Manual vs Automatic

Of the 7 Deadly Sins, “Slothfulness” has one of the greatest appeals for modern man. “Lazy” means you don’t have to do anything.

But automatic has a price.

You can’t automate your health and exercise regime, you must do the work.

You can’t automate cutting your hair, hand written notes, or staff training.

You can’t automate copywriting. No software will ever write with the emotion that comes from human to human thoughtfulness.

High performance race cars are all manuals. Manuals gives drivers greater control. Driving a manual means you decide when to change gears.

To achieve high performance in anything you do, you can’t automate the elements of work that only a human work effort can produce.

The answering machine will never be seen as better than a warm human voice greeting you. Salespeople will always have a place because trying to automate a sales process will never achieve the high performance speed (numbers) a hard working, perfectly in tune human can.

Automation has a place. Automating the mundane, low skilled, easily distributed functions can be automated. The don’t possess high value components. Your blog can distribute straight to Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr and virtually any social media service via RSS feed, but it will never write the blog for you. Your blog content is a high value, manual human effort required to touch the lives of people and add value to what they do.

Introducing “semi-automatic”. Truly manual gearboxes in race cars may be something of the past. The last Formula One race car fitted with a manual gearbox raced back in 1995. With the introduction of electronic sensors to enable clutch-less gear changing, engineers have removed an inefficient human time waster from a process, to retain the driver controlled ability to shift gears as they need to maintain high performance. But here’s the point – it’s not automatic gear changing. It’s automated the mundane process of pushing your leg on a pedal – it hasn’t removed the driver control. The manually focus of a human being and the action of changing gears still comes from a human.

You can’t automate keyword research for your website, you need to think like a human being about what your market thinks like. Keyword research has now become and will likely always be a semi-automatic task.

The lesson in all of this is “You can go fast in an automatic, but only the driver with 100% control of the gear they’re in goes fastest!”

1. Look at the manual areas of your life that require your human work effort. Accept these and develop the disciplines to complete them. Your expertise and strengths you gain come from no other place.

2. Automate the mundane time wasters to leverage your skills and abilities to maximise your results. (Tip for Men, washing machines wash your clothes automatically and keeps your girl happy! All you have to do is put the clothes in and press a button – but they haven’t automated hanging them out!)

3. Think semi-automatic where you can. Technology is changing life very rapidly. But remember to use it in a way that keeps the human heart, the human touch in all you do. Picking up the phone and calling a friend on their birthday is ten times better than a note on Facebook.

“May the Sloth in us forever seek ways to innovate, and the human in us forever make the effort to make it happen.”