Life, living and… Keep it simple…

Life, living and… Surviving it

Life is uncertain and that’s a fact. Another is that the realization of that simple fact escapes the understanding of a lot of folks.

They yearn for those simpler times when everything was clear, and the path forward uncluttered. Well here’s a newsflash: Those fabled times really never existed. Ask your parents or grandparents what their life was like in the 40’s, 50’s ,60’s, and even the 70’s.

It’s a good bet they’ll tell you about the precarious life they lived, replete with wars, recessions, economic uncertainty and dramatic political changes. And while today’s challenges and distractions may be different, they aren’t any more challenging than those they weathered.

Life is what we’re doing while we wait for its challenges to pass.

There’s a saying that goes, “We didn’t make the ocean we’re sailing, but we still have to navigate it”. That doesn’t mean we can ignore the news, but rather that we can’t let it be the reason to lose sight of our goals.

Oh, and here’s the good news. Many, if not most of those external problems troubling us will fade and won’t have any lasting impact. Just ask those who lived through those earlier decades.

Keep it simple… if you really know

Ever notice when some “experts on some technical areas are asked to explain how something about that discipline works they often deliver a convoluted, lengthy and pretty incompressible explanation.

Contrast that to a different individual who’s able to deliver a short, direct and very understandable answer, and that makes immediate sense.

The difference lies in the truism that if you can’t explain even a complex idea simply you probably don’t really understand it all that well.

Take that disinfectant cleaner we’re proposing. The customer asks us what’s the difference between the sanitizer he’s using and the disinfectant we’re suggesting. Of course we could launch into a lengthy explanation of germicides and bacteriological gibberish and lose the attention of that buyer and likely the sale as well.

Or we could explain that one kills 100% and the other 99.9% of the pathogen but that surviving 0.1% can divide again and again every twenty minutes resulting in tens of thousands of dangerous pathogens in just a matter of hours.