kaibara87 on Flickr

Is your intention everyday just to survive? Is your intention everyday just to make it through the world, because your interpretation is ‘the world is so hard, so stressful, so chaotic, I hope I can just get through this day’? Because if that’s where you’re at, that identity for you is small. – Brendon Burchard

I used to whine…a lot. Practically every word out of my mouth was a complaint of some kind. I was either talking about my frustration over my homework load, kvetching over the constant barrage of e-mails, or just going on about random aches and pains and fatigue. The only information I had to share with anyone was about how something was bothering me.

I was hardly conscious of my behavior; whining just seemed to be the natural thing to say, and after all, it seemed to me that most conversations were based around complaining. People would get together after work to basically whine about the difficult week. Guys would bond over complaining about their girlfriends, and women would commiserate over the poor quality of men in their lives. Most of the student conversations I heard were about academic frustration.

Still, I was not pleasant to be around, and my family made this very clear to me.

I didn’t want to be that guy nobody invites to parties (I was already that guy, and knew it wasn’t fun). I didn’t want to be the guy nobody could rely on who couldn’t handle his own life. So I resolved to change what I thought was a seemingly simple habit of conversation.

I had no idea how deep it went.

The rule I instituted was: if what I am about to say is something negative and simply expresses how I feel bad about something, with no suggestion of actually fixing the problem, I will keep my mouth shut.

With only moderate self-control, I did very well at this. It was merely a matter of keeping my lips sealed. Sometimes I found I had nothing to contribute to conversations, but at least I wasn’t bringing people down anymore.

Then I made a horrifying discovery.

I had nothing at all to say anymore and I had suddenly been forced to listen to my internal dialogue, which turned out to be almost 100% negative. Not only had all my speech been composed of complaints, but my thoughts were all negative as well. I learned that my initial reaction to almost every event in my life was to look for the bad in it. I had a worldview that was completely dominated by the perception that everything was difficult, frustrating, tedious, uncomfortable, or held some, as yet unknown, pain. The way I saw the world, it was hard, cruel, and utterly unfair. After all, this was the only way I could justify my constant complaining and generally stagnation in life.

I occurred to me that I while I would be able to change my speech by simply keeping my mouth shut, I might never be able to change the way I thought. It just seemed totally overwhelming. We weren’t talking just about how I behaved anymore. Now I was taking on a foundational aspect of how I saw the world. I resigned myself to simply acting optimistic in order to fit in.

…I Just Woke Up One Day

That was at the end of college. It’s been three years, and I realized this morning that I hardly ever whine anymore. Even more significant, my view on life rarely includes thoughts of complaint. My first reaction is to put a positive spin on everything that happens (which still annoys a lot of my friends and family…I guess I can’t win). I’m always hopeful that bad situations will get better, and if something is unbearable, I smile through it, look for the good in it, and try to actually do something about it to make it better in future.

How did this happen?

I have no recollection of any specific turning point. I don’t even remember thinking that things were getting better, or that I was feeling better. The change came about in little steps and consistent practice. Without realizing it, the positive outlook I’d been ‘pretending’ slowly seeped its way into how I actually saw the world.

Exercises in Positive Self-Delusion

For example, when learning how to attract women, one of the hardest principles to master was that of always being upbeat without being phony. I would go out night after night, whether I felt down or not, and in order not to get totally rejected, I had to psych myself up. Not only that, but I had to stay positive no matter how many girls blew me off, how many awkward silences I created, or how tired I was. Every encounter had to be approached with fresh optimism and energy, otherwise, I’d just crash and burn in a never-ending spiral.

It was an exercise in self-delusion, but the delusion eventually gave way to a reality of optimism and resilience.

Similarly, when I started learning about personal and professional success, one of the overriding themes was that success requires the ability to take risks knowing that things might not work out. Most people focus only on what could go wrong and what they could lose if they take a professional risk. That is why so few people break out of the 9-5 to grasp financial freedom. A successful entrepreneur has to see that the positive outcomes are worth the risks and to focus on the possibility of freedom and real change in the world.

I knew in my heart I wanted to be financially free, but some might say that, lacking the right mindset, I just wasn’t cut out for it, and would have to accept that. I was stubborn enough to think I could just emulate the mindset. Surprisingly, it started to become real.

And of course, there was exercise. Exercise is inherently an exercise in positive thinking (excuse the pun). You have to put yourself through discomfort in order to get better. To do that, you must have faith that the positive outcome is worth the discomfort and that the discomfort will not last long. You have to look past the immediate unpleasantness and see the potential for something better.

My drive to be strong and fit overrode my attachment to a negative worldview, so I just ignored my pessimism, and it slowly faded away.

I didn’t really believe these ideas in my heart when I started, but I kept reading, filling my head with a different worldview, and put the ideas into practice in my life. I went out to meet new people, giving myself pep talks in front of the mirror before a night out. I would visualize strength and power before a hard workout. I started following all of those hokey personal success rituals advocated by business gurus. I did all this with much skepticism, but I was noticing differences in my performance, so I kept at them. I was carried not by a desire to ‘be happy’ but rather, to ‘be effective,’ to be able to do the things that made life exciting for me.

Eventually, the behaviors started to change the way I thought and the way I saw the world. Instead of contemplating a move to Korea and thinking only of how difficult it would be, I saw it as a challenge and an opportunity for growth. I knew I’d be starting all over again, but instead of thinking how much I’d lose, I could only see how much there would be to gain starting with a blank slate. People actually had to remind me of how difficult it would be.

Because the changes were so tiny, I never noticed them until the cumulative effect hit me one day, and I compared my current self to how I had been in the past.

Now, I don’t even have to work at staying positive. It has become my default mode of thought.

Besides feeling better about myself, the other benefit of eliminating the whining habit is that the world seems full of possibility. I used to imagine the things I wanted to do and immediately become overwhelmed by how difficult they would be. As a result, even the smallest things seemed to require superhuman resources and effort.

Now, however, I think of what I want to accomplish and I see so many potential paths for getting there. I’ve discovered that it is just as easy to imagine possibility as difficulty.

