'Or' Is A Bore - Make Better Decisions With 'And'.

A few years ago at the dawn of the petrol/electric hybrid car (stay with me here), a major vehicle manufacturer ran an ad campaign with the strap line ‘Or is a Bore’.  The concept was that either petrol or electric wasn’t any good – we wanted both.

And why not?  The silliest phrase in the English language is ‘you can’t have your cake and eat it’ because after all, what’s the point in having cake (literally or figuratively) if you can’t eat it?  Isn’t that the point of cake?

Ok, so there are times in life where having both just won’t work.  If they’re mutually exclusive options, for example having children or not having children, wearing a pink dress or blue trousers,  read a book or watch TV (experts say that multitasking is a myth and that we’re not doing either properly) in these cases, having both may not only be undesirable but also impossible.  But why don’t we say “I’ll have A and B more often”?  Who says we can’t have both?

Social conditioning from our peers and parents often moulds our thinking and behaviour, pushing us to conform to so-called norms.

Once upon a time women made a choice of marriage or a career; later it was career or parenthood and now, even though it’s hard work, mothers can have both.

At the dinner table when the sweet trolley rolls round, do you find yourself in the choosing dilemma between the profiteroles or the cheesecake?  Would you rather have both but feel ‘greedy’ or as if you might be judged?  If you do then ask yourself whose voice you’re hearing.  And is this valid?  Why can’t you have both? 

Bond or Bourne?  Why choose?  Twitter or Facebook?  They do different things so using both is a no-brainer.

Replacing ‘or’ with ‘and’ often challenges conventional thinking and can raise a few eyebrows.  Sometimes finding a way to have both requires compromise but that needn’t be a negative thing.  Compromise can mean taking the best of one thing and adding it to the best of another to make something better than either on its own.  It gives us more creative and interesting results.

For example, someone who liked champagne and thought that adding one of your five-a-day would balance things up nicely and gave us Bucks Fizz. 

Not only does AND give us what we really want but on a larger scale, creative solutions mean progress – as the manufacturer of one of the world’s first hybrid cars has found.