Hi there – thanks for making it back to randomness that is Austin’s World. Today I’m coming with a series of thoughts inspired by Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, which I’m really enjoying. Somehow, I’ve let this one sit on the bookshelf untouched for way too long.
Here is the story of the “rubber mallet”, a solution to a problem but not a solution that removes the problem.
The Rubber Mallet
At some point in the not-so-distant past, a crew of American car manufacturers flew to Japan to inspect a Japanese car manufacturers assembly line. From what they could tell, everything was technically sound and on par with what was being done in America. Although there was one small handheld object missing from the process.
The American dream team noticed that the Japanese manufacturers weren’t whacking the doors at the end of the assembly line with a rubber mallet to ensure the doors fit properly. Since this lapse in attention to detail is not something typical of the Japanese culture, perturbed they were.
In American assembly lines, they had a dedicated job for the rubber mallet. One to ensure the “doors” in all of those four-door sedans were securely applied to the chassis of the car. At the end of each assembly line, an employee would test each door with a rubber mallet to ensure the doors fit properly. This was seen as a good assurance test before the cars shipped off to dealerships (or wherever they went back in the day.)
When asked about why the rubber mallet occupation had been left in Western society, the Japanese manufacturers replied by saying they simply engineered the doors to fit before they went through the manufacturing process.
Instead of being introduced to the problem at the end and fixing it once it presented itself, they engineered the system from the beginning to avoid, or solve, the problem altogether.
Short Term Solutions
How often are we in places in life where we are applying short term solutions to long term problems?
We wake up one day and have a problem we need to fix, without looking at how the problem came to be. Restricting the days we go out because we aren’t saving money. Putting time limits on social media apps because we mindlessly scroll until our thumbs go numb. Vitamins because our diets suck.
In each of these instances we’re putting band-aids over paper cuts but continuing to spend our days at Dunder Mifflin. These are all rubber mallets. We’re adding onto a faulty foundation.
Elimination Diet
There is a concept in bodybuilding called the elimination diet. Effectively, bodybuilders restrict their diet down to a few items to see what their body digests and responds to best. Then they add and subtract additional items to get a sense of how they can distribute their diet in a way that best fits them.
If done correctly, it’s the same result as the Japanese changing the process of door manufacturing in the beginning, to remove the need for the rubber mallet. It’s a different way of approaching the problem, one that removes the need for the solution.
Clean Slate
It’s easy to fall into routines and systems that compile over time. An issue gets introduced and the band-aid goes on. We don’t have time to restructure our days to solve it from the onset, we just need to get the inconvenience covered so we can get back to the day. But how long can we keep that up? Regardless of the answer, do we want to? That is life doing unto us, not us doing unto life.
A clean slate allows us to look at a problem from a different perspective. To get into the “how” instead of the “what”. We can start to categorize things into little puzzle pieces and decide what we want to introduce back into our lives and what we don’t need. Maybe it’s as simple as removing a few streaming subscriptions, maybe it’s moving across the country.
So, the next time you’re faced with an existential crisis over something that just won’t go away, ask yourself, have you been applying a rubber mallet to the problem?
Great reminder!! Sometimes we/I do this without even realizing it.