Be Who You Are

I watched an interesting TED video presented by Brene Brown, who has a doctorate in social work and is a author many times over--she talked about one book in particular called The Gifts of Imperfection: Letting Go of Who We Think We Should Be and Embracing Who We Are (2010).

She said that from all her studies and research, what she learned is that purpose and meaning in life comes from the connections we make and maintain.

But what gets in the way is shame and fear--shame that we are not good enough and fear that we cannot make real connections with others.To move beyond shame and fear, we need to feel worthy as human beings--true self acceptance--and say "I am enough."
 
However, she points out that as a society there is a lot of numbing going on (i.e. plenty of shame and fear) and that is why we are the most in debt, obese, addicted, and medicated society in history.  I liked this presentation and thought about how hard we are on ourselves--we are never good enough.

• All our lives we pursue signs of advancement from that gold star in grade school to collections of degrees, awards, promotions, material goods, and even relationships.
• We constantly push ourselves further and faster on the treadmill of life--in part to learn, grow and be better, but also to try to achieve our sense of self-worth and -acceptance.

Yet, as Brown points out those that are successful with relationships and have a strong sense of love and belonging are those that feel they are inherently worthy. They have self-esteem without having to achieve any of these things.

That sense of self-worth and confidence, Brown says, enables you to achieve three key things in life:

1. Courage--This is the courage to be yourself and to tell others who you are with a whole heart (i.e. they don't hide in shame).
2. Compassion--That is compassion for others, but also for yourself first--you accept yourself.
3. Connection--Getting to solid relationships in life is a result of our own capacity to be authentic.

When you have that self-worth and confidence then you can embrace your vulnerabilities and make them beautiful, rather than numb yourself to constantly try to cover the disdain you feel for your frailties and weaknesses. 

From my perspective, our growth and contributions to the world are good things--leave the world better than you found it!

However, the proving ourselves and amassing "things," while milestones in life, are not a measure of a person's true worth. 

Sometimes it is fine to get over it all--accept yourself, be yourself, and stop worrying that your never good enough.

In the Torah (bible), when Moshe asked G-d his name--G-d replies in Exodus 3:14: "I am that I am."  

To me, this is really the lesson here--if we but try to emulate G-d, then "we are what we are."

That is not defeat or giving up on bettering ourselves, but acceptance of who we are, where we came from, and where we want to go in our lives.

We don't have to beat ourselves up for being those things or for making good faith mistakes along the way. 


 (Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Be Who You Are

Life Perspective

I saw this picture and immediately feel in love with it--it is so simple, yet so brilliant.

Like the 6 days of creation and then G-d rested, this picture illuminates in 6 panes of shades of black and white, the cycle of life of man and woman, and then stops (rests).

From carefree children to growing young adults, love and marriage, old age together, loss and loneliness, and finally together again--returned to the earth and I believe in the after-world.

The tree on the left overhands and follows the path of the couple; it grows, matures, and seems to whither along with them--this is mother earth clearly sheltering and closely intertwined with its children.

The connection between people and earth, between one person and another, and between this world and the next...the whole of life's existence and purpose seems to be expressed here.

The meaning and purpose is inherent in the cycle itself--throughout our growth, we experience trials and tribulation--and our mettle is tested and proven until it ends or perhaps begins again.

The overall story is of time marching on, and we but mortals experiencing so much--growth and decline, connection and separation, pleasure and pain--yet never escaping time's grasp.

This is the cycle of life and G-d is ever at the helm.

To me, this picture brings perspective, understanding, fear, and peace all at the same time.

(Source Photo: here)

Life Perspective

Making Something Out of Nothing

At the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit this past week (October 7-9, 2009), I heard about this new math for value creation:

Nothing + Nothing = Something

At first, you sort of go, WHAT?

Then, it starts to make a lot of sense.

Seemingly nothings can be combined (for example, through mashups) to become something significant.

When you really think about it, doesn’t this really happen all the time.

INFORMATION: You can have tens or thousands of data points, but it’s not till you connect the dots that you have meaningful information or business intelligence.

PEOPLE: Similarly, you can have individuals, but it’s not until you put them together—professionally or personally—that you really get sparks flying.

Harvard Business Review, October 2009, put it this way:

“Ants aren’t smart…ant colonies are…under the right conditions, groups—whether ant colonies, markets, or corporations—can be smarter than any of their members.” This is the “wisdom of crowds and swarm intelligence.”

PROCESS: We can have a workable process, but a single process alone may not produce diddly. However, when you string processes together—for example, in an assembly line—you can produce a complex product or service. Think of a car or a plane or a intricate surgical procedure.

TECHNOLOGY: I am sure you have all experienced the purchase of hardware or software technologies that in and of themselves are basically useless to the organization. It’s only when we combine them into a workable application system that we have something technologically valuable to the end-user.

