It's 1 AM and this might be the bad pizza I had earlier talking, but I believe I have something to say. Or rather, I have something to say that I believe in. My father once said, "Get the bad news over with first. You be the one to say the tough stuff." Well, here goes. There is a cruel wind blowing through our lives. We all feel it, and if we don't, perhaps we've forgotten how to feel. But here is the truth.We are less ourselves than we were when we started this life of ours.
I remember the conversation my friend and I had "You and I are blessed, he said, "we do something that we love."
Tonight, I find those words guiding me back to an important place, and an important truth. I care very much about the fact that I have learned to care less.Our college is one of the top three in this city and we represent over a thousand students.The heights of competition has never been bigger, or tougher, or more written about.And we are at the forefront. But I wonder today,as I make my way out of college we've talked a lot and partied a lot over the last three days, but I dare say that not one of us have said what we really think.
It is beyond the easy arguments waged against college,and our college on the pages of the Times Of India.It's more subtle than the baseball strike, than Sourav Ganguly's retirement,Abhiram's branch transfer....I'm talking about something they don't write about. I'm talking about something we don't talk about.
We are losing our battle with all that is personal and real about our academics.Every day I can look at a list of subjects only partially attended to.Returning home,I think of only what was not accomplished,instead of what was accomplished.The gnawing feeling continues.We are pushing ourselves around, doing our best, but is there any real satisfaction in success without pride? Is there any real satisfaction in a success that exists only when we push the messiness of real human contact from our lives and minds?
There is a good bet that I will erase all of this from my pc,and you will never read it. But if you are reading it, and you're reading it right now, it is only because I was unable to stop.I was unable to forget the quiet questions in the hallways, when some of my juniors asked me on the side: "How do you manage to keep all these subjects,their relevance separated in your mind?" Chances are, I didn't say much. I might have told them "it's easy," or, "you're not working hard enough." Chances are, I said something that they expected, maybe even wanted to hear. But it wasn't the truth, and it wasn't what I felt. And if you ever wondered about the drawbacks of being quiet about important things, talk to yourself in the mirror some time, say the truth. Yell the truth to yourself, when no one is listening. See how good it feels? "Every time you allow a problem in your life, you are actually at a point of transformation. Crisis is a powerful point of transformation."
Even in my own life, after 18 years feel that I have never done that one thing, that noble thing that defines a life. Even writing this Mission Statement is odd for me. I am used to enjoying my life and friends.Later later later later. It is too easy to say "later" because we all believe our work to be too important to stop, minute to minute, for something that might interfere with the restless and relentless pursuit of forward motion. Of greater success. Make no mistake, I am a huge fan of success. But tonight, I propose a better kind of success. I could be wrong, but if you keep reading and I keep writing, we might get there together.
We are sometimes as important as priests or poets, but until we dedicate ourselves to worthier goals than getting a illegal phone number, we are poets of emptiness.
Somehow all this has been bubbling up inside me. A man is the sum total of his experiences. And it is now that I am interested in shaping the experiences to come. What is the future of what we do? Give me a goal, and I will achieve it. That has been my secret design for most of my life. Perhaps you are the same. We're all goal-oriented, so I hereby present a goal. How can we do something surprising, and memorable with our lives? How can we turn this job, in small but important ways, into a better representation of ourselves?
How do we wish to define our lives? So that when we are sixty, or seventy, or eighty and we're sinking down onto that cool floor of the new international airport, with playoff tickets in our pockets, perhaps we too can know that we led A Happy Life? Do we want to be Remembered?
Recently I was asked in so many words, "What do you stand for?" I was lost for an answer. At 14, I wasn't lost for that answer. At 18,I was blown away that I had no answer. I could only look at the fade of a man , needing my help, just looking at me for the answer I didn't have.
The look on that man's face face is a part of me now.And the feeling I had, and have now, is pushing me forward, writing this Mission Statement.
I propose that, like the world embraced those telephone answering devices, we talk to the our lives.Let's bring soul and character to what is already there. I propose that we recreate everything that we're currently about. Right now we're at the top of our game. Traditionally people do one thing at this point in their success. They try like hell to maintain what they did to get there.
Their personal and intense road to success, their original inspiration (which is at the heart of every success) is now lost in the pursuit to keep the money machine smoothly rolling forward. Delivering crisp green sheets of greater and greater amounts of fortune. But there is a problem with this stage in the success game. In so doing this maintain-success cycle, they forget the original glimmer of passion that got them there.And historically, no one successful ever pauses to think that they might tumble like everyone before them who forgot. The whole success cycle dooms the very thing that causes the success in the first place - it puts shutters on the windows of reality. It makes us all forget that monetary success comes from something very pure. It comes from a desire to do well, to make life better, not just to do well with financial regularity.