***

I used to think that whining was just a part of my nature. I was always going to be pessimistic, even if I changed the way I behaved around other people. But, by focusing on small things in daily practice, I managed to bring about a complete change in the way I see the world.

I literally changed my mind. Everyone who has known me during that transition would attest that the change has been for the better.

The lesson I took out of this is that you can change anything about yourself that you want to improve. Don’t think about rushing the change, just focus on the daily behaviors and keep your goal in mind. Just as looking for the easiest conversation topic in whining led to a self-defeating mental attitude, enacting positive behaviors led to an empowered mental attitude. Without even realizing it, things will start to pick up momentum and one day, you’ll open your eyes, or look in the mirror, or an old friend will comment on the change, and you’ll wonder what happened to the old you. The mind adapts to support the most common behaviors, to make them natural and easy.

These changes happen slowly, but you’ll look back one day and be shocked at how far you’ve come.

Please share any stories you have of surprising positive change, or insidious negative change, that snuck up on you over time.

- (**

Mostly Dans on Flickr

I get a lot of criticism for my failed attempt at starting a t-shirt design company. We had one run of t-shirts, I didn’t sell all of them, and my income was so low I couldn’t even cover the cost of the website hosting. I lost a lot of money, too. Some might think this is strong evidence that I shouldn’t go into business, since I couldn’t make even a small project work.

I have told the naysayers that I intend to try again. The usual response is a look of horror.

I learned a lot by failing, and I want to try applying the lessons to another project and see if I can make something else work. Isn’t that the whole point of learning? Make the failure worth something by learning from it.

When we are first learning how to write a paper in school, we usually don’t create a masterpiece of academic argumentation on the first try. Our first draft is horrible, and even the paper we turn in isn’t great. Yet, nobody tells us to give up on school altogether, or on writing papers. We know that we need to practice. If you saw how much wasted effort went into my first research paper, you’d see a lot of similarities between that and my first attempt at starting a business.

Lessons Learned

For example, when learning to write my first paper, I followed my teacher’s instructions on how to collect data, doing things the ‘right’ way. I used notecards to organize my ideas, even though I never referenced them. I never used notecards again, and actually found them more awkward than helpful. Every paper I wrote after that first one followed my own personal process. It was too easy to get caught up in an elaborate system of organizing notecards and never get around to the actual writing.

This is similar to how I hired a web designer to create my website, which I could have done faster and more cheaply on my own. I felt that getting a good designer was simply ‘how things are done’. While they produced a beautiful website, it took several months longer than it should have. I got so caught up in the design that I neglected to actually sell t-shirts. I could have gotten a passable website up in a weekend (I was actually designing websites professionally myself at the time).

I worried more about how my term paper looked than what it said, filling it with lots of images and packaging it in a nice plastic protector. The information in it wasn’t actually that enlightening, but it sure did look beautiful. Similarly, I spent much more money and effort on having a nice-looking website for my t-shirts than I did on market research or advertising, or even selling the shirts.

The biggest lesson I learned in both cases was to give myself more time than I thought I needed. Since the first paper I wrote was supervised by my teacher, we started a month ahead of time, but I never actually sat down to write the first draft until the weekend before. I spent all weekend on that paper. I was astounded at how much time it took, since I’d never written anything that long before. I had to write my first draft and the revised final at the same time, which didn’t contribute to their quality. In future, I always tried to write my first draft at least two weeks before the final was due.

Similarly, I didn’t give myself nearly enough time to develop my start-up before I left the country to work at an English school in Korea. I thought that I could run it from here, and maybe I could have if it had been better established. But I didn’t even start selling shirts until August, and then I was out of the country at the end of the November. If I had designed the website myself, I would have had more money and several additional months to get the ball rolling.

Creating a System

I got much, much more efficient at writing papers over the years, because I never shirked them and I always threw myself completely into them when I had one assigned. I checked out every book in the library related to my topic, and I’d keep them with me everywhere I went, so for about a month, I was carrying around a shopping bag full of library books. I read every single index entry related to my topic. Then, I sat myself down with all my books around me and hammered out a first draft. Paper and books were spread all over my room, but I relied on my memory to find the sources I needed. I had a system that worked brilliantly because I didn’t waste effort on unnecessary (for me) components like a personal reference system. I became so good at it that in college, I was able to write two 20-page final papers in 5 hours. I had read all my research articles the week before, and one night after all my friends had gone to bed, I sat up and pulled all my thoughts together. I got A’s on both papers. I don’t use the exact same process for any two papers, but the general structure is there. The rest changes based on the circumstances.

I expect that is how starting a business works, too. Once I try a few more times, I’ll start to figure out what matters and what can wait. I’ll develop my own system and figure out how to improvise to meet the demands of the situation.

So why did I get an A+ on that first paper but lost a lot of money on my first business? Well, the paper was supervised by a teacher who ga

ve me step-by-step instructions, and I was being graded on my ability to follow directions, not on whether it was actually an informative paper. I wrote about tornadoes and didn’t say anything innovative.

My business, on the other hand, was not guided by a mentor, and it was graded on its effectiveness. It did have to be something innovative, if only in a small way.

***

So, yes I’ll be trying again soon. I’ll make sure to give myself more time, and focus more on DELIVERING and less on PRESENTATION. I will save the unimportant parts for later, when I have the resources to dedicate to polishing up the store. Instead, I will focus on reaching my market and building a loyal base of fans for whatever I’m doing.

Maybe you’ll be one of them.

MSVG on Flickr

When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everyone will respect you. -Lao Tsu

I don’t know why it is so hard to be myself, but it seems to be the biggest challenge I have faced in life. From what I read of others’ journeys, it is a universal struggle. Not only is it difficult, it is fraught with dead ends, false trails, and misleading half-truths. For many of us, we don’t even realize we are not being ourselves. We think we are acting spontaneously and expressing a creative individuality, but in fact we are mimicking some idea of individuality or are simply repeating old habits.

So what does it mean to ‘be yourself?’

I don’t think ‘being yourself’ is the kind of thing you can talk about directly. It is the subject of Buddhist meditation, the mystic’s search for communion with the divine, and an entire literature of spiritual, scientific, and cultural studies. So, to explain what I think it means to ‘be yourself’ I will resort to an example.

