So many times when couples break up, we’re told it was a “mutual decision.” So often when a team member leaves a business, the spin is that the company and the employee decided to part ways.

This is never true. Behind the facade, there is always a leaver and a leavee. The “leaver” has all the cards. The “leave” is left to assemble a new hand, often pained and diminished in the process.

This up and down, yin and yang, positive and negative, invades and permeates all relationships. And it is colored by all manner of conventional wisdom, which holds that it is a good and natural thing:

• Opposites attract
• Different personalities balance each other out
• All extremes need to be diluted and tempered

This is all rationalization designed to equalize things.  To settle on mediocrity. To prevent the exceptional from outshining the ordinary.

Most regrettable to me is when one person is a driven meteor determined to be an unmitigated success and another with influence over them (love, fear, a false sense of friendship) is equally committed to keeping them from achieving their dreams. To leveling the playing field. To making certain that they are not eclipsed by the shooting star.

Amazingly, this pernicious goal–this drive to keep one person down so that both can be “equal”– is predicated on the unspoken truth that the enemy in disguise wants the person or people closest to them — family, friends, co-workers–to fail so that their own failure has a built-in camouflage. And they often succeed by subtly threatening to withhold their love, their approval, their illusion of support, knowing just where to strike to keep the talented and ambitious one from reaching the stars. From revealing them, in the process, for the slackers, losers and whiners that they are.

We see it in academia. We see it in the workplace. We witness it on the homefront. As business managers and as friends and lovers, we can step in at times and help to liberate the confused and often conflicted party. But in the vast majority of cases, we can only watch from the sidelines and witness the syndrome in silence.

As we look to the sky, we see the tale wagging the comet, slowing its orbit and casting a shadow on its course.

The holy men, the professors, the priests and the philosophers, they all advise us to accept what we have, light a candle to it, chant a blessing and then place our heads on the pillow and drift off to sleep.

I know there is wisdom to this. That in a cosmic and spiritual sense, it is good and right and in part, essential for our well-being. But I also know that it has rarely, if ever, worked for me.

The issue draws a line in the sand we all have to contemplate, at one point or another. When do we accept our place in the world, our position and accomplishments as the way it is supposed to be — as good enough– and when do we swim against the tides, run into the headwinds, reject the sermons and —  even when we know we have so much to be thankful for–  demand even more?

I keep demanding. Not of government or of others but of myself. Yes, I can take joy and pride in the blessings I have (and they are considerable) but it keeps pressing on me to reach higher, to think smarter, to arrive at a breakthrough that brings me to a new and unexplored dimension. Each time I believe that I have done something important, the glow fades quickly, only to be replaced by the need to accomplish something far more significant.

I don’t say this with pride. In fact, I understand that there is something unappreciative in this failure to accept. When one has been blessed to the level I have been, I know that needing more, driving myself to achieve it, saying that I will never accept, is ungrateful and even worse. But then the sun rises, I hike with my dog Sky and I think, I ponder, I dream: how do I climb up from here?

I’m sure that shrinks would have a field day with this but I don’t give a damn. I can’t seem to put my emotions, my time on earth, my precious gift of life, in a tidy little box, flip on the TV, open a bottle of wine, and say “All is fine.”

It is but I can’t seem to be satisfied with that. The energy that wells up through my mind and body keeps upping the ante, searching for more, keeping me restless, bored with details, searching everywhere for what, in all likelihood does not exist: a sense that I have fulfilled my obligation and my dream of creating a body of work that endures. That has true meaning. That inspires and motivates others for generations to come.

I cannot simply take up space.  I cannot simply accept. I will not stop. I will not rest.

If this is a blessing or a curse, if this is catalyst or a conceit, well that’s for the wise men to contemplate.

For me, it’s just an exhilreating reality.

When one of my sons arrived at college for his freshman year, one of his first classes took him by surprise.

The professor–brown tweed suit, bow tie, right out of central casting–proceeded to greet his highly impressionable students with a power point that outlined his impeccable credentials: cum laude this, chairman of that, Fields Medal winner in physics and on and on.

In an instant, my son wrote him off as a stuffed shirt, pompous academic who had to make a boastful impression on a group of young students. It looked like a classic case of overkill that had backfired on a prince of the Ivy campus.

But then, a moment later, the scholar lit up a second Power Point: “My other resume,” as he put it. This one revealed the dark side of his life:

• Recovered alcoholic
• Neglectful father
• Insensitive and uncaring friend

With this surprising act of brutally honest revelation, the professor redeemed himself in my son’s eyes. More than that, he earned his respect as a man who was willing to be open and transparent about himself, awards and warts alike. And my son embraced the opportunity to learn from him, which turned out to be one of his most rewarding experiences at school.

My epiphany from this experience was immediate and profound: everyone has two resumes. The one we show the world with total transparency and the private issues we guard carefully and keep to ourselves. This is only natural and universal.

