Looking For Silver Bullets
Photo by Robin Pierre on Unsplash
It’s a romantic notion, the idea of silver bullets.
It’s exciting (and oh so promising) to believe that there’s something out there - a solution, a framework, a technology, etc. - that has the potential of solving all of our problems or, at the very least, delivering a material, manifold improvement in our situation immediately.
In our personal lives, we search for that elusive formula that will transform us: make us richer, happier, calmer, more focused. Every new article with a clickbait headline promises us the 10 steps to utopia and we devour it in the hopes that that might just be the one piece of information that’s been missing in the jigsaw puzzle that makes up our lives.
It’s the same thing in the business world. We read books written by visionary founders and famous academics in the hopes of copying their personal frameworks and emulating that success. Or we look to the promise of technology, as the ultimate panacea to all of our problems, with the ability to deliver immediate, exponential improvements in how we operate.
(The latter point on technology is one of the most prominent these days. The promise of digital and AI is incredible but I wonder if we tend to look at these areas as ends in and of themselves, as opposed to being the means. This is the tech that will finally help us cross the chasm…)
The truth isn’t quite like that, of course. The fact of the matter is that there are no silver bullets, no single solution that will take us from Joe Average to Steve Jobs, or from the proverbial garage start-up to the next Netflix.
There are certainly tools that will help. There are frameworks that will organize our thinking. There are lessons learned that will improve our efficiency in how we do our work. And, yes, there are technologies that will make our lives easier, as well.
But none of those will take away from the mental focus, the hard work, the persistence, the diligence - the sheer blood, sweat and tears - that’s needed to move us forward. None of those tools detract from the fact that our process will still be a messy one, with back-and-forths and left and right turns we never anticipated.
Maybe it’s because of that that we keep looking for these silver bullets, that one thing that will finally solve all of our problems. That’s human nature, I suppose. (I’m sure it’s hard wired into us, which is why we react so immediately to those clickbait headlines.) And if it’s human nature, it’s going to be hard to fight.
At the same time, as I indicated earlier, none of this is to suggest that there aren’t nuggets of wisdom or value in these sources. Let’s learn from others and their experiences, let’s use the tools available to us, let’s take advantage of anything that might give us an advantage.
But it’s important to put them in context - at the very least in our heads. We need to see them as enablers, not panaceas. We need to recognize that the essential work to be done doesn’t go away. We need to understand that at the end of the day, we will still have to work as hard and as smart, that we will need to work together and keep pushing through that messy, difficult path towards the vision we’ve laid out.
At the end of the day, we have to remember (and believe) that we are the silver bullet.
