There are many ways to live life. Some people see certain things as an opportunity. They then aim to organise themselves properly and do outstanding work.
Some people have a positive attitude and take this approach in the personal lives. Some take it in their professional lives. They focus on the possibilities and do their best to achieve positive results.
Some people take this approach when leading teams or organisations. Some take it when aiming to do work that helps to build a more positive society.
Different people follow this approach in different ways. Let’s explore how they may focus on these themes.
Opportunity
Some people see certain events as an opportunity. They then focus on the possibilities to build on their strengths and do superb work. Some may even see setbacks as a possible springboard to achieving success.
Some artists see the opportunity to create their own websites and reach their target audience. Some athletes see an upcoming tough challenge as an opportunity to do their personal best and deliver peak performances.
Some employees get frustrated when their company is not open to certain pioneering ideas. Some then move on to become entrepreneurs who implement their ideas and take advantage of opportunities in the market.
Kate Griggs used her experience of dyslexia to educate people about its strengths. She created the website Made By Dyslexia and co-founded the University of Dyslexic Thinking. This shows how the skills demonstrated by dyslexics can help to produce superb work in an AI World.
Some people who have an illness redefine it as a project. Chis Hoy, the Olympic cyclist, translated his experience of prostate cancer into a campaign to educate men to check for early signs of the illness.
Organisation
There are many ways to build on your strengths and organise your resources to do superb work. Some individuals, teams and organisations follow the coordination approach. This involves focusing on the following themes.
Clarity – This involves clarifying the real results to achieve and translating these into a clear picture of success
Coordination – This involves coordinating your resources to do superb work on the way towards achieving the picture of success.
Concrete Results – This involves getting some early wins and then doing your best to achieve the picture of success.
Great workers are good at priority management. They focus on their key goals and organise their resources to do superb work. Some may also hire people who can compensate for any of their weaknesses.
Great organisations also hire coordinators. This is because getting people to combine their talents can sometimes be a challenging. Good coordinators ensure that people channel their efforts towards achieving the agreed goals.
Imagine that a person has pursued an opportunity and organised their resources properly. They may then move into action, get some early wins and aim to achieve success. They may also focus on the following theme.
Outstanding Work
Some people see the opportunities in challenging situations. The following section describes three people who took this approach and went on to do outstanding work.
Maria Montessori – Doing
Outstanding Work In Education
Maria was an Italian educational pioneer who lived between 1870 and 1952. Her approach has helped many people to follow the learning process of absorption, adventure and achievement.
Maria became one of the first women in Italy to qualify as a doctor. She wanted to work as a teacher but met many obstacles. She therefore chose to focus on other opportunities.
She began working with children in hospital and this then led to meeting children in asylums. The Association Montessori Internationale described her approach in the following way.
She started to educate them: to lead them out of their isolation and deprivation of any stimulus. Maria really became an educator through force of circumstance and her dedication to truly invest in these ‘idiot’ children.
The children in the asylums started to develop positively beyond anybody’s imagination. So Montessori started wondering how well ‘normal’ children might benefit from the sensory didactic materials.
She was part of a group of socially committed young people that had connections. Through these she came into contact with Signor Talamo, who was responsible for the San Lorenzo social housing project.
He asked her to do something with the children of the San Lorenzo tenants. As their parents were away during the day to earn money, they were left to their own devices.
The positive results of her work in San Lorenzo became well-known, with the news spreading across Italy, Europe, the US, Australia and India.
Maria’s work won her the right to set up her own schools that eventually spread across the world. Here is a summary of some of her ideas.
Our aim is not only to make the child understand, and still less to force them to memorize, but so to touch their imagination as to enthuse him to their innermost core.
We must not dwell on the child’s limitations but focus on their possibilities. The teacher’s task is to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child.
The essential thing is for the task to arouse such an interest that it engages the child’s whole personality. The first essential for the child’s development is concentration. The child who concentrates is immensely happy.
The first dawning of real discipline comes through work. Every action of the teacher can become a call and an invitation to the children.
The more the capacity to concentrate is developed, the more often the profound tranquillity in work is achieved, then the clearer will be the manifestation of discipline within the child.
Childhood passes from conquest to conquest in a rhythm that constitutes its joy and happiness.
There was a time – during the early part of the Twentieth Century – when it seemed Maria’s approach would be adopted throughout education. Her ideas made a profound impact but some fell victim to other philosophies and mass schooling.
Maria’s outstanding work has helped many people to pursue their interests, take responsibility for their learning and work to reach their goal. They learned to flow, focus, finish and, as a by-product, find fulfilment.
Jürgen Griesbeck – Doing Outstanding
Work With StreetFootballWorld
Jürgen Griesbeck followed elements of this approach. Spurred on by a tragedy, he developed Fútbol por la Paz (Football for Peace) in 1996. This was a project using football to combat violence and drugs on the streets of Medellín, Colombia.
Based on this experience, he created Straßenfußball für Toleranz (Street Football for Tolerance) in Brandenburg, Germany. His next step was to create streetfootballworld in 2002.