It is not easy to hide a winning formula. Take a successful t.v. show. The following season, you see twenty others just like it.But the great ones all do one thing at the time of their greatest success. They change the game. They make it harder for themselves. They raise the bar. They work not just harder, but they work smarter. That is why the great athletes, politicians, musicians, philosophers all got stronger instead of more weary. We must do the same. And for those wondering when I will propose an answer to these many questions, I must ask you simply to hold on. Because it's coming.
Maybe I'm crazy, maybe it's just tonight, but I really do think I'm onto something here. And, as I said earlier, if you're reading this, it means that I didn't conquer this statement with my own fears of rejection. If if you knew me, and many of you do, you know that "rejection" and "fear" are not words I say easily. But this is more than a Mission Statement. This is not the equivalent of one of those magnetic "poetry kits," you know the ones you buy at a stationery store, a mess of words so you can assemble funny poems on your refrigerator door. This is from my heart. This is a love letter to a business I truly love.
Hypocrisy is stopping us from being what we always wanted to be.Our Limitations tend to increase more and more as we grow inlife...take this for an example:Athlete Y is a superstar, and is more talented. But to tell this to Client X would be asking him to become Ex-Client X. And so begins the game of flattery, of lip service, of doing everything possible to soothe and stroke. It is part of our lives, and part of our jobs. The game of agenting. The tapdance. Not only will Client X be a tapdance, but there will be a tapdance involved in explaining why I didn't return the call and begin the tapdance earlier.I know it is a tapdance, and so does he.
But as I sit here in the darkness ,the answer to the future is rather obvious. If the tapdancing becomes less constant, less furious, less necessary, what will the result be? The result will be more honesty, more focus,the new day of honesty will create a machine more personalized, more truthful, has a greater chance of greatness next year.Less dancing. More truth. We must crack open the tightly clenched fist of commerce and give a little back for the greater good. Eventually that goodness will be infectious. We will have taken our number oneness and turned it into something greater. And eventually smaller will become bigger, in every way, and especially in our hearts.
Forget the dance.
Focus.
Love the job. Be the job.
Let us be honest with ourselves.
I propose this as the very heart of the Mission Statement that is flying across my screen. I am not a writer but I can't stop from writing this. It is something pure, from the deepest part of me. It has to be right.And if I am wrong, then grab me by the collar and tell me why you disagree. And I will happily talk with you because we are talking about something that matters.
I see a young girl skating in the night,The simple beauty with which she cascades across the smooth cement, the intelligence with which she uses this path that is crowded with shoppers .At night, it is hers. She owns it. I feel the same pride of ownership, owning this world that allows me to type this message to you. And perhaps save the future.It is a great feeling, not just that wretched desire to survive, to outswim the huge wave that may drill me into the sand below the water, but to seize this time. To set the agenda. To say what I feel. I have the distinct feeling that what I have written is "touchy feely." I don't care. I have lost the ability to bullshit.
Most of the time, we are creating nothing. We are shoving digits around. But to address the growing pains of our lives and academics,and to create a new way of looking at what we do ... because these growing pains could easily be dying pains. But we are meant to live it out.Our work actually does have an effect on people. In a cynical world, we make people happy.It is important to tweak the greater concerns of our fellowmates too.Because the ability to forget social causes happens easily, in the night. Suddenly the desire to survive obscures the quest to give back to a community. If we don't exercise the muscle of charity, one day it is dead. It doesn't respond, it's just a fiber in your body that serves no purpose. And the next thing that happens is the lack of depth that comes with financial prosperity. How many rich people have said this in our presence: "I thought I would feel better when I was rich, but I don't." That happens when we don't listen to the loud sound of the quiet voice inside. Life, I believe, is not a country club where we forget the difficulties and anxieties. Life is the duty of confronting all of that within ourselves.You can e-mail the President, you can get sushi in a supermarket in the middle of the desert, you don't even have to read a book anymore, you can buy a tape where it is read out-loud. But where is the simple truth about how to live a quality life? I hope that I have not overstepped my boundaries by writing this to you. This is an attempt to reach out, and say loudly the things that have been festering within. And once you begin to speak these things, it's hard to stop.
I have never been a writer, but I can see how this great lost art will never truly die. Putting words to paper is a sacred thing. It's more than a phone conversation, it is a document. It is something you are putting on paper. The relationship between a phone call and a letter is the difference between a magazine and a phone book. One you leave on a plane, the other you save.
