I own a pinball machine. BARRACORA is her name. It's part of the office furniture. I play it for fun. But I also play when I get stressed.
Then I got to thinking how playing the little silver ball relates to our everyday lives.
We start out each day with the silver ball in the chute, getting ready to pull the lever to send the ball into the pinball playing field, where there are thousands of ways to score big points. There are the bumpers, where the ball randomly bounces around, adding points to the scoreboard, but a player has little control over where they go.
My pinball machine has three targets and hitting them consistently racks up some big numbers. But my favorite is the “lock," where if the ball hits the flipper just right, I can shoot the ball in the hole. It stays there while other balls appear and I can play two or three balls at the same time, which really sends the score into hundreds of thousands of points.
When I'm really on a roll (no pun intended), I can score a couple of million points. Then there are times when I just couldn't get it together and scored below 50,000.
So, think about your business life as a pinball machine:
• Do you “bump” around from task to task, with no real plan to score big today?
• Do you have a “target” plan where you might not yet be there, but you keep aiming at it every day?
• Do you have a “lock”, meaning do you have a living, breathing, working strategy in place (that never fails you) so you can “play ball” with other ideas while the “locked” one is making you money?
So, what's the one target you are aiming for in 2012 in hopes of racking up that big score?
