I am a Plate Spinner

I just read a headline somewhere today that purports to prove, once and for all, that first borns are smarter. I never had the sibling problem, so there's no way to compare. But I do know that keeping my brain engaged is an ongoing quest. It's not that I get bored easily...but I don't have much patience anymore (sound of family in the background shouting "that implies you did at one time...NOT") for lightweight things.

I read once (and took to heart) that most people talk about people, fewer talk about things, and fewer still talk about ideas. Talking and thinking about ideas has become what I do most often now...sometimes to the detriment of actually doing things. In fact I just hung up the phone (really? from which tree?) from a conversation where a significant logistical business problem was solved...and in an elegant, and eminently doable way.

And because I spend a lot of time thinking about things, I tend to be interested in opportunities. I have a friend (hi Paul!) who often says, when confronted with a problem: "I can do that." For me it is more likely to be "ooh...it would be cool to..." I don't jump out of airplanes or ride roller coasters, because I'm not an adrenaline junkie. But I do tend to think that my ideas should be put into practice. Hence the title of  this post.

Lura lent me a book a year or more ago called Refuse to Choose, by Barbara Sher. I highly recommend it to you. The premise is that there are people (like me) who are interested in so many things that they can't stick with just one. One of the subsets of what Sher calls scanners is the plate spinner. If you're my age you remember this guy on Ed Sullivan...the object was to keep as many plates spinning on the end of a stick as you could...and he ran back and forth from end to end of this row of plates keeping them in the air.



That was my life.

But after reading the book, I made what I think was an intelligent decision to arrange my plates into a circle, lopping off the ones that didn't add value to my core values. Now I'm not bored, but I can (most of the time) keep all the plates in the air because I'm not running end to end, I'm circling and reinforcing my values. It's made a lot of difference.