Making the Clay: A parable about how projects come to life.

p/c WAI – John Cargile

In the dim glow of his studio, the sculptor stood before a vast expanse of pristine clay, lost in thought. His mind danced with visions of what he would create—a masterpiece that would captivate hearts and minds, a testament to his skill and vision. Yet, before his hands could shape the clay, there were crucial steps to take, like preparing the raw material before the artistry could begin.

As he contemplated the sculpture taking form in his mind’s eye, he pondered the perspectives he would bring to his creation. Each angle, each curve held significance, and he knew that his vision would resonate differently with each observer. He envisioned the awe in their eyes, the whispers of admiration as they saw his work.

But this sculpture would be unlike any he had attempted before—it would be monumental, stretching skyward in grandeur. The clay alone would not suffice; he would need the finest materials that could withstand the test of time. Yet, the cost of these materials weighed heavily on his mind. It was a venture that would require more than just his own resources.

Thus, he embarked on a journey to seek investors—patrons who believed in his vision and were willing to invest in its realization. With their support, he would procure the materials necessary to bring his creation to life. But it was not just financial backing he sought; he needed a team of skilled artisans who would join him on this sculpting journey.

Finding the right team was no small feat. Each member would bring their own expertise and perspective, enriching the project with their unique talents. Yet, it was not just a matter of talent—they would need to share his passion and commitment, willing to sacrifice their own pursuits to see the vision through.

And so, he set out to assemble his team, each member drawn by the promise of being part of something extraordinary. Yet, he knew that their dedication could not go unrewarded. He would provide for them, ensuring they had the means to sustain themselves as they poured their hearts and souls into the project.

With each detail meticulously planned, he secured a space large enough to accommodate the monumental sculpture, a blank canvas upon which his vision would take shape. And in his heart, he held onto the hope that there would be a patron waiting in the wings, eager to claim his creation as their own.  A customer.

As he surveyed the clay before him, he saw not just a mound of earth, but the embodiment of possibility—the first step in a journey that would culminate in something truly extraordinary.

With determination burning bright in his eyes, the sculptor began to mold the clay, each touch infused with passion and purpose. He knew that before the sculpture could stand tall, it must first be brought to life in the fertile soil of his imagination.

Sound familiar? 

If you launch a new idea, a new project, a new company, or a new rocket…you’re the sculptor.  You alone see your vision.  To see this new vision come to life, you will need to gather others, inspire them, challenge them, and ultimately organize your new team toward the goal of making your vision a reality. 

It won’t be easy.  Great things never are.  You’ll risk failure at every turn.  You’ll have to overcome challenges you never knew existed.    

But you’ll never achieve meaningful success in your project (whatever it is) without taking the risk, making the clay, gathering your team, and ultimately bringing your vision to life. 

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Serve others first…

Tim Ferriss asks a question of most of his podcast guests:

“If you had a billboard that millions of people would see every day, what would you put on that billboard?”

Tim’s guests have given answers ranging from the comedic to the serious.  Some have talked about a cause that is their passion, or an inspirational passage they’d like people to see.

Each time I hear the question, I come up with the same three words:

Serve others first.

Serving others first means:

  • taking others’ needs and desires into account before our own
  • looking out for their best interest first
  • our decisions are more thoroughly considered because we’ll be taking time to think about how our decisions impact others
  • trying to make someone else’s job easier and more rewarding
  • showing someone gratitude for the work they’re doing
  • minding our manners (as my mom used to say when I was a kid)
  • listening to, and respecting others (even if we disagree with them)
  • looking for ways to improve a situation rather than making things worse
  • being the first to forgive.

It’s easy to focus on our own interests and challenges first.  It’s easy to think everything happening in the world is directed toward us, personally.  This “me first” mindset is hard-wired into our DNA…our DNA is selfish about 99.99% of the time.

The tougher path?

It’s the one that leads to serving others first.  It goes against our wiring, which takes significant effort.

