Oh, No to Status Quo

Pressing on, moving ahead, dreaming big, and making the next move is something I have never had a hard time with.  Sure you have to be calculated and educated on your moves and not run blindly into the future.   I don’t want to be presumptuous.  I want to meet the world in the morning.  I don’t want the world to come to me and find me sleeping.  I do some of my best work between 4-6 AM sometimes.

I read a blog this week from Seth Godin (www.http://sethgodin.com) that I thought had some great questions to help test yourself and see if you are advancing or slipping; paving a way or waiting for a way to be paved for you.  Whether it’s your church, business, education, non-profit, or you own personal growth; say no to the status quo.  Here is a test from Godin to see if you are slipping into the status quo…

When confronted with a new idea, do you:

• Consider the cost of switching before you consider the benefits?
• Highlight the pain to a few instead of the benefits for the many?
• Exaggerate how good things are now in order to reduce your fear of change?
• Undercut the credibility, authority or experience of people behind the change?
• Grab onto the rare thing that could go wrong instead of amplifying the likely thing that will go right?
• Focus on short-term costs instead of long-term benefits, because the short-term is more vivid for you?
• Fight to retain benefits and status earned only through tenure and longevity?
• Embrace an instinct to accept consistent ongoing costs instead of swallowing a one-time expense?
• Slow implementation and decision making down instead of speeding it up?
• Embrace sunk costs?
• Imagine that your competition is going to be as afraid of change as you are? Even the competition that hasn’t entered the market yet and has nothing to lose…
• Emphasize emergency preparation and the expense of a chronic and degenerative condition?
• Calling it out when you see it might give your team the strength to make a leap.