Powerful Words^™

Every rattlesnake I’ve ever seen—in a zoo, in a book or on TV, that is—has been a mottled brown and tan. That’s just the color rattlesnakes are. There are variations, of course. I’m not a biologist, but I know enough to know that rattlesnakes, like every other living thing, adapt to their environment. So rattlesnakes living in the desert are lighter than ones living in the Rockies, for example. What do you think a rattlesnake living in the vermilion cliffs of the Grand Canyon would look like?

Silly me. You already know the answer, because I gave it away in the title. There are actually PINK rattlesnakes here! I’ve seen one…in a park ranger’s slide show. At first I thought it was a joke, but the ranger told the story of how the rattlesnake was found. A ranger saw it in the canyon, caught it with a stick, quickly grabbed it’s neck, carried it at arm’s length up the canyon, carefully transferred it to his other hand, held it out the window as he drove to the ranger station, boxed it up and sent it to the San Diego Zoo, where they confirmed it was a new species.

It had evolved its own color to help it blend into the color of the canyon’s orange/red walls. THAT is adaptability at its finest, right?

The story of the pink rattler, whose nickname is Pinky by the way, made me think about how fundamental adaptability is to business. We think we are adaptable by doing things like changing our hours to meet our customers’ needs, putting anti-bacterial lotions in restaurant bathrooms and offering weather or Twitter feeds on our websites. Those things are not bad, but they are only surface adaptations, like birds raising their young in caves when a forest fire wipes out the trees.

We convince ourselves doing these surface things will help people see that we are doing things to meet our customers’ needs. We think these things are part of building relationships, and the ultimate goal is to make more money from it. Those adaptations are easy enough to accomplish, and that is maybe the reason they aren’t really adaptations.

Think about what had to happen for the pink rattler to adapt its color to the canyon. Time had to go by—a lot of it. It had to be totally committed to that environment only. And here’s a thought: it happened naturally. The rattler didn’t make it happen. It just happened as the rattler lived the life it was meant to live. (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service, by the way.) 

I’m learning something about the potential of adaptability in my own life, by accident. I finally had it with life and trying to make it turn out the way I wanted it to, so I just chucked it all, bought a Jeep and took off. Why? Because I couldn’t not. The gypsy in me finally won out over children, parents, hometown, love and security. Adventure and change are the deepest parts of me, and through a series of events they finally weren’t pressed down, so they sprang up.

I have never been happier, or more successful.

What if, in our businesses, we stopped trying to make things happen? What if we decided to open ourselves up to what we really are, what we really want as people, and what if we allowed our businesses to adapt to that? I wanted to go the Grand Canyon, so I went, and my business has been naturally adapting to this environment for the past five days. What do you want to do with your life? Not what you think you should do, but what you REALLY want to do? What if you really did it?

I think businesses try too hard. It has got to be easier. It just takes time. It takes focusing on one thing that means the most to us. And we’ve got to stop trying to make things happen, and instead let them happen naturally. Before we know it, our skin will be turning the color of the canyon we live in.