Landmark Forum Leader Insights

Inventing an enterprise for our lives

By Barry Grieder

Throughout our lives, we’ve each had special dreams and hopes—times there was something about ourselves, our community, our family, our world—that sparked for a moment that called to us. But somehow there wasn’t enough oxygen to turn that spark into a flame—yet that spark remains. When that’s the case, the sense of possibility narrows, and we tend to operate in smaller, more limited ways and with less satisfaction. We mostly don’t see that process as a product of our conversations (and how those conversations set the values, limitations, and direction of our daily lives) When our background conversations shift, our world shifts, too.

Possibility lives in the conversation which we are. Changes in our vocabulary are where transformations are generated. New advances, new ways of understanding the world (democracy, equality, relativity, human rights, etc.), don’t happen until there’s a vocabulary in which they can happen. When we see that language goes beyond merely representing something, we have access to our true nature—to who and what we are. If we say something that actually makes a difference, it provides an opportunity for things to mean something they didn’t mean before. When our background conversations shift, the foundational maps on which we construct our understanding of the world shift, too. It’s in language that we shape, articulate, and define who we are, and invent what’s possible. In inventing an enterprise for our lives—our vision and goals begin to emerge and flourish—we’re one with being alive.

Barry Grieder
Landmark Forum leader
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