Leaning In, but Only When Your Heart Is In It

Have you ever pursued something that you felt like your heart wasn't in? Maybe it was a relationship? Maybe a friendship? Maybe a job?

You worked at it, and worked at it, and then worked some more. But it just seemed so hard, so toilsome, with so little fruit to show for your labors. I believe that good things aren't supposed to feel deeply toilsome. That doesn't mean we don't persist, but it does mean we should start to pay attention when the toil lasts longer than we expected, especially when the toil is voluntary rather than involuntary.

There has never been a time when I pursued something wholeheartedly where I wished I had toiled a little longer at the wrong thing. The right things in our lives feel good. They feel like stepping deeper into a pool of cool water. They feel oddly familiar, and oddly good. Sure they're hard, but its a different kind of hard. Its a kind of hard that brings us life, and reminds us why life is really worth living.

Take my decision to leave a good job to pursue design school, for example. In a down economy, I decided to get a master's in a field that at the time felt superfluous, and unproven. I went to study design thinking, a field that only a few years beforehand had been heralded a "Failed Experiment," in Fast Company magazine no less, by Bruce Nussbaum no less. But scholarly business writers don't always get it right.

No one could have ever predicted what a "good experiment" design thinking might be for business at large. It is now being adopted by companies across the country as "the next wave of corporate." And its disrupting business as usual in industries like financial services, transportation, healthcare, and insurance, just to name a few. There are now too many case studies to ignore: design thinking hasn't failed, but it did need to evolve.

And so it is, too, with our pursuits, large and small. Sometimes, we need to evolve our own thinking to find the place that's right for us. In my latest post, I mentioned an inspiration for a new series: sticky buns. What's my sticky bun? I'm only just figuring that out. And the only way i'm learning how to do that is by tasting lots of things that turn out to be a lot more salty and crunchy than my palate prefers. I've leaned in a lot over the past year, but i've learned that sometimes leaning in isn't enough. When your heart craves sticky sweet, sometimes you've got to let it have it, rather than trying to convince your heart that salty is more your style.