None of us will be perfect on this path.  We’ll stumble, and we may even wander a bit.  But, we can be a blessing for others along our journey, and that’s what we should be seeking.

The good news is that following this path gets easier with practice.

Photo by Adrià Crehuet Cano on Unsplash

 

What a Wonderful World

Sadness can find us with little or no effort…

Sadness can find us with little or no effort…sometimes on a daily basis.

I see trees of green,
red roses too.
I see them bloom,
for me and you.
And I think to myself,
what a wonderful world.

Sadness, defined as anything that’s the opposite of joy:

Emotional pain

Feelings of disadvantage

Loss

Despair

Grief

Anger

Helplessness

Disappointment

Sorrow

Frustration

Guilt

I see skies of blue,
And clouds of white.
The bright blessed day,
The dark sacred night.
And I think to myself,
What a wonderful world

Oddly, we sometimes seek out sadness for our own purposes.  Maybe we need an excuse for not being the person we know we can be.  Maybe we find comfort in burdening others with our pain.

The colors of the rainbow,
So pretty in the sky.
Are also on the faces,
Of people going by,
I see friends shaking hands.
Saying, “How do you do?”
They’re really saying,
“I love you”.

When sadness in its many forms pays a visit, we have two fundamental questions to ask ourselves:

  • What will we allow inside?
  • How long will we allow it to stay?

It’s easy to say that we get to decide.  That doesn’t mean it’s easy to kick sadness out once it arrives for a visit.

I hear babies cry,
I watch them grow,
They’ll learn much more,
Than I’ll ever know.

What to do?  Here’s a list that I have to remind myself of from time to time:

  • Tune your mind to find joy in the simple things
  • Seek out and cherish love in your life
  • Offer forgiveness to yourself and others
  • Share your time and attention with others
  • Seek opportunities to serve others first
  • Observe life with a sense of awe and gratitude.

Joy won’t find us the way sadness can.  Joy only shows itself when we take action to greet it warmly with open arms and outstretched hands.

And I think to myself,
What a wonderful world.

Yes, I think to myself,
What a wonderful world.

Oh Yeah.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

No Matter What

What’s on your no matter what list?

  • “I’m going to do this, no matter what.”
  • “I’ll be there by 5pm, no matter what.”
  • “We’re having this party, no matter what.”
  • “We’ll finish this project by the deadline, no matter what.”
  • “We will hit our quarterly numbers, no matter what.”
  • “My family will always come first, no matter what.”
  • “My career will always come first, no matter what.”

No matter what doesn’t compromise.

No matter what won’t be distracted.

No matter what knows its priorities.

No matter what gathers allies but has the power to alienate.

No matter what takes no prisoners in pursuit of its objectives.

No matter whats are easy when we’re young, protected, and naïve; but hard to uphold in the wilds of real life.

No matter whats morph, adapt, and may even be forgotten as time passes.  But some remain unchanged for our entire life.

What’s on your no matter what list?

How many no matter whats do you say out loud?  Which ones do you keep to yourself?

Do you define your no matter whats, or do they define you?

Maybe it’s time to find out.

 

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

Time for a Lens Change?

We control our settings.  We control our lenses…

Way back in junior high (in the last century), I learned about photography with 35mm SLR cameras.  These were the “real thing.”  They were a far cry from the cheap Instamatics that everyone I knew used at the time.

We learned about shutter speeds, f-stops, light meters, focus points, passive and active lighting, shadows, framing, composition, film types, and lenses.

Did we want to capture the action close-up, or in the distance?  Blur the action, or stop it?  Shadow the subject, or light it?  Black and white, or color?  Grainy or smooth?  Focus on the foreground or the background?  Capture the subject from the left, or right?

It didn’t matter if we were photographing a mountain, a flower, a person, or a can of tomatoes.  Using all the tools at our disposal, we controlled what happened in each photo.

