When I was creating the Hand, I had already retired from my corporate job. As I asked, How then shall I live?, I turned to Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. It’s based on the course they taught at Stanford, the most popular course at the university.

Burnett and Evans identified four areas of life:

• Work
• Health
• Love
• Play

The Work area stymied me, until I saw my work falling in two areas: the work I did for the pure joy of it (writing, such as writing these posts), and the work I did for other reasons (teaching at UC, or special projects for my condo building). So, I split them apart, and that’s what led to my 5-item list and then to the 5-digit Hand.

My first finger is ‘Create.’

This is where I most fully and joyfully express my true self. It’s where I find myself in Flow, as described by Csikszentmihalyi. It’s where encodings thrive, as described by Jim Collins, in What to Make of a Life.

Collins says encodings are deeper and more powerful than strengths. My interpretation of encodings is that they are a  unique combination of inherent strengths that become most powerful when they work together.

I know I’m in my encodings when doing something that uses my superpower, my unique combo, as identified by a former boss. My superpower is to assimilate and simplify complex information to create a tool others can use to accomplish something critically important to them.

The first time I did this was in grade school, when I created an illustrated book out of construction paper. The book was a tool to encourage me out of illness.*

It happened at Arthur Andersen, when I was sent to Atlanta to spend time with Reuben Bolling, the best analyst in his division, to learn how he thought so we could train others to think like Bolling. Thanks to Reuben (and his deep Southern accent), we created a model that included as Step 5: “Waller in the Data.”

This process of analyze-synthesize-create happened multiple times in my instructional design and talent development roles: learning something from experts, simplifying it, then creating something so others could learn how to do it. It happened again with StoryJoules.

Now that StoryJoules is complete, I don’t know what will join ‘Blog’ at the tip of the index finger, but that’s okay. It’s nice to have some breathing room.

For you, I’d hold off on labeling your first two fingers until after we’ve covered the second, so you can decide the labels that best fit your life.

*Maybe TMI: When I was a kid, my mom showed me tenderness only when I was sick. I didn’t realize this until I went away to college, and found myself getting sick every time before I went home. Writing this post resulted in a more recent insight: “Jule, isn’t it interesting that you got bronchitis just before you were scheduled to visit your mother?”

***New here? Welcome! The series on the Human Compass and the Hand begins here.

Chewing the Cud of Good

Thankful for peonies and the ants that help them open.