A - Z 2021: Strike while the Iron is hot

Photo by Jonathan Bean on Unsplash

Welcome back to A - Z 2021. Yesterday we explored what Home means.

I is for 

Strike while the Iron is hot 

I had a hard time coming up with an actual situation to write about. 

Instead I figured I could watch YouTube videos and learn how farriers actually make horseshoes. 

It's really fascinating to observe. They take this ordinary looking steel bar and heat it in a furnace, and when I say heat, I mean it: 2,300°F (1,260°C)!

After a while, the formerly black piece of metal comes out annealed! Bright orange and red of color, and it becomes easily bendable and shapable. They call it "forging".

As the metal cools down pretty quickly though, the blacksmith needs to work fast and precisely. 

The saying really makes perfect sense. Use a rare opportunity before it's gone!

I still have no everyday example. What's wrong with me? Evidently there are people who have several irons in the fire?

The reason may be that I am not your typical opportunist? 

Thinking about it, I don't like to ask for help, I don't like to sit around and hope to get lucky, and I don't like to depend on others. 

I like to create m own opportunities. That way they will be exactly the way I like them.  It involves way more time and effort, but it makes me feel like it's more precious and deserved.

In my all Duck or no Dinner post. I mentioned how I was taking matters into my own hands.

Back to horses though. There is another idiom, you may have heard of it: flogging a dead horse.

The wisdom of the Dakota tribe, passed on from one generation to the next, says that when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.  

Some creative person has put this into business context, where for obvious reasons the horse stands for investments, strategies and practices that deserve rescuing, and some of the analogies are hilarious. They suggest it'd be a good idea to be

• Buying a stronger whip.
• Changing riders.
• Threatening the horse with termination.
• Appointing a committee to study the horse.
• Arranging to visit other sites or countries to see how they ride dead horses.
• Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
• Reclassifying the dead horse as “living-impaired.”
• Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
• Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
• Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance.
• Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.
• Declaring that the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes more to the bottom line than some other horses.
• Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
• Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Does any of it sound familiar to you? 

Do you have any irons in the fire as we speak? 

Let me know down below, and please include the link to your post so I can return the visit.

Happy Weekend! Be back Monday morning, bright and early - we may need your help to overturn some score from the East German Judge!