Don’t even get me started on developing film in a darkroom.  We learned about that too.  More ways to control the image that appears in the photo.  For younger readers, darkrooms are the place where the exposed film was transformed into photos.  Using various methods, we could edit an image like you can today in your phone’s photo editor or Photoshop.

The main lesson about all this wasn’t the tools and techniques of photography. It was the realization that the camera was only a tool to capture a moment.  That moment, with all its beauty, drama, imperfections, and emotions.

More specifically, the camera captures a feeling that comes from the image and our memory of that feeling.  The image is merely a pathway to our feelings about the subject.

We capture moments and feelings every day.  Usually without a camera.  We control how these moments and feelings appear on the canvas that matters the most.  In our heart and in our mind.

If the world seems to be against you, and all you see is ugliness and despair, that’s probably because of the way you’re choosing to see the world.

If everything is amazing and perfect, that’s also a result of the way you’re choosing to see the world.

Neither view is 100% accurate.  Reality has its ups and downs.  We face challenges and triumphs, victories and defeats, every day.

The key is to understand that we have way more to do with the way these moments are captured and interpreted than anyone or anything in our world.

We control our settings.  We control our lenses.  We choose where we focus.

Ultimately, we choose how to frame our moments.  Not the other way around.

Photo by Warren Wong on Unsplash

Letting Go

You are not what has happened to you…

“If there are pieces of your past that are weighing you down, it’s time to leave them behind.  You are not what has happened to you.  You are someone unimaginably greater than you have ever considered, and maybe it’s time to consider all the possibilities that are within you.”  –Matthew Kelly

How much baggage are you carrying from your past?

The mistakes you’ve made.  The opportunities you missed.  The disappointments.  The tragedies.  The could’ve beens and the should’ve beens.  The people you still won’t forgive.

Letting go doesn’t mean forgetting your past.  It doesn’t mean ignoring the lessons you’ve learned.

It means forgiving yourself and forgiving others.  It means loving the amazing person you’ve become and letting go of the person you or anyone else thought you should have become.

Each of us is a work-in-progress.  We have an opportunity every day to define our future.  But, it’s impossible to choose our future while burdened with all the weight of our past.

It’s time to let go.  Drop the weight.  Drop the guilt.  Drop the anger.  Drop the regrets that quietly gnaw at your core.

Let go and prepare yourself for the awesome future that you choose.

As Matthew Kelly says, “You are someone unimaginably greater than you have ever considered.”

Photo by Gianandrea Villa on Unsplash

 

Desire and Appreciation

When was the last time you purposely spent time appreciating your life and the people you love? 

“…people are programmed to desire, not to appreciate.” –Matt Ridley

Imagine if we had the ability to appreciate as much as we desire.

Imagine if the things we appreciated were all that we desire.

We might not get as much accomplished, but we’d probably be a little happier.  Maybe, a little more content.

As infants, we’re 99.99% desire.  It’s the only way we can survive, connect, learn, and thrive.

As we grow, our desires get more advanced.  We visualize, fantasize, dream, and hope.  We talk about the things we’re going to do, the places we’ll see, the people we’ll meet, the mountains we’ll climb.

In all of this, there’s little time for appreciation.  We don’t have time to reflect.  We’re too busy fulfilling our dreams, finding the next challenge, quenching our desire.

When was the last time you purposely spent time appreciating your life and the people you love?

When was the last time you purposely spent time appreciating yourself and the positive impact you have on the world?

Maybe it’s time.

Desire, with all its motivation and energy, is critical to our success.

But appreciation brings meaning to that success.  It makes our success (however we define it) matter.

Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash

Grandma’s Hot Chocolate

There’s something special about grandma’s hot chocolate.

It doesn’t matter that she boils water and pours in the envelope of instant powder like the rest of us.

It’s what she does while the water’s boiling.  The questions she asks while stirring-in the powder.  The way she stops stirring to listen to your answers.

Grandmas have that way of listening, even to the stuff we’re not saying.

