Reflection Title: Consistently Inconsistent
Book – Harvard Business Review: On Leadership Vol. 2
Book Description:
Stay on top of your leadership game.
Leadership isn't something you're born with or gifted as a reward for an abundance of charisma; true leadership stems from core skills that can be learned. Get more of the leadership ideas you want, from the authors you trust, with HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership (Vol. 2). We’ve combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you maximize your own and your organization's performance.
Reflection:
The most fun you will ever have at work is when you are brand new and trying something for the first time.
Side note, I hate the word “work”, I really need to come up with something different to describe activities that perform for commerce generation in this world. No one “work’s” tennis, they “play” tennis. What is the difference? One is supposedly “fun” and the other is “work”. In the spirit of always being impeccable with my words, I haven’t found a new way to distill down what meaningful work means to me in a way that we can communicate effectively with each other. I’ll try to work on that for the future and share.
Back to the thought, when you are “working” on a new task there truly is nothing better.
Think back to the last time you tried to dedicate yourself to learning something new where you spent hours a day immersed in the subject. For most of us, the best example you will come up with most likely is taking on a new job at “work”. If your anything like me in this setting, your mind is at maximum engagement as you rapidly watch yourself growing, developing, and moving from knowing absolutely nothing to making progress day by day. That feeling is intoxicating and your mind is all consumed in this process. You think about it when you are at work, you think about it when you get home, and you think about it when you sleep at night. The new questions on how to achieve proficiency flow out of you like a fire hydrant and it feels like you will never run out of them.
While the flood of unanswered questions, growth, learning, and progress for the future is all consuming, it is also incredibly frustrating and tiring. We can’t always live in a constant state of 24/7 unknowing, that would drive us mad. We HATE not knowing and that pushes us to be better, but it has its limits.
“Knowing”, on the other hand, is our comfort zone. While not knowing may send us into a wild, all-encompassing search for answers, “knowing” is peace, calm, and silence. Once we find our answers and become “experts” the questions slowly begin to dry up. The voices in our mind quiet down and we chill out…we found the answers and we can give ourselves permission to relax. Every once in a while, we may stumble upon a new question that peaks our interest, but for the most part, we spend all of our time telling others how to get to where we’ve already gotten.
And that is the problem with knowing…knowing is so boring and will suck the life out of you as your well of questions to explore runs dry.
So, if we can’t live life in a constant state of unknowing, and we can’t live life in a constant state of knowing either, what can we do?
Be consistently inconsistent!
Find ways to constantly mix it up each day, week, and month and keep the mind fresh, the questions flowing, and the heart pumping. Try new things out of your comfort zone and soak in all the new learning and knowledge you acquire while you give yourself permission to suck at all this new stuff.
Then, take those new learnings and apply them to the one constant you should have always at the forefront of your life…your purpose. Your purpose is the ultimate rock of your life. Your purpose is boring, but that is the point because your purpose is supposed to be the one thing you know more than anything else in this world. Your purpose can change and evolve, but slowly over time.
By being consistently inconsistent, we find balance.
Question: How do you keep yourself off balance to stay balanced?
Links:
What is The Year of Magical Learning? - An Introduction
YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon
YOML Bookstore - HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership
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