Focus

There are 58 posts tagged Focus (this is page 2 of 3).

Notes: Own Your Idea

Julien Smith writes about the importance of figuring out your message, your core idea, the thing that your very existence stands for. I've been thinking about this a lot lately and Julien's question towards the end of this highlight is fantastic; when I think about his question I feel like I can almost put my finger on my core message.

I've spent a lot of time around authors over the past little while and I've started to figure out that almost all of them have one primary thing to say, a single idea that they are really about. Seth Godin could be "be remarkable," applied to multiple different formats. Tim Ferriss: "most effort is wasted– do what matters." Pema Chodron: "Drop the storyline." I could do this all day.

Here's the thing: authors have to write down their ideas and express them differently. It's their job and they have to work at it, so they get many ideas in their head and stick with those that matter to them (or sometimes those that sell– sigh). Point being, even non-authors need to figure this one thing out. But most never think about it. They plod along without much direction or grand goal at all– and if it is, it's often rather selfish.

Again, I include myself in this.

Here is my suggestion: If you had a TED talk, or some other grand idea, how would you present it? Think about it. This is your one chance. How would you use it?

Thom Chambers wrote something along these same lines. I keep this close and re-read every few days:

It’s tempting to want to break new ground each time you publish a piece of writing. To dazzle. Far more valuable in the long run, though, is when you take an idea and run with it. Show us around it. Show us how it works in action, how it affects us. Own your idea and you’ll be remembered for it.

Notes: Owning Yourself and Stripping Away False Identity

In an article featured in Your Money, Your Life, Adam King writes about how after failing several times to make a living online, he discovered his real problem: he wasn't owning anything of himself.

The concept he shares towards the end, that of uncovering layers of false identity through testing our assumptions, ideas, and beliefs, is incredibly powerful and it's something I intend to actively practice.

I met a successful entrepreneur for brunch in Chicago and she proceeded to fillet the problem wide open for me. "You're not owning anything of yourself," she said. "Own your words, own your vision, own your life."

It didn't take long after that talk for me to uncover the root of all the exhaustion, overwork, stress, and physical breakdown over the past ten years. Simply put, I was pursuing pre-conceived visions of an ideal lifestyle.

Each of my offline businesses was aimed at producing particular experiences tied to a lifestyle vision that I had adopted from other people or from the expectation of the crowd associated with that type of business. The same thing happened when I moved things online. I was pursuing what I was told was the ideal internet lifestyle but, again, it was someone else's ideal rather than my own.

Chasing lifestyles is exhausting because it drains your knowledge, abilities, emotions, and time into bottomless pits. There's no way to achieve the ideal lifestyle of someone else without massive sacrifice of your own truth and happiness.

It's taken time to remove the layers of what I thought I was supposed to pursue so that I can tap into the raw and powerful realizations of what I've actually wanted all along.

One of those layers is identity. In the past, everything I pursued in business and in life was all tied to what is assumed I should obtain due to that identity. If I eliminate the idea of being a writer, artist, designer, or whatever I might call myself, and just focus on mastering that craft, then I grant myself the freedom to achieve the lifestyle I desire outside of the realms of identity and in spite of the social expectations that come from that particular genre or crowd.

It's difficult, being honest with myself about my desired lifestyle. Guilt was a huge factor in holding myself hostage to the work and life I thought I was supposed to have. But the reality was, adhering to that guilt was keeping me from bigger and better things.

In reconstructing my own vision for my ideal lifestyle, I've been learning about the path of people like Derek Sivers, Richard Branson, and even Abraham Lincoln. Doing this has revealed their paths have piles and piles of failed businesses, elections, pursuits, ideas, and dreams behind them.

But in the end, it's those failures that were necessary for success. Each one was another layer of false identity being stripped away to reveal their core truth.

And that's really the key to stopping the pursuit of other people's lifestyles. Be willing to test each idea and inspiration as far as it needs to go in order to learn what you need to learn. Then repeat, often and always. This will quickly peel away the superficial that's hiding the truth about where you want to go and what you want to do.

The Wandering Mind and the Wild Horse

What's important? I've been asking myself that a lot lately. What is important to me and what am I doing with it? If being fully invested in present is important to me, where am I right now?

