The most profound words on career advancement were written in 1998 by Craig Lambert in his book Mind Over Water.
And they weren’t about career advancement, they were about rowing a boat:
"Rowers have a word for this frictionless state: swing… Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. The swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung.
The boat swings you. The shell wants to move fast: Speed sings in its lines and nature. Our job is simply to work with the shell, to stop holding it back with our thrashing struggles to go faster.
Trying too hard sabotages boat speed. Trying becomes striving and striving undoes itself.
Social climbers strive to be aristocrats but their efforts prove them no such thing. Aristocrats do not strive, they have already arrived. Swing is a state of arrival."
