What’s important? Do you know?
What is really, deeply important, in your heart? Do you know?
On Thursday, I thought I had problems.
And then the tragedy in Connecticut shook me and my family to our core. As a father of two young children, Friday changed a lot for me. It disoriented me. Every adult I talked about this with wept on Friday, myself included. The ground moved beneath our feet on Friday. Here, our foundation shifted, and the very lives we’ve built creaked, groaned, and even wailed — like an old house in a hurricane.
This groaning, this shifting, this creaking was the crystallization of some powerful personal and professional truths. I’d like to share them with you here. I am still working on all of these items. I am aware of them, and I am working on them:
Don’t wait. Do it now. If you’ve been thinking about trying something, going somewhere, buying something — do it. Delays lead to delays. Action leads to action. It’s physics. It’s momentum. Plus, trying feels better than regretting.
Be in the moment. Be engaged. The Internet, the blogoshpere, the news media, make it all to easy to lose sight of the moment. These media lead to a detachment from personal interaction, from productivity, and from the moment. Consume enough news, and a mild depression begins to set in. That moves us even further from the now. Our unlimited access to news and rumors must be managed. Otherwise, it will manage us.
Put the past to bed. We are not here long enough to spend time dwelling on the past. If there’s something to be learned from what’s bothering us, we must find it, learn it, then move. If it pops up again, we must remember the lesson, which is the value of the experience. Dwelling on the past keeps us from the present.
We must help people every day. We must teach. We must assist, without being asked. And, ideally, we must do so altruistically, because people can sense ulterior motives. If it’s not natural to you today, just start helping. It’ll become more natural, and the altruism will set in on its own.
If you don’t like doing it, stop. Life’s too short to do things we don’t enjoy. Plus, there are always people who do enjoy what we do not. Find them and enlist their help.
Leverage your greatest strengths. What are you best at? Do more of that. Peter Drucker said that developing weaknesses is not a worthwhile pursuit. I believe that’s because even after you’ve improved your weaknesses, they’ll still be far behind your strengths. So understand your strengths, and leverage them to the aggressive exclusion of everything else. (If you’re not sure what they are, ask those close to you. Family, friends, colleagues, clients, customers — they’ll tell you the truth.)
Contribute to the flow. At the end of Walter Isaacson’s wondrous biography of Steve Jobs, he quotes Jobs as follows: “We try to use the talents we have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.” What will you add to the universe’s flow? What will you contribute?
That’s my list. What’s yours? What most important to you? Will you focus on it?
There is nothing we can tell the parents of the children that were ripped away from them so soon, and we cannot begin to understand their pain, their grief and their sorrow. May they know that we grieve with them. And may they know that in focusing us on what’s important, their children have touched our lives. Their children have improved our lives. We are grateful.