The Book that Wants to be Written

I always wanted to write a book. It was a thing that called to me. The idea of writing an epic adventure made my heart sing. It just felt perfectly right, to write.

But I never did. I never sat down to write consistently, and when I finally got myself writing regularly, it was in the form of short blog posts, rather than the long-form writing I wanted to tackle in a book. It was as if I was afraid of writing even though it was the one thing that felt more natural than anything else.

I had my excuses. I wasn’t ready. I wanted to make sure I was skilled enough to do justice to the story. I told myself I would take some time after I was done with whatever I was doing to really study writing and get it down. Then, I would write my masterwork. I didn’t want to try to write now, when I wasn’t sure I’d have time. Better to wait until I could dedicate an entire six months.

Then, I had two years after college when I didn’t write my book.

Two years, living at home with my parents, making good money working 3 hours a day, when I had nothing to worry about and all the free time I needed. And still nothing got written.

I knew after that it wasn’t a matter of time or skill. It was a matter of aligning my life with my dreams. I needed to stop accepting my infinite excuses and just do what I kept talking about and dreaming about.

So, in Korea, I started to write a book, even though it was sloppy, I didn’t have much time, and it messed everything else in my life up. It isn’t even the book I dream about, but it’s something.

Despite all the problems I created by insisting on writing at the same time every day, and despite how surprisingly hard it is to maintain that commitment, I feel completely free now that I am writing something long. I feel more in tune forcing myself to write (even when I don’t feel like it) than I did trying to balance my life and sacrificing the writing for more ‘practical’ things or letting myself just take it easy.

That, I think, is what it means to ‘be yourself.’

It Feels So Right

It means to follow your bliss in the face of everything that gets in your way, including your own resistance.

It means to finally start doing the thing that makes you happy, despite practical considerations. It means finding a way to make your dream happen. I have to account for the real world—the need to cook, go to work, exercise, sleep, etc.—but after carving out just enough space, I sometimes feel like I’m jamming writing in there regardless, forcing other things out of the way. Sometimes I don’t prepare meals quite on time and have to buy dinner. Sometimes I am up a bit later than I need to be. Sometimes I have to take the writing to work and rush a bit in my class preparations.

But, it feels like it’s worth it.

What does it feel like, to ‘be yourself’?

It feels like a breathe of fresh air, when you didn’t even realize you’d been holding your breath.

It feels like finally running after holding back for so long. Your muscles thrill to be stretched and to power down the road. Sure, they ache and burn, but the feeling of speed and freedom overpowers the discomfort.

It doesn’t mean you never face obstacles, but you find that you have the willingness to tackle anything that challenges you.

Suddenly, things feel easy, even when they’re not, because you’re doing what you were meant to do. You’re eager to face challenge, even if you’re not sure you can overcome it.

Buddhism talks about Nirvana this way, as the ultimate freedom from ignorance, fear, attachment, and habitual thought. You are you, in every moment new and spontaneous. Nirvana is being yourself in everything you do, every moment of every day.

The Resistance

People will scoff. They will tell you that you can’t just drop all that baggage. A responsible member of society doesn’t just walk away from all that. You have no right to be yourself, and that it is the most selfish thing you can do. People who love you will say this. If you meet absolutely no resistance, you’re probably still going with the flow.

When you start ‘being yourself’ you find your own flow, and you go with that instead. So even as you face resistance from the world around you, you are bolstered and supported by your internal energy. And things start to align for you, and the universe conspires to make your dream come true. Not because the stars line up just for you, but because you’ve finally lined yourself up with the stars.

***

Ok, this got a little new age-y. But in a way, it’s true. When you’re out of tune with yourself, you’ll always be fighting yourself. Your energies will be divided. This is as true in athletics as it is in life; if your body is too tight, half your strength will go to overcoming tight muscles. If you can align your entire body to one task, you find you have more strength than you thought.

If you align your entire being—mental, emotional, and physical energy—with the one thing that feels right, you find that you have more passion and energy than you ever thought possible, and things that seemed improbable or impossible suddenly are within reach.

You probably think I’m an idealist with my head in the clouds. You won’t know until you try.

ButterflySha in Flickr

“If you wait to do everything until you’re sure it’s right, you’ll probably never do much of anything.” -Win Borden

To really experience life, you’re going to have to get out of line first.

When I studied Arabic in Jordan, I initially applied to go through a program. It was quite a prestigious program, and it promised all sorts of  exciting (pre-arranged) adventures in addition to a language study at the University of Jordan. The brochure also stressed how safe it was and how secure the travelling student would be, even as they learned to step outside their comfort zone on a study abroad program. I had my misgivings, but when I got a phone call letting me know I was accepted, I was very excited…until the lady got to the part about the cost of the program.

Having lived in the Middle East, I knew that the costs were inflated. I asked if I could just stay with my family there and spare them the living expenses, but the woman (quickly getting annoyed with me for daring to suggest I might have a better experience through other channels) explained that it would detract from the experience. This didn’t answer my question, and she ended the conversation by saying that if I didn’t pay soon, they would give the spot to someone else.

I never followed up with that group. I simply signed up for the University of Jordan’s Arabic program directly. Of course, there were some bumps in the road because of that, but when I showed up with twenty or so other students who hadn’t finalized their registrations, I really had to “step out of my comfort zone” to speak for all of them and cow the program director into letting us all join the program a day late. That would never have happened if I’d went with the ‘secure’ program.

I also wouldn’t have discovered a spiritual guide/guitar teacher, volunteered at a refugee daycare school, gone to a crazy Arabic wedding (where I was related in some distant way to all 200 people there), or talked a cab into driving me across the Jordanian desert from Petra to Amman, a four hour drive, at midnight.

Just because you’re studying or living abroad doesn’t mean you’re being adventurous, especially if you’re operating inside some larger institution or program. In fact, most of our lives nowadays are within the safe confines of some kind of institutional structure that sets the boundaries for our behavior and defines our experience of the world.

Living In the Lines

A friend of mine shared this deeply disturbing and powerfully inspiring video. It is about how our culture denies us independence and how we never develop into independent adults anymore. After the structured morality and care-giving we receive in childhood, we hop straight into another set of structures on how to behave, how to live and perceive life and our world, and how to think: school, college, corporate work environments, religious institutions, political parties, the scientific-governmental-capitalistic morality of profit equals good.

