Tecumseh

Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.

Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their views,and demand that they respect yours.

Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.

Seek to make your life long and of service to your people.

Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.

Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a stranger if in a lonely place.

Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.

When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life and strength.

Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living.  If you see no reason for giving thanks,the fault lies in yourself.

When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death,so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.

Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.

- Tecumseh of the Shawnee Nation, whose tribe hunted and lived on the land in Indiana where I grew up

Ethan Bauley sent me a link that’s a perfect depiction of the ‘Unsung Hero’ idea. Take a look at this video shot at the recent Sasquatch Music Festival outside Vancouver:

The first dancer, Collin Wynter from Calgary, deserves credit for initiating well. He’s having fun, and he’s high energy, connecting with the music and the rest of his environment and not at all caught up in his own little world. He is acting on his environment (the hillside and the soft grass and the music) and as a consequence, the environment ‘acts on him’ as his dancing becomes infectious. But it doesn’t become a scene, it doesn’t find its game, until the second dancer joins. The second dancer adds and heightens, and from that point on, there’s no stopping this scene.

The second dancer learns the ‘rules of the dance’ from the first dancer, then yes-ands, making dance even more playful by falling to the ground and crawling through the first dancer’s legs. It is the second person who defines the game and plays it in a way (by yes-anding) that others cannot resist joining.

After the third person joins, the joining becomes a wave that lasts until the music ends. (And maybe beyond, that’s where the video cuts.) This same dynamic is characteristic of any productive game. A game played alone has finite potential, while a game that invites joining has unlimited upside. It is the second person to play who signals to the crowd that your game is worth joining.

This article in the Calgary Herald celebrates Collin Wynter as being some kind of hero, but does not mention the second dancer, or even the existence of the unsung hero of the game.

A gamechanger identifies and plays a productive game. Focuses on preparation more than planning. Is more concerned with getting results than in producing specific outcomes. Seddiqui could not be playing this game if he hadn’t prepared. And he could not have imagined a particular outcome. (Note that his ‘50/50/50 objective’ for the game is different from its ‘business outcomes’.) What Seddiqui trusted was that he was initiating a game that would produce results, and cause positive things to happen. New relationships would form. There’d be new experiences had. Skills learned. Insights gained. Possibilities awakened.

He is not sitting at home living the inevitable bad economy cliche, sending out job applications and getting rejected. Instead he created a game that generates acceptance in massive doses. David Seddiqui is creating a narrative in which he gets 50 job offers–and he’s going to accept all of them! Good story.

In Living the Map, Daniel Seddiqui is sending a three great big, important messages to the world:

1) All work is honorable. We should not judge a person by what it is they do, but by how they do it. Respect the work, respect the worker.

2) So what if you have 50 different jobs in your life? That’s a goal. Working in one place, at one job forever is drudgery. This is one generation telling another that it can stick the gold watch up its ass.

3) There’s work, lots of it, that needs doing. But you’ve got get out and find it, player. It is not going to find you.