It’s 2010. Where Are You?

There was a small hotel I stayed at on several visits to London. It was within walking distance of Victoria Station and in a nieghborhood filled with bed and breakfast places and all sorts of little shops.

After a day of sightseeing, I’d often stop at the corner convenience store to buy a magazine or some Cadbury’s. The same man stood in the same spot behind the same counter (probably wearing the same clothes), with the same stony expression on his face—year after year.

Frequently, I’d  leave the store pondering such a life. I can barely imagine going to the same place at the same time and having the same experiences day after day after day. That’s a death sentence for the creative spirit and breeding ground for all sorts of negativity.

I also know that it’s an unquestioned way of life for many people. I was reminded of that the other day when a friend told me about a woman she’d met who said that the best thing about her job was that she didn’t have to learn anything. That’s not my idea of a job benefit. 

There are, of course, many ways to keep from evolving forward. For instance, there’s a man I know who seems to have formed all his opinons about life at the age of eleven and has spent the last thirty years looking for evidence to support those beliefs.

Consequently, his philosophy of life includes such things as people can’t be trusted, if something can go wrong it will, and so on and so forth. He’s quite certain about the correctness of his beliefs and determined to keep proving them. Needless to say, he’s a grumpy old man in a middle-aged man’s body. He doesn’t laugh very often, either, I’ve noticed.

Although I don’t hear it so much anymore, when I lived in the Midwest, I often heard people defend their limiting notions by saying, “I wasn’t raised that way.”  My (unspoken) reaction to that was, “You wouldn’t wear your mother’s clothes, would you?  Why are you wearing her outdated beliefs?”

We don’t need to trap ourselves behind the counter of a convenience store in order to be trapped in a world without discovery and adventure. Yes, I understand that limiting beliefs are often fueled by fear and self-doubt, but if we don’t challenge our assumptions, look at other perspectives, we stay stuck in certainties that may not bear any resemblance to the truth.

Opening our hearts and minds to a bigger world, a world where ideas flourish, where people are spreading joy, is absolutely essential if we’re ever to discover who we are and what we can become.

It’s no coincidence that the motto of the wildly successful Cirque du Soleil is, “We must evolve.” If we don’t take that challenge, we stay stuck in the Twentieth Century while the adventurers are blazing new trails.

Quite simply, we can’t make it better by keeping everything the same.

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Every Friday morning, I wake up to a mailing from the folks at Prairie Home Companion. My favorite part is always The Old Scout’s essay and this week’s is worth passing along. Garrison Keillor is hanging out with the college crowd. You may want to eavesdrop. http://tinyurl.com/2c6hcdm

In Business to Delight

When I got home from my recent trip to Minnesota, there was a package waiting for me from Lands’ End. I’m not a big customer of theirs, but I’m a happy one. For starters, there’s their order department. Moments after dialing their 800 number, a cheerful voice, a live person, answers. They’re always as cheerful at the end of the call as they are at the beginning. I might ask about the weather in Wisconsin and they might be eager to tell me about their last visit to Las Vegas. 

 

This thriving mail order business was started by Gary Comer who first got into mail order selling with an earlier business. Lands’ End began as a sailboat equipment company in 1963 in Chicago, Illinois. The business became so successful that it expanded into general clothing and home furnishings. When Comer realized that he had a growing business on his hands, he decided to locate to the quietly beautiful area of southern Wisconsin. After all, this wasn’t going to be a city slicker operation. The company is named from its sailboat heritage, after Land’s End, but the misplaced apostrophe in the company name was a typographical error that Comer could not afford to change, as promotional materials had already been printed.

 

Even though their business was conducted by post, the company was determined to delight their customers. They became known for their return policy which was “Guaranteed. Period.” 

 

Lands’ End endeared themselves to me with a photo in one of their catalogs showing a car driving down a country road at dawn. The copy talked about their energetic employees who came to work at Lands’ End after milking their cows at home. They promised that if we ordered from these folks we’d get the same attention as they gave to running their own farms. 

 

Several years ago, the Lands’ End holiday catalog arrived. After dinner one night, I began browsing through it and there, among the fleece and knits, was the most marvelous essay by Garrison Keillor called What I’m Giving You for Christmas. Of course, the piece was entertaining, but it was also bold. Here, in a catalog of merchandise being offered as potential gifts, Keillor was warning about the perils of giving and receiving.

 

He wrote, “A Christmas gift represents somebody’s theory of who you are, or who they wish you were…You’d like to get a gift that aims high—Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a ticket to Nepal, a MacArthur grant—and instead here is a pair of bedroom slippers with lights in the toes so you can see your way to the bathroom at night.” I was so delighted that Lands’ End shared this charming essay that I wanted to order one of everything  in the catalog right then and there.

 

Jerry Garcia once pointed out  (delightfully) the responsibility we must assume in order to make the world a better place  by saying, “Somebody has to do something and it’s just incredibly pathetic that is has to be us.”

 

What do you suppose might happen if more of us took up the cause of being delightful? What kind of business would we create? What kind of relationships? Pathetic or not, why not make it your mission to do whatever you’re doing in the most delightful way?