But there is a key issue here for our business and personal lives. Those with the narrowest space between the ruse of the two resumes–where the side of ourselves that we show and the side that we seek to keep under wraps, is only shades of difference as opposed to diametric opposites–are the most genuine people. Those we can believe in. Those we can trust. Those who are real as opposed to imposters.

When this is the case, the “ruse” is simply a natural act of human behavior. The trick for all of us in business, in love, in life, is to identify who is using the two resumes to market themselves innocently and who is using it to manipulate reality to the level of a con.

When I was a high schooler I worked as a short order cook at a pool club in the middle  class environs where I grew up in Queens, NY. I say “pool club” advisedly as it was really a concrete hole filled with hyper chlorinated water situated on a blacktop slab near a mall. No trees, no grass, no golf– really a bathtub in the street but we thought it was Nirvana so if perception is a major component of reality, I guess it was Shangrila.

Anyway, the snack bar owner, my boss– I think his name was Al–put up about 100 signs touting how much he aimed to please and that the customer was a god at this summer establishment situated in working class heaven. I made a mental note of the customer relations campaign and filed it away in my mind determined to imitate it when I started my own company someday.

And then I had the Wonder Years epiphany courtesy of customer centric Al.  One searing August day I opened a commercial size carton to french fries that I would regularly toss into a hot oil machine, get them crisp and sell them with the burgers and fries that were the staples at our culinary cul de sac.

This time the uncooked fries were completely covered in a thicket of blue moss that looked like hair. As we never rotated stock at Al’s poolside enterprise, the fries must have been sitting in the delapidated cooler since Memorial Day. When I showed Al the Petrie dish the carton of fries had become, and motioned that I had to toss out the goods post haste, the customer advocate grabbed my arm in a vice lock and spewed forth with the wisdom of the street:

“Are you crazy? Has the sun gotten to you kid?”

With that he showed me how business was done in the real world, confidently tossing the blue goo into the fryer and watching it all turn to crispy brown.

“Serve em up kid. They’re fine.”

Even earlier in my life I was watching a hot shot government figure (I think it was The Secretary Of State) giving an address to the. American people on a special TV report that preempted regular programming. It appeared to be all big-deal type of stuff and though I wasn’t sure what it was all about, I was impressed by the national leader and the pomp and circumstance of the speech to the citizens.

When I told by dad that he should come in and watch the great man from Washington, my father took one look and wrote it all off the way Al would brush me aside when I wanted to toss the fries.

“They’re all a bunch of hot air,” dad said. “Don’t listen to a thing these guys say. Everything is always the opposite of what they’re selling. Lies. Lies. Lies.”

That I shouldn’t automatically believe the Secretary Of State regardless of what he was saying struck me as disrespectful at first but within hours I gleaned the deeper meaning inherent in my dad’s assessment:

• Never believe anyone just because they have a lofty title.
• Always keep in mind the Shakespearian principle of “thou protest too much.” Al’s customer pledge was just so much hot air.
• When you are faced with a “fact” demand that it be proven to yourself.
• Always remember that the most important word in business, in life, is Why?

The fact is, people who make things happen, who innovate, who are changemakers, don’t go through life seeking the truth, they create it.

All of life is rife with paradoxes. Few as striking, profound and poignant as the contrast between Steve Jobs and Barack Obama.

It is more than likely that Obama’s childhood home will someday become a national monument. I have no objection to that. He was smart and skillful enough to charm his way into the seat of power and though he has used it to destroy so much of what is exceptional in America, the feat of a successful rise to power is undeniable. So let there be an Obama homestead monument erected smack dab on the beaches of  Hawaii.

But another childhood home, specifically its garage, will never be a national monument: that of Steve Jobs. More than Obama (and, of course, most presidents of either party) Steve Jobs did so much to sustain America’s leadership as the land of innovation and entrepreneurial genius.

The profound difference between Jobs and Obama is that the former used his origins to inspire while the latter has used his to insult, denigrate and diminish the nation that gave both the pass to achieve to their highest level.

For Jobs, the garage was a springboard to magical life of imagination and commercial execution. For Obama it was a score to settle, a gripe to avenge, a disdain for the red, white and blue that is the oldest enduring republic in the world and that deserves a salute from all who have been blessed enough to live within its shores. And to thrive here.

Obama ran as a unifying force who would bring all people together under a common umbrella of decency, hope and boundless optimism. Instead, he has divided, pitted classes against each other and– in a relentless drive to protect his power and imperial lifestyle– has proven to be a Chicago pol of the worst order.

Ironically, Jobs — who never ran for office and hardly had the temperament for the falsity of the campaign trail– has been the very unifying figure the President promised to be. Generations of people, especially the young, will want to be like Steve: dreaming, risking, building, making as Jobs himself liked to say, “a ding in the universe.” And all without a single handout from Mother Government.

As America looks into the future, it faces a titanic struggle between the operatives who sell utopian dreams for votes and those at the diametrically opposite end of the spectrum, who walk the high wire without a net, asking for nothing but the liberty to do so.

The battle between the garbage and the garage is hardly new. It simply seems to be reaching a breaking point.