Mark Zuckerberg, Dr. Chafetz, and you!

Each of us occupies a one-of-a-kind intersection of skills, relationships, experiences, interests, and historical context. In other words, our unique position. Does this matter? It can matter a lot!

In 2002, a Harvard undergraduate named Mark Zuckerberg was already brilliant, inquisitive, creative, ambitious, and tech-savvy. He was also the right guy, at the right moment. In short, he was well-positioned to start Facebook.

Don’t laugh at the audacious juxtaposition, but I think positioning has been similarly helpful to me.
Almost ten years ago, I completed my book, Loving Hard-To-Love Parents: A Handbook for Adult Children of Difficult Older Parents. The book describes thirty tools that I learned from hundreds of families of older people who had come through my clinical psychology practice since I finished my training in 1982. Through ten concepts, ten insights, and ten skills, my book passes forward the wisdom of those families. I called them CODOPs, or Children Of Difficult Older Parents. Almost ten years on, these individuals continue to fill my Dallas practice, and the book continues to help CODOPs everywhere. A win-win.

I was able to write my book only because my particular training in clinical geropsychology and the particular timing and structure of my practice in Dallas positioned me to work with so many families of difficult elders. Purely by paying attention, I became deeply familiar with the types of difficult elders and the many responses that their adult children develop. After 35 years, I simply organized and named the many aspects of this issue. I had fortuitously been at the right place at the right time.

What does this mean for you?

If you pay attention to everything around you, you might, by virtue of the position you happen to occupy in your world, be the first to notice a phenomenon, a need, or a solution that other people might have noticed, but didn’t! If you are the first to put it into words or take action on it, then soon everyone will be able to see what they had previously overlooked, and your name will forever be associated with it!

So, stay alert! Eyes and ears open! Read a lot! Use the tools you already have. Turn your unique position into your secret weapon for success.

Your contribution may not, like Facebook, become indispensable to the lives of 40% of the world’s population. Or, it might!