This harnesses the power of football to create environments that empower people to shape their future lives. Every year it reaches more than 2 million people in over 90 countries.
Running tournaments in local communities across the world, it uses football to bring people together. People make connections and combine their talents to tackle other challenges they face. Here is an introduction from their website.
Jürgen went on to work with Juan Mata, the Spanish footballer, and in 2017 they founded Common Goal. This invites those involved in football to pledge 1% of their salaries to support disadvantaged young people.
Many players, managers and other people have pledged to support the venture. Here is an excerpt from the Common Goal website.
We’re uniting the world of footballers behind a shared commitment to give back. The idea is simple. Players pledge a minimum of 1% of their wages to a collective fund. And we allocate this fund to football charities that create the greatest impact worldwide.
Imagine uniting the world of football behind a shared social vision. Imagine the impact we could create and the lives we could change. 1% may seem like a small figure, yet it stands to make a big difference.
If the entire football community pledged just 1% of its collective income to a movement like Common Goal, we would generate a colossal 400% increase in funding for high-impact football NGOs the world over.
This translates to an additional eight million disadvantaged young people gaining access to football-based development projects each year. Through Common Goal, this is what we are trying to achieve. And we want you to join us.
Joseph Campbell – Doing Outstanding
Work By Describing The Heroic Journey
Joseph Campbell’s work reached many people through his PBS Television Series with Bill Moyers called The Power of Myth. His writing also influenced George Lucas in the making of Star Wars.
Joseph was pursuing an academic career until the Great Depression. Spending much of the following five years in a rented shack, he devoted his time to studying mythology and literature from many cultures.
He found that these stories followed a similar structure and described this in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Joseph’s writings were popularised by Christopher Vogler in his book The Writer’s Journey. This became a set text for budding writers across the world.
The heroic journey involves many stages. But let’s explore how you may follow elements of this in your own way.
Travelling – Starting On The
Journey Towards The Grail
You may be content in your world, but then comes the call to pursue an adventure or tackle a challenge. For example, you may lose your job, get an illness, see an injustice or catch a glimpse of the Grail.
At first you refuse the call but, after repeated asking, you embark on the journey. Now you are in a different world and do not know the rules, so you gather information and search for a compass.
Looking for guidance, you will meet helpers: but are they friends or enemies? Nevertheless, you continue on your chosen path.
Toiling – Following The
Journey Towards The Grail
You encounter tests on the journey: toils, trials and tribulations. There are highs, lows, breakthroughs and setbacks, but you try to keep your eyes on the Grail.
Christopher Vogler’s book shows how film plots often follow the structure that Joseph Campbell found in myths and legends. He writes:
A hero leaves her comfortable, ordinary surroundings to venture into a challenging, unfamiliar world.
It may be an outward journey to an actual place: a labyrinth, forest or cave, a strange city or country, a new locale that becomes the arena for her conflict with antagonistic, challenging forces.
But there are many stories that take the hero on an inward journey, one of the mind, the heart, the spirit.
In any good story the hero grows and changes, making a journey from one way of being to the next: from despair to hope, weakness to strength, folly to wisdom, love to hate, and back again.
It’s these emotional journeys that hook an audience and make a story worth watching.
(The Heroine’s Journey is similar to The Hero’s Journey, but with one vital difference. Women gather knowledge and wisdom from the tribe earlier. Men often only ask for help at the last moment. Even then they may see it as a sign of weakness.)
Overcoming challenges, you finally stand on the edge of victory. You venture into what Campbell calls the inmost cave and face the supreme ordeal.
How will you behave in this moment of truth? For example, will you be generous or will you submit to greed? Will you flow, fight or flee?
Transcending – Lifting The Grail And
Gathering Wisdom From The Journey
Sometimes you will lift the prize; sometimes you will simply gather wisdom for a future journey. You may enjoy a moment of transcendence – an epiphany – and see the world in a different way.
The Hero/Heroine sometimes returns with the prize, but first there is the journey home. This is the return to the ordinary world.
How can you make sense of what you have learned? Will people be able to understand? That is when the wisdom begins to seep into your bones and you are changed forever.
Joseph Campbell says people take one of three routes after returning to the world.
They share their vision, but the world does not want to know, so they retreat back to the woods, ‘with a dog and a pipe’.
They meet resistance, become disheartened, and revert to the ‘world’s way’.
They make a living by becoming, in the broadest sense, a ‘teacher’ and pass-on their message to people who are receptive.
Days, weeks and months pass. You rest for a while, but then you become restless. There is another mountain to climb, another adventure to pursue.
So you embark on your next chosen journey. Or does the journey choose you?
There are many ways to live life. Some people see certain events as an opportunity. They then aim to organise themselves properly and do outstanding work.
Let’s return to your own life and work. Can you think of a situation where you may want to follow elements of this approach? How can you do this in your own way? What may happen as a result of taking these steps?
If you wish, try tackling the exercise on this theme. This invites you to complete the following sentences.
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