Friday, March 17, 2006

some fools are pretty ingenious

Listening to him I started to enjoy his naiveté. He was explaining why the plan wouldn't fail. He was trying to sell his plan to the cube neighbor and what started out as a brief sales pitch turned into an hour long infomercial. He was backing up his facts and figures with theories and studies; it all looked good on paper. He said it was foolproof.

I've been around enough to know that the best made plans some times don't work out, so you never promise something to be foolproof because some fools are pretty ingenious. To make something foolproof you have to think like every fool that will come across your little something. You have to think foolishly and take into account that foolishness which technically makes part of your plan foolish.

The guy, that was talking, lives his whole life on paper. He has never had to suffer the consequences of a plan gone wrong. He's never had to fix his own mistakes because he is just a planner. In his mind the plan was good; it was the environment that was wrong. He'll start to sell his plans to others, others who have had to deal with prior mistakes, others who have gotten their hands dirty in the real world, and he'll meet resistance. He will get frustrated that not everyone will jump onboard his paper train.

Sometimes you have to follow your gut which can't be pie charted or vectored on a graph. He doesn't respect the gut instinct, the instinct that comes with time and sweat. He disregards the failures. He thinks that today is a different day but today will only be different if you don't repeat the mistakes of yesterday.

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