Putting one foot in front of another through the dark

🧃 STEW IN YOUR OWN BRUCES: Accepting our unresolved journey of identity with compassion & faith, not cynicism & myopia

I have a colleague who has been a business owner for close to twenty years.

Funny thing is, he’s one of those guys who never had much of a brand. He never needed one. Clients always found out about him somehow, he performed excellent work for them, and the referrals have kept coming in.

But that's been a perpetual source of frustration for him. If you were to sit my colleague down and ask him to tell you about his brand, he would be hard pressed to communicate his value in a unique and compelling manner.

It’s the strangest thing. Because he actually is a brilliant and creative communicator. There’s just something about the relationship to identity that’s really challenging for him.

And believe me, we’ve tried every strategic branding exercise in the book. We’ve done corporate identity brainstorms no less than ten times in the last twenty years.

However, nothing concrete ever came out of it.

And my emotions are mixed on the matter.

• Part of me is determined to help my colleague identify and package his niche as a professional service provider if it’s the last goddamn thing I do.

• Another part of me wonders, what’s the point? He’s gotten this far without honing his professional positioning asset, so why change a winning formula?

• The cynical part of me thinks that his unsorted baggage is too heavy and expensive for him to ever find himself, and he should just stop searching.

• But then there’s the last part, the compassionate side of me. Which thinks, wow, identity is something that has always come easy to me from a young age, and what a gift that is. What a luxury to know who you are. What a blessing to have a handle by which others can hold you, one that feels authentic and special and yours.

Springsteen, in his stunning concert documentary about his fifty plus years in show business, made a profound observation about identity. Bruce said that it’s easy to lose yourself, or never find yourself.

But the older you get, the heavier that baggage becomes that you haven't sorted through, and so, you pay the price. And the older you get, the higher that price is.

Now, he isn’t suggesting that it’s impossible to find the cruising altitude for one’s identity after a certain age. Boss just says it’s harder. More of an uphill battle.

It’s funny, we all have this tendency to believe that everyone else experiences the world the same way we do. But that’s just myopia bias.

We see and interpret the world through the narrow lens of our own experiences, baggage, beliefs and assumptions. In reality, what one person is so good at they make look easy, is another person’s fiery crucible.

Bruce had another insight about this journey in his documentary. He said that when the music's over at the end of the day, life's mysteries remain and deepen. Its answers, unresolved.

But if your heart is open, and you're thinking hard, and living and loving in good faith, the questions you are asking yourself grow deeper, better.

You walk on in pursuit of those better questions, tentatively putting one foot in front of another through the dark.

Because that's where the next morning is. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What are you so good at that you make look easy?