Driven by cut-throat competition and incessant pressure to perform and deliver, the business world is a hard, unforgiving environment.
And it’s that grinding focus on the short-term that all too often drives people, teams and entire organizations over the edge.
It is widely thought that competition is good for innovation and creativity. If you don’t, you simply get left behind. Rapidly.
The writer begs to differ. Yes, competition does and will drive certain forms of exciting creativity and innovation. There are, however, revolutionary, game-changing ideas, knowledge and technologies that will not surrender into pressure-cooker environments because they require quiet spaces, vision, attitudes, mindsets, personal development and above all, clean motives that would enable people to access possibilities that exist beyond the reach of the short-term driven frenzy.
There is a world of difference between being creative to best someone else and being creative with a well-meaning intention of making the world a better place to be in
Which brings us to the universal domain of the fountain of youth.
“What has the fountain of youth got to do with all the above?”, you may ask.
Well, a lot. But inversely so.
Google ‘anti-aging’ to have nearly 85 million results at your finger-tips. Many of which offer all sorts of recipes, super-foods, wonder-drugs, timeless music, meditations, secrets, esoteric devices, treatments, books… It’s, amongst other things, a massive industry, ranging from the credible to bizarre profit-making schemes.
Let’s add one more element to the anti-aging equation: Time-frames preponderance.
“What is meant by time-frame preponderance?”, you may be asking.
Answering a question with a question, what time-frame rules your life? Is it the short-term or the long-term? Where does the contemplation of eternal values and qualities live in your belief system?
Being overly based in the short-term makes people grow old before time simply because short-term pressures have an increasingly short shelf-life, going through quick death time and again. So, short-term oriented people experience the cycles of expendability, including the stress-inducing start-stop syndromes, over and over, in ways that impact their body and mind, pushing many towards the burnout zone.
Being based in the long-term in a way that upholds timeless values and qualities – such as patience, wisdom, long-term vision, the many levels of care and much more – shapes a person’s attitude and alignment to life, thereby making a person grow younger, time and again. Because the only way to be firmly rooted in the timeless eternal that has no beginning and no end is by being child-like in it. And yes, there is such thing as the universal fountain of youth that keeps the human opportunity young and refreshed inside of the universe’s incomprehensible magnitude and great mysteries.
Leaders who are based in the long-term are thus able to engender the magical balance between the long and the short-term; leading organizations to solid growth and profitability while maintaining the well-being of those under their charge.
The human is made to be forever young in the ageless while growing old in the temporary
David Gommé
World Copyright 2018© David Gommé