The leader your self needs

In the profession called life, you can either choose to be led or you can choose to lead. Are you leading your self, or is your self being led by someone else?

If you're being led, you risk your life being swept down a path that leads to someone else's definition of success. You risk finding yourself stuck in an endless loop wondering where all of your time went and why you're not getting to where you want to go.

But if you lead your self, if you choose to accept responsibility for your own life, then you get to choose your own adventure. You get to stop at every crossroads and make a conscious decision about where you want to go next, instead of just going wherever the current wants to take you.

You don't need permission.

There's nobody else out there who is responsible for your happiness and there's nobody coming to tell you what you should do next.

You're alone. That's the hard truth.

Life can be a short dull race that you play safe to a regrettable end, or it can be a long wild adventure full of risk, challenge, and discovery. It's entirely up to you.

Your actions, your choices, your decisions. They're all yours.

What are you doing with them? Are you leading your self?

Leading isn't easy. It's often lonely and full of uncertainty, and doubt, and fear and leaders rarely know if they're going in the right direction.

But that's okay. That's what makes them a leader. They choose a destination and head towards the unknown. They go against the current. They do what nobody else does by choosing to accept responsibility for whatever happens next. They don't ask somebody else to accept responsibility for their actions.

Every great adventure is filled with obstacles and seemingly unsolvable problems. That's what makes it an adventure! Leaders see those unknowns and then go on anyway because they know that's part of the deal.

If you want to get somewhere you've never been, you need to be willing and ready to do things you've never done—that's what makes it fun!

Lead yourself. Accept responsibility for your life.

Be the leader your self needs.

Rewrite Your (Failure) Story

When thousands of people began reading what I was writing, I got scared. Each day I looked for more ways to reassure myself that everything I did would lead to a little more success, that each step would be safe. Eventually, I got so scared of failure, so scared of 'losing it all', that I stopped risking failure altogether.

It took me a long time to figure this out, and it seems so obvious to me now, but you cannot have success without failure. Success is achieved by overcoming failure. You can't have one without the other. The more that you try to avoid the risk of failure, the more you avoid the potential for success.

Here's something else I realized: a 'success story' is just that, a story.

There's nothing special or magical or mysterious about success. It's a story. It's a recollection of a specific series of events that follows the hero's journey, a common template that stories have been following for thousands of years. It involves 1) facing a challenge, 2) choosing to accept the challenge despite the risk of failure, and 3) overcoming the challenge.

A failure is just an incomplete success story.

A failure is one of the steps on the way to success. It's a toddler falling down on her way to running, the scale not budging on the way to getting in shape, and the frustration of inadequate knowledge and experience on the way to achieving a dream.

There are so many success stories and so few stories of failure because failure is a story that we don't want to hear (and because it's only part of a bigger story—it's an incomplete success story). Failure is a painful thing that reminds us that success requires work, that it requires effort. A story about failure reminds us that our work and our effort might not get us to where we're trying to go, that getting to where we're trying to go might require more work, and more effort.

The narrative of your life's story is controlled by what you choose to focus on. Reframe your story by consistently focusing on the positive, not the negative. Focus on the potential for success, not the risk of failure. Tell yourself a different story. Is there a chance you'll fail anyway? Sure, but focus on the positive! What positive thing might come out of failing? Focus on that.

If you choose to focus on the negative, all you'll see is negative. If you choose to focus on the risk of failure, all you'll see is failure. That's how stories work. Whatever part of the story you choose to focus on becomes your reality. It becomes your story.

Remember, you don't need to have a perfect record. You only need to show up more times than you don't.

So show up. Rewrite your story.

Writing Style: Readers Welcome Influence

Your writing style influences how your readers' inner ear hears your writing.

In the same way that nobody reads Emerson using Shakespeare's style, nobody reads your writing while imposing their own style.

Readers will embrace whatever style you write with because they're reading your writing. They're listening to how you're communicating the words. Nobody reads like an editor (except editors, and they already know they're reading like editors).

The very act of choosing to read puts your readers in a receptive mode that welcomes influence, whether they realize it or not. The placement of your commas and periods, the points at which sentences and paragraphs end, the words that you choose to use, all of it influences how your writing sounds inside the head of your reader.

They do not use your style--whether good, bad, or full of errors--to judge you as a writer. (Again, editors and people inclined to read like editors are the exception, but they're not the norm and they're most likely not your average reader.)

So embrace whatever style comes natural to you. Avoid letting your inner editor judge you before others even get the chance to read what you have to say. Don't let your style, or lack thereof, prevent you from writing. What you have to say is far more important than how you say it.

Standing Alone in the Darkness

Creativity feels good, being free to brainstorm and think and try and test and then scrap it all if it doesn't work and start over from scratch, all of that sounds fantastic when looked at from a distance, no matter how small that distance may be. But the truth is that living as a creative, working to embrace creativity wholly and completely on a regular basis, in between these dryly dull rituals of endless and inescapable routines, to exist as a creative soul and create things with creative energy, that's like wrestling a thousand-pound gorilla inside a thick, dense rainforest, in the middle of the night. It's like facing a crocodile in a swamp where you have no footing, and then standing there in the pitch black with no knowledge of where you are or what's lurking nearby.

