April 14, 2006 / via the Wayback Machine
Written while I was at MIT
An intense center of work is a function of having intense people. Intense people cannot be borne in a workplace—they have to start out that way. Having a common overall goal indeed helps, but the former condition is necessary.
Constructive, intense people find rewards for progress within themselves, not from the outside. They find positive ways to interface with their community—often serving to lead the dialogue and energy for the benefit of all. Less constructive, intense people seek external rewards and try to disengage themselves from a sense of community with a kind of righteousness that threatens all the goodness around him/her.
In my own career, I have found myself wavering between the good and bad like any normal intense human being. I have seen in life, there is a choice in either extreme. My current experience has guided me to conclude that the former (the light side) is in the end truly the only route for any career with a deeper meaning. I ask within each of your own developing careers, that you find the more productive route to life sooner, rather than take as long as I have had to finally figure it out.
November 15, 2018
Twelve years later I wrote a piece on Kyloboss vs Yodaboss.
2 Comments
I’d love to talk to you about this at some point :). What is the light side? How do you make choices to stay there? Who do you surround yourself with along the way?
I really dig this, thanks for sharing.
I keep a journal of small life lessons I’ve learned, and one of them feels related to finding the light side path as you outline here: “It’s easy to get caught to chasing someone else’s dream, but it’s a distraction from what gets you up in the morning.”