STOP!
I received a lot of positive response on my last Centering Hint about the great thinker and inventor, Bucky Fuller. Here's another teaching.
It was the early 1980s, and Bucky was presenting a lecture for our Windstar Foundation in Aspen, Colorado. The energetic 85-year-old had been traveling for most of the day, and as usual, was mesmerizing the audience for hours with one of his spell-binding talks about the principles of the universe, sustainability, and personal integrity (he called them "thinking out loud" conversations). Still going strong at 10 pm, he announced that the following day that we all would erect for the first time in history a new version on his geodesic dome.
This was news to me and my team. The workshop was to start at 9 am and we were going to need to buy all the building materials for this 35 foot diameter dome project. Bucky gave us the detailed list of the materials. He then stayed up all night working at the kitchen table doing on the math and the design for the dome.
Cut to next morning. My team had managed to purchase and deliver all the materials. But when I entered my office there, on my desk, I found a letter from Bucky. It was entitled "ERRORS." In detail, it enumerated the errors he had made, making the project at this time infeasible. At the end were the words:
When you have made an error,
the first thing to do is to say so quickly
and stop the derivative action.
STOP!
How many times in our lives have we egotistically plowed on - as individuals, as employees, as leaders, in business, in politics - only to magnify a problem?
May we all have the courage and wisdom to discover and admit our errors. May we have the wisdom to correct them even if it means having to say "STOP!"
Tom
PS. One year later, with Bucky's assistant Amy Edmondson and Windstar scientist John Katzenberger redoing the math, we built that 35 foot geodesic dome in one day, with an ebullient Bucky leading the charge.
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The Place to Be in September
Boats, trains, planes - these take us places we want to go. But the biggest journey - the most exciting and rewarding of all - is the trip inside, the journey to the place inside of us where we find true and lasting peace.
Join Tom Crum this fall for his annual Journey to Center program (September 8-12) in Peaceful Valley, Colorado (honest - that's the name of the place!) and embark on your journey of a liftime.
With the critical skills you will learn in Journey to Center, you will be able to:
- Respond to change and complexity with power and efficiency, from a calm place within.
- Deal effectively with conflict while maintaining centered relationships with all.
- Develop the ability to act effectively under pressure.
- Reduce the exhaustion of modern life so that you can operate at optimum levels of energy, performance, productivity, and peace.
The program combines full-group sessions, small-group discussion, mind/body exercises, and one-on-one coaching, all in a rejuvenating, pristine, Rocky Mountain setting, to create a dynamic, entertaining, and enlightening experience.
Be sure to visit our website to learn more and register; or call us today at 585-924-7302.
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On Fuller Living
Would you like to hear more about Buckminster Fuller? Tom is participating in a special free teleseminar series for the Global Energy Network Institute (GENI), an institute creating environmental solutions to global problems. The next in the series will be Marshall Thurber on May 13. Tom's program is on July 8. You can sign up for the series on the GENI website.
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