These questions weigh heavily on my mind after an unusually varied week, full of everything from writing, to answering an a high volume of emails, to strolling and running through a state forest, to completing freelance web development projects, to playing with my nephew and helping my brother-in-law fix home wiring issues (and getting electrocuted in the process; there's no room for pride in science).

The question of importance is inevitable when the demand on our attention (whether from others or from ourselves) exceeds what is available to us. But there really are no excuses to misdirected focus. As I wrote in my latest essay, our system of keeping time doesn't determine when we act; we determine when we act.

The concept of time is a subject I could talk about for hours. I could run circles around what it is and what it isn't, why it matters and why it doesn't. But one fact remains: I will die. 

This physical body will eventually break down and stop functioning; it will eventually cease to act as a vehicle for life. My true self may be timeless and limitless, but this physical body definitely has limitations; its lifespan is restricted by the framework we call time.

How we spend our time and energy within those limitations is influenced by what is, or what isn't, important to us. We can take a reactionary approach to life and simply spend our time doing whatever calls our attention, or we can take a proactive approach and decide where that energy will be focused.

In reflecting on this for the past two weeks, I've found myself spending less time paying attention to my phone; less time checking and answering emails; less time on social media; less time worrying about how to respond to this person or that person; less time wondering what's next or where I should focus my energy tomorrow; less time reading; less time writing. 

I find myself spending less time and conserving more.

Things that are not present don't receive as much attention because that attention is being redirected here, where I can be present. Instead of volunteering my time and attention to long elaborate email responses, never-ending to-do lists, phone calls, people, projects, and goals, I find myself reserving that precious commodity for here, right now.

I find myself holding depth in conversation as something worthy of great respect, an outpouring of energy that cannot simply be dumped into every email, comment, and conversation, but rather something that is reserved for special occasions where some passionate voice inside becomes inflamed and pushes that pent up reservoir over the edge.

A few days ago I began my morning playing with my nephew. When I'm visiting my parents I usually play for a minute or two before rushing off to start working on my laptop, catching up with emails, figuring out what project I need to complete for that day, and otherwise "spending my time and energy" doing whatever I think needs to be done.

About two minutes into playing with my nephew, I felt the pull of "this other stuff"; it was stronger than usual. I had stuff to do, things to finish. The morning was already getting late and there was so much to get done.

Instead of giving into this pull, I allowed myself to feel overwhelmed, to "fill up" with this sudden self-imposed surge of demand on my attention; I resisted the urge to get up and go (with lots of help from my 2-year-old nephew).

Instead of getting up and going, I got down on my hands and knees; my nephew climbed on my back. 

Then the reservoir tipped. 

Wrapping his arms around my neck, he tried to stay on my back as I marched around the room like a wild horse. Laugher spilled from the both of us as he repeatedly slipped off and then jumped back on. 

This went on for more than 15 minutes until both of us were exhausted from laugher.

***

There will always be other stuff to do, people to meet, conversations to be had, stuff to learn, places to experience, work to be done.

But there will only be one now. 

We need to be fully invested in that, in the present. Instead of letting it wander aimlessly, we need to bring our mind home.

What's here in this moment is gone in the next and unless we decide to experience life from that perspective, the perspective of the present, we cannot live a whole life.

We can invest in the future and even in the past, but we need to invest that energy carefully and with intent. Unless most of our energy is being invested in the present, where are we really?

I'm going to practice expending less energy in areas where energy easily dissipates. I'm going to practice more proactive conservation and focus, less reactionary and aimless expenditure. More here, less there; more now, less then.

The past and the future do not really exist; what exists is now.

Notes: Running a Lifestyle Business

Thom Chambers' latest magazine, How to Run a Lifestyle Business, is a goldmine of motivational and thought-provoking ideas from many different leaders. I've highlighted my favorite parts below:

As Simon Sinek explains, people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. It's not the new features or the best-in-class that gets us, it's the story we tell ourselves when we buy or use a product or service. Sinek uses the launch of the iPod by way of example; while other mp3 players were there sooner and cheaper, they were focused on 'what' the product was: a 5GB mp3 player. Apple, meanwhile, sold the 'why': 1,000 songs in your pocket.

