Have you ever sat in an important conversation but couldn’t concentrate? I recall sitting with my mentor at Stanford years ago. It was a few weeks after returning from a year-long journey through Southeast Asia, where I spent time meditating to experience a deeper sense of life.
My mentor and I discussed my upcoming onsite interview for a faculty job at MIT. A strong resume got me the flight out there, I still needed to close the deal. We spoke about interview strategy, but on the inside I kept wondering what I was doing with my life. Did I really care to continue teaching persuasion in a materialistic world after being saturated in self-growth? I bombed that interview, I couldn’t stop thinking of this question.
Slowly, metamorphically, I began to combine communication with personal growth. The result is my new book on personal power. This book represents the synergy between life and work. But possibly the most important topic on personal power is not even in the book. That is the idea of BEING and BECOMING.
You may be familiar with the statue of the Self Made Man pictured above. I first saw this statue as a young adult in the home of another mentor, Nathaniel Branden. I loved this statue because it embraced the concept I held most dearly in my youth – we choose who we become.
We figuratively carve out our identity through education, hard work, and tenacity. We BECOME who we desire deliberately.
This is half the equation to fulfillment. But it overlooks a huge truth that I would only come to understand years later – the qualities of the stone itself.
Michelangelo once said, “every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”
BEING is recognizing the qualities that make up our heart, the grain and material composition of the stone that represents us.
The pressures of society and our own desires don’t always match up with our heart and spirit. When I carve against the grain, I feel unfulfilled. Even as I succeed in shaping my world, that success no longer fits the relationship I want to feel with life.
True power, true fulfillment, comes from an alignment between BEING and BECOMING.
I invite you to consider whether today is a good day to pick up the hammer and continue shaping your dreams, or to slow down and examine the grain of your spirit.