When you pick people to be on your team, they take up a spot. When you’re assigning roles, there’s only so many to be given out. And when you are promoting or hiring for a specific leadership position, you’re typically picking from multiple candidates to fill just one.
If working on a team were like Musical Chairs, it often feels like there aren’t enough seats. Someone’s bound to lose. To those who look at the limited number of higher positions on an organizational chart and don’t get the position they hoped for, this situation sounds like bad news.
It may be the case that there are only a select few who win the most desired seats pursued by the many.
But this doesn’t have to be the case, nor does it have to be one’s permanent circumstance.
You have the option, and thus the ability, to fashion a seat all just for yourself. You don’t have to wait for a seat to open up or for the next turn. You can start building it now.
Building your own chair likely won’t be easy. It’ll take perceptiveness to recognize that you have the tools, time, and resources to make it. It’ll take patience to persevere through faulty designs and the discipline to do it until it’s done. You will have to care, and you will always have to take initiative to keep going from one phase of construction to the next.
However, in the end, it could be more than worthwhile. Because what you get isn’t a chair, but the ability to make your own.
