dreams, not cravings

Recently, since I've had much more free time (or rather, time to spend in whatever way I like), I've been experimenting with allowing my time to be dictated purely by what I WANT in each moment.

If I wanted to work, I worked. If I wanted to watch TV, I allowed myself to. (etc)

As you may imagine, I had a terribly unproductive few weeks, and it scared me, because I wondered: if this is how I spend my time when I do what I want, how can I ever be happy in a sustainable way? (short of winning the lottery and spending my life on the couch)

And through this experiment, I've discovered an important distinction that I had never considered making, which has changed my life.

In considering the things we want, I discovered that there's a great divorce between our cravings (the things that we desire in this moment) and our dreams (the things that we want for ourselves overall).

Some quick examples:

Cravings:

- Television

- Unhealthy Food / Overeating

- Oversleeping

- Spending money

Dreams:

- Starting a company

- Writing a book

- Staying healthy and in shape

- Constant self-advancement

I think I read somewhere that cravings can be considered the wants of the body, whereas dreams can be considered the wants of the soul.

(consider the craving of adultery vs. the dream of finding a soulmate)

A few things I've learned:

- Fulfilling cravings is TEMPORARILY SATISFYING, and inevitably is followed by a period of dissatisfaction - like the crash after a caffeine high

- Fulfilling dreams is more difficult to BEGIN, but then easier to CONTINUE - and feels REWARDING and SATISFYING afterwards

- I LOVE cravings that fulfill dreams (I've recently gotten addicted to pull-ups, for instance)

In every moment, we have a choice to make between our short term cravings and long term dreams, and so often, I feel like when we surrender a short-term craving, it feels difficult.

The biggest thing I've realized is that when we turn AWAY from the cravings that are not dreams, it FEELS like we're keeping ourselves from what we really want, but we're NOT!

WE'RE DOING EXACTLY WHAT WE, OUR SOULS, WANT! THIS IS FREEDOM, PEOPLE!

So don't think of it as denying yourself, think of it as granting yourself your own greatest wish :)

michael shorb - geese

Geese

They are over the marsh now

An umbrella of feathers and cries

It's almost more

Than I can hold

The way reeds bend

To spy the shadows

Of their own swaying

They and the fading geese

One string

Inviting the dark to dance

To sift from the branches

Of the actual

To surround me like breath returning

When everything else is gone

- Michael Shorb

read between the lines

As a friend said,

'I'd like to be able to watch a movie like this, and within it see a music video like THIS."

what's in a screename

It's interesting to me that the internet started as a place where anonymity was attractive.

Even today we see the remnants of this, as everyone's AIM or AOL screen names are totally made up, random names, rather than names that can identify who they are.
The same is true of old e-mail addresses - no one ever put their name in their e-mail address, lest someone figure out exactly who they are.

Why didn't we want people to know? For one, I think we were afraid. It was a new environment, new technology, and it's always difficult to leap right in - anonymity allowed you slip a toe into the water to see how warm it was.

Also, I think it was the result of more freedom - in the real world, we're tied to the names we have - interesting how many people chose to escape that by creating another identify for themselves because just using their name was 'boring'.

Today, the name of the game is to use your name so often that when people google you, they find you. It's a huge form of personal branding and personal marketing - if you don't have an e-mail address that resembles your name, then it's harder to trust you. No one today will knock on you for 'no being creative' with you name - quite the opposite - it's irritating if you don't because you become impossible to find!

I think this is a statement about how a sort of 'unreal' world becomes part of the real world.

People start using their real names.

paulo coelho - risks

"You have to take risks.

We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

Every day, God gives us the sun – and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy. Every day we try to pretend that we haven’t perceived that moment, that it doesn’t exist – that day is the same as yesterday and will be the same as tomorrow. But if people really pay attention to their everyday lives, they will discover that magic moment. It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us. But that moment exists – a moment when all the power of the stars becomes a part of us and enables us to perform miracles.

Joy is sometimes a blessing, but it is often a conquest. Our magic moment helps us change and sends us off in search of our dreams. Yes, we are going to suffer, we will have difficult times, and we will experience many disappointments – but all of this is transitory; it leaves no permanent mark upon us. And one day we will look back with pride and faith at the journey we have taken.

Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won’t suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back – and at some point everyone looks back – she will hear her heart saying, “What have you done with the miracles God planed in you days? What have you done with the talents God bestowed on you? You buried yourself in a cave because you were fearful of losing those talents. So this is your heritage: the certainty that you wasted your life.”

Pitiful are the people who must realize this. Because when they are finally able to believe in miracles, their life’s magic moments will have already passed them by."

teaching entrepreneurship

I love this.

staying long enough

I once wrote this about inertia, and NOW I've discovered the problem with the second type of inertia I discussed: the fact that once you're moving, it's hard to stop.

What I'm realizing is that once you've broken free of the fear of change, you nearly immediately become imbued with the fear of settling down, of committing to something.

