I’ve had a break from writing anything on this blog. Initially, it was the post-holiday blues. How do you engage, find the discipline, to blog, when your head is still full of Rio, and the assault that part of the world has on the senses. Eventually the world of business kicked in.
I found a piece by Ken McCarthy that said that “Like a unguided missile, many people launch themselves on a trajectory of what they think is diligent activity assuming that activity alone is going to get them to a happy place. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most people would profit from stopping everything they’re doing for a day and going to some quiet spot with a notepad and a pen and thinking outloud on paper about where you’re at, where you’re trying to go and what is it you’re actually doing every day.”
OK. Maybe being busy does prevent us from focusing on the real matters at hand. What do you find, at the beginning of a year, to keep driving you to the next goal? The catharisis eventually got as far wondering why people blog
Then, out of the blue, I got a call to interview Alberto Gilardino, the AC Milan footballer. Milan were in Malta on a winter training camp. And in an hour I morphed from strategy consultant to the excited fan gibbering about the World Cup, lost childhoods and whatever it is that moves grown men to behave badly and occasionally, tears. I spent twenty minutes with a guy young enough to be my son, a millionaire by the time he was 18, someone well-trained in the art of communications and PR. And after a while, he started to open up. I asked him what it was like, when he went through a lean spell in his career, when he could not score.
“When things go wrong you have to get back to doing the simple things well. You need the affection of people who really care for you. Primarily your family. You look for your inner calm. You train hard. You dig in and cultivate that element of self-belief to take you through the bad times. I never give up. I know when I am in a tunnel. I know I have to get out of it. 50% of a great player is his mental strength.”
I guess everything is pointing to the same place. I’m taking some time to stop being busy, and focus. On life-strategy. On the important stuff. The beginning of a year is not a bad time to do this.
StrategyWorks 