Every day I write down ideas. I write down so many ideas that it hurts my head to come up with one more. Then I try to write down five more. The other day I tried to write 100 alternatives kids can do other than go to college. I wrote down eight, which I wrote about here. I couldn’t come up with anymore. Then the next day I came up with another 40. It definitely stretched my head. No ideas today? Memorize all the legal 2 letter words for Scrabble. Translate the Tao Te Ching into Spanish. Need ideas for lists of ideas? Come up with 30 separate chapters for an “autobiography.” Try to think of 10 businesses you can start from home (and be realistic how you can execute them)? Give me 10 ideas of directions this blog can go in. Think of 20 ways Obama can improve the country. List every productive thing you did yesterday (this improves memory also and gives you ideas for today)
I Was Blind But Now I See: Time to Be Happy Here’s the truth: You will work harder at something you love than at something you like. You will work harder than you have ever worked when you start chasing a dream. You will hustle and grind and sweat and push and pull. You will get up earlier and go to bed later. But that’s okay. Know why? Joy is an incredible alarm clock. It will wake you up and keep you up and pick you up and gently pull you through a thousand rejections along the way. If your goal is to work less, stay on the road to average. Do something you just kind of like. Settle into life like a long winter’s nap and coast on through to your 80s. But if you want to dream—if you want to live out some unique talent you’ve been given to steward during your time on this planet—get used to 4 a.m. alarms. Get going. Get up.
You have to love the act of being awesome. Writing, selling, singing, running a business—whatever the act is, that’s what has to fuel you through the land of Harvesting. Even if you harvest a thousand accomplishments during your time in this land, treat them as rewards for what you do, not the reasons for what you do. Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters The only way to stay young is to keep learning. That’s not last-chapter hyperbole—that’s science. In the book Ten Steps Ahead, Erik Calonius wrote, “Even though the number of neurons in the human brain decreases as we age (as has been said time and again), the number of synaptic connections can grow as long as we live. If we keep using our noodle, in other words, we can make our brain better every day.” Neuroscientists Steven Quartz and Terrance Sejnowski report, “Being born some way doesn’t amount to forever remaining that way. . . . Your experiences with the world alter your brain’s structure, chemistry, and genetic expression, often profoundly throughout your life.” And most encouraging—given that the first land on the road to awesome is Learning—is what New York University neurologist Joseph LeDoux has to say on the matter: “Learning allows us to transcend our genes.”
Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters “If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t,” asserts Steven Pressfield, “you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself; you hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet. Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”
The only way to stay young is to keep learning. That’s not last-chapter hyperbole—that’s science. In the book Ten Steps Ahead, Erik Calonius wrote, “Even though the number of neurons in the human brain decreases as we age (as has been said time and again), the number of synaptic connections can grow as long as we live. If we keep using our noodle, in other words, we can make our brain better every day.” Neuroscientists Steven Quartz and Terrance Sejnowski report, “Being born some way doesn’t amount to forever remaining that way. . . . Your experiences with the world alter your brain’s structure, chemistry, and genetic expression, often profoundly throughout your life.” And most encouraging—given that the first land on the road to awesome is Learning—is what New York University neurologist Joseph LeDoux has to say on the matter: “Learning allows us to transcend our genes.” Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters Are your 10 most expensive material possessions the 10 things that add the most value to your life?2/3/2014
Here’s an exercise for you.
Take a moment, write down your 10 most expensive material possessions from the last decade. Things like your car, your house, your jewelry, your furniture, and any other material possessions you own or have owned in the last ten years. The big ticket items. Next to that list, make another top 10 list: 10 things that add the most value to your life. This list might include experiences like catching a sunset with a loved one, watching your kid play baseball, eating dinner with your parents, etc. Be honest with yourself when you’re making these lists. It’s likely that the lists share zero things in common. What if, instead of focusing the majority of your time, attention, and energy on the 10 most expensive material possessions, you shifted your focus towards the 10 things that added the most value to your life? How would that make you feel? How would your life be different a month from now? A year from now? Five years from now? But then we stopped taking it at face value and asked, “What is an anchor?” That question led us to an important discovery about our own lives: an anchor is the thing that keeps a ship at bay, planted in the harbor, stuck in one place, unable to explore the freedom of the sea. Perhaps we were anchored—we knew we weren’t happy with our lives—and perhaps being anchored wasn’t necessarily a good thing. In the course of time, we each identified our own personal anchors—circumstances keeping us from realizing real freedom—and found they were plentiful (Joshua catalogued 83 anchors; Ryan, 54). We discovered big anchors (debt, bad relationships, etc.) and small anchors (superfluous bills, material possessions, etc.) and in time we eliminated the vast majority of those anchors, one by one, documenting our experience in our book, Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life. It turned out that being anchored was a terrible thing; it kept us from leading the lives we wanted to lead. No, not all our anchors were bad, but the vast majority prevented us from encountering lasting contentment. Simplicity: Essays If there’s a definition of freedom, I think it’s this: living life on your terms. And Werner was the freest man I’ve known. I miss him terribly. Outside the cottage, rain. I close my eyes, listen to it, and imagine him sitting across from me. “I’m sorry, man,” I say.
