Painting Pictures of Egypt

Wanting what you had won’t get you what you want. 

Have you ever been stuck looking backwards?

You look at the past, and it looks so easy. Perhaps this is because it was easy. Perhaps you were lucky once. 

This is a post about working the problem–any problem–forward. If you take nothing else away, take away the knowledge that hindsight is not only 20/20, it’s viewed through vanity-tinted lenses. 

Now, if that hasn’t captured your imagination, I don’t know what will. So, here it goes: 

There’s a lyric from a Christian artist named Sara Groves that goes something like:

I’m painting pictures of Egypt
And leaving out what it lacks
The future looks so hard, and I want to go back.

The reference is, of course, to a hypothetical point of view of a member of the Jewish nation, just freed from bondage under the Egyptians, and now facing an uncertain future.  

I imagine a person, flooded with trepidation about wandering in the wilderness, painting portraits of Egypt that showed it “wasn’t as bad as we thought.”  

The future looks so hard, and I want to go back.

For those of us who think about the past and the future a bit too much, it’s a very comforting lyric, in some ways. 

 When I talk to executives nearing the end of their careers, I find it interesting to hear about their “best job.”
It’s often fun to realize that, contrary to conventional wisdom, their best job is rarely the highest paying or most prestigious one. 

It’s the one that came with purpose. 

But a hallmark of successful senior executives is that they work the problem forward. They focus not on how great things were last year or how to maintain the status quo, but on what the current state of play is, and how to make it work well. 

They don’t paint pictures of Egypt. They look for the promised land. 

How does this work for you, today?  Maybe you are sitting and thinking about how great you had it in that sales role in the ’90s. You forget about the steady harangue of the regional Vice President, though, don’t you? 

Maybe you are leading a company that had a much easier competitive environment 5 years ago. You might be forgetting that it was easier simply because you were big and the competition were dying in the GFC.  

Are you working the problem forward, or trying to re-set to simpler times?  It matters. 

Companies die when their leaders try to do old things in a new environment.  If your leadership team is running the cost reduction play that got them through the GFC, and it’s 2016 and the world has moved on, your team might not be working the problem forward. 

We all do it.  We all look back on some level. 

But, wanting what you had won’t get you what you want. 
Maybe painting pictures of Egypt isn’t all that productive after all. 

What do you think?