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awesome tips (7)

The importance of being 'to the point'

 

We are on the finish line of our little tutorial of how to improve your consulting skills. This time the focus will be on saying as little as possible and at the same time creating the most value for your customer.


Note that this is an imperative to exclusion. Since you will find that in life the majority of things are not worth your precious resources (time/passion/money etc.), I guess an advice to include the most valuable things would be more of a boon, e.g. 'Focus on what is (truly) valuable.' However you will certainly agree, that this is not always easily achieved. The value you actually aprecciate often comes with downsides. Sadly life of adults often is about compromise. Your favorite food is not available at work, so you choose 'the best there is', you would like to travel to far away places, but can't afford it because of time/budget/other restrictions, so you stay within your restrictions, your dream car is way too expensive (and probably way too unfit for your everyday requirements), so you just put up with the lemon you got from the local dealer on short notice and so on. I am sure, nobody experienced enough will deny the fact, that the more responsibility you bear in life, the more conflicts of interest you might face with every decision you take. See it as a privilege and bear in mind, that best solutions are not always best for everybody in every situation. Whatever your decision: be true to yourself and think long term.

Be optimistic (no matter what). Just don't try this as a cheer-up line on funerals, right in the consequence of devastating news, or on people who have just lost their relationship/home/job/savings.


To me this sounds like the NIKE slogan 'Just do it'. Might even work. In any case, mind the seqeunce ;-)

Nobody enjoys life in every moment. Don't even try to believe this is possible. If everyone, every single person, would always, at any given moment, enjoy life, life would be utterly boring and trivial. If there was a guarantee to free happiness, the concepts of love, compassion, freindship, achievement, development and improvement, only to name some, would all be completely obsolete. I'm having a vision of the Matrix and I seriously doubt the blue pill, symbol for a blissfull ignorance and illusion would be most people's choice against the red pill, symbolizing the embracement of the partially hard and painful truths of reality.


Personally I rather spend time with my family than call them, but working in consulting I have to admit, this is reality. Rather than 'You should call your family often.' this probably means 'You will call your family often.', unless you are with them together often. Thus basically this is not an advice, but a law of nature. You can't advice people to abide by the law of gravity. They just will.
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