The PT Challenge

When things are going well, we don’t question our everyday actions. Why should we? What we’re doing is making our business hum along just as fine as we’d like.

Consider the American car industry, circa 1970. It had a reasonable formula that had worked quite well. Not only Americans, but prosperous car buyers around the world wanted larger and faster cars, and American manufacturers were able to churn them out year after year. They kept buyers buying with lots of model variations, ample chrome trim, and occasional new technology like headlights that dimmed themselves and automatic retracting seat belts, producing sufficient profits year after year to keep shareholders happy. Nobody really worried about foreign car manufacturers that were turning out undersized, underpowered, and no-frills cars—distinctly un-American cars.

Then came the first oil crisis in 1973, and Americans suddenly stopped buying leviathan cars because they couldn’t afford the fuel. Japanese cars started grabbing all the headlines; these once marginal producers began stealing market share from General Motors and Ford. They even bankrupted Chrysler.

When things go well, we don’t question the accepted wisdom. Americans like large cars. Our recent history reconfirms this, but all it takes is a sharp change in outside circumstances for the reasonable to become unreasonable, and vice versa. All of a sudden, small cars, even tiny cars like the original Honda Civic—first introduced in 1972, ahead of the oil crisis (were the Japanese clairvoyant?)—caused a run on the market, completely reversing 50 years of car-size inflation. This about-face contradicted everything that the entire industry had been raised to expect, and it caught the American manufacturers completely by surprise. How could this happen? Because when things go well, we don’t question. We just do what is expected and what has worked for so long.

Taken from : unreasonable

“Be reasonable!” How many times have you heard that in your life? How many times have you said it yourself? If those admonitions have any meaning at all, why should you do the opposite? For most occasions, being reasonable—acting in the way most people expect—is the right thing to do. But not always.

And thank goodness. This wouldn’t be much of a book to read if the subject itself was so unreasonable as not to be worthy of serious consideration. Yet the idea is so important that you must take it very seriously if you are committed to making your business take off from wherever it is right now.

What do you do when the reasonable thing—the expected thing—isn’t working the way you planned? What do you do when the reasonable thing—the way you and your peers were taught to behave—isn’t getting the results you’d hoped for? What do you do when the things that have worked so well in the past—things that, in fact, are still working—just aren’t working well enough?

By now you should have figured this out: you become unreasonable. Occasionally you come across an individual who acts in a brash, creative, counterintuitive way, and does it all the time. As a consequence, people like this produce some pretty striking results day after day. But this doesn’t describe most people, and it may not describe you.

Most of us act in ways that are acceptable and predictable. We respond within certain boundaries and limitations. We respond reasonably. And most of the time this is OK because reasonable behavior gets us pretty good results. But there are times that call for something beyond OK. They call for a stronger response, a different response—perhaps a response that’s so unusual that everything we generally know about getting things done falls short. That’s when you need to be unreasonable.

Taken from : unreasonable

A conservative model produces conservative results. Repeating the successes of the past, preserving tradition, and keeping everything the same can at best produce results like those in the past. The problem is that in this new future—our present—those results will not be as good as they once were. Unreasonable success requires unreasonable approaches to the future.

Take Fridays off. Working nonstop (24/7 for 365 or whatever) until your tank is empty is for dullards and plodders. Take Fridays off and refill your tank. Going full steam ahead day after day after day can produce excellent short-term results, but it can also produce exhaustion. Not only physical fatigue, but also exhaustion of the spirit, exhaustion of ideas. You must re-create if you want to keep going. Take time off and use that time to develop new energy.

Don’t worry about getting it right. That’s what Version 2.0 is for. Perfection prevents progress. New ideas must be tested against real human beings. If you wait to get everything right, it will be very late when you get there. It may even be never. Think functionality and workability. Experiment in the chaos of the market and fix the problems that arise later.

Be afraid. If you’re not scared, you’re not doing anything worthwhile. All great ventures contain within them an element of risk and the promise of failure as well as success. If you are not at least a little afraid, you are probably not doing anything that will ever be called great. Unreasonable people are often afraid. Just be sure you are afraid of the right thing.

Being unreasonable is about breaking rules, but not about creating new rules. Don’t break old rules only to replace them with new ones. When the new rules become simply “the rules,” they will bind you just as surely as anything that was there before them. If you must, create signposts, guidelines, and indications. Anything but rules.

There are three meanings of reasonable: the reason of logic and common sense, the reason of explanation, and the reason of fairness. Whichever meaning of reason comes to mind, being unreasonable is about violating your common presuppositions. Breaking tradition. Contravening the accepted sense of justice. Defying conventions and logic and all the ideas about what has worked before. Any and all of this—at once, if possible.

But make no mistake; this is heady and sometimes difficult stuff. It takes powerful reasons to be unreasonable.

