Happy Sunday Everyone:
7 or 8 years ago, a friend told me he did a book club with his team. I thought it was the lamest thing I’d ever heard so I let it go in one ear and out the other. 8 years later, with 2 years of smarterness (new word) under my belt I decided to try it and it turns out to be a very cool thing for team/personal development and bonding. I think we’re 4 books in, we do a chapter a week and then discuss everyone’s favorite take away, takes 10 minutes but its super impactful. Please excuse the title of the current book “Unfu*k Yourself”, it was chosen by one of our team members and is actually amazing (my 2nd time reading it).
Last week we read the chapter titled “I am not my thoughts, I am what I do”. My intention here is not to do a book report vs. talk about something that hit me. As I was reading, I came across “sometimes our mind is like the equivalent of a fun-house mirror, distorting and contorting and blurring our lives and our potential”. For me, this resonates. At times I feel on top of the world, valuable, important, needed, worthy, other times I can question, what is my value? am I needed? am I worthy? I don’t mean the last statement as dark as it might seem vs. just constantly questions what I’m doing and does it matter. Perhaps this doesn’t resonate or isn’t accurate for all of you but for me I can tell you the only difference in those two frames of thought is my mind playing tricks on me, making me more “important” than I actually am, or less “important” than I actually am, but very rarely neutral. In both scenarios there has to be qualifies as to what makes me more or less important, needed, worthy, etc., it’s a vicious cycle.
As I was thinking through it, I thought back to something I wrote about in 2019. It was a quote from Peter Drucker to Jim Collins, he said “stop focusing on being successful and start focusing on being useful”. In case you ever wonder if I truly write these for myself, this would be proof. Taking myself back to the simplicity of that statement takes the above paragraph off the table. The simplicity of being useful blocks out the fun house distortion of questioning our value/worth/importance. The other words hover high above the actual action of simply being useful, they require too much validation. Useful is humble, it’s without fanfare, it’s without caveats, it’s really basic. Basic i.e. less complicated, is super good for me. Less thought, more useful.
I think of Kim and I as I write this and I believe some of us are more on this hamster wheel than others depending on our personality (Kim less, me more). It’s not a compliment or an insult but depending on what side you’re on, only suggesting some of us struggle for outward validation of effort more than others. Net net, if I can get it in my head that nothing needs to be about my worth, my value, my importance, but instead I focus solely on being useful in my present situation, no matter what that situation is, I’m certain the fun house in my head would go out of business.
Just be useful.