Skip to main content

What's Your Quest?

 Are you living your own life or following someone else's compass?


Here are three questions for you:

What is your name?

What is your quest?

What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

If you’re like most people, it was probably easy to answer two of those three questions. We all know our name, and a simple Google search can give us the other answer—twenty-four miles per hour.


I saw that today and it spoke to me. There has never been more pressure to "get life right". From what we have been taught, to a culture that is focused on keeping up and the onslaught of social media - most people don't understand how they don't have it together while so many other people do.


There are so many people in the world telling us what to do, who we should be and what is the right path it's easy to start living by someone else's rules.

The challenge that I have seen and experienced with this is that most people come to the realization that they are living by other people's rules much later than they should.

It is extremely difficult to be a nonconformist. To have the strength to challenge and question yourself and what you are being told to believe.

To quote Cornel West:

...dying takes the form of calling into question certain assumptions that you have. And if you let that assumption go, that's a form of death.


You have to be deliberate about your thinking. About your life.

To put as much effort into understanding yourself and what you are trying to achieve. It is as much "work" as anything else you will ever do in your life. The problem is, it isn't something that it formally taught, you have to do it on your own.

It will be hard, things will come up about yourself that will make you happy, sad, frustrated, angry - but in the end, that understanding and self-awareness of yourself is the most important thing you can do for yourself to build the life that you want.

Everything from there gets easier.

How you interact with others.

Where you want to work.

What is important to you and why.

Your ability to the design for the type of life that you want improves dramatically.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Black Swan

  Maybe I think differently because I have read this? With everything going on with the CoronaVirus, it is incredible to see how people are behaving. Everyone and their cousin is talking about the Supply Chain, about being prepared, about not having enough capacity ... it's crazy. I honestly wonder if the people making all of these comments have ever actually ran any operations, if they ever had to responsibility to actually get things done. It's easy to say how prepared you can be, and what companies should have been doing, or pointing the finger saying "how could you be out of stock". The reality is, we have a lot of choice. The average grocery store for example can easily have 15,000 to 20, 000 skus that move through their stores ... think about that for a minute. That many skus, that are all cycling through the stores on some type of regular rate of sale.  Or let's take something that's more in people's face at the mo...

Growth & Success

  We spend so much of our time focused on results and outcomes. Did we win? Did we lose? Was it a success or a failure? How do we measure it? Track it? Compare it? Everyone wants to "succeed" because that is what we feel is the right answer. That is what gets praise from those all around us. It makes us feel valued and safe as it makes us feel like we have earned our place (at work or within our community). Does every step forward have to have the same outcome? At what point is the growth and learning just as (or even more?) valuable than some expected outcome? Our world is changing so quickly these days, more quickly than it probably ever has in the past. We have access to so much information, to so many more people and communities, we are constantly trying to "measure up" to everything around us. We are experiential creatures. Every experience that we have contributes to our knowledge and understanding our our-self and the world we are a part of and influences the...

Give your best stuff away

    This is an interesting and sometimes polarizing topic. One group of people believe that the more content (ideas, conversations, posts, videos, etc) that you put out into the world, the better your return is as you are connecting with more people and getting greater exposure. Another group feels that by investing all of this energy into giving away "free stuff", takes away from what you could be doing to grow your business, give to your clients or to your employer. That giving your stuff away doesn't pay the bills, so what's really the point other than feeling good. For me personally, I'm all about giving my best stuff away for free, and what follows are really my "whys". First and foremost, I don't really prescribe to the idea that anyone really has "best stuff". That's finite and fixed and I truly don't believe this applies to people the way it can be associated to things. If you are a miner, and you m...