Embracing the Tension

If I am honest with you I spend a significant portion of my life in tension, tension I both crave and loathe in equal parts. In fact for a majority of my life I lived with tension about tension. I called that something different, I called that frustration.

Tension fuels greatness, but frustration feeds self-destruction.

I’m an artist, you may be an architect, or an accountant; the tension to create better work than we are currently able to is not constrained to any subset of culture. We all feel the presence of this gap. I recently watched a video featuring Ira Glass, who confronted this gap,

“We all go through this. And if you are just starting out, or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is a lot of work.”

Simply said, lean into your tension: in your work, in your craft, and especially in your leadership. That tension is the only thing that will drive improvement and make you better than you are right now. Throw frustration out and allow tension to mean that your best is yet to come. Think about that, the very best work you will ever do is still ahead of you.

Go do it.

By James Vore