Ensuring your voice is involved in your work

Deciding between the commercial value of your work and what you are most excited about is always a difficult balancing act.

I, personally, have aired on the side of excitement – meaning, I have to feel some connection to what I do, there needs to be some thread there that interests me to be fully committed to following through.

There are countless projects I've left behind because, I went ahead, unclear about that excitement, and then after some time it simply wained...

There are some people who are much more operational in nature, whose focus is on the growth of metrics and crossing off tasks. These people are great optimizers... They care less about the expression and more-so on the score going up and what that symbolizes. They solve problems and see problems to be solved.

Then there are others... artist types... idiosyncratic types, that go by their own set of interests for how to be in the world and what to measure.

Mimetically we might still get stuck wanting something on the scoreboard that others covet... but only for a time because deep down we are after a different type of feedback from the world.

It's easy to spot the idiosyncratic type... they struggled to focus in school, despite loving to learn and consciously choosing to spend a good deal of their time learning. The exam scores were simply not interesting... a scoreboard that didn't resonate.

Ultimately, it takes courage and leadership to follow your own score and take the time to balance your work resonating and serving others while still containing your own voice, your own version of how you think things should be.

It takes courage to go ahead in the world with this sense of purpose for how you want to use your time and contribute.

I've been enjoying David Whyte's "Crossing the Unkown Sea, Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity" and this quote stuck out to me about this topic:

“The great question about leadership, about taking real steps on the pilgrims path, is the great question of the individual life: how to make everything more personal. How to understand life and leadership not as an abstract path involving devious strategies but more like an inhabitation, a way of life, a conversation, a captaincy, an expression of individual nature and gifts, and a familiarity with the specific nature of your own desires and fears.In a conversation there is always more than one voice, and one of those voices must be our own or there is no conversation at all.”

Have a great week,

xx David