2020

You know how I always dread a whole year? Well, this time, I’m only going to dread one day at a time – Charlie Brown

How do you look at a year in reflection? And how do you look at planning the next year? It’s complicated, even in the best of years but this one’s a doozy. We’re recording this right in the middle of the pandemic, and a lot of us have been through many different things. Some of us had plans and those maybe didn’t come out the way we expected. Some people had unexpected loss. Other people had major life changes. Some other people found themselves with a lot of time on their hands, and not much to do. And whatever it is, and whatever year it is, it’s great to reflect and think about what kind of impact this last year has had on us. They’re all different. They’re all weird. They all do something to us that’s a little bit different.

End-of-Year Rituals

Gretchen Rubin in the Happier podcast mentions about how do you usher in a new year, and she talks about it as exorcising, not exercising, the previous year. People wrote in and talked about how they like to end their years and what types of rituals they do. They had someone who’s going to build a 2020 pinata and fill it with all sorts of dreams for next year, and candy. The whole family was going to beat on it and enjoy New Year’s Eve. There was a lot of burning too. People were going to throw a lot of things in the fire. Having these kinds of traditions always helps people do that reflection on the previous year, but then also try to come up with the plans for next year. Some people make this the time where they do charities and donations. I know a lot of nonprofit organizations get a majority of their gifts at the end of the year. People clean their house; they make room for new things in the house. Sometimes it involves food. In the chilly Midwest, we have cocoa and mulled wine and that goes a long way to keeping us cozy. The fireplace gets going. My friend always bakes and shares Christmas cookies. And she loves to watch all the classic Christmas movies, and Die Hard which by the way, is not a Christmas movie. I always watch It’s a Wonderful Life. One Christmas a few years ago, we had this perfect snow where it was gentle and twinkling. Wasn’t too cold out and I went into my garage and found the skis that I bought 30 years ago and never used. I went cross country skiing. It was downright magical. I could hear the snowflakes hitting the ground. My new hope is that every Christmas, I can go cross country skiing in the woods. I just loved that. I also pull out a book that is special for the end of the year. There’s also a lot of things that have to the end of the year to do with money. Everyone does something that’s a little bit different. And I know I’m single, so my list is a little bit too much a me, me, me.

• https://gretchenrubin.com/podcast-episode/303-find-a-ritual-to-exorcise-2020

End-of-Year Questions

Think about what you can do with your spouse or your friends. And it’ll help you to with this type of reflection that people love to do. Having that other person who can ask those questions of you and write them down for you and then go through their list is helpful. Or even doing these things together and think about how the year went. Always remember that when you look at these past years, life always brings change for the good and for the bad. It’s never one thing or another. And I think that what you have to do is give yourself a lot of grace at this year in particular. There were things that you have planned that you just can’t get done and you’re not going to get done just because of the nature of the year. There were things that you probably hope to tackle, and you just didn’t have the energy to do it. This is that time to be graceful to yourself and to give yourself a little forgiveness. When you look back at a year, there’s nothing you can really do about it. Unless you built yourself a time machine, that year is done and over with. All you can do is go forward. The only purpose of reflecting on your previous year is to give you a stronger perspective for the future. And so just remember that when you look back at your year, this is not a time to beat yourself up. This is a time to learn from it and learn how to go on and do better next year in everything that you do.

So, one of the things that I do is I have created a OneNote planner for myself. And I asked a lot of questions about the previous year in this OneNote journal. And here are some of the questions I asked:

• How did the year go?
• Was I happy last year?
• Did I do interesting things?
• Did I see key areas of my life improve?
• What really made me laugh?
• What went wrong?
• What did I do about the things that went wrong?
• What do I need to forgive myself for?
• What do I need to forgive others for?
• Are their trends of the things I did last year?
• What did I learn about myself?
• What helped me spiritually and helped me feel closer to God?
• Did I gain friendships or lose them?
• What about my career?
• Did I take a step forward in my career or back?
• Did I have a good working year?
• Did I like the work that I did?
• What makes this year unforgettable?
• What did I enjoy doing this year?
• Who are what is the one thing or one person I am grateful for?
• What is the biggest win this year?
• What did I read, watch, listen to that made the biggest impact on my year?
• What did I worry about the most before this year? And how did it turn out?
• What was the biggest regrets and why?
• What was the one thing that changed about me the most?
• What surprised me the most about this year?
• And if I could go back to January 1, and tell myself something, what would I say?
• Were there goals and plans that I had? How did they go? Do I want to continue those plans next year? Or do I want to consider them complete?
• What surprised me the most?
• What was my favorite meal?
• What was my favorite book, favorite trip, favorite quote, favorite event?
• What made me laugh the most?
• What changed the most about me this year?
• Were there any big milestone events in terms of marriages? Or birthdays are anything that happened?
• What was my biggest influence this year?
• If I were to write a book about the previous year, what would the title of the book be?
• If I were to write a paragraph that would go on the back cover of the book, what would that paragraph say?
• How is that going to influence what I am going to do next year?
• Is there anything or anyone I need to tie up any unresolved issues with?

What I can tell you is to dig deep inside of all these issues. This is a chance for you to really reflect and it’s not about listing one thing per question. It’s about listing an exhaustive list of all the things. What went right can be a list of 100 things that went right. It’s important to get those down. And again, this might be fun to do with other people so that you can reflect on them with another person.

• https://covisioning.com/how-to-assess-your-year/
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/pauladavislaack/2016/12/28/8-questions-to-help-you-evaluate-2016
• http://www.mariasfarmcountrykitchen.com/10-ways-to-end-a-tough-year/
• https://www.jamessweetman.com/my-end-of-year-ritual/
• https://vidyaliving.com/rituals-my-end-of-year-ritual/
• https://www.denisedt.com/blog/end-of-year-ritual
• https://www.yesandyes.org/2016/12/end-of-year-traditions.html
• https://www.businessinsider.com/new-years-rituals-around-the-world-2013-12

Have an End-of-Year Project

The other thing I do when it comes to the end of the year, is I always have an end of the year project. One year I sewed pajamas, I don’t know why. I got my sewing machine out and learned how to use it.  I got some flannel material. I said I was going to sew myself flannel pajamas, and I am going to wear them on Christmas Day. And sure enough, I did that. They weren’t the most comfortable pajamas in the world. But you know what I made them, and I wore them on Christmas Day. Last year, I worked on a project where I changed every password on every website and started using a password manager. Oh my goodness, that was not a fun project. Usually, I try to pick fun projects. But I benefited from that all year long! This year, my project is going to be my Day One journal. Day One is a journaling app that is found on iOS and MacOS. I’m going to try to fill in a lot of holes where I failed to journal. I’m going to go through Facebook and find all the pictures, I’m going to look through my picture files and look at the dates. And I’m going to put them in my journal. And I’m just going to try to come up with lists of pictures and events that I did. I plan on working on that now until the end of the year. I also plan on working on this podcast and making it better.

