Are you great at being still? Me neither.
You’re standing in line, and your phone’s already out—am I right? Waiting for the microwave? I bet you’re scrolling. (Don’t worry; I do it too.) My podcast guest and author Dr. Alan Gregerman gently—okay, not so gently—called that out, and I had nowhere to hide.
Four-and-a-half years ago, Alan had a stroke that took his sight and his speech. For eighteen months, he couldn’t make a sound that a human could hear.
Today he’s back to speaking, writing, and hiking, and he credits a sheer, dogged refusal to imagine any other outcome. He’s also one of the world’s most original thinkers in business, an innovation consultant, and the author of The Wisdom of Ignorance. (And yes, he has better glasses than I do. I’m working on it.)
Alan says that eighty percent of people are quietly unhappy in the box they’re in at work. Here’s how he wants you to climb out of yours:
1. Stop filling the quiet. Start engaging the world. Alan says we pass about one hundred people every day who could change our lives, and we miss every single one because our heads are down. His life hack is almost insultingly simple: Park your car in a city you don’t know, walk around with your eyes wide open, and look for one thing that’s remarkable to you. Why bother? Because almost every new idea is built from something already in front of us. You can’t connect dots no one else has connected if you never look up … or down. I’ve been known to appreciate a flower earnestly sprouting from a crack in the sidewalk. Your next great idea is outside, not in your inbox.
2. Make friends with strangers (and weird ones, especially). “You’re only as remarkable as your weirdest friends.” That’s a direct quote, and I’m putting it on a T-shirt. Alan’s point: Our friends are mostly like us, which is comforting but limiting. Strangers stretch us. They push us to be interested in more things, to be broader, and to be more open than we’d ever be on our own. He once chatted with a woman at a bed and breakfast who turned out to be a world-renowned landscape architect—a conversation that eventually led him to spend a day with her in Copenhagen, watching kids play in a park she’d designed. You don’t have to be an extrovert. You just have to say hello.
3. Embrace what Alan calls “enlightened ignorance.” This is where I lit up, because reframing scary words is literally what I do on stage. “Ignorance” sounds like a flaw. Alan reframes it as your superpower. If you know a lot about something, you can make it better. If you know nothing, you have a chance to create a breakthrough. Enlightened ignorance says, I don’t have the answer yet, but I’m determined to figure it out. That’s leadership. SHIFT™ the meaning of the word, and you SHIFT™ what you’re capable of.
Here’s what tied it all together for me: Alan isn’t asking us to be more productive. He’s challenging us to do these things so we can recreate a better version of ourselves. That’s a much more important ask and a much better one.
Be positively altered.