There is in business and in life a natural cycle, a natural way of doing things.
We talk about a natural way as though we understand it, as if we understand our actions are somehow in sync with the natural rhythms or the natural processes of life. The reality is most of your actions are either the opposite or in conflict with these natural laws.
Farmers tend the land and fertilise fields – they think that what they do is part of nature. Yet farmers only manage a process that nature already does very well on it’s own. Production of wheat or meat is not really making anything, the natural cycle does all of the production.
Sure farmers can plant seeds but they can’t make wheat, only the wheat plant itself grown from seed can do that. In the same way that a farmer can’t make a cow – a farmer can breed one but they can’t make one. It is only nature or a natural process that can make us a cow or a tree or a beautiful flower.
Nature has rules that it clearly understands – these rules determine how things end up.
Some of these rules are written into the DNA of living things – if you like coded into the very being of that thing.
If you stop for a moment and think about nature or natural science in any detail and you’ll quickly realise that the entire process is very, very special. Go look at a flower in close up, or an insect and you will notice how intricate it is – highly complex yet it manages to work and work consistently without much input from the world around it. Natural things choose their environment, decide what they need and select a suitable place to be, provided it all makes sense the natural thing flourishes. If things are not just so, that branch of nature dies out.
Think about that for a moment – if your small business was running on similar lines you would do things very differently, you would be in less of a rush and make more money – simply because much of the time, you’d be doing the right thing, with the right product in the right place – that natural way of doing business.
Forget farmers for a minute, let’s consider the spiders web as an example. Mathematically it is has a certain perfection, the measurements of the web form patterns which have mathematics built in. The spider doesn’t know, it knows nothing of mathematics or of fractals yet it manages to create a perfect example of mathematics in it’s work. It does this without a highly developed brain. How does it know how to make a web then how to position itself on the web? Is it really just hoping or is something else going on.
Importantly, if you go look at a spider close up you will notice how wonderfully engineered it is – mechanically very special – with a built in web building program.
For some reason the spider knows that if this web doesn’t work out the a further random collection of webs certainly will, it needs to be lucky just a handful of times throughout his lifetime. Spiders don’t need to eat for months at a time and in the UK only survive for a couple of years – natural efficiency springs to mind.
This is the same as your business only having to make a couple of sales a year in order to survive – wouldn’t that be great – catch two really clients – boom!
The spiders web has to be secure for its owner but it also needs to be able to work hard as a collector of other insects (food). Some of which of course manage to escape. The spider seems not to worry about escapees, it seems to survive despite the occasional loss. Indeed the evidence is that the process the spider uses is one that works very well for it. If the web is unsuccessful it is simply abandoned and moved to another place leaving behind the one no longer needed.
The making of webs is a consumable resource – the spider knows how much time and energy it should spend on making one web and holds enough in reserve to make another and probably another – scarce resources are with with maximum efficiency.
If you start applying the same techniques used by spider and by nature in your own business, to your own life, very soon things will start to change for you.
Human equivalent of the spiders web is systems and processes, this could well be a set of written rules and processes, a book of procedures. I guess you could call it a compliance manual or how to run your business (life) manual).
Let me ask you now how many times have you moved the web in your business by that I mean how many new things have you tried? Consider, your marketing, your sales, your investment in new products or services – the moving parts. What have you made or abandoned, what has the spider done today that you have not?
Wherever you look in the natural world you will find answers to problems, solutions in nature or plentiful because nature has already solved the most complex problems for you and I.
The natural world is an incredible problem solver and if you look you will see patterns patterns that seem unique at first but then show up as connected – just look like a line drawing of a lung – they look very similar to river tributaries viewed from space.
Octopuses have eyes that appear to be very similar to goats yet they could not live in a more different environment. There is a reason for it, a purpose. Something that makes sense to both the octopus and the goat. It is sometimes joked that a goat is really just shell of an animal that has an octopus inside using each arm to pull levers – funny thing is they are bright enough to do that – only don’t live long enough to evolve fully into something that could take over the world – that said, nine brains, three hearts and blue blood, able to live under stupid water pressure – it is an impressive animal.
Forget spiders and marine cephalopods for a moment, let’s consider trees. They have an efficient shape in order to maximize the collection of sunlight and they cram each leaf into the right amount of space to make sure they maximize the collection of sun. But they also avoid excesses of wind and water, which is why trees grow into the shapes they do. Obviously they are shaped by other forces of nature like minerals in the ground etc. How do they do all of this? Is it because the trees know something that we don’t, possibly.
You don’t really need to ask too many questions of nature in order to know how fantastic it is but you do need to start to understand what it does and the method in which it does it. By applying the lessons learned to your business increases in efficiency and profits will follow.
You do need to be asking why things happen in such a way, why are natural shapes efficient and, why is the spider’s web so good at catching prey and how does the spider know how to make its web, how does it make use of fractals? Each one of these questions has a lesson to be learned, makes business more relaxed – easy. It certainly makes sales a lot more interesting.
Fractals have been called the thumbprint of God, there is certainly something going on with them certainly something the natural world seems to understand very well.
Once you start to look at any natural thing you will realise that there are lessons to be learned – instead of thinking or guessing that we have all of the answers just look around and see what questions have already been answered questions that have already been responded to and how you can use what already exists.
When you are ready to start making changes, to sell more or to be more profitable and do all of that easier than ever you can get a “borrow my brain” session – either a free half hour of my time or a longer ‘full on’ session which is charged – either one has the power to transform what you are doing and will make you money. Book yours now.