“This is a carburetor. Take it apart. Put it back together. Repeat until you’re normal.”
– Hank Hill, to son, Bobby, on “King of The Hill,” the FOX Animated series, in an attempt to divert Bobby’s attention from an interest in Witchcraft
Granted, my sense of humor is off-kilter, but I love this show. I’ve seen it maybe eight times, but it cracks me clear up! Some of the characters remind me of the guys Dad knew on the farm and in the factory back home. I also love this show because it, like The Simpsons and other great sitcoms (All In The Family, Cheers, M*A*S*H*, Friends), uses great writing and humor to illustrate basic life lessons.
How does the carburetor quote relate to making a difference? To bringing about meaningful change?
A mechanic needs to understand how something goes back together. All carburetors, basically, work the same way….granted, there are some four-barrel and some two-barrel…but they all do the same thing. Fuel, air, mix…move to a collision with the spark…internal combustion! Sometimes, when we’re looking for solutions, we need to know that when we “look under the hood” we know that under each hood is something like a carburetor. We need to understand where the interaction of the live ingredients happens.
By the same token, in these changing times, we have a unique opportunity to re-invent ourselves from the ground up. Instead of taking something apart and putting it back together, we might need to take some things apart and build something different…or take some things apart and see if we can operate without them, etc…but all in the context of understanding and re-focusing on what the parts were intended to do — and on whether we need to re-purpose them to address our changing world. We need to apply our mechanic skills as an engineer would — to solve a particular problem.
Yes, the analogy is a stretch, even for me. But, it’s an illustration of how we must re-focus our thoughts if we’re going to drive the kind of change that can make a real difference. It’s going to be less and less about what we’ve always done, and more and more about what we must do; and that means that while some things need to be done the same way, there are many that we’ll need to do differently.
If you’ll bear with me for an unusually long DD, we also need to think about how the word “normal,” plays in to our world. It’s a dangerous word. To be difference makers, let’s commit to getting real comfortable with abnormality. Let’s worry less about “repeating things until we’re normal” and focus more on making something incredible happen, even if it seems “less than” normal.
That’s a lot to chew on….and it ain’t as organized or efficient as I like to have things….but I’d sure love to know your thoughts on the concept…
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