Planning for Next Year

So next let’s talk about planning. You know, it’s one thing to reflect on the previous year. But then there’s another way of taking a look and saying how can we plan for the next year? We talked in previous episodes of this podcast about planners out there like the Full Focus Planner. That planner is really engaged in reflection and planning. How can I look back at the things I did? And how can I look forward to the things I’m going to do? A lot of people like journaling on paper with a pen and they find it much more meaningful to them when they write it out. I can’t read my own handwriting.

Develop a Perfect Week

Everything for me must be digital. So, I have this OneNote journal that I created, where I took a lot of ideas from books and journals. But some things that I do for a year is I first start out with what would the perfect week look like. It’s just a grid of every hour in the day and every day of the week. And you don’t fill it out by typing in each of the grid areas. What you do is you draw these big color blocks around it. So, you’d say this is the time that I work. This is the time that I sleep. Maybe I want to read a book every night before I go to bed. I want to pray every morning before I go to work. I want to exercise every morning when I get up. Every weekend, I want to be with my friends and have lunch and every Sunday I want to go on a hike. Whatever it is, you block these out as your perfect ideal week. And then you place it all over your house so that you can look at it. And I will tell you that once you start planning out what your perfect week looks like, it starts to happen. You start moving more and more towards that perfect week. And suddenly your real week start looking like your perfect week. I remember my boss asked me how my weekend was. And I said, “You know what, it was perfect!” And I really meant that because I did exactly what my perfect week for a weekend was supposed to look like and it really actually helps a lot.

Create Planning Questions

Then I have planning questions. My planning questions are sort of this combination of my OneNote book, but it also comes a little bit from that book I talked about in a previous episode, The One Thing and remember, his thing was to ask that question, “What is the one thing I can do this day, this week, this year, that by doing such, everything else becomes better or easier?”

Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project

One thing that really helps is this thing called the Happiness Project, and this is a book by Gretchen Rubin. We talked about her in the past. She wrote that personality tests that talked about Upholders and Obligers. But this was an earlier book where she was happy, but she wondered if she could make herself even happier. To learn about her Happiness Project, she has resources on her website. She also has the whole book which you can read. But I will tell you that one of the really interesting things that you can do is just search on the internet for Happiness Project and see the amazing things that people have done with their own happiness projects. So, for my take on it, the Happiness Project starts out with these 10 Commandments, and they’re for the year. And to give you an idea, here’s my 10 Commandments

1. Be the best Jill possible
2. Face things honestly and say things honestly.
3. Be with God and that includes prayer and reading the Bible every day.
4. Health is what we do every day, and not something we do every once in a while.
5. Focus on strengths and minimize weaknesses.

This one was a bit of a premonition because I hadn’t even thought about doing this podcast yet.

• Small steps and if it’s not working, make the steps even smaller. Wow. There you go. A whole podcast right there.
• Focus on actions, not outcomes.
• Stand up for yourself.
• Listen more, ask more questions.
• Controlling your behavior starts with controlling your environment.

Then the next step is to take 12 ideas of improvement one for each month. You’ll focus on one thing each month. So last year, my focuses were daily exercise. Then the next month was going to bed and getting up at the same time every day. I had a sleep project where I worked on making my sleep better. My third month was about controlling snacking, and getting only one snack every day, I had a house cleaning project where I had to every day throw out something every day organized one thing: a drawer, a shelf, just something. And by the time I was done with it, my kitchen was incredibly organized. It still is today. But that was because I focused on it to clean everything within one shelf one area and made it so much better. It’s a really good way of just having these mini goals to tackle some of the issues in your life.

• https://gretchenrubin.com/books/the-happiness-project/about-the-book/
• http://www.mariasspace.com/2009/12/i-have-book-to-start-your-new-year-with.html

Summary

1. Come up with a list of questions for your reflections of last year. Make sure you look at good things and bad things. Examine plans that went right plans and didn’t go right.
2. Work with friends or spouses to come up with reflections of last year together. See how the year went for you.
3. Develop an end-of-the-year rituals so that you can put a close to the last year and start thinking about next year.
4. Ask good questions about what you want your next year to look like. What is the one thing you could do next year that by doing so would make everything better?
5. Consider doing a Happiness Project including 10 commandments for the year and 12 themes for each month. And then little mini goals that go under them. You can tackle each of these overarching themes and make it better each month of next year.

Challenge

• Come up with next year’s 10 commandments, what would be the 10 rules that would make the biggest impact on your life in 2021.

Now we’re going to look at our advice of the week. This quote comes from it’s a wonderful Life and our friend, the angel Clarence.

“Each man’s life touches so many other lives when he isn’t around and leaves awful hole, don’t you think?.”

I think everyone understands what their life means to them. But what they don’t realize is everyone has an impact on everybody else they touch. everybody else’s lives are interlaced in theirs too.

I appreciate all of you and I hope you have some good reflections on the last year and some good planning on the next year.

“System thinking is a discipline for seeing the wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things for seeing ‘patterns of change’ rather than static ‘snapshots’ ” – Peter Senge

Today, we’re going to talk a little bit about the difference between having a system or having a goal. The word “goal” gets thrown out there and sometimes we don’t really know what that even means to have a goal. So, think, for example, if you are someone who was a coach, and you say, ‘My goal is to go to the championship.”’ You might not be able to go to the championship. And so that’d be super depressing, because only two teams go to the championship. Instead of having the goal of winning the championship, and being that sole team, come up with a system. It will include coming up with better plays, getting better players on your team, having coaches that have particular skills, and talents, having good practices where everyone gets stronger and better at the game. And those systems will build your way to becoming better and more likely to winning the championship. It will provide a pathway for becoming better next year, becoming better five years from now. And that is really what the difference between having a goal and having a system that makes it likely that you will get your goal. but you will go beyond that. When I first lost weight, and I had that goal, it gets very narrow minded because there’s a lot of different ways to lose weight. You could starve yourself and you would be in very poor health. But you’ve lost weight. You don’t think about it as losing weight.  James Clear talks about the problem of goals is that everyone has the same goals but not everyone succeeds.  He Says “Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.” What you do is you think of a system, I want to be a healthier person. I want to be a more fit person. Instead, think about those things you really want to do. A system is about doing these exercises that will give you a strong core. That will give you strong legs. That will give you a lot of stamina and a lot of endurance. And then we’re going to work on healthier eating so that you can start reducing weight, you feel better and your stats are healthier when you go to the doctor. Because now you have a system in place of healthier living instead of a goal.

