In early December, I had the opportunity to participate in a great new experiment. A group of 24 industry “thought leaders” gathered to host a 24-hour, worldwide online “unconference” called TFT12. (If you didn’t have a chance to see my presentation or the other 23 great ones that shared the stage, click here to watch mine and then browse the rest!)
Whether this is the way that things will be done in the future or if this turns out to have just been an interesting experiment remains to be seen. But what is perfectly clear is that this was not a passive activity. Chris Dancy and the folks at SDI actively imagined what the future might look like and then put themselves out there to see what would happen. They imagined a future and took a shot at creating it.
It made me think.
What future am I creating? Where in my life am I actively imagining a future – my future – and then taking deliberate steps to create it? Not enough, that’s certain. How about you?
It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking of the future as something that WILL HAPPEN to us – rather than something that we are, in fact, creating. Every day. With every decision we make and with every action we take.
I have been fighting a nasty, nasty cold for the past week. In a moment mixed of boredom and exhaustion, my son and I started reading poetry to one another. Which led me to one of my all time favorites, Invictus by William Ernest Henley. It’s a powerful poem that ends with two lines that I always fall back on:
“I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”
As we begin 2013, my hope for myself – and for you – is that we can keep this at the forefront of our mind. We are not passengers. We are not spectators. We are the stars of our own lives. We are creating our future every day. We are the masters of our fate. We are the captains of our soul.
What future will you create tomorrow?
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