'What' is all about reason, about rationale. It's the classic nice-guy-finishes-last syndrome: he can display to the girl all the logical reasons that she should date him, from his good job to his nice house, but nobody ever fell in love based on a list of features and benefits. Rather than coming from this place of practicality, 'why' connects to emotion.

Starting with why means saying, "I believe this", then creating products and services that make that belief a reality. Those products and services are the 'what' of your business. They're the physical manifestations of your beliefs, nothing more.

When you start with why, suddenly everything changes. It's no longer about trying to pack more features into your product or to offer your services at a lower price than your competition. It's about stating your beliefs loudly and proudly, then acting on them. Do this well enough for long enough, and people who believe the same things will align themselves with you and your business by becoming customers and fans.

Simon's TED talk, How great leaders inspire action, is a must-watch.

Professionals, as Steven Pressfield notes in The War of Art, are those who turn up every day, no matter what. They do the work, relentlessly, knowing that each day is a battle against the Resistance that tries to get you to procrastinate, avoid the hard work, and settle for less than you desire.

When things gets tough, it's easy to look for excuses not to work. Isn't this meant to be my lifestyle business, my utopia? Surely it should always be fun?

As Pressfield explains, "the more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it". Building a successful lifestyle business is one of the biggest evolutions you can undertake, so you can be damn sure that you'll encounter plenty of Resistance along the way. Fight it. Do the work.

Or as Julien Smith would say, don't flinch.

In the following section, Thom is talking about Seth Godin's concept of finding just ten people to share your idea/message/product with and how those ten people will be enough to determine if what you have will succeed.

Perhaps the best way to look at it is this: you're replacing promotion with creation. Leo Babauta has written about this on Google+, calling for a less in-your-face approach to selling work. Make it, make it available, and let the fans decide if it's worth spreading. Then get on with creating what's next.

The idea of 'first, ten' means that, in Seth's words, "the idea of a 'launch' and press releases and the big unveiling is nuts. Instead, plan on the gradual build that turns into a tidal wave". He also acknowledges that this might mean your growth ends up being "not as fast as you want". But if you're in this for the long run rather than just the big show that tries to make-it-big-quickly, then you'll certainly grow fast enough to succeed.

What I got out of this is the need for focus. I seem to have a hard time focusing on something long enough to turn it "into a tidal wave". But that just tells me I need to decide what's worth focusing on and then make a commitment to seeing it through.

It's about having the attitude of an artisan instead of an amateur, as Thom explains in the next bit.

When it doesn't require a huge financial or time investment to get started, it's easy to be less committed to a project - "this website only cost me a few bucks, so it's not the end of the world if it goes wrong. I'll give it a shot and see how things turn out".

This is where your attitude comes into play. You can have this attitude, the attitude of the amateur - or you can have the attitude of the artisan.

The artisan doesn't have much money, but is still relentless about quality. The artisan sees her small size as a phase, a stepping stone towards success, and acts accordingly. Even when she's starting out, she's conducting herself as she would if this were a fully-grown business.

You're always told to dress for the job you want, not the one you have. In the same way, you need to write and create for the business you want one day, rather than the business you have today.

When you hear about a startup that sold for a hundred million after six months, remember: you're not playing that game. When you have the chance to spam your list to make a few affiliate sales from someone else's new product, remember: you're not playing that game.

Which leads us to a simple question: what game are you playing? The answer is found in one of the great overlooked conflicts in every lifestyle business: the conflict between the artisan and the accountant. The artisan creates work that brings satisfaction and pleasure, with no concern for money. The accountant creates work that brings money, with no concern for satisfaction or pleasure.

In most traditional businesses, to a greater or lesser extent, the accountant is king. Money matters most. When you choose to start a lifestyle business, though, you embrace your inner artisan. You see that money isn't everything, that lifestyle, happiness, and satisfaction are just as important.

For some, starting a lifestyle business is the start and end of their inner artisan. They focus entirely on building their business in a way that best pleases the market, or brings the owner the easiest life. The extreme of this are niche site owners, who find profitable markets and run affiliate or AdSense campaigns. They 'set it and forget it'.

For others, the artisan takes over and they focus on doing work they love without worrying about the market. The extreme of this is the blogger who gives everything away without any business model in place, hoping to make money somehow, someday.

