Byron's Babbles

Play Big

Posted in DTK, Educational Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Development, Mindset Mondays by Dr. Byron L. Ernest on March 23, 2021

“We are, after all, a work in progress.” This was the last sentence in Chapter 30 entitled “Work in Progress” of Mindset Mondays with DTK by David Taylor-Klaus (DTK). Actually, I talk about this a lot. I use the metaphor that my portrait will never be finished. Even when I die I don’t want it to be finished, but still be adding brush strokes of something significant. DTK had a drawing of success really looking like a squiggly line, as opposed to the straight line many imagine or try to achieve. So, I took a moment and roughly plotted out my life’s journey (featured image of this post). Upon further reflection I would make a few more dips in it, but you get the idea. I would encourage you to do this little exercise. It will make you reflect deeply about your journey.

Bottom-line is that a significant life takes many twists and turns. DTK taught us that we should not make our definition of success too narrow. I would argue we also need to focus on being significant over successful. Had I stayed on a straight path to, so called, success from college till now without all the twists, turns, valleys, and peaks I probably would be disappointed. By not getting caught up in what DTK called “hyper-specific outcomes” I have had some amazing experiences and opportunities I never could have planned for, or left canvas space in the portrait that has become my life. In other words, I could have never planned out those specific outcomes in my wildest dreams. Fortunately, I have had the opportunity to play big. Are you allowing your portrait to take some twists and turns of the brush as you go?

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: