We all know people – friends, colleagues, coaches, mentors, leaders – who are simply great at helping others be the best that they can be. You may well be one of them.
Achieve more by letting go? Backing off the pressure to run and going for long walks in my neighborhood over the past few months has given me some new insights into the art of making activities of all kinds more sustainable through the power of enjoyment.
I was in my mid-twenties, with very little business experience. Like many young people that age, I was keen to prove to myself and others that I could contribute in useful ways but had nothing remarkable to point to that would give me any special claim to anyone’s attention. I had potential as we all do, but that potential was still completely unrealized from a professional standpoint and could easily have remained so.
Well over ten years ago, in what now feels like a completely different life, I attended a management meeting with a few hundred colleagues.
We all face choices and trade-offs, it’s just part of life. Some are small and (likely) inconsequential – like picking between the pear and the custard at the dessert table last night.
I admit it freely: Whether it be books or movies, I’m a huge science fiction fan. I recently re-watched one of my perennial favorites—James Cameron’s 1986 ‘Aliens’ starring Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley.
Here’s an interesting question for you: Should you run your team at work as a high-performance athletic program, or as a community sport club? Stop. Don’t answer just yet. I know, I know: You’re a high-performance type of person.
Social distancing measures have been in full effect for weeks and legions of people have retreated – more or less happily – to the relative safety of their homes. Workplaces and public spaces that used to teem with people lie eerily empty and many employees – fortunate ones for whom telecommuting proved possible – have carried on with their professional lives in a strange virtual world where newly disembodied organizations large and small continue to operate.
What we are attempting, as far as I know, has never been done. Some microorganisms such as yeasts, fungi and bacteria can go completely dormant for periods of time that can stretch over thousands of years, a phenomenon known as super-long anabiosis: a glacier moves in, the bacteria go into a deep freeze; the glacier pulls back ten thousand years later, the bacteria go back to their business.
Society as we know it is a vast tapestry of overlapping organizations – some private, some public – that serve to structure human activities and human relationships into an edifice of intricate complexity.