It’s the way she adds the right amount of milk to “thicken it up a bit.”  Nobody else gets it exactly right like grandma.  She knows just the way you like it.  In fact, she’s the only one who does.

It’s counting out the right number of baby marshmallows.  Enough to sweeten things, but not so many that they get in the way.

It’s the way she squeezes your shoulder as she places the cup on your placemat.

It’s the way she sits to enjoy it with you.

That first sip is such a treat.  Is it the taste of the chocolate, or seeing grandma’s warm smile across the table that makes it so good?

It doesn’t matter.  Your loving journey to the bottom of this cup of wonder is just beginning.

Funny how the simplest things in life are transformed when they’re mixed with grandma’s love.

A love she teaches us to bring to the simple things in our own lives each and every day.

Photo by Salome Alexa on Unsplash

Begin with I Don’t Know

A powerful thing happens when we begin with I don’t know…

It’s easy to assume we know everything, or everything that matters.

If not, we can comfort ourselves that at least we know enough.

“Been there, done that,” is our unspoken mantra.

When we know, we feel the need to tell others.

When we know, there’s nothing more to learn.

When we know, listening is optional.

When we know, questions waste our time.

Curiosity and exploration are irrelevant.

A powerful thing happens when we begin with I don’t know.

We listen to others more than ourselves.

We open our mind.

We embrace the potential for change.

Curiosity and questions fuel our journey.

We become interested.

And, interesting.

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

Always Better

Seeking better every day yields a compounding effect that far surpasses the value of merely being best for one day…

We’re taught at an early age to do our best.  That we should strive to be the best.

Being the best is a great accomplishment.

Best student.  Best musician.  Best cook.  Best athlete.  Best employee.  Best boss.  Best entrepreneur.  Best leader.  Best parent.  Best friend.

There are at least three problems with best:

  1. Best is often a subjective comparison to the subset that’s around you. There’s a phrase, “big fish in a small pond,” that represents this well.  You’re the best runner in your school.  But, when it comes time to run against another school, your best isn’t good enough.  You finish second in the race.  Every time the subset gets larger, best gets redefined.
  1. Best is a fleeting moment in time. You might be the best today, but what about tomorrow?  Next week?  Next year?
  1. The value of best goes down quickly. Does it matter to your 48-year-old self that you were the best student (however that was measured) back in high school?  Sure, it’s a proud accomplishment from your past, but does it really impact your life 30 years later?

I propose an alternative to being the best:  being always better.

Consider the challenge and reward of always better:

  • No matter what measuring stick you use, if the goal is to always be better than yesterday, the challenge is clear, and the improvement is measurable.
  • There’s no place to hide when the goal is always better. No excuses for not improving, even just a little bit, from yesterday, last year, ten years ago.
  • Always better pits you against your past self. The subset never changes.  It’s you.
  • If the definition of success is to always be better than before, you get to celebrate success every day that you improve.

What if you don’t improve today?  That’s okay, we all have setbacks.  Setbacks remind us not to take our improvements for granted.  We get to see how great it is to come back to where we were, and then take another step toward our better self after that.

Seeking better every day yields a compounding effect that far surpasses the value of merely being best for one day.

Ask these questions of yourself:

  • What am I doing to improve today?
  • Am I focused on learning from my mistakes, or imagining a new way, and charting an improved course today?
  • Do I realize that each day is an opportunity to be better than yesterday?
  • Am I willing to challenge my own status quo, my comfort zone, today?
  • Am I a better student, musician, cook, athlete, employee, boss, entrepreneur, leader, parent, friend, or whatever else you find most important, than I was yesterday? If not, why not?

Ironically, if you work on always being better, there’s a good chance you’ll become the best.  But you won’t care, because the reward you seek comes from the never-ending quest to be always better.

God gave us all weaknesses.  It’s a blessing to find out what they are so we get a chance to turn them into our strengths.

Photo by Fancycrave on Unsplash