The story you’re about to read is true. The names haven’t been changed to protect the innocent because everyone in the story is innocent, some more than others. The telling of this story is inspired by my friend, Charlotte Wittenkamp, by whom I was moved to tell the first part of it in a LinkedIn thread she started. She’s innocent, too. 
Many years ago, I was returning from a Sunday afternoon outing with some friends in their station wagon. (Remember station wagons?) Frank drove. Janine sat beside him. I occupied the back seat. And, Sarah, their three-year-old daughter, played in the wayback. As we drove into the setting sun, I remarked that I couldn’t believe the weekend was ending; and the next day would be Monday already.
Sarah then asked what remains my all-time favorite question, as profound as it is full of the singular wonder of children: “Daddy, where do the days of the week live?”
There was a momentary silence, after which Frank replied softly, “I don’t know, Sweetheart.”
He wasn’t trying to be brief or brusque. Rather, as Janine and I were already doing, he merely wanted to get back to pondering the joy and genius of the question.
Perhaps the only thing that drains us of that kind of child-like wonder faster and more completely than the onset of adulthood — that saps our own joy and genius and renders us unaware that we can choose to retain it for a lifetime — is our entry into the world of business. Ironic, isn’t it? In business, we’re constantly compelled to talk, write, read, and hear about Innovation, invention, and ingenuity. We’re bombarded with superlatives — biggest, fastest, greatest, best. But none of it contains the sense of wonder that might make such expressions genuine, credible, persuasive, and contagious. Why do we settle so? Why do so many of us bind ourselves to futures of unconvincing rhetoric and going through motions?
The answer is no … but … there needs to be purposeful deliberateness about the effort to retain perspectives of wonder. Case in point: In 2005, Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko’s, was the subject of a feature article in Fortune Small Business. I was sitting in the lobby of a client’s office, waiting for a meeting, when I read the article. It took just a few minutes. But I’ve never forgotten what Orfalea said:
It’s pretty popular among chief executives these days to brag about their open-door policies – how they get to the office at 7 a.m., eat lunch at their desks, and don’t leave until well into the evening. That is crazy! When do they ever have time to sit back and think? Or wander or wonder? … I worked in cycles, spending roughly three weeks on the road followed by three weeks back at the main office … I found that leaving headquarters got me away from the mundane, daily grind that left no space for insight, inspiration, or innovation. Instead of “chief executive,” I preferred the title of “chief wanderer.” While constant motion suited my constitution, it also fueled my creativity, which never seemed to flow in the office.
The Wellspring
Wonder and wander. That’s what children do. It’s what their natures compel them to do — untainted, uninhibited, not yet self-conscious, not yet aware of being judged or conditioned to being criticized, not aware of limitations imposed by the predispositions of others that translate into self-limiting insecurity and lack of faith. The world is the playground of their curiosity. And their curiosity is boundless.
What happened to ours? For many of us, we went to work. And for some of us who went to work, we went about work that neither motivated nor fulfilled us. It may have rewarded us with Money. But cash is not the currency of the soul or the reward of the spirit. And while money may be a means to some ends, it’s no muse. In exchange for a salary plus benefits, we checked our creativity at the payroll window and never wondered at our loss of wonder.
More than 20 years ago, a co-worker in the ad agency we both served was miserably unhappy in his job. He was Director of New Business. But his Education had been in music, and he’d played in jazz bands in New York City. He would ask me routinely: “What am I going to do?”
My reply was always the same: “If you can’t find something in this for yourself — if you can’t invest in it in any way that delivers some measure of fulfillment — you have to go.”
He couldn’t do it. Sometime later, he was fired. It was a Friday. By Tuesday of the following week, he was teaching music in a local public school system. He was an award-winning teacher for at least the next five years after that. He was lucky. His muse found him. But he might have done the finding — and sooner — if his perspective had retained the creative spark of self-faith and wonder he’d carried through music school. Like beauty, joy and genius are in the eye of the beholder:
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
It’s Yours to Find
In thinking about your job, your company, your company’s brand, its products and services, its accomplishments, the people with whom you work — when’s the last time you sought to marvel? When were you last mindful of finding at least one thing of which you could say or think, “That’s wonderful” — that struck you as literally full of wonder? What would it take to amaze you?
If you don’t know, find it. If you do know, and you can’t find it in whatever you’re doing now, make a change. Shift your perspective. Pretend you have new eyes and ears. Pretend you’ve gotten younger and that everything — like your voice when you learned to scream as a baby, like your feet when you learned to walk as a toddler — is new and limitless. If that doesn’t work, look for another job. Start a new career. Create something. Suggest something that has everyone telling you you’re crazy — and do it.
Exceptions prove rules, and rules were made to be broken. Change something. Do something different. Do one thing — anything — differently. It might be your last chance. You can’t know till you try.
As an added bonus, you just might remember where the days of the week live.
It is better to be high-spirited even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent. Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model. (Vincent van Gogh)
Originally Published on https://www.bizcatalyst360.com/category/lifecolumns/notes-to-self/
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