For instance, someone in a long term relationship, though it may be destructive, finds it difficult to get OUT of the relationship, that same person would then find it difficult to get back IN to a relationship, since change would be the new name of the game, and they'd be worried about committing to something that might not work out.

The same could go for someone who quit their job to take a new one - it's highly likely that the momentum that got them to quit is still surging, making it difficult to settle into the new job.

It strikes me that the challenge in dealing with inertia is in staying long enough.

Long enough to give things a chance, to try them out, to fight through the inevitable rough patches that you'll face in the beginning of something new and different.

But NOT long enough that you know that where you are and what you're doing is ultimately detrimental to you - NOT long enough to create an irrational dependency on an unhealthy situation.

w.b. yeats - he wishes for the clothes of heaven

He Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths,

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

- W.B. Yeats

the beautiful pursuit

There are two standard expressions you see on the face of someone who's hurrying somewhere.

Nine out of ten times, you'll see some mix of anxiety, concern, and self admonishment, as the person is upset that they're late, and worried that they're not going to make it.

The tenth time, you'll see a smile, or even a face near laughter, as they hurry past you.

These people are fearless.

They know they've gotten themselves in a situation, but rather than fearing the outcome, they're excited for it, eager to see if they'll make it! Or they're smiling in spite of themselves, laughing at how they've done it to themselves AGAIN, but certain that they'll be just fine.

Imagine having that feeling, that expression, that fearlessness every time something went wrong.

Just be certain that you'll make it.

two kundera ideas

Two awesome ideas from Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

First:

"To have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other's misfortune but to also feel with him any emotion - joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme."

Kundera considers the idea that a human's ability to feel compassion (he relates compassion to empathy) is what ultimately creates our moral conscience. The ability to clearly and accurately imagine the affects of our actions on others - this is what gives us morality, and those with a heightened sense of this inevitably end up with less forgiving consciences, which ultimately compel them to do right by those whose emotions they're so well imagining. Awesome idea.

Second:

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."

This point that even though we can recognize which actions we consider admirable and which actions we consider deplorable, and though we may strive ceaselessly for the admirable, that the deplorable STILL holds such a power over us...I find this to be a great statement of truth. Vertigo then, is the name of all the urges we have to let go of our values and live easily, in a way that we do not admire.

exhaustion of discipline

An interesting experiment about the 'exhaustion of discipline' - the idea that humans quite literally have finite amounts of self-control, and WILL eventually run out of it.

our need to know how much further

I had an interesting thought on one of the concepts I learned in Operations Management that decreases the 'perceived wait time' of a person in line.

They say that to people waiting, 5 minutes FEELS longer if they don't know that it's going to be five minutes.

Similarly, when completing a task online, the best practice is to let people know how many steps it is (you are currently reading paragraph 2 of 4 within this blog post). This way, they can estimate how far along they are, and how much further they have to go.

I was reading an article in a web magazine I've recently adopted: Thinking for a Living, and I noticed they have a novel way of presenting readable text (definitely worth checking out). They present the text in skinny, newspaper-like columns, and you click to scroll horizontally rather than the standard vertical scroll. I really like it, but the one thing I notice is that I don't know how many columns there are, which makes me hesitant to read - I don't want to start an article that's 50 columns because it'll take forever to read!

What I realized as I was reading and looking for some kind of indication of how much further I had to read is that...it is our desire to look into the future that makes this kind of 'status' comforting. If we were really enjoying the article, then why should we need to know that we had 3 columns left? Why not forget the future, forget how much left we have to read and continue reading so long as we're enjoying this moment, this column, this sentence?

billy collins - passengers

Passengers

At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats

with the possible company of my death,

this sprawling miscellany of people –

carry-on bag and paperbacks –

that could be gathered in a flash

into a band of pilgrims on the lat open road.

Not that I think

if our plane crumpled into a mountain

we would all ascend together,

holding hands like a ring of skydivers,

into a sudden gasp of brightness,

or that there would be some common place

for us to reunite to jubilize the moment,

some spaceless, pillarless Greece

where we could, at the count of three,

toss our ashes into the sunny air,.

It’s just that the way that man his briefcase

so carefully arranged,

the way that girl is cooling her tea,

and the flow of the comb that woman

passes through her daughter’s hair…

and when you consider the altitude,

the secret parts of the engines,

and all the hard water and the deep canyons below…

well I just think it would be good if one of us

maybe stood up and said a few words,

or, so as not to involve the police,

at least quietly wrote something down.

- Billy Collins

witnessing

I have problems with guilt.

When I'm not maximizing the way that I spend my time each day, I experience guilt.

Each day that I don't go to the gym, or waste a few precious hours watching useless TV, or don't spend enough time working on my business, I feel guilty.

Each time I say 'No' instead of 'Yes', to a new experience, I feel guilty.

One thing I've realized over time as I've tried to improve various parts of myself is the idea that you can't get MAD at yourself for failing to do or act or think like you'd really like to.

Getting mad or feeling guilty at yourself for failing to live up to your resolutions doesn't have the positive effect that we'd all like it to have. Instead, we just feel guilty without changing, and focus on the negative feeling, rather than the change (POSITIVE feedback, remember!?).