Taken from : unreasonable

You don’t have to do something just because someone says you should. Should always implies the status quo. Ask, “Why should I?” whenever the conversation turns to shoulds and shouldn’ts. Should is the road to mediocrity. “Why should I?” is the first step toward majesty.

You can’t improve something you don’t understand. Don’t base your reality on fantasy or falsehood. Many strategies and plans are based on wrong or incomplete assumptions, which necessarily lead you astray. If you don’t know accurately where you stand, you can’t chart a true course leading from there to your goals.
Plan your exit strategy from day one. Most businesses are built on an idea or an opportunity presented today, with little thought being given to how things will wind up. The result is that they wind up wherever and however they do, often to the dissatisfaction of the leaders. Choose your exit strategy (your final move)
today and chart a sure course toward it.

Freedom comes from responsibility. Be completely responsible for your actions and your results. Normal people look for causality, something or someone to blame for the way things turned out. Unreasonably lay claim to every miracle or debacle within your sphere of influence; make them all yours, for that’s the only way to exert dominion over them and gain freedom. Being unreasonable is about being totally responsible for everything around you and completely irresponsible about transgressing cultural norms.

You must spend, otherwise you’ll go bankrupt. As stated in the Book of Ecclesiastes, there is a time for everything, and so there is a time for thrift and frugality. But cutting expenses to the bone will retard your growth and cause your business to fail. If it is growth you seek, spend more.

You must waste, otherwise you cannot create. How much genuine creation works the first time? If your business shrinks from waste and failure, it will also avoid experimentation and innovation. You must make mistakes if you are to achieve great things. Take action now and empty your trash bin regularly.

Taken from : unreasonable

Consider why normal is normal. Ask how normal things became that way. Is it because they were effective, or is it because they were easy? Being unreasonable is not about being abnormal, paranormal, or transnormal—it is about looking beneath and behind the normal so that you can see how it got that way, and once you understand why that normal is considered normal, acting to create the results you seek without regard to what normal people think.

You know what you should be doing. So do it. You don’t need more gurus and pundits to tell you what to do. You have already taken it all into consideration, and though it may seem unreasonable, you already know what to do. Take action.

Think whatever thoughts. Reasonable thinking is the silent editor, the censor who disapproves of and redacts your errant thoughts. Think whatever thoughts arise and follow them to their best conclusions. Often the most transformative ideas come spontaneously and unbidden. Then, reasonable thinking kills them.
Don’t let it do that.

Don’t base your life on what’s likely. If you have been paying attention to the world, what you now consider likely is already incorporated into your business activity. It is probably also incorporated into your competition’s. Search your world—internally and externally—and find the promise of the possible.

Expect the best. Unreasonable as it seems, expect the best from those around you. Expect them to be successful. Count on it. Plan for it. Budget for it. Expecting the best gives you the highest likelihood of getting it. Start with the optimal scenario and truly grasp how to ensure that it happens. Expecting the worst has a similar, but opposite, effect.

Back yourself into a corner so that the only place to go is forward. Warrior-sage Sun Tzu wrote that nothing is as dangerous as an enemy who has been backed into a corner. Such enemies will fight to the death, for they have nowhere else to run. Use this strategy on yourself.

Taken from : unreasonable

Businesspeople of the world, now is the time.

Your tried-and-true ways of getting things done are running out of gas; they no longer provide the outcomes you seek. Because your old ways of behaving sometimes appear to work, you think they will work forever. Unhappily, that is just an illusion; it is likely that if they still work at all, it is only for the near term.

Consider this: extraordinary accomplishments begin with extraordinary ideas and find their realization in extraordinary actions. Think about that one word for a minute: extraordinary. Break it into its roots and it says extra ordinary. Not extra in the sense of “more than,” but rather from the Latin extra, which means “beyond, outside, superior to” the ordinary. That’s what we mean by unreasonable.

Read through the following principles carefully and deeply, perhaps more than once. Use them to find your new truths. Being unreasonable means achieving the extraordinary by doing things that are unexpected, unpredicted, and beyond what normal people consider normal.

Being unreasonable requires rejecting compromises. Compromises force you to sacrifice what truly matters in exchange for efficiency and expediency. They are insubstantial things that exist because of a belief in a false context. Change the context and the compromise dissolves.

Don’t wait to play the high cards in your hand. Being unreasonable is about giving your best in every single situation in which your best is called for. It is about asking for excellence in people because it is in everyone’s interests. People hold on to their aces, waiting for the right time to use them. Don’t hold back. Play your best cards.

Do more than you are asked for. Most people don’t ask for what they truly need, and therefore they don’t get it from you. Ask people for more than others usually do; you will shock them into action beyond what they thought themselves capable of doing.

Act on the possibility of things. Being unreasonable is about acting on the possibility of great things without worrying about the probability of success. This increases the probability of success dramatically, ensuring that things that are possible become real. Make the improbable happen by bringing attention and resources to those things that lie beyond the norm—beyond the expected—but that can change your world.

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