A Million Places To Run…No Place To Hide
September 5th, 2007
You wake up in the morning and you look at your clock and you get dressed and you go to work and you come home, eat dinner, watch TV and start the cycle all over again, every moment wishing for the weekend. What a miserable way to do this thing called LIVING. Why do you do it this way? In all likelihood, it’s because you see only one path. One route to your goals. One way to be a success. One way to bring value to your job. One way to grow your business. One way to be a friend. One way to learn, enjoy a special moment, make love, cope with pain, maximize joy…the whole crazy ass stew that is LIFE. One way?
No way! There are a million ways to run through your days, your years. All you need is a willingness to experiment. To eschew the safe and narrow. To put your butt on the line. To dream crazy dreams and turn them into reality. To forget the call for a safety net. To walk the high wire, come hell or high water.
It’s all a meteor shower. Is that dangerous or infinitely beautiful? Scary or exhilarating? The answer, that one damn answer, defines your life. Because if you see the fear, if you live it, if you are shackled by it, you get under the covers and hide. Not literally-because there is no place to hide-but instead by getting up, getting dressed, going to work, going through the motions, wishing for the weekend, waiting for Godot, eating Jell-O, blaming everyone for the fact that you go nowhere and are bored by the cocoon you have built for yourself. That’s what the routine is: just another way to hide under the covers. You take no chances. You have no risk. You are safe.
What a Pyrrhic Victory.
I am a businessman. This is a business blog. That doesn’t mean it has to follow the Harvard case study approach. That turns out managers who “live” by the book. And they are a curse to the shareholders in any business.
I just read Time Warner’s CEO Richard Parsons reject the idea that he should be compared to Rupert Murdoch’ because to paraphrase Parsons, the latter has been relentlessly driven to build a media empire and I just have a job to do?
A job to do? The fabulously compensated CEO of a major public company built by Henry Luce and other driven capitalists, and he sees it as just a job. As just one way? One route? If it’s just a job, let the guy who runs the mailroom do it.
Business success and life success are inexorably related. The dreamers, the rule breakers, the visionaries who see a million roads to run, who wouldn’t think of hiding anytime, any day, anyway, they become the Richard Branson’s turning music empires, into airline anomalies, all the while breaking speed limits flying hot air balloons around the world.
Hide? Routine? Safety? Guarantees? Are these words in your vocabulary? If so, turn up the electric blanket and go back to sleep.
Mark Stevens
CEO
September 6th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
This is why this is the only business blog I visit with regularity. I literally had to drop what I was doing and comment on this.
People walk around paralyzed in fear…hogtied by their own excuses and rationalizations as they keep themselves from ever getting to the bottom of anything!
I think a beautiful way to illustrate this is the concept of the small town. Why does 99% of a small town stay in that town forever? Why do they never wish to leave? You go to these towns in America and still hear people that are borderline afraid of ‘city life’! Yes in 2007, people are still afraid of this!
Then you see the one guy or girl who gets out, who moves to the big city, and winds up finally seeing just how ridiculous things were in that ant-hill of a town filled with nothing to do and overly gossipy people who do nothing but try and keep you down.
The problem is ‘the fog’….when you’re in the fog you don’t know whats out there, you’re clouded and the decisions you make are all 100% affected by this. The hard part is breaking through this mysterious fog that clouds our lives. How many times have we been in a relationship and looked back on it and said what the FUCK was I thinking???? It was ‘the fog’ the whole time…the fog is perhaps one of the most powerful jail cells known to man kind and I don’t know a single person who has not fallen victim.
it’s the people who learn to trust their guts that make it out. I’m a firm believer that even those in the thickest of fogs know deep down in their gut that things just ain’t right. The problem is that virtually NOBODY listens to their gut and virtually EVERYBODY has this all backwards. The people who walk through life in the fog make it a whole lot roomier and more comfortable for those of us who trust our gut, never rationalize, and are not passive aggressive.
So i guess the moral of my story is definitely learn to trust your gut, and that actually takes a good deal practice.
September 8th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Great post. Too often the usual or standard way of doing things is all people think of. This frame of thinking leads not only to missed opportunity, but also to a limit to the creative process. Until someone tells you you can’t do something, you might just figure out a way to do it. This applies to life, career, hobbies, and overall quality of life. Stop and figure out what goes for you and go from there. Perhaps the next great idea or solution to something out there is in your mind. Or maybe you will just be happier.