1-2-3 Inner Game
Start With Wow, Not How
Listen to the audio version of this issue
Was this newsletter forwarded to you?
A magic trick lands. The room goes quiet for exactly one second, then someone asks how it's done.
Harris, the illusionist and author of The Wonder Switch, opened EO Dubai's season with that moment, then named the reflex behind it. He calls it howing the wow to death.
We are wired to jump from wow to how almost instantly. Someone brings a possibility into a room and the leader answers with logistics, cost, or precedent. It feels responsible. It is actually the fastest way to kill an idea before it has a pulse.
Kodak had the digital camera. They asked how instead of wow. Blockbuster passed on Netflix at fifty million dollars.
Companies rarely die from moving too fast. They die from moving too slowly, one reasonable question at a time.
Here's the part that's easy to miss. How used to be the hard part. Not anymore.
Knowledge is abundant, AI executes, and method is now the cheap part of any idea. What's scarce is the discipline to sit in possibility long enough for something real to form.
Harris backed this with the Pygmalion effect. Teachers were told, at random, which students were high performers. Those students then outperformed, not because they were smarter, but because the teachers' belief changed how the teachers behaved toward them.
What you choose to believe first decides what your brain is willing to solve for. Seeing is not believing. Believing is seeing.
Belief comes first. It always has. Waiting to see something work before you'll believe in it is the expensive order, and it's also the default one.
The information age rewarded knowing how. The imagination age rewards whoever is willing to believe something before it's proven, especially about themselves.
Where are you howing your own wow to death this week?
Here are some Inner Game perspectives to consider this week.
1 Question from me
What's the wow you're howing to death right now, in your own head or someone else's?
2 Questions (and answers from me)
Q: How do I stay sceptical about a new idea without shutting it down before it's had a chance?
A: Turn the period into a question mark. "That won't work because" is a declaration wearing curiosity as a costume. "If that happened, how would we respond?" keeps the same scepticism and produces a plan instead of a dead idea. Same doubt, different sentence, completely different outcome.
Q: What's one small thing I could do to change how people experience working with me?
A: Find your popsicle hotline. A modest hotel earns thousands of five star reviews because a poolside phone summons a butler with free popsicles. It costs almost nothing and changes the story the guest tells about themselves. You already have something that cheap available to you. Find it and use it on purpose.
3 Insights
Belief comes first, evidence second. Waiting to see it work before you'll believe in it is the expensive order, and it's also the default one.
Say "the story I'm telling myself is" before the conflict escalates. Most people can't finish the sentence out loud, because the story sounds absurd the moment it's spoken.
Split your meetings into wow meetings and how meetings, and name which one you're in. Fifteen minutes where nobody is allowed to ask how, on purpose.
Until next week:
Protect the wow first.
Ask how second, on purpose.
Believe before you're proven right.
— Dhiren
Comments