18 Caveats on How to Avoid Money Story Ownership and Change

If you are adamantly opposed to change, these caveats will embellish your position. If you are considering change, they might illuminate beliefs or positions that need addressing.

1. Focus on the system.
Devote special attention to the things that seem frustrating, out of your control, and impossible to address: politics, corporations, and economics. Systems must remain in focus as broad categories in order for you to feel distanced and disaffected.

2. Maintain a focus on theory.
Avoid detail, singular aspects, and application. Cling to your theories and abstractions about how to transform various systems, about what needs to be done, maintaining the frustration of what continues to seem out of your control.

3. Believe that the answer will appear when you step out of the box.
Simply opposing the system can be an end in itself.

4. Keep the point of reference external.
Believe that the antithesis of conformity is opposition; know that one or the other of these external points of reference of conformity or opposition holds the real truth.

5. Do not decide.
Allow the urgency of a situation to decide for you. The gravity of a last-minute emergency forces action and avoids planning. Waiting for the deadline excuses responsibility for thoroughness and excellence.

6. Believe that the answer is more rules.
Further structure will provide greater compliance.

7. Debate the obvious.
Give energy to the controversial.

8. Believe in experts unequivocally.
Expertise is authoritative. Dismiss any notion that expertise is perceived, processed, and filtered through assumptions, belief systems, and prejudices of experts.

9. Do not seek your own information or develop your own solutions.
You will always have experts to listen to. Find someone to provide a map for you and avoid anyone who wants to help you develop your own navigation system.

10. Always find some cause-and-effect relationship to explain things you can’t otherwise understand.
Some tangible explanation will inevitably offer a specific, concrete focus on what is wrong or who can be blamed. Warning: Much work is required to maintain this position. You must be certain the obstacle can never be totally removed, else its causal effect would have to be confronted as inaccurate. The perceived cause must always be just beyond reach and remedy in order to remain as effective blame.

11. Keep doing the same thing and expect a different outcome.
If the outcome doesn’t change for the better, do the same thing harder.

12. Be suspicious of new ideas.
Feedback from others can confuse and derail.

13. New ideas must be curbed or even silenced.
Any perturbation of the existing system threatens disruption.

14. Meticulously guard against mistakes.
The best way to be sure to avoid mistakes is to keep doing the same thing again and again with perfection as the goal.

15. Maintain a focus on avoiding failure.
Give failures the proper respect of fear so that they remain ever in focus with their guiding principles of avoidance.

16. Be extremely wary of new strategies and solutions.
Invest instead in enforcement of the existing approach.

17. When you make mistakes, focus on the mistakes.
Redouble efforts to get them right.

18. Continue to hold prejudices.
They are excellent markers of emotional landmines.