Pearls: Let’s all stop doing what doesn’t work

EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl

When everything is going wrong, and when other action fails, there seems to be one simple solution that we overlook far too often: We can do the opposite of what we’re doing.

I’m amused with myself sometimes, the lengths to which I will go to ensure that I don’t have to admit that I was wrong. All I needed to do was change my methods, and I could have won the moment, but instead I listened to pride, failed, then blamed something or someone else for my frustration.

How many times have we heard it – or, unfortunately said it – from someone this time of year: I just cannot get my tomatoes to come out as good as Jim’s up the street. You can’t? or you won’t? Have you asked Jim what he does? Did you do exactly what Jim does, or did you change this detail or that to better suit your situation? If you and Jim switched gardens, would his tomatoes still be better? But we’re a stubborn lot. We try something, fail at it, then we get upset with successful people for not failing with us; instead why don’t we just do the same things that successful people are doing? But that leads to the next expression you and I have heard far too many times: That kind of thing would never work here.

You go to another town, enjoy the sights, spend money, then you come home and make excuses why the same thing would never work back home. Well, why wouldn’t it? It was the first lesson I had to learn in advertising sales for the newspaper, way back in the day when I was working along-side my dad in the summertime.

You can’t be afraid of ‘No,’ he would say to me. You’re going to hear it, and you’ll survive. (It was essentially the same advice he had given me for asking out girls, incidentally.)

When we cancel an idea before we even give it the chance to succeed, we’re basically putting the word ‘No’ into other people’s mouths. Why would we do that? It might have been a ‘Yes,’ or perhaps even a ‘Yes!’ We as a people have undoubtedly canceled many wonderful ideas before they had the chance to get off the ground, and we need to do better.

Much of what we are doing is not working, so we need to do something else.

We accept too many things as inevitable. It becomes inevitable that our small towns lose businesses. We begin to believe it is inevitable that we succeed in this venture, and that we fail in that one: and I tell you that each of those ideas can be dangerous.

We convince ourselves that only Jim, who lives up the street, can grow the kind of tomatoes we want from our gardens, when the truth is that we need only do what Jim is doing to succeed on our own.

The towns who primarily read this column – Albany, King City, Grant City, Stanberry, Union Star and, thanks to my friends at the Forum, Maryville (and the two dozen little communities between them) – could each choose to emulate another community that has found greater success. By emulate, I mean copy. You find a town that has it figured out, and you shamelessly copy their pattern.

And what is more, in my experience I have found that those who have succeeded are eager to share what they know. Walk up the street and find out: Jim is dying to show you how he gets those beautiful tomatoes. The same pride that you and I have been using to deny ourselves success is the pride that Jim possesses: he’s just flipping it, taking his confidence in a job well done to teach others his methods.

If it’s not working, change it. If you don’t know how, find a successful person. There’s no magic to any of this, but the easiest path to failure is to continue doing what doesn’t work.

Matt Pearl owns and operates newspapers in King City, Albany and Grant City.