Scott Adams How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big on Systems

The next person who talks a lot about systems versus goals is Scott Adams in his book, How to Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big. He says, “… losing ten pounds is a goal (that most people can’t maintain), whereas learning to eat right is a system that substitutes knowledge for willpower” And he talks a lot about how the systems then will become routines. He says, “Compare the goal of exercising 3-4 times a week with a system of being active every day at a level that feels good, while continuously learning about the best methods of exercise. Before long your body will be trained, like Pavlov’s dogs, to crave the psychological lift you get from being active every day. It will soon become easier to exercise than to skip it – no willpower required. And your natural inclination for challenge and variety will gently nudge you toward higher levels of daily activity while at the same time you are learning in your spare time how to exercise in the most effective way. That’s a system.” And that you will be able to create this constantly rewarding system. So, you can have tinier steps. You can have tinier goals and celebrations because you’re constantly achieving the system. So, you reward yourself, not for losing weight, you reward yourself for following through on your weekly plan of becoming more fit. On your weekly plan of eating better, and you’re warding yourself. Because this will eventually get you to where you want to go. Goals can be very negative, because when you don’t get there you feel depressed about them, you feel sad about them. And so, it’s really one of those things that makes it so much easier for us to keep going. Because what we’ll do is we’ll turn these steps into routine, and they will be habits. And then we will stop spending energy trying to force ourselves to do something, but we will become used to this pattern. And that’s why it’s important that the system has steps that are easy to follow and easy to accomplish. As you start getting better at these steps, just like when I first started, I said I had to do this amount of cardio every day. I am much more capable than I was back then. So, I tweaked it up a little bit. I’ve done some more interesting things. And I’ve been able to actually make it a little bit more fun. I bought myself an Oculus Quest and now instead of just being on the exercise bike or the rower, I’m rowing in the Antarctic. It’s more fun. And because I was able to tweak this as I was able to go along, I found a way to take something that was fine and make it even better. So, you keep tweaking those things until they become a routine that you will enjoy. You will be less likely to go back to your old habits. Because sometimes when you say well, I want to lose this amount of weight and then you lose that amount of weight. And you go right back to where you were before you got into your healthier lifestyle. But when you have a system, it’s no longer about that goal, even though you probably will hit it, you will probably shoot past it. And you’ll say great, I’m not interested in losing weight anymore. So, I can adjust my system a bit. Maybe I get a few more calories, but that same system is in place to keep us from going back and sliding back into where we are. Problem is goals as they tend to be very inflexible.  

https://www.scottadamssays.com/2013/11/18/goals-vs-systems/

Flavio Rump On Systems

Next article we’ll talk about comes from Flavio Rump calls The Underlying Principle of Becoming the Person he said when you work on a system as compared to goals, “What seems to happen is that you start becoming the person who works out regularly, or the person who reaches out to new prospects every day. And then you feel good every time when you act, you start becoming a person who naturally does this, and you start doing it regularly, more frequently than you would otherwise do it, it turns the path into a goal, you reap the benefit of feeling good every time.” So, he talks again about how goals are really narrow and specific. While systems are bigger. Find a way of making smaller steps that will break the things that you’re really looking to do in the end into small repeatable actions. Stop thinking of things in terms of goals and start thinking of things in terms of skills and repeatable actions and it will become a lifelong habit of taking you well beyond that. You just not going to lose 10 pounds, you’re going to be a healthier, more fit person who loves to be active and go hiking and go skiing, because you’ve built this system of health instead of having a goal of weight loss.

https://medium.com/@flaviorump/systems-vs-goals-a67fcd937370

Summary

1. Look at your goals in your life and think, how could these be broken up into smaller steps? What are the types of behaviors I need to learn or actions I need to take in order to meet this goal?
2. Build a system around those steps that you’ve just determined that you need to take and make them repeatable.
3. Come up with smaller step celebrations, not because you achieved your goals, but because you achieved the method of your system.
4. Learn how to tweak your system as you go on, so that you’re able to make it more fun, more beneficial. And we’ll start meeting where you are right now, instead of where you were two months ago when you started the system. Adapt the system to meet your new scenarios as you build up your strengths, your knowledge, your abilities.

Challenge

• Take one thing that is a goal of yours and break it into a system and write that system down and give it a shot for a couple of weeks to see if the system is more positive, more flexible, and easier to do on a weekly basis. It’s going to take a little bit more time than a week because things just take time. But it should be apparent that this is easier to follow instead of trying to meet some goal.

Our fun movie advice of the day is from the Two Towers by JRR Tolkien

Sam: It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

Whew, that was a long one. Sorry about that. But it is one of my favorite quotes in a movie and it just seemed so appropriate right now. And Sam has it right! These stories of people going through dark times or hard times are great because they did not think about how bad things were right at that moment. They were able to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The only thing that separates any one of us from excellence is fear. The opposite of fear is faith. I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence is something I can reach for perfection is God’s business. – Michael J. Fox, from the book, Lucky Man.

Perfectionism is a hard thing for a lot of people. And it’s really surprising to because you will not believe how many people are actually perfectionist out there who don’t appear to be perfectionist. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. The book by Jon Acuff called Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done. Jon Acuff writes a lot of really great books. But this one tries to tackle some main issues about why people can’t get to their end goals or their end projects. What’s really stopping them? And the first one that he calls out is perfectionism. He said, perfectionism isn’t the only roadblock to finishing. We also made things difficult by creating overly ambitious goals. And suggest that when we are making goals in the first place, to remember, goals are a marathon; they take a long time. They’re not a sprint. And so, you’re more likely to get to your goal if you have a longer time to work towards it and if you can continually build up. It’s bringing that idea of small steps towards our main goal. Again, having that pacing, that gets us to the end of the goals. When we think about trying to get to goals, and I think it’s an all sorts of different things, ‘I want to get a new job by this’ or ‘I want to lose 100 pounds by then’ we come up with these goals that are steep and hard to reach. You may never reach them. And scientists talk about this as Excessively Optimistic Thinking, we tend to think that we can achieve these giant goals in a very short period of time. When you look at statistics, according to the book, 92% of us fail to achieve our goals.

