Lots of Little Dots

Have you ever stood too close to a pointillist painting? All you can see are the dots.

But then you take a few steps back and you can start the whole thing and all of the little dots start to blend together and then the whole picture starts to come into focus. If you stand too close its like trying to imagine what a 10,000 piece puzzle looks like by looking at just one piece. But as you move further back all of the little pieces come together to form an amazing picture.

I feel like there are a lot of times when I'm so close to the details that I just don't get it. I may not like the color of one of the dots, and I think to myself, "Why did this have to happen?" or "Why do things have to be this way?" I don't realize that maybe this is the highest point on the majestic tower.

It's funny how things like that work: the times in our lives that seem the most difficult end up being some of our best experiences. Not long ago, a friend and I were talking about how the best semesters of school are the ones where you are so busy that you have no idea how you are going to get everything done. And similarly, some of the best times in our lives are also the most difficult.

There is a son that I like entitled You're gonna miss this. It talks about how we are always in a rush to get through life, to get to the next phase (graduating, getting married, buying your own house, etc) and how we then look back on the times that we rushed through and miss them. We just need to slow down and enjoy life, even the hard times.

I think God meant for the most difficult times in our lives to be the best though. They are the times when we learn the most, when we grow the most, and when we really rise to our full potential. Of course, we can't do it on our own - but we can do it. We just need to remember, that while we are so close to the details that all we can see are some dots (some of which may look quite ugly all by themselves), that He can see the whole thing. And if we will let Him, and not insist on making the dots the colors and sizes that we want, then He will paint a great masterpiece greater than we could have ever envisioned.

Defeat: the Key to Success

Defeat

Defeat. Its an interesting feeling: knowing that you lost. Some people are more used to it than others; and some people handle it better than others do. Of course, there are different kinds of defeat as well. You can be defeated at something that you don’t really care about. You can be defeated at something that you have poured your whole heart and soul into. You can be defeated at something that you wanted, but that you never gave it the time that it needed. You can even be defeated at things that you didn’t know you could be defeated at.

Success in life is more about how you handle defeat than it is actually about the successes that you have. Those who are successful are usually those who know how to handle defeat well. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it hurts any less, but it does mean that they don’t let it overcome them.

How you successfully deal with defeat depends greatly on how you are defeated. If you are defeated after doing your very best, then it is much easier to hold your head high than if you feel that you lost because of some of lack of effort on your part. Whereas, if you are defeated at something that is of little importance to you then you are not likely to have issues with shrugging it off. And if you are defeated at something that you really had no control over (but still may be important to you, such as a job that you were fully qualified for, but someone else was a friend of the boss or being rejected by someone even if you were the perfect man / woman), then success ultimately lies in being able to let it go and move on.

However, success usually lies in taking defeat (graciously) and learning from it in moving forward.

Recently, I experienced defeat in an unexpected way. There was someone at work that had been intending to get to know better for a few months but had never gotten around to it. It hadn’t been that important to me. Then, one day last week I decided that I was actually going to do something about getting to know her better, only to find out that it was her last day. I hadn’t expected to feel so disappointed because it hadn’t been that important to me (I mean I hadn’t done anything about it for more than two months), so I was surprised to find that I was feeling very disappointed with myself for not having taken the initiative to get to know her better.

That’s the worst kind of defeat: being disappointed in yourself. But in many ways, it’s also the most important kind of defeat in success. If we are to be successful, then we have to experience these kinds of defeats occasionally. They are critical to our success – but only if we learn from them. Because, conversely, if we do not learn from them they will ultimately be the cause of our failure. Successful people have usually experienced many defeats over the course of their life. What makes them successful is that they learn from them and are made better by them. That is the difference between those that are successful and those that aren’t: it’s not in the number of defeats, it’s how they learn from them. Thus, if we are to be successful, we must learn to from our defeats.

Everythings Amazing & Nobodys Happy

So someboday at work posted this on our internal website. I found it amusing, and also an interesting perspective so I thought I'd share it.

Thank You

I’ve been thinking about life the last few days, and it’s made me realize how grateful I am for the many wonderful people in my life.  I have an awesome family and great friends.  You mean so much to me.  So I just wanted to stop for a moment and say,

Thank You!

To Love or to Be Loved

To Love or to Be Loved

“To be, or not to be? That is the question” is just one of the many oft quoted lines of William Shakespeare. While I believe that Shakespeare was one of the greatest wordsmiths of all time, I think he missed the mark a little bit on this particular point.  “The question” really ought to be: to love, or to be loved?

To love, or to be loved? That is the question.  While I do not pretend to be a Shakespeare expert (in fact, I must admit that I have never actually seen Hamlet [which is what the famous “To be, or not to be?” comes from] – which is a shame), as I understand it, he is talking about living or dying, and the injustice that is life.  And yet, had he asked a different question, “To love, or to be loved?” he would have found the answer to the question that he did in fact ask.  For had he asked the question, “To love, or to be loved?” he would have found the secret to happiness and the cure for the injustice of life.

The world would have us think that being loved is far more important than loving.  I would guess that there would be some that would go so far as to say that the only reason to love is to be loved.  Many good people believe that being loved is what brings happiness in our lives.  And they are indeed correct, at least to some extent.  Being loved brings some degree of happiness into our lives.  When we are feeling down, a frequent cause is that we feel like no one cares about us.  We probably even know that there are people that care about us. Yet somehow, even though we know that, we don’t feel it; we still feel like no one cares about us, or we feel that we are alone, or that no one knows how we feel.  Usually such feelings are entirely irrational, but that doesn’t change the way that we feel.

But if we change our outlook and start looking to love rather than being loved, then we would find that no matter what happens, we can still have a joyful life. That doesn’t mean that we don’t experience pain or that our life all of the sudden becomes perfect, but it does become filled with joy, in spite of all the bad things.

Many times we feel depressed because we have answered the question the wrong way: we are looking to be loved rather than to love.  And in fact, by answering the question that way, we can mistakenly then ask Hamlet’s famous question: “to be, or not to be?” instead of the question that we ought to ask, “to love, or to be loved?”

To love.