#69: Encouragement
As I thought about writing a lead-in for this one and organizing the many thoughts that are flooding through my head into a few short sentences, I soon realized that it'd be better to simply leave it as is. Thank you for your sheer honesty and openness Pip.. you inspire me to more often do the same.
-Amanda
Pip Coburn pcoburn@coburnventures.com
ENCOURAGEMENT
THIS INTENTIONALLY RUNS THROUGH the email below and the link is key to the video.
At times I have some non-typical thoughts. Yesterday a dear friend prefaced some words to me with “If you were a normal person I would have been surprised, but I know you aren’t normal.”
I am not.
I have some big ideas that are core to me that seem a tad out of place in most places.
I have the thought of creating a small business that will lead to a company without borders that might lead to a community for change. I have the thought that business and community and life and family and joy might all swirl together. I wonder why “work” needs to be a place where we feel we can’t express our life just as fully as we enjoy with our dearest loved ones.
I think trust can happen in an instant and scale infinitely even though it doesn’t happen much.
I think that full individual freedom is a path toward the greatest community.
I think that all of us humans created “us-them” and that it is NOT in our DNA…
… and that we can also reverse it and experience just one “us”.
For many of my ideas, there is just not a lot of evidence that some of my thinking makes any sense at all.
Occasionally I get down.
If anyone thinks I am a self-propulsion energy machine I am most certainly anyyyyyyttttthinnnnnng but that.
Sometimes I do want to give in and move to Vermont and live in a small house. Just Kelly and me. I don’t know why I always pick Vermont in this mental departure.
Perhaps it is my new favorite smoothie of peanut butter – spinach – banana – yogurt – honey — coffee — soy that keeps me at it.
I don’t think that’s it.
About 13 years ago as we started our tiny company my friend Keith Yamashita who himself was encouraged by a speaker in Tokyo the prior week said, “Keep running as fast as you can as if you are along the edge of the Great Wall of China. You will fall off. But you will get up and run again as fast as you can…”
I remember these words as if yesterday.
I think more than anything I keep following my thoughts and heart and aiming to turn them into action because of your company and…
…encouragement…
Maybe I am just the only one of seven billion people who is fueled not by awesome smoothies but by companionship and encouragement especiallllly when my ideas are so atypical at times… just as yours undoubtedly are here or there or… everywhere…
I hope you find my companionship and encouragement even one-tenth as valuable to you as yours are to me.
I can use it!
So… IMAGINE…
IMAGINE, if you would like, what it meant to me to receive the email and link below from a dear friend Marcelle in The Netherlands on Christmas morning six months ago…
It was one of the first things I saw that morning in my daily routine.
Marcelle… I could not ever pay you back for your encouragement… but I will work at it… and same to you all.
pip
(From Marcelle)
...with the community for change! Hereby a video of a similar experience: John Lennon’s Imagine...playing for change..this is how the zoom sessions make me feel!
Maybe you can share it with the community?
Have a wonderful Christmas with your families and/or friends and let’s rock in 2018!!
Cheers, Marcelle Mettes
Pip's first-person bio:
More than anything I suspect I am driven by “community”. Across the past 15 years, I have grown to realize that most any success or fortune I have had in the work I do I have re-invested back into my activities such that I spend more and more of my life with people I adore and admire and just loving being around and working on a whole bunch of things that I am incredibly excited about. I like to study monumental change at the levels of society, marketplaces, organizations and most significantly… people. I like to study culture deeply. I like to attempt to create culture. I like processes and helping others advances their processes and being trusted deeply. My wife Kelly is both supportive and probably confused by what I do for a living which makes two of us. My greatest joy in my work is when I have the chance to draw from two decades of intense work in order to perhaps help someone have a break through.