Project: Hartford Way
When it comes to giftedness, I consider myself the following: creative, intuitive, organized, efficient, strategic, a good speller, and tidy—all very sexy qualities, I know. For example, I can walk into a room and immediately see a handful of ways to make the space work more efficiently and feel more welcoming. I can create and manage a design project with relative ease. And I nail the details. Every time.
When it comes to math, however, I am less than stellar. Every one of those annoying little digits gets stuck in my brain and they spin into a blurred, confusing mess, causing me to count on my fingers so I can bring a visual to the problem.
(It should come as no surprise that my first hire in business was a proficient bookkeeper.)
My friend, Christine, on the other hand, is wicked smart when it comes to numbers. She has this crazy talent that’s fun to make her pull out at dinner parties. Here’s how it goes: you ask someone to say a sentence, any sentence, and within seconds Christine can tell you how many letters are in that sentence. For example, if I said, “Numbers are not my forte and I get anxious helping my son with his eighth-grade math homework,” Christine could tell me in a flash that that sentence has exactly 76 letters in it.
Crazy, I know!
Her ability to remember and compute numbers in that calculator she calls a brain is foreign to me because her brain works entirely differently than mine does.
But isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? I believe we all have equally important, but very different gifts and abilities to contribute. Some of us are destined to write and play beautiful music while others of us will design and engineer the next device on which we’ll listen to that music. Some of us will lead multi-million-dollar companies and others of us will forego a paycheck altogether and stay home to raise our kids. My point is that we all have something to share with the world.
In one of my favorite books, Tattoos on the Heart, author Gregory Boyle tells one of the L.A. gang members he mentors, “You have what the world wants.”
You have what the world wants.
Isn’t that beautiful? And isn’t that what we all long to hear? I think there are God-given gifts inside each one of us that the world wants to see or hear or learn. They are already there whether we recognize them or not. We can choose to use them or to ignore them. We can do good or cause harm with them. We can fight them and envy the gifts He’s given others, or we can embrace them and run with the gifts He’s chosen to give us.
So, this holiday season, as we at KCI continue to use our gifts to design beautiful homes, my wish for you is simple: find your thing and run with it. Because in this season of giving and receiving, you already have what the world wants.
Happiest of holidays from Kari Campbell Interiors!
P.S. That last sentence = 43 letters.
And yes, I used my fingers.