When I enter the little park down the road with my dog Luna, the first thing she does is try to find a stick.
She’ll keep one eye on me to see if I’ve found one, while doing a calculated zig-zag pattern across the field to find her own.
If I find one first, she rushes back to me.
If she finds one first, she grabs it, brings it to me, then starts to tear it apart at my feet.
It seems like she enjoys the stick right?
Now here’s the thing. If Luna has a perfectly good stick in her mouth, and then I pick one up, she’ll see whatever stick she doesn’t have as the new target.
She’ll rip her current stick into two, then quickly try to grab hold of mine.
It turns out that it’s both:
While Luna enjoys the hedonistic aspect of destroying the stick into little match-stick-sized threads, she actually prefers the act of “striving” – of feeling like she’s getting closer to the stick.
Successful striving feels like progress. We also like this.
The question is, rather than needing to jump to a new stick all the time, do we have the capacity to innovate in our current work to keep moving forward?