The artisan refuses to compromise; the accountant will do anything for the sale. The artisan wants a headline that reflects the mood of the work; the accountant wants a headline that goes viral.

Both are valid in their own way; it's up to you to choose the point at which you're happiest between the extremes of pure integrity and pure income.

Notes: Is this noteworthy?

In a response to The Dangerous Effects of Reading (an essay I highlighted in a previous note), nlawalker wrote the following comment on Hacker News.

His last point about noteworthiness is an incredibly useful way to avoid wasting time. I started curating and sharing notes on things that I read because I feel that doing so will not only help me retain and determine the usefulness of what I'm consuming, but also help others spend less time filtering through stuff.

I definitely agree about the "filtering crap from gold" bit. Once you reach a certain level of skill it can become a hindrance: you develop an extremely low tolerance for anything that doesn't catch you as interesting within a few seconds, and you start speed-reading absolutely everything. This is good in that you aren't wasting time consuming something that's not really useful, but it's bad in that you end up continuously subjecting yourself to input in this way. You can spend a whole day processing a million inputs, throwing them all away and learning nothing, when the alternatives are to spend your time doing something more fun or productive, or slowing down a bit and maybe actually getting a tidbit or two out of the first few hundred inputs and leaving the rest for another time.

A while ago, when I was reading for the purpose of focused learning (technical books, scouring blogs for information about some framework/API, etc.), I began the habit of taking copious notes. My notes are very wordy; it's almost like I'm having a conversation with myself and rephrasing ideas so I can understand them better. OneNote is my weapon of choice - for me it reduces the "barrier to entry" of starting notetaking because it's easy write now and organize later.

Over time, I realized that when I took notes this way, I had a much higher retention rate and a much greater understanding of what I was reading. So much so that when I find myself sitting at my desk or on the couch and "infosnacking," I try to stop and ask myself, "is what I am reading right now worth taking notes on?" If it is, then I start writing. If it's not, I make the effort to tear myself away and either do something that's more productive or something that I really enjoy.

Notes: The middle-man to your happiness

David Tate writes about the dangerous effects of reading, but more than that he explains why it's so vital that we stop being filters, that we stop developing a habit of judging what we're consuming in attempt to consume things that make us happier and instead focus on creating the things that actually make us happy.

I think we should all agree that getting faster at judging things is bad, but I think the real danger in having a super-efficient-filter is that your default mode is exclusion – you reject long enough and you lose the ability to create things that pass your own filter. You stagnate at work for fear of everything you do being judged like every news article or viral video that you view.

So how do you break the power of consumption? By creating your own things. All the things you consume - somewhere somebody is making all this stuff, right?

Adding anything (not just your opinion) to the world is creating – writing, drawing, dancing (not line-dancing which is not art but instead some sort of long-term psychological annoyance stress test). Normally when people think of 'creating' or 'innovation' they think of a naked hippie standing in the woods painting a tree, an alcoholic writer slaving away at a sad tale of a small town, or some tech geek coming up with some new way to annoy everyone by sharing every detail of their pointless life.

If the world overwhelms you with its constant production of useless crap which you filter more and more to things that only interest you can I calmly suggest that you just create things that you like and cut out the rest of the world as a middle-man to your happiness?

Pushing Through 'The Dip'

I believe that I'm at the point in this experiment that Seth Godin would refer to as 'The Dip'. It's the point at which one feels no upward progress is being made and where one feels momentum has stalled. It's where continuing further doesn't feel worth the effort.

Seth says it's where most people quit. It's the reason great ideas and businesses often fail. They don't fail because the idea or business was no good, but rather because the person keeping the venture alive decided to give up. They weren't patient and persistent enough. They didn't push through the dip.

As I experience the dip in this experiment, I find myself questioning more and more the purpose of it. I find myself looking for an out, trying to convince myself that nothing of value is being produced and that I'm wasting my time. But I know none of that is true and it's almost comical to watch myself go through this phase.

I'm able to look at these feelings objectively because I made my decision not to quit before I started. 

I accepted that no matter what, there would be value in this experiment. Even if all I wrote was narcissistic gibberish -- something I knew my perfectionist, value-based side wouldn't allow for anyway -- I knew there would be value in finishing.

