How to own the world
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts …”
Shakespeare’s immortal lines beautifully capture how many of us often feel about ourselves and our lives. We often feel a sense of transience surrounding our existence – at a sub-conscious level, we are aware of the ephemeral nature of our existence, of our inescapable mortality. There is also a lingering feeling that somehow we’re not fully in control; that the script of our lives is being written (or has already been written!) by forces beyond us.
How does this affect how we relate to the world around us? I believe this creates two fundamentally different mindsets: I call one the “visitor” and the other the “owner” mindset.
The visitor mindset is in many ways similar to being an actor on a Shakespearean world stage. Visitors feel like they are playing their assigned part and while they may do so dutifully, the stage and the script don’t belong to them. This makes the world and its problems less real because “nothing really matters”, and “what can I do about it anyway” become convenient rationalizations. Visitors often leave unresolved issues to a mysterious “them”. “They should fix this”, “they didn’t do this right”, and “they should change that” are statements we have all made at one time or another. A visitor mindset tells us that the world’s problems are not really ours and the task of making the world better belongs to someone else – to them, whoever they are.
Alright, so who are they? Turns out there is no them outside of us – in other words, we are them! We just need to be in a different state of mind to be them, and I call this state of mind the owner mindset.
And that brings me to my success tip of the month: If you want to own the world, act as if you do!
An owner mindset is obviously much more empowering and useful. We own this place, albeit on a short lease. We are not just visiting here on a tourist visa. It is both our privilege and our responsibility to do what we can to make this place better, as opposed to just checking in, staying for a while, and checking out. We fulfill ourselves by investing ourselves fully and engaging completely with our world and with all its issues, as opposed to being a mere visitor or even worse, a spectator. We create the next generation of owners and bequeath to them our life’s work, for them to take forward.
You might think, “Yeah right! This is easier said than done”. Indeed, it is easy to fall back into a visitor mindset from time to time, especially in difficult times, and to some extent and for some time, everyone goes through a phase when the empowering owner mindset is out of our reach. A little trick I use to get it back is to literally act as though I own the place, since pretending is easier for most of us than believing. After all, if the world is a Shakespearean stage, I can always play the part of the owner, can’t I? So in tough situations, I ask myself, “If I owned this company, what would I do?” or “If I were running this country, how would I behave?” and it puts me right back into an owner mindset. The wonderful secret about the nature of our existence is that if you act like you own the place, you end up behaving as though you actually do and the difference between the act and the reality disappears!
As you think about how you relate to your world – your home, your work, your community, your country – ask yourself how you see yourself, as a visitor or as the owner? My suggestion: act as though you own the place, and you will find that you do!
