Old line isn't always bad. That's the signature for the values in "Downton Abbey." And it had been the flavor of READER'S DIGEST. Some in the GOP as well as most of the Roman Catholic Church are still getting mileage out of it.
But, overall old line is not culture for an organization or the personal branding for a player. The Reader's Digest Association can't retrofit it and it's again handing out pink slips, this time to some of the employees who would have been been been going anyway in the sale of WEEKLY READER to Scholastic.
The problem with old line is that we might not realize we're there until we aren't there in our line of work. With things moving so fast, few of us have managed to always remain not old line. And it isn't generational. There were Generation X sites like Gawker which seemed to get old line in their ossification of a tone and content which wasn't resonating any more.
So what are the attitudes and behaviors which doom us to old line? Here are some:
Obsessing about results. That might be earnings, traffic, comments, instead of being totally in the zone about creation. Sure, we have to analyze the game to determine winning formulas. In his early career Kurt Vonnegut got lucky and editors showed him the way. But after that it's about risk taking. When Gore Vidal and Truman Capote stopped taking those risks they got old line.
Wanting to be on the top of our game. Again, this goes back to preoccupation with success. It often happens with those who are, as it's called, "prisoners of success." Usually that success has evaporated, long ago. Playing the game, at least according to standard game theory, is about constantly aligning our moves with others's moves or what we anticipate they will be. To do that we have to be playing the game, not watching ourselves.
Not willing to sit some out. Often the shrewdest strategy is to just stop. Do nothing. There's that anecdote about famous test pilot Chuck Yeager. He was one of the few who survived going beyond the speed of sound. That's because he had passed out in the cockpit. Incapacitated he did nothing. Other pilots died while trying to over-correct a situation. Back in graduate school, when our thinking started getting stale, professors told us "go see a movie." Right, just stop.
There's no time for feeling ashamed when we go old line. That's just more of watching ourselves intead of being in there, in the now.
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