He talks about two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, they found that people bias towards optimism, and consistently underestimate how long something will take to complete. We go on one side by thinking we can get this done in a short amount of time, which makes us do two things. It gives us a deadline that we cannot meet. But it also makes us have this very ambitious goal we can do and becomes frustrating, and we become frustrated in the goal. And so, the first thing that he suggests, whenever you’re trying to come up with a goal for you to live your life, cut it in half. If you don’t have the ability to cut it in half, then double the amount of time it will take because the worst thing that will happen is you’ll finish earlier. And we talked a little bit about that when we talked about taking small steps, that it is better and better for our brains if we finish something early, or we overachieve and finish more of it, than if we constantly set ourselves up to fail. So that’s what john is really talking about, trying to cut those goals down so that we can have wins along the way and actually attain our goal. And so, the next step he talks about is the other reason why we fail at a lot of things that we do is because we believe fundamentally that we must be great at everything. Step he talks about taking is just admitting that we cannot be great at everything. But there are some things that other people are great at. And they get praised for that maybe it’s not the thing we’re great at. when it comes down to it. You have to realize what things are so important that you need to be great at, and what things you don’t. And I’ll just give you a funny example of it. I was running behind one week and this is taped right in the middle of the pandemic.  I brought my laundry up, and it was late, and I really needed to get to bed. I had important training in the morning. But I really wanted to put my laundry away and hang it up, so it wasn’t all wrinkled in the morning. And then I realized, I’m not going to see another person for a month. Who cares if I’m wrinkled! And suddenly when you start realizing there are things that you can let go. There are things you don’t have to do right at this moment or be particularly great at them. Again, most jobs require you to have some minimal form of time management skills or have some ability to write but not everybody has to be great at everything. And so, I’d say take a look at some of the things that you’re okay with not being perfect at.  That you’re okay to let other people be perfect at those things. He talks about it as being Strategic Incompetence and admit that you don’t have the time to do everything. And you don’t have the time to be perfect at everything. Give those things a minimum amount of effort because this gives us more time to be great at the things we need to be great at. Some things are just good enough.

He also talks about having a project parking lot. My friend, and I always have this joke about how whenever we’re cleaning something, we always end up in the basement. So you’re cleaning out a closet that’s just been annoying you for really long, you’re going through all these clothes and getting rid of you know, some of the clothes you don’t want and suddenly you find this box and it has to go in the basement. Suddenly you’re in the basement and you don’t know where you’re going to put this box. And so, you start cleaning the basement. Stop doing that and instead have a project parking lot. So, whenever you get sent to the basement, whatever project it is, and whatever the basement is that you write that down, and you do later. You don’t have to engulf the entire planet into your projects. So again, having a project parking lot, where you can just set this thing aside and say I’m not going to think about the basement right now. I’m going to work on that some other time.

His next point is that sometimes when we think about the word goal, it sounds painful. It means discipline and accountability, and it makes us unhappy. And the thing of it is, is if you have unhappy goals, or goals that make you dread them, you will be less likely to achieve them. And if you can actually turn your goals into something enjoyable, you will have a better chance of actually achieving them. It is always more fun when you’re successful. And it’s always more fun when your goals are fun. And so, you can’t underestimate at all, how much having fun goals are really important. I think one of the things that my trainer always works with me about is that instead of thinking your goal is doing two minutes of planks or doing this or doing that. Instead, the goals are fun. You know, one really good way of learning how to surf is to be really good at doing planks. That’s a fun way to say, ‘look, if you keep working on this, and you keep working on your core strengths, you will be able to go surfing someday’, or you’ll be able to go on that hike you always dreamed about.’ It’s about changing that goal into saying your goal is two minutes a plank and turning it into your goal is to go to Hawaii and learn how to serve. So much fun, right?

And even points out that sometimes deadlines can be motivating. I know the deadlines always kind of pile up in some people’s brains and stresses them out. But I know a lot of people who go on these fun runs. And the reason they do it is to raise money for the great cause that these fun runs help. But it’s also because it gives them this fun deadline. I want to get better at running, but I’m going to work my way into this fun run. And having these sorts of fun deadlines, not just deadlines, can make things also easier to achieve. He also cautions about making them again, too strict. He wants you to extend your deadlines. He wants to cut your goals in half. And he says “If something is easy, it can’t be worth doing. That is a classic perfectionist rule. If I can’t be successful in x many days, then it’s a failure. And these are things that we have to get away from doing instead of making these deadlines or these rules are these goals into something that is prohibitive, and ominous, and not fun and turning them into a fun thing.”

But he talks about how we sometimes secretly sabotage ourselves like these really harsh questions. Well, if I can’t pay off my bills in two years, then I’m just never going to get done. That’s not a thing. In fact, those are sabotaging your goals by having these rules that don’t make any sense that are made up and they’re not real. And so sometimes you might say why don’t have time for this. If I’m going to do this right, then I’m going to make it perfect. I can’t go to the gym every day, then this is not worth it. It’s one of those things that this negative self-talk that you tell yourself is just going to harm you reaching your goals. So, he talks about looking for these hiding places where you have these negative emotions stashed away that are hurting your overall goals. He talks about hiding these negative emotions away so that they spring up at us when we’re at a dark place.

He talks about having these secret rules that he mentioned this in an interview, where he said that there’s these secret rules that we don’t even know we have. And this is what he said “Anytime you’ve seen someone who can’t get out of their own way, and maybe it’s an employee, or somebody you manage and it’s like they’re right there at the finish line, they sink their own ship sabotage themselves.” A lot of us bring secret agreements and secret rules into the work we do in the middle of our bad times. But also, just as we’re about to get to the finish line. What this said to me, and I didn’t realize this for a long number of years is I struggled at times to get projects finished, I was really great at jumping out and getting a head start and doing this project. But somewhere almost like 70% of the way out, I would stall on the project. I wouldn’t know what to do. I get confused about it. I couldn’t understand why I was doing that. And what made me realize what I was doing is that I was creating some sort of perfectionist rule. If you finish a project, and it’s not as perfect as you thought it was. And maybe the people around you don’t appreciate it the way that you hoped that they would that’s on you. But if you never finish that project, if you find some stalling point, and find that it’s not worth doing, they can’t criticize your project, because you never finished it. And this sort of attack on your project from inside your brain is a way of preserving a perfectionism that exists somewhere deep inside, that maybe you didn’t even realize you had. If you would have asked me if I am a perfectionist? I say ‘No, I am not a perfectionist.’ I know people who are I’m not one of them. But then when I started to analyze about why I sabotage some of the very things I want to get done, it’s because I realize that I think it will never be good enough. There is a little perfection is living inside of me who’s trying to kill things off. And once you know that’s there, you will help to avoid that problem. So, one trick he talks about perfectionism is this, what if scenario, and he talks about it like, well, what if I write a book and nobody likes it? What if I write a book, and nobody wants to publish it? And you start doing these “What Ifs”, and that’s what I’m talking about. This project that is getting killed off by this. “What if”. What if I finished this project for my boss, and they hate it? What if I finished this project that I think will get me a promotion, and I don’t get it? And then you stop doing the project because it’s easier to live with the failure of never completing it than it is to live with the failure of the “What ifs”. 

