Skip to main content

The Tipping Point


Certain phrases and labels mysteriously appear in the everyday lexicon and virally spread. Before long Four Wheel Drive vehicles are the quaint labels used by absent-minded old codgers to describe SUV’s.  Portfolios used to refer to man-purses carried by toffs. All day has morphed in to 24/7 and social networking has erupted from the realm of Church tea and scone get togethers in to the ubiquitous tweeting of mass popular culture.
A few years back it seemed like all change was described as a paradigm shift. More recently the term ‘Tipping Point” has made its entrance.
Unlike the word paradigm, which is a non-descriptive word without soul and colour, favoured by Lawyers and politicians for the obvious reason that they facilitate obfuscation, I quite like this new player. You can mentally shift gears when imagining a tipping point.
With the warp speed evolution of ideas into things and an apparent unquenchable appetite for the novel and uber cool latest technology; tipping points become relevant reference points to measure key predictors of performance-read profit.
When did Facebook move from being a nerdy indulgence into the leviathan it now is? At what point did Obama move from obscurity into the barely comprehensible position he now holds? Ideas hover as intangible flights of fancy until a tipping point where an action takes place. Individual actions appear irrelevant until a point when for no apparent reason the masses jump on board and the virus takes hold.
If only we could predict the tipping point and adapt accordingly. That point just before a relationship moves from uninspiring to broken, or from a brief glance into a full-blown life passion.
Some people seem to have a multitude of life tipping points. Eureka moments and moments of profound clarity that completely redefines their future endeavours. Many alas don’t. Those poor souls who live lives of quiet desperation, taxiing down the runway of their life, never quite committing to accelerating enough to take off.
In a world of immeasurable options, we all have potential tipping points on a daily basis that can potentially reshape our whole life experience. To protect ourselves from the chaos and anarchy of unpredictability, we covet our comfort zones. Comfort is not to be under estimated. The danger of course is that this zone is often not actually that comfortable, but ‘better the devil…’
If there is a message it’s this. Sometimes there’s merit and reward in throwing off the shackles of predictability and embracing the unknown. Tipping points are usually noticed after we’ve stepped over the edge. So there’s a risk, a risk of falling flat on your face, but nothing ventured nothing gained.
Hope your Tipping Point works out well for you!



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Isn't The Law of Attraction Working for You?

This is a confronting and provocative question. It presumes there’s a gap in your life and that you are in some way failing, falling short of your own expectations. If The Law of Attraction does indeed work, how then do we explain how bad things happen to good people? How can we explain how the worst of criminals can win the Lottery? Indeed we can question whether this much-quoted Law is in fact a myth. The point of this article is not to ponder the riddle of this apparent phenomenon or get bogged down in the mire of attempting to define the intangible. Rather I would like to posit the following commentary. Let’s twist the above question. Imagine that despite your initial reaction to the topic, that you are indeed living the dream, but have failed to realize this fact. Perhaps your appreciation lens is clouded.  Perhaps you are with your ideal life partner but are blinded to this fact by virtue of your incessant fantasizing of some parallel universe where some

Maybe You Should Just Quit!

Not a slogan Nike would advocate! Without some context words such as persistence, patience, endeavor and dedication suggest a noble attitude to life matters. They symbolize ‘the stiff upper lip’ attitude to struggle. "Never ever give up"; to paraphrase Churchill goes to the heart of most self-help and personal development philosophy. The danger of blindly following this type of perseverance without considering its context is that more often than not, triumph does not overcome adversity, at the first attempt. There is a massive industry peddling personal development material. Books, Seminars, Webinars and all manner of strategies that range from useful and inspiring to borderline extortion. Harsh comment? I don’t think so. We live in a society that reveres its celebrities regardless of their substance. The personal development industry has its share of super rich ‘leaders’ who have attained a status within their tribe equivalent to religious pontiffs. Some of thes

Ordinary May Be Overrated!

We live in a culture that increasingly embraces connectivity. The melding of outward disconnection with a simultaneous 24/7 digital conversation is both ironic and mildly disconcerting to those of us not permanently attached to this digital umbilical chord. Social niceties and courtesies are becoming severely diluted. I recently navigated the labyrinth that is Victoria Station and found myself marveling at the mass commuter hive of activity and yet clinically barren of human interaction. Each earnest participant on this treadmill journey seemed to be lost almost trance-like in some parallel universe, having engaged some sort of automatic homing device to skilfully navigate the human traffic. Ipods at full volume, newspaper in one hand, steaming coffee in the other and midst this madding crowd a complete absence of eye contact.  In this new world it would seem arcane and redundant to distract the herd by smiling, excusing yourself or being so bold as to offer some poor lost soul