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

This 1 Thing Increases Your Career Capital More Than Anything Else

The Art of Better Decision Making Have you felt scared to make a decision? Maybe you get preoccupied with making the 'wrong' decision?  Did you know that 68% of people have admitted to not doing because they thought it would be harder than it actually is. Getting comfortable with making decisions is one of the biggest challenges new leaders face. You will be placed in situations where there isn't enough time to get all of the information. Or even harder, you will be placed in situations where you'll never get more information than what you have. The good news? Making better decisions is something that you can improve by being deliberate with your learning and how you choose to approach it. This is the approach I take to decision making. These have been test and is what I have used over my 15 year career to teach and develop teams. - Accept that you will make mistakes. There is rarely a perfect answer. Getting comfortable with ambiguity is a leadership muscle you need to

Grace Under Fire

  Leadership is not a title, and it is not only something reserved for your professional life. One thing that has greatly helped me over the years is finding what is the same rather than focusing on why situations are different. There will always be differences and nuance with whatever you are dealing with, I challenge however, that there is more that is similar or relatable to something else than what is different. True leadership is about how you react, how you handle the circumstances in front of you. True leadership is also how you carry it. For every decision, position or action that you see publically, there are two to four times more that most people never see. Professionally or personally we all carry a lot, we are all going through something all the time. Being a leader means that you have to do more. It is your responsibility to still take care of your team, your peers, your friends, your family. You have to be a guiding light, a steady hand, a source of confidence and comfor

Ego

   Ego is one of the hardest things to deal with as a new manager. You are in a new situation, you are most likely leading people for the first time, you are probably a bit younger ... and you just feel like you HAVE to prove yourself. This kinda makes sense right? You were obviously promoted because you knew your stuff and were really good at your old job, so now it MUST be your job to make sure everyone knows how good you are. WRONG! This is the number one mistake most new managers make. I totally get why, we have created this hierarchy in our corporate structures that makes people believe a good supervisor = a good manager = a good director = a good VP. This. Is. Completely. Untrue. The reality is that it takes different skills to be a good leader; and excellence at one level does not automatically mean excellence at the next. To be a good leader, you have to always be trying to check your ego. Yes you are smart, you probably have good ideas, you p