Once in awhile you feel something in that darkness, you grab onto it, and for that one endlessly brief moment in time things feel a bit better, you feel a bit more in control, the stuff you're trying to do seems to happen a little easier and then you find yourself suddenly doing it and you start to tell yourself that YES, you can do this, you can work with this, you are a powerful and unstoppable force of nature because now you've found it, that hold, that little thing that seems to make all the impossibility of what it took to get there seem insignificant and unimportant and you forget, very quickly, how much effort it took to arrive at where you are, how much unknown you had to face, how much self-conscious ridicule and self-doubt you had to let go of, how much fear you had to put aside to find that little thing you're now clinging onto, that preciously delicate but incredibly potent little flow you're tapping into, hoping, wishing that it will never stop running, that it will never go away, that you'll never lose it again. But you know that's an unreasonable request from the universe. You know that soon your fantastic grip on this creative world you cherish so dearly will be gone, and you will once again return to being that tortured, naked soul, standing in the dark with so many unknowns all around, so many thousand-pound gorillas ready to wrestle and so many prehistoric crocodiles in these waters, and now you're right here, facing them all over again, looking, searching, waiting for that one thing, that one thread of connection, prepared to embrace that flow at a moments notice, ready to begin, alert, aware, patiently understanding that this wonderful thing called creativity is a gift worth waiting for, a gift worth giving up comfort to stand there, all alone in the dark.

Has fear replaced purpose?

Can fear replace purpose? Is it possible that in place of purpose, many are living in a perpetual state of fear, going about their daily tasks with the driving force behind all action being fear? Do they smile out of fear and love out of fear?

Am I being driven by fear? Is fear driving me to write this right now? Am I afraid that if I don't write regularly I will lose whatever gains I've made, that my skill will begin to deteriorate and that my readers will begin to lose interest? Am I afraid if I don't start writing right now that I will lose these thoughts I want to share?

What about all these people in their cars, driving here and there. Are they going places because they're afraid of something? Are they afraid of being scolded at work, or of being fired, or of not having enough money, or missing the due date on their bills, or running out of gas, or not having a refrigerator full of food in case the grocery stores are overrun and they're trapped in a hurricane with no means of survival?

Are they afraid of not getting to their next appointment on time, or running out of fuel for their generator in case they lose electricity and can't watch TV to see what else they should be afraid of?

Do they put on jackets because they're afraid to get wet, adorn unique layers of clothing because they're afraid to look like everybody else, lock their cars and lock their houses because they're afraid of being taken advantage of? Do they conform in life because they're afraid to stand out, to break the patterns, and to be different?

For most of my life I've marveled at the flow of automobile traffic, a seemingly endless stream of people going somewhere, headed toward a destination whose description was only limited by my imagination. But where were all these people really going? What was it that instigated them to take action? What pushed them to get in their car, choose a destination, and then do something about getting there?

What was their purpose?

I've tried to imagine all the different scenarios, to find a common thing that seemed to describe all the movement in a modern society. I looked at love as the primary motivator, but tossed that out when I saw hate, jealousy, anger, and selfishness far more prevalent than kindness, compassion, honesty, and generosity. I looked at survival, but I tossed that out too when I realized how overly abundant people were already living.

In fact, I looked at as many positive reasons as I could find, but nothing added up.

If our motivation and inspiration was something positive — if it was something that made us feel good — then why were we doing everything with such reluctance? Why were we so reactionary, so easy to anger, and so quick to blame?

I remember thinking a few years ago, while sitting in traffic on the way home from a 10-hour day at the office, if my motivations for living were positive, why was I doing things on a day-to-day basis that made me feel negative? Why was I wishing I was somewhere else? Why were my choices reflecting a fear of the future? Why was I acting and reacting to fears instead of doing things that moved me towards happiness and freedom?

If societies were motivated by positive goals and people were motivated by positive purposes, then why was everybody under so much stress? Why were societies and people so slow to change? Why were those in power more interested in correcting accusations made towards themselves than debating real issues that affected the people they've chosen to serve?

If you throw fear into the mix, suddenly everything makes sense.

We are so afraid. We're terrified of breaking rules, suspicious of change, and paranoid of the unexpected. We seek direction in authority and give our power to the status quo, no matter how dangerous and untrustworthy that status quo may be.

And it's killing us. It's killing us because it's holding us back. It's killing us because it's preventing us from growing and embracing our full potential. It's killing us because we're being suffocated by fear and choked off from the from the flow of life.

Fear has a purpose, but its purpose has no place in our motivation for living.

Edit: Moments after finalizing this journal entry, I came across a project called Humans of New York and I began to wonder if maybe we ultimately find whatever it is we're truly looking for, whether that be love or fear. But then I realized what each of the photos and stories in that project captured: presence. If we live in the moment, we cannot live in fear.

How I've Been Sweating the Little Things

I tell myself that I don’t sweat the little things, that I’m really good at letting things go, but if I’m frank with myself and I take a hard look at the evidence, it’s clear that I do hold on to lots of little things. Many small, rather insignificant things that prevent me from growing and moving forward.

