Contribution

In the game of contribution you wake up each day and bask in the notion that you are a gift to others.- Benjamin Zander

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I got a letter on my twenty-fifth birthday from an aunt and it was one of the best gifts that I have ever received. She always remembered my birthday. As a summer baby I never had a classroom celebrate my birthday and had only two people show up for bowling. Diminished expectations grew, I even avoided my birthday all together. Despite this blasé attitude toward this day, with secret glee I would rush to the mailbox and see what it was that she sent to me. It usually was a shoebox full of my favorite candy, fabulous pens, magnetic poetry, and completely awesome little doohickies that I never knew that I always wanted.

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When I was ten, I set the record for most late-work slips that my teacher ever gave out to one student in one year. Mrs. Swanson had taught for more than twenty years, and with my twenty-five slips (admittedly some of these slips were accumulative), she was at her wits end with how to motivate me.

I remember one assignment that we had battled over in particular. It was a picture of a Haida Raven, with intricate layers and small areas to color. I insisted on finishing the project with each section colored precisely as I had laid out. The project stretched out from a quick thirty minute third grade coloring exercise to an Artistic Project that took several hours. The teacher and I battled, because she wanted to teach me that sometimes, you just need to get things done; I protested, because sometimes getting things done right was more important than deadlines. My internal sense of accomplishment was more important than artificial deadlines imposed by an outside source.

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In The Art of Possibility Ben Zander tells a story about how he moved from measuring his life through accomplishments, but instead recognizing how he used his gifts to make a contribution to the world. Instead of measuring accomplishment through outside sources, he started to have a sense of how his unique and remarkable gifts created a difference. I think that I have been living inside Zander's sense of accomplishment my whole life. Grades have never been an outside motivating force. They are letters that I have earned by hard work and learning how to creatively apply that new knowledge.

Transitioning from the classroom into the world, the rules for accomplishment have changed. My hard work can be ignored (or taken credit for) by someone else because I am young, a new professional, or a woman. Yet I am well aware of how I have changed things. In that letter on my 25th birthday, my aunt told me that she loved my awareness of "the youness of you." It's a phrase that has become a mantra for me. I have the skill of a strong sense of self to know exactly how I have contributed to the world.

Yet this idea of contribution does have a downside. My strong sense of knowing when a project is complete is often at odds with deadlines in the real world. I've come to recognize that sometimes Mrs. Swanson was right in that getting things done is often as important as getting things done properly (or dare I say done perfectly?). It is often a sign of respect to co-workers or professors that I stick to deadlines. Therefore, I realize I need to contribute my gifts, but not all of them all and not all at once.