It's a Thing
I think it’s important to acknowledge what you think is real. I thank Ray Dalio for his curation of really good thoughts around the topic of knowing what is real and challenging yourself and others to synthesizing a more perfect understanding of it. Knowing what is real is more important than winning, because there is no sustainable victory without it.
I find it helpful to acknowledge and repeat THINGS I think are real when I talk to others. I want to make sure there is room in every dialogue, so I like this simple short way of expressing it:
"It’s a thing"
People don’t get what our business does … Yep, it’s a thing!
It costs us too much money to get customers … it’s a thing.
People will always need X in good times and bad. … it’s a thing.
"It’s a thing" to me means:
It’s something we need to understand right now or at least very soon.
It’s something that will punish us if we ignore it.
It’s something we expect to talk about a lot more as we go.
It’s something I’m holding onto tightly, but I’m willing to let go if you have a Better More Real Thing to replace it with… and then that will be a thing.
Lobster Telephone is a Surrealist object, created by Salvador Dalí in 1936 for the English poet Edward James (1907–1984), a leading collector of surrealist art. To Dali, lobsters and telephones were things.
