Still more wonderful is the feeling that we do not have to be specially distinguished among our fellows in order to be useful and profoundly happy. Not many of us can be leaders of prominence, nor do we wish to be.
There follows a whole long list of rewards, and I’d like to take them one or two at a time. So I’ll do that. My old saw about the above is that I don’t like to be specially anything, I’m a hide under the heap kind of person.
Today, at work, I sat for three hours with four other people and made plans for the future of our program. I disagreed with the majority twice. Once, they went my way, and once, they didn’t.
I was very happy to be getting along with them, not trying to dominate or push my view hard. There are things at work that I feel passionate about (like wearing name tags, for example) but the issues we discussed were important but not vitally so. It really felt nice to just sit there and work it out with them. And I really, really hope that they came away from it feeling that I am OK to work with, if they thought about it at all, which they probably didn’t, because it just went well.