Two years ago, I stumbled on this Huffpost article by Thomas Kuegler and felt that he was speaking just to me. Except that I was 52.
“My best bet was to act like I knew what I was doing. Because everybody else seemed to know what they were doing, right? I should just step into the crowd and pretend that I’m like them. But after I took my place I realized something. As I got closer I realized that they were sweating from their foreheads as much as I was, and their eyes kept nervously darting from side to side, hoping that nobody noticed.”
Another day I listened to this TED talk by Brazilian CEO and visionary Ricardo Semler. He had some crazy ideas like “managing without managers” or “leading without rules”. But the biggest lesson I learned from him was to ask myself three whys in a row.
“Because the first why, you always have a good answer for it. The second why, it starts getting difficult. By the third why, you admit that you don’t really know why you’re doing.” When I did this, I came to the question, what for? What am I doing this for?”
The best cure I had found for this self-induced stress and anxiety was the “law of two feet” from Open Space.
“If you’re not learning or contributing or having fun (I added the last one) where you stand right now, use your two feet to go somewhere else, where you can learn, contribute, and have fun.”
I quit my 9-5, corporate, cubicle life in December 2018 and joined WeCloudData Inc. I have been since practicing the “law of two feet” and learning, contributing, and having some serious fun… 😉
