Article PDF: 5.1.1 Event Pressure [1]

Eight rules for dealing with the pressure of events upon choosing our responses.

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This article examines one of the biggest challenges in undertaking actions to pursue opportunities: the pressure of events. Unless we remain focused on our mission, events can rob us of our ability to choose our actions. Events create the "ringing telephone" problem. We cannot know if the call is valuable or not without answering it, but the probability of value is remote while the cost of disruption is certain. We often seem helpless to choose our actions in the face of events. Events come to us, knock on our door and keep knock demanding our attention. They can even seem to demand specific actions that leave us little choice but to respond. If our lives become a series of ringing phones, we have no time left over to do anything but answer and answer endlessly.