WELCOME TO MODULE 5!

So I was sitting on my porch the other day, enjoying a delicious peanut butter sandwich for lunch, when a brightly colored bird flew by and perched on a nearby tree.

“What a beautiful bird!” I exclaimed. “The most beautiful bird in all the land!”

Looking at a bird like this one, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that its design was planned exactly that way from the beginning as part of some “master species plan.”

“How could it not have been perfectly designed this way from the start?” you might find yourself asking.

Dive into your seventh grade biology textbook, however, and you’ll quickly learn this isn’t the case. The beauty of the bird– every detail of its design– came to be over time through a process of– you guessed it– evolution. Over thousands and thousands of years, through the processes of natural variation (in which varied and different types of birds were born) and natural selection (the strongest live and the weakest die), only those birds with certain traits survived and reproduced.

In other words, the species evolved its way into its current state.

In a way, your career is a lot like a beautiful, magical bird: its design evolves over time.

The big difference, however, is that species evolve unconsciously and are almost totally at the mercy of their environments. As people, on the other hand, we have the ability to evolve consciously and deliberately. We can shape our own paths and carve our own way in accordance with our personal compasses, and that, my friend, is what E & E is all about.

Remember the analogy from Module 1 about how becoming a great person is a lot like becoming a great company? One of the researchers’ key findings (in their six year research study described in the book Built to Last) was that that a key characteristic of visionary companies is their ability to effectively harness the power of evolutionary progress:

Of course all companies evolve to some degree. Evolution happens whether we purposely stimulate it or not. The real world is full of chance events that affect the trajectory of life. It happens to individual people, it happens to organizations, it happens to entire economic systems, but– and this is the crucial point: visionary companies more aggressively harness the power of evolution.

In this module, you’ll learn all about evolution and how it aplies to your career path. Most importantly, you’ll learn how to effectively and deliberately harness it so that your small experiments can (& will) evolve into full-on, passionate pursuits over time, even though right now you may not know exactly what the “end product” will end up looking like.

The three keys to effectively harnessing the power of evolution, which we’ll explore in the upcoming three sections, are:

1) Actively experiment

2) Evaluate in accordance with your aliveness compass

3) Evolve (follow up & branch out– or don’t)

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Next: Move on to Section 5.1: Actively Experiment

[Bird image by Raymond LaRose]