Even if you wanted to step out of bounds, you’d have to go a long, long way. There are even institutions for fringe elements and anarchists. That’s the only explanation for why so called ‘rebel’ groups like hipsters, hippies, and goths have always had an identifying set of behaviors and appearance cues.

What would it take to really step out of bounds?

A is reading a book entitled, Magic and Mystery in Tibet, written by one of the last foreigners to explore Tibet before the Chinese invasion. There were no roads there, no travel itinaries, and no tourist agencies making sure she would see all the important sites. She just went, hounded some Lamas into teaching her Tibetan Buddhism, and wandered the Himalayas.

Who does stuff like that anymore?! We almost think it’s illegal to JUST GO and see what happens.

Our Perpetual Childhood

I makes me profoundly sad that there is no more room for independent exploration anymore. There are very few places where there aren’t roads, buses, or tour guides. Someone is always happy to tell you how to experience their country, for a small fee. Even in our personal lives, there are gurus and experts telling us how to do everything from exercising to eating to keeping a journal. The internet is full of life coaches and there are countless systems for self-actualization.

Of course, we don’t have to take the bait. We do not need to take the easy way out. Most of us, however, are afraid of being wrong. We are afraid to waste our vacation by exploring without a guide, or we are afraid we will hurt ourselves if we workout without a trainer. Nobody wants to mess up their business situation, so few people take a real risk and start a business. Nobody wants to mess with their health, so we’re content to just follow the official guidelines instead of learning things for ourselves by actually trying them.

The result is that we’ve lost our intuition and our instinct. We cannot trust ourselves anymore, because we don’t actually know how to.

In this world, you never, ever have to take a step in anything without guidance and instruction. You can always find a ‘right way’ to do everything.

But is that really a good thing?

I would say that it is not a good thing to always let yourself lean on someone’s prior experience. First of all, their experience cannot apply to your particular situation 100%. Unless you are willing to actually customize it and extrapolate from it (which contradicts the need to seek it out in the first place), it won’t actually carry you through the trials you’ll face on your journey, whether that is starting a business, getting in shape, or writing a book.

Secondly, always looking for someone else’s approval is a profoundly childish way to approach life. Children do it all the time. They run up to a new toy or friend, but stop short, glancing back at their mom to make sure it’s okay. When they detect her approval, they go ahead and explore. Adults who do that, however, either by looking everything up on the internet or constantly checking in with their superiors, become reliant on external validation to accomplish anything.

I have been in that situation. You would think a twenty-something young man would be able to make his own decisions in a relationship, but for a distressingly long time, I called my parents for advice on everything. I didn’t realize how that contributed to my relationship failures until I broke the habit and noticed my girlfriends doing the same thing. I felt like I was dating their mothers, not them, especially because they could never trust their own feelings. They ended up doing things they didn’t want to, because their parents’ advice couldn’t be 100% tailored to the current situation. I don’t know how common this used to be, but it seems like it is becoming more common among people in my generation.

Outside of relationships, I’ve known people who would freeze up when they couldn’t ‘check in’ with someone or something, people whose knowledge was basically a carbon-copy of Wikipedia articles, who thought along lines preset by their internet communities, and changed their ideas as new trends came and went, never noticing how they were simply a cork floating along in a river, going wherever the current decided to take them, never setting their own direction.

We all have opinions and perceptions that are not our own which we would not have adopted if we’d taken the time to assess a situation with our own ideas and judgement. Sometimes we have held these ideas for so long–and seen them challenged so infrequently–that we don’t even realize they are there. This is why travel is such an eye-opener for people who manage to immerse themselves in a host culture; they suddenly see an entire society of people with totally different assumptions about how the world works. This leads them to reassess the basis for their own preconceptions.

Nobody Else Can Tell You What Matters

I do not think there is any one ‘right way’ to do anything really significant in life. There is no ideal model of health that applies to every human being, though fitness magazines would have you believe otherwise.

There is no formula to writing a book. Every book is different. You embark on the journey, see where it takes you, and adjust accordingly.

There is no formula to starting a business. You just have to jump in and go for it.

There is no formula for spiritual seeking.

There is no formula for how to raise a family.

If you know the whole path from start to finish, and you’re following a well-worn trail, you will not derive the true benefit of your journey, which is always as much spiritual growth as material accomplishment. If all you do is the latter, when the situation changes, you will find yourself helpless, because you will not have learned anything more than how to follow directions.

There is no formula for adventure.

And that is the point.

UmmZ on Flickr

The most significant lesson I ever learned in trust-based relationships is that all anybody asks for is respect. If you give them that, you have extended the greatest sign of love and compassion there is. If you don’t give them respect, you’re not really loving them. You’re simply looking after them, attached to them, or maybe even taking advantage of them in some way.

Perhaps you think this is obvious, but consider how many times we ‘love’ without giving respect: parents taking care of their children with no concern for what the child wants; codependent couples using each other to bolster their own self-esteem; men and women with a need to rescue their partner or be a hero; friends who hang out together because they look better in comparison to each other.

True respect, true compassion, involves the recognition that the other person is a complete, functional, human being. Even if they need help in some things, they are still complete beings.

I’ve learned this living with my girlfriend, A. She has a lot of really amazing artistic talents, and sometimes when she starts a new project, I want to give her advice to help her. I used to voice my opinions and suggestions without thinking. I thought that I was just helping her make her project that much better, and that of course she should be grateful.

I would be hurt when she responded negatively to my suggestions, no matter how gently I made them. I thought she was just stubborn, but I decided to take a closer look at myself first.

What I discovered wasn’t all that shocking, but it was enlightening. I wasn’t trying to help her for her own sake. I was doing it to feel more important. I wanted to be an important part of everything she did, so by offering my suggestions, I was looking for validation that my contribution was valuable.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I stopped.

Lo and behold, her artwork did not suffer, and in fact became even more expressive and unique.

