“We are not what we do. We are not what we have. We are not what others think of us.” The quandary presented by those claims is that many of us believe just the opposite – that we want very much to be what we do; what we have; and – most insidiously – what others think of us.
The conundrum associated with that apparent contradiction becomes obvious when we stop to think of how we obsess with not having enough; worry excessively about what others think of us; try to appease the unappeasable; and try to force our jobs into our personalities.
The person quoted in the first paragraph above is Henri Nouwen (Nouen in French). He was a brilliant 20th century mind who taught at the Menninger Foundation, Notre Dame, Harvard and Yale. But this Dutch priest, sensing a life of incompleteness, gave up those scholastic endeavors and devoted the last years of his life to the personal care of someone at L’Arche Daybreak, a community of mentally and physically handicapped people near Toronto, Canada.
Nouwen’s choice to turn his back on an eminently successful academic career is an extreme example of how one person dealt with the puzzle of the what-we-do, what-we-have, and what-others-think-of-us challenge.
Let’s put it in a business context: What would the business, technical and philanthropic world look like today, if Bill Gates had not left Harvard against all conventional wisdom to nurture the seeds of what would subsequently become Microsoft?
Executed well and for the right reasons, such life-altering moves can have a profound effect on both the individual and society.
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