Quote of the day
August 3rd, 2009
My boss at Harvard Business School used this quote as the opening of his fall syllabus:
Really believe in your heart of hearts that your fundamental purpose, the reason for being is to enlarge the lives of others. Your life will be enlarged also. And all of the other things we have been taught to concentrate on will take care of themselves. – Pete Thigpen
How cool is that? And how lucky am I to have a boss who takes this as his philosophy of life?
And, more to the point: in what ways do you strive to embiggen the lives of others?
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Ooooh, my favorite subjects evah!
Practically, I have a vocation where I can expose people to things that turn them on their heads (gently), expose them to the magic of the world we live in, and expose us to working together for the benefit of something other than ourselves. Any two people can have common leisure or dicker about any old thing pretty easily…how we accomplish things together is often more interesting to me. The challenge of working together makes us a people with a purpose.
Philosophically, I try and live by example (failing daily, if not hourly), living the only two things I’ve ever found to be capital-T-True – that everything changes (so live like you expect change) and everything that happens contains the seeds of its opposite, its paradox (so live like you expect to see that too).
I love opening someone’s consciousness to even the tiniest little thing (“I never knew carrots grew underground! Or that spiders are not scary!”) that they never noticed or thought of before – that is all that matters. Because when it happens for someone else, it happens for me too.
I’ve been lucky to find a few things that operate best in the gift economy, where mutual generosity makes everybody richer.
One is customer service, being a little smarter and more helpful than people were expecting. Another is keeping up with people I trained at work, catching up with their later accomplishments over lunch or on facebook.
Another is singing.
Another is my book blog, whether readers go on to read the book, or just take a nugget away from my single page of remarks. (BTW, Robin, the computer at Barnes & Noble asked me for a review of your book, and I just happened to have one handy! Happiness!)