🙂 Today was a rather leisurely day in the South Sea. Our ship is anchored for 24 hours. There is nothing to relate except that I lay on the beach of Samoa, went swimming a lot and ate well.
At 6 p.m., we will again be on our way. Our next stop is precisely determined by degrees of longitude and latitude. The captain tries to steer us free of rain and poor weather. His top priority is to avoid collision with another ship or U-boat. He also tries to economize on fuel and reach our goal on time.
In life, it is the same as on board ship. You should remain on course and know the location of the next harbour. And you should arrive there safe and sound. If you manage to do that, the journey was a success. In life, however, the next harbour is not quite as easy to determine by two given numbers.
So what is the success of human life? What is it that makes an entrepreneur or an enterprise a success?
I think it is a good thing if you can drive things, instead of being driven. If you can actively steer, instead of being controlled by anonymous or known powers or by true or imagined necessities. It sounds easy, but it is nowhere near as easy as it sounds.
Because there are two problems:
- You need a goal.
That is difficult. After all, a goal consists of success criteria that have to exist. You can be aware of them and write them down, either in simple or complex form. There are, however, also some unconscious success criteria. They have their roots in your culture or your values and it is often not so easy to be aware of them. I get the impression that important values are often lived without us noticing it. And it takes some time for them to be written down or voiced – if at all. If the success criteria are reasonably met as far as they are feasible, then we have been successful. But: Your success criteria must be in harmony with your enterprise (and/or with your own personality). Standardized or grossly reduced success criteria, such as “shareholder value” will be of little help, both for the enterprise and the human being. - The general drift must not be ignored.
It is not a recipe for success to swim against the current. Consequently, it is not good enough if you just sit at the steering wheel and make the right movements. The steering wheel also has to transfer its power to the rudder. And it would be best if the rudder would make use of the current. When sitting at the steering wheel, you should also have a sense of what is possible in your environment. And of what your environment simply will not allow! It is best if you can make use of the current and simply have to correct occasionally by using the steering wheel. Yet you must not overexert your own or the shared strength by incorrect steering. The ship might easily be harmed.
To put it bluntly: you have to know where you are heading. But you have to be realistic. Sometimes, you have to change your goals or re-arrange your priorities. You should remain humble when you are a success. You should actively drive things towards a goal, but yet you must let yourself be driven in a clever way. You should control your course, yet you should adapt to the environment all the time and with an awareness of reality. And once in a while, you have to enjoy your success, even if it seems small.
At one time, my friend Rupert Lay called the increasing mediocrity the greatest problem in our social and economical “country”. I find it enormously mediocre if you formulate your goals by slavishly following the super-ego of a “that is how society is”. It is also mediocre if my entire entrepreneurial concept is based on nothing but “shareholder value”. Or if I identify my private happiness with how much I earn or how (seemingly) secure my financial situation is.
The only way to leave mediocrity is by trying to take responsibility for yourself and then widen your own horizon in many dimensions. And when I tried it, I was lucky. I even met like-minded people. Thus, perhaps my own initiative has an impact beyond my small horizon.
All the aforementioned is true both for entrepreneurs and project leaders, in a partnership and in the family, and in many dimensions of life. It is the only way to make a direction for your life possible, a sort of strategy. It is certainly not easy and can never be totally realized.
This is how I daily escape mediocrity, often feeling like the rabbit in the fairy tale. As soon as I arrive at my goal, the stupid hedgehog awaits me, sticking out its tongue. I, however, keep running …
🙂 Well, I guess these are the kind of ideas you can only get under the South Sea sun …
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
You can find all the articles of my entrepreneur’s diary on Drehscheibe!
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