I am too excited to sleep. I want this Mission Statement to last to the light of day. Outside, a passing car plays a snatch of an old Pink Floyd album. Money ...
I am wondering what that exact moment is when we truly, truly love our jobs. Is it during the day, or at the end of the day, or is it years later looking back on all we accomplished? I think perhaps truly loving something is the ability to love it at that moment. It is an elusive ability, something I have never been able to quite accomplish. I must go home, and take my experiences like a squirrel, and consider them, before I can truly enjoy them. I must work on this. The daily journey is everything. Being able to enjoy enjoyment while it is happening. I might erase this part.
Some of you are younger than me, some of you are older than me. Right now I have one foot in each of your worlds. I am thinking about marriage, and the future, but I'm old enough to have a past that I (hopefully) have learned from.
I have now written far too much on the subject of our future, the future of this life. But the beauty of this proposal, I think, is that it is only a slight adjustment, an adjustment in our minds. An adjustment in attitude. An adjustment to point where we can discuss the things that really matter to us.Let us work less hard to acheive things that don't really matter in the long run and work doubly harder to keep all those that really will. believe in these words, and while they may not yet be true for you, they are true for me. And I ask that you read this with that in mind. I am dictating not what I want us to be, but what I wish us to be. There is a difference. You can only get there if I have written this correctly, and if you are inspired. I am reaching out to you, personally. I choose to be passionate again. I choose to reclaim everything that was once exciting about this job. I wonder if this might just be the best idea I've ever had. I hope you understand. In the words of Martin Luther King, whose suit I suggest you all visit before they move it from its display in the Atlanta airport: "A life is not worth living until you have something to die for." (I'VE NEVER BEEN TO THE AIRPORT,BUT CAME TO KNOW ABOUT IT")
A life is not worth living if you are sleepwalking through it. Because that is what feels like death. That is what causes athletes to, out of despair, get drunk and wrap their cars around a pole. Or lash out at someone they love. It is the feeling of sleepwalking. Of others living life around you, keeping their fists tightly wound around whatever dollars they can muster, caring little more than nothing about those around you. We cannot sleepwalk. We cannot just survive, anything goes. We can take control of our lives, we can quit sleepwalking, we can say - right now, these are our lives, it is time to start living it. It is time to not second guess, to move forward, to make mistakes if we have to, but to do it with a greater good in mind.
Let us start a revolution. Let us start a revolution that is not just about basketball shoes, or official licensed merchandise or what ever,let us do something worthwhile,let us prioritise. I am prepared to die for something. I am prepared to live for our cause.
I remember the conversation my friend and I had "You and I are blessed, he said, "we do something that we love."
Tonight, I find those words guiding me back to an important place, and an important truth. I care very much about the fact that I have learned to care less.Our college is one of the top three in this city and we represent over a thousand students.The heights of competition has never been bigger, or tougher, or more written about.And we are at the forefront. But I wonder today,as I make my way out of college we've talked a lot and partied a lot over the last three days, but I dare say that not one of us have said what we really think.
It is beyond the easy arguments waged against college,and our college on the pages of the Times Of India.It's more subtle than the baseball strike, than Sourav Ganguly's retirement,Abhiram's branch transfer....I'm talking about something they don't write about. I'm talking about something we don't talk about.
We are losing our battle with all that is personal and real about our academics.Every day I can look at a list of subjects only partially attended to.Returning home,I think of only what was not accomplished,instead of what was accomplished.The gnawing feeling continues.We are pushing ourselves around, doing our best, but is there any real satisfaction in success without pride? Is there any real satisfaction in a success that exists only when we push the messiness of real human contact from our lives and minds?
There is a good bet that I will erase all of this from my pc,and you will never read it. But if you are reading it, and you're reading it right now, it is only because I was unable to stop.I was unable to forget the quiet questions in the hallways, when some of my juniors asked me on the side: "How do you manage to keep all these subjects,their relevance separated in your mind?" Chances are, I didn't say much. I might have told them "it's easy," or, "you're not working hard enough." Chances are, I said something that they expected, maybe even wanted to hear. But it wasn't the truth, and it wasn't what I felt. And if you ever wondered about the drawbacks of being quiet about important things, talk to yourself in the mirror some time, say the truth. Yell the truth to yourself, when no one is listening. See how good it feels? "Every time you allow a problem in your life, you are actually at a point of transformation. Crisis is a powerful point of transformation."
Even in my own life, after 18 years feel that I have never done that one thing, that noble thing that defines a life. Even writing this Mission Statement is odd for me. I am used to enjoying my life and friends.Later later later later. It is too easy to say "later" because we all believe our work to be too important to stop, minute to minute, for something that might interfere with the restless and relentless pursuit of forward motion. Of greater success. Make no mistake, I am a huge fan of success. But tonight, I propose a better kind of success. I could be wrong, but if you keep reading and I keep writing, we might get there together.
