A Hindu priest and a philosopher dismount their asses and walk into a bar…
At least that’s how I’d like to imagine the story starts.
In any case, the two were having a dispute about the path to enlightenment in which the philosopher argued the following…
The ass that you mount and that you use to get to a house is not the means by which you enter the house. You have to dismount.
His point was that while you can use a ‘concept’ to get somewhere, you have to dismount to get beyond it.
In business, it’s often said that what got to you where you are today isn’t necessarily what will take you to where you want to go.
I find this incredibly true when working with businesses that are scaling.
So I love the visual that this story provides of the blunder and near impossibility of trying to ride a donkey into a house contrasted with the absolutely sensible, even mundane, act of dismounting the donkey and walking in.
When I talk to business owners that want to make their infrastructure more scalable, it’s often thought of as a large-scale effort resulting in step-function transformation and growth.
They think it will be hard because trying to do it themselves has felt like forcing an ass through a door. (I mean, have you ever tried?)
And while the results of infrastructure building are often monumental, the path to growth isn’t as complex and difficult as we might imagine it to be.
Too often we create these narratives in our head that make it difficult to let go of our past and make us fear the “what if’s” ahead of us.
But what if instead of beating ourselves up over the things that are not working, or refusing to let go of the things that we poured our blood sweat and tears into, we simply dismounted our donkey and thanked them for taking us this far?
That’s part of what I’ll be thankful for this week. All the things – good and bad, beautiful and messy, difficult and easeful – that have gotten me to where I am today.
Ready for those next steps.
For if the philosopher insists we must get off our asses in order to step into the house of God, then who am I to argue? 😜