I came across a column article called How We Get Better, written by Steven Pressfield. Steven tells the story of his friend Paul who recently had a writing breakthrough and accidentally discovered his writing voice.

Steven explains how we get better by sharing the observations he made of his friend’s breakthrough. The observation that I found most interesting was number four: “This new voice was not the ‘real’ Paul; it was the artistic Paul.”

When I read any of my old writing, especially the writing that I feel is good, it never sounds like me. It’s as if there was someone else writing it. Was it because I was writing with my artistic voice and not my normal voice (i.e., the voice that I identify with)?

And if there was an artistic voice within me, what was holding it back when I wanted to write? Where was the resistance coming from?

Intrigued, I started scanning my collection of old unpublished drafts. I don’t know why I started there, but intuitively something told me that’s where I should go next, so I listened.

Within a few seconds I came across something that I had written nearly two years ago about not sweating the little things. The draft included two incomplete stories of events that caused me to start writing the draft.

While the stories were incomplete, I immediately remembered the events in great detail and recalled the importance and impact of their lessons.

In both events I had run into situations that seemed impassable. There seemed to be no possible resolution that did not come with repercussions.

But instead of stressing out, worrying, and taking premature action, I took a deep breath and released the situation to the universe.

Almost immediately the situation changed in ways that I never thought possible and both problems were resolved, like a magical missing piece to a jigsaw puzzle falling into a place that I didn’t know existed.

As I read this old draft and recalled the story and the lessons I learned, I realized that the resistance I most often experience actually comes from getting in the way of the natural flow of things.

The problem isn’t that I’m incapable of making more money, producing better writing, improving my social skills, or learning how to cook. It’s that I’m holding myself back from progressing forward by spending valuable time sweating the little things.

When I’m trying to learn how to cook, for example, I hold myself back by giving credence to thoughts of insufficiency.

Instead of looking up recipes online, buying ingredients, and then experimenting, I choose to worry about making something that won’t taste good, or wasting ingredients, or that my being too analytical isn’t compatible with cooking.

(In the past few weeks I’ve overcome a lot of this resistance and discovered that I love cooking, but more on that another time.)

When I’m trying to write, I resist forward progress by holding myself back by giving attention to needless thoughts.

“What if people don’t understand what I’m trying to say? What if I don’t know what I’m trying to say? What if my point is missed and my writing is criticized? What if I do more harm than good in my haste to publish?”

These thoughts, these unrelenting doubts and worries and questions, never seem to let up. They appear to be waiting for one thing and one thing only: for me to give up.

I’m realizing that the key isn’t to challenge these things that present resistance but instead to ignore them, like a raging river ignoring a large rock and flowing around it.

We get better by not sweating the little things but by letting them go and moving on to the next step with fearless bravado. It’s only when we try to take on the whole world, to shoulder responsibility for getting every single thing perfect, that we hold ourselves back from getting better.

The Other Side of Discomfort

I spent this past weekend learning a new language. Not a spoken language, but a programming language called Python. It was incredibly rewarding and it’s hard to believe that I almost paid someone to take that opportunity away.

A few weeks ago I came across a traveling programmer who had written some software to show a map of his travels on an embedded Google Map. He included a drop-down that allowed the selection of different maps, each map representing a different period of travel in his life. 

After being thoroughly impressed—and perhaps a little bit jealous—by his extensive travels and the simplicity by which he displayed all this data, I began to envision how I could do something similar on my own website.

His software was fairly straightforward: It looked at the contents of several Google Earth KML files, parsed the map data inside them, and then displayed that data on an embeddable Google Map.

Straightforward? Perhaps. But I didn’t even know what KML files were, let alone how to use Google Earth. The last time I played around with Google Earth was years ago. I had no idea how to create maps with it.

But I wasn’t going to let that stop me. 

I foresee myself traveling for years to come and I’ve been looking for a good way to track and display my travels for awhile now. I’m currently using the TravelMap plugin on my map page, but it has limited features and doesn’t scale for my nomadic lifestyle. This Google Earth solution seemed elegant, practical, and scalable.

So I downloaded Google Earth and learned how to create lines and points. I watched tutorial videos on YouTube and read documentation. I exported one of the test maps to a KML file and opened it in a text editor to learn about its format. 

I discovered that KML files were simply XML files (very similar to HTML). The locations of the points that I added in Google Earth were identified using its GPS coordinates; the lines that I drew between two points were represented by a series of coordinates: start-coordinates, end-coordinates, start-coordinates, end-coordinates, and so on.

With my newly acquired knowledge I set out building several Google Earth maps, each representing all my travels for the past two years, starting with my trip to India in 2010 and ending with my present location in Australia in 2012. 

It was around this point where I began to think about what the process of updating my current location with this system would look like on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis. 

I realized it would require opening Google Earth on my computer, editing the map with my new travels and adding new points and new lines, then exporting the file to KML and uploading it to the web server.

That seemed like a lot of work, especially when I was already recording my travels to some degree using geotagging on social networks like Twitter and Foursquare. 

I’m very suspicious of repetitive things when it comes to my time. (It all started when I calculated how much of my life each year was being spent simply looking at various notifications on my computer: 15 hours! I no longer use notifications for anything.) If I’m already recording my location online, why should I spend time recording it again in Google Earth?

How could I automatically update the Google Earth KML file with my latest location without spending any additional time?

After a bit of research, I discovered that Foursquare provides a KML feed for all my check-in data. So, I just needed to create a program that would automate copying the data from one KML file to the other and then updating the path line to show that I traveled from the old check-in to the new check-in.

With my limited knowledge of programming languages, I knew that Python was the best language for this job. The problem was, I knew practically nothing about Python. I was a PHP programmer and I knew that solving this problem with PHP would be both messy and time-consuming.

At this point I’d already spent a lot of time learning about KML files and creating maps in Google Earth. The thought of learning a whole new programming language just to get a travel map on my site was pushing the limits of what I expected to invest in this project in terms of time.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just hire someone else to do this final part? 

Never before had I hired someone to write a program for me, but for the first time I found myself taking the thought seriously. Was I getting lazy? Was this laziness the result of being able to afford to hire someone?

I posted the job on Elance with a maximum budget of $250— that’s what this program was worth to me. Within a few hours I began receiving bids, but with each bid I felt myself more and more disinterested with this idea.

Why was I paying someone to take away my opportunity to learn and grow? 

That’s when I realized something important: It wasn’t that I was being lazy. It’s that I wanted to pay someone to take away the discomfort of learning and growing. 

That one realization changed my whole thinking and instead of succumbing to the discomfort of learning something new, I decided to push into the discomfort and find out what’s on the other side. 

On Friday night I found a free Python tutorial online and began learning. I started with the very basics and ignored what I already knew about programming. I completed every exercise, from the very basic to the more advanced.

At first it was repetitive and boring, but as the hours passed I found myself muttering over and over, “that’s interesting”, every time I learned a new concept or understood how something worked.

This learning and exploration became so fun that I spent nearly the entire weekend indoors, peeling myself away from the computer only to eat, fulfill my running commitment, and watch the sunset.

By Sunday morning I began exploring beyond the Python tutorial and started searching the Internet for examples of using Python to handle XML files. There were very few examples specific to KML files and I couldn’t find anything that did what I wanted, but I continued experimenting.

By that evening I had finished a 248-line program in Python that did exactly what I wanted. It’s certainly not the prettiest code but the sense of empowerment and elation that I experienced upon finishing it was worth far more than $250.

The lesson? When it comes to spending time or spending money, always spend the time if you’ll learn something that will save you both money and time in the long-run. 

And more importantly, when it comes to learning new things, don’t pay someone to take away the discomfort for you: lean into that discomfort. 

On the other side of that discomfort exists a world where you live with more knowledge and understanding than the present version of yourself. It may be hard to imagine that world right now, but push through the discomfort and you’ll get there.

I haven’t finished integrating the new travel map into my site, but here’s a working sneak peak of the Journey Map.

Notes: You are part of the discussion

The following was written by Manuel Loigeret and I'm republishing it here with his permission.

I'm not awesome at social events but I am getting better. If you are like me, you think that you might not be interesting and people might find you boring. Imagine what the other person thinks: well this guy looks like a proud jerk who is too snob to be interested in me. That's probably not true and you feel the complete opposite but this is the signal you are sending. The only remedy is to go talk to people and let them know that it is ok to come talk to you. (I know: I did reinvent the wheel here) It can be awkward but it will be ok in the end. I promise you.

At some point I closed the comments on every new blog post I published. Because I wanted people to link to my posts if they wanted to contribute to the discussion. Nobody did. The real reason was that I was scared that someone criticized what I wrote, but I hid it behind a supposedly clever idea. The message I sent was: you are too stupid to be part of the conversation. I also cancelled my facebook account because I was scared of people seeing me change and they might have made fun of me. Ridiculous. Seriously it was snob and stupid. Like going to a party and not talking to anyone.

If you are online (on facebook, on a blog, on flickr or wherever), don't try to limit your access to people. Don't hide behind smart ideas of what is right and serious. Admit it, you are online for attention, so let the doors open.

Don't be a snob, you are already part of the discussion.

I think there are so many important lessons to be learned from this one post, especially with regard to not limiting access to people online and recognizing that our perspective isn't the only perspective we need to consider.

Notes: Book Highlights from the Impossible Manifesto

My highlights from Joel Runyon's Impossible Manifesto:

Some time between our teenage years and adulthood, people strip away the possibilities from us. We're told what we can do and what we can't do. What's possible and what's not.

We're made to believe what we should do and what's simply irresponsible. Somewhere along the line, we forget that we control a lot of things.

It's your life. You get to decide what happens. There are a million different influences around you every day trying to get you to buy into what you "should" do, but ultimately you really can do whatever you want.

You get to write your story.

***

Are you telling a good story with your life? The emphasis is on the word "good", because whether you like it or not, you're telling a story. No matter what you do, with each decision you make, you're writing your story every day.

Whether your story is an adventure-filled page-turner or more boring than a 50-year-old-textbook is up to you. But, you get to decide.

***

When you want something, make sure you want something worthwhile.

Because eventually you are going to have to fight for it.

And it better be worth it.