He talks about, the best way to get over this type of perfectionism that is lying deep inside of you is through data. He brings up this example of this person who wanted to stop working so much at night and spending more time with their kids. Every time they would actually crack open their laptop and start working at home, ‘I’m a failure’. ‘I’m not doing this right’ ‘It’s not working well for me’. Once they started keeping track, they realized that they were able to increase the time with their child a lot. And these times when you’re working at home, we’re actually just a few short hours here and there. And so, while it’s not perfect, it’s pretty darn good. And so, data sometimes can help drive you out of that process. I know when I was struggling to lose weight, and I’m working out and doing all this exercises. I’m lifting weights, but the scale wasn’t reflecting it. You know, what was? The weightlifting! My ability to be able to lift heavy things in my house and clean my house without just getting tired was a success. There were other measures out there, like the size of the clothes I was wearing, that suddenly were able to break through. What I thought was a giant failure because one statistic was not reflective of it, but these other statistics were. Perfectionism can sometimes be defeated, just by keeping track.

The end of the book talks about just having some real honesty with yourself. If you can’t tackle why you’re not able to finish some of the projects you want to finish, then you might not really get to it. So, you have to be brutally honest about really what’s going on with you. You can have self-pity, and you can feel bad about not getting your goals and you can feel bad about certain things. But once you start digging in, just like I did when I realized I was not finishing projects, because I was afraid to finish projects. And I could really dig into what was I actually afraid of. And I had this fantastic boss at the time, where I admitted to him, I said, you know, sometimes I get involved in these projects, and I stall because I don’t know how to get this to be fantastic. Bring it up to the next level. It’s just easier for me to stop than it is to finish. And the fantastic thing he said to me was just come to me. We’ll work on that together. But if you don’t ever dig out exactly what’s going wrong with you, you can ever get to that point where maybe someone else can help you or that you can fix the problem that’s going on. When you think about criticism or you think about this lack of perfection you’re going to have in your project, that internal joy and satisfaction that you get will be so much better than maybe even the reviews will be he gets through those answers and finding those internal joys and satisfaction will help carry you through. And then getting to the real reason why you’re not finishing will help you break through those barriers and maybe, like my boss, get you some help

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2017/10/03/how-to-finish-what-you-started-according-to-jon-acuff/

Summary

1. Get away from perfection. Stop this, everything must be perfect, I must be perfect at everything and find the things that you must be very good at and get rid of those things. Or at least bring them down and saying, you know what, it’s okay, if I’m not perfect, or not very good at these other things,
2. Cut your goals in half or give yourself twice the amount of time to get them done.
3. Motivate yourself to have fun Make the goals fun. Make the end results fun and try to make the deadlines fun.
4. Remove any sorts of self-made nasty talk out of your head. And these destructive rules that you’ve made for yourself and secret and use data to help prove these ideas wrong. That you’re not failing and that you are actually doing this. Overcome these obstacles, these hidden rules through data, and then finish strong. Because when you finish strong and you crush a goal, that’s really hard for you to do. It’s going to be so encouraging to you. It’ll be enlightening to you; you will have so much self-satisfaction from just doing it. But not only that, it will make everything you do from that point on easier.

Challenge.

Look for a few ways in your life that you are demanding perfection from yourself and figure out how you can decide it’s okay to be imperfect, or potentially drop it all together. Try to get rid of some of this excess baggage in your life and become perfect at the things that matter and imperfect and almost everything else.

Now it’s time for our fun advice of the week. This comes from the movie Only Time from 2013.

“We’re all traveling through time together every day of our lives. All we can do is do our best to relish this remarkable ride.”

“Every artist was first an amateur. “Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Today we’re going to talk a little bit about passion versus talent and finding the things that you will be great at. And I think that even though the book that we’re going to talk about today talks primarily about career, I would challenge you to think about it when it comes to how you invest your fun time even.

Today, we’re going to talk about Cal Newport’s book. So Good They Can’t Ignore You; Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. This book was written in 2012. Cal Newport has strong opinions when it comes to work and what makes you successful in work. He talks about the example of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, loves Zen Buddhism, that was his passion in life. And Steve talked about doing what your passion was. But that’s not really what Steve did. Steve actually didn’t follow his passion. He followed what he was good at. That’s what really earned him his fame. Cal Newport finds that passion is not something that you follow. This phrase that “Do what you love. and the money follows” is not something that you should really believe in. And over the last I would say, feels like 20 years, people have been really pressed like you have follow your passions you have, find what you love and do that. If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. And while it’s true, in the end, it’s not exactly how you get to either finding passions in your hobbies, or passions in your career, it just doesn’t happen that way. Or at least it doesn’t happen very often. So, his first part is passion is rare and often times, passion comes by getting good at something. That a lot of us don’t really have a passion for anything until we become masters of what it is we’re good at and then we fall in love with it. The quote is, “Don’t do what you love. Learn to love what you do” by acquiring mastery, autonomy, and relatedness. And when you’ve mastered something, you will be more likely to be passionate about it.

Self-Determination Theory

He talks about a scientific theory called Self Determination Theory which has three basic factors in intrinsic or internal motivations, which will bring job satisfaction. And the three feelings are Autonomy, the feeling that you have control over what you do day-to-day. Competence, the feeling that you’re really good at what you do. And the third one is Relatedness being connected to other people. And those three things are intrinsic values, when it comes to job satisfaction. And really the idea that self-determination just means in psychological terms, that each person has the ability to make choices and manage their lives. That’s important to people. There was a quote, when it came to research about Self Determination Theory, which Dan Pink said, “It argues that we have three innate psychological needs, competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied. We’re motivated, productive and happy. When they are thwarted, our motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet. If there’s anything fundamental about our nature, it’s the capacity for interest, and some things facilitate it. And some things undermined it.”

Jobs, Careers and Callings

 A researcher named Amy Wrzesniewski, did a study of college administrative assistance, and found that there were three types of categories when discussing A job. Job a job pays the bills. Career, it’s a pathway to increasingly better jobs and fulfillment. And then there’s Calling which means that your work has now become part of your life and part of your identity and is really built into you. And those are sort of the three levels of jobs. And when she was doing this and investigating it, she actually found that time and mastery was more related to whether a person called what they did for a living a job, a career or calling.

And the book goes on later to talk about this passion mindset. And it revolves around what do I want. And that’s what we have been telling people for many years, you have to do what you want. You have to go seek your dreams. You have to go find your passion. And he talks another bit about this courage industry that is built around and if you just had enough courage to quit what you’re doing and reach out and go find the thing you love, you’ll be satisfied. And that’s what Cal Newport says is not true. That passion is not something that will actually bring you happiness in the end.

