Release 6: "Rule number 6!"

We saw some great clips from Ben Zander during the training I keep refering to form a guy called Benjamin Zander. Benjamin Zander is an Orchestra Conductor, Music Teacher, Speaker on Motivation and Leadership, and has co-produced various IP products (books, videos) on these subjects.

This is the first post in reaction to Zander's message. More will come in this iteration.

So, "Rule number 6" then!

Zander tells this story of people bursting into the prime minister's office shouting and screaming, completely disorientated and obviously quite concerned about important things... The Prime Minister happens to be in a meeting with the President of another country. Every time somebody enters the room in such a style, the Prime Minister says "Please, remember rule number 6 will you?". And every time he mentions that Rule Number 6, people who were 1 minute ago in a real state instantaneously calm down and leave the room.

At the end of the meeting, the other President asks the PM, but what is Rule number 6? The PM replies "Don’t take yourself so goddamn seriously". The President then asks "But what are the other Rules?", to which the PM replies "they aren't any".

Zander has lived and witnessed events in his life, and the whole relativity of how seriously we take ourselves has appeared to him as a real blocker to becoming what we could become.

In XP teams, we take ourselves seriously! We have to. It is all about money! Our customers want us to be serious, our peers require seriousness from us, we impose on ourselves to be serious in order to impress others, progress in the hirearchy and get better paid (;-).

On the other hand, seriousness creates a barricade between us as we are today and a world of possibilities.

If anything, this post is an advice for you to go and buy Zander's book: "The Art of Possibility"