I recently read J.K. Rowling’s book called “Very Good Lives” and it touched me in an incredibly powerful way; I hope you’ll take time to consider reading this book. So much of what she writes about in this 2008 commencement address to a group of Harvard graduates resonates on many levels of what I’m working on in social media: there are benefits to failing and growing our imagination.
Like most financial advisors I know, our community of professionals are not hip to failing.
When you handle another human being’s future through financial means, failing is pretty much not an option. Our job is take theoretical planning and make it become a reality for those who invested their time, trust and money into our expertise. That’s an enormous amount of responsibility.
As J.K. Rowling shares in this book, “Ultimately we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is eager to give you a set of criteria, if you let it” could not be more true of how financial advisors live every day through their planning practices. It’s even applies to me in providing social media assistance to advisors.
My goal is to give advisors enough of a foreshadow into what works and doesn’t work with social media in their practice, but ultimately the advisor must decide what they feel was their failure; I can’t do that part for them. At the same time, my job is to provide imaginative ways to disrupt the common day person’s way of seeing our community. It’s all about the balance between the two.
This book is a quick read (I read it in less than 30 minutes) and when I came upon this sentence:
“We do not need magic to transform our world; we carry all the power we need inside ourselves: we have the power to imagine better.”
I knew she was talking to all of us in financial services.
Are you experiencing a very good life? What are you uniquely doing to transform your world? Are you working to imagine things in a better way? Ask yourselves these questions and do the work to make them statements of affirmation.
Be bigger, better and more BIONIC!