Wednesday with Avrom – Wait for it….

A great person once said that all beginnings are difficult. A beginning is half of everything while the other half of everything is executing the right timing. As the Byrds /King Solomon wisely realized, “to everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven.” 

There is a certain beat to life that it seems only a few people really get. Avrom mastered the perfect timing of a joke to get out of sticky situation, “how do you make a hurricane?”, the perfect timing of a story to signal you are no fool, “we are no longer kids in Brooklyn”, and the perfect timing of kindness to become an avuncular figure in so many lives.

In an earlier post, we met Mr. X, a revered and legendary American lawyer, who proposed to the U.S. Department of Energy an absurd offer to drop one of his client’s lawsuits if the Government dropped the other. The ultimate decision was above Avrom’s pay grade and thus he could have let it go. However, it deeply bothered him that someone so smart would make an offer so seemingly dumb. It was a challenge that took Avrom weeks to process and when he did, he visited Mr. X to let him know he solved the mystery. 

As for the business world, Avrom taught me how essential it is to get the timing of an idea correct. Every bold ambition is encountered with obstacles and barriers. These exist because of bureaucracy, embedded processes and inertia to change. We need grit, gumption and guts to overcome. But, first, we need to master the art of perfectly timing when an idea has been fully crystalized, and it is ready to be implemented.

We need to take people on the journey of our ideas, but only by executing perfect timing will we be successful. We must recognize that although we feel compelled to tell someone, and are bursting with enthusiasm, if the idea is not ready, we do tremendous damage. An analogy would be in the simple egg; you need the pressure of the boiling water and the exact amount of time for it to cook properly. If you take the egg out too early, you may ruin it. Ideas also need time to brew sufficiently. As Einstein said, “it’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” 

Ideas unfold in their own time.

The litmus test to know when an idea is ready is when you can explain it with absolute clarity and simplicity. It is very easy to explain a correct idea and very complicated to explain a wrong idea. Again, back to Einstein, “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Then there is the timing of when to present. All mankind marches to the beat of a universal rhythm – the seasons, sunrises and sunsets. Companies also beat with their own ebbs and flows. It’s easy to miss this cadence as we get lost in the regimented schedule of the quarter close, deadlines and scheduled meetings. We need the self-awareness and mindfulness to balance these competing demands and be tuned in when the company is ready for the developed idea.

We may wonder if others will question why it took so long to figure out something so ostensibly simple. We must remind ourselves that educated people will understand that the simplicity and clarity is the result of deep analysis and nurture. And when everything aligns – the idea has fermented and is bursting to come out and the world is ready for it – magic happens. Timing is everything!

This is part 10 in the Wednesday with Avrom series, please check out more here.