2009 – 2010 A Temporal Boundary Condition

One of key requirement for getting people engaged and motivated toward a goal (IMHO) is to condense the goal or objective into something simple – something the person can carry around with them in their working memory and access as needed throughout their daily activity.

We all are too familiar with the experience of using a great computer program but for some reason it chews up too much memory.  It works great until you open another window or launch a new application (can you say Firefox or Tweetdeck? – both memory hogs.)  When that happens, nothing works.  Everything crashes.

Few Words – Many Thoughts

Great writers have the ability to condense very complex thinking into a few words and allow you to keep those words in your working memory and, in my case, haunt you. 

I have had in my Google reader a blog post from August 2008 simply because it had one sentence in it that I knew I could be use someday.  It is a great sentence.  It contains only eight (8) words.  Yet it stuck with me for 16 months and it informed much of what I worked on all year.

And now, as I cross the chasm of time from 2009 to 2010 I can use it.

The sentence is:

 “Human beings are naturally drawn to ‘boundary conditions.’"

Boundary conditions are those places where land meets sea.  Where mountains meet sky.  Boundary conditions are those places where one thing stops and another starts.  

Today is a boundary condition – albeit a temporal one.

Today is a boundary condition where what we've done connects with

what we can do

what we should do

what we won't do anymore

The turn of new year is another place where we can see the change between two things.  The person I was and the person I can be.  It is a boundary condition.  And we are drawn to it as if it were a beach house or a ski chalet.

As the calendar moves to 2010 tonight at midnight – revel in that moment where there is no 2009 and no 2010 – the point at which you are fully in the middle of the boundary and enjoy the fact that you are and you can be anything.

Happy New Year.