“All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are.”
…stated the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
But “what we are” is not always apparent to even ourselves at the beginning of our journey.
That was true of our friend David Leventhal. When we met for breakfast, one blue sky Saturday morning under the trees in the garden of the Delancey Street Café in San Francisco, David surprised us when he said, “You know, my friends of just a few years ago wouldn’t recognize me today”.
He then told the story of how he was once a Type A, hard charging, successful high-tech leader of business development and acquisitions. Looking at the happy, relaxed David that day in the garden it was hard to imagine him as that previous person.
(BTW — I am not telling this story to impress you with our friend David, even though he is quite impressive. I am sharing his story because we often have two versions of ourselves that surprise even us and that second version is very important to how we will live and work in the future. As David Brooks communicated in his book The Second Mountain, if we are open to discover the true nature of “what we are”, we often discover the person who climbed the first mountain of life…“it’s all about My Success”…is…
