I had a cool conversation with a friend recently talking about keeping challenge, growth and passion ever present in our lives. And I shared an illustration that I know I heard somewhere, and then added my own flavor – but I wanted to share it with all of you.
As you look at opportunities or teams to get involved in, whether it is work, a hobby or a passion, never go if you will be the best player in the band. When you are the best player on the band, or the fastest player on the team, there is no where to go but down. Here is why:
- Everyone wants you to be a little worse at what you do, to reduce the distance between you and them, for their own guilt or self-worth.
- You won’t be stretched, so you will get lazy and out of discipline because on most days you won’t need to be to still come in first on that team.
- It will kill your initiative to learn, because you will be answering questions so often that to you are simplistic, and you won’t have as much desire to push on.
- You will eventually get bored with what seemed like the dream job – where you would start as top dog, but you end up just being the fastest fat guy around.
So, what sort of opportunities or teams should you chose? Here are my recommendations:
- Join the team that you would just like to be in the room to hear them talk about what they do.
- Step into the opportunities that are tremendously over your head (but you better bring your passion with you…hehe).
- Ask yourself “Would I work here full time for free just because of what I would learn?” If the answer is no, look somewhere else – because anything else doesn’t match your passion or is too easy. (And you may have to work for free to get into some of these opportunities – no matter what team it is, it is super hard to turn away a dedicated and passionate full time volunteer!)
Exceptions! Of course there are exceptions, here are a couple I can think of:
- People are always telling you that you’re too intense, driven or talking over their head. If this is the case then it is likely that you will keep pushing regardless of the team you are on. BUT, you can still get stale if you aren’t able to execute on the challenges and possibilities that you see. And your drive will move from a healthy disruption, to very destructive on that team.
- You don’t aspire to do anything great.
- You really just want to get to the highest rank for your Halo 3 profile in Xbox Live.
- Watching 4-10 hours of tv a week has drained your mind of the will to think.
- You think that someone else is going to magically see the hidden genius inside you and mentor you to greatness, which you will then take the credit for as you become a keynote leader with a six figure income and a best selling book.
Well, thats all I could think of for exceptions. If what you’re doing, investing the time of your life on, isn’t so challenging that you’ve got to stop during parts of the day to just pray and ask God to show up, then quit and get yourself into the middle of an overwhelming hailstorm.
