My wife and I have a sixteen-year-old son. Those who have, or have had a sixteen-year-old in modern times understand that this generation, not so unlike the prior one, tend to think they know everything while also continuously looking for the easiest way to do things. As a parent of a sixteen-year-old I find this to be a great lesson in the futility of searching for the easiest path. Conversely I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the longest path is necessarily the right path, rather that when our first objective is to make things easier, we are missing the point.
So here’s the story.
My wife and I do not use a microwave, as we do not believe it is a healthful way of heating or cooking food, though our young ones do not necessarily subscribe to this notion. Presently we have a microwave in the basement, stored over the summer and designated for our eighteen-year-old daughter’s college dorm in August. So our 16-year-old decides he’s going to make a dish for himself by following a recipe that calls for the use of a microwave, and he asks us how he can make it without a microwave.
We suggested a couple alternatives, neither of which he was favorable to, and his response was to use the microwave in the basement, because…are you ready for this…“It’s easier.” So he hauls the microwave up from the basement, clears space on the counter, plugs it in, heats his food, and then hauls it back down to the basement. In his mind this is easier than simply heating in the oven or on the stove; his objective being to make things “easy.” In fact he was so focused on making things easy that arguably he made it more complicated.
An alternative could have been to explore the joy of cooking food and making something tasty or as many restaurateurs strive for, to make great food and be highly efficient about it. At least in their case there is some balance between the joy of food and the serving of food that people love together with efficiency.
Many of the great thought leaders are repeatedly illustrating for us that when we focus single-mindedly on increasing efficiencies and cutting costs, that we lose focus on our purpose for being in business in the first place. If we are going to do business and do it well, we must start with the joy for what it is we are doing, passion for the results we produce, and the enjoyment our customers and clients receive from it. When it’s all about efficiencies and profit we might as well nuke everything in the microwave just to save time.
P.S. On the topic of communication: We also tried to advise our son to make sure to use the jalapeno salsa versus the habanero salsa, advice to which he failed to heed. So halfway through the eating of his dish, with eyes watering and sinuses draining, he had to call it quits.
LOL… as it is communicated nowadays 🙂 The quick fix or response of today’s world is still challenging for me. This cute reminder helps me be at peace with “the old fashion” way. Thank you!
As a high school teacher and a parent of now-adult children I think teenagers have a lot to teach us about spontaneity and seeing things with fresh eyes, among other qualities. That being said, we had a sign on our refrigerator for a couple of years that read, “Teenagers: leave home now while you still know everything.”
“Teenagers: leave home now while you still know everything.” Good one Lanny. Thank you.
Nice story to illustrate an excellent point that also applies to all human systems, reminds of something I recently read (pretty much everything reminds me of something I recently read, but anyway…) in a book called ”Walk Out Walk On’ (Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze) about how the goal should not be efficiency, which leads to dependence and exposure to the risk of collapse, but resilience. Some quotes from the book:
“The goal of optimization…is based on the illusion that there exists in a system some sustainable ‘optimal’ state around which we can model the world.”
Quoting a book called ‘Resilience Thinking’ by Brian Walker: “The more you optimize elements of a complex system of humans and nature for some specific goal…the more you diminish that system’s resilience. a drive for an efficient optimal state outcome has the effect of making the total system more vulnerable to shocks and disturbances.”
“…(I)n the long term,life unfolds unpredictably and chaotically. And yet we persist in making plans and setting targets as if we were able to control their outcomes. When we aim to produce the efficient optimal state, we are designing systems whose fate may hang in the balance of a single variable.”
“A resilient system that has the capacity to rebound from disturbance does this by increasing its diversity and redundancy, by forgoing growth and speed in favor of sustainability, and by engaging in a wide range of small local actions that connect to one another.”
Thank you Steve for all the great quotes and thoughtfulness. I particularly like the notion that “the goal should not be efficiency, which leads to dependence and exposure to the risk of collapse, but resilience.” This is a very Indigenous way of looking at things, as the Indigenous recognize nature as the true storehouse of information from which we need to model our lives, and nature is in constant flux.