The Selfish Need to Help Other People

Charity in our society is sometimes seen as an obligation. In many schools, children are required to get a certain number of hours doing volunteer work or community service to qualify for graduation. Colleges are always looking for that sort of thing, and it is a great resume item. You’re supposed to help, and those who help are ‘better’ people, according to the standards of university admissions and human resources. So, while we may resent the burden to be of service, we also associate it with our own moral superiority.

We may think, “I am a good person, because I help others.”

When we see someone, we immediately look for some way to help them, even if they don’t really need help. We basically become vampires, using other people to try and bolster our own sense of self-worth.

Of course, we should always be willing to help other people, but there is a right way and a wrong way to help people.

The right way is to only help when necessary. Sometimes we may be asked directly, but not always. We cannot always assume we are the right person to help, and sometimes staying uninvolved is a better way to help someone. Being helpful is a skill. We must develop the ability to understand when someone needs our help; sometimes they need it but won’t ask, and sometimes they don’t need it but will ask.

The wrong way to help is to force it upon others when they don’t need it. This is helping for our own sake, so that we feel important and good.

Another way we may help without actually being helpful is by offering aid in a way that makes the other person reliant on us. This happens a lot with NGOs and international charities. In order to make sure their continued existence is required (and therefore to justify continued grants), they provide aid that does not help communities become self-sufficient. Instead, they may actually force a transformation that makes the community even more dependent on the charity. The organization can tell itself and the world that it is doing good work, while the community receiving aid becomes more and more desperate and reliant.

Individuals can do this too. One of the strongest motivators for getting into a relationship is to have a sense of being needed. It makes us feel important. We then learn the behaviors that make our partner even more dependent on us over time, looking to us for emotional support, decision-making, money, or sex.

If we try to do everything for our partner, it can imply that they can’t or shouldn’t do things for themselves, and this implies a lack of respect of the person’s autonomy. We end up treating the people we love like children, hog-tying them instead of empowering them.

Helping other people out of genuine concern for their needs is a wonderful thing, but I think that when we really look closely, we will find that people need our help far less often than we think.

Robert Couse-Baker on Flickr

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” -Albert Einstein

The hardest thing I’ve encountered in becoming happy and successful is that it can make other people upset. Even if most people are happy for you, that one voice of resentment can destroy you.

That provides a great excuse to hold yourself back: we’d rather be liked than happy (the absurdity of that statement should be apparent).

In high school, I was at the top of my class, but I was miserable because of it. Academics came easily to me, and I knew many of my classmates did not feel the same way. I felt horribly guilty about this. I felt that I didn’t deserve to do well, and I guessed they felt it wasn’t fair. Luckily, I had the sense to continue getting good grades, but I tried to ‘atone’ for my academic success by cultivating a self-hatred that was in agreement with how I thought my peers must see me.

I see this a lot with the kids I teach in Korea. Many of the academically successful kids are ostracized by their less-capable peers. It’s not that they don’t like the smart kid, but rather that they resent their success because they themselves want it but can’t (or won’t) do the work to achieve it.

It took me a long time to learn to be happy about my successes. It took me even longer to be unapologetic. When I started seeing success in fitness, I discovered that I was a source of inspiration for my friends at CrossFit, rather than a source of resentment and jealousy.

The Root of Resentment

Still, there were those who resented my success, especially where it came easily as in running or gymnastics. And I resented them their success in weightlifting, undervaluing my own achievements.

All I saw was the end result, and I would feel jealous that they’d been blessed with a gift while I had to work my butt off. It didn’t seem fair.

People only see the finished product, and they think the gods are petty in distributing their blessings, and so they think, “it’s not fair.”

When I read a great book, for example, I only see the finished product and think, “I’ll never be this good. It’s not fair that this author has so much talent I’ll never have.” I have to remind myself that they probably spent years on the book, and that their first draft was probably comical in its inanity.

A good example is the new life planner I’ve created from scratch. People who see it now in its leatherbound, embossed tabbed glory have commented that they’ve always wanted to make something like that, but that they don’t have the time to put all the pieces together and think out the organizational system and routines they’d need.

These same people had seen the book in its first iteration–just a bunch of paper stapled along a fold to form a rough booklet–and scoffed at my excitement. When they comment on the elegance of the finished product, I try to explain how miserably inelegant the original was, and how many tiny steps it took to get here, and how easy it would be for them to take that first tiny step. But they can’t see that. (check here for a photographic chronicle of my LifeBook, to be explained in a later post).

We always want the last step, the denouement , the final draft, and it blinds us to the ugly, unformed idea behind every work of art, chiseled body, or literary masterpiece.

Anyone can take that first step, but we tend to forget that it is the first step that leads to that amazing end result, so we never even start.

I think that the real problem is not that we resent others’ particular successes, but rather that we think it reveals some kind of superhuman ability we think we don’t have. We know how much work we put into our efforts, even though we hide it from others. But when we see someone else with something amazing (only amazing to us, because we can’t imagine ourselves doing it), we assume it was effortless for them. So we bluff about how naturally talented we are, and they match our bluff by being dismissive about their achievements.

The result is that we end up resenting each other out of insecurity. It’s a mess.

You might try downplaying your hard work to avoid this resentment, until you start to hate your own gifts and accomplishments because you think it makes others dislike you.

You’re the Inspiration

So what should we do?

My solution has been to stop apologizing, externally or internally, for my success or good fortune. I don’t rub it in peoples’ faces, but I don’t try to downplay it’s importance either.

Because there are people, lots of them, who need you to be a big deal. They need to see someone succeeding at what they are working so hard to accomplish. They need to know you are proud of your accomplishments because they want to know that it is worth all the hard work and frustration they are dealing with right now.

To them, you are a beacon of hope and encouragement. If you apologize for being good, you send the message that the goal is a waste of time. At worst, it suggests those who do value it are misguided.

An example is learning to do pullups. I’ve helped so many people learn to do pullups, which take a long time. They see me ripping out a few, and they wonder if they’ll ever get there.

There are two ways to respond to this. I could say, “oh, it’s nothing,” thinking that if I devalue pullups, they won’t feel so bad for not being able to do a single one. This doesn’t work, because you can’t change what people want or what they value.

