The Demon Clock

The clock on my office wall was demon possessed, of that I am certain.

At first it was kind of subtle– a few minutes ahead one day, three minutes slow the next. Close enough for a punctuality scofflaw like me.

But when one minute it was close and five minutes later it was off by hours, I began to fear the worst. Finally, when the second hand began to twitch, I knew there was more going on inside than the Energizer Bunny. So off the wall it came, and was sent to where all bad clocks go.

This got me thinking about all the regulatory things in our lives, technological and otherwise. We have databases and professional regulations and policy manuals and lists. All of them are well-intentioned and all were created to address some need or some lack, real or imagined. All too often they fail in their stated goal.

Take our customer relations management systems, for example. The notion of having all of your information about your clients in one place, easily accessible, is clearly a good idea. Yet in my experience, not one in twenty professionals or entrepreneurs uses their CRM effectively. Most don’t even open the app on a regular basis, and even those who do aren’t making use of the opportunity to manage client relationships (duh, is that what a CRM is for?) or mine the base for more business.

Or take policy manuals. My good friend Lewis Eisen is a speaker and consultant on policy. He observes that most written policy manuals are ineffective because they sound like angry parents scolding their children, and every one of us learned how to tune that out when we were four years old.

I don’t know about your to-do list, but if my money would grow at the same rate that my to-do list does, I’d be very wealthy. When I’m not watching it, new items add themselves like weeds. What good is a to-do list if all it does is depress you?

Only recently, as I have begun to articulate the Alignment Doctrine, have I come to realize that the reason so many of our regulatory devices fail to regulate us, and often annoy us, is because they don’t fit. They are trying to make us be something which we are not.

The trick to being the best you can be is to start by being yourself and having stuff work for you, not against you. Using devices to make you be something that you are not is a bit like the old oriental practice of foot-binding– you may get a result, but it’s painful, useless and fulfills somebody else’s dreams.

When we’re in the place where our aptitudes are in the driver’s seat, regulatory devices can enhance our lives but when we spend our square peg lives trying to fit into round holes, regulatory devices will always be futile and counterproductive.

Are your regulatory devices working for you or against you?