I'm slowly moving towards something my grandfather calls 'witnessing'. In his teachings, the two primary principles are self-watching and witnessing. Self-watching is a fairly simple concept (though not easy to do). It means to be aware of what we're doing, thinking, and WHY we're doing and thinking those things at all times. To be fully present at all times. It makes us aware of our motivations and actions every step of the way, so that we're never doing or thinking anything without being totally aware of it.

When it comes to changing ourselves, he advocates 'witnessing'. Let's assume we realize we're engaged in something we don't want be doing (i.e. Maybe we're sitting on the couch watching reruns when we could at least be reading a book, learning something). Witnessing means to simply be aware, to notice what we're doing without passing judgement on ourselves. He argues that simply being fully aware in the moment that we're doing something we don't like will cause us to change (just as they say recognizing you have a problem is the first step - he says its really the ONLY step).

This idea of not judging ourselves is key for me. I'd recognized that it was bad to judge OTHERS, and I'd accepted this as a truth worth working towards. However, I'd not yet understood that just as it's important to not judge others, it's equally important to accept ourselves as fallible and forgive ourselves for that - negative feelings about ourselves have no value.

the difference of positive feedback

A few recent experiences have made clear to me the extraordinary difference between positive and negative feedback from the people you're working with.

It's so so so much easier to wait and watch and point out the things that your employees are NOT doing, or are doing incorrectly. You think that if you catch them in the act, then they won't have the power to argue or be upset, because they're clearly in the wrong. BUT of course, this isn't the way the human mind works - even caught in the act, the mind turns defensive: "why is this so important anyway?", "why are they just waiting for me to mess up?", etc.

Imagine instead if you waited for people to do the RIGHT thing and then praised them loudly for it. What an incredible difference it would make! People LOVE praise, their memory hangs on to it, their steps are lighter after it. They'll do the right thing just to get a little more of it. And think about your own mindset - instead of looking for what's wrong, you're looking for what's RIGHT.

In the same way that positive people experience a world filled with good luck people looking for what's right will find and cause more and more of it, improving their entire outlook and perspective.

don patterson - rain

Rain

I love all films that start with rain:

rain, braiding a windowpane

or darkening a hung-out dress

or streaming down her upturned face;

one long thundering downpour

right through the empty script and score

before the act, before the blame,

before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone

beside a silent telephone

or the dress lies ruined on the grass

or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source

along their fatal watercourse.

However bad or overlong

such a film can do no wrong,

so when his native twang shows through

or when the boom dips into view

or when her speech starts to betray

its adaptation from the play,

I think to when we opened cold

on a rain-dark gutter, running gold

with the neon of a drugstore sign,

and I’d read into its blazing line:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood—

all was washed clean with the flood

we rose up from the falling waters

the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.

- Don Patterson

strengthen your strengths?

An interesting idea by Simon Sinek: that rather than assessing people's strengths and weaknesses and helping them develop their WEAKNESSES, we should instead help them continue to develop their STRENGTHS.

I think I agree with him when it comes to 'hard' SKILL sets, (he uses baseball and swimming in his analogy) - there are certain things that we are naturally skilled in that will prove to be assets to the organizations we work for.

However, there are weaknesses that we should always be improving on as well - listening and communicating come to mind - two skills that we should aim to constantly improve regardless of our strengths.

And, reconsidering the point of swimming and baseball - I wonder whether there are areas of overlapping skills that would make good swimmers better at baseball? Specific muscle groups that are strengthened by swimming and useful in baseball? How about perspectives? If the finance guy takes a course in marketing, might it open him up a little bit to consider the work he's doing in a new way?

On the whole, I'm beginning to agree - take what you're good at and become AWESOME at it.

BUT, there are so many exceptions to this rule that I'm not sure it's something to live by.

write. (and happy 300)

This is my 300th post.

I've arrived at it shockingly quickly (the poems and referrals help - little effort involved there!).

I was looking through some old posts, starting with the very beginning to try and assemble some sort of top 10, but I realized that 300 is too many posts to go through, and that I'm too in love with my own ideas to really choose the best among them, hahaha

However, what I did realize is that it has been an extraordinary pleasure writing all of this down. It's been cathartic, as it has relieved my mind of at least some of its churn (much like the Pensieve in Harry Potter). I also notice that my desire to continue writing has helped me highlight patterns and improve my general self-awareness overall.

As a result of this, I find myself often giving the same piece of advice these days.

Write.

When something is troubling you, write it down. All of it.

Very quickly you realize that there's more to it than you thought.

That you're errantly dismissing something.

Or that it's not as big a deal when it's on a piece of paper written out.

Or that once it's written down, you can make a to-do list out of it.

Or that writing it down is like having a conversation with someone who actually listens to you.

And so, in the 300th instance of my writing something down, I urge you to do the same.

Cheers, and thanks for reading, if you are.

I hope my words have been of some use to you.