We all want simple answers.  Like a child, we want answers we may comprehend.  Children don’t have the language or understanding of multiple meanings to grasp the subtleties of experience and the truth derived from multiple perspectives.  As adults we are continually learning new ways of seeing the world provided our intent is improvement and adapting to our constraints.  There’s a spectrum of intelligence amongst us humans from young to old.  With this in mind there is no simple answer.  What may answer one individual will confuse another.  A simple explanation for one will not be “right” for another.  Our situations are different.  Being derived from a lifetime of experiences, our mental models are different.

What does any of this have to do with managing the business of you?  It’s simple really (pun intended).  It’s up to us to find the answers that work for our particular situation both internally and externally.  As we go about our business in life, it’s also important to recognize others are managing their business as they see fit.   Expecting others to manage themselves in the same way we manage ourselves is unrealistic.  Knowing this we can better align our purposes to achieve more than we can when acting alone or in isolation.  When we work with others personally or to achieve an objective and realize we are all working with answers derived from our own experience allows us to open up and accept each other for our own particular set of constraints, circumstances and experience of the chaos around us all.

An analogy of this idea is signal versus noise in electronics or music.  We all have our particular signal or song emerging from the noise around us all.  When we align our signal with others, our signal strength increases.  This is true of music, electronics or of personal experiences we derive our signal from. Extending this analogy further, it is up to us to find our own song in life and merge it with the unending music around us.  In finding our own signal we can let the background noise drop away.  Knowing our song, we can understand when people are attempting to change it for their own purposes like sacrificing our time to serve the needs of others. We can hear the song of unspoken expectations or assumptions from our work or relationships and make a decision about what is appropriate for us to commit to given our own boundaries or constraints.  It’s up to us to sing our own song and find the answers therein.