Story-tellers use deadlines to increase the excitement.
The hero has 10 seconds to get through a stone door or be trapped forever.
The heroine has four hours to get to the lookout before the love of her life leaves forever.
The young boy has only enough strength to hang on for 25 more seconds.
The deadline – plus the consequence – equals excitement.
How much less exciting would it be if the woman could get to the lookout whenever she wanted?
My guess is, loverboy would be waiting up there until sometime next July.
Deadlines work. Because they force us a consequence.
To choose a life with something. And a life without something else.
In made up stories, consequences are real.
But, most of the time, in real life, the consequences aren’t.
We always believe there’s a second chance.
In relationships.
In business.
In health.
We (the generalised we – the assumed most of us, going by personal observation, no proof, just an opinion), we don’t see a consequence as final.
An un-met deadline is often just the start of a re-negotiation.
A consequence (ironically) of believing we can have it all.
And, most of the time, we get away with it – because the person we’re re-negotiating with doesn’t want to be the bad guy. To break our un-hardened hearts.
And that’s perhaps why most of us don’t handle consequences well.
But, if we did – if we saw deadlines as dragons, if the consequences we invent were accepted and not just the start of a re-negotiation – how much better would our lives be?
Consequences – genuine consequences – force us to try harder. Or not try at all.
If consequences were real – if deadlines came on the wings of dragons and not the breeze of our imaginations – my guess is we’d spend more time up front making sure we had enough time and enough information to get the job done right, to make sure we knew the other enough to believe we were getting into a good relationship, to make sure our actions wouldn’t harm our health.
And we’d be prouder of the results we ended up with.