We are sometimes as important as priests or poets, but until we dedicate ourselves to worthier goals than getting a illegal phone number, we are poets of emptiness.
Somehow all this has been bubbling up inside me. A man is the sum total of his experiences. And it is now that I am interested in shaping the experiences to come. What is the future of what we do? Give me a goal, and I will achieve it. That has been my secret design for most of my life. Perhaps you are the same. We're all goal-oriented, so I hereby present a goal. How can we do something surprising, and memorable with our lives? How can we turn this job, in small but important ways, into a better representation of ourselves?
How do we wish to define our lives? So that when we are sixty, or seventy, or eighty and we're sinking down onto that cool floor of the new international airport, with playoff tickets in our pockets, perhaps we too can know that we led A Happy Life? Do we want to be Remembered?
Recently I was asked in so many words, "What do you stand for?" I was lost for an answer. At 14, I wasn't lost for that answer. At 18,I was blown away that I had no answer. I could only look at the fade of a man , needing my help, just looking at me for the answer I didn't have.
The look on that man's face face is a part of me now.And the feeling I had, and have now, is pushing me forward, writing this Mission Statement.
I propose that, like the world embraced those telephone answering devices, we talk to the our lives.Let's bring soul and character to what is already there. I propose that we recreate everything that we're currently about. Right now we're at the top of our game. Traditionally people do one thing at this point in their success. They try like hell to maintain what they did to get there.
Their personal and intense road to success, their original inspiration (which is at the heart of every success) is now lost in the pursuit to keep the money machine smoothly rolling forward. Delivering crisp green sheets of greater and greater amounts of fortune. But there is a problem with this stage in the success game. In so doing this maintain-success cycle, they forget the original glimmer of passion that got them there.And historically, no one successful ever pauses to think that they might tumble like everyone before them who forgot. The whole success cycle dooms the very thing that causes the success in the first place - it puts shutters on the windows of reality. It makes us all forget that monetary success comes from something very pure. It comes from a desire to do well, to make life better, not just to do well with financial regularity.
It is not easy to hide a winning formula. Take a successful t.v. show. The following season, you see twenty others just like it.But the great ones all do one thing at the time of their greatest success. They change the game. They make it harder for themselves. They raise the bar. They work not just harder, but they work smarter. That is why the great athletes, politicians, musicians, philosophers all got stronger instead of more weary. We must do the same. And for those wondering when I will propose an answer to these many questions, I must ask you simply to hold on. Because it's coming.
Maybe I'm crazy, maybe it's just tonight, but I really do think I'm onto something here. And, as I said earlier, if you're reading this, it means that I didn't conquer this statement with my own fears of rejection. If if you knew me, and many of you do, you know that "rejection" and "fear" are not words I say easily. But this is more than a Mission Statement. This is not the equivalent of one of those magnetic "poetry kits," you know the ones you buy at a stationery store, a mess of words so you can assemble funny poems on your refrigerator door. This is from my heart. This is a love letter to a business I truly love.
Hypocrisy is stopping us from being what we always wanted to be.Our Limitations tend to increase more and more as we grow inlife...take this for an example:Athlete Y is a superstar, and is more talented. But to tell this to Client X would be asking him to become Ex-Client X. And so begins the game of flattery, of lip service, of doing everything possible to soothe and stroke. It is part of our lives, and part of our jobs. The game of agenting. The tapdance. Not only will Client X be a tapdance, but there will be a tapdance involved in explaining why I didn't return the call and begin the tapdance earlier.I know it is a tapdance, and so does he.
But as I sit here in the darkness ,the answer to the future is rather obvious. If the tapdancing becomes less constant, less furious, less necessary, what will the result be? The result will be more honesty, more focus,the new day of honesty will create a machine more personalized, more truthful, has a greater chance of greatness next year.Less dancing. More truth. We must crack open the tightly clenched fist of commerce and give a little back for the greater good. Eventually that goodness will be infectious. We will have taken our number oneness and turned it into something greater. And eventually smaller will become bigger, in every way, and especially in our hearts.
Forget the dance.
Focus.
Love the job. Be the job.
Let us be honest with ourselves.
I propose this as the very heart of the Mission Statement that is flying across my screen. I am not a writer but I can't stop from writing this. It is something pure, from the deepest part of me. It has to be right.And if I am wrong, then grab me by the collar and tell me why you disagree. And I will happily talk with you because we are talking about something that matters.
