In which Wolf explains the right way to shave a yak and save a kingdom all in an afternoon.
In which Wolf explains the right way to shave a yak and save a kingdom all in an afternoon.
Released April 6, 2021
When we think about our highest ambitions, it's easy to become overwhelmed by all the obstacles we face. Everywhere you turn there's another obstacle, so you end up just spinning in place. It might seem like the easiest thing to do is just conclude that there's too many obstacles to overcome and give up. Fortunately, this is almost never true.
Prejudice, ideology, bias, distortion, mindlessness: bad thinking is everywhere. The world needs heroes to lead the way to better, higher, more valuable ways of thinking. These ways are timeless, and never more needed than right now. Some claim that these timeless ways of thinking are now dangerous. To them I reply: BEWARE OF WOLF.
What's holding you back from what you truly want? For a lot of people, the answer is simply not knowing what they want: not having a Goal. We'll talk about how to think about Goals more in future episodes.
For the moment, let's assume you know what you want, like the kid in my previous episode who said he wanted to be a film director. In that dialog, he gave a litany of excuses for why he hadn't made any real progress on that ambition: he hadn't learned the tools, he lacked all the other things he thought were needed to make real films, he was afraid that his work would be unworthy, his time pressures from school, his desire to hang out with his friends, his career pressures from his parents, and so on.
The first encouraging thing to remember in such situations is that, no matter how far you think you are from your goal, every single step you can take towards it is just that: a step in the right direction. And there's always something you can do to move closer to your goal. Figuring out what the best steps you can take is the real challenge, and in the next few minutes I'm going to show you how to do just that.
My software Flying Logic is used by businesses and the consultants and trainers who work with them to identify and create strategies to deal with deep, complex problems. One of the interesting things about complex systems like businesses is that it almost always boils down to a single factor, called the constraint that needs to be managed to improve how the whole system functions. Your life is also a complex system: you've got work or school, family, friends, hobbies, health, and all that going on simultaneously. You can't just stop all but one of them to focus on one thing. And yet to make progress on something important in any of those life areas, you've got to figure out what that thing is (your goal) and what you need to do to make progress (your constraint). It's said that if you want to cut down a tree, you've got to hack at the roots, not the branches. So what you want to avoid is taking ineffective actions that at best only address the symptoms of the problems you're facing and not the root causes. The same is true here: if you're going to take action when you're facing a lot of obstacles, you want to know it's one of the best actions you could possibly take.
But sometimes the best actions you could possibly take truly aren't obvious. They might even resemble having to shave a yak.
There's an old proverb that goes:
Small things can have big cumulative effects. This proverb identifies the root cause of the kingdom being lost as the want of a nail. Working it backwards, you'd have something like my own variation:
This technique, repeatedly asking "How?" is a simple way to reduce complex problems to actionable ones. And just as having a nail doesn't look much like saving a kingdom, a most effective action may not at first glance look related to your goal at all.
Technologists have a term we jokingly use: "Yak shaving." Imagine you're at the office. You go looking for your colleague but they're nowhere to be found. You search high and low and eventually find them in the Himalayas, shaving a yak! When asked how they got there, they recount a completely plausible sequence of events starting with their original work task, from which they are repeatedly diverted by some clearly necessary predecessor task... until they find themselves in the Himalayas, shaving that yak.
A simple technique is to have a dialogue with yourself where you keep asking yourself, "How will you do that?" and writing down the answers over and over. The trick is to never accept the answer "I don't know." Because as soon as you say "I don't know," you terminate your own continued thought. So never say, "I don't know." Instead answer with "I'll find out." This lets you ask yourself again, "HOW will you find out?" There are always people in your life you can ask, and of course there's always the Internet.
And if you come to a point in your self-dialogue where you feel like you've answered the question but you think there may be more, just ask "How ELSE?"
The purpose of this self-dialogue is to reach a set of simple, actionable steps, even if the ones you can actually do right now seem like "yak shaving."
So how would our teenage would-be film director apply this technique to his thinking?
...and so on.
This technique also gives you practice in affirming that you can and will be successful at making progress toward your goals. It also helps keep your expectations realistic by reminding you of the price you're going to pay to achieve your goals, because there's always a price.
All that remains is to consistently spend that time you've set aside on taking very next steps you've identified. When you do something every day, it begins to become part of you. The change might be so gradual as to be imperceptible to you at first, but you literally begin to transform into what you want to become.
Learn more about the world's premier critical thinking tool Flying Logic at FlyingLogic.com. Help spread the word by rating and reviewing this show on your favorite podcast platform. Discuss this episode at BewareOfWolf.com. And keep raising the bar, whether the world likes it or not.