Turn one given over

Most of us start each day holding a set of givens.

The job we have. The city we live in. The hours we keep. The people we answer to. The way the people around us already see us. The savings, the commute, the habits. Planning, for most people, is the work of arranging those pieces into the best shape they will allow. It is patient, sensible work, and it mostly produces small results, because a fixed set of pieces can only make so many shapes.

Now imagine a rule that let you take one of them, any one, each day, and declare it open. Not all of them. Just one. The hours could be anything today. Or the city. Or how you introduce yourself to a stranger.

The arithmetic changes at once. With everything fixed, a plan is a puzzle with a handful of right answers. With one piece loose, the number of answers jumps, because every other piece can now combine with whatever you decide that one should become. Much of what looked impossible was only impossible because all of it was being held still at the same time.

This is as true of a product launch as it is of a shop, a career or a week. Somewhere in the list of givens there is usually one that is not really given. It is habit, or fear, or the way it has always been done.

Each morning offers the chance to pick that one up and treat it as something else. Whether we do is mostly a question of nerve.