Thursday, May 24, 2012

Moneyball and Paradigms

There is a current movie starring Brad Pitt entitled, MONEYBALL. I saw it several weeks ago at the movie and was pretty much bored from beginning to end. I thought the part Pitt played was weak and a bit silly and the movie was slow and seemingly disjointed.  It is a true story!  I was able to force myself to watch it again a few weeks later on a movie channel and found myself mesmerized with the meaning that resides in the heart of the movie ... a paradigm!

An academic definition of a paradigm is: Intellectual perception or view, accepted by an individual or a society as a clear example, model, or pattern of how things work in the world.  a paradigm is a mindset that blinds from seeing other opportunities and once a paradigm is borne, it is almost impossible to see things in any other way.  Farmers put blinders on plow horses just for that reason meaning that the blinder preclude the horse from seeing anything except that which is straight in front of him.  If you want a straight furrow, you block out any diversion from that straight line; a paradigm.

Shifting a paradigm begins with destroying a mindset.  The movie is the best cinematic rending of a paradigm destruction process in Major League Baseball I have seen.  The context of the movie is that the General Manager, a great baseball player himself in his time, is now the General Manager of the Oakland A's.  He becomes invested with a graduate economist that looks at baseball not in the view of superstars but as a statistical application of wins and hits and on base statistics.  That approach ran completely counter to tradition, the paradigm, of the world of baseball.  But the Pitt character stayed the course against all paradigmatic push-back and proved to the baseball world that that is a right way to configure a baseball team; using the production numbers at the aggregate and not big names and big salaries.

I am not advertising for the movie but I am extremely impressed with how the power of paradigm destruction will normally always have synergistic results.  Today, think about something in your life that is a paradigm, a mind set, a set of blinders.  Do not rationalize that it, whatever the it is, has to be that way but think about the mindset to how and why destroying it can take you to a different place in your own life and your heart.  Go ahead; it will not hurt too badly nor be too scary but you will look back and be very proud of having destroyed that paradigm which, of course, is an impediment to a better you!

Make me proud!  Write me and share with me your challenge and especially the thrill of the victory when the destruction is done!

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