Yesterday, I went to a meeting with some of the people I work with at Dimo’s. Right now, the company is going through a restructuring that has all levels of employment working together in order to diminish the hierarchical structure that currently exists. In college I took a few business classes for my minor, but it’s really exciting to have some hands on experience of how a small business functions and evolves.
Anyway, one thing the company is focusing on is being transparent. The goal of transparency is for every employee to know how every branch of the business functions (what they do, what they make, how they are helping the company, etc). It’s very cool how this business runs and I’m looking forward to seeing it change.
But after the meeting, I went and got a drink with one of my coworkers, Matt (part of my plan to be more social outside of work) and we started talking about this idea transparency. Matt is a very interesting person to talk too. He’s seen the world a few times over, studied some philosophy over the years, and believes that being wrong is one is one of the greatest gifts because it means there is still more to learn. I’m looking forward to hanging out again.
As we drank our craft beer (because so few people of our generation drink the mainstream big time brews) we started to talk about this idea of transparency. One thing we agreed on was that the key to being transparent was to just BE transparent. It’s a confusing concept, but in reality, it’s simple. It actually reminded me of something my sister Jill (of Jillfit.com) says a lot:
“If you say it, you’re not it.”
Basically, if you say you are transparent, you aren’t transparent. If you say you’re a confident person, you are not really a confident person. It’s the actions that will convince others of your true nature. So many of us, myself included, want to BE a certain way. But if we aren’t taking that action to be the people we want to be, we will be stuck in this state of never being completely satisfied.
So what do we do? We act. We figure out who we want to be and how we want to be portrayed, and then we do it. It’s that simple. I want to be a world traveler so I buy my ticket. I want to be more socially available, so I participate in social activities. I want to be more transparent, so I act accordingly. We act and do until we are. Think about how much time we could save by not focusing on what we want to be, and just start being.
