DrContrarian

Acceptance Enjoyment Enthusiasm Stillness No-thingness

The biggest killer of success is success. (The fear of failure grows in direct proportion to what you have got to lose.) This Contrarian principle has a number of corollaries: Bigger is always worse Innovation leads to less innovation Growth leads to death If you think you disagree, just add (ultimately) to the end of each of the above. Such is Life.

Managing conflict Had an opportunity to do some coaching today. Now it is not my natural/ day job, but I quite enjoyed the experience. The topic du jour was as per this blog title. Later I saw a vlog ( http://blogs.bnet.com/intercom/?p=434 ) on office politics, which referred to the fact that managers spend 42% of their time on this activity (managing conflict) – but no reference to how to actually do it. So here goes the d price methodology: The pre-requisites are: 1. Is it my conflict to solve? If you are fighting someone else’s battle, you are bound to lose it. Don’t go into bat for someone else in the office. You may think you are helping, but you are trespassing. 2. Take a positive view of the conflict. Don’t see it as a negative/battle, see it as an opportunity to clear the air and to rectify misconceptions or clarify an issue. You may well be wrong so you might just learn something. It will also help reduce the tension - before you start. Then stepping into the act...

There are many obstacles to achieving success. Failure is the default position, I think. (Several 100 million sperm, one baby. Etcetera.) So what are the obstacles? Let me not count the ways… there still many blogs to come, but I’ll just focus on one: CYNICISM. Cynicism is such an easy, ‘adult’ excuse. It masquerades as word-weary experience, so it is very handy to pull out. And because success is more exceptional than it should be, the cynics are often right. But to be successful, you need an almost child-like naiveté: To remain positive in the face adversity, to persist against the odds – all these things require a suspension of ‘reality’ that’s seems very self-evident to the cynic. There are always more reasons to give up than there are to keep going so to be cynical is more realistic and possibly even more rational. Cynicism also provides the rationale after you quit – making it the easy option; justifiable under the circumstances. And because the circumstances are always s...

A rhetorical question today: Do you also wonder (sometimes) if we are truly able to make our own life (successes and failures) or whether it has been pre-determined by God? The age-old debate of predeterminism: God must know everything - or else He is not omniscient. If God knows everything, then my decision is already made. Is life worth living if my success or failure is not as a result of my labour and initiative and creativity? The answer lies in what the image to the right represents. It is an image of Pollock's paintings ("Convergence: Number 10, 1952" at The Albright-Knox Gallery). It is a fractal image. Just Google 'fractal pattern') and you will see tens of thousands examples. Fractal image is an image of chaos. It illustrates one of the tenets chaos theory very clearly: At the level of the whole it appears chaotic; random swirls and lines. Look closer and you will see fine repeating patterns. And Life is like that: For the individual in his or her own ...

Success – that elusive thing A new (ish) book out now by Carol Dweck ( Mindset: The New Psychology of Success) has now postulated a new theory about success. Surprise, surprise, the ‘positive mental attitude’ (Dale Carnegie + million others) is apparently not sufficient. It really depends, according to Dr. Dweck, on whether your mindset is fixed or whether it is a growth mindset. She contends that a fixed mindset is actually negative, because, even if you believe you are talented or that you are a star, that this mindset limits your growth and achievement. On the other hand, a ‘growth’ mindset allows you to learn, grow and improve. Dweck discovered that mastery-oriented children are very keen on learning something and they effectively have “learning goals” - which inspire a different chain of thoughts and behaviours than “performance goals.” [Private thought 1: Soon, everyone will agree with my thoughts, which were originally quite contrarian J . Private th...