I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
When you accept that life does not turn out the way it “should,” you are free to take actions that are not constrained by the need to control life so it turns out the way that it “should” (or, at the very least, to make sure life doesn’t turn out the way it “shouldn’t”).
Tracy Goss, The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen
If life doesn’t turn out the way it should and life doesn’t turn out the way it shouldn’t, how does it turn out? “The way it does,” says Goss.
Once you accept this, Goss says, you let go of outcomes. You let go of your attempts to make life hew to your will.
For the past couple days, I’ve been perseverating about a way in which life did not turn out the way I figure it should have for me. This is not just tiresome, it is unproductive.
Time to let go of that, to accept that life turns out the way it does, not the way it should.
Thinking of how life turns out the way it does, not the way you or I always want, makes me think of a David Whyte poem that I once heard Buddhist teacher Tara Brach share on one of my favorite meditation recordings.
The well of grief
Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief,turning down through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe,will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,nor find in the darkness glimmering,
the small round coins,
thrown by those who wished for something else.
Doesn’t everyone wish for something else at times in their life? There’s no one on this earth who hasn’t faced disappointment and sadness at something that happened to them.
What is the solution to thoughts about how life is not what it should be? Taking action towards important goals instead. Goss would say: make a bold promise— “a promise that stretches you beyond the limits of your present reality.” In fact, she advises that you make a series of bold promises, then take action again and again to fulfill them, so that you can bring what seemed before to be an impossible future into being.
She writes:
For now, it’s important to recognize that your initial promise is made without fear. You construct it before you know the obstacles you will encounter. There is no question that you will encounter obstacles. The obstacles are all an opportunity to develop your muscles of transforming an impossibility to a possibility and a possibility into a reality. The obstacles are part of the game.
If I were to make a bold promise right now what might it be?
How about this:
To live an affluent life as an artist and writer.
The parts of that promise that are important are:
- To live affluently, meaning I don’t have to sell my house or squeeze my budget
- To do that as an artist and writer, not as a data scientist or other technologist—so I’ll have to earn money from those activities, not just enjoy them as hobbies
That feels pretty impossible if I were to follow my usual winning strategies, which include earning money at corporate jobs and building marketable skills through formal education. Instead, I’ll have to take on the seemingly impossible tasks of earning money not through tech skills but through art and writing and earning money not via someone else’s business but via my own.