The Liberation Paradox

Strategic insights from the personal and mundane

Karma

It’s been a week.

Our much loved Blue Burmese, Apollo, has mysteriously vanished. His sister, Wabi, is distraught. We’re pretty upset too.

Missing Cat Experts (yes, they exist) concur he’ll be within 100m. Hiding in fear. Hidden away out of human gaze. And he will come out. But only after a week or two, when hunger and thirst drive him from his hidey-hole.

We’ve plastered that 100m radius with posters, we’ve done 3am searches by torchlight, we’ve door-knocked, and we’ve bailed up passers-by. We’ve even turned the cat-hunt digital, by joining online communities which specialise in “doing good”, at a hyper-local level (including one called the Good Karma Network).

And guess what we’ve noticed?

Our normally aloof, “mind your own business” inner city neighbours (a mix of retailers, professional services, residents, Airbnbs and hotels) are a true community. Complete strangers have volunteered to search, to send posters to their networks, and to let us search their yards and garages. Even the homeless guys camped in the pocket park nearby asked, “Is that reward for real?” and when told, “Yes, absolutely”, said, “Leave it to us”.

Years ago, I worked with an arts organisation that had always kept their struggles private. When a 30% funding cut threatened their flagship program, the director decided to share their predicament at an industry forum. The response was immediate: competing galleries offered exhibition space, a legal firm offered pro bono services, and an unexpected sponsor stepped forward.

So, Apollo’s not back yet — but I feel confident he will be.

We have to rely not on karma, but on the collective good that we didn’t even know resides in a neighbourhood we’ve lived in for 25 years, until we revealed we’d had a loss.

Question: In your business, what loss or challenge could reveal the support networks around you, if you openly disclosed it?

---

Play

At tennis this week, I sighed when I saw a horde of 3-year olds spill onto the court next to ours.

Eight of them. With four adults. (Trust me, I counted them). And, what looked like hundreds of tennis balls.

Predictably, it wasn’t really tennis they played. Those balls were largely swiped at and missed, many of which rolled onto our court. The kids ran to collect them, in our path, sometimes mid-shot. And, my opponent, Tom, has a serious serve, capable of knocking a small child out, I suspect. So, our game was stop-start, at best.

But what I noticed too was how much fun they were having.

Fun at NOT playing tennis. Instead, they used racquets and balls to play all sorts of games. Juggling. Rolling. Putting balls in cones. Stacking balls on racquets. Making shapes on the ground with balls. Their shrieking was as cute as it was distracting.

As I kept mis-serving, what occurred to me was this: so much of our adult, professional lives is consumed with attainment: of skills and capabilities. My clients want to grow their strategic capabilities. Industries have capability frameworks. Boards have a capability matrix. We compete for projects and positions against people whose capabilities we seek to outshine.

Yet, what we fail to recognise is how valuable play is.

Unformed, unfocussed, and un-deliberate activity. Especially at the nascent, explorative, familiarisation stage. It feels great when we do it, but we don’t do it often. But, there is a skill that I am genuinely ‘playing’ with. With AI, I’m doing what the three year olds were: using the tools ‘improperly’, experimenting with ‘what happens next’ and, most of all, having fun.

Yes, by playing more, our skills will grow, but we’ll also feel comfort, we’ll understand the boundaries of what we’re working with, and we’ll enjoy ourselves.

Question: When is exposure through play the best way to build a skill?

---

Not The Beatles

The first music I ever bought with my own money was a cassette of The Beatles’ “Red Album”. I didn’t buy it because I wanted a compilation of their early-60s hits. I bought it because, at age 10, they were the only band whose name I confidently knew.

I took it home, and played it over and over until the tape stretched. I can still sing most of the songs on it. And, even as my taste evolved into more esoteric music, my fascination with John, Paul, George and Ringo just grew over the years. That they only produced ten hours of music in ten years is astonishing, when you consider that of 200 songs, 30 were Top 10 hits, and an astonishing 20 made Number 1. And that from their early ‘beat’ days (think “She Loves You”), they reinvented themselves at least twice: into folk rock (“Eleanor Rigby”) and psychedelia (“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”).

But it was only this week that I got a powerful strategic insight from finally watching Ron Howard’s masterful documentary of The Beatles’ live years. They quit touring in 1966, at their peak, because, because the pressure of public life was intensely draining. At that point, they went back into the studio, and in three years produced five incredible albums, starting with what Rolling Stone magazine called the greatest album of all time, “Sergeant Pepper”.

And they got there because of a very simple instruction Paul McCartney gave the band.

He said, “We’ve got to forget we’re The Beatles”.

His rationale was that they had to liberate themselves from their prior patterns: from their feelings of burn-out, of meeting massive public expectation, and the soul-deadeningly repetitive performances and interviews. And, even their prior musical ruts.

McCartney's "Forget we're The Beatles" became their liberation manifesto. Free from the weight of their own legend, they created their most groundbreaking work. When they stopped trying to be The Beatles, they became immortal.

Question: When shouldn’t you be yourself?

---

Click the ‘heart’ button if you're prompted, even in a small way, to transform something in your world, through a brave admission, a playful experiment, or an identity-shedding moment.

I’ll be writing to you again next Friday, hopefully with a cat on my lap.

Andrew