Success and Emptiness: A Launchpad - Robert Strock and Dr. Ken Blanchard

You know, what I've noticed is that if people only are dealing with one side of them. For example, when I work with business folks, I find that they're focused on success, which to them is accumulation of wealth, recognition for their efforts in power, status. What I'll say to them is that there's nothing wrong with making money, nothing wrong with being recognized, nothing wrong with having some power and status. What's wrong is if that's who you think you are, if your self worth is tied up into that, the only way you can maintain your self worth is to get more of those. And I think that's where a lot of this greed has come off. This part of our whole economic situation now where, you know, here's somebody's got millions of dollars and somehow they want more because that's how they keep score or you know, their recognition, you know, I need another reward or I need this. And they miss what I think spiritual thing is more after significance, which is, you know, the opposite of accumulation. Wealth is generosity in time, talent, treasure, touch. And the opposite of recognition is service. How can I serve you and help you? The opposite of power and status is loving relationships. And the spiritual one really helps you in that area. But we've got a colleague of ours in our own support group who really spent a great deal of time on generosity and service and loving relations. And all of a sudden he's getting to the point where if anything happens to him, he's worried about his wife because he hasn't been very good at managing finances and, you know, other kinds of things. So it's a, it's a very interesting thing that kind of completes the wholeness if you look at both of them.

Yeah, I think it really is such an area of balance between those two sides. And then the other subtle part, which I'm curious how you deal with, is when you have the realization or you have the experience that having success isn't fulfilling enough and you try to impart that to someone else, there's always a danger that what you're going to reach is just a guilty place inside them where they don't feel that they want to be moving towards what you've called significance or towards being more generous or compassionate, they're still in a. In a situation where they really believe that accumulating more or being more successful or being better at what they do would help them. And so one of the parts of my work is to try to not push people into that, but to really maybe sometimes share the experience in a very subtle sort of way, but really convey to them, you know what? This isn't something that you should want. This is actually a place that is a gift. If you inwardly experience that, you feel like you're missing something, but if you don't, don't feel guilty, because that's not going to help for not wanting it. So I'm wondering, do you deal with that distinction in your work with people?

You know how they say that when the student is ready, the teacher appears? I think when people are ready to move from success to significance, that time comes. Right. A good friend of ours, Bob Buford, wrote a wonderful book called Halftime, and his analogy is that when we get in the locker room at age 50 or above and we're going to come out for the second half, most people want to move from success to significance. And that's a natural move. And he's really been very helpful in creating an organization around Halftime and helping people look at that transition. Although my wife, Margie, got on this board and she said, bob, I'm afraid women don't always go through the same pattern that you do. She said, a lot of women I know want to move from significance to success. I mean, you know, raising kids and doing some of the things that maybe they've done is very significant from their standpoint. And then they like to maybe do something out there. So I think it's a matter of timing.

Yeah.