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Words to inspire the belief that we have all we need to be the change we wish to see.

Month: November 2022

To be or to do

Author Ryan Holiday was talking with Tim Ferriss on The Tim Ferriss Show and he said, “To be or to do? This is a key question that comes to us from the great strategist John Boyd who, as he mentored young men and women in the Pentagon, would see that you kind of can go down two paths in life. There’s the person who wants to look important, that wants to achieve a high rank, that wants to be in the newspapers or on TV. Then there’s the person who wants to quietly get things done. I think it was Truman who said, ‘It’s amazing how much you can accomplish if you don’t care about who gets the credit.’

To be or to do is largely about credit. Do you care about accomplishments, or do you care about impact? Do you care about credit, or do you care about getting things done? You have to ask yourself, ‘Am I trying to be an important person? Am I trying to accomplish important things?’ And this question is critical, ‘To be or to do?’ How are you measuring your life?

Hillel said, ‘If I am not for me, who is?’ And then he said, ‘If I am only for me, who am I?’ This, I think, is related to the idea of to be or to do.” Continue reading

How messaging can affect our outlook

I was listening to Professor Heather Cox Richardson this week talk about current affairs and how messaging can affect our outlook and actions. Driving some to do terrible things for a supposed cause or take part in a figurative war that those holding the societal marionette strings want to see come to fruition.

She used the example of Shakespeare’s Othello. Iago was jaded about being passed up for a promotion, so he started whispering in Othello’s ear. Gaslighting him. Telling him stories about his life and his wife. The story ends badly for Othello and those he loves. But it got me thinking. Continue reading

Four Thousand Weeks

I’m reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. What an eye-opener. The premise is that we have four thousand weeks if we’re lucky. And how do we plan to spend them?

Constantly chasing after the next carrot, running on a symbolic treadmill, or simply accepting that we can’t do it all and focusing on what matters to us the most? Continue reading

The chance to do a very special thing

I saw this quote from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and it made me think. He said, “To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”

Our finest hour. Do we even know what it may look like? Does it happen at the job we are doing now? Is it part of a future job that we can’t even imagine doing today? Will it be using a skill we would define ourselves as having or something far deeper, that we haven’t even discovered yet? Continue reading

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