What's your one word?

Months ago a great friend and colleague shared with me that he thought everyone has a word - one word - that defines them.

‘What’s your word?’ I asked

‘competence’ he replied.

It stuck with me, and as a team we’ve spent time thinking about the words that define us, and how they relate to our personal narrative - as this post from Charlie Kneen observes.

But something else has come up. It turns out that eventually your word ‘flips’ itself: if you spend long enough pursuing competence there comes a point when you are surrounded by people less competent than you are. And your challenge ‘flips’: either you are going to spend the remainder of your life cursing those around you, or you are going to have to learn to adapt to a world where others are not driven by the same things.

I see this a lot in my contemporaries: people who have mastered their word, but now have no-where to go. A kind of bewilderment that everyone else is not catching-up. Not understanding that others are not on the same path - that their word is different.

And that’s my word: understanding.

And the thing I’m really struggling with is that it takes two people to innovate: one to see the solution, and another to sell the T-shirts. To sell it to people on their terms. And I’m not terribly good at that. Selling is not my word. So you see, I’m stuck.