The Unsung Power of Ordering Off the Menu

It amazes me how one comment is enough to change you, even enlarge you.

It came over lunch in Providence, which seems a fitting name for a place to be transformed in.

Getting useful advice is hard, my friend said as we waited for sandwiches. It’s easy to get useless advice of the you’re bonkers/that’ll never work/why bother variety. My mind can generate that crap all on its own.

She continued, I’m filthy stinking rich in unoriginal thinking about my body, getting old, what I should do with my life, am supposed to do with my life. I can benchmark myself against others with the best of them. The perspective I want is one I can’t come up with. Something original.

And that stuck with me long after our sandwiches arrived in Providence.

John Cleese spoke of a Monty Python member - he wouldn’t say which one, perhaps you can guess - who when writing skits, always went for the first joke. But the really good stuff, Mr. Cleese said, wasn’t what’s lying right on the surface of our thinking. It was the third, fourth, fifth joke that requires excavating into untrodden layers of our mind where the really fresh, interesting stuff lives.

The ideas that enlarge history - the Salt March, lunch counter sit-ins, nuclear disarmanent, seat belts, no smoking indoors - are the product of people deciding to order off the status quo’s menu.

And far too many original, off-menu ideas are snuffed out because the person with the idea was told, “Be realistic, don’t be naive,” and “That’s not how the world works.”

We could be the person who remixes expectations, who says, “You had me at, 'I know this is a little different...’ How can I help?” Who does what the best improv actors do and doesn’t subtract or whittle down, but adds and adds and adds.

And we could not only do this for the ideas of others, we can do it for our own ideas, too.

The status quo shapes what we think is normal, what is possible. But a whole lot of great stuff when it first came on the scene was far from normal, way outside the bounds of possible. Or so the status quo would have us believe.

In other words, the status quo might set the menu. But we don’t have to order off it.