Thoughts racing in my head

I'm smack in the middle of reading "Linchpin Are You Indispensable?" by Seth Godin.  It's the kind of book that you instantly identify with & want to keep reading, however finding chunks of uninterrupted time in my life are rare, so I'm reading & digesting it in bits & pieces.

Seth has the gift of being able to coin new terms. He reintroduces old concepts in new ways so that you visualize them in entirely new contexts.  He really paints a new vision for his audience - it's almost like art. One of those terms is "the resistance" which more often than not prevents us from staying on course and seeing our goals through to the end. There are also those endless personal to-do lists that we all continually add to, but never seem to fully complete.

"Whichever way the wind of resistance is coming from, that's the way to head - directly into the resistance. And the closer you get to achieving the breakthrough your genius has in mind, the stronger the wind will blow and the harder the resistance will fight to stop you." - Seth Godin

There have been so many thoughts and ideas racing in my head as I've been reading this book.  It makes you really take a look at how you have been approaching your life & more specifically, your work life & career.  Most people have this vision of the things they strive to accomplish, but perhaps are not as deliberate when considering the process or the journey. Things just happen & most people are unaware of the specifics of what got them from point A to point B. Most of us have done the things asked of us & have been rewarded for doing so. Or so we thought.

"Optimism is the most important human trait, because it allows us to evolve our ideas, to improve our situation, and to hope for a better tomorrow." - Seth Godin

Reading this book, however has made me reevaluate my journey from here on out. Maintaining optimism in my thoughts will be a key to making that happen. It's also related to the "awakening" I mentioned in my last post which is part of my personal recession definition. Nothing in my career life right now seems to be moving quickly towards certainty or closure.  This past year has seemed so much more like a roller coaster ride - one I'm not behind the controls of.  Along with that feeling of having had my fate fall in someone else's hands, a fear of sorts, comes an almost primal need to make a transfer of power, to free up the resistance and to keep driving towards accomplishing my goals even if it means swimming in uncharted waters. It's an effort to develop & share my own works of art with the world in whatever form they may be.

"Where do you put the fear." "The linchpin feels the fear, acknowledges it, then proceeds." - Seth Godin

We all have episodes in our lives when initial fear has held us back & the ideas presented in this book really challenges us to push past where the fear wants to take us in lieu of something greater, something much more fulfilling. While I will share more nuggets of truth from this book in future posts, hopefully for now I have given you a little taste of what this book is about, so that you'll want to pick it up & read it for yourselves.