The Craftsman Mindset

But by contrast, he talks about the Craftsman mindset what value You can I bring to my job. And being a craftsman means that you’re always crafting your skills and you’re crafting your career. And he uses this quote from the comedian Steve Martin, “Be so good, they can’t ignore you.” And by focusing on being that good, that’s what’s going to bring you success and happiness. It’s not an either-or thing. It’s about being good at it and crafting it that will make you happy in the end. And when he talks about this idea of becoming a master at certain aspects of our job and crafting them, this is where it starts talking a little bit about the 10,000 hours of practice. But it’s not just practice, practice, practice, or taking classes or becoming better at the thing that you think will make you a master in your career. It’s about the right kind of challenge. Think about weightlifting, if you were to be someone who started out with no fitness at all, and you got yourself a five-pound weight. You worked out all the time with your five-pound weight eventually it becomes too light. And something my dad always told me doing when I became interested in chess, he said, “Always play with people who are better than you that will make you better” I think that’s really what Cal is getting at. And not just about practicing anything but is really going after those skills that are rare skills, that will make you just a notch above the rest. That’s the Craftsman mindset is focusing on becoming so good, they can’t ignore you with rare and valuable skills.

And just to give you an example of something that happened to me, I thought that there was someone at my work who was doing great. And she was she’s doing great at her job in my company. And I thought honestly, that’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking for more of her and I dedicated almost a year of my life to becoming her. But you realize that what happens is you just become a second rate her, instead of becoming a first rate you I worked, you know, hard to sort of emulate the skills that she was good at. And I tried to take on the mannerisms she was good at. And she was very different than me. And so, I don’t think that it really actually ever helped me. And then by some weird chance, we ended up traveling together. And we were at a situation that reached this critical point. And I had what I called my “Oprah Moment”, where I was able to pick up a microphone and challenge the team in front of me by pointing out all the things that they were good at, and all the skills that they had. And then the fact that that all they had to do was pull things together. And this would be just one of the most fantastic teams on the planet. And it was this chance for me to bring people together through public speaking. And after I got done, she said, “Wow, I could not have done that.” And it struck me that in all this time I was trying to be her and failing to take out the things that made me, me and honing those skills. And at that point, it really changed my career. Because that I started doing things to try to home the things that’s different about me and the things that I’m better at. And I think my career improved greatly, just by the fact that I started looking at what makes the best job possible. He also warns against scattershot. Trying to do everything and being good at all of them. Because he said that if you do not focus on a few key skills, you’ll just become scattered and your interests will be scattered, and you will develop only superficial skills. You’ll never reach the cutting edge of what’s possible.

Talent Supply and Demand

He talks later the book about supply and demand. We always think about supply and demand when it comes to goods. If you have a product at the grocery store and everybody wants that product, that price will go up. Or if you have something that nobody’s really interested in, that price comes down. Being in supply and demand means that skill that you should have, that just makes you so good. And if you get successful in something that everyone is really good at, it’s not going to provide you that standout career that you’re looking for. The way that you feel great about you and the way that will really launch your career or launch your hobby is to be great at something that not everyone is good at. And so really picking those valuable skills. Those things that you look around you and you say ‘I’m good at this. I don’t see a lot of people out there that are good at this.’ And when I think about how I’ve applied this to my personal life, I think about this podcast. I happen to think that podcasting came right in at me because I’m a public speaker. I read a ton of productivity books and listen to a ton of productivity podcasts. And I love explaining things to people. And so, for me it felt like this podcast was this convergence of all the things that I’m good at, but also the things that I’ve learned to become passionate about all built into the same thing. Podcasting is this convergence of being a geek and a ham.

Take the Promotion?

And he talks a little bit later about gaining self-determination in your job gaining that independence. And what’s interesting about it, he says, it’s this conundrum. That if you take a promotion, that moves you out of your competency, you may go into something you’re not good at. And you have to admit, you see that type of thing every day. Someone who was a great this, and suddenly, they became promoted to a manager. And they’re not that good. So, he talks about being a little bit wary about being promoted into something that isn’t hitting that key set of talents that you have crafted in your career.

Little Bets

And then the last point is that careers require us to take little bets, which is a little bit like having that experimental life, we talked about in previous podcasts. Using small, achievable tiny projects, to explore if it’s possible, that this next skill set is exactly what we’re looking for. And if we do that, that gives us a competitive edge, that allows us to become great at something and turn our skills and hone them through practice, challenges, stretching goals, and we become great at what we do. And he talks about taking these tiny steps in your career, these little bets and being a craftsman at our lives, will take us in unexpected turns, and will provide us options to bend our lives in a way that we are good at. But that we also eventually develop a passion for. It may not be what you expect it to be. But these little bets, these talent gathering methods all converge in a rare skill activity that we have passion for, we find fulfillment in and hopefully provides us with a great career, or a great activity outside of our jobs.

Let’s say a person wanted to be a programmer. So maybe they studied programming a little bit, and they get their first job inside of a company. And they found out they don’t really like being a programmer. It was not something maybe they’re particularly good at, no matter how hard they practice, they never seem to really get that much better at it. It just wasn’t the thing that they dreamed it was. However, as they start working in this company, they realize there’s technical documentation. There are business analysts who are great when they know technical things about software programming, but also the human needs of the product. Maybe once you get into this job, and once you start trying to gain your mastery, the job takes you in a different path than you expected. That’s why you’re really supposed to take these little bets. And as these little bet’s payoff, they start diverting you one direction or another. And maybe it’s not what you thought it was going to be, this whole path of mastery guides you into something unexpected. But it’s also about having skills and value in the things you do outside your work too. So, don’t just look at it as a work thing. Think about it as a life thing.

I do agree that passion comes from becoming great at something. I remember one of my bosses telling me, she goes, “Can you feel it right now? Can you feel that this is really what you’re meant to do? That you’ve really hit that thing that you’re great at.” But she felt it. I felt it. And that felt fantastic

Summary

1. Take a look at the self-determination rules, and figure out if you have motivation in your job or your hobbies, that make you feel like you have autonomy, make you feel like you’re competent and make you feel like you have a connection to other people try also to determine Do you have a job, a career or a calling? 

2. Try to figure out those key aspects of a job that would just make you that much better little tiny skill sets that would make you one of these special people that hold something inside of your job inside or your industry that would make you fantastic. Start to figure out time and a study process to hone those skills.

3. Develop the Craftsman mindset where you’re going to take your career or your hobby life and you’re going to finely hone it with specified stretch goals that are going to help you become so good they can’t ignore you.

4. Take little bets try to come up with little plans that can help you prove that not only are you good at this thing, but that it’s a skill that would be valuable to your career, or to your personal life.

Challenge

Try to list out three skills that would accelerate you to the next level, either in your career or your home life. That would just make you exceptional. And start coming up with a plan that will help you take yourself to the next step in at least one of those skills. What’s that one key thing that would just make you fantastic at what you do?