The other option, which I find actually gets people fired up, is to immediately tell them how long it took me: two years doing pullups almost every single day. I sucked at pullups more than anything else, and now, they are my strongest movement. This makes people realize that they can be really bad at something now and get better at it. It’s just a matter of doing the work. Since most people will work hard at anything they really want, this makes them realize it is something they can achieve.

These same people are my biggest supporters. They were the ones who stuck around to cheer me on at CrossFit competitions. They wanted me to be even better. They believed in me. They didn’t want to undermine me or make me feel less so they could feel better.

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The trick is to decide which voice you listen to: the haters, or those who love what you do?

I knew there were people who admired me, but I was so eager to please that all I heard were those who hated me for being good. One negative voice would drown out hundreds of supportive ones in my head. I gave too much weight to criticism and not nearly enough to encouragement.

So in the end, the solution (still in progress) was simply to recalibrate my sensitivity. Learn to notice the overwhelming vastness of the bright blue sky, instead of fixating on that single wispy cloud near the edge.

So I never felt I had a grandmother. But though she wasn’t officially family, I had Auntie Phyllis, and that was, as far as I was concerned, a better deal anyway.

My first memory of my Aunt Phyllis was in Florida, where she let us stay after our home in Kuwait was rendered inhospitable by Desert Storm. I remember spending entire days chasing her cat, Effie, through dark, dusty rooms full of the artifacts Phyllis had collected during her time in Kuwait. Heavy wooden chests full of scratchy woven rugs, wrought iron chandeliers, dark, secret alcoves and the thick tile floor served as a playground for me and my sister.

Phyllis herself held a magical quality, like a benevolent witch. For one thing, her backyard sloped down to a river where we saw alligators, an appropriately creepy animal for a witch’s backyard. It was at her home that I had my first experience of the infamous concoction, dirt-for-dessert, a meal of pudding layered with Oreo crumbs and served in a flower pot, topped with gummy worms.

When we were older, we used to visit her at her cabin in the woods of the Adirondack mountains, where she would stow my sister and I in her loft with a fairy tale library and a full-sized, real bearskin rug (complete with gaping maw still attached), while my parents slept on the pullout couch. With the musty furs, mounted animal heads, and three playful dogs, it was a wonderland. Add to that the fact that it was usually buried under more snow than Lia and I had seen in our entire lives, and we were in heaven. We woke to the smell of fresh pancakes and bacon filling the one-room cabin, spent the mornings playing with the dogs in our pajamas, the afternoons exploring the snow-covered woods, and the evenings curled up by the great stove.

Phyllis took care of my family and she looked after us kids. Her world was always magical and full of wondrous things to explore. She happily shared her cabin, barely big enough for her and her husband Richard, with a family of four including two rowdy kids. She always had room to spare in her heart for anyone, person or animal, that might need someone to look after them; she worked at an animal shelter, and was never with fewer than three dogs in her tiny cabin.

When I got old enough to want to understand my father, I turned to Phyllis, who had known him longer than anyone else I knew. Clearly, she was important enough in his life for him to justify buying a cabin only five minutes from hers. My dad spent as much time as he possibly could up there.

So it only made sense that, in seeking to connect with him, I should spend time with my Auntie Phyllis. I had one really good conversation with her about my dad, and I regret not having been more direct sooner.

Phyllis passed away last week, after a yearlong bout of leukemia. I got the news in an e-mail from my dad late at night, sitting up in my small kitchen in Korea. Phyllis had been so excited for me to go live abroad, perhaps because she had done the same thing when she was younger. She was eager for stories, but every time I called her, I just got the answering machine.

Missing the Connection

In the preparations to go to Korea, I had seen very little of her during 2011. I visited during hunting season, but when I was set to leave the States in September, it seemed that I would not get the chance to see her again. She had been diagnosed earlier in the year, but hadn’t been expected to live so long and with such vigor. She seemed to have beaten the leukemia, as improbable as that was, and even had her hair back.

But despite all that, I had a sense she would not be waiting for me when I returned from Korea. Resigned to that, I got ready to leave.

Luckily, our job offer fell through, leaving me in the States until December. I went up to the cabin with Anna, to see Phyllis and say a proper goodbye.

Anna and I visited several times, and shared dinners with Phyllis and Richard. When it came time to leave, nobody said anything about final goodbyes, but the tears that sprang to our eyes made it clear that there was more being said than a simple, ‘see you later.’

Phyllis read my blog every day. She was so happy to hear about every adventure we were having in Korea, eager to follow the developing perspective chronicled here. I kept trying to call her, but eventually gave up. I caught myself taking her for granted, putting it off and blaming the time difference.

And then, I woke up and realized I shouldn’t waste time, that there wasn’t really any time at all. If I couldn’t reach her by phone, I would send her an e-mail with a detailed, personal update on my life.

I sent it on Tuesday.

I got my dad’s email on Thursday.

I wondered, did Phyllis read it? In her last days, would she have had the energy to check her e-mail? I at least knew I had reached out, but what good was that if I hadn’t reached her?

I was oddly calm to hear of her passing. I had been emotionally prepared, and we had said our proper goodbyes, so I wasn’t surprised. But did she know I had been thinking of her? I wanted her to know that I hadn’t forgotten to share my stories in Korea.

I called Richard to offer my condolences. Funny how when we seek to offer comfort, we find ourselves the recipient. Richard told me Phyllis had read my e-mail, and that it had made her so happy, easing her pain a little.

And that’s when I felt the sadness well up, like a tide waiting for the right combination of seasonal elements to overwhelm a protected harbor. It was a gentle grief, full of love, but I was happy to feel a loss.

In Memory of…

Phyllis taught me many of the things I needed to grow up into a happy adult, and embodied many of the values that are so central to my quest for balance right now.

She taught me that nature is vitally important. She taught me that there is always room to love, and that you don’t need much more than a warm home, good food, good friends and a few dogs to be fulfilled in life. She taught me how to understand my father. She taught me that magic is real, that the world is full of wonder, that age is no excuse to stop laughing and acting positively childish. In my quest to get as mature as possible as fast as possible, there was always Auntie Phyllis, making fart jokes, playing with dogs, doing all the things responsible adults were supposed to put behind them, reminding me to stay lighthearted.

