Episode 19: There's No Single Answer

There are lots of really useful sources of information that will tell you how to do something. In this episode I suggest that with the end goal firmly in mind, there may be different ways to achieve that goal.

The resources you need may appear quite unexpectedly. Don't be dogmatic; stay flexible and you may still Make Life Better. By Design.

Transcript

Kevin: 0:12

Hello and welcome yet again to an episode of Make Life Better by Design with me, Kevin Drayton. Now, you should, uh, today have been listening to an interview I did with a very interesting woman. A veterinary surgeon and martial arts expert. However, my lack of knowledge of technology has again caught up and I'm having to spend a lot of time turning what was a perfectly good interview into a half decent recording. Because what came out at the other end, once I'd transcribed it all was pretty much unintelligible. Nevermind it will happen. I will bring you that interview. And it is interesting because the take that Rhona Warnock for that is the vet's name has on certain things to do with taking decisions, making choices, which is basically what I think design is about, in her business, is different from my own, not surprisingly. So there, there's a little taster, of what I hope is coming up very shortly that's also thrown out my schedule. And I've missed a week, which I hate doing. So. I am instead going to give you today, uh, a different look at how we might go about the business of making life better by design in terms of the process involved. Now, in my younger days, I was quite into teaching myself. Different techniques different, arrows in your quiver of ways to respond to a situation. So we'd gone through all the formal training and education. And now I was finding out that there's all this other stuff that goes on about personal interactions and how you phrase things and different ways of looking at situations, all of which are meant to help you get on in life. And this links in to the fact that just recently, my wife and I have been watching Sally Wainwright's latest television series, the Absolutely Wonderful Riot Women, how does that all come together? Right. Well, I will tell you. One of the courses, that I took when I was in my Teach Yourself how to be a smart human being mode was, by a guy called Jack Canfield. And he's an incredibly engaging speaker. I don't, I don't know. He may well be dead by now, but, he did produce a lot of really good sort of business, self-help type stuff. And one of his, one of his thoughts was that most people, when they decide they want to achieve something, go about it in the following manner. They say, right, if I can get certain stuff. So say for somebody who wants to be a footballer, he's gotta get the boots and the kit. Uh, and then once he's got that, he'll be able to do, football stuff. He can, he can get on the pitch and he can play football and train practice. And eventually with enough of that. He may, if he's lucky and diligent, become a footballer. Now, obviously cutting this down greatly from Jack's entire lecture. He said, look, you really need to think of this the other way around. Said, okay, so you wanna be a dancer? Well, what you've gotta do is be a dancer in your head. Once you are, as far as you are concerned, a dancer, you'll get to do dancey things. You can move, you can get in a studio or a dance floor or whatever and move. That's the essential thing. And eventually, after a while, you'll get the opportunity to have the dancey things, the ballet shoes, the outfits, the leg warmers, whatever it is that signifies being a dancer to you. Now that reversal of how you go about things, that struck me very powerfully and it made me think about my own, mix of those two things. So yes. I certainly craved the, the things, the objects, the utensils to do with being an architect, as I understood it at the time, which was negligible. But yeah, I, I wanted these pencils and paper and drawing board and goodness knows what, but that was because in my head I had, it is fair to say, already decided that that's what I was. What I had to grow into. So it was a bit of a halfway house and it only took whatever it was, seven odd years of formal training and then entering an office and going through several more years of learning and finding out and getting it wrong that I suppose it all came together. However I did mention a few minutes ago watching that fabulous series Riot Women. For those of you who don't know, Sally Wainwright is a West Yorkshire playwright, writer, screenwriter, whatever, who has produced some very engaging TV series. Probably the most notorious was Happy Valley, which looked at the, the rather nasty underbelly of life in a small West Yorkshire town But a later series, very interesting one, from which I have to say, men did not come out particularly well at all. There was a group of, aging women, they described themselves quite reasonably as menopausal, who got together, because they were fed up with being ignored and wanted to find a way to say it like it is. And they decided that the way to do it was gonna be through music. Broadening this out and thinking about people whose aim is to be a musician, whose aim is to be a singer, part of a band or whatever, will often think: right now, what instruments do we need in this band? Or what instruments do I need to play myself unless I'm just gonna be a singer? So they assemble the instruments and for a typical rock band, which they were attempting to be there was the usual mix of drums, keyboards, bass guitar, lead guitar, rhythm guitar. That's fabulous. They also had backing singers and a main vocalist. Then they were actually making the music, writing songs, rehearsing, playing them, and finally, they hardly believed it themselves sometimes, they got to be a band. The band was called Riot Women. If you've not tried it, please watch it. If you have watched it, I'm sure you thought it was terrific, but it was interesting how it was an illustration of, I suppose, the typical way of going about becoming something, putting something together. Another way of looking at it from a musical point of view, not: right we need these instruments, so who do we get? Right,now let's make some music and, and then we eventually will become a band, possibly signed up to a record label. Another way of looking at that is, again, one of my favorite, anyway, an outfit