Scott Belsky on “The Love Conundrum”

In Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming Obstacles Between Vision & Reality published by Portfolio/Penguin (2010), Scott Belsky introduces what he calls the Action Method and urges his reader to use it to “question many of the traditional practices of project management.” For example, near the end of the book, he discusses Jason Randal, a multi-talented person: a Ph.D. in social psychology, stunt double work, a board-certified master hypnotist, NAUI master scuba instructor, instructor at Chuck Norris karate school. Randal suggests that there are three components to mastery of almost anything: (1) a deep desire and interest, (2) the ability to learn all about it, and (3) the capacity to enlist support.

“As Randal describes his approach to many interests, the common theme is a deep and authentic love for every skill he has developed and his experiences using them. Randal has an insatiable desire to become better, but not out of ambition or competitiveness. Randal is driven by love. Love keeps him engaged long enough to learn, experiment, and take bold risks.”

But according to Belsky, there is a conundrum: love can also disappoint us because we tend to idealize what we love most and seldom (if ever) attain the vision we have of it. “The feeling of it is so pure that you can’t make the real thing that has that feeling and so you’re inevitably going to be disappointed by it. And in some way, the depth of that disappointment is in direct correlation to how beautiful the vision was to begin with.”

“Your challenge is to maintain an organic relationship with the craft that you love…constantly finding new ways to reengage, keeping the love affair alive despite the suite of pressures that come between our visions and reality.”

I agree with Belsky that our love of chess or playing the cello, for example, may be “pure” but we must accept the fact that our performance is seldom (if ever) perfect. It is reassuring to know, however, that the same love that inspires our effort will also sustain us during our inevitable disappointment with the results of that effort.

As Helen Keller observed, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”