Epilogue

Responses to Some Challenging Comments and Questions We Receive

PEOPLE ARE NATURALLY SKEPTICAL ABOUT CREACTION, and rightfully so. If you are going to become an advocate for Creaction, and we hope you are, you can expect pushback. Here is how we respond to the comments and questions we get.

1. This whole thing sounds too simple.

We know you didn’t mean that as a compliment, but we would like to say thank you anyway. Making this simple and easy to understand was our intent. At its most basic, Creaction, a method that we believe can augment the way you think now, is something that we all did before we were introduced to more formal ways of reasoning.

As an infant, toddler, and preschooler, everything you confronted for the first time was an unknown. Because it was, you tried certain things. You cried. You tried to walk. You put your finger in a light socket. And as a result of your actions, certain things happened. Some good (walking). Some bad (that shocking light socket). But that is how you dealt with what, at the time, was an unpredictable universe for you. You took small steps to learn about it.

This way of approaching life has become unfamiliar to us over time, because it has been replaced by the Prediction reasoning used to explain reading, writing, and arithmetic, and just about everything else. But, our natural way of learning—the approach we had as children—has remained within us. We just want to help bring it out.

2. What the heck do you guys know about life in the real world? Why should I believe that this is anything other than just another egghead theory?

You’re right about our backgrounds (although each of us has had substantial profit-and-loss responsibility throughout our careers). But the last thing we hope you do is take this on faith. Belief will get you nowhere; only action will. Either this makes enough common sense for you to try it or it doesn’t. Don’t take our word for it. Take a small, smart step and see if it feels right to you. If it does, take another.

3. Your whole argument can be reduced to “ready, aim, fire,” can’t it? Isn’t that stupid on its face?

As we’ve said, the summary really is: aim, fire. There’s not a lot of getting ready. At its heart, we are saying that when you are in a situation where you don’t know what is going to happen next, and the cost of acting is low, then fire with what you have at hand or can assemble quickly.

As for “stupid,” you won’t know if it’s stupid for you until you try it. Until then, all you have is the thought that this may be stupid. That thought sure won’t take you anywhere. (By the way, this approach has been proven by smart, successful serial entrepreneurs. They don’t think it’s stupid. That’s what intrigued us in the first place.)

4. Who has time for taking steps down a road that may lead nowhere? I have a finite amount of time, resources, and energy, and I simply can’t afford to waste them.

Agreed. But you really have only three options when faced with the unknown: (1) You can think forever and conclude the situation is hopeless or the problem is too big, so you do nothing. (2) You can do all that thinking, and when you are absolutely, positively, sure, you act . . . only to find out that (a) you may not have been right, or (b) while you were doing all that thinking, someone beat you to the solution or the solution changed. (3) You can do enough thinking to take a smart step toward a solution, one that won’t cost you a lot if you are wrong (leaving you enough resources to try again).

5. I will grant you that maybe this could work for people thinking about starting a small business, but I need $500 million for the biotech company I want to start. How is this going to help me?

It’s probably not, at least not beyond the early phases of your project, which, by the way, is where biotech entrepreneurs and others who need a lot of money use it. Clearly, you can use all the principles of acceptable loss to help you determine if you are truly committed to starting your manufacturing facility, biotech lab, or whatever the venture is that will consume a lot of capital. And once you get your money, you will use Creaction in your product development to some degree.

But at some point, you are going to need to attract serious money. And that will mean finding serious investors, investors who are going to rely on—and will want you to rely on—Prediction. That’s perfectly fine. Remember what we have said. Creaction—and acceptable loss is part of Creaction—isn’t designed to replace Prediction. There are still going to be many places—such as raising huge amounts of capital—where Prediction, with its emphasis on future cash flows and return on investment, is going to be the way to go. This is one of those places, so predict away.

6. This is never going to work in the big company where I work.

You may be right. But as veterans of working in and with big companies, we know this: they will commit to anything that will help them make more money legally. They are not going to reject it out of hand if there is a promise that it will make them more successful. (If they do, the idea has been presented badly.)

7. Have you met our mayor? Town council? School board? Clergy? What do you mean, it can work in all aspects of my life?

Until you act, all you have is your thoughts. If you think it can’t work and you don’t act, you will be left with the thought that it can’t work, and that will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Our whole argument is that you need to act to create what you want. Once you have acted, you have evidence. The evidence may confirm that this approach may not work with your town council—you really won’t be able to overcome the politics that will get in the way—and maybe it won’t work with your clergy. But we have seen it work with governments and religious organizations. The bottom line: until you act, you will never know for sure.

8. Maybe all this could work in business, but you don’t know my mother-in-law, wacky sister, or offbeat friends. How can you possibly think this will work with families and friends?

You’re right. It probably won’t work with in-laws. (That was a joke, if our in-laws are reading this. [If they aren’t, it wasn’t.])

But although the dynamics are different with family and friends—the acceptable loss concept is far more important, for example—we have seen the concepts work and even help people get dates.

9. If this is such a good idea, how come it is not being taught in schools?

Our question exactly. Our schools are now training people who are going to be in the workforce in the year 2065. Who can predict what they will need to know? Since they are going into the vast unknown, they should be armed with as many potentially helpful tools as possible, and clearly Creaction can be one of them. Our schools really are the place to teach thinking. And the thinking we are advocating here is easy to teach, because people already know it. They only need to practice more. Our suggestion: Don’t add any new classes. Just fold Creaction activities into what you are teaching now, beginning in prekindergarten and continuing through the postgraduate level.

10. How can you possibly believe this can change the world? The problems we face are too intense and immense.

They are. And Entrepreneurial Thought and Action in general and Creaction in particular are hardly the whole solution. But they are part, the neglected and insufficiently applied part. After all, entrepreneurs have made some absolutely wonderful contributions to humankind through the literally millions of things they have brought into being.

The beauty of Entrepreneurial Thought and Action is that it creates a defined logic or reasoning around this thing called Creaction, which otherwise looks like a black box. It allows people to make Creaction explicit and apply it in any area of their lives. It just becomes ordinary.

That takes us full circle, of course. People are bound to read what we have to say and think, “But I knew that.” That’s our hope.

Takeaway:
The One-Minute Creaction Seminar . . . the Book in Seventy-Eight Words

1. Know what you want.
2. Take a smart step toward that desire as quickly as you can, that is, act with the means at hand; stay within your acceptable loss and bring others along with you if it makes sense.
3. Make reality your friend. Accept what is and build off what you find.
4. Repeat steps two and three until you accomplish your goal or until you decide it is not possible, or you decide you’d rather do something else.