Directory:Gary S. Goodman/Your Money or Your Life: Need a Minute to Think This Over
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| Gary S. Goodman | |
 Dr. Gary S. Goodman | |
| Residence | [[City:=Glendale|Glendale]], [[State_Name:=California|California]], [[Country_Name:=United States|USA]] Template:Country data US |
|---|---|
| Born | |
| Contact | 631 West Broadway Glendale, CA US 91204-1007 818.243.7338 [http://www.customersatisfaction.com/ customersatisfaction.com] [mailto:gary@customersatisfaction.com Email] |
Your Money or Your Life: Need a Minute to Think This Over
By Dr. Gary S. Goodman
Comedian Jack Benny, who built a winning personality as a notorious penny pincher, is remembered for this signature skit.
A robber sticks a gun in Benny’s ribs and demands, “Your money or your life!”
Benny pleads: “Can you give me a minute to think it over?’
All of us cut our deals with life, calculating what’s worth more than something else, how we want to invest our working and leisure hours, and with whom we want to share company.
And just as the expression that says people shape their tools and then their tools shape them, the same idea can be applied to decisions we make.
Some decisions, like marrying and having children can be permanent ones. In fact, we’re told that these sorts of decisions should be irreversible.
Tacitly, we’re also expected to develop a single career and to stay with it, unless calamity strikes or obsolescence sets in.
Yet these efforts to find PERMANENCE seemed doomed. Marriages fail to endure, and careers are truncated by an economy that under-values loyalty and over-values world wide sourcing of labor and materials.
It makes you wonder if we would be served better by adopting a philosophy that embraces transience, one that actually induces us to deliberately scrutinize our personal and professional commitments on a regular basis, tossing what doesn’t work, while emphasizing what does.
For example, I’ve made an effort to retain the same business telephone number for more than twenty years. My idea has been that I want to make it easy for people to contact me who happen upon a copy of my books containing this number.
But this is a dumb pursuit in an age of email and the internet, where a seeker can easily find my phone number within a few clicks. I’m paying extra, long-distance remote call forwarding fees, for what?
The reason is that somewhere in my psyche I believe, wrongly of course, that habit and tradition and above all, consistency, are the hallmarks of virtue. That staying the same, being old-reliable, predictable and static, are good things.
You can see how absurd this is, can’t you?
But how many of us take false pride in driving the same car way beyond its serviceable life, forcing us to pay for expensive mechanics, and to suffer a lot of down time, simply because we believe “There’s still life in the old thing, yet!”
Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
I hate to think I have a little mind, and having earned a handful of college degrees I suppose I’ve gone to some lengths to dispute this notion. But when it comes to EMBRACING CHANGE, I’ve been slower to adapt than I’d like.
Peter Drucker, my former professor and management guru, proposed that companies should force themselves to engage in “systematic abandonment,” canceling programs and projects that aren’t delivering the profits as they once did.
Standing in the way of rational discontinuation we find managers who insist “Why, that widget built our company; we can’t simply turn our back on it!”
“We’ve always done it this way, so we are destined to always do it this way,” they maintain, with no little nostalgia for the good old days.
I say, as individuals, we should also systematically abandon what isn’t delivering the goods for us: emotionally and financially. Doing so requires we set aside time, perhaps daily, weekly, or at least monthly, to scrutinize our recurring behaviors and commitments that have us acting on auto-pilot.
Best-selling author of 12 books and more than 1,000 articles, Dr. Gary S. Goodman is considered "The Gold Standard" in negotiation, sales development, customer service, and telephone effectiveness. Top-rated as a speaker, seminar leader, and consultant, his clients extend across the globe and the organizational spectrum, from the Fortune 1000 to small businesses. He can be reached at: gary@customersatisfaction.com.
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