Albert Einstein is credited with saying “Insanity is doing something over and over expecting different results.” I tend to do that – lapsing into familiar behavior patterns that I know through experience don’t produce desired results. 

Last Sunday morning, as I awoke from elusive dreams I can’t remember, I had these words running through my head: “Look, think and act differently.” Inspired advice? For me, it was.

I need to embrace change and look at challenges in my life differently, think about them differently, and act differently to overcome them.

For example, I know that sitting on the living room sofa alone in the evening watching some dumb cop show triggers insatiable hunger. I have experienced that over and over and over. I need to change that behavior. I am always less hungry when I am productively engaged in a meaningful project that focuses my mind away from food.

Professionally, I too often accept the status quo as the preferred approach. I must not be satisfied with the ways things have been.  I need to look for new, creative solutions, different ways of doing things that deliver better results.  I must be a catalyst for change, not someone along for the ride.

When I get back home from my current business trip, I am going to make a big sign like the little one above. Then, I am going to follow this advice. I am going to change. I want success, not insanity. Care to join me?

Did you ever wonder where the term “square peg in a round hole” came from?  According to Wikipedia, the term first appeared a book by British novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton his late 19th century book, Kenelm Chillingly, His Adventures and Opinions:

Kenelm Chillingly asks, “Does it not prove that no man, however wise, is a good judge of his own case? Now, your son’s case is really your case —- you see it through the medium of your likings and dislikings, and insist upon forcing a square peg into a round hole, because in a round hole you, being a round peg, feel tight and comfortable. Now I call that irrational.”

The farmer responded, “I don’t see why my son has any right to fancy himself a square peg … when his father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, have been round pegs; and it is agin’ nature for any creature not to take after its own kind.”

As I see it, when square pegs and round holes meet, we have two options, both requiring significant change:

1. Carve the square peg into a cylinder.
2. Cut the round hole into a square.

If neither gives, a mismatch will persist.

Have you ever felt like that?