***

Wanting to live vicariously through others takes relatively little effort. You can sit back and watch TV or scan the Internet, reading about people doing interesting things with the click of a button. But, because there's little effort involved, there's little conflict.

There's also little reward and little meaning.

The more worthwhile the cause, the more Impossible it tends to be. The more Impossible something tends to be, the more conflict the character invites in. But the more conflict the character invites in, the larger the story arc becomes and the more potential it has to suck you in because it's so compelling.

***

Living a good story is an amazing reward by itself.

Even if nobody knows what you're doing, you're enriching your life by immersing it in a story. Instead of having arbitrary goals and accomplishments, by living a great story, you create narrative for them. A context. A purpose.

Instead of just crossing stuff off a list, you're experiencing a story. You're living an adventure. One that's worth writing about.

One that's definitely worth living.

***

The really great stories are about pushing the limits and seeing what is possible. Not stopping ahead of time because the challenges seem too great, but rather pushing forward exactly BECAUSE they seem so daunting. You see a massive conflict ahead, but realize that victory is just going to be that that much sweeter.

***

When you start to challenge what's Impossible you begin to realize a whole new world of things that aren't actually Impossible. They only represent the limitations of other people's imaginations.

Once you've shot through the limits that are placed on you by other people, you begin to realize that there are still things beyond your limits that now seem within reach. So you keep going and going and keep discovering new so-called "Impossible things" that are now somehow doable.

Every time you challenge the Impossible, you gain a new understanding of what is actually possible.

You realize how small a world you had created for yourself with your own self-imposed limitations in the past. And how big of a future is possible. Pretty soon, even the most ridiculous things in the world don't seem out of reach if you really want to achieve them.

***

It's hard to imagine owning your own business when you're stuck working at UPS getting chased by dogs in the snow. It's hard to imagine running a marathon when you can barely jog a mile without heaving up a lung. It's hard to imagine traveling the world when you haven't even been out of the state.

You have to gain perspective.

***

It's hard to make huge jumps sometimes and imagine yourself in a completely different world living a completely different life than you are now. But that's because of your perspective. Your current perspective colors your subjective version of reality.

Push the boundaries of Impossible and you'll see that it expands. Keep pushing and you'll see that your subjective version or what's possible isn't as accurate as you think it is. The boundaries of the Impossible are constantly expanding. So keep pushing them.

***

Do something. I said this earlier but it bears repeating. The easiest way to confuse the feelings of accomplishment with the feelings of inspiration is to forget what accomplishment feels like. If you've accomplished something recently and remember what it feels like, the lure of watching someone else do something isn't nearly as attractive.

***

No one will live your life story for you. No one will make your life one worth reading about for you. No one will challenge what's possible with your life for you.

No one that is...except for you.

***

Chances are, you probably already know what you need to do. That thing you have in the back of your mind. That thing that gets you excited about life. That thing that keeps you up at night, but you're scared to try because everything might fall apart. That's the thing you need to do most.

***

The need for courage

The great myth of fear is that you overcome it. Fear isn't a barrier and it isn't something that you overcome. It's simply a constant.

You don't learn to get over fear. You learn to coexist with it and press on anyways, in the midst of it's presence.

That's why you need courage.

Courage allows you to look fear dead in the eye and tell fear to suck it.

People who do great things don't have an absence of fear. They have an abundance of courage, which allows them to do the Impossible, in spite of the fact that they're scared out of their mind.

***

It isn't all about you. Lots of people have lived great stories, but the ones that have the most impact are the ones where the authors look back to see how they can help other people tell great stories as well.

You can download the full manifesto for free over here: Impossible Manifesto.

Notes: Book Highlights from The Flinch

The Flinch by Julien Smith is a short, but great read (it's available as free download; you'll need a Kindle reader, which you can also download for free).

"The idea is simple: our flinch mechanism can save our life. Our flinch instinct short circuits the conscious mind and allows us to pull back and avoid danger faster than we can even imagine it's there. But what if danger is exactly what we need?"

It's a fascinating concept, one that I can definitely identify with. As I note in one of the highlights below, overcoming the instinctive desire to finch is what allowed me to create and publish my first ebook. The flinch is something I'm consciously learning to lean into more often.

(As always, the numbers at the end of each highlight indicate the location in the Kindle book.)

If you got injured, you were done. No modern medicine, so each encounter meant blood loss, infection, or death. You can't relate to this. Your lifespan is double that. Science and technology mean you can survive almost anything. It may be expensive to do so, but that's still a significant improvement over death from an infected cut. (112)

Let's make a list of the fears you were born with: falling; abandonment; loud noises.... Yeah, that's about it. You were born with these fears because you need them to survive. These fears kept you safe. The rest are just ghost stories that the flinch has taken over. They're signposts. Look for them. They point the way toward barriers you need to pass, to doors you need to open. (134)

the lessons you learn best are those you get burned by. Without the scar, there's no evidence or strong memory. (155)

Maybe, when you were a kid, your parents didn't want you to get dirty, or you didn't like heights. Avoiding dirt or heights built a pattern of pain avoidance, which added to the habit of flinching. Your parents' fears became your fears, their lives became your life. They flinched for some things, so you began to do the same. But behind every undiscovered flinch is a lesson. If you do everything your parents' way, you'll never discover the truth. You'll never discover the edge. You'll never get the lessons you need. (159)

Forget secondhand learning. It leaves no scars. It doesn't provide the basic understanding that sits in the body as well as in the brain. There's no trace of its passing. It might as well have been a dream. (166)

Firsthand knowledge, however, is visceral, painful, and necessary. It uses the conscious and the unconscious to process the lesson, and it uses all your senses. When you fall down, your whole motor system is involved. You can't learn this from books. It just doesn't work, because you didn't really fall. You need to feel it in your gut—and on your scraped hands and shins—for the lesson to take effect. But if you're surrounded by padding, scar-free learning is all you have left. It defines who you are. It limits you, but those limits aren't actually yours—they're the limits of the men and women who came before you. But other people's limits will no longer do. (168)

You can't settle for reaching other people's limits. You have to reach yours. If you don't test yourself, you don't actually grow to your own limits. For you to map out this new world, you need to test it, and test what you're capable of inside it. You need to make mistakes, resist the flinch, and feel the lessons that come with this process. Kids naturally begin this way. It's why their world is always growing. They find hurdles, jump them, and get stronger. When they see they made it, they move on to bigger hurdles. If they fall down, they try again later. It's a basic cycle. It's how kids figure out they can eventually change the world, found a startup, or build a house—by experimenting, learning, suffering, and growing. It's a process. But for that growth to continue, they need to avoid listening too closely to what they're told. They need to stay open-minded. (175)

The anxiety of the flinch is almost always worse than the pain itself. You've forgotten that. You need to learn it again. You need more scars. You need to live. (190)

Ask yourself this: would your childhood self be proud of you, or embarrassed? (197)

no one has a problem with the first mile of a journey. Even an infant could do fine for a while. But it isn't the start that matters. It's the finish line. (213)

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." (247)

getting lost is not fatal. Almost every time, it will make your world bigger. You can look at the edges of your map, the places you were unsure about. Old explorers even had a phrase for it: "Here be dragons." (258)

You need find your dragons, look them in the eye, and destroy them. (263)

Samurai and their modern counterpart, kendo practitioners, say that fights are won internally, even before the killing blow is landed. They face an internal struggle before they ever face the enemy. So will you. Stop shying away from it. (273)

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT, PART 2 You need more training. Let's take this further. Ready? Go to the kitchen and grab a mug you don't like. Mug in hand, go to a place in your house with a hard floor. Hold the mug in front of you, in your outstretched hand. Say goodbye to it. Now, drop the cup. Whatever rationalization you're using right now is a weak spot for you. Flag it. You'll see it again and again. Drop the damn cup. Did you do it? If so, you'll notice one thing: breaking your programming requires a single moment of strength. Now, clean up the mess. That wasn't so bad, was it? If this was too easy, because a cup is simple to replace, try something harder, like your Blackberry. The strength you gain by letting go is more important than any object you own. (310)

You're only as strong as your weakest moments. Learn to reinforce those weak spots before they cut you down. (337)

Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it's really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy. (340)

Krishnamurti, a great Indian sage, once said: "You can take a piece of wood that you brought back from your garden, and each day present it with a flower. At the end of a month you will adore it, and the idea of not giving it an offering will be a sin." In other words, everything that you are used to, once done long enough, starts to seem natural, even though it might not be. (343)

The flinch doesn't want you to change. Its agenda is to keep you in status quo. It believes your identity is what's kept you alive and stable, and that settling is better than dead. But it's a trap, because almost none of the risks modern man takes are fatal at all. (346)

You can change what you want about yourself at any time. (350)

If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it's the only way. (353)

The first step is to stop seeing everything as a threat. You can't will this to happen—it requires wider exposure. If you've been punched in the face, you won't worry as much about a mugger, for example. If you face the flinch in meditation, you don't worry about a long line at the bank. Build your base of confidence by having a vaster set of experiences to call upon, and you'll realize you can handle more than you used to. Doing the uncomfortable is key. It widens your circle of comfort. (384)

Law enforcement officers, professional fighters, and members of the military—all of them learn systems that leverage the flinch. They use it to react faster than their opponents even realize. Instead of flinching back, they flinch forward—toward their opponent, and toward the threat. When you flinch forward, you're using the speed of your instincts, but you don't back off. Instead, you move forward so fast—without thinking—that your opponent can't react. You use your upraised hands as weapons instead of shields. You use your fear to gain an advantage. (395)

Raam's Note: This is exactly what happened when I wrote my first ebook, Small Ways to Make a Big Difference. Creating that book felt so important that I leaned into the doubt and procrastination that I knew was awaiting me. I worked obsessively for three weeks until it was done.