Knowing I would come up against this resistance, I gave myself just two rules: One paragraph, ten days. These rules were optimized to get me through the dip. I knew that even my perfectionist self should be able to share that much.

And as it turns out, I need only look to the previous seven days for proof: More than three thousand words shared and lots of resistance overcome.

Losing Focus Through Association

Where is my focus? Am I focusing on the right thing? Am I putting too much effort in the wrong direction? Am I inadvertently stunting my growth?

These are questions I ask myself quite frequently. I'm not sure when I started asking these questions or even why, but I do know that asking them often leads to recognizing areas of my life where I'm stagnating or where I'm otherwise unconsciously holding myself back or underutilizing my potential (or simply walking in the wrong direction).

The world is full of people who want to tell us how to do things. And I don't think that's bad. I don't think they're doing it with malicious intent: sharing what we know is an innate human quality. I also don't think it's bad to listen to what others have to say: I've grown so much in my life thanks to the advice and experiences shared by others.

But I think there's a danger in following too closely, in listening too intently, in modeling our life too closely around the lives of others. We lose a bit of ourselves through association. If we permanently associate with anything but our true selves, we will easily forget why we're doing things we're doing. We will lose sight of what feels innately important to us.

To really get at the core of what matters, to really focus our energy on growing in the right directions, we need to strip away everything, all the labels, the assumptions, the role models, and the beliefs. 

Who am I? 

When I strip away everything, I just am. And when I approach life from that state, I become a paint brush and everything else becomes the paint. There are no labels, no genres, no niches, no must-haves and have-nots. There are no limitations, no restrictions, no "this is who I am" or "this is who I am not". There just is, and pure potential.

Setting the Right Intention

If you set the wrong intention, you'll feel like you're going somewhere without actually going very far. Setting the wrong intention leads to unsustainable effort.

Without the right intention we won't be able to set the right priorities, and without the right priorities effort will be made in all the wrong places.

It's the reason why so many people set the intention to get in shape every year only to return to their old lifestyles within a few weeks or months.

It wasn't a lack of effort or inability to commit that eventually turned them away from getting in shape. It was that getting in shape was the wrong intention and as a result they set the wrong priorities. The thing they felt was so important quickly became not important enough.

Often something that we consider important becomes not important enough because we set the wrong intention. (It's not "get in shape" that we should be focusing on, but rather "change my lifestyle".) 

Changing your lifestyle takes a bit more work than signing up for a gym membership, but that's why the former often results in transformation while the latter results in wasted time and money.

If we set the right intention, we'll set the right priorities and our time and effort will propel us towards our goals. But how do we set the right intention? I believe it starts with taking a look at the bigger picture and understanding the why. Why is this important to us?

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.

Notes: Entrepreneurs: Picking Something vs Being Someone

I've read a lot of stuff over the past few years about building a business online. Most of it talks about the need to identify "our niche" so that we can focus on talking and selling to our "right people". The problem was, settling on a niche meant giving up my multi-faceted self and I wasn't prepared to do that.

So when I came across Abby Kerr, I loved the way that she broke that status quo. She still talks about 'right people' -- which is a concept I agree with, to a point -- but she also takes things a step further and embraces expansiveness in nichification.

Her newsletter comes with a fantastic free e-Course called Creating a Truly Irresistible Niche. All of the emails in the series had something fantastic and her style of writing is one of the few styles that I find really engaging and fun. The highlighted piece below from the email series really hit home:

I don't think wannabe entrepreneurs should just pick something.

I think that wannabe entrepreneurs should be someone.

And the best part about being? Being is an evolutionary process. It's never stagnant. It's continually changing by nature. All beings are born from a process of change and are destined to change, forever.

And really powerful, sentient beings {like you and me} don't just evolve, they create revolutions, and they have revelations. And they help their Right People to have them, too.

I like to look at my entrepreneurial niche, and yours, as an ongoing evolution and revolution {of self, ideas, and ways of doing business}, full of revelations.

This isn't just playful phraseologie.

This is a complete approach to claiming your entrepreneurial niche in this moment, living what you believe to its fullest, being a great friend to those you help and serve and create for, while embracing the reality that because you are not a stagnant being, neither will be your business.

