Every once in a while, something comes along that catches our attention. Maybe someone asks us to get involved with something. Or we have an idea we can’t quite shake. There’s a person we’d like to know better, something we’d like to create, or a possibility that keeps wandering back into our thoughts.
For a few moments, we’re interested. And then we begin thinking of all the reasons it probably won’t work.
We’re remarkably good at this. In fact, I suspect most of us have something that comes built-in. I’d like to introduce you to the Internal Department of Reasons Why This Won’t Work, or IDRWTWW, for short. Mine has apparently been fully staffed for years.
Give the department a new idea and it can usually get to work within seconds:
- You don’t have time for that.
- You don’t know enough about it.
- What if nobody is interested?
- You’ve never done that before.
- This could become a lot more work than you think.
The particularly annoying thing is that sometimes it’s right. We really don’t have time. An idea really isn’t very good. Something may cost more, require more, or become considerably more complicated than we imagined. So I’m not suggesting we shut down the department.
But there is one serious organizational flaw: its job is to tell us why something won’t work.
It doesn’t spend much time asking whether something matters to us. Or whether we’re curious. Or whether we care about the people involved. Or whether we’d simply like to see what happens. And those questions matter too, because “Will this work?” isn’t always the most important question.
Sometimes we call someone simply because we’ve been thinking about them. Or we show up because people we care about will be there. Or we try something because we’re curious. Maybe we take on a role because, somehow, it feels like ours to take on. None of those comes with a guaranteed outcome.
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I’ve been thinking lately about the things that matter to me. Family matters. Friends matter. How I relate to people matters. The communities I’m part of matter. How I spend my time and attention matters. And perhaps that’s why I’ve started wondering whether “Will this work?” is even the right question. Maybe another question deserves to be heard:
Does this matter enough to me that I’d like to try?
That’s a surprisingly different question from Will this work? It moves us from predicting the future—which we’re lousy at anyway—to recognizing what matters to us now.
Our Internal Department of Reasons Why This Won’t Work will keep doing its job. There may be something useful in what it has to say. It can even have a seat at the table.
But it doesn’t get the final vote.
A Quiet Question
What matters enough to me that I’d like to try?
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