Ambition, competition, and greatness can, and in fact must, exist in the same universe as humility, selflessness, and servanthood.*
(Erwin McManus)

After each episode of flow a person becomes more of a unique individual, less predictable, possessed of rarer skills.
(Mihály Csikszentmihalyi)

Some are tempted, when they see the toxic nature of competition, to replace it outright with cooperation.

Cooperation is good, our goal, but misses the edge competition brings for everyone, those we work with and those we seek to deliver to.

Yet those who only pursue ambition, competition and greatness lose out on how much farther we can travel when we pursue humility and selflessness and servanthood, too.

By these means, in uncovering our individuality, we find our cooperation.

*From Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior;
**From Mihály Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.

You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.*
(Annie Dillard)

With the increasing specialisation of knowledge, and professionalisation of everyday life, suddenly being delighted by something, or loving something, was seen as vaguely disreputable.**
(Tom Vanderbilt)

Tom Vanderbilt is reflecting on how the meanings of dilettante (from the Italian dilettare – “to delight”) and amateur (from the French aimer – to love”) have changed over time.

The work I’ve been developing for more than twenty years is about helping people to develop their talents into strengths, to focus on what they are good at and passionate about, but as Vanderbilt ponders,

What new passions might there be out there that you’ve yet to discover?**

It’s a good question that provides me with both nuance for my work and a personal challenge.

Quoting Winston Churchill, he encourages me to turn to other things which I can both love and delight in. Not in order to become an expert but, as I would suggest, to wander through:

It may well be that those whose work is their pleasure are those who most need the means of banishing it at intervals from their minds.^

The other delightful and lovely part of this is that we have no idea as we begin just what will be added to to what we love and delight in most of all.

*Annie Dillard, quoted in Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing blog: Olfactory Work;
**From Tom Vanderbilt’s Beginners:
^Winston Churchill, quoted in Tom Vanderbilt’s Beginners.

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.*
(Shunryu Suzuki)

Being of any real sort appears to require limitation. Perhaps this is because Being requires Becoming, as well as more static existence – and to become is to become something more, or at least something different.**
(Jordan Peterson)

If we are to become more, we must become less.

To learn new things is to be one without knowledge and expertise, our place of limitation.

At first we are incompetent, clumsy, mistake-ridden, but a different you and a different me will emerge.

Until we begin again.

*Shunryu Suzuki, quoted in Tom Vanderbilt’s Beginners;
**From Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life.

a lot of people were raised to believe that they need needed to fix their weaknesses but their talents would take care of themselves*
(Mary Reckmeyer)

May you have the grace of encouragement
To awaken the gift in the other’s heart,
Building in them the confidence
To follow the call of the gift.**
(John O’Donohue)

We have the opportunity to be for others the space of encouragement they need to explore the height and depth and length of their possibility.

It is also the means by which we move into greater discovery because we realise we need to grow and become in order to be the place they need:

To the warrior, greatness is not the product of ego but of service. If you live for yourself, you can settle for less. If you live for others, it requires all of who you are.^

We don’t know all of who we are. At least I hope I don’t. This is a journey that may be never-ending, if we are prepared to make it:

It remains the dream of every life to realise itself, to reach out and lift oneself to greater heights. A life that continues to remain on the safe side if its own habits and repetitions, that never engages with the risk of its own possibility, remains an unlived life.^^

*From Mary Reckmeyer’s Strengths Based Parenting;
**From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For a New Position;
^From Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior;
^^From John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us.

strengths are not the opposite of weaknesses, and you can’t turn weaknesses into strengths*
(Mary Reckmeyer)

When you live a life of obligation, it steals from you your strength. Wisdom allows you to harness your strength.**
(Erwin McManus)

For a long time, we’ve been on a journey into our strengths.

We’ve had to negotiate temptations to compromise, demands to go with the flow of what others or the culture demand.

Strengths are more than talents, a weaving together of our abilities and passions and most enriching experiences, laying where we find ourselves in the vitality of the present moment, forgetful of self, at home in our wildness:^

The poet wrote the poem no doubt, but he forgot himself while he wrote it, and we forget him while we read.^^

One of the sad things today is that so many are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. … This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside their should. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts.*^

*From Mary Reckmeyer’s Strengths Based Parenting;
**From Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior;
^This doesn’t mean that we cannot learn new things, nor learn from others who have completely different strengths to ours: indeed, these are signs that we are pursuing our strengths rather than our weaknesses;
^^E. M. Forster, quoted in Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting;
*^John O’Donohue, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Identity Politics Turning Us on Each Other and on Ourselves.

You’ll happily take the destination but the truth is, the journey is too arduous.*
(Seth Godin)

We all need some quiet place to go to uncover our questions: seek, ask, knock.

*From Seth Godin’s blog: Destinations, risks and journeys.

To forget its Creator is one of the function of a Creation.*
(E. M. Forster)

Forget me but, please, remember to be you:

Who is my True Self?

What is my Contribution?

*E. M. Forster, quoted in Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting.

Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.*
(John Wooden)

The man of action … forgets a great deal to do one thing.**
(Friedrich Nietzsche)

Strength isn’t invincibility, peace isn’t serene calmness.

They never have been.

They are about continuing and overcoming through failure and doubt, difficulty and anxiety, challenge and complexity, against the odds to prosper and flourish.

So we keep going with what it is we must do.

Maybe if we’re feeling invincible and serenely calm then we’re not doing what we must.

*John Wooden, quoted in Mary Reckmeyer’s Strengths Based Parenting;
**Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting.

Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is inevitable to the eyes.*
(The Little Prince)

Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.**
(Jesus of Nazerath)

We can only see so much with our minds.

There is much more to be seen with our hearts.

More still only within our activeness.

*The Little Prince, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: How to draw what is invisible;
**Matthew 7:7-8.

My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast. I will sing and make melody. Awake, my soul! Awake, O harp and lyre! I will awake the dawn.*

The adjacent possibilities are plenty but can dissipate when met by our plans.

A friend introduced me yesterday to David Whyte’s A Morning Poem:

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.**

I didn’t know it when I arose this morning that I would be reading a very similar thought from John O’Donohue:

May morning be astir with the harvest of night:
Your mind quickening to the eros of a new question,
Your eyes seduced by some unintended glimpse
That cut right through a surface to a source.
…
A morning when you become a pure vessel
For what wants to ascend from silence
…
To reach beyond silence
And the wheel of repetition.
…
In order to come to birth
In a clean line of form,
That claims from time
A rhythm not yet heard
That calls space to
A different shape.^

I’d already read these words and passed on when I re-read Whyte’s. I almost missed the significance of them, moving on to read other lines in other books.

That’s the problem, we can so easily miss that moment of possibility, of imagining a different day: it led to an idea for a piece of art.

In this moment Whyte mentions, there’s the possibility of forgetting what we were going to do, and re-membering what we could do.

Bring the unplanned possibilities to birth.

Here is Whyte’s poem for morning in its entirety:

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?^^

*Psalm 57:7-8;
**From David Whyte’s A Morning Poem;
^From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For the Artist at the Start of the Day;
^^A Morning Poem.