#08 What do you have faith in?
I have faith in nights.
The less we trust (in ourselves, in others, in life), the more we try to make reality stop; what change could possibly be to our benefit?, we think. We are bombarded with messages of inadequacy (social media), lack (ads), and ruin (news), and the only projections we can make are negative ones, either out of despair or insufficiency.
We believe that the world is only getting worse, so why bother trying to do good? Or we believe ther we will finally have everlasting happiness when we own this phone or that car, and we stay miserable for not getting it or become miserable when we actually get it and realizing it didn’t bring happiness after all.
Alan Watts, responsible for much of the westernization of Eastern philosophies (chiefly, Buddhism and Taoism), makes a stiking distinction between belief and faith:
Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes.
Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown.
Belief clings, but faith lets go.
(Watts, A. The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message For An Age Of Anxiety. 1951)
Have Faith
Two of the most direct distinction of belief and faith in business are the yearly budget and the management by objectives. By definition, they’re wrong - setting in stone what needs to happen in twelve months is both impossible and detrimental to success. How would you be able to seize good opportunities if they’re not budgeted for? How would you deploy the creativity and energy of your teams if they are bound for the year to the activities by the bonus?
These are tools to give people the sense of control over reality, when reality is ever changing. Is it too new-age-y asking companies to do away with these practices and have faith in their people? Maybe. But those that do are reaping massive benefits. As one of the companies put it, “In the new way of thinking, we aim to make money without knowing how we do it, as opposed to the old way of losing money knowing exactly how we lost it.”
The same is true for careers. Never in my plans (when I had them) were to finish a grinding pre-seed startup acceleration program on the first try, launch a company, close it eight months later to join an industry I knew nothing about, move to New Zealand two years later without a job, get a job in Austria during Covid while still in New Zealand, and rejoin the company I left with an European position and move to the city of my wife’s dreams, Barcelona. How could I have planned this?
I couldn’t. But I learned - and I’m still learning - to have faith in others, in life, and in me. And I can’t wait to see what comes next.
WIIFM
Detach your sense of worth from the results of your work. The shiny items, the praise, the thing everyone is seeking is not the measure of who you are; they can be one consequence of a good work, well done, for the right reasons, but when you actually do a good work, well done, for the right reasons, you’ll likely not even care too much for what you get. The joy is in the dance.
Poet’s Corner
[Du Dunkelheit]
Rainer Maria Rilke
Du Dunkelheit, aus der ich stamme,
ich liebe dich mehr als die Flamme,
welche die Welt begrenzt,
indem sie glänzt
für irgendeinen Kreis,
aus dem heraus kein Wesen von ihr weiß.
Aber die Dunkelheit hält alles an sich:
Gestalten und Flammen, Tiere und mich,
wie sie's errafft,
Menschen und Mächte -
Und es kann sein: eine große Kraft
rührt sich in meiner Nachbarschaft.
Ich glaube an Nächte.
[You Darkness]
(Translated from the German by Robert Bly)
You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! —
powers and people —
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.