Three Guiding Principles for your Life and Career - Part 3

Find Your Passion

The happiest people are the ones that find their passion, the one thing that they enjoy doing above all else and they build a life around that passion.  Finding your passion provides you with a drive and a focus that is essential to achieving anything worthwhile in life.  So many of us simply drift into our roles in life,  instead of conscientiously sitting down and determining who we are and what we are about and where we want to go in life.  Life has a current of its own that will pull you to places you never expected.  So unless you know where you are going and can swim against the current to better direct yourself, you will wind up in a place that you never wanted to be.
In his book Law of Success, Napoleon Hill describes the need to find a passion and a direction in life, he titles this purpose as your 'Definite Chief Aim', it is the target that you should be shooting for constantly.  Before you set your 'Definite Chief Aim' you need to know something about yourself and that is what do you have a passion for? So many times people will pick a target and run towards it only to discover at the end that it was all for nothing.  Before you define you life target you need to decide who you are and what really gives you satisfaction.  Once you identify your passion you can then go on to build a 'Definite Chief Aim' around that passion.
If you do not work at your passion you will burn out.  You eventually find yourself at a point asking yourself the question immortalized by the Talking Heads in their song Once In A Lifetime, "Well I did I get here?", or even worse lamenting over lost time because you had been working at things that held no meaning to you.
God created everyone a specific purpose and we need to find that purpose and chase it with our entire being.

Dan Pink's Talk on Drive Animated

I came across this video and I think it is both fun and very informative.

Three Guiding Principles for Your Life and Career - Part 2

Find the Best Source of Opportunities Long Term

Long term is the key word here.  Life is a marathon not a sprint, and we should treat it as such.  Often we pick a course of action because of the short term gain.  I have usually looked for the short route and not the best route.  In my career I have chosen the paths that had the most immediate pay-out and did not seek the ones that would provide me with the greatest long-term benefits and enjoyments.
The old Aesop fable of the grasshopper and the ant illustrates this wonderfully.  We all know the story so I won't retell it, but the grasshopper chose the short term path, which held the most enjoyment for the moment, not the path for the best opportunities long term and so was left out in the cold when summer ended and winter came.
In our careers and personal lives we need to be looking down the road at the outcomes of any action that we under take.  The short pleasures and gains many times hurt us long term.  A great example of this is with diets, over eating and eating junk food gives us short term pleasures (I am starting to rethink this logic but that is for another post) but long term damage our bodies.  I recently lost 30lbs, I had to stick to a strict diet and had to give up many foods that I love which is anything fried.  But now I am reaping the rewards, I feel better and I look better.
When you are making a decision and apply this principle you should view the opportunity not only as what will bring in you the future but also will this opportunity come up again in the future.  Many times we are offered opportunities that are truly a once in a lifetime chance.  This doesn't mean that you should automatically take the opportunity but you should consider the fact that you will not have this chance again.
Use this principle to guide you daily life in a direction that you have chosen, by ignoring this principle you will make decisions that might be good for your immediate future but you will eventually find yourself in place you didn't intend nor want to be in.

Three Guiding Principles for your Life and Career - Part 1

I am constantly questioning the volume of information that we have flooding into our lives and vying for our attention and whether or not we really need to pay attention to any of it.  All the blogs, tweets, magazines, ads, e-zines and we could go on here for days.  But one of the exceptional pieces of information that is now available to us are the lectures and course materials from top universities, such as Open Courseware from MIT.  Stanford University has a lecture series online entitled Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar, you can find the podcasts on iTunes.  This lecture series brings in the top players in the technology startup field, where they share their experiences and ideas about technology and entrepreneurship.  If you are at all interested in business and entrepreneurship I highly recommend it. 

A recent comment from one of the speakers really struck me.  The speaker was Randy Komisar, an experienced leader in the technology field and author of the book Getting to Plan B.  What he said was that even though he had failed many times, he had only felt like a failure twice and that was when he didn't follow his three guiding principles.  His guiding principles were these:

1. Find the Best people in the world you can associate with and learn from them

2. Find the best source of opportunities long term.

3. Find something today, this moment, that engages your passion.

I found these points profound for a couple of reasons.  The first was what he prefaced these statements with and that was, he had only felt like a failure twice in his life.  Now like many people I feel like a failure often, more recently it has become a more profound struggle.  I have reached or am coming up on middle-age, whether or not I am there yet depends on how you define middle-age (personally I think 40 is the new 30 so I am a good ways off).  And as I look at some of my peers and their accomplishments mine accomplishments pale in comparison. So if I had something to keep me from feeling like a failure then I want to know what that something is.  The second reason that I find these three principles exceptional is that these statements encompass some basic truths that if you read a lot of success and business literature you will see these truths repeated time and again.

