What's Your Sentence?

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

If you could define your life in a single sentence, what would it be?  Your purpose, your motivation, your accomplishments, what you want to be, where you want to go, who you want to be?  All of that summed up in a single sentence.

How would you define yourself?  Is it how others would see you, too?  Or is it wishful thinking?

And, most importantly, what have you done to make your sentence reality today?  Yesterday?  What will you do tomorrow?

All great questions with multiple answers for most folks.  But to be really effective, don't you need to hone that down so that your efforts are concentrated in the most important directions?

Daniel Pink has been asking readers to distill themselves into their own sentences based on advice he gives in his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

I find the challenge of distilling myself and my scattered work and life histories into a single sentence to be elusive -- and motivating -- at the same time.  How, exactly, would I want to describe myself to a stranger?  How would I want to be defined by others based on my actions?  What can I do to change my sentence to what I really want it to be instead of what it happens to be at the moment?

See...really interesting things to be asking yourself, aren't they?


When we were in law school, one of the professors (who no longer teaches there) shared her theory on how to achieve what she wanted out of life:  it was a rule of five.  There were five areas she concentrated on, and if an activity or opportunity fell outside those five areas?  She said no thanks.

Even if it were an interesting opportunity, if it didn't work within one of her "rule of 5" categories, she took a pass on it to concentrate her efforts elsewhere.  It was an intriguing concept, something that goes along with the "what's my sentence" line of questions, but not something I adopted for myself at that point. 

Now, however, I'm wondering what I could have already accomplished had I done so.

Mr. ReddHedd and I were talking about this over coffee this morning.  He learned an analogy early in his life that stuck with him that amplifies all of this that I'd like to share with everyone.  If you take a regular water hose, with average pressure, you can get a lot of nice things from it:  nourishing water, happy play time, green lawn...all from a water spray and a little, scattered effort at various times.  If you take that same water hose, but concentrate the spray down to a tiny hole rather than a wide spread, you can commit the same effort but the concentration increases the intensity of the water that comes out -- so much so that at a certain point, you reach an ability to cut through metal with the same volume of water -- just by increasing the concentration of pressure applied.

What if you lived your life that way?  Concentrating your efforts on a few things, and doing no more in a day than you are doing -- just only doing things within that concentrated zone?  What would that yield?  What would you like it to yield?  And how can you change what you are doing to achieve that?  What steps need to be taken to make your goals possible, or even more probable, and what areas of concentration would be required in order to achieve those goals?

Isn't that an interesting set of questions to ask yourself, too?

Today, I'm going to spend some time working on my sentence:  what it is now, what I ultimately would like it to be, and what I need to do to make the ultimate sentence my own reality.  I'll be interested to see what I come up with in the end.  And in what yours might be as well.

(I found Dan Pink's blog via The Happiness Project.  Thanks!)