Steve Jobs' commencement address at Stanford is a pretty moving piece. Great stories!

His first story about connecting the dots underscores and area that I've been working through in the past month. Trust vs. Paranoia.

Trust something - your co-workers, your gut, the process, God, whatever...trust that you've done what you can, things happen for a reason, and that things work out when everyone's trying to make good stuff happen. (Granted, preparation is the mother of luck, and luck happens to those who trust, so you can't go through it all just trusting and not preparing...)

On the other hand, you have paranoia. "If we're not owning it, we can't contol it and it won't get done right" is the previaling line of thought here. I agree with it sometimes, but frankly, we don't all have the bandwidth to be as paranoid about something (everything) as we'd like some times. It drives us nuts that we can't control the outcome of everything...so we have to trust...that we've set our expecations that that things will turn out well.

Me, I'm all about trust with verification. Set expecations, trust that things will work out, plan for when they don't and check the work. That requires so much less bandwidth and frees us for productivity sans paranoia.