“Audacity and self-confidence are not the same as rashness; a healthy self-confidence is based on developed and tested powers of thought and action, not on nervous compulsion.”
– Henry M. Boettinger, in Harvard Business Review article, “Is Management Really An Art?” (circa 1975)
There is a reason that Boettinger used the word “audacity” in this description. When someone acts in a decisive way when those around them are accustomed to indecisiveness and lack of direction, it can seem pretty outrageous. Pretty audacious. Almost rash.
Why is that?
Imagine if every morning you just tossed one little bag of garbage from your kitchen in to the garage, next to the trash bin. Just one bag of ‘nana peels, coffee grounds, yogurt cups and bread crumbs. It’d take less than a second. In the interest of busy-ness, just one little act of carelessness, of disregard for what you knew you should do. All in the interest of serving the beast of the “urgent” in your mind. Over the course of time, the stench in the garage would become pretty awful, huh?
So, one evening, you arrive home, and realize there’s no room in the garage for the car. You’ve had a hard day. You’re tired. You’re “mad as hell and you’re not going to take it anymore,” to borrow the ol’ movie line.
You take a deep breath, and calmly, yet directly, haul, lug, drag all that garbage to the curb. It takes a lot less time than you thought it would, but your spouse looks at you like “why now, after all those weeks?”
Your answer might be, “because it’s time. Because just tossing the garbage out in the garage never worked. Oh, maybe it worked the first day or two, before things started to smell and the flies started moving in, but, the fact is, it never really was the right thing to do. And now it’s time to correct the mistake, once and for all.”
Your “audacious” act? The self-confidence with which you carried it out, compressing months of inactivity in to minutes of appropriate response? The apparent rashness of your action? Well, they might seem a little wacky to someone who watched you just open the door and toss for so long, or to someone watching you drag a year’s worth of garbage to the curb for no apparent reason.
The sense of audacity comes from the change in behavior…no matter how positive it might be, it’s different and it feels weird to those observing it. The reality, though, as we’re reminded by this quote, is that, to really make a difference, we may need to take action that is based on developed and tested powers of thought and action, and not on habit and / or nervous compulsion.
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