Fun Advice

You can be anything you want to be. Remember, the saddest thing in life is wasted talent. You could have a world of talent the world but if you don’t do the right thing, then nothing happens. But when you do, right, guess what? Good things happen.

This comes from the movie A Bronx Tale starring Robert De Niro. And he has to agree with them. That one of the saddest things in life is wasted talent but having that talent and putting it in the right place to do the right thing. And that’s amazing. That’s really where the magic happens. So, try to find where you can bring all of that together.

“You can’t be anything you want to be, but you can be a whole lot more of who you already are.” – Tom Rath.

In our lives, we tend to fall into things, or luck into things or desperately cling onto things. And many times, we don’t design the life that we’re looking for. Even though we see the results of what planning and design does for other things, we don’t take that on ourselves. And not only that, when we design our lives, we tend to design based on the goal, and not based on the realities of who we are. We’re going to talk a little bit about talent and designing your life. After reading a number of articles and books about this particular topic, it seems all of them fall into this line, where your happiness is an intersection of your values, and your talents. You’ve always seen those talent shows where people aren’t very talented at the thing they’re supposed to be talented at. Boy, they love what they’re doing! Or someone has a job in what they’re talented at, but it makes them miserable. I think we’ve all met people who are really good at their jobs, they hate it. What we’re trying to do is find that intersection of value and talent.

https://www.outsideonline.com/2373876/three-steps-happiness

Strength Finder 2.0

The first book we’ll talk about today is Strength Finders 2.0 from 2007 by Tom Rath. He worked for the Gallup company for 13 years and is author of this book that focuses on what you’re good at. It’s not one of these personality tests. But instead, it’s a list of talents. And then rank orders your talents are from best to worst. And they’re not even just things that you would find in a personality test. Like I’m an introvert or I’m an extrovert. It’s things like lifetime Learner, and Ideation, Connectedness, and Relators. There are all kinds of personalities that are built into this test. He also talks about what a waste of time it is, to really work on your weaknesses, I would that is partially true. You have to be at least minimally good at time management or minimally good at other things, even if you’re not particularly good at them. Because modern day life and work requires you to be at least okay in those things. But really, where you have to focus in your life are what your talents and strengths are. This book is called Strength Finders, 2.0. And you can find it everywhere you find books. The interesting thing is that if you buy the book, you get a code. And so, make sure that the book, either digital or physical, has the code to go online and take the test. The test will give you the top results, you can actually just buy the test from the website itself and it is five dollars cheaper, but you don’t have the book.

https://store.gallup.com/c/en-us/assessments

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

The next book we’ll talk about is a book from 2016 called Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. We’ve talked about very small motions when it comes to habits and goals. I hear a lot of people right now talking about this exploration of where their life is at or where their life could be at. There’s a lot of time for introspection right now. While there are small steps, in terms of experiment, and research, and looking at what makes you happy, it still is about major life changes. Which means the work is a little bit bigger than a lot of the different plans that we’ve talked about in the past. That doesn’t mean that you couldn’t take some of these ideas and try some of them. You don’t have to plan your entire life; you can just plan aspects of it. For example, if you think you might be interested in volunteering for a nonprofit organization and maybe you’d like to be on the board someday. Give it a shot. Try it. These are experiments. While the book itself talks about big life changes, they don’t have to be big. You can run very minor experiments in your own life. It’s time to really step out and really see what’s possible for us to do. Don’t be intimidated by the message of the big changes. If you are considering doing major life changes, such as living in a different place, or getting a different kind of job, I do suggest reading this book. It’s a very detailed book with lots of ideas and exercises. The exercises will help you in designing a full-blown life. I found the book really enjoyable and really enlightening. This book is about going after the things you really want to have in your life and not just falling into them or accidentally backing into them. This is a really great perspective to have through any aspect of your life. The book is a little bit focused on jobs. But this is important for all of your life, not just your work. He says that life is about, “playing the infinite game of becoming more and more yourself each day,” I’d say it’s never too late to start, and you should start right now.]

What Problem Are you Trying to Solve?

That’s what I think this book is really about, designing life where our talents meet our values. The first step in doing that is trying to figure out what problem you’re trying to solve. You’re here in your life for a particular reason. Maybe because you fell into it, or it’s a life that you tried to design. Maybe you’re happy with it, or maybe you’re not happy with it. But you decide that there’s some problems that you want to solve. And when you start identifying these problems. Sometimes we just give up, we get what is called “learned helplessness”, which is when we won’t even solve our problems anymore. Because we just determined that it’s just not worth it. ’I’m never going get what I want.’ He talks about two types of Gravity Problems. Gravity is not a problem and if you said that gravity is your problem, it wouldn’t work. Because gravity just is. You can’t stop gravity. The two types of gravity problems are Functionally Inactionable. Which means you could maybe change it. But there’s a high risk, high effort, and it probably won’t change. Best thing you can do at that point is to alter your goals into something that you can win. Then there is Totally Inactionable. And that means you can’t change it, no matter how hard you try. He gives us an example of maybe a poet who wants to earn a lot of money. But you know what, poetry doesn’t earn a lot of money, and he’s never going to make poetry earn a lot of money. That is a Gravity Problem. This is where he talks about changing your focus. Could that person who writes poetry, become a songwriter? Or get together with a graphic artist and start making posters? There might be something that this person could do that incorporates what they love to do, but actually earn them money. Get out of that gravity well and look at something that you could actually change!

Lifeview and Workview

The first part of his plan talks about reflecting on your life with two 250-word paragraphs and to spend no more than 30 minutes on them. The first paragraph is your “workview” philosophy. What is good work? What is satisfying work? Is it money? Is it impact? The second paragraph is the “lifeview”, which involves personal values. How a good life is lived, Is it religion? Morality? Justice? Society? what are those things that makes your life valuable? Now, the goal is to balance those two things. If you compromise one of those in favor of the other one, you will become unhappy. Find out where those two paragraphs intersect.

Good Time Journal and the AEIOU Method

He asked everyone to do what he calls a “Good Time Journal.” You’ve heard people probably talk about “joy” or “flow” or “peak experiences”. It’s those times when you’re having so much fun. Time just disappears. You don’t know where the day went.  That’s what you have to start documenting. He talks about also then documenting the things that drain you he talks about using a method that he calls the AIEOU method

• A – What were you actually doing?
• E – Environment? Where were you? What was the mood of the area?
• I – Interaction? Was it people that you were working with machines devices? Was it a formal setting? Was it a casual setting?
• O – Objects What were you actually working with? Were they devices? Or tools? Or things?
• U – Users who were you there with? Were they adding or subtracting to your flow? Why?

He also talks about running this kind of analysis with memories of our peak experiences or memories of our bad experiences. Memories stick with us for a reason. He asked us to do the good time journal daily or at least every few days for at least three weeks.

Then once you have a few ideas about what really gives you those flow moments or what really detracts from those flow moments, he asked people to generate lots of ideas about what would make our lives happier. He says don’t fall in love with that first idea. Our brains are lazy and it’s just going to fall for whatever we say the first thing is, or it’ll fall for the thing that seems like the least amount of work, come up with lots of things that will potentially make your life happier. Once we have those ideas, he asked us to look at creating prototypes of solutions to those ideas Test out the things that we think are going to be great ideas, or solutions for the problems we’re trying to solve. Ask questions, do research, collaborate with other people.

Feasible Other Lives

His next step is to create possible other lives. He wants you to look at creating three possible, five-year versions of yourself. Where could you be in five years, if things were just radically different based on what you documented are your values and what you documented are your problems that you’re trying to solve? And there’s no right answer to this. A few of them will be feasible, some of them will make you happy. Make sure they’re just not different versions of the same thing, or different versions of what you’re doing now. Present your plans to other people who know you and can give you good feedback. You then move on to having hands-on experiences. What could I do in exploring these feasible five-year plans? But the important thing is that these aren’t full-scale models. They’re just tiny examples of what your future feasible life could be. Try to get other people involved in your experience. Start conversations with others who are doing what you’re thinking about doing. Try to turn those into opportunities of learning. He calls it “sneaking up on the future”. You’re going towards the life you want, but not fully. So, one example he gave was of a woman who wanted to be in charge of a restaurant. She thought she just loved everything about restaurants. She quit everything, used your savings, and bought a restaurant. And as it turned out, she did not like owning a restaurant. She liked designing restaurants. She liked planning them out. But the actual day-to-day work was not something she enjoyed. She could have found that out by doing some minor experiments, like working in a restaurant, or interviewing people who work in restaurants. But because she jumped in without these experiments, it became hard for her to analyze this before it happened. And she just jumped right in.

Interview Key People

My friend’s father who I’ve mentioned before, always had this great idea where he talked about interviewing people. One of the exciting things about interviewing people is they love talking, particularly when it has to do with themselves. So, it’s very easy to ask someone for 30 minutes for a cup of coffee, or maybe a Zoom meeting just to talk over what their lives are like, or what their thoughts are about this kind of industry. People love to talk about themselves. Give it a shot! It sounds a little scary, but I can tell you it’s a valuable effort. I had this opportunity to do something very similar to that. I came in second place on a scholarship for actuarial science. And while I didn’t get the scholarship, the person who was in charge of the scholarship, liked my application. He invited me to come out to his company and spend half a day there and really learn about what it takes to be an actuarial scientist in an insurance company. So, I got two hours of his time, which was amazing.  I got to interview him about what he thought the job was like, what he thought the company was like working for. I had a lot of reason to believe I would love this job, because I’m a math girl. And I love anything that involves math. Except when I walked away from this interview period, I figured out that while I like math, I don’t like statistics about death and accidents. And I would become very depressed about a job like that. So, this interview process led me into a different path, and allowed me to see that this job potential wasn’t really for me. Think of an example where a person decides that they think they would enjoy owning a restaurant, but they’re not entirely sure. Or maybe they would give up their high-pressure job and work in a library. These experiments can happen by taking small part time jobs, or volunteer jobs and giving it a little experiment to see if it’s true. Would you like working in those scenarios? That’s what he means when he talks about running experiments. Test out aspects of these feasible lives.

You’ve come up with some ideas. You created this feasible life. You’ve interviewed and done some research about what these feasible lives will be. Now to look at the options, narrow down the list, really understand things. And deep dive into what you learned in this whole process of looking at your designed life. You can even start to live part of your reality if it’s possible. Again, you could volunteer at a library, work part time at a restaurant, and play out some of these scenarios.

Failure

And then he says, if we do get stuck in learned helplessness, don’t consider yourself what he says “screwed”. Instead, acknowledge that you’re stuck, and then reduce the risk and do a smaller prototype. But just remember, it can sometimes feel like a failure if things didn’t really work out the way you thought they were. But if you’re living a life of curiosity, and experiments, there is no such thing as failure. There is learning something and amending your plans. Or experiment passed and you have more things that you’ve learned and more experiments to run. But something didn’t go the way you thought it was going to go. Write it down, categorize it, and then look for insights. Sometimes there are screw ups where you just messed something up. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, and it has no bearing on the future. Or there’s weaknesses. That’s where you have to go in and look at it and say, ‘Maybe I could hire a business manager, or a third-party company that could take care of those things for me. So, I can focus on the part I love.’ Again, that analysis has to take place when you live that life of a curious person. Keep trying stuff and don’t postpone it. But we’re doing little experiments. There’s no reason why you couldn’t volunteer at a library next week or work part time at a restaurant after your day job right now. So, don’t put off these experiments. Just keep experimenting and looking at those things. And if you run into a problem, again, re-frame it a little bit, don’t just say, ‘Oh, well, I failed. This is over.’ But instead look at where you were coming from. What would be some other perspectives that other people might have about what went wrong? Maybe talk to someone who knows you very well to help identify what actually went wrong and what could be done to change it. But all of this is a real process, and an awareness for us to really understand what we wanted, and what went right what went wrong.

Once you design something, it will change your future, it is possible to change things just by designing it.

https://www.outsideonline.com/2373876/three-steps-happiness

Summary

1. Take an assessment of your strengths. Get feedback from other people about your strengths, you might be surprised!  But get really focused on what you’re good at where your talents are and then start strengthening those talents.
2. Know what problems you’re trying to solve in your life. Make sure that they are solvable, and that you’re taking a framework of it, that makes it possible to solve it. Make sure that you don’t have learned helplessness and just get defeated right away. Make sure you take a new look at what’s going on and coming up with the right problem to solve.
3. Identify those flow moments and peak moments and also really bad moments and analyze them with the AEIOU method.
4. List your values of work and home life. Are you getting the right money? Impact? Expression? Value? Where is it that your life values and your work values intersect?
5. Create three, five-year possible lives. Research them determine what would be the best life for you. Ask questions of experts or people in that field. interview people in that life and try out small experiments to see if you can prove that these would actually be good ideas for you.
6. Remember, you can’t fail when you live a life of curiosity and experiments. There’s always lessons to be learned whether they fail or succeed.

Challenge

Write two 250-word paragraphs about what your work view is and your life view. What are your values, your requirements, your satisfactions? What makes you happy? So, you know where your first options to design your life will come from?

Fun Advice Quote

Our fun advice is from Buckaroo Banzai “Don’t be mean. We don’t have to be mean. Cuz remember, no matter where you go there you are.”

And he’s right about that. You are where you are. And now’s the time to design where you’re going to be next.