Whatever, the combination, we don’t always know in advance what we are going to get when we make new connections—this is the process of ideation, innovation, and transformation.

Think of the chemist or engineer or artist that combines chemicals, building blocks elements, or colors, textures, and styles in new ways and gets something previously unimaginable or not anticipated.

In a sense, organization and personal value creation is very much about creating relationships and associations between things. And a good leader knows how to make these combinations work:

Getting people and organizations to work together productively.

Generating new ideas for innovative business products or better ways of serving the customer.

Linking people, process, and technology in ever expanding ways to execute more effectively and efficiently than ever before.

Enterprise architecture shares this principle of identifying and optimizing relationships and associations between architectural entities such as business processes, data elements, and application systems. Typically, we perform these associations in architectural models, such as business process, data, and system models. Moreover, when we combine these models, we really advance the cause by determining what our processes are/should be, what information is needed to perform these, and what are the systems that serve up this information. Models help architects to identify gaps, redundancies, inefficiencies, and opportunities between the nothings to improve the greater whole of the something.

The real enterprise architect will make the leap from just describing many of these elements to making the real connections and providing a future direction (aka a target architecture) or at least recommending some viable options for one.

Nothing + Nothing (can) = Something. This will happen when we have the following:

• The right touch of leadership skills to encourage, motivate and facilitate value creation.
• The allocation of talented people to the task of combining things in new ways.
• And the special sauce—which is everyone’s commitment, creativity, and hard work to make something new and wonderful emerge.

Making Something Out of Nothing

Technology, A Comfort to the Masses

Typically, as technologists, we like to point out the great things that technology is doing for us—making us more productive, facilitating more convenience, allowing us to perform feats that humans alone could not do, and enabling us to connect with others almost without regard to space and time. And truly, we are fortunate to live in a time in history with all these new unbelievable capabilities—our ancestors would be jealous in so many ways.

Yet, there is a flip side to technology—what some refer to as the 24x7 society—“always on”—that we are creating, in which life is a virtual non-stop deluge of emails, voicemails, videoconferencing, messaging, Friending, Linking-in, blogging, tweeting, YouTubing, and more.

We are becoming a society of people living in a Matrix-type virtual world, where we go around addicted to the online cyber world and yet in so many ways are unconscious to the real-world relationships that are suffering in neglect and silence.

A fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal, 22-23 August 2009 entitled, Not So Fast, by John Freeman states that “we need to protect the finite well of our attention if we care about our relationships.”

Certainly, online communications and connections are valuable, and in many ways are meaningful to us. They can create wonderful opportunities to bond with those near and far, including those who would be normally beyond our reach geographically and temporally. For me it’s been great reconnecting with old friends from schools, jobs, and communities. And yes, who would think that Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger would be but a FaceBook message away for me?

Yet while all the online interaction is fulfilling for us in so many ways—filling voids of all sorts in our lives—in reality the connections we make in the virtual world are but a tiny fraction of the real world human-to-human relationships we have in terms of their significance and impact.

The Journal article puts it this way: “This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, workplace meltdowns, and unhappiness. How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen?”

One of the biggest fears that people have is not their own mortality, but that of being left alone in the corporeal world—for each of us, while a world unto ourselves, are small in the vastness of all that is around us. Perhaps to feel less alone, people amass and encircle themselves with great amounts of familiar, comforting, and loving people and things. And while people have these, they are connected, grounded, loved, and they are comforted that they are not alone.

But the harsh reality is that no matter how much we have in our lives, people are beings onto themselves, and over time, unfortunately and extremely painfully, all worldly things are ultimately lost.

The Journal states: “We may rely heavily on the Internet , but we cannot touch it, taste it, or experience the indescribable feeling of togetherness that one gleans from face-to-face interaction.”

Connections are great. Virtual relationships can be satisfying and genuine. All the technology communication mechanisms are fast, efficient, and powerful in their ability to reach people anytime and anywhere. Yet, we must balance all these with the people we care about the most. We cannot sacrifice our deepest and most intimate relationships by sitting in front of a computer screen morning, noon, and night and walking around with the BlackBerry taking phone calls and emails at our kids' school play, on their graduation day, and during their wedding recital. We are missing the boat on what is really important. We have forgotten how to balance. We have gone to extremes. We are hurting the ones we truly love the most.

“We need to uncouple our idea of progress from speed, separate the idea of speed from efficiency, pause and step back enough to realize that efficiency may be good for business and governments, but does not always lead to mindfulness and sustainable, rewarding relationships.”

Finally, with all the technology, we are in a sense becoming less human and more mechanical—like the Borg, in Star Trek—with BlackBerrys and Netbooks as our implants. Let’s find some time to pull the plug on these technologies and rediscover the real from the virtual.

Technology, A Comfort to the Masses