Monday, July 19, 2010

Do You Believe In Magic?


Magic is underrated. We don't put much weight on it. Magic does not seem to have as much rhyme or reason to us as a spreadsheet does. It requires surrender to the unseen as well as faith. You can't touch or see magic and you certainly can't download it onto your computer screen. Or can you? If you believe in magic that might be possible.


Our information on overload world drums it  into our head that we must look at the facts, we must do the research, and base  our plans on what we come up with. It's gotten worse since the computer invaded the desktop. There are now a dozen ways to look at the same information with the click of a key.  We take the elaborate conclusions reached from  a software program that someone designed to do a calculation to be the corporate bible. We point and say, there it is! That must be the way! We discount magic but we never discount what the machine told us. We forget to think and we forget to believe.

I am not advocating not doing the work. If I don't write I don't get published.

I am not suggesting to forgo research and data. If I don't know my market, no one will buy my services.

But I am suggesting that we have to remember to look at the forest and not just the trees. The trees themselves are important. Without them there is no forest. But it is the forest in its entirety that emanates the magic, those patches of  fresh grass and pink and yellow flowers in between that popped up out of nowhere, even when someone told us the ground was not suitable.

If you want to shake up your life, whether a minor renovation or a complete overhaul, in the words of Tug McGraw, "Ya Gotta Believe." When he coined that phrase in the 1973 baseball season no one imagined that the  New York Mets would go from last place to first and win not only the division title but the National League pennant. For Tug and the Mets it was about believing they could become champs. The statistics were against them, but it didn't matter. They created magic because they believed.

This might sound too supernatural for many of you but I recommend pondering it a while. Choose to believe in some force bigger than yourself,  besides your computer and the non stop bad news emanating from the Internet, the newspaper and television. Do the work and surrender to the magic. And let me know what happens.

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