When my two oldest sons were very young, one summer we visited great friends in Norway. One day my friend and I took his two sons and mine, all aged between about 3 and 8, for the over two-hour drive from Oslo to their cottage on a lake for an overnight trip.
It was a wonderful trip, but on the way back the boys were bored. My friend asked them to pick a colour. They chose blue. He then asked them to count all the blue cars they saw.
Amazing how many blue cars you see when you are looking for blue cars.
Today a story about the word beautiful as it relates to business and seeing it when you are looking.
Also a thought around the power of having a focus word like Blue, or Beautiful.
Noticing Beautiful
One of my regular readers of this daily blog is fellow Modern Elder Academy alumnus Toby Trevarthen of Spatial Shift.
Regular readers know I have a focus on Beautiful Leadership and doing business beautifully.
Toby commented to me recently that he is now seeing “that word” (ie Beautiful) everywhere. It is his “blue car”.
This week he sent me a blog from Fred Wilson. Fred is a VC who has posted daily on his own blog every day since 2003 (so far!), so my 500 or so posts is simply a beginning!
Fred posted a blog called Progress Is Ugly talking about dockless electric scooters and how they are left discarded all over his neighbourhood.
In his blog, he asks the question of the startup world:
“can we innovate more beautifully?”
Great question, Fred, great question.
Beautiful is a provocation, an aspiration, something we can always look to be and do more of.
The power of a theme, a focus word
So, we’ve seen that once we choose a word we see it all the time.
At the start of the year, I wrote: “What is your one-word theme for 2019?” (btw, in that post I noted that mine is Beauty!).
When we have a theme, it brings focus to us, an anchor, a driver, a lens over our work and life.
I encourage you to read that post and consider what your theme is? If you’d like to talk to me about that on a call, message me and let’s look at connecting.
A beautiful blue car
Oh, and as a postscript, that isn’t just any blue car in the photo. That Jaguar XK120 is a beautiful racing machine that my father owned and raced in the early to mid-1970s, and this young boy, under 10 years old at the time, was in awe of his father racing it and in love with that car. I still am both of those things.