Strengthen Your Core

This 21st blog entry sums up the weeks before and after the 30th of January 2024. Getting to this point actually required borrowing Occam's Razor to help decipher 3 important messages alluded to in Blog Entry #1.

Ton

3/29/20242 min read

An article I read some weeks back quoted a history professor postulating that a constant state of war exists within Elon Musk’s head. If one takes that argument and places it side by side with Simon Sinek’s Infinite Game, we all inevitably draw the conclusion that, apart from his immense wealth, we all should not be any different from Mr. Musk. Balance undeniably necessitates a constant state of civil war within ourselves. We have no choice on the matter of constantly fighting in the many theatres of that war, in our bodies, in our hearts and in our minds. And outside perhaps of intentional self-destruction, we should all expect to be always surrounded.

Drawing inspiration from a former management trainee who once shared something about constantly working on emotionally protecting herself, I thought I’d celebrate this piece by summarizing 3 very simple career-long discoveries about strengthening our own respective cores:

1. Make peace with yourself. If Mr. Sinek is right about the Infinite Game, there can be no victory. There can only be peace. Our fears and the brave fronts that we put up to conceal them will never help us forget our past, simply because unless you have the anti-gift of dementia or Alzheimer’s, there can be no forgetting. There is only forgiveness, especially whenever we decide to put ourselves out there - an inevitability, given our nature as social creatures. It is only when we finally decide to confront our own monsters, that we would begin to realize how much we ourselves have conspired to supply them the power they have over us.

2. Read to imbibe, not to quote. We should ideally read for ourselves alone, to enrich us and to renew us by helping us understand more of ourselves in the grander scheme of things that continue to evolve, and perhaps as a consequence, understand more people, and their constant evolution. If we are to become ready to be a benefit to others, we have to make sure that we are first a benefit to ourselves. It matters a lot what we decide to invest our time reading for sure.  But it matters more that we ourselves are convinced about the truth of what we've read, regardless of whether we could convince others to believe the same.  

3. Imagine the possible. And then ask the right questions. Someone who I didn’t think highly of once said this to me. It’s both funny and sad how oftentimes people readily accept or dismiss something that is said, simply because of the person who said it. No single person has either the monopoly or the poverty of truth. To ignore this fact about truth is either a worrisome indication of laziness and cowardice, or just simply something born out of a dreadful lack of imagination. Arriving at the right answers will be a very exhausting challenge if for whatever reason, we always choose not to ask the right questions.

Our pursuit to achieve the dignity of work will often leave us exposed to situations that would potentially shake our core.  A strong core may not always be enough to protect everything we hold dear.  But for all the inner conflicts within us that others cannot see, our core should be built to protect at least one thing - hope, if not for ourselves, then at least for those who would dare to believe not necessarily in who we are or what past had made us, but in what we choose to stand firmly enough to take action for.  There are many people who appear strong, as much as we would all like to believe that we are.  And that may be so.  But absent that sort of hope, all our cores could ever become are impenetrable fortresses of our individual and collective self-imprisonment. 

I look forward to seeing many of you on the battlefield.

Happy Easter!