Why go horizontal before you go vertical

(Subtitled: And why I’m only buying cars from women salespeople forever and ever.)

There’s no better way to explain this concept than through car shopping.

But first: One of the Third Layer … mantras? Pillars? Principles? … is to go horizontal for waaaay longer than you think you’d have to before you even think of going vertical. Translated: Want to write a short story? Come up with ten ideas and then pick from that before you even start writing.

So, we’re looking for a car right now, and the Tucson hybrid plug-in was at the top of our list. Our Hyundai guy told us it wasn’t available in our state, so I started calling around — to other dealerships and even other states.

I got one good piece of information from my local Hyundai guy (they don’t even sell the plug-in hybrids in our state). I tried to grill him (could we buy one in another state and bring it in?), but he understandably didn’t know much about a car he couldn’t sell.

So I called another dealership. And a third from out of state. Both were pretty worthless — dudes who didn’t seem to know much. Then I got a woman at the Bremerton Hyundai.

Aha! Good information: not only do they not sell the plug-in hybrids in WA, the dealers can’t even do maintenance on them under warranty. So if we’d bought one out of state, we either would have had to service it out of state, or pay for it ourselves. (Thank you, Lily!)

I then called two more places, and got even more helpful information from one (a woman) and an out-and-out lie from the other (take a guess).

If we hadn’t have made these calls, we might have popped down to Portland for the e-hybrid. We might have ended up with a car we couldn’t service in Washington.

A second opinion, on steroids

Our society isn’t set up to allow this, so we’ve learned not to do it, even within our own brains. We don’t look for doctors’ second opinions. We really can’t; it’d either be far too expensive, insurance wouldn’t allow it, or there’s just no time.

Vertical thinking kills us

But we die. All the time. Medical mistakes and misdiagnoses hover around our eighth leading cause of death. Yet, we continue to approach medical issues on a vertical timeline: We find one doctor and drill down with her or him. They make it worse: they chide us for researching via ‘Dr Google.’

The other day, I met a man at the dog park who had chronic pain. Life-altering back pain. (He and his wife had a King Charles Cavalier Spaniel with syringomyelia, the same brain/spine condition I have, this the conversation.) I was suggesting cranio-sacral therapy for their dog when he said he tried PT that made his own pain worse, so he gave up and never tried again (read: never considered going horizontal).

Here’s the thing: creativity requires horizontal thinking. But it’s expensive and time-consuming, so most of us give up. But he’s living with chronic pain every day of his life. Is that better than spending 10 hours and $1000 to research and try out other options that might be to the side of PT? Or even just a different PT than the one he’d been seeing?

When I moved eight years ago, I went to maybe five or six PTs before I found one good one. It sounds like a lot, but I went from having trouble walking to being able to kayak weekly. Yes, horizontal thinking is expensive, hard, annoying. But so is a lifetime of pain.

The vertiginous thrill of horizontal thinking

Here’s where creativity comes in. Creativity — like horizontal thinking — requires a ton of acceptance. Of uncertainty, cost (money, time or energy), trust, your own discernment, that the cost is worth it.

I didn’t call 100 dealerships and chat for three hours each. I called or visited seven. And it absolutely took all seven to learn what I needed to learn.

I’ve had my current car — a lilac purple 2002 Toyota Prius — for 19 (!!) years. That’s 19 very, very vertical years with the exact same car. These horizontal calls I’m making now? They will save me potentially 19 years of being stuck with a car I have to drive three hours to get serviced.

So go ahead and get creative. Get a second opinion. Or a third. Come up with five horizontally equal ways to ask your boss for a raise, before you pick one to go vertical on. If you’re young, it could make the difference of a million dollars over your lifetime. The gratification is delayed on horizontal thinking, but that million dollars would have really come in handy car shopping.