I was watching Aaron Sorkin's
wonderful series Sports Night
on DVD on my new PC on the flight to Miami this afternoon -- it's great
to be liberated from the mediocre crap they show on the airplane
screens. Every episode of the series has a couple of truly memorable
lines. The line that really hit home this afternoon, especially since I
was flying on a work assignment on the Sunday before a holiday Monday
(a holiday in Canada, anyway), was the one the studio crew member spoke
when asked a question about his job, and how it fit with the jobs of
the exemplary and perfectly matched team of workers on the show. He
said simply, with delight, "It's What I Do."
To be able to answer with that statement is, in a way, to know the
meaning of one's life, and one's personal role in the world. We are
hard wired, like every other creature on Earth, to strive to know what
we're doing here, our purpose, the meaning of our existence, to
instinctively figure out what we need to do to survive and how to do it
well. What we do, how we
make a living, is more than just a job, it's an essential part of the
definition of who we are. This idea has been echoed by artists in
different ways as long as we have existed. The TV program Millennium had as one of its tag
lines "This is why we're here".
The extraordinary Sheryl Crow song "We
Do What We Can" reaffirms it. We all want to know our role, what
we were uniquely born for. It is an essence of our psyche. We all want
to say, knowingly, "This is what I do." -- I with a capital letter, bold.
In business the name for this dangerous concept is Distinctive Competency, which means
the one specific thing you do better than anyone else. Most of us spend most
of our lives looking for it, and many never find it, content to do an
average, replaceable job, brainwashed by the political manipulators and
economic elites into believing we're just commodities, like the
products we're induced to buy. But we are not. We are all, every
creature on Earth, special, unique, destined by the stars or by Darwin
or by God or whatever guiding hand you choose to believe in, to do
something utterly individual, inimitable, matchless, without compare.
The butterfly fluttering its wings in South America not only
precipitates the tidal wave in Japan by doing so, it was meant to do so. That's what it does.
We have forgotten all this, to our catastophic impoverishment and
debasement. If we all realized that we have a distinctive competency,
the consequences for our self-esteem, for our perceived value in the
workplace, for the entire social and political and economic system,
would be enormous, earth-shaking. It took me forty years to find mine.*
We need to teach young people how to find theirs, more quickly and
efficiently, to help them learn what is their true calling. We live in
a world so connected that, having found our calling, what we do best,
we could almost certainly find the market, and the people whose
distinctive competencies are a perfect fit with ours, the people we are
ideally suited, destined to make a living with. This is my vision for New
Collaborative Enterprises.
And how liberating, how empowering, how uplifting it would be for every
one of us to find and know what we do better than anyone else! Perhaps
it's possible that it could bring such extraordinary meaning to each of
us, to our lives, that it could be the catalyst for global peace and
harmony, for an end to violence and hatred and envy and greed and
inequity. Because what possible reason would there then be for us to
fight among ourselves, or with nature's other creatures, if we knew
that no one else could fill our role, our place, our destiny? That we
have no competition for what we do best, and that others are no threat
to us, or us to them. That we have a purpose, and nothing to prevent us
from realizing it, fulfilling it. Is that so crazy?
_________________
* My distinctive competency is idea
transfer, the ability to take an idea or invention or creation
from one discipline (say, astrophysics or architecture or literature)
and conceive of how it might be practically applied in a completely
different discipline (say, software design, or printing, or education).
It's something that I innately knew how to do, and then honed by
practice, and study of the creative process, and nurtured through
extensive, broad reading. My ancestors took the name Pollard, as was the custom of
their time, from their
distinctive competency -- to pollard
means to cut off and harvest the top part of a tree, in such a way that
the remainder continues to grow. We were the first human renewable
foresters, and the fact that this was what they did, uniquely, was so
important, so essential to these ancestors that they took their very
name from their job -- what they did literally defined who they were.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
