Wrinkles, Lists and Gut Reactions

After landing in Paris on Tuesday morning I took the Orlyval into Anthony on my way to La Defense. I couldn’t take my gaze off a middle aged man whose face was covered in a very acceptable numbers of clear wrinkles (please let me finish the story before you draw any erroneous conclusions). It reminded me of the fact that to raise a smile it requires your face to use 27 muscles (or some other such large number) – much more than it requires to scowl or to cry or to display any other type of emotion. The conclusion I drew was that this man must have smiled a lot in his life. The next hops that my rather tired mind made at that stage were (1) I’ll be quite happy if I have a similar number of wrinkles when I’m his age and (2) that given how much time we spend at work, then we should be smiling a lot, otherwise we’d have to spend every evening and the whole weekend grinning like a Cheshire cat to ensure that our face will end up with sufficient happy wrinkles. This second thought then naturally reminded me of the lists that I created shortly before I left Accenture and before I joined Wipro. I created a “why I am leaving” list and an “it will have been a success if...” list. I vowed not to look at those documents for a year but I’m already looking forward to opening them again in June. That said, as much as I love my lists (just ask anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes in my presence), the older I get the more I realise the importance of gut reactions and feelings in any decision making process – do I really need to wait for 6 months to confirm what I know already?