A consensus tends to round off the the edges, but the edges are what cut through convention and lead to innovation.
Wabi-Sabi Street Art Photo by Robert Van Valkenburgh (artist unknown)
There is a fine line between brilliance and insanity, as the saying goes, between a great idea and a crazy one. The problem is that great ideas often sound crazy to the people around us, even to our biggest supporters. For this reason, asking for permission or waiting for consensus tends to shut down great, but crazy sounding ideas before they ever see the light of day.
Obviously, not all crazy-sounding ideas are good ones. In fact, most are not. However, often the only way to know if something is worth doing is to do it, to try it, to experiment, execute, and then evaluate the results to adjust, pivot, and re-execute with better information.
Crazy ideas are only great ideas if they work, but there is only one way to know if they will work or not. This does not start with permission or consensus, but with risk, action, and even failure, maybe a lot of failure before our idea reaches its true potential. In order to know if our ideas are crazy or great, we have to take a chance, make our art, build our dream, and see what happens.
Holistic Budo: As it is in budo, so too it is in life. As it is in life, so too it is in budo.
Waiting for perfection before taking action is just procrastination masked by a poor excuse and unrealistic expectations.
Street Art Photo by Robert Van Valkenburgh (artist unknown)
Perfection may be an ideal, but it is unattainable. Waiting for perfection to manifest prior to doing the thing we know must be done or even simply doing the thing we know that want to do is really just a way of excusing ourselves from risking failure. There is more failure in fear and inaction, however, than in one single act of failure taken on bravely.
The time to do the thing, to take the action, to make the move is not when we are or the situation is perfectly ready. By then, it will be too late, for the opportunity will have passed. The time for action is when action is possible.
By taking action, by risking failure, and by making mistakes, all in the direction of our goals and dreams, we come closer to perfection than waiting perfectly will ever get us. None of us make it out of this life alive anyway. It is better to risk our lives on a dream over and over again and to fail than to succeed at dying a thousand deaths of fear and hesitation each day.
Holistic Budo: As it is in budo, so too it is in life. As it is in life, so too it is in budo.
When we combine the needs and wants of others with the things that we need or want to get done for ourselves, we quickly begin to realize that there is not enough time to accomplish everything or to satisfy every demand.
One of the easiest ways to guarantee that we constantly spin our wheels, without really getting much done or making much progress, is to fail to prioritize what is truly important over what is just noise.
If every demand on our time is given equal importance and equal priority, we will find that we get very little done and we will be left feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, ineffective, and, oftentimes, resentful.
There is no possible way to be effective in our lives without evaluating and prioritizing the needs and wants on our time and attention, but this is our responsibility alone.
No one else is going to manage this for us in a way that is truly in our best interest.
The caveat, and often the most difficult part of prioritizing our tasks and to-do list, is that this will require us to learn how to say “No” in a variety of ways to a number of people, but this is necessary if we are to accomplish that which is truly important in our lives, setting aside, for the time being or perhaps permanently, those things which are not.
If we are to maintain both our priorities and our relationships, we will have to find a way to do this with an unwavering amount of both courtesy and courage.
Holistic Budo: As it is in budo, so too it is in life. As it is in life, so too it is in budo.
Meditations on God 