The Music Of The Silences

When you sit together in silence and the music plays without a sound, you know there is a love no one has to work at. No one can replace. No one but a very few – perhaps no one else at all – can experience. It is yours. Everyone else can only look on in envy. It is The Music Of The Silences. And it is so much more powerful than the music of the orchestra. Of the exclamations. Of the boisterous proclamations. When nothing has to be said, and yet everything is as clear as can be, it is a masterpiece.This is the art of the subtle. Once in a lifetime it strikes from nowhere and must be treasured for the rarity it is. But we must also learn from it to enhance our careers, our businesses, our lives.

Every great love has a quiet confidence about it. Every great business person lets their accomplishments talk for themselves. Every great company delivers something exceptional and allows the silent referrals to build its base. People go to business school for years to learn how to make noise. To beat drums. To spend zillions on advertising. Caught up in the machine of conventional wisdom, they forget that yes, life imitates art but business imitates life as well.

Look around at your loves, your friends, your romances. All hold greater business lessons than a lifetime at Wharton. All of the passion, the pathos, the complexity in your personal life, has a mirror image on the business side of the ledger. Actually, there is no other side. It is but one ledger, one canvas, upon which we paint ourselves, our minds, our hearts, our brains. Everything you do in the dark-far from the office, removed from the Blackberry-has implications, has learnings, has analogies, for everything you do in the neon of the boardroom.

If we can look through the Berlin Wall of our imagination and look from east to west, personal to business, business to personal, without obstruction, knowing the lessons apply in both realms because in reality there is only one realm, LIFE, we are infinitely smarter than if we allow only the Harvard Business Review to guide us. We learn more from love than we can from an MBA. More about business. About how to deliver greatness. How to respect and adore. How to drive for the exceptional. How to identify the good and the great and how to accept nothing but the latter.

A champion diver lands in the water without making a splash. If you have ever been privileged to hear The Music Of The Silences, you have the greatest education, and the most magnificent gift, anyone can provide.