that started life as the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. They're now, I think, just known as the Penguin Cafe. But the Penguin Cafe Orchestra was the invention of a guy called Simon Jeffes and it deserves probably a TV series of its own, but Simon was intent on making music. And because he wasn't in a position at the beginning to gather together a whole load of people playing instruments that he thought he needed for this music of his, he just looked around and said, well, what have I got? What's available to me and what music can I make from it? And he had, for example, one piece called"Music for a Found Harmonium", and the story behind it goes that he came across an old harmonium that had been thrown out, played around for a bit, found out its possibilities and limitations, and wrote a gorgeous little piece of music for it. Music for A Found Harmonium. Lovely piece, and it didn't even have to be a musical instrument. He has made pieces using a rubber band, using the engaged tone on a telephone. Essentially, it was a case of Right, what have we got? What's around us? I am a musician. I will use this and music will come from it. And it did and it was quite wonderful. It blossomed, it developed, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra at full strength. Uh, had, I don't know, 12 or 15 people with a very unusual array of instruments. Just very quickly off the top of my head, I don't think they ever had a drum set. but they had woodwind, strings, ukuleles, um, and, and the type of music that came out of that was probably different from anything I'd really heard before. Let's just take another example. Food. Cookery. Now, our choices and decisions when it comes to food could take the standard route, the normal route, which is let's go to the shelves, get a cookery book, and we will find a recipe that we really fancy. Right? Smashing. Got that. It contains a list of ingredients. We go to the shop, we find those ingredients, or if we're really lucky, we're going to the garden and, and pick'em and dig them up. Comes and the recipe in front of us and we set to work and we end up with a meal. Lovely. But there is of course, the other way of doing it. In, I think it was a TV program, Ready, Steady, Cook!, Where somebody was given some ingredients, didn't know what they were gonna be, and then said, right, let's see what you can make with that. And because first and foremost, those people were cooks and chefs, they had the right mindset, they had the right attitude. They said, okay, let's see what we've got and see what we can do with it. Let's apply our, our knowledge, our thinking, our creativity to it, and we'll come up with a fabulous meal. And of course, they did time after time, time after time. So what am I getting at? Make life better by design. Yes, but making life better by design doesn't have to follow a simple, straightforward route. It doesn't mean getting goods and having got that stuff, doing things with it that make life better. No, it doesn't. It starts with having a mindset that says, I want to make life better every and any opportunity I get, and it can come out of nowhere. It can come very suddenly. You've gotta be prepared to take those opportunities and not worry that it's not fitting into some standard format. One rather sobering example from last week when I was failing to make the other podcast, I came out of a shop onto a side road in a village near my home. The side road, was a hill, fairly steep hill. I had parked on this hill and I started walking up toward my car and I realized in the middle distance there was what appeared to be a figure lying in the middle of the road. And as I got closer, I confirmed it was a body lying in the road and another person squatting beside it, holding a mobile phone. Well, this poor chap had fallen, and the woman that was squatting beside him trying to get hold of an ambulance had been coming down the hill and saw it happen. Screeched to a halt and rushed over to help. I'm not gonna go into the very fine detail of this, but. I arrived, found out what had happened. The chap was in a bad state. He'd only just come back from, I think having lost consciousness and there was blood everywhere. His head was in a poor state, and as anybody that's played rugby knows, head wounds really do bleed. So it looked pretty bad. And the chap was obviously of a certain age as well. I'm useless at this. I've got no first aid skills, but what I could do was just go a little bit further down the road and stop vehicles that we're now trying to come up this side road. So the first one I, I stopped, put my hand up. Please. Stop. The guy wound the window down. And he said, what's happened? And I explained that somebody's had an accident here. We tried to get a hold of an ambulance, and he said, okay, I am a paramedic. I'll park up. I'll get my kit and I'll be with you in a second. Oh, that was fantastic. That was just amazing. But the second vehicle that I stopped he wound the window down, what's going on? I explained, I'm afraid that you can't go up. It's, there's an accident here. I said, luckily, a paramedic has, just arrived out of the blue and he's helping. And this chap in the second vehicle said, well, I'm a fireman off duty. We've got some stuff in the van that I think might be able to help, and I'm used to dealing with this type of situation. So he pulled over and turned up. With the aid of what we had, which was principally a paramedic with a first aid kit and a fireman who happened to have in his van a camping chair that he set up on the side of the road, we managed to get this guy off the road slightly patched up, more comfortable with some water or whatever, and chatted to him until the ambulance arrived. I'm not quite sure how, but I am convinced that incident made life better, not only for the chap who had the accident, but probably for all the rest of us involved as well. So it's not necessarily a simple, straightforward progress. There are opportunities to make life better by design and by design sometimes means little more than taking notice, making choices, taking decisions, and getting on with it. I very much hope to bring you the interview with Rhona Warnock very soon, but if it turns out to be a problem, you may get another of these rather disjointed lectures from me. If you have been, thanks very much for listening, and I look forward to being with you again soon. Bye now.