Hobie Swan from Mindjet is up at the podium at Gnomedex 5.0. Out in the lobby the book, The Cancer Code: How a Journey through Leukemia Led to Software That Changed the Way People Work (website) by Mike and Bettina Jetter, is scattered on tables and freely offered.
Mindjet founder Mike Jetter was struggling against an acute phase of leukemia at thirty. Knowing he will die, he decides to make a difference with the talents he possesses and the short six months he has left. Working from a German cancer ward, the young software engineer codes his legacy: software that reflects the way the human works and boosts creativity.
Remarkably, he ends up living. Mike's wife, Bettina, writes:
It is a bright summer morning as Mike and I walk out of our
house and head to work. After a two-minute drive, we can see the one hundred fifty-foot tall chimney that remains an earthquake-ravaged San Francisco. It somehow seems fitting that we ended up here, because our story is all about rebuilding, too.
The book is about how "the battle against cancer transformed their lives..."
On the eve of the six-month anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami, I recall that one of the mantras that stuck in my mind in the days and weeks and months that ensued was, "Don't Settle."
I'm reminded that six months in, the rebuilding of buildings, hearts, lives and communities continues today in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, India and in many other countries. As the Jetters write, sometimes you can actually emerge resolutely stronger from life-shattering events.
"Out of tragedy, Meaning" is the headline to Peter Russler's, a Wall Street headhunter, article in the aftermath of 9/11 in the May/June issue of Worthwhile Magazine. (He says he was a hard-nosed profits-at-all-costs businessman previously. Today he's a volunteer firefighter; his new book is Spiritual Capitalism: What the FDNY Taught Wall Street About Money.)
Don't settle. I realized after the tsunami that while I was heading in the right direction, it was definitely the slow leaky boat to China approach. My own sense that the important is finally urgent (Stephen Covey would be proud) has, remarkably, not faded.
This morning at the sessions I'm catching up on conversations spurred by this blog, I come across this reminder from an Australian business lawyer's blog:
Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle...
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. - Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement speech
Don't settle I'm reminded by Chris Locke's recent post which includes a short excerpt from the Cluetrain Manifesto:
WE DIE.
You will never hear those words spoken in a television ad. Yet this central fact of human existence colors our world and how we perceive ourselves within it. "Life is too short," we say, and it is. Too short for office politics, for busywork and pointless paper chases, for jumping through hoops and covering our asses, for trying to please, to not offend, for constantly struggling to achieve some ever-receding definition of success. Too short as well for worrying whether we bought the right suit, the right breakfast cereal, the right laptop computer, the right brand of underarm deodorant.
Life is too short because we die. Alone with ourselves, we sometimes stop to wonder what's important, really. Our kids, our friends, our lovers, our losses? Things change and change is often painful. People get "downsized," move away, the old neighborhood isn't what it used to be. Children get sick, get better, get bored, get on our nerves. They grow up hearing news of a world more frightening than anything in ancient fairy tales. The wicked witch won't really push you into the oven, honey, but watch out for AK-47s at recess.
Amazingly, we learn to live with it. Human beings are incredibly resilient. We know it's all temporary, that we can't freeze the good times or hold back the bad. We roll with the punches, regroup, rebuild, pick up the pieces, take another shot. We come to understand that life is just like that. And this seemingly simple understanding is the seed of a profound wisdom.
It is also the source of a deep hunger that pervades modern life -- a longing for something entirely different from the reality reinforced by everyday experience. We long for more connection between what we do for a living and what we genuinely care about, for work that's more than clock-watching drudgery. We long for release from anonymity, to be seen as who we feel ourselves to be rather than as the sum of abstract metrics and parameters. We long to be part of a world that makes sense rather than accept the accidental alienation imposed by market forces too large to grasp, to even contemplate.
And this longing is not mere wistful nostalgia, not just some unreconstructed adolescent dream. It is living evidence of heart, of what makes us most human.
Technorati Tags: gnomedex, tsunami anniversary | Flickr photo by kagey_b
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