“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
~ Robert Anson Heinlein

So how do you rate?  (I think I score about 9 out of 21.)

=> What are you specializing in?  What if you were truly committed to that?  What would that look like?

=> What else can you do?  What can you do adequately?  (Adequate is what you should be striving for most of the time).

=> What’s your Great Work?  What help do you need with that?  What specialists can you call in?

The other day I was speaking with my friend, Jen Louden.

Jen’s been a big success is the world of self help, in particular for her work as The Comfort Queen and providing insight for women to build greater comfort into their lives.

For the last little while, she’s been looking at evolving, asking “what’s next?”

And she’s been stuck in every increasing, then decreasing, then increasing, then decreasing, circles in her head.

The problem  is trying to figure out the future is nearly impossible.  We try and extrapolate from the past and that leads either to improbable fantasy or reality +/- 5% which isn’t that exciting.

Jen’s solution?

Pick something and start it.

The way you figure this stuff out is you start doing it, and then see what happens.

Seeing what happens – really seeing what happens – is a key part of the process.  You have to stop on a regular basis and ask:

=> How’s this going?

=> Is this taking me closer to, or further away from, where I want to go

=> What should I stop doing at this point?  Start doing?  Continue doing?

So if you’re feeling stuck because you’re trying to come up with the perfect answer before you start doing anything, forget it.

General Eisenhower said it best:

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plansare useless, but planning is indispensable.”

PS – watch for Jen’s next best guess at what her Great Work is soon.  It should be a cracker.

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“It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.”
~ Jacob Bronowski

=> To what are you giving too much respect?

=> What would the act of rebellion be?

=> What assumptions are you working under?  Which ones should you question?

… it will be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.”

I’ve been rewatching one of my favourite movies, Lord of the Rings.

How Peter Jackson managed to create these movies, to walk the finest of lines between honouring the Tolkein’s original work and yet to bring it to life in a completely new and different way, I’ll never know.  It’s extraordinary.

It’s full of moments of peril, of crossing the threshold and moving from safety towards … risk and danger, reward and

The quote above comes from early on in the first movie, when our hero Frodo’s companion Sam stops in a nondescript field.

It’s a moment anyone doing Great Work will recognize.

And here’s Frodo’s response:

“It’s a dangerous business going out your door.  You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

And there it is:  the glory and the risk of Great Work.

“Maybe the most that you can expect from a relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.”
~Marianne Faithfull

There’s wisdom in this quote, and not just for us going through a bad relationship or who are aspiring songwriters.

Wisdom comes not just from experiencing the thing – but then thinking about and understanding what you just experienced.

An approach I’ve used myself and coached others upon is, during any event, good or bad, to ask yourself:
==> “Where’s the story here?”

That allows you to step outside the hurly-burly of the moment and to see how you’re playing things out, understand a little more your role, and to learn from what’s happening … so you know more what to say Yes to and what to say No for your future Great Work.