Today is August 2 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you remind yourself that you have unlimited potential in creating yourself?”
As the French philosopher Henri Bergson once noted "To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly."
People who navigate the chaos understand their unlimited potential in creating themselves. Canadian psychoanalyst and organizational consultant Elliott Jaques is one such example. Jacques coined the term “midlife crisis,” in a 1965 paper.
Jaques wrote that during this period, individuals come face-to-face with their limitations, their restricted possibilities, and their mortality. In his own midlife and beyond, however, Jaques remained opened to the possibilities of what life had to offer and wrote 12 books in the 38 years between the publication of his paper that coined the term “midlife crisis,” and his death in 2003 at age 86.
He also married Kathryn Cason and the coupled founded a consulting company devoted to the dissemination of their ideas.
As Carlo Strenger and Arie Ruttenberg reported in a Harvard Business Review post “Elliott Jaques, you might say, lived twice. By the end of his first life, in his mid-forties, he had earned two doctorates, one in medicine and another in psychology. He had gone through psychoanalytic training and had gained a lot of experience as both an organizational consultant and a psychoanalyst. In his second life, Jaques became a truly independent thinker. He greatly expanded the range of organizations with which he worked, and he created the concepts and theories for which he is most famous. He formulated some of his most original ideas in the late 1990s, when he was in his late seventies and early eighties.”
Jacques recognized his unlimited potential. Do you?