Find the trim tabs. Or be them.

Raise your hand if you’re feeling overwhelmed. That’s often a feature of the onset of a new year. Perhaps you already feel maxed out, and you know there is much more to come.?

Now please put the other hand up, stretch, and breathe. Overwhelm is human, but ultimately not useful.?

For most human reactions, I can think of the purpose they serve. Anger, for example, tells us a line has been crossed. We must then examine whether the line was in the right place, and act accordingly.?

Not so with overwhelm. Overwhelm puts us into inaction, and inaction breeds more inaction.?

My first boss out of college was Buckminster Fuller. How incredibly lucky I was to be at the right hand of this extraordinarily perceptive person. Bucky thought deeply and acted. Now, forty years later, his formulations float across my mind on a daily basis.?

The one I’m thinking of today is trim tabs. Trim tabs are small, adjustable pieces of material on the rudders of marine or air craft. An adjustment in trim tabs has effects completely out of proportion to their size. As Bucky explained:

Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. I say that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. I say, “Call me Trim Tab.”

The truth is that you get the low pressure to do things, rather than getting on the other side and trying to push the bow of the ship around. And you build that low pressure by getting rid of a little nonsense, getting rid of things that don’t work and aren’t true until you start to get that trim tab motion. It works every time.?

That’s the grand strategy you’re going for. I’m positive that what you do with yourself, just the little things you do yourself, these are the things that count. To be a real trim tab, you’ve got to start with yourself, and soon you’ll feel that low pressure, and suddenly things begin to work in a beautiful way.?

By the way, the t-shirt can be purchased at https://www.bfi.org/product/organic-unisex-crewneck-t-shirt-call-me-trimtab/, and proceeds go to the Buckminster Fuller Institute .