Train yourself to flinch forward, and your world changes radically. You respond to challenges by pushing ahead instead of shrinking back. You become bigger instead of smaller; you're more stable and more confident. Your world becomes a series of obstacles to overcome, instead of attacks you have to defend yourself from. (401)

Don't wait until you can talk yourself out of it—you're already too good at that. Instead, act before your self-talk overpowers you. Get yourself into a position where you can no longer back out. Your old self would back away here—instead, burn your bridge so you can no longer retreat. Flinch-breaking is all about eliminating the pointless, cowardly, and habitual, and choosing the useful instead. Useful cannot be discovered in the abstract. It has to actually happen. (474)

From the outside looking in, everyone looks like a conformist. But really, no one is; they're just waiting for another person to speak up. The question is, why isn't it you? Do you feel like you'll be judged, or ostracized? Do you think you'll be ignored and humiliated? Do you feel impotent? The truth is likely quite different. Everyone wants progress but very few want to lead. So a whole group waits for the first hand to go up before their hands go up, too. Suddenly, a vote goes from a unanimous NO to a unanimous YES. All it took was one voice of dissent—and suddenly, everything changed. The secret to overcoming the flinch is that everyone wants you to succeed. People are looking for proof that you can be amazing so that they can be amazing, too. The Web is so great because you can see others being truly themselves, and succeeding at it. This diminishes the power of the consensus. The pressure diminishes. You can be who you like. Getting in the ring becomes easier because you have supporters. So if you see no one like you, no one who agrees, don't worry. There are actually hundreds of people like you, and they're waiting for a leader. That person is you. Stop flinching. Speak up. (505)

Turn your mobile phone off for a few hours each day. Having nothing to do while you're waiting for a bus can be boring, but it's only when you're bored that the scary thoughts come to the surface. Use a dumb phone on the weekends to prevent yourself from checking your messages. (555)

Imagine that you have to leave a legacy, and everyone in the world will see the work you've done. Volunteer. Create something that lasts and that can exist outside of you, something that makes people wonder and gasp. Build a support structure for others. Devote some of your time or money to it. (563)

Leaning into the Flinch

What's the difference between the people who are remembered by history and those who make up the silent majority who simply live and die? 

I don't believe history remembers people by chance. I don't believe some people are born with better ideas or more capable skills or that it requires a unique set of circumstances to do great things.

Many of us -- perhaps most of us -- have incredible ideas, world-changing visions for how things could be better. We think many of the same thoughts that memorable people throughout history have thought. 

So why aren't we doing anything? Why are we just living out our lives, caught up in the daily grind?

I think the answer lies in our reluctance to believe in ourselves and face our self-doubt. We see the possibility in our idea and we get scared that it just might work. As Julien Smith calls it, we flinch. We see the possibility and then pull back from going any further.

I read Julien's new ebook today (it's short and free [edit: it's not free anymore, but you can easily find it for free by Googling 'the flinch']; a great read) and there were lots of things about his idea that rang true for me. For example, in one part of the book he talks about leaning into the flinch and allowing that instinctive desire to retract to point us in the direction we should push forward.

The last time I clearly remember leaning into what I would've normally pulled back from was when I wrote my first ebook, Small Ways to Make a Big Difference

The idea for the project came suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere. I was sitting at my laptop in the kitchen of my hosts house, only a few days after arriving in Kathmandu, Nepal. 

It certainly wasn't the first time I'd had a spontaneous idea for an ebook, but what followed the idea this time was much different. Instead of over-thinking and considering all the reasons I shouldn't do it, I immediately sent an email to 60 people inviting them to participate in the project.

That one action, that leaning into what I normally would've pulled back from, essentially opened the door to the completion of that project. It took three weeks of obsessively working on it every single day, but there wasn't a single moment in that entire three weeks where I thought of quitting. I kept leaning into the flinch until I was done.

I think the people who are remembered by history are the ones who don't stop pushing. They see something, or have an idea, and instead of doubting themselves or the possibilities, they lean into them. 

Despite the entire world pushing the status quo onto them and doubting the usefulness of their rebellious nature, these few people push back. And they don't stop pushing. Ever.

Failure doesn't make them flinch because they're leaning into failure. They're walking in the direction they expect to fail while holding onto a belief that what lies ahead is something worth it. And they're usually right. What lies on the other side of failure is usually what helps them change the world.

Breaking Barriers to Self-Expression

It's easy to write about what should be done. It's easy to see a problem, a deficiency, and then describe an action or series of actions to change it.

When change is viewed externally, it seems easy. Our brain has no problem dissecting what's wrong and coming up with possible solutions. What's a bit more challenging is taking those thoughts and actually turning them into actions.

Action takes something special. It takes commitment. Action requires accepting that something is important enough to expend energy doing it.

Much of my writing is a reflection of what's on my mind. The words I'm typing right now are literally recording bits of what's going on in my head. Sometimes what's going on is clear and articulation comes easy. Right now I'm "in the flow", typing these words with only the effort required to maintain grammar and spelling.

I started this Journal entry spontaneously. It started as a thought, "I want to write", and then, being that I had nothing else pressing to do, I began to write. But when I started thinking about what I was doing (as I did towards the end of the previous paragraph), I found myself pausing. I immediately had trouble articulating my thoughts.

It seems that's a problem with most "things we want to get done but don't". They come to our mind as clear as day but then we start thinking about them. We end up destroying our original thought with buckets of analysis and self-doubt.

"Is someone going to think this is stupid? Should I step back and think about this a bit? What if I'm making a huge mistake?"

Instead of following our intuition, we follow our self-ridicule. Instead of allowing the result of action to determine whether we should continue, we suffocate the motivation to act before it's even born.

