Did you know this?

Most of us are reasonably successful adults. A few are amazingly successful adults.

But I bet the vast majority never knew this. Got 2 minutes? Watch…

Ok, so the point isn’t really about learning to tie your shoes, although I admit that this will come in handy when I’m in Paris, or Seattle, or San Francisco and doing a lot of walking in my dress shoes.

The point is, you can’t learn anything new if you’re unwilling to admit you might not already know everything.

In fact, the older we get, the more likely we are to resist new information that doesn’t coincide with what we believe we already know.

So today, what I’m asking you to imagine, is the possibility that perhaps you don’t already have all of the smartest programming minds in the world inside your company.

I’m asking you to consider the possbility that you may have, at some point, dismissed someone as irrelevant who, in fact, could be a huge asset to your success this year.

Is that possible?

If you don’t think that’s possible, I’d like you to read this line out loud, so you can hear how preposterous you sound: “The smartest programming minds in the world are already working for me. There is nothing anyone I once dismissed could possibly teach me that would be a better solution to some of our challenges than the ones I’ve devised and been using for the past few years.“

Did you read it out loud?

Are you slightly embarrassed now?

If you could read that out load, without embarrassment, I can do nothing for you.

No one can.

If, however, you hear how absurd that sounds, perhaps you’d be willing to invest a few minutes to call me and let me give you a few names of fabulously talented programmers who can’t get you to return their calls.

If you reached this age, and found out just now there’s a whole new, and better, way to tie your shoes, anything is possible…