We’re almost at the finish line. 2018 is well within sight. How are you feeling?
Full disclosure: I’m a little tired. A little road-weary; spent.
I’m also a believer that sometimes we hear just the right words at just the right time. Recently I was listening to the pilot episode of Tim Ferriss’s new podcast, Tribe of Mentors. In telling the show’s origin story, he said he simply asked himself this question:
What would this look like if it were easy?
And the answer – building a tribe of mentors – just came to him.
OMG.
As a working mom, entrepreneur, and (massively subpar) Girl Scout leader, this nearly bowled me over.
What would this look like if it were easy??
Some days everything just feels hard. You know the days. But so often our default (OK – my default) is to blame everything but me. Demanding clients, uncooperative schedules, lower back pain – you name it, I blame it.
But what if the real culprit is me? What if I’m just not asking the right question? What if complexity completes me?
As a society – at least here in the US – we’ve come to accept, even celebrate, exertion as a proxy for achievement.
But why?
What if there was a way to win that was fueled by ease and grace, versus burn and churn? Would we even recognize it as winning?
What if – when we hit a wall – instead of trying to push through it, we considered another path altogether? We reframed the problem, inviting entirely new solutions or approaches to show themselves?
For Tim Ferriss, it’s about deconstructing excellence. Knowing all the answers is hard. But what if instead of knowing, you just found lots of excellent people around you, crowdsourcing and curating their responses? Maybe that’s your easy. Surely it was Tim’s.
So I encourage you, and me, to do the same. Give space to this question. For yourself, for your team, for your partner or family – just sit with it for a moment or two.
And don’t worry – pain and struggle will always be waiting around the corner should you feel incomplete without them.
What would your ‘this’ look like if it were easy? I’d love to hear what you come up with.