Trojan Eagle

28.12.2016

TROJAN EAGLE.

Ending the year at work on this rah rah note (on a bullet train, appropriately, with the super boss beside me).

A few weeks ago, a favorite client partner confided in me – he is the CEO of a publicly listed company that’s on track to grow its market leadership and topline 5x heading into 2020 (that’s the kind of time and place we live in).

“As you know, Andre, it can get very lonely at the top. You set out big hairy audacious goals (yes, he used BHAG) and you don’t really know if people believe you, if your own people believe you, if you yourself even fully believe you”.

I don’t know about the rarefied big company air he operates in, but I do know plenty about doubt – both to have doubts (mine and others’ doubts) and to have those doubts erased by the belief of others.

It’s the essence of the work I’ve chosen and loved and was born to do: by definition, you cannot innovate and push the bounds of what people accept as possible if you’re not also forever fighting doubt. So you live with doubt as a way of life, and that is why in your universe Belief is all-powerful, Belief is divine.

As we close another year, I have to say THANK YOU to all of you who believed and continue to believe: everyday showing your conviction by the way you carry your role; by your quiet heroism and the amazing grace of your lack of BS in word and in deed; by your faithfulness in owning your piece of our immense, profound and ever-revealing puzzle. You know who you are, but you don’t know how deeply indebted I am to each of you. You look to my strength and will, but you don’t realize how much strength and will I draw from all of you.

Be Legend, unleash daily the hero with a thousand faces. That’s what we said – it’s at once a challenge and commitment to each other, a mission that refuses to say die and only grows stronger with each new obstacle, a vision that has withstood the test of human ambition. We’ve been through enough to know that this is bigger than all of us. This is the Lord’s work: He is captain, chairman and CEO.

We learned a lifetime and a half in 2016. 2017 we will come to even fuller grips with what it takes to Be Legend. And because of our faith – faith in our mission, faith in each other, faith in humble obedience to the one and only who leads us all – many more will soar on this wing and a prayer we’ve baptized the Trojan Eagle. Believe and Be Legend, 2017 is a coming!

Andre Yap December 28, 2016