I once had a friend ask me… “If you had to boil down your professional skill sets into a single word… what word would you choose?”. Obviously choosing a single word to identify the value that you bring to your profession is a difficult exercise; however, the exercise identifies a set of valuable advice at the core of the question.
Our lives become more and more complex each day as society continues to advance. The complexities of our lives continue to allow us to experience more that life has to offer and we have the unique opportunity, today more than ever before, to specifically align our passions and interests with our talents to define a profession that allows us to provide value to society. At least, that has always been the nature of society and this perspective has been part of the traits that have lead to success. Instead of each person focusing on their own needs and trying to achieve everything required to survive by themselves, society established the practice of specialization of labor by organizing into roles such as farmers, bakers, blacksmiths, craftsmen, scribes, etc. that allowed each individual member to bring unique value to society as a whole while garnering benefit from other members to meet each individual’s needs. This specialization lead first to the barter system and later to the system of commerce and capitalism that we now enjoy.
The challenge in modern society is in choosing. Specifically, the choice of how to focus your time when a number of competing priorities and opportunities compete to make the best use of our energy. Additionally, once you have chosen a specialization to focus your energy, you must then determine how to monetize that opportunity to allow you to achieve survival and continue your efforts. This often becomes a significant barrier and although the use of modern technology has provided us efficiency in many ways and has led to more freedom than ever before to allow a person the ability to explore multiple opportunities to find their ultimate passion, this freedom is the cause of significant inefficiency due to the paradox of choice. Although we still follow the practices of separation of labor, which helps to define specific roles, it is important that we as members of society make a conscious effort to more specifically refine how we will focus our energy during any given time period and make that use of energy have a positive impact. Of course, there will always be barriers of entry and challenges to overcome to achieve particular goals; however, that is exactly what we seek in this effort of continued growth, as overcoming those challenges are how we continue to excel. The ability to overcome an obstacle and share the knowledge of how we achieved the result is our contribution to society. As long as each member of society continues to make positive contributions, society as a whole will continue to thrive.
My goal with the launch of this blog is to do just that in hopes that this blog will serve as a medium to share and grow together. The topics you will find here are specific areas of interest of mine and will obviously follow my focus of energy. I will follow-up with additional posts to explore my background and hopefully provide insight into my specific areas of interest in hopes that this blog will provide value to others. Of course, I cannot guarantee that the content on this blog will be anything more than just my thoughts, opinions and interests, but I hope that you will join me in this journey and share your own journey along the way. I am open to comments and feedback and look forward to the journey ahead.