How many tips does it take to change your life?

“Send us your top ten tips,” they say, following the ever-popular way to introduce someone’s work.

This presents a dilemma…

Just go along with the request and supply a list of useful, but rather shallow ideas, and be complicit in a state of impatient ignorance? Or risk a disconnect and say that to really make a difference, we need something rather deeper, or more lateral?

The thing is…

You can’t get across the water by running faster (or as Edward de Bono said “you can’t dig a new hole by digger the one you’re in deeper”).

“Ah, we’ve only got time for tips and quick fixes,” some say. Well, that’s because they never make time for something deeper and more profound.

To make a real change, we need to draw breath long enough to learn more fundamental things, so that instead of running faster (to overwork the metaphor), we change our whole mode of transport.

Unfortunately…

We can pick up tip after tip and never acquire the deeper learning that would rescue us from our need for the quick fixes in the first place.

And there’s a problem with the word “tip” itself. It implies what’s on offer is just a few throwaway items – useful in themselves, but not the real gold, not the real nuggets. But perhaps they are the real gold, perhaps they are the real nuggets. If they’re labeled “tips”, what value will the audience place on them? In truth, they’ll be disempowered.

Now, I’m not saying it’s always easy…

But we need to break out of this bind of never really learning because we’re too busy, and being too busy because we never really learn.

So watch out for the tip junkies.