“Ah,” he waves his hand at me. Smiling. “Let it go.” We’re both quiet for a little bit. “Reach out to Siv once in a while,” he says, “and Ice.” Siv, his wife. Ice, his dog. Rain picks up, drums on the roof. He smiles, slow. “But they’ll be gone too.” Long pause. “And you. Life, it is quick.” Life is long, a chain of intertwining moments, looping round and round. But life is short. Blinks. Memories. Connections. Then you’re gone. The truth: I live my days as if I will live forever. Putting off so much, expecting there to be more time, another chance. If I accepted my mortality to my core, never knowing when the chain snaps, then how would I live? More on my terms. A free man. I’d write more, I’d love more, I’d laugh more. Can I succeed at it, this way of living? I don’t know. But I will remind myself daily: I am mortal. I will feel gratitude for it. For another opportunity to be here, to live and love and hurt and play and create and make good and bad decisions. Life. I have a hunch that my journey, however long it plays out, shall be better for it. Thank you, Werner Live Your Truth Your best chance of bouncing back, sorting it out, and getting things rocking again lies in the practice of social contracting, a discipline that management thinker Peter Block introduced in his terrific book Flawless Consulting.
But to make it easier, here are five fundamental questions to ask and answer. You don’t need to ask them all. I’m sure you’ll find your own best combination for the person and the situation. Just make sure you ask some of them before things get rolling. You’ll want to remember that any good contract is a mutual exchange. So don’t be fooled into thinking that your job is just to ask the questions. You need to be willing to answer them as well, so you and your collaborator both know where you each might stumble. What do you want? (Here’s what I want.) This is a question that almost always stops people in their tracks. It’s deceptively difficult to answer and incredibly powerful when you can define clearly what exactly it is you want from this relationship. Of course you’ll want to articulate the transactional nature of things: I want you to get this done and get that completed. But see if you can go beyond that. What else do you want? (“I want this to position me for my next promotion.”) What else would make this relationship one to truly value? (“I want this to lay the foundations of future work together. Where might you need help? (Here’s where I’ll need help.) This turns the “What do you want?” question over and comes at it from a different angle. You might want to specify where you’ll trip yourself up (bold), how you might fall short in the relationship (bolder), or even how you might get in the way (boldest). When you had a really good working relationship in the past, what happened? (Here’s what happened for me.) Tell a story of a time when you were in a working relationship similar to this one, and it was good, really good. What did they do? What did you do? What else happened? What were the key moments when the path divided and you took one road and not the other? What else contributed to its success? When things go wrong, what does that look like on your end? How do you behave? (Here’s how I behave.) Tell another story, this time of when a working relationship like this one failed to soar. It might be when it all went hellishly wrong or it might be when it disintegrated into mediocrity. What did you do and what did they do? Where were the missed opportunities? Where were the moments when things got broken? When things go wrong—as they inevitably will—how shall we manage that? The power in this is twofold. First, you’re acknowledging reality: Things will go wrong. Honeymoons end. Promises get broken. Expectations don’t get met. By putting that on the table, you’re able now to discuss what the plan will be when it does go wrong. I’ve done everything from creating a code phrase (“I need to have an ‘off my chest’ conversation with you…”) to inventing a process (“I’m hitting the Mission Pause button”), to simply agreeing that we have permission to talk about things when we feel we must. Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career (The 99U Book Series) Timidity is the mind-set that says you’re too weak, too small, and too unimportant to be deserving of real power. Who are you to live a meaningful life? You’re just one insignificant person among billions. This belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In reality, you’re so powerful that you’re actually turning your own strength against your-self, temporarily rendering yourself weak. You’re like a god who declares, “Let me be powerless.” And that’s exactly what happens. Timidity causes you to settle for puny, empty goals that don’t in-spire you—assuming you even set goals at all. You perform meaningless work that doesn’t matter to you, live in a place you don’t care for, and settle for disempowering relationships with other weak-minded people who regard you as another warm body for their pity parties. Mean-while, your true self is practically screaming at you, but you drown its voice with idle entertainment, junk food, and other distractions.