I do this all the time.

A few days ago I wrote a follow up essay, Say More, to the essay I published the week before, Say Less. I found it interesting that after writing Say Less, I was using that essay as an excuse for not writing more. 

That's when I realized how important it is to say more. I can hide behind being succinct forever, but then I'll be sharing very little. If I feel that I have so much to share (and I do feel that way), then I should make every effort to share more.

It's in my nature to say less. As a child, I was taught the value of listening. I would stay quiet for hours at a time, doing nothing but listening. As I grew older, I continued listening. My dad often repeated a quote that stayed with me: "A wise man thinks first and then speaks. A foolish man speaks first and then thinks."

That quote really resonated with me even at an early age. It made a lot of sense. If you speak first and then think, it's too late to decide not to say anything. But if you think first, then you'll always have the option of choosing whether to speak.

Ando Perez recently shared a quote with me by Jean Jacques Rousseau that reminded me of my dad's quote and inspired me to see it from a different angle: "People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little."

I certainly wouldn't claim that I "know much", but I do feel that I don't say enough. I hold inside too much of what I feel is important. I need to learn to say more. To speak up. To share what's inside.

When I reflected on why I don't say more, I discovered self-imposed barriers to my expression, barriers that I had created, perhaps long ago, to ensure that I wasn't too wordy or needlessly verbose.

Those barriers served an important purpose and I wasn't ready to rip them down. 

My public writing is usually the result of careful consideration. For the past two years I've maintained a relentless desire to abandon "the way blogging should be done" and replace it with something that felt more true to my heart.

Readers connected with this form of writing and my work felt more real than ever. It felt more like something that I would actually want to read.

But something was beginning to feel stale. More and more things felt trapped inside. I felt caged by my own quality barriers and unable to express and share things that I felt would be really useful to others.

So the idea for this Journal was born. I would create a place to express myself, a Journal in which I could write without barriers (or at least very few barriers) and share what was happening inside.

But, just as it's easy to write about what should be done, it was easy to create this space to write. The actual action of writing here, of taking down those internal barriers and allowing my thoughts to materialize, to become tangible pieces of writing, has been incredibly challenging.

I did not realize just how difficult this process would be until I started writing. It has required an entire rewrite in the way that I think about what I'm sharing. 

Before the Journal, I let everything percolate in my mind. I gave myself as much time as I needed to flesh out an idea to the point where it felt, in my head, polished and easily sharable.

Now, I needed to share that percolation process. I needed to find a way to express my thoughts and ideas before they felt polished.

Perhaps if I had already been keeping a personal Journal, this transition would've been easier. 

There were a few years during my early teens in which I kept a Journal on my computer. I wrote thousands and thousand of pages in a simple text file, sharing my deepest thoughts and observations, and my most private ruminations.

Then someone close to me, someone I trusted, violated that trust and read my Journal without permission. They took things that I wrote out of context and accused me of thinking thoughts that I had not really thought.

It was traumatizing, perhaps more so than I realized.

I deleted the entire journal, several years worth, and promised myself that I would never record such deep thoughts on any medium that a person could access. My mind was the only safe harbor now.

And so my mind became the storehouse for what would've gone in a journal. What I did share verbally and through writing became more refined and more carefully considered.

When I began attempting to write for this Journal, those barriers became apparent. The difficulty of expressing my deepest thoughts without judging myself or holding back felt incredibly difficult and challenging.

This Journal entry is probably the closest I've come in the past 10 years to actually recording my thoughts unedited. I haven't stopped writing since I started the beginning of this Journal and I haven't gone back to edit or reread anything as I normally would.

When I wrote the 'Say More' essay, I was talking to myself. I was telling myself that it's time to stop holding back. 

For more than ten years now I've learned how to hold back. For more than ten years the voice inside has been silenced and moderated by fear. It's time for me to leap past that plateau and move forward.

I'm going to do an experiment for the next 10 days in attempt to cultivate this unedited side of myself.

Every day until January 1st, 2012, I'm going to write at least one paragraph in this Journal. Perhaps some of those paragraphs will turn into longer entries, but no matter what I'm going to commit to writing and sharing at least one paragraph each day. (To minimize the number of emails you receive, I will combine the entries into one email sent out on the 24th, 28th, and 31st.)

Do you hold back? Do you unnecessarily censor yourself? Is there something inside that would benefit others if you shared it? Do you ever feel like you should speak up, but don't?

Notes: Going through imaginary walls

Manuel Loigeret writes about going through imaginary walls and why we need to stop putting people on a pedestal. He uses many examples from his own life -- learning computer programming, learning English, moving to Canada -- to demonstrate why we need to go through the walls we perceive:

There was some fear, that’s for sure, but I don’t think this is the core of the problem. The real constraint was other people. Those who made it and told me it was extremely difficult and nearly impossible. The coders who made me believe that their code was cryptic. Those who told me I could never stand the cold winters of Canada. The teachers who told me I would never be good at speaking/writing in English. Those who told me yoga was only for girls. Those who told me you can only evolve in your career by working from 9 to 5, etc... All these people building imaginary walls to cover their (lack of) knowledge so they could stay in their fortified ivory towers.