I’m sitting beside an older couple as I type this. They looked very familiar when they walked in but I couldn’t remember where I had encountered them before. Until she moved closer to him, into his embrace, and then I remembered:
‘Light Bulb Flashing’
This was the couple making-out at a café Benjo and I visited one evening. Seems like they didn’t get their fill. Seems like they’re still crazy about each other. That’s a good thing I guess.
Good for Phyzer.
Some of you didn’t get that. Good for you.
Very distracting thought.
Anyway, before the dark side of my mind takes over, I’d like to share something more beneficial. It’s an idea I like to call “The Bullet or the Cannon Ball?”
One of the things I am most thankful for is the opportunity to dwell in multiple worlds and glean from different perspectives. I’m grateful that I get to participate in board meetings with individuals much older, more experienced, and much much more intelligent than I am, but I’m also very happy for the time I have with the kids (not my kids, though I wish I had five), who also are incredibly insightful though they don’t know it. I also benefit from being able to move between business and non-profit worlds, experiencing the resource rich world of value creation, but also being able to immerse deeply in poorer communities in another form of value creation. Other than just the old and young or rich and poor, like most of us, my different interests and efforts have introduced me to other circles, opening doors for a diverse range of participations.
And it is in the process of meeting my responsibilities in these different circles that I first started thinking about whether I would rather “bite the bullet now” or “swallow the cannon ball later”.
Because inevitably, whoever we are, whatever we do, something is coming at us – life is coming at us – and we need to know how to meet it.
I was once sitting in a meeting with people from a very reputable company. They had done very well, had grown immensely the past few years, and as is many times the case with companies enjoying a successful term, recent history took the place of total history. In other words, the good times covered over the memory of the bad times. And while it’s nice to have happy thoughts, we need to keep a complete picture that teaches complete lessons. In the course of the meeting it became apparent that we had to make some changes. What had gotten us this far, the past success, the past innovations, the past practices, even the past heroes (people responsible for the growth) would not take us further – they were actually threatening to drag us down. This is a completely natural reality of life – everything changes. A hungry baby can wait for his mom’s breast to feed. A hungry man needs to get a job to eat. (He can also go for the boob but that won’t do him any good. It won’t give him the needed nutrition. The supply might not even be there. It might even land him in jail.) As circumstances change, needs change, and solutions also must change. What’s important is the principle: both a baby and a man need nutrition, what changed is how that need is met. In the same way companies must be able to protect the principle, or principles, what is called core values, even as almost everything else around changes.
To make a long example short, we didn’t apply the necessary changes. I don’t remember if we found the changes to radical, too painful, or if we ended up just being complacent. I think it was a mixture of things, as well as a desire to protect our individual interests – interests that no longer benefited the company as a whole. But a few years later we would meet again and discuss essentially the same issues, only now having morphed into something much larger – something much more dangerous.
Enter the idea: “We should have bit the bullet before. Now we have to swallow a cannon ball.”
From Companies to People
Sometimes what’s true for companies is also true for us. Companies are made up of people after all.
I find that there are also many bullets I have to bite on a personal level and on a daily basis, some small, some big, and some have grown scarily huge simply because I never took them seriously – seriously enough to deal with them. There are a lot of disciplines I undertook early and now serve me well and bring me a lot of fulfillment such as work, reading, and playing the piano. But there are also things that I have indulged in, such as sleeping late, my temper, self-pitying in depressed moments, as well as areas where I lack discipline and self-control, that now hurt me simply because I never dealt with them.
I guess the main aversion to biting bullets is the pain and discomfort they cause. Aside from pellets and paintballs, I have never been shot. I don’t intend to find out how it feels to be hit by a real bullet, but I’m pretty sure it’s excruciating, or it can be painless – but only when it means you’re dead.
What does it mean to bite the bullet? It means to endure something with fortitude. To complete the thought, it means to do something unpleasant for the purpose of bringing forth something better.
There are many unpleasant things we will have to do, things that require discipline, sacrifice, and even pain. But these are necessary ingredients of life. They are actually inevitable price tags to being alive. We will pay a price. It’s only a question of whether we pay now, while we have discretion, or later when the circumstance limits our options to more painful choices. Sometimes the situation will force our hand. Sometimes it won’t, but like an unfelt gunshot, that probably means we’re dead.
No pain no gain as they say. Also true is, no pain, no discipline, no hard right decisions, no sacrifice today doesn’t just mean no gain, it means more pain tomorrow.
When I find myself having to bite another unwanted bullet, I just ask myself, “The bullet or the cannon ball?” Hopefully I’ll always choose the bullet, because a bullet may pierce my throat but a cannon ball will tear my head off.