I see a young girl skating in the night,The simple beauty with which she cascades across the smooth cement, the intelligence with which she uses this path that is crowded with shoppers .At night, it is hers. She owns it. I feel the same pride of ownership, owning this world that allows me to type this message to you. And perhaps save the future.It is a great feeling, not just that wretched desire to survive, to outswim the huge wave that may drill me into the sand below the water, but to seize this time. To set the agenda. To say what I feel. I have the distinct feeling that what I have written is "touchy feely." I don't care. I have lost the ability to bullshit.
Most of the time, we are creating nothing. We are shoving digits around. But to address the growing pains of our lives and academics,and to create a new way of looking at what we do ... because these growing pains could easily be dying pains. But we are meant to live it out.Our work actually does have an effect on people. In a cynical world, we make people happy.It is important to tweak the greater concerns of our fellowmates too.Because the ability to forget social causes happens easily, in the night. Suddenly the desire to survive obscures the quest to give back to a community. If we don't exercise the muscle of charity, one day it is dead. It doesn't respond, it's just a fiber in your body that serves no purpose. And the next thing that happens is the lack of depth that comes with financial prosperity. How many rich people have said this in our presence: "I thought I would feel better when I was rich, but I don't." That happens when we don't listen to the loud sound of the quiet voice inside. Life, I believe, is not a country club where we forget the difficulties and anxieties. Life is the duty of confronting all of that within ourselves.You can e-mail the President, you can get sushi in a supermarket in the middle of the desert, you don't even have to read a book anymore, you can buy a tape where it is read out-loud. But where is the simple truth about how to live a quality life? I hope that I have not overstepped my boundaries by writing this to you. This is an attempt to reach out, and say loudly the things that have been festering within. And once you begin to speak these things, it's hard to stop.
I have never been a writer, but I can see how this great lost art will never truly die. Putting words to paper is a sacred thing. It's more than a phone conversation, it is a document. It is something you are putting on paper. The relationship between a phone call and a letter is the difference between a magazine and a phone book. One you leave on a plane, the other you save.
I am too excited to sleep. I want this Mission Statement to last to the light of day. Outside, a passing car plays a snatch of an old Pink Floyd album. Money ...
I am wondering what that exact moment is when we truly, truly love our jobs. Is it during the day, or at the end of the day, or is it years later looking back on all we accomplished? I think perhaps truly loving something is the ability to love it at that moment. It is an elusive ability, something I have never been able to quite accomplish. I must go home, and take my experiences like a squirrel, and consider them, before I can truly enjoy them. I must work on this. The daily journey is everything. Being able to enjoy enjoyment while it is happening. I might erase this part.
Some of you are younger than me, some of you are older than me. Right now I have one foot in each of your worlds. I am thinking about marriage, and the future, but I'm old enough to have a past that I (hopefully) have learned from.
I have now written far too much on the subject of our future, the future of this life. But the beauty of this proposal, I think, is that it is only a slight adjustment, an adjustment in our minds. An adjustment in attitude. An adjustment to point where we can discuss the things that really matter to us.Let us work less hard to acheive things that don't really matter in the long run and work doubly harder to keep all those that really will. believe in these words, and while they may not yet be true for you, they are true for me. And I ask that you read this with that in mind. I am dictating not what I want us to be, but what I wish us to be. There is a difference. You can only get there if I have written this correctly, and if you are inspired. I am reaching out to you, personally. I choose to be passionate again. I choose to reclaim everything that was once exciting about this job. I wonder if this might just be the best idea I've ever had. I hope you understand. In the words of Martin Luther King, whose suit I suggest you all visit before they move it from its display in the Atlanta airport: "A life is not worth living until you have something to die for." (I'VE NEVER BEEN TO THE AIRPORT,BUT CAME TO KNOW ABOUT IT")
A life is not worth living if you are sleepwalking through it. Because that is what feels like death. That is what causes athletes to, out of despair, get drunk and wrap their cars around a pole. Or lash out at someone they love. It is the feeling of sleepwalking. Of others living life around you, keeping their fists tightly wound around whatever dollars they can muster, caring little more than nothing about those around you. We cannot sleepwalk. We cannot just survive, anything goes. We can take control of our lives, we can quit sleepwalking, we can say - right now, these are our lives, it is time to start living it. It is time to not second guess, to move forward, to make mistakes if we have to, but to do it with a greater good in mind.
Let us start a revolution. Let us start a revolution that is not just about basketball shoes, or official licensed merchandise or what ever,let us do something worthwhile,let us prioritise. I am prepared to die for something. I am prepared to live for our cause.
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