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Be Unreasonable!

By Peter Lloyd

For roughly 13 centuries, Ptolomy’s geocentric model, which held that the sun circles the earth, seemed perfectly reasonable. After all, the sun certainly appears to rise, arch over the earth, and set on the opposite horizon each day. It took creative courage to to challenge such an apparently reasonable model and replace it with what seemed obviously unreasonable.

I can understand why the heliocentric model took some time to take hold. So it is with many challenges to widely held, apparently reasonable ideas. The more reasonable the accepted notion, the more unreasonable the truth appears at first. And if the reasonable fallacy proves serviceable, is it not reasonable to work with it?

photoGeorge Bernard Shaw observed a split among people who satisfy themselves with the way things seem to go and those who work to make things go otherwise.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Shaw’s reasonable person is no fool. Happiness, you may have heard from one guru or the other, comes in part from acceptance. For me, being alive and savoring the moment, almost any moment, can be a calming source of pleasure.

There’s really no need to invent or create anything else in order to enjoy what William Blake extols in “Auguries of Innocence.”
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Unfortunately in order to enjoy the luxury of stopping to smell the roses, one has to work, or at least belong to a group that works. Work, planning, specialization, organization, and the like create leisure time. The indifferent world cares nothing for those who pause to admire it in a grain of sand or a spiral galaxy. It teems with other life forms all competing for limited resources. And to some of those critters, you are an edible, exploitable resource.

So, here’s to the unreasonable person. The men and women who question the status quo, buck the system, break the rules, and turn the tables. We need more not fewer courageous creative artists, inventors, and innovators who challenge authority, conventional wisdom, superstition, and dogma! No rebellion means no progress.

I’m sure you and I could spend an evening over drinks debating the nature of progress and just how reasonable or unreasonable it is. But we’d do so in the evening, after our work is done. To ensure that we have time to wonder at the world, we have to dominate our niche or at least bend it to our requirements. We have to struggle upstream before we can drop in and go with the flow.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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