by Kent Sterling
An interesting thing happens when you focus your attention on moving in a direction. The first is that you move farther away from being the person you were before you started moving. The second is that you get somewhere else more quickly than when you stood in one place. That sounds elementary as hell – so simple that it barely deserves to be written down.
Learning instead of doing is wonderful. There is freedom in admitting that I don’t know everything. The pursuit of the knowledge that has avoided me has been very rewarding. So much of our time at work is spent trying to prove that we are worthy of our position – or the next rung on the corporate ladder that we become impervious to the notion that we have so much else to learn.
The last year has been a time of ridiculous change. My boss and friend died quickly of cancer – six months from diagnosis to the grave. I was fired by the new manager for the place I had called my professional home for 17 years. This was the place I thought I would retire from. He told me when I was fired that he was probably doing me a favor, which is the kind of trite bullshit that most of us hope is true when we fire someone, but so seldom have the stones to say out loud. Oddly, he was right, but he gets no credit for that – at least not from me.