There is No Holy Grail

Regardless of what you may have heard, there is no Holy Grail.

Now…we may never know if the the myth of the Holy Grail is real or not…but…looking for the “holy grail’ in your life  is a waste of time.

I run across a lot of folks looking for that holy grail. They are looking for the perfect process, perfect system, perfect strategy. They are looking for the thing that will ‘turn their life around’.

I see a lot of this type of thinking in business. Some examples that I recall from my career:

• Email is the holy grail for marketing.
• E-commerce is the holy grail for business
• Virtualization is the holy grail for IT.
• The balanced scorecard is the holy grail for Operations.
• Social media is the holy grail for marketing.
• Certified Project Managers are the holy grail for project success.
• The Cloud is the holy grail for IT.
• Social Business is the holy grail for business.

Notice a pattern here?

I could take just about any two phrases and wrap them in a sentence…and probably make good money selling that new sentence as a consultant. Here’s the template:

_________ is/are the holy grail for _______________.

I’m thinking about trademarking that. 🙂

The idea of a “holy grail” is one we all want to believe in.

The mega-millions lottery this past weekend is a great example…you couldn’t do anything without running across someone talking about what they will do when they win ‘all that money’.  Its great to wish and dream…but the odds of winning were 175 million to 1.  Those are big odds to overcome.

Now…I’ll be the first to admit I spent a few minutes dreaming about winning the lottery and being a bazillionaire. It would be nice, no?  But…my practical side came back fairly quick and I went about my day.

The “holy grail” doesn’t exist for 99.999% of people. Sure there are some that are lucky…but that luck isn’t what you should be looking for.

Stop looking for the holy grail. There is no holy grail in life, business nor in IT.

At the end of the day, its all about doing the work. Getting better at the work and doing the work some more. And then doing the work some more.

Image Credit: Holy Grail By Eddi van W. on flikcr