She was like this until the end. And while she had the grace to let others look after her when she needed it, she was still looking after us all when she left us.

I love you, Auntie Phyllis. You will always be a part of me.

Just imagine the serene sense of control you’ll have, effortlessly flitting from one task to another, making decisions with a quicksilver wit, and being as engaged with your family as your work life.

It’s a pretty mouth-watering prospect, if you ask me.

Getting Things Done is a book about an organizational system that has swept the productivity and business worlds (so I’m way behind the curve, as usual, but maybe you are too). It is fairly complex, but not because it requires special equiptment or organizational tools. All you need is a stack of paper, a pen, and file folders, but you can implement the system with electronic tools as well (which is what I ended up doing).

I won’t get into the details of the system. Suffice it to say that Allen explains the basic requirements of an organizational system that works for you, instead of enslaving you to it, with the ultimate purpose of freeing your mind to be creative and courageous, confident that nothing is slipping through the cracks.

In a word, GTD explains how to create a brain extension, or at least a memory extension, with the express purpose of getting nagging to-dos out of your subconscious and on to a piece of paper or PDA. Allen’s theory (which I think he backed up with experiential, if not scientific, evidence) is that freeing your short-term memory from the mundane task of reminding you lets it go to work solving problems and developing inspiration.

 Implementing the System

I read the book at a time when I was feeling totally swamped by all the things I had to do. I think I actually had a panic attack or two worrying about all the blog articles piling up and the classwork that needed grading.

Luckily, GTD helped me get a handle on everything by getting it out of my head. Really, all that meant was that instead of thinking of everything I had to do at once, I was able to look at my list and see just one thing to do, NOW. In GTD-speak, this is called the “Next Action” (it’s a big deal, apparently: the holy grail of GTD culture). Once everything had its place, I was able to start getting the ball rolling on a lot of stuff.

Of course, the method isn’t so important as the purpose behind it. Allen’s book succeeds because it is unique in that it focuses on the possibilities enabled by getting things done, rather than the doing itself. While the book does not go into setting life dreams and goals, Allen states from teh beginning that the big picture is why we have to master the details.

 My Experience

Personally, I think the system is pretty amazing, but it is starting to grate on me. It freed me up to deal with stuff, but it is not a simple system, and I still feel the burden of the lists themselves, looming over me. A part of me wants to just let everything go and use a minimalist form of productivity, as espoused by Zen Habits. Also, I’ve been using my iPhone and the internet to manage my to-dos, but something inside of me cries out for a pad of paper and a nice dark pen…there’s nothing like crossing out something when you’ve done it.

Nevertheless, GTD was an invaluable read. It taught me:

1. I do need an organizational system, with rules and procedures, whatever those happen to be
2. Being fastidious is not a block to creativity, but instead can enable it
3. The habit of checking reminders is more important than the form those reminders take, or even how tidy they are, as long as they pop out easily
4. The importance of planning. Plan sufficiently ahead of time and the task itself becomes a breeze.

I haven’t been this productive and organized since high school, and I have a lot more on my plate now than I ever did. I kind of wish I’d found it in college.

I recommend this book to anyone who has a lot to do. If you have one project in your life, then you probably don’t need it. Even if you’re usually on top of things, this book will teach you some tricks and ideas that will help you streamline your organizational process and save you even more time to focus on the doing, rather than the preparation. I plan to review it soon, even if I end up adopting a more personalized organizational system.

Latest Update

Since the original draft of this article, I’ve updated my system and personalized it a bit. I finally heeded the call to create something of my own, instead of relying on GTD tools created by others, and I constructed a (rather complex) booklet to act as my life organizer. It includes a GTD-esque task manager. The important part for me is that I got everything off the electronic medium into something that reflects the way I like to interact with the world. I find myself checking it all the time, largely because I’m so amazed that I created it, and its quite artsy as well. This means all my reminders are constantly in front of me.

The principles of GTD are still in place. I’ve just adapted them to my personal approach.

stevendepolo on Flickr

I have recently been burned in two business interactions that left me hurting both financially and personally. Not only did I lose money, I felt taken advantage of and cheapened. I invited my clients to undervalue my hard work by undervaluing it myself. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but I realize it’s all part of the learning process, and the more I delve into business, the more I realize how much good business relies on good character.

One of the most profound lessons I’ve learned in my business experiment has been that there is a very fine line between an exchange of services and an exchange of gifts. When you manage to present the business transaction as a happy exchange of mutual value, the client is happy to pay what you’re worth, and you are happy to do provide great service. The money is almost a gift given as a token of appreciation which cannot really equal the value of your service.

When you handle the interaction poorly, however, there is resentment on both sides. You feel taken advantage of, or underpaid, while the client feels like they are being ripped off.

One of the ideas I gleaned from Seth Godin’s Linchpin was to think of products and services as gifts given to society or your community. The idea is to give so much value that your clients can’t possibly hope to equal your contribution with a mere monetary contribution.

This casts the business transaction as a gift-giving interaction. When we give Christmas presents, we try to give the gift that will have the most value to the recipient, either through the effort we put in to create/acquire it, or its usefulness/desirability to the recipient.

We don’t ask for payment in return, and to do so would negate the value of the gift.

But all parties know that gift-giving is a reciprocal process (at least, it is in societies where it is a common practice). And so, eventually, your community of followers, who derive incalculable benefit from the art and genius you put into the world, will return the gift of your art with the gift of community support, usually in the form of monetary compensation (but not always).

 The Burden of Reciprocity

It is a bit idealistic, and it applies to a more human, visceral kind of exchange than is the norm in American society, where many prefer the sterile, safe exchange fostered on a website. Consumers don’t want gifts in the form of art, because it creates the implicit burden of reciprocity. They just want cheap ‘things’ without the human interaction.

Have you every felt guilty getting an awesome present that you know you’ll never be able to repay?

I think this guilt is more a symptom of our poor grasp of gift-giving than a problem with gift-giving itself. Assuming you didn’t act like an ass and refuse the gift or ostracize the friend who gave it to you, you probably allowed the relationship to deepen. Hopefully, you found ways to reciprocate the intent of the gift-giving by helping your friend, picking up their dinner tab every now and then, listening to their problems, inviting them to parties, and generally showing kindness.

