Enjoy these insightful words from Thich Nhat Hanh:
“When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change”
Ambition can get a bad rap when it’s paired with words like “greedy,” “selfish,” or “ruthless.” But in actuality, ambition — loosely defined as a strong desire to achieve something through hard work and determination — is the crucial driving force behind accomplishment and action. It’s what marks the difference between a dream and a reality, an idea and a project, a vision and a cultural shift.
Our ambitions can only be limited by our doubts.
Rajesh, Indian actor and politician
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
— Mark Twain, novelist
I think a lot of people dream. And while they are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the really successful people, the really interesting, powerful, engaged people? Are busy doing.
To everyone who thinks that Black Lives Matter or White Lives Matter—respecting all humanity regardless of skin, hair or eye color really matters. Stuff your divisive racism where the sun doesn’t shine and get a life.
You can handle a little risk. You can handle a little discomfort.
You can handle a little pain. You can handle a little inconvenience.
You can handle a little embarrassment. You can handle a little effort.
You can summon a little patience. You can summon a little discipline.
You can do whatever must be done when the reason is meaningful enough. You can get yourself to take the necessary action when it serves a worthy purpose.
What have you avoided, made excuses about, or put off until later just because you thought you couldn’t handle it? Imagine all the good that will come when you go ahead and utilize the strength that’s already there inside you.
It’s about a single sentence Jobs included in the letter he wrote when he resigned as CEO of Apple, 10 years ago this week. But it has its roots in the commencement address Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005.
“I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.”
It’s simple, matter-of-fact, and almost boring, despite how momentous the letter itself was. Read it in the context of what Jobs had said at Stanford, however, and it takes on incredible power.
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.
It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.
Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”
Steve Jobs
(I’ve embedded the video of Jobs’s speech at the end of this article. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.)
By early 2011, Jobs understood that he was becoming “the old,” and that it was happening ahead of his time. Turning 56, he was battling pancreatic cancer for the second time. He’d had to take medical leave for most of the year.
He knew what was coming, and he died just 42 days after stepping down at Apple.
I expect that we’ll see quite a few retrospectives on Jobs’s life over the next little while, as we approach the 10th anniversary of his death.
But, these lines came racing back to me when I read that Cook, Jobs’s hand-picked successor, was entitled to a $750 million bonus this week for having served as Apple CEO for a decade.
It’s a lot of money, obviously. And I’m not going to pretend that Apple is without its detractors and its problems right now.
Still, consider that not only did Jobs recruit Cook to Apple, but he set up a succession plan that has now resulted in stable leadership for a full decade, and a company that is worth more than 7.5 times what it was in 2011.
Things often look inevitable in retrospect. But, all you have to do is compare the seamless transition at Apple over the past decade to succession battles at other companies that wind up consuming everything.
Heck, Jobs was a veteran of multiple succession battles at Apple, for that matter, dating back at least to when he recruited John Sculley as CEO, only for Sculley to force Jobs out of the company.
Couple that history with the fact that Jobs had already had the experience — he talked about it in the Stanford speech — of being told that his cancer would likely kill him in a matter of months.
He defied those odds for several years afterward, but the experience guided him.
The brutal truth here is really twofold:
First, all of us will die someday: you, me, everyone we know and love.
But also, if you want the things that you build to live on, then you have to begin to let go ahead of time.
Think far into the future, recruiting and growing the people you hope will take over. Let go of the very human concern that succession planning is about finding a replacement, and instead think of who might lead in his or her own way, and to destinations you might never dream of.
It means recognizing that when it comes to the tumultuous, emotional experience of a leadership change, it’s much better to be in a position where your official announcement can be as “matter of fact” and “almost boring,” as Jobs’s was.
Here’s the video of his speech at Stanford. If you haven’t seen this, I think it’s worth your time.
“There is peace even in the storm.” — Vincent van Gogh
“The Master sees things as they are, without trying to control them. She lets them go their own way, and resides at the center of the circle.” — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in.” — Haruki Murakami