Claiming a niche, the Niche of You, allows you to continue your own growth process. You can explore your niche, be expansive within it, play with it, turn it on its head just for kicks, break it down into its many facets and go deeply into each one.

Remember, even the smallest bits of earthly matter are a universe unto themselves.

And so are you.

And so is your niche.

Dreaming big or just big enough?

If you always felt you were born to do something big, something really, really big -- something so big that your existence would end up shifting human history and leaving a dent in the fabric of time -- what would you do? 

Would you think about what your best career options were, what things you were good at, and go from there?

Would you stress out over money or financial concerns or hunker down and save your money?

Would you focus on doing things that made you comfortable or ensured that people would like you?

Would you limit your focus to things that you could achieve this lifetime?

Would you be realistic?

Or would you think about the biggest, most crazy thing you could imagine? Something that seemed so unlikely for a single human being to achieve but that, when you thought about it or talked about it, filled you with spine-tingling, eye-watering, goosebump-making surges of energy that seemed to emanate from some unknown source deep inside?

That thing that despite being so unrealistic and crazy lingered on your mind, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.

If you ever asked me in person to share my biggest dream, I'd probably tell you that I would like to reach the end of my life and see humanity more connected and forward-looking, to have an end to poverty, hunger, and inequality at least somewhere in sight, and to know that my actions played at least a small role in making that movement happen.

But if you asked me again, what's my biggest, craziest, most wild dream, I'd likely change my answer.

I'd tell you that I'd like to see humanity not only more connected and in tune with nature, but also exploring and stretching off planet Earth. I'd want to stand on planet Mars before I die and feel that humanity as a whole finally recognizes its precious potential. 

I'd like to witness the beginnings of humanity-level cooperation taking place, pushing the human species forward together to eliminate silly things like poverty, hunger, and inequality so that we, as a species, can move on to bigger and more important things like exploring the universe, not just the universe around us, but also within us.

This is Star Trek type stuff, yes, but if you really asked me what my biggest, craziest dream was, that's what I'd honestly tell you. I'd like to know that I played a part in moving the human race forward, towards something that my intuition tells me we'll eventually arrive at anyway.

But you'd never guess any of that reading my writing or even communicating with me online. In fact, very few of my actions in life really reflect that level of thinking.

Why? 

Because I gave up on that dream long ago. It was too unrealistic, too "out there". If I was going to use my potential for something great, why would I throw it at something so preposterous?

Following that thinking was always a series of justifications, a train of logical reasoning to back up the impossibility of that thinking:

"I'd need to become heavily involved in entrepreneurship and business and investing and money... I just don't like any of those enough to do something big with them."

"I'd probably need an engineering degree and that would be too much of a time commitment... I'm too old and my time is running out fast."

"If I failed to achieve my dream, I will have wasted my time and energy."

"If I fail, all my potential, my whole life, will have been for nothing."

"Nobody else is doing this kind of stuff -- or even attempting it -- so it must be unachievable and silly to even consider."

I've gone through this process more times than I can count -- throughout my whole life -- often justifying the process itself by telling myself that some dreams really are just too big, but that it's healthy to think about them anyway. 

However something changed in the past year. Before I returned home from India last year, I won a chance to see one of the last Space Shuttle launches in Florida. 

That experience led me to connect with a whole new circle of friends who were passionate about space and who lived with those futuristic dreams on their minds every single day. 

Those events led to my learning about Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal who, with a real passion not focused on being entrepreneurial and making money but for making humanity a multi-planetary species, went on to found SpaceX, now the leading private space company in the world.

Yes! That's exactly what I should be doing! But (and here's where the fear and self-doubt steps in)...

"That's just not me..."

"Space exploration is so disconnected from the immediate humanitarian needs here on Earth that I really care about..."

"I can't possibly focus on addressing world poverty if I'm focused on getting people into space..."

"Elon Musk was rich and had tons of money to start with... I'd be starting with nothing and that would make it impossible..."

But Elon is moving the human race forward.

He's chasing his seemingly impossible dream because that's what he believes he should be doing. He's running his business the way he believes it should be run, telling employees and investors face-to-face that he and his business are not in it for the money but for the legacy of humanity.

In the past year I've connected with so many people who are fascinated with space and I've learned about people like Elon who are taking their dreams and pushing them forward. 

