About four or five years ago – I can’t remember exactly – I was out browsing galleries with one of my good friends, Mads Mathiesen. It was a Sunday morning, the weather was grey, but good, in Copenhagen. It was one of those days for real chilling out in the city.

After having talked, walked, and looked (you know, browsing galleries), Mads suddenly says “I’ve sold my apartment”. Cool, I thought and asked about where he was going to live next. “I don’t know yet”, he said. I have to admit, I was caught by some surprise at Mads’s rather laissez faire attitude to now not having a place to live. (I would later put myself to shame and revise that opinion). We continued talking, and I asked Mads why on earth he would do such a thing. “You know, Bjørn, sometimes you gotta shake things up.”

In fact, Mads did not at all have a laissez faire attitude to having no place to live. He was actually completely relaxed that he had shaken things up; had a new set of dice to play … I didn’t get it right away.

Over the past years this approach has really grown on me. I have long been a strong subscriber to the “you have to see the mountain from more angles than the one you are chained to”-perspective*, and shaking things up is a big, big lever to pull if you want to do this for real. So now, shaking things up can be an objective in and of itself for me to do things. I haven’t done it many times, and I see almost no people doing it. People may like to think to themselves that they do, but they don’t. Trust me, they don’t; what they do has other objectives that are by far their real motivation. Shaking things up is not only counter-intuitive, it’s against your instincts. Which makes it uncomfortable, makes you sweat, doubt, cry, even shake. If it doesn’t feel this way, you’re not shaking things up. You’re doing something else.

Now, I’m not saying you ought to shake things up every day, week, or even year. You also need to play your hand once you get it. So this probably happens, for real, quite infrequently. But if you feel things are too steady, too comfy, too predictable, too Doug**, then you should consider what you can do to make them less so.

Shake things up.

* One of the many beautiful descriptions from A Fugitive Crosses his Tracks (Danish: En Flygtning Krydser sit spor) by Aksel Sandemose.

** Doug is the fiancée of Vicky, in Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona. He doesn’t shake things up, that’s for sure. If you don’t remember him – or haven’t seen the movie – watch it now.