Do You Come "Batteries Included"?

This past week I spent a day in New York, NY at the East Coast HQ of Google participating in their ThinkHealth event. During this event I had the pleasure of seeing the presentation, The Reimagination of Healthcare, by my good industry colleague, Steven Krein of StartUp Health. During this presentation, he introduced this idea of "batteries included"an analogy that applies to people who give versus drain energy from a situation. He talked about how badly we need people in our lives and businesses who come with batteries included. He also challenges us to be people who come with our batteries included. 

In our lives and work we are moment by moment faced with challenging situations. We are also all experts at identifying how and why challenges can/will NOT be overcome. When we stay in this posture and do not proceed to the second thought related to how we can/will overcome challenges, we have our batteries strapped on.

So ask yourself the next time you are in that interaction that is challenging, or tackling a challenge, consider if you are "batteries included", or if you need to go back home and get them. :-)

Thanks again Steven for a great new concept to live by.  

Everyday Greatness

Yesterday I spend a day with a few hundred men at my church at our annual Men's Retreat and one of the topics which came up for consideration was how we as men achieve greatness everyday in our missions to be all that God is calling us to be in this life time. Surely there are as many answers to this question as there are pairs of ears to hear it. As I sat and meditated on this, my own answer emerged and I'd like to share it here.

1. Practicing the Great Commandment as stated in the Bible, to love God, self, neighbor and enemy. Its seems to me, and I have increasing personal experience to confirm this, that an intention of love in all actions does as much as anything to bring out our unique greatness as anything else. It overcomes inappropriate ego drive, hate, fear, undue selfishness. 

2. Resisting comparison as this practice robs all perception of greatness of its effectiveness as one's greatness is one's unique posture to occupy in the world and if you use a comparative definition another's will always seem to overshadow your own. Knowing my own posture and cherishing and being satisfied of the unique greatness of that is critical to showing up as great everyday. I recommend my prior post on this topic at, http://wiseworking.blogspot.com/2008/01/self-comparison-better-than-other.html.  

3. Developing mastery, a practice of operating at a level of high creativity in a space of one's natural giftedness for purposes that benefit one's self, network, community, society and the world. I highly recommend Robert Greene's lecture on this topic at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sYmQFPXmJA.  

4. Practicing patient persistence as achieving greatness as a result of practicing the first 3 points requires patient persistence. This path is not easy and continually dis-courage-ing, one must cultivate a commitment to proceeding with patience and not prone to giving up knowing that greatness is a journey more than a destination and that at anytime we are great, if only in the eyes of our mothers, and have the potential to achieve even greater degrees of greatness. I recommend my prior post on this topic at: http://wiseworking.blogspot.com/2007/11/patience-persistence-2-practices-worth.html.

So here is to our showing up and acknowledging our greatness everyday.