Seth's Blog : Guardrails

A large, freshly-paved parking lot has no boundaries. You can drive in any direction, free to speed to your destination. But once there's more than a few cars driving, traffic stops. It's too risky, there are too many uncertainties. A...

Guardrails

A large, freshly-paved parking lot has no boundaries. You can drive in any direction, free to speed to your destination. 

But once there's more than a few cars driving, traffic stops. It's too risky, there are too many uncertainties. A car could come at you from any direction, and so we crawl.

Flow is far more efficient, and flow comes from well-placed guardrails and intelligently painted lines. Flow only happens when the guardrails are universally accepted, when we can find the confidence to drive just a bit faster than our eyes can see.

One opportunity to make progress presents itself when it's possible to move a guardrail, to show the others a better route.

The other leap occurs when we realize that we've been imagining a guardrail, one that's been causing us to detour when in fact it's not actually there. We're obeying invisible guardrails when it doesn't benefit the others. Ignoring these self-erected guardrails permits us to contribute more than we thought possible.

       

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