The Tao at Work

The other day I asked a colleague how it can be that one of our star investors again rightly predicted the demise of a controversial company even though that particular sector wasn't even part of his coverage. She thought about it and then responded, "Well, I guess if you don't have an ax to grind you just have a sounder perspective." When she said that I immediately understood that she was describing a Tao traveler. That is what we do, we are completely impartial to whatever it is that comes our way. The Tao just is. This may sound like a cliche to you, but the longer you travel along your spiritual path, the more you intuitively feel that this is correct.

I work as an investment strategist and talk a lot to people with different views, conjectures and strategies. Everyone of them is good. The one thing I have learned in my business, you want to listen carefully to everyone, no matter whether they might have been right or wrong in the past and whatever they may have little or lots of investment experience. Believe it or not, I even listen carefully to myself. As E.M.Forster once said, "How can I tell what I think 'till I see what I say?" When you carefully listen to what you say, how you say it, and how your environment reacts to it, you can learn so much about what you really believe. Just to give you an example, sometimes I feel a little tingle in my knee after I have said something. Immediately a voice pops up in my head, "Aha, you are being inflexible again." I learned that insight from Louise Hay who claims that bad knees are a symbol of inflexibility.

I see the Tao daily at work. Lao-Tzu discovered this Force first in China but you can discover it everywhere. No matter what your professional background might be and no matter what position, you will always find the Tao at work.