QUICK ASSUMPTIONS

Have you ever noticed how some words take on a whole meaning of their own? How we can get the wrong end of the stick by making quick assumptions?

For example, much is written these days about social media and if you just latch on to the word social you could assume, wrongly in my view, that it was just about making friends and being social, rather than being about business and involve work.

When I worked in government I reported to someone who didn’t like the word play with regards to children – it sounded too frivolous to him – so we had to change all the wording in documents to read knowledge-based activities. Given that children learn through play this wasn’t far off the mark, but why make it so complicated and what was wrong with saying it as it is?

More recently, I’ve come across the book The One Page Business Plan which my Me Inc participants asked me to include in the program. Now this is a useful book and it does walk you through the process, but the words one-page do imply a quick fix, an easy task. That you can boil down your plans to one page, actually requires a lot of work. You still have to go through the research, do your homework and think through what you actually want to achieve. The fact that you can capture it on one page is the bonus, but without doing the work required to get there, it’s a waste of paper.

We live in a world that wants instant fixes, that makes quick assumptions and judgments, and sometimes, we just have to slow down, and do it the old-fashioned way –one step at a time.