You weren’t meant to live hiding under a rock. That isn’t you. You’re selling yourself short, grossly underestimating your true capabilities. This is your reality, and you’re responsible for it. Stop trying to live in denial of that fact, and face up to it. You didn’t come here to spend your life obsessing over trivialities. Wake up and take a good look at yourself and admit, “This is garbage. I can do better than this!” Start listening to that powerful being inside you for once. It won’t steer you wrong. Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth Understand that you can only take action in the present moment, and you can only enjoy your results in the present as well. You can’t accomplish or experience anything in the past or future because you’re never there. When people learn about goal setting, they often set goals in violation of this fact. It’s difficult to achieve something that’s based on an inaccurate model of reality—such a goal will surely be an uphill struggle. The purpose of goal setting isn’t to control the future.
The point of goal setting is to improve the quality of your present-moment reality. Setting goals can give you greater clarity and focus right now. When you set a goal that improves your present reality, what does it matter how long it takes to achieve the final outcome? Whether it takes one week or five years is irrelevant. The whole path is fun and enjoyable. Whenever you set goals, you can envision a path of sacrifice and suffering by focusing on the illusion of the future, or you can allow the goal to inject your present reality with excitement, enthusiasm, and motivation. Even though it seems like you’re setting goals for the future, you’re really doing so for the present. The better you understand this, the more easily you’ll achieve what you set out to do. If you adopt this mind-set, you’ll soon learn to set different kinds of goals. If your goals look great on paper but don’t fill you with desire and motivation when you focus on them, they’re worthless. Don’t settle for wimpy goals you aren’t passionate about. Effort If you want to turn your desires into reality, at some point you must take action. When you set goals that truly inspire you, you’ll feel naturally motivated to take action. You’ll work hard, but it won’t seem like hard work because you’ll be so inspired. For the most part, you’ll just be doing what you love to do. When you focus single-mindedly on what you want, you’ll begin to notice new resources appearing in your life. If you don’t take action, however, those resources will dry up, and you’ll be no closer to your goals. Self-Discipline Self-discipline is another one of those dirty words. We’re told to take it easy. Go with the flow. Don’t sweat it. The myth of fast and easy pervades modern society. This may convince you to buy a lot of junk you don’t need, but it isn’t an effective way to run your life if fulfillment and success matter to you. Self-discipline is the willingness to do what it takes to achieve the results you want regardless of your mood. Motivation starts the race, but self-discipline ultimately crosses the finish line. Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth If that’s you—if you have too many passions and don’t know which one to focus on—here’s what you do:1/13/2014
If you’ve got a pile of possibilities in front of you right now and the idea of editing is overwhelming, step up into the observatory tower and gaze into the land of Harvesting. Which destination feels like success? Which one feels good, but not great? Which one feels okay, but not awesome? When I did this exercise, it forced me to realize that to progress as a copywriter in the company I worked for, I would probably need to become a creative director. I would manage projects and people, which would mean I’d spend less time actually writing. That pretty quickly became a destination I wasn’t eager to arrive at. If you’ve got ten paths, this simple exercise will help you eliminate a few pretty quickly. Especially the ones you’re just good at. Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean it’s the road to awesome for you.
If that’s you—if you have too many passions and don’t know which one to focus on—here’s what you do: Pick one and start. Don’t try to prioritize your list. I used to tell people to do this, and it was a mistake on my part. I would say, “Make a list of all your passions, from most interesting to least interesting. Then start working on the one you are most interested in.” This seemed like good advice, but it’s not. The list is miserable. It’s a crippling waste of time. Instead, just pick one and start. If they’re all passions, then what is the worst thing that can happen? You spend time doing something you enjoy and realize along the way it’s not what you enjoy the most? How is that a fail? That’s called an edit. If you wait to create a perfect prioritized list or just simply wait because you don’t know where to start, you are guaranteed zero percent joy because you’ve worked on zero percent of your passions. I’m horrible at math, but even I know some is better than none. Start on something. Edit it if it’s not your awesome. Move on to the next thing. Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters |
Click to set custom HTML
Categories
All
Disclosure of Material Connection:
Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” |