Inspired Media Online

Long-lasting systems can’t survive if they remain insatiable.

An insatiable thirst for food, power, energy, reassurance, clicks, funding or other raw material will eventually lead to failure. That’s because there’s never enough to satisfy someone or something that’s insatiable. The organization amps up because its need is unmet. It gets out of balance, changing what had previously worked to get more of what it craves. Sooner or later, a crash.

More fame! More money! More investment! Push too hard and you lose what you came with and don’t get what you came for.

An insatiable appetite is a symptom: There’s a hole in the bucket. Something’s leaking out. When a system (or a person) continues to demand more and more but doesn’t produce in response, that’s because the resources aren’t being used properly, something is leaking.

If your organization demands ever more attention or effort or cash to produce the same output, it makes more sense to focus on the leak than it does to work ever harder to feed the beast.

The taxi’s waiting, it’s honking its horn, time to go to the airport.

Yes, the passport is in my pocket. I checked five minutes ago.

Of course, the cost of checking again, just one more time, is tiny. Hardly worth discussing with myself. And compared to the cost of being wrong, of missing the flight… go ahead, check again.

And like giving in to a toddler every time he whines for ice cream, this is the problem.

The lizard brain seeks constant reassurance. It will wheedle and argue and debate with the rest of your head, pushing for one tiny bit of evidence, some sort of proof that everything will be okay.

Don’t do it.

When you indulge the lizard, it gains power. It doesn’t walk away ashamed, humiliated at its anxiety. Instead, it merely sidesteps and looks for the next thing to worry about, because, ready for this? It’s nice to be reassured.

Developing the reassurance habit is easy to do and hard to kick. The problem is this: there are some ventures where no reassurance is possible. There is important work for you to do where no proof is available.

If you’ve trained the lizard brain that reassurance is forthcoming, it will scream even louder when those projects that don’t come with proof are at hand.

Why bother buying them, putting them up, electrifying them and then taking them down again?

After all, the economist wonders, what’s in it for you?

The very same non-economic contribution is going on online, every single day. More and more of the content we consume was made by our peers, for free. My take:

People like the way it feels to live in a community filled with decorated houses. They enjoy the drive or the walk through town, seeing the lights, and they want to be part of it, want to contribute and want to be noticed too.

Peace of mind and self-satisfaction are incredibly valuable to us, and we happily pay for them, sometimes contributing to a community in order to get them.

The internet is giving more and more people a highly-leveraged, inexpensive way to share and contribute. It doesn’t cost money, it just takes guts, time and kindness.

No wonder most people don’t insist on getting paid for their tweets, posts and comments.

Two asides: First, it’s interesting to note that no one (zero) gets paid to put up Christmas lights, but some towns are awash in them.

and second, I think there’s a parallel to the broken windows theory here. Broken Windows asserts that in cities with small acts of vandalism and unrepaired facades, crime goes up. The Christmas Light corollary might be that in towns (or online communities) where there’s a higher rate of profit-free community contribution, happiness and productivity go up as well.