The world outside is always full of opportunities. Between you and the glorious opportunities is a door. This is mostly a mental door, but sometimes it can be a physical door too. All you need to do is to open it and step outside. Embrace the new world.
If only it was that easy. Even when we are charged up and we boldly step forward to open the door, we stop. We seek additional information before we can venture into the world of uncertainties. We are cautious and that is the point at which the momentum is lost. The opportunity disappears and everything again starts looking like a mirage.
We forget that no information can give us the fair degree of certainty we want. It is only on opening the door that the mysteries will be revealed. Will the door lead to expected opportunities, new challenges, unchartered paths, problems, solutions or something unknown? No one knows and no one can answer.
But that is the very reason that anxiety takes over. New uncertainties create shadows that start looking threatening. Imaginary negativism raises its hood. The positive within self becomes doubtful.
We want to be assured of probabilities! We want surety! We want to be prepared for future. A future no one has seen. A future that is always vague. A future that will take shape at (n-1)th moment.
We satisfy ourselves looking through a one-way a peephole into future. We attempt to see what waits us on the other side of the closed door. Knowing fully well that such peepholes can at best look outward into past and that hindsight vision is always clearer than the foresight. Because you are not trying to look out from the room (hindsight), you are trying to look inside the room (foresight). But it is a hint that we seek.
Trust me, at times it is best to let the door remain closed, ignore the peephole, in fact cover it and enjoy the comfort of darkness. A new heightened awareness that comes with the decision to play as it comes.
In our professional or personal life, we have peepholes mounted on many doors that surround us on every turn. We still expect to walk from that corridor of life into a room using a peephole we can only look the other way round. We are ok with vague future and seeing magnified pictures. The peepholes research is used to build up future understanding and create the lovely strategic scenario. We are always in the area of inferred future realities. At some stage with an element of risk we have to move forward and open the door.
Truth remains that most of us are happy to live with collective failure than really to chase risky individual success.
The peephole vision we see depends on the kind of peephole we invested in. But even the best cannot guarantee a 20:20 vision.
A Simple peephole gives a straight tunnel vision. We upgrade with higher investments into one with wide-angle view. Hoping it will help us catch the hidden clues at the edges. We task many experts to interpret the images. Something the inherent cost-result expectation does not allow us the technology we want. Yet the closed door needs to be pushed open.
Detailed vision depends on the height the peephole is mounted. How early in the process do we seek the interpretations of the vision projected through the peephole?
We have experts to man and interpret these peephole visions. They are expert and hopefully are capable of making sense of the peephole vision. Remember they are not the one who has to finally push the door open and take that bold step.
The peephole experts remain static in their place. Past visions blinding and biasing them. The shadows start having different meaning and they start reading clues that are not there, the experts are meant to do that.
Inexperienced person with that uncorrupted mind only sees hazy pictures. He is willing to take the plunge with uncertainties. The experts Peephole Vision Holders and the old guard entrusted with the door opening stop them. In process building another crop of organisational cautious soldiers.
Always expecting hostile environment and imaging things they move in to invest in a larger size peephole and adjusting the height for a better vision.
There must be some merit in it as there could be some merit in being bold enough to close the peephole and killing the uncertainties. Just deciding which side of the door we really want to be.
Or playing to inherent fear and over cautious approach, invest into installing a window where peephole was sufficient. Sometime, it makes no difference. Peephole or windows both remain ornamental.
Or ignore the peephole, open the door, step outside and learn by experience.
Or install multiple peepholes in search of elusive insight, mantra, wave, and transaction. And be paralysed with differential images that create a collage we cannot make sense of.
Whatever is there, it is ultimately we who have to decide what to do with the peepholes we have mounted or the doors we face.
We most likely are living with the peephole barrier that stops us to move forward.
Maybe its time, that we closed a few of peepholes in our life ad open few more doors.
The decision as they say is always yours.
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Sanjeev Kotnala with 28 years of corporate experience is Founder of Intradia World. A Brand, Marketing & Management Advisory, he focuses on IDEATION (Harvest and Liberate) and INNOVATION (InNoWait) process workshops and training. Email sanjeev@intradia.in tweet @s_kotnala web: www.intradia.in www.sanjeevkotnala.com.