In this way, money becomes a representation of community support rather than dross metal and bills.

 Your Friends Will Have Your Back

Another way to look at this interaction is that if you have strong friendships and selflessly contribute to those relationships without any thought of getting something out of them, you will get something out of them.

I experienced a bit of this when I launched my t-shirt design. The first people to purchase t-shirts were my friends. I didn’t have to push the shirts on them. I didn’t show up and lean on our friendship, trying to leverage it to guilt them into buying. They demanded that they be allowed to buy the shirts, and they were happy to pay for them.

I was actually sort of surprised. I was expecting my friends to feel like they shouldn’t have to pay because they were my friends. This wasn’t because they were bad friends, but rather demonstrated my shallow understanding of friendship. I’m glad the quality of my friendships was deeper than my understanding of them.

They made it a gift-giving transaction. In return for my friendship, I was getting the opportunity to give some really comfortable t-shirts and an expression of support in the form of cash.

 A Gift is Not Free

While I like the gift-giving perspective, I’m still learning the important distinction between giving things away and asking for fair compensation. It’s a tricky thing to negotiate gracefully. I’m always impressed when I meet someone who does it well. They have a strong sense of their own value and while they’d love to help me out, they can’t enter into an exchange in which they’d be forced to undervalue themselves.

A gift-giver understands the value of what he gives. To accept less than its value is worse than to accept nothing, because it allows the recipient to disrespect the gift itself and the gift-giver. Not only does the giver feel cheapened, the recipient also feels dissatisfied with what they got for so little.

This is the gift-giver selling himself short, undermining his own contribution for mere payment.

I have a problem of accepting less money than I’m worth. This reflects a problem with my perception of self-worth, especially in the context of societal and community value. It’s something I’m working on, but I don’t want to devolve to cutthroat business practices, either. I’d rather aim for a more human interaction and edge towards a financially sensible approach than demean my work and those I serve.

Someone very wise and very close to me explained it by saying that it is easier to be reasonably successful in business by being inhuman and treating it like a purely financial exercise. But it is more rewarding in the long run, personally and financially, to do business with heart. Those who succeed become renown for it.

- (**

Espara on Flickr

“I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.” – Mark Twain

Intensity in exercise is good. Most of us aren’t getting enough of it. Instead we settle for lifting weights we can handle comfortably and running at speeds that just break a sweat.

And then there are those of us who do nothing but high intensity exercise. We’re CrossFitters and Traceurs, MMA fighters and sprinters. We only have one speed, and that’s insane! We are not know for our gentleness, with others or ourselves.

I used to be one of those. Until I got injured, which happened a lot actually. When you’re body is constantly working near its limits, there is not much time for healing or recovery.

My most recent injury was a pulled muscle in my hip that immobilized my lower back. I couldn’t even bend over to tie my shoes. I had zero flexibility.

Out of options and fed up with being in pain all the time, I started practicing yoga to regain my flexibility.

I started it only as a therapeutic form of exercise, but I noticed that I felt much better on days I started with some yoga than those without. Clearly yoga was addressing some aspect of my physical training I’d been neglecting with all the CrossFit and gymnastics.

The intense stretching didn’t help at all. The painful deep tissue massage didn’t help, either. But slow, comfortable, gentle yoga slowly untied my back and improved my flexibility in other areas as well. When I finally started being gentle and kind to my body, it stopped punishing me with pain.

Surprise Benefits of Yoga

The next time I went in for a CrossFit workout, I found it much easier to get into the positions for weightlifting and bodyweight movements. As a result, I could move more weight and go faster. I was amazed at how hard I could push without straining or getting winded! Whereas before at least half my strength had been wasted fighting tight muscles, now it could all go into generating power.

Spending time loosening my hips with yoga had made me more powerful!

This experience convinced me that there is a lot of value in low-intensity exercise done correctly for the right purpose. Yoga’s main benefit seemed to be helping me develop body awareness and range of motion, which weren’t the focuses of CrossFit or gymnastics (though they were addressed to an extent).

Besides the yoga, I spent more time refining skills in various movements, another low-intensity activity. I would do exercises at a lower intensity, with a keen focus on perfect form and smooth, controlled movement. I improved my balance and the precision of my movements. Not every ‘workout’ had to leave me totally destroyed.

The result of the skill work turned out to be greater efficiency at higher-intensities, so I tired less quickly.

Again, training lower-intensity, more mental aspects of fitness had improved my performance overall.

Besides the performance improvements, I also felt less stiff generally, more energetic (because I wasn’t constantly burned out) and more relaxed.

A Prescription for Gentle Movement

Since starting a regular yoga practice, I’ve occasionally substituted with other, low-intensity exercises where the focus is on quality of movement rather than how far or fast I can go. Where I might have thought it a waste of time in the past, now I will happily spend an entire workout mobilizing and stretching or grooving one tricky balance move (handstands, for example, which are at least as much about skill as they are about strength).

I’m still exploring this area of fitness, but in general, it seems that a good foundation of skill work, body awareness, and mental engagement may be lacking in general fitness training, especially with the growing popularity of the super-intense fitness trend. The emphasis has always been on forcing your body to change, instead of coaxing it gently.

Trying to force our bodies to change is like trying to get a tree to grow one direction by physically pushing it. The tree isn’t going anywhere, and will just break if you push too hard. You’ll have more luck with light trimming and directed sunlight, and the final result will be much stronger.

I think that the fitness world may have overcompensated for excessively tame exercise by going for excessively hardcore fitness. The point of exercise is to promote health. It is essentially an act of caring for our bodies. And yet, we approach it with such frustration, as a means to punish ourselves and our bodies for not being as good as they can be.

If you’re finding yourself burned out, stiff, sore, frequently injured, or lacking in flexibility, and compensating by just pushing harder, I encourage you to try swapping out some workouts for rest or mobility training that emphasizes mental awareness, efficiency, and precise movement. Even just five minutes of yoga in the mornings made a big difference for me.

What are your thoughts on the appropriate ratio of low-intensity and high-intensity exercise?

- (**