All of this has rekindled within me the "impossible" dreams that I've held inside for so long. It's made me reconsider them and start asking myself questions about what I'm doing and why I'm here on Earth.

Why can't I become someone who builds businesses that determine their success not based on monetary profit but rather on the welfare of the human species as a whole? 

A space company that addresses humanitarian needs? Why not? So what if nobody else has done it or if nobody thinks it would work.

Steve Jobs said, "stay hungry, stay foolish". Perhaps to really stay hungry we need to chase dreams that are unrealistic and seemingly impossible; perhaps to stay foolish we need to believe in dreams that seem a little crazy but that call to us, like a whisper from the future, asking us to do the impossible.

Notes: End up at the right destination

I've long resisted using social media in a way that didn't match how I socialized offline (which is to say, not very much). Despite all the online advice telling me I needed to be heavily involved in social media to grow online, I've refrained from this because it didn't feel true to my core.

This bit from a recent letter by Thom Chambers, How to be Antisocial and Become a Better Writer (subscription required), explains succinctly what I felt intuitively:

Your business is your chance to create your very own utopia, your ideal lifestyle. When it comes to your writing, it’s far more honest to have a setup that you want to maintain indefinitely. If you were a best-selling author, would you tweet?

The answer to that may be "yes", in which case great. But if you’re just putting on a facade of sociability in order to build an audience, then two things will happen. One, you’ll build the wrong sort of readership who come to expect you to be someone you don’t enjoy being. And two, you’ll probably get found out.

Being antisocial might very well mean it takes longer to get where you want to go. But at least you’ll end up at the right destination.

Notes: Meditating with your tongue

This technique used by Manuel Loigeret as a path to go beyond words is incredibly simple and amazingly effective. I never realized how "active" my tongue was until I put conscious thought into relaxing it.

Here is the technique: I close my eyes and I completely relax my tongue. I know... it sounds strange. I don’t know about you, but my tongue is almost always activated, pressing against my teeth or the roof of my mouth or simply floating in my mouth. It rarely becomes relaxed and pulled down by gravity. I noticed it also gets tensed when I am preparing to talk or when I am writing. Am I weird or are you the same?

Relaxing my tongue seems to have an effect on the muscle in throat and my shoulders. It feels like everything was locked there and suddenly became able to relax.

In the book I read (Anna Wise – The high performance mind) it is explained that when the brain commands the tongue it puts us in verbal mode. Our brain responds to the somatic activation of the tongue (and vice-versa) and we find ourselves stuck in this mode. To sum up: we think the way we talk. I believe this is how most of us "think". This reduces our meditation process to our language grammar when our brain could actually go to other layers of abstraction.

Notes: There is no reason a polymath cannot excel

This is an older comment written by Lynn Fang on a blog post that Mars Dorian wrote about needing to focus on one career. Her points are extremely well expressed:

There is no reason a polymath cannot excel at all her interests enough to create careers out of all of them.

Take Benjamin Franklin. He was a Founding Father who started our country, a political statesmen. And yet he was also a scientist, inventor, and writer who contributed numerous inventions to improve our understanding of weather patterns, electricity, and even invented bifocal glasses. Or Leonardo DaVinci. He was a successful painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, geologist, botanist, and writer. He excelled at all of them and is still well known for both his paintings and his mechanical inventions. There are many such people throughout our history. They may seem like gods, but so do Michael Jackson and Shepard Fairy.

I'm sure Michael Jackson made a great impact on the world and uplifted many millions of people. Is his work of lesser import than Ben Franklin's? You can't really compare them. They are equally important people, who hold significance to people in different ways. I think it is the systems thinking polymaths that will truly change the world, because they can see the big picture, how all the little interlocking pieces fit together to create the world. They can see what makes the world go round, and step in to make a difference.

I don't mean to brag, but I excel at both writing and science. I also have a knack for design that could be used professionally, should I choose. I am skilled at all three, but I can't do all of them at the same time. I feel, what makes me unique and powerful, is the combination of interests and skills that I let my heart embrace. I plan to see each of these fields bear fruit one day. On Scott Young's blog, he teaches something called Holistic Learning, which is making connections between seemingly unrelated fields. If you did not open yourself to other fields of inquiry, you could miss out on valuable connections.

