Unthink: Rediscover Your Creative Genius by Erik Wahl

Author:Erik Wahl [Wahl, Erik]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780770434021
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-06-03T14:00:00+00:00

FINDING YOUR PATH

Disenchantment is a danger we all face. In the corporate world, the path to success is typically laid out before us via the history of our position—what the best before us have done—and the preestablished system into which our jobs inevitably fall—what our company is already doing to succeed. The temptation is to fall in stride without considering the options we have about what our job could or should be.

Shutting down our curiosity not only kills our creativity and makes us less potent employees, it leads to either success that doesn’t satisfy or failure that is doubly disillusioning in that we’ve failed our responsibilities and our desires. Ultimately, many of us become people who work every day at a job that is neither personally invigorating nor professionally compelling. We become yes-men and -women who repress career and company growth.

In this regard, Dave Gibbons’s story is a cautionary tale of what can happen when we follow a path that is detached from our desires. Even when we are successful, we are not happy. The arresting studies we read every year about dissatisfaction on the job would say this is not an uncommon mistake. One of the latest studies was initiated by the Dale Carnegie Training Institute and carried out by MSW Research in May 2012. According to an article by Jeremy Quittner in Inc. magazine, from the interviews of 1,500 employees nationwide, the study reported that fewer than one-third of employees describe themselves as fully engaged with their work.2 That’s not only sad on a personal level. It’s a death wish for entrepreneurs and executives trying to build vibrant companies.

But don’t lose hope. These findings don’t mean your fate is sealed. They are a report of where most workers are now, but they say nothing about where they can go. Your future changes when you find a way to bring your convictions to work—because your passions represent your greatest catalyst for bigger ideas and deeper engagement.

Dave Gibbons’s story is not only a cautionary tale. It also illustrates what can happen when convictions begin to shape not only why you work but how you carry out your job.

The week after the Easter extravaganza, Gibbons quietly faced the revolution escalating inside him. His heart was no longer in his job. A few weeks of soul searching and prayer eventually led him to share his feelings with his staff. The announcement was a shock to the whole system he’d created. There was, however, an original investor in the audience who sensed this wasn’t mere burnout or some form of midlife crisis. She told Gibbons about an opportunity to start a church in Thailand. Gibbons saw it as a chance to get away and unpack his feelings. It was there in Thailand, where the Western church protocol didn’t jibe with culture, that he came to understand the problem.

The script for success he’d been following wasn’t his script; it was the script his industry had defined two decades earlier, which he and his colleagues had only reinforced.

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