Heavy Water
Heavy in business and life is how things feel lately. No matter where one sails, one finds significant challenges spanning numerous aspects of life simultaneously. To succeed in business and life, regardless of circumstances, I have found it important for me to lighten up. It takes some of the weight off. Besides, when it comes to business and life – just like water – you would rather not be unnaturally heavy.
Naturally Unnatural
Heavy water has hydrogen and oxygen but the hydrogen atoms have a neutron in them in addition to a proton. This makes the water have different properties: about 10% denser with a higher melting point and a slightly different color than normal water. Heavy water is naturally occurring though far rarer than the water we drink. If you imbibe a lot of it though, it’s over! Recall you are made up of 60% water. Imagine if that water were actually heavy, things aren’t going to go swimmingly for you are they? You get the idea.
How natural is it for you to carry all the metaphorical weight of your business and life? You don’t wake up needing to be significant about your competition, sales pipeline, suppliers, high water mark, cash flow and employees. Similarly, it isn’t natural to get all weighty about your personal finances, relationship challenges, and your daily water consumption, much less worry about never ending ideological conflicts overseas in an untransformed world, is it? The bottom line is whether we are talking water or our own lives, heaviness just doesn’t work.
Design, Design
Business and life are actually really simple. There is nothing heavy or significant about anything, unless you make it so. It’s all a matter of design. Heavy water suits a purpose – it is a highly effective coolant. That’s its design.
There is a musical instrument called a hydraulophone. It is a tonal acoustic musical instrument. You play it by touching it. The sound is generated…wait for it…hydraulically. This was invented in the mid-2000’s. Two questions: can it play Ripple by the Grateful Dead and does it sound different playing sad love songs with heavy water? Whatever the case, I prefer it to the bowed water psaltery instrument, don’t you?
Create a capitalist society and watch everyone focus on making money. Invent a language with a middle voice, like Swedish or Icelandic, and now people are talking in three voices: active, passive, and middle. I would explain the middle voice but English is not designed for it!
Lighten Up
Somehow others can design all sorts of things like societies, languages, and exotic musical instruments. Those inventions impact everyone’s behavior, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and desires, among other things. There is a certain comedy to it all. Someone invents and designs something and everyone else reacts to it – stimulus and response at its finest!
People have a design to themselves too. People are going to do what they do. And, they are not going to do what they don’t do. There is nothing heavy about it – everything plays out as designed. So, lighten up and design something new! Just make sure it isn’t another water musical instrument, I hear gurglings they are heavy and the market for them has been unnaturally oversaturated.
Here's to you and your awesome future.
Until then, keep your feet on the board and keep riding your wave!
Robert J. Khoury
CEO Agile Rainmakers