Creating Space

This morning, I’ve been listening to music and thinking about taste. A song that opens the sky for me — that brings light every time I hear it — can bounce off friends of mine without impact. They may even frown and ask me to turn it off.

There are some songs that reach a wide audience, like “Here Comes the Sun” or “Dragostea Din Tei”. There are others, like “Little Earthquakes” or “March of Cambreadth” that specific audiences take to passionately. There are still others, like the four bars I made up and hum to myself when in a particular mood, that are strictly individual.

All of these songs have their place. The world would be poorer without any of them.

It took me a long time to find my work in the world. I tried a lot of different things, achieved moderate levels of competence in them, felt my attention drifting.

When I found Martha Beck’s book Finding Your Own North Star, it was like being hit by lightning. Like having a parade with drums, trombones and elephants march past my door just to pull my attention to a banner that read: “Do what you want. No, really, DO WHAT YOU WANT!”

“But, but,” I stammered, “what if I want something horrible?”

The conductor kindly stepped aside to answer my question. “You won’t. When we are true to ourselves, our true selves are true to the world, too.”

Martha Beck’s been gathering the evidence. Po Bronson gathered evidence. So did Barbara Sher and Marsha Sinetar and Jack Canfield and many more. What you really want will be to make something, help someone, or solve a problem. That’s the vision that will pull you through the sometimes tedious thousand steps to make it a reality.

What specifically will be your vision? It will be like your favorite song — maybe something millions also love, maybe yours alone. How can you find it?

You could read and work through the authors I’ve mentioned above. Or you could call me. Because my vision is to create a spacefaring civilization by putting the best success tools in the hands of science fiction fans. I’d be very glad to help you find what you want to do and how you can do it.

“What makes one step a giant leap
Is all the steps before.”
– Leslie Fish, from “A Toast for Unknown Heroes”

In some ways, looking at the Apollo program is misleading. Especially now that three decades have passed to blur the details, it’s easy to take the impression that Sputnik went up, JFK waved his hands, and suddenly we were landing on the moon.

It took a lot more than that. Just along one path, someone had to design every part of the rocket, capsule, and lander. Someone had to mill each part, and someone had to assemble them.

Previously, someone had to train the engineers to design the parts. Someone had to do the research that told us what designs were needed. Someone had to test and redesign.

Even more basically, someone had to make the paper that the engineers drew on. Someone had to sell the pencils. Someone had to keep the electricity running, and make the breakfasts, and bring the coffee.

Many of these actions we take for granted. They are part of the baseline of our civilization. We have systematized making paper, distributing pencils, training engineers, and bringing coffee beans from tropical regions to our home markets, roasting them, brewing them, and putting the steaming cups in the hands of the people who want them. All of this takes place without much of our attention.

At least it does until something goes wrong. Recently, for example, we’ve been losing ground on science education. That’s a problem that could lead to losing our ability to field engineers later. So those who find and work on such problems are the sustainers of our civilization.

So here’s a better way to look at the success of Apollo: millions of Americans, just like us, continually built and rebuilt a robust economy, with coffee and engineers and huge industrial capabilities and much more, and when we gathered that enormous power behind the inspiring vision of reaching the moon, we took not just thousands, but billions of steps that acculumated into Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind.

Any grand project takes both the vision to give it direction and the thousands of steps to make it a reality.