The Opportunity of Surprise
It becomes increasingly easy to manage your reputation and project a false self in our growing world of social media. The me you see is the me I want you to see. Sure, the duality sometimes catches up with people like we’ve seen recently with the unfortunately named former Congressman, Anthony Weiner. But far more often we project what we’d like and nobody is the wiser for it. While the consequences rarely catch up to each person individually, we pay the fee collectively. We see this in a number of areas.
Our lack of trust,
our skepticism,
our avoidance of vulnerability,
our nagging insecurities,
our need to impress others.
You might argue that these are all normal human behaviors. While that is true, our world of technology has sped up our use of them. That’s why we now have a new opportunity unlike ever before: surprise people with what’s on the inside.
You may have wondered about the pictures at the top of this post. At first glance they appear to be some type of art. That’s technically true. But the surprising detail is that they are pictures of the inside different types of golf balls. The photographer James Friedman decided to look for beauty in an unexpected place. And he found it.
We’re on the same search.
Be more than you seem. Ensure that your first impression is not your best impression for others. While this isn’t easy to do it will now start to pay out new and surprising dividends. In a world of distrust, those who prove trustworthy stand out from the crowd. We often try to look past the exterior to what goes deeper, usually in fear of what we’ll find. But what happens when we are pleasantly surprised? What happens when we find beauty? When a golf ball becomes something to stare at in awe?
Those are the opportunities for us to excel. For us to have genuine friendships, to have lasting business relationships, and to have the opportunity to invest ourselves in meaningful ways. The opportunity to change lives and to change history.
Sounds pretty easy right? But just as you didn’t know how cool the inside of a golf ball looked, you probably don’t know the beauty inside many of the people around you. That’s because that type of beauty is hard to show on Facebook or Twitter. It comes from consistency, courage, and relationships of sacrifice. From a willingness to allow the hype to pass us by while we invest in areas that nobody will see.
Where is your beauty?
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