What is your role in life?
How active are you in creating harmony (and a result happiness)?
Thinking about harmony is great… but useless.
Harmony requires application… It requires ACTION.
I was never a good student. I don’t know all of the details of finance. I don’t remember all of the formulas I should know from engineering. I make up parenting as I go along.
Sometimes I wish I was different (disharmony).
I have always wanted to be the MASTER of something…
I admire people who are great at something; be it golf, math, history, electronic instrumentation, stocks, a certain kind of medicine, entrepreneurship…
I am crazy turned on by expertise and dedication.
What I have always been drawn to…
What I have dreamt of perfecting…
What I wake up for everyday is creating harmony…
That hasn’t felt like an “area of mastery”, but as I get older, I believe that it might be…
I am a pain in the ass with those I know, love and work with respect to harmony.
I am not a “detailed” person, nor a “perfectionist” – and yet in harmony, I want and expect perfection.
I know I am NOT a lot of things. I am NOT many things I wish I was. But, I am a HARMONIZER. I spend my life HARMONIZING…
I am on the phone with my parents every night. It is the same conversation. My comments are virtually exclusively to help them find harmony. I say things to help them see the value in each other. I give them ideas to help them understand the truth in the situation beyond what they can see. Often it is fruitless. Occassionally it works.
This week, my mom called my dad. They no longer live together. They went to lunch. They have been married for 51 YEARS tomorrow, and they have found such minimal harmony in their relationship despite my efforts. But, on Wednesday they went to lunch together and had a good time. My dad cried seeing my mom. It breaks my heart that harmony can be so hard and elusive for some.
At home, in virtually every conversation, I am thinking, suggesting, and trying to act on harmony. And, occasionally I fail. How I help with homework, I am thinking about it. Am I building and acknowledging on the behavior that is there – or speaking to the behavior that is not? What I make for breakfast, I am thinking about it… how do I show the boys love and inspiration in what I make? Trying to help myself and Susy understand how a younger mind works – while trying to show the boys how and why their “absolute truths” today tie to who they want to be tomorrow.
We are far from perfect, but I find amazingly deep satisfaction knowing that our family seems to love spending time together, knowing that we can talk about all topics with my boys – even awkward ones, knowing that even though our relationships are not perfect, we are all respectful of each other and trying to make it better.
That is harmony. It’s not about it being perfect. It’s about embracing what is there and actively working to make it better. The pace doesn’t always feel fast… but every so often you see the breakthroughs.
Harmony is about acknowledging the breakthroughs. Seeing EVERY breakthrough and acknowledging it. Not overly so – but progress is progress – and acknowledging it is essential.
EVERY meeting that I have. EVERY conversation that I have at work. EVERY thing that I do, is in some way trying to drive HARMONY.
Helping people understand our strategy – so that they can embrace our truth and move us into the company that we want to be.
Helping people understand each other – so that they may construct and not consume each other.
Suggesting, encouraging, or making people have the conversations that they need to have DIRECTLY WITH the people they need to have them with. Without candid conversation – we cannot understand the truth – we cannot build trust – we cannot move ourselves into the reality that we want – we can NEVER reach harmony.
Suggesting to people HOW to have the conversations, how to see the value in the people that work for them, or with them. Encouraging my colleagues to be themselves, to be honest, BUT TO DO IT always exploring for the absolute truth, mindful of our own bias and how our attitudes may affect the conversation and deliberate about the direction that we are trying to go.
Someone once asked me what my role as president is, and I told them, “My role is simple – all I need to do is make sure that the conversations that NEED to happen, CAN happen, and DO happen! If those things happen, everything solves itself. What I don’t say is that I work really hard to make sure conversations happen in a way that allows them to happen more productively and more often – in order to achieve harmony – and therefore success.
When I look back on my days, I can trace virtually every activity that I do to harmony… truly VIRTUALLY every activity that I do is committed to constructing it in
The people
The conversations
The strategy
The situations
The plan
The decision
Harmony and sustained success requires it.
The reason that I have not achieved greater success in my life, is because I have lacked focus… and yet, part of my focus was to run a company… and now I do (I actually run two).
The reason that I have not achieved greater success in my life, is because I have lacked courage… the courage to take greater risk, but as I understand myself better – I have taken the risks that mattered to me. I have moved often. I have seen the world. I have always put myself in positions and situations that scared me.
But regarding my post a few days ago, who defined this race? What does winning look like?
I do look at those 20 something, 30 something and 40 something guys or gals that create a Facebook, or an Apple, or so many other lesser known companies, and I envy them a little. I envy the FLOW they must have found early in life, if not in total, in some specific space or idea.
But harmony is not relative – its absolute.
We are each on our journey.
Part of living a life of harmony is figuring out who you are and trying to merge that with who you want to be.
Part of living a life of harmony requires figuring out who you are not and accepting that in your decisions – to keep you from wishing you were someone else.
A life of harmony requires APPLICATION and ACTION…
I am not who I thought I would be… and in many ways I am better.
As much as I wanted to be an expert in something specific, harmony is my thing.
I will always be a student of harmony.
By definition, harmony has no cumulative mastery, as it exists only in the moment.
I will always want to be more than I am today.
By definition, it is that energy to achieve and grow that keeps us in harmony.
I will work to be better at accepting that harmony is valuable and “something” that is worthy of me, and that I am worthy of “it”…
“HARMONY” wasn’t something I thought about as a kid. I just felt the absence of it.
“HARMONY” wasn’t a class they taught in college. I was just drawn to it.
“HARMONY” is not a traditional area of mastery. So, it doesn’t show up on most radar screens. It doesn’t receive credit from traditionalists.
I hate to admit it, and I don’t know that I admit it completely.
HARMONY may be the only thing that I am good at. It may be the only thing I care about.
HARMONY to me is culture, its family, its strategy, its coaching, its success, its happiness, it is the atom of all success and happiness.
It is because of my aspiration for and love of harmony
that I have an amazing family,
that I have deep and rich and wonderful friendships,
that I have somehow managed to become President of two companies and
that we have something special in our company with respect to how we treat each other and how we are growing,
that I am so much happier than I have ever been,
that I have greater peace of mind,
that I am convinced that I am living for something greater than myself,
that I am no longer afraid of dying…
HARMONY is in the application…
And, I, despite my many failings, am AN ASPIRING HARMONIZER.
That is, for whatever reason, the role that I was born to play in life.
What is your role in life? And, is being a harmonizer a piece of it?
Make HARMONY happen!
Nestor