you may have to make.
In the last few weeks I linked to a video where Malcolm Gladwell talked about how Prego overtook Ragu in the spaghetti sauce market when their research figured out that people’s general preference is for either regular, chunky or zesty/spicy sauce. Now you can walk into the store and have 20-30 choices of sauce from Prego alone. Ragu hired Prego’s researcher in an attempt to catch up and offers a similarly large variety of sauce.
Knowing that Prego met with success and knowing that Gladwell is considered a real smart, insightful guys these days, you may decide he is right and there is no one perfect product for everyone. But is offering a wide variety of arts experiences right for your organization? Is it even within its capacity to execute?
Inspiring stories of success can be great to hear but the strategies aren’t sure things for everyone. The now cliched phrase “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we X” only proves that different people with different expertise and different resources were able to put a man on the moon.
And there have been very few attempts to follow that path since.