We have heard the adage, “If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you always got.”
We are blessed with a great memory – and it’s a double-edged sword. The past is our social conditioning, compromising our ability to see things with fresh eyes. We are imprisoned by time-tested ways of seeing. Often, we languish in a quagmire, repeating past mistakes.
But consider this diverse assortment of examples:
- A new CEO presents his five-year strategic plan. To everyone’s surprise, he invites his senior managers to the microphone, challenging them to publicly shred his plan to pieces. He offers awards to those who can prove that the new CEO is incompetent. The company culture is forever transformed.
- A dad is facing persistent disobedience from his rebellious teenager. One day, rather than getting angry, he starts dancing when his son is being defiant. He explains to the confused teenager that he is joyous that his son is flowering into a courageous young man, not merely a replica of his dad. That changes the relationship forever, resulting in a deeper acceptance of their differences.
- A company is confronted by suppliers who are bitter that they don’t get paid in a timely manner for their deliveries. The company responds by giving them a book of signed blank checks that they can fill in themselves and deposit for immediate payment right after their deliveries. Trust explodes as the incredulous suppliers see that the company trusts them with blank checks – something their own families would not risk.
- A child is asked every morning by his dad: “Do you want to sleep in or go to school? Do the homework or blow it off?” The father explains to bewildered neighbors that he sees his role as “protecting his child’s creativity from the schools.” Eventually, the son earns four master’s degrees and a Ph.D. The father was unknowingly enacting Finland’s educational policy: By eliminating homework and having children spend fewer hours in school, Finland improved its global educational rank from 29th to first place.
The Indian mystic Osho explained the conundrum of re-enacting the past and perpetuating the status quo, despite our desire to embrace novelty: The memories of the past show up in the present and, simultaneously, the future is born out of these seeds of the present.
The past is therefore constantly recycled into the future.
The wisdom that “history repeats itself” reflects the cosmic tragedy of humanity trapped in this vicious cycle. To the mystic, seeing this mechanism is the pathway to liberation.
And now to the mysterious art of unlocking the unexpected. We live in a world of “linear logic” and time-tested patterns of reasoning that result in predictable outcomes. However, the key protagonists in the examples above are not acting illogically. They are in sync with “nonlinear logic,” unlocking unexpected outcomes beyond the linear extrapolation of the past.
The art of unlocking the unexpected can be consciously cultivated only in exploring the “road less traveled,” grappling with complexity and challenging surface-level perspectives at every decision fork in our lives.