Month: December 2010

About Love and Excellence

Riverside Church, NYC May 2002

I had a different blog post in mind for this weekend. I was going to write about the iPad & my experiences with it these past few weeks. Yawn.

Instead I want to write about someone who’s lying in a hospital bed tonight, but who is surrounded and hopefully lifted up by the love and prayers of not only his family, but hundreds of members of his extended family.

I spent 5 years singing in a choir led by Johannes Somary and they were some of the happiest times of my life. He seemed to me more like a force of nature than an actual human being at times, so strong was his personality. You always wanted to do your very best for Johannes, because that was what he expected. And he got it.

But what you got out of the work you put in for Johannes was so much more.

I learned not just to love choral music in my years with Johannes, but also about passion, and commitment, and about excellence. And also about leadership, although back then that wasn’t really on my mind.

My thoughts tonight are with him and his family, and hoping that although he is beginning 2011 in a very dark place, that the rest of 2011 will be a much better one for him, because the world without Johannes would be a dimmer, less musical place.

Passion for The Job

This morning, my collague John Nack wrote a blog post about the passions which drive his work pursuits, and the last line of that post struck a very deep chord for me:

the deep threat isn’t losing my job, it’s working on something for which I lack passion.

That goes right to the heart of my own career path. I’ve held jobs where I wasn’t passionate about the work that I did, and those are the jobs that grind you down and make you feel a little dead inside. It doesn’t matter if to the outside view they seem like perfectly good jobs – if you’re not truly happy to be doing what you do, sooner or later 1) it shows and 2) you pay a price.

Over time I came to realize that what I care most about is the interrelationship of people and technology. If I were more visually-focused, perhaps I’d have become a UI or UX professional, but I can’t design my way out of a paper bag. And tech for tech’s sake alone also does not interest me — it’s how people use their tools, what they do with them, and how they connect to each other that gets me up in the morning.

So here I find myself, after a long and sometimes convoluted road, in the extremely privileged position of working on something which I have a great passion for – and I get paid to do it. May we all be so fortunate.