Random thought for the day…
Great things often start out small…like ideas, or projects, or teams.
You have to start somewhere and figure out how to provide what the thing needs to metamorphose and grow….and you just can’t know how amazing it will turn out until you get there…but you have to have some courage to try, to let it happen. And you have to have the strength to nurture and protect what is growing, to push back where you need to, to try to see what the end result might look like, and the guts to not let someone else try to define it for you.
I’m working on all of that.
I sort of feel that when I was in my grad school days I was part of a pretty amazing human experiment of people that our supervisor chose us all to work not just on topics of interest, but also to work together and grow and learn from each there, as a team, but more as an academic family. A bit of a collection of oddballs, and we had our moments of drama, but by and large we worked well together, supported each other, and the success of one was the success of all.
I know that mode of working together better than any other, and I spent more time in that world than I have in any other, so I draw from my own experiences and I hope I can build something similar.
It’s weird to move away from thinking largely autonomously though. I’ve had a significant lack of support for so long that I just had to figure out how to get shit done in the absence of any form of real leadership. Someone said “Be the leader/mentor you wish you’d had“. I’ve had good leaders/mentors, and I’ve had absolutely terrible ones. And I hope I’ve learned from the right ones.
I have a little bowl of acorns on a shelf that caught my eye, and thus my random (maybe not so random considering what I’ve been struggling with the past couple of days) thought.
Where did the acorn come from? Not around these parts…Mom picked them up somewhere when she was out in Quebec ages ago and, when she passed away and I cleaned out her house for sale, I found them in a chest. She collected the most interesting little things and had them in a bowl here, on a. shelf there….and so when I come down the stairs everyday and see that little pile of acorns, in a little pink depression glass bowl, I smile and think of her.
