6th of an 11 part series

A personality assessment that many of those I work with have taken says that I “prefer to apologise for exceeding [my] authority rather than getting permission in the first place.” What can I say? Guilty as charged.

To be fair, I will, more often than not, honor the boundaries I’ve been given. It’s in those moments that obstacles come before me that I begin to wrestle with this personality quirk. Where some see a barrier to their goals as something to break through, I tend to see them as something to go around…or under…or over…or even use as part of the solution. There is this thing about me that prefers looking at creative solutions to obstacles. Many times creatively tackling a bottleneck can lead to finding solutions in places one might not otherwise discover.

One of my favorite stories is when the Disney Imagineers were designing Soarin’. They were stuck. They just could not figure out how they were going to make this work. Hours and hours of thinking and meeting had not developed into a viable solution. It wasn’t until after one Imagineer started playing with his child’s Erector set that he was able to construct a model for how the attraction would eventually work.

This is one of the reasons that I see everyone that crosses my path as someone that I can learn from. The moment I think “oh, this person (or organization or _____) can’t teach me something is the moment that I stop learning. The moment I stop learning is the moment I begin to limit my ability to find creative solutions to obstacles.

That is not acceptable.