It's true that if I focus on writing, my design will suffer. But at some point I will get bored, or tired, of focusing solely on writing, and that is when my design will bounce back. It's simply a matter of time, as my focus cycles through my various interests.

My legacy will be to have lived my life as fully and richly as possible, while contributing as much value as I can to the world. As Austin Kleon says, keep your side projects. "it’s the side projects that blow up."

You can also read my response to Mars' post here.

Notes: Digital Suicide and Understanding Your 'Why'

My friend Ali Dark recently asked a circle of friends on Google+ if anyone felt he had made a difference in their life. He was feeling digitally suicidal, which meant that he wanted to delete his online identity and start from scratch. Here was my response:

You've made a difference in my life by being an example of someone who continues to push forward despite feeling unsure. You have a similar online personality as I do, someone who comes up with a great idea, thinks they've "got it down", and then charges full force down that path. It's only when you're half-way down the path and you look around and notice that nobody else is with you that you start doubting yourself.

It's a lot like hiking a big mountain: In the morning at the trailhead, there's lots of cars and other hikers preparing for the hike. You feel a sense of commonality, a sense of community. You're all there to hike this mountain. As you start hiking, you'll find lots of other hikers, either passing you or you passing them. Again, you feel a sense of community, a sense of shared struggle.

But eventually, the trail gets tougher and more narrow. It gets steeper and you start slowing down. As you start focusing on the path in front of you, you walk one step at a time. If you stop and look around, you'll notice there are no other hikers around, nobody passing you and nobody you're passing. On a straight part of the trail, you might look up and see others hikers struggling further up, or if you look down the trail you might see other hikers pushing through the part you've already passed.

It's in those lonely times when you need to remember why you started in the first place. It's then that you need to look inward and trust that your decision to hike this mountain was a decision you made for you, not for the other people who have their own struggles to deal with.

The closer you get to the summit of the mountain, the more hikers you start meeting. When you eventually make it to the top, it's crowded and you quietly exchange smiles and a sense of accomplishment with other hikers that you met earlier that morning. All of you know that you're there not because of each other, but because you all made it through the tough parts relying on nobody except yourself.

It's when the going gets tough that you need to ask yourself why you do what you do. If you're not sure you're on the right path, ask yourself if that unsureness comes from a lack of commitment or from an external distraction. You make a difference in the lives of others by making a difference in your own life. Are you making a difference in your own life, or are you doubting the difference you make?

It's OK to pause and take a break from your digital life. It's OK to change direction without asking for permission. Hikers on the trail stop and take a break all the time, but most of them get up and keep going up the trail. If you're always stopping and asking for someone to give you validation for continuing on, then you'll find yourself making little progress and being frustrated with every stop you make (as opposed to feeling refreshed and invigorated to continue).

These are the lessons I've learned and I share them with you because I think I understand exactly how you feel. For me, it was the realization that I was making zero forward progress by doubting myself and throwing everything away over and over that finally pushed me to adopt the mindset I have now. Now when I make changes, it feels like I'm simply making course corrections while continuing to move forward, instead of restarting my journey -- digital or otherwise -- from scratch.

The Potential to Cultivate

An oak tree may produce thousands of acorns before a single seed finds fertile soil. It may live for two hundred years producing acorns and waiting for random chance to carry one seed to germination.

Each acorn contains the potential of an entire oak tree along with thousands of more acorns. All that's missing from each acorn is an intelligent force of cultivation.

We possess the gift of cultivation. We possess the ability to plant a single seed with intention, tilling its soil and carefully nurturing it to maturity.

This is our human gift, the gift of cultivation. When we plant seeds, how much isn't nearly as important as the focus of our intent.

It's not how hard we work, but rather how our work helps others.

It's not how much money we make, but rather how that money is spent.

It's not the length of our exercise routine, but rather the intensity of each exercise.

It's not the volume of our experiences, but rather what we learn from each one.

It's not how many words we publish, but rather the intent behind those words.

It's not how much time we have, but rather what we do with each moment.

Increasing volume will not increase our potential to cultivate. We don't need to wait for chance to plant roots and grow; our goals and dreams will spout when they're cultivated. Focus on the quality and cultivation of each action and leave volume to the trees.