Where To Invest My Energy?

Where and how to apply myself?

In running an old company, my co-founder - and creative visionary, Adam - had a particular skill (one of many): to make the first move.

When faced with a blank sheet, most stumble.
Someone or something needs to begin. Something to kick against.

Adam did this.

Most of us don’t.

So - where do you begin?

Chatting to a friend last week, something similar surfaced.

Where to apply myself?
Where to focus my energy?

He’s some months out of a big startup adventure.
All encompassing, as it was. Creative. Bruising, in its own way.

There’s a new vision in the tank, a bun in the metaphorical oven. Financially planned and modelled.

Head or heart though, I'm not sure.

Irrespective, this new vision tugs at him.

As does the day to day.

Family life is busy. Two young kids wanting, needing what young kids do, old skool that they are. Food on their plates. A roof above their heads.

A wife travelling the world in her work too.

And amid all this, the question returns:

Where - and how - to apply myself?

Do I go all in on the next big vision?
Is that what I’m supposed to do?

Or do I, like most 'normal' people, get a job?

Two lenses I’ve found useful here.
And a third, slightly more provocative.

But first.

James Hillman - a renegade psychologist - wrote about what he called the acorn theory.

That there is a seed in each of us, wanting to grow.

In the main, of course, we don’t.

Preferring instead the slightly empty safety of playing within someone else’s guard rails.
Be the doctor. The lawyer. The marketing manager.
Play nicely. Don’t make a fuss. Be quiet, plan your next holiday and go out for meals.

Nice, maybe. But each day, a little more dead than the day before.

So:

What might be trying to find root in you?

The poet Rilke said it well:

"This is how we grow: by being defeated by greater and greater things".

This a LeanMind guiding invocation.

Which brings us to Jim Collins.

One of the most prominent business thinkers of our time.
His recent work - 13 years in the crafting - asks a bigger question:

"What To Make Of A Life".

In studying people navigating what he calls “cliff moments” - those crevasse like phases where the old no longer quite works, or falls apart completely - he returns to an idea he calls encodings.

The patterns you can’t help but return to.

Ways of thinking, working, creating - that your mind and body recognise as yours.

A felt sense.

Acorns, by another name.

Which brings us to the third. Slightly more provocative.

Nir Eyal - author and student of the mind - writes about prayer.

Not necessarily as religion.
But as practice.

People who pray, he notes, and research tells us, are happier.
More connected.
Healthier. Longer lived.

Prayer, in his telling, need not be to a god - whatever that means to you.

It might be nature.
Something larger.
Something shaping and moving through all this.

But if it is to something - the effects, he suggests, are stronger still.

Which brings us back.

To my friend wrestling with the question - and maybe you know someone too. If so, send this to them.

Where and how to apply myself?

We try to think our way there.

We churn it.
Turn it over.
Optimise it.
Wrestle.

Try something else.

Pray on it.

Sit quietly.

Let the noise settle.
Let the mind steady.

Feel the moment.
A simple sense of appreciation - of being here at all.

Then ask:

Where - and how - should I apply myself?

Drop the question into the pond of your soul

And listen for what returns.

Not for the loud answer.
Or the clever.

The one your body recognises as true.

See what the acorn asks of you.