“Give A Mouse A Cookie” Syndrome

One of my favorite books growing up (even after I’d gone through The Firm and Rocket Ship Gallileo) was called If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, a story whose basic message is all about event chains, lateral thinking, Möbius strips, friendship, and obviously, mice and cookies. Here’s an excerpt, to give you an idea of what I mean*:

If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk.

When you give him the milk, he’ll probably ask you for a straw.

When he’s finished, he’ll ask for a napkin.

Then he’ll want to look in a mirror to make sure he doesn’t have a milk mustache.

When he looks into the mirror, he might notice his hair needs a trim.

So he’ll probably ask for a pair of scissors.

Honestly, that’s about the first half of the book, but it explains something I’ve briefly glossed over before: “Give a Mouse a Cookie” Syndrome, where steps are continuously added to accomplish a goal that actually impede its completion. And we all experience GaMaC Syndrome, though it can come in several ways. Here’s a few examples:

• You’re done with college, and now you need money to cover living expenses. So you go out and get a job. Now that you have a job, you need to make sure that you’re up to date on all the latest industry developments, so you buy a bunch of books at the bookstore. While you’re at the bookstore, you run into an attractive person and ask them out. They say yes, so you go out on a date. While on the date, you realize that you two have nothing in common, so you turn to a dating website. The dating website tells you that you need an online payment account to join. So you sign up for the account, then realize you can use it to buy stuff on an Internet auction page. So you buy an expensive car that you can barely afford. Desperate for more money, you ask for a raise at work. And they tell you that if you want the raise, you’ll need an advanced degree, which means you’ll have to go back to school.
• You want to lose a few pounds for swimsuit season, so you decide to get in shape. You start researching gyms, weight loss programs and at-home fitness videos. You realize that you’ll need to buy workout clothes, so you go to the store to get them. On your way to the store, you realize that you should probably talk to a doctor first and get their advice. So you call the doctor and schedule an appointment next Tuesday. The nervousness about going to see them about such a personal and embarrassing thing makes you stress-eat. You’re now pudgier and in even greater need of exercise.
• You’re filing your own taxes. The old-fashioned way, without software.

It’s easy to create logic chains and event structures around things. The “if X, then Y, then Z” model is something that is used in everything from computer programming to assembling furniture to deciding what to have for lunch. By laying out the steps needed to accomplish a goal, things can get horribly discombobulated, and you’ll wind up seven steps from where you wanted to be.

Think of the last time you went to the grocery store to get JUST ONE THING AND NOTHING ELSE and ended up buying a whole cart-full. It’s easy to blame marketers for their shelf displays and impulse buy arrangements, but what it comes down to is a lack of the 6 P’s.

The 6 P’s, or the 6P system, is this: Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

If you can take the time to plan things out, whether it’s a business plan, a daily to-do list, or even just a few thoughts on how to accomplish a problem, you can weed out a lot of the unnecessary stuff and focus on what needs to be done. Instead of running around in circles and procrastinating, you can get to the real meat of the problem and find a solution.

Man, all this talk about planning is making me thirsty. I think I’m gonna grab a glass of milk. And while I’m at it, maybe I should get a cookie, too…

* Numeroff, Laura J. and Felicia Bond. If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. HarperCollins, 1985.