What does it feel like to move at 58,000 miles per hour? Well, it turns out we all know the answer and that even when we’re standing still, so much more is happening than what meets the eye.
Hey, it’s David, and you’re listening to Leadership Without Losing Your Soul. Your source for practical leadership, inspiration tools, and strategies you can use to achieve transformational results without sacrificing your humanity or your mind in the process. Thanks for joining us for another episode. We are getting close to the end of season 11 here, and we have a couple more interviews coming up. But before we do those, I wanted to share another selection from Tomorrow Together: Essays of Hope, Healing, and Humanity. I’m sharing this one because as we head into the holiday season all of the different elements that can creep up, the stress and the rushing around, and all the different aspects of things combined with the normal stress of leadership, perspective is so important. Maintaining a perspective that helps us keep our sanity and helps us remain human-centered for ourselves and for everyone else around us is important.
Today it’s all about perspective. John Green, the author of a great book, The Anthropocene Reviewed, has an essay where he says, “from the cork to the Super Nova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that’s in short supply, our ability, and our willingness to do the work that awe requires.” So what does it feel like to move at 58,000 miles per hour? Well, we do know the answer. We actually know more than that. Our Sun is moving through space at 58,000 miles per hour, or for our metric friends around the world, that’s 93,342 kilometers per hour. That speed is hard to wrap my head around.
But then you realize the entire solar system that’s orbiting the sun, all the planets and moons and asteroids are also flying through space at 58,000 miles per hour as they stay in orbit around the sun. And while we’re standing still, we’re not done yet. Then there’s the planets movement to consider. Earth revolves around the sun and it’s moving fast, traveling around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour or 170,000 plus kilometers per hour. So Earth covers just under 100 million miles in one year. That’s wild, right? And we’re still not done. The Earth is also spinning. If you were standing on the equator, that’s another 1000 thousand miles per hour of rotation.
Let’s put it all together, if you’re standing still on the equator. You’re spinning at 1000 miles per hour traveling around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour in an entire solar system that’s moving through space at 58,000 miles per hour, 1000 miles per hour, 67,000 miles per hour, 58,000 miles per hour, and all of that motion is pretty much impossible to sense. We only become aware of it if we pay enough attention over time. When I think about that, it makes me wonder what else is happening that we don’t notice.
From a leadership perspective, my goal here in sharing this is not to make you dizzy, thinking of us whirling around through space, but it’s to recognize how much is happening even when it feels like we’re standing still. So pause, take a deep breath and take a moment to recognize all that is happening in your team, in your leadership, in your business, and in yourself.
Until next time, be the leader you’d want your boss to be.
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