There are sentences that last a lifetime. Today we’ll consider the sort of aphorisms that allow us to remember why we read. Sure there are times when one picture is worth a lot of words, but how often is one picture worth any words? How often is a television program worthy of a single sentence? There are, however, single sentences that can change how you think of the world.
One tidy little example is the airline pilot who came on the intercom after we’d hit a patch of bad air and said cheerfully, “Nothing to worry about, folks; just a few potholes in the highway of the sky.” I’ve never been bothered by turbulence since. That was a decade ago.
Now, let’s get to our first candidate for unforgettable sentiment:
“Pressure is a privilege,” so sayeth Billie Jean King.
We hear people whining about stress but rarely do we hear someone extolling it. And that’s why I’d like to make a distinction between stress and pressure. I understand that the two words are used interchangeably, and that there was a book about good stress, but the word is itself stressful. Stress is when you’re contemplating failure, when you’re threatened, in danger, being pushed. Ah, but pressure can be when you’re hopeful, when you’re contemplating victory, when opportunity is winking at you, pulling you onward.
In Billie Jean’s world, pressure is when you have a shot at winning when you’re not supposed to. It’s when you’re up 5-4 in the final set, looking at pulling off a huge upset. In other words, it’s when you’re ahead of yourself (that expression itself being a splash of language Tabasco). On the other hand, pressure is also when you’re the favorite and you’re losing to the upstart in the final set. Can you rally one more time and prove yourself one more time? To be in either position is a gift. Yes, pressure is, indeed, a privilege.
Lifelong Companions
I think Billie Jean’s sentence has the stuff to stay with me a lifetime. I know that a related one, “Deadlines are your friends,” has been my companion for many years. Deadlines mean you get to finish, to let go. And, for many of us, deadlines mean you get to start. After all, if there’s no hurry, it’s never going to see the upper half of your to-do list. A deadline is “game on!”
And speaking of finishing, our second candidate for unforgettable sentiment is a dark horse, coming as it does from someone you’ve probably never heard of and presenting a quirky concept.
Michael Manes, a consultant and business philosopher out of New Iberia, La., occasionally sends me marvelous bits of wisdom. (His is one of those names that gets me smiling even before I open the e-mail.) A recent message said, “Your column today reminded me of a quote from a good friend, Tommy Canterbury (who runs a national health-care-marketing company called Sportscare USA), ‘Self-starters are OK, but what I really want are self-finishers.’”
While doing innovation work with corporations, I’ve come to understand that coming up with ideas is the easy part. Experimentation is the hard part, not to mention the effort of transforming the experiment into an actual innovation. This takes more than mere ideas … what every good idea needs is a skilled implementer, an angel of organization. Thus, there is a case to be made that the most valuable employee is the closer, the finisher—for that’s the person who will finish something you started while you move on to the next idea. Of course, if a colleague does both—start and finish—well, that’s an even better cut of velvet.
All wisdom flows to the same sea, and it’s true of our lifetime sentences: Self-finishers are the ones who take on the deadlines and the potholes in the blue sky the ones who smile at the pressure, knowing that it’s a privilege.
Dale Dauten is the founder of The Innovators’ Lab. His latest book is “(Great) Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success”.
