Sometimes the home field can be so constrained that a curious outsider is truly the only one who can see the solution.*
David Epstein

We know the situation better than anyone else. The knowledge we can call upon is voluminous. Our position is well thought through and tested. And yet the solution evades us.

The outsider who deeply listens and then reframes the problem from a perspective that seems to have nothing to do with the issue- or situation-at hand may be the one who helps us to our solution.

May we be open to the outsider and also be the outsider to others, not underestimating what it is we bring when we are prepared to deeply listen.

*From David Epstein’s Range.

You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.*
Frances Hesselbein

Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience.**
Robert McKee

Frances Hesselbein is now 106 years old and possibly still working – she certainly was at 100.

Making herself through volunteering, she moved into her first paid employ in her mid-50s, transforming the organisations she worked with, including the Girl Scouts in the United States. She had no plan as she set out on this epic journey, feeling ill-prepared for each role and learning as she went, a favourite beginning to her story being “I never envisaged … .”

Frances carries a big basket.

And we all have our basket.

Even if we haven’t been intentional, we’ll have gathered plenty along the way and it will be worth our while to take a look at just what’s in there.

And knowing it’s there, we can make it bigger: widening it to gather more, deepening it to hold more.

To borrow, Robert McKee’s words, what we are then doing is creating a story to take what we have and make a difference, as Lewis Hyde exhorts us:

The only essential is this: the gift must always move.^

David Brooks offers the following as the stages of intimacy: a glance, curiosity, dialogue, pushing open the gates.^^ They provide us with our own stages for peering into our basket: take a look, ask questions, begin exploring, commit to finding out more. There are more stages to follow – the leap, crisis, forgiveness, fusion (try out ensuing ideas, fail, start again, commit) – but for now I just want you to take a peek at what’s in your basket.

*Frances Hesselbein, after a girl scout leader, quoted in David Epstein’s Range;
**From Robert McKee’s newsletter: Why Audiences Love Action;
^From Lewis Hyde’s The Gift;
^^From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.

Writing in your journal is more powerful than simple meditation for the same reason that writing your goals down is more powerful than leaving them in your head.*
Ben Hardy

It’s the same inward journey we’ve seen before: the plunge inward and then the expansion outward.**
David Brooks

Writing is an incredible gift: when we write something out then we are more likely to be consistent.

Try it: think of something you want to accomplish this week.

Now try writing it out: spot the difference?

*From Benjamin Hardy’s Willpower Doesn’t Work;
**From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.

[A man] doesn’t always know himself what he would do, but he feels by instinct, I’m good for something, even so! … I know that I could be quite a different man! … There’s something within me, so what is it!*
Vincent van Gogh

Take me down to the spring of my life, and tell me my nature and my name.**
George Appleton

Vincent van Gogh attempted one venture after another in order to plumb the depths of his being including art dealer, teacher, missionary, but none of these reached the depths of who he was and what he could do.

Even when he returned to art, his drawings and watercolours didn’t take him there.

Out in a storm, he was to discover it was to work quickly with oils that took him there where he found his crystallising intent and he began his art-altering work.

Anything less would have been a lie, as it is for each of us.

*Vincent van Gogh, quoted in David Epstein’s Range;
**George Appleton, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.

Thou shalt create complex characters rather than merely complicated story.*
Robert McKee

If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success your life has probably been wasted.**
Thomas Merton

The culture offers many attractive stories to step into, but the best stories are those we’ll only be able to imagine and live as we develop the complexity of our character.

*From Robert McKee’s newsletter: Building a Character;
**Thomas Merton, quoted in Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond.

Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere, wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without reservation or regret.*
William Sheldon

But to be what I am, to live what I was meant to live to want to sound like no one else, to yield the blossoms dictated by my heart: this is what I want and surely this cannot be arrogance.**
Rainer Maria Rilke

This morning, I have been honoured to attend a memorial service for someone who lived their life wholeheartedly.

As I carefully listened to all the eulogies that opened the opportunity to honour this person’s bright life, I also felt a deep call to live my own life wholeheartedly.

William Sheldon describes so well what I have often called my slow journey in the same direction.

I know, whilst I have walked this way for many years, there is far more the journey can include.

The wonderful thing about wholeheartedness is that we don’t have to hold some back for tomorrow. Indeed, it seems the more wholehearted we live, the more we will find freshly in store for the new day.

*William Sheldon, quoted in David Brooks’ The Second Mountain;
**From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life.

I think when you’re self-taught you experiment more, trying to find the same sound in different places, you learn how to solve problems.*
Jack Cecchini

But to be what I am,,, to live what I was meant to live, to want to sound like no one else, to yield the blossoms dictated to my heart: this is what I want – and surely this cannot be arrogance.**
Rainer Maria Rilke

Don’t wait to be taught or trained.

Teach yourself.

The first can help us to fit into something that needs to happen. The second comes up with new things that we see need to happen.

Obviously there’s a lot more to all of this, but the more we take responsibility for our learning and pursue it wherever we are, the more likely we will be to innovate:

the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.^

Don’t give up on being taught or trained, but take it into your own learning practice.

*Jack Cecchini, quoted in David Epstein’s Range;
**From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life:
^From David Epstein’s Range.

There are no shortcuts. There’s just the same eternal three steps process that poets have described from time eternal: from suffering to wisdom to service.*
David Brooks

These words cause me to reflect on difficult experiences within roles that I took on for more than three decades.

I learned to turn towards the pain and to make a place for it within my life so I might learn from it, and when I did this, something quite special happened. I became a dreamwhisperer with something I must share.

*From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.

The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment.*
David Epstein

in finding your True Self, you will have found an absolute reference point that is both within you and utterly beyond you at the very same time**
Richard Rohr

Developing creative range is something we are each capable of.

Though rigidity sets in over time when we fail to stretch, there remains some plasticity to be taken advantage of throughout our lives: n other words, it’s never too late.

It’s not about simply going deeper and deeper into what fascinates us.

We are curious creatures built for exploration and we should explore, bringing back ideas and pictures and words and colours and feelings and experiences and questions and enjoyment … .

These are the kinds of thing that will alter our creativity in the right direction.

We are not only what we know, as explorers, we are also what we do not know: we are also what is out there waiting to be encountered.

*From David Epstein’s Range;
**From Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond.

Through our humility, gratitude and faithfulness there will continue to be nowhere quite like home.