A Lesson in Taking Risks from a Skeleton (with a Lightsaber)

On Halloween, I broke with the habit of a lifetime.

I actually remembered to buy some trick-or-treat sweets in advance for once.  Tonight was going to be a much better effort than my usual after-the-fact dash to the corner shop with instructions to my wife to ‘Keep ‘em talking!’.

Nope, tonight I was prepared. Locked and loaded*.  Three bags of sugar-charged pick’n’ mix, all ready to go.

So after about an hour,  I was a little disappointed when I didn’t get a single knock on the door. Not one.

Puzzled, I look out of the window.

Then it dawned on me:  I had my sweets.  I’d left the light on.  But there was Something Missing.

All the other houses in the road had little jack-o-lanterns in the window. It would seem that standard Halloween Protocol in  our area is to give a Sign that you’re in on this whole thing.

I’d forgotten about that bit. Oops.

Never mind.  Maybe next year.

[*I should point out that although that’s a firearm metaphor, I wasn’t sitting by the front door with an assault rifle.  That wouldn’t really have been in keeping with the spirit of things.]

I resigned myself to having failed once again in my mission

Then the doorbell rang.

I opened the door.  And standing there was a four-foot-tall skeleton.  Holding a Lightsaber.  Along with a sadly empty bucket.

“Trick or treat?”, he asked plaintively.

I smiled, then popped my head out of the door. The streets were empty.   Our skeletal Jedi friend was clearly a late starter.

He wasn’t doing too well, presumably due to supplies of sweets being exhausted by the competition.

So I delightedly put the sweets in his bucket. All of them. They spilled over the top.

He was now a very happy skeleton. And I wasn’t faced with the prospect of working off all those sweets which I’d inevitably end up munching if they were left sitting around the house.

Let’s look at this from our skeletal friend’s point of view

Having started late, he was faced with what looked like a barren field.

He could have given up, and gone home empty handed. Decided that trick-or-treating wasn’t happening this year.

But instead, he decided to go off the beaten path, and ring the doorbell of someone who had a light on, but wasn’t obviously handing out sweets (because I’d done a half-assed job of  advertising the fact).

What’s the worst that could have happened?

I suppose he could have got a rude, unfriendly response. But that was unlikely, especially as his mum was standing behind him.

There’s a fair chance that he could have got a simple and polite “no”. No big deal.  Especially for a kid – ever noticed how it’s only when we ‘grow up’ that we stop asking things in case someone says no?

But there’s also a chance that his risk could pay off

Like it did in this case.

In business, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of telling ourselves that there’s no point trying, because it’s all been done already.  When all we’re doing is looking at the obvious paths, and assuming that because they’re all worn out, everything else must be too.

We don’t want to do something out of the ordinary because it might go wrong.  And that’s how we miss out.

I’m not going to pretend that every time you do something unorthodox, you’ll end up with a bucket full of sweets.

Quite often, it won’t work. But the downside is very rarely as bad as you think.

So where are you following the obvious path?   And how could you take a detour to risk finding something wonderful?

PS: Find another lesson and win a free session

When I was writing this post, I spotted at several other lessons here.  Let me know what else you see in the comments. I’ll give the author of the best answer a free Irresistible Introduction session worth $47.

Image Credit: Kevin Dooley. Yes, I know it’s not a skeleton with a lightsaber. But this appeared when I typed “Light Saber” into Flickr and I just couldn’t pass it up. I mean, how much cooler would Star Wars have been if it had included Giant Cats?