Familiarity breeds contempt: Rupert Holmes is genius!

Humans are very peculiar if you really think about it.  We work so hard to achieve, yet once we arrive, discontentment soon follows. What is this? Some would say it's a positive "keep pushing" and "never satisfied" attitude that helps form a champion spirit. Ok...Perhaps.  Conversely, discontentment can also be the leak in our hull that keeps draining our satisfaction with our present moment.

Get busy living or get busy dying

In 2011, the evidence of how businesses have fallen by the way side are all around us. While unavoidable economic hardship may be the culprit, many of their failures are no more than a lack of innovation. At one time they were on top and thriving! Yet, like all living things, unless it innovates and rejuvenates it will then begin the process of dying. As the line goes in the movie the Shawshank Redemption, "Get busy living or get busy dying." The dilemma is that while humans are naturally dreamers and creators, we are also addicted to predictability. The reason being is that predictability provides a well known landscape for our daily living. While you may not be content with it, at least you know it. Knowing something well then provides a sense of confidence and comfort. The irony of this mindset is that knowing something so well that it lacks all creative breath is fundamental to a presumptive life of perpetual motion. Get busy dying.  

Are we writing in sand?

photo source: Claudine Zap

Last week I read a story of an extremely wealthy Arab sheikh who spent his money having a crew dig  ditches in a sand peninsula so that the ditches would form the letters of his name. Now plenty of us have enjoyed casually drawing our name in the sand, however the difference with this attempt at significance is that the sheikh made sure the ditches were so large that his name could be read from space! To be so rich that you can waste money on digging your name in sand only to be washed away is an absurdity to most.  Having the will and resources to pull off such a task is something that most of us will never have to ponder. However, before we rush to criticize with such impunity, it does beg the question if we are unknowingly spending large amounts of time and treasure in other not-so-obvious activities that are essentially just writing in the sand? 

Breaking Through

"Reaching Our Full Potential" by Elsa Mora

Win Today!

Victor

Crisis of comparison?

Reality TV, walls, reunions, and top ten lists.  All modern day measuring sticks to let us know if we are doing ok. If we see someone else of similar background or measure doing worse off than ourselves we may feel empowered about our current condition. Conversely, if we fail by comparison, we may feel defeated. As narcissistic and even ridiculous as this may sound, it is a common theme that commentaries are beginning to observe in western culture. Can it be that the deep need for comparison is a symptom of something deeper?

Rise and grind. What to do when emotion ends and reality remains.

We've all had those days. The ones when the emotional tank is on empty and the motivation to keep turning the crank of responsibility seems to wane.  Similar to those Hollywood scenes where the spirited rebel gets in their car and drives down the highway to escape the mundane, only to hit reality when the fuel runs out in the middle of the desert with no gas station in sight. Suddenly, the romance runs dry and the dream seems less inspiring since the distance to destination didn't match up with what you originally calculated. For any new venture, or an old one for that matter, a person will surely hit this wall. Whether it be a business person or a romantic relationship, the wall moment isn't a signal of failure, but rather an opportunity for growth. It's in these times when we feel that we've gone too far to go back, but question our ability to get to the other side that our capacity can increase if only we will chew on the fundamentals of work.

So what do you do?

So what do you do?....It's a question that we have come accustomed to asking or being asked when introductions occur. Having witnessed and experienced the awkwardness of this scene one too many times, lends me to believe that the understated profoundness of this question may be serving as a driving force for much of the relational and career choices that we experience. If we assimilate to the social norm of this repetitive Q & A scenario, we can then consciously, or subconsciously, build our lives according to this "existence" defining scoreboard. In order to "win" the next time this question is asked we may overextend our financial and social resources for presentation sake. And this is when the trap snaps! Just like a dog chasing its tail, the feeling of never arriving in our own skin cycles with each "what" achievement. As the what piles up, the loneliness of why can haunt us. The real question to be asked is "Why do you do what you do?" What's motivating you each day that you wake up? The what achievements will fade quickly. The why motivation will fuel us continually.


Simon Sinek, an organizational consultant, has been helping groups re-evaluate their business paradigm in order to reposition their motivation to the Why instead of the What. He shared his "Start with why" model at a TED conference video below.  I believe that this model has profound implications to our Win Today efforts since winning today isn't about achieving the largest to do list that we can before we go to bed, but to the contrary, it is about engaging in, and finding value with each moment that we are granted to exist. Life is happening right now, not in some past or future state. By discovering a constructive why to replace the soulless what for each of our domains of life, the well of passion has a greater chance of being tapped into instead of just hoping to discover it.  

Win Today!

Victor

Entitlement can be killing our ability to commit, grow, and discover.

Recently, when I was running I came across this out of place flower bursting through a crack in the concrete curb. The fact that this flower, once a seed, had committed itself to fulfill its God-given potential even though its' circumstances were obviously working against it, is a life-lesson metaphor worth appreciating. No pot. No potting soil. No support system. No fanfare or glorious flower bed to be a part of. Just gutter water and shallow soil in the crack of the sidewalk. It was a real life example of the old saying "commit to bloom where you are planted." Could the same be said about you and I with our lives, or is an entitled persona keeping us  from experiencing real growth?