The Journey is the Destination

I turn 59 in a couple months. And a few weeks ago I lost someone dear to me.

Last June he sat in our living room smiling confidently abd sharing a cancer diagnosis. Stage three. By January it was stage four and there is no stage five. Outpatient became inpatient then hospitalization, hospice and finally the call we’d been anticipating but that still came as a shock. He was 53.

Losing someone is like looking up at the night sky in the desert. It makes you wonder what it's all about and if anything you do really matters. This past year I've pondered my own smallness and ephemerality more than usual.

I didn’t start this piece thinking it would be a downer. Sorry about that. I started out thinking I would write about my professional choices and ambitions. For better or worse, contemplating mortality just seemed the natural place to start.

I think we can be a bit too stressed about where we are going, with our destination; even though its the same for everyone. We talk about building, creating, disrupting, saving the planet, and getting to Mars. I’m not saying these things aren't important. But I think sometimes we miss forest of life for trees of achievement (how's that for a pretentious turn of phrase?).

Or perhaps its even deeper; it's the mycelium we miss (the connective tissue that holds the whole thing together).

[NOTE: mycelium is the almost invisible fungal network that connects root systems together in a forest. Trees use it to communicate and share resources. It’s pretty cool and I’ll link a video below if you want to learn more.]

OK let's talk about work — this is LinkedIn after all. My work is ostensibly about organizational effectiveness. I do my best to help create companies that work as intended. Organizations that create something of value, use resources efficiently enough, and bring in enough revenue to keep going.

On one level this is painfully mundane work — we design and build processes, org charts, team habits, metrics dashboards and the like.

I never expected to find myself in this line of work. I always thought I’d be an academic or an artist; that I’d ponder and create. But whenever I took a job to pay the bills I always found it was the people who mattered most to me.

I could be working on something really cool but if I didn't gel with the people, I'd leave. And likewise some really mundane work was made meaningful because of the team I got to be with each day. It's always been the people more than the work that would keep me in a job or repel me out.

For me, organizations and life are both about relationships. If and when I find myself in the same position as my friend — health failing and seeing the world with me no longer in it — I imagine I’ll look back on the quality of the ride more than any accomplishments I’ve made.

So this is why I do what I do. Because I believe how we travel together is more important than any destination we might be heading for.

There’s so much more I could say about this; I could give you frameworks and tools and processes and lectures on management theory. I'll leave all that for another day.

Today what I want to leave you with is this. How we get places is what really matters; the journey is the real destination. And when we lose sight of this, we lose sight of something essential.

VIDEO: How Trees Secretly Talk to Each Other in the Forest