Find the Best People and Learn from Them

In this principle is a truth that goes back millennia, in fact you can find this truth in arguably the best piece of success literature ever written, the book of Proverbs.  The following verses echoes the sentiment of this principle

He who walks with wise men will be wise, But the companion of fools will suffer harm. Proverbs 13:20

and

Iron sharpens iron, So one man sharpens another. Proverbs 27:17

You are who you associate with, this can not be statement more emphatically.  Napoleon Hill took this principle to an even higher level with his Law of the Master Mind.  This idea is from his book The Law of Success.  The idea of the master mind is that people are connected and influence each other in ways that are not directly observed.  Hill put forth that you need to find people that are of like mind to help move you forward in life.  This is idea of association is important even in parenting, one of the greatest concerns that any parent has is who their child hangs around with.  And yet we do not exhibit that same level of judgement or effort when selecting our associates that we would want our children to exhibit.  Make an effort to look around you and strike up friendships with people that you would want to be most like, many of these people are more approachable than you might think and everyone loves to show off what they know.

The second part of the statement is "Learn from Them", being around brilliant and inspiring people is worthless if you do not listen to what they have to say and apply it to your life.  Many times this requires some humility and healthy self-image to allow your self to be quiet and listen to people and stop trying to impress them.  This is my issue many times,  I will get around brilliant people and will not be quiet long enough to listen to what they have to say.
In Part 2 I will break out the second guiding principle "Find the Best Source of Opportunities Long Term".

Get Over Yourself

Get over yourself you are not that big of a deal, you have no right to a good life, a well paying job, or even good health.   Life is not fair, yes that jerk deserves what he has just as much as you do and maybe even more so.  And no, your arbitrary expectations that you have placed on your boss, your spouse or your friends do not really matter to anyone or anything but to you and your insignificant little world.
Sounds harsh doesn't it.  It really isn't, the point is that we think that the world owes us more that it does.  We think we deserve things that we haven't earned, and sometimes worse we think we have a right to it.  Like some soul singing diva we cry out in our heads, 'Doesn't the world know who I am!?'.
Now let me be clear about something I am not going against a positive attitude nor am I saying that one should not try to improve themselves and the world around them.  We should all strive to improve our lot, and I truly believe that you can't know what you are capable of until you have tried, failed and repeated the process until you either quit or die.  Many times we think we deserve something by some imaginary birth right.  The problem is that instead of focusing on the work and situation in front of us we rail against the world because it hasn't delivered to us our just desserts.
The point here is that we should avoid getting hung up on what is fair or what is not and comparing our status to others and simply define our goals, identify where we need to start to achieve them and roll up our sleeves and start working.
This is a mental trap, and I think it manifests itself in a number of ways but when you boil it down to its core I am talking about envy.  Which apparently is such a big issue that God identified it as one of the Big Ten do's and don'ts.  Most of the time when we think about envy we think about desiring something that someone has, like a car or a house or a certain job.  But it also applies to situations where we think we deserve more of something.  The reason you think you deserve more is because you are comparing yourself to others around you.
Humility is a great attribute, you can be humble and confident. Humility is freeing from the stand point that if you are humble you no longer have to worry how you measure up or compare to anyone else. The problem with comparisons in this life is that our paths are as unique and varied as we are. You simply focus on being the best you that God created you to be.
So get over yourself and start being yourself.

Distractions

In today's world we are constantly inundated with information in one form or another.  Be it passive like television or interactive such as reading RSS feeds and blogs on the web, there are countless things vying for our attention.  It is no small wonder it is a struggle to focus on any one thing.  Distractions make procrastinating easy because we find something else to occupy our mind with little effort.
Sometimes these mental diversions occur without our intentions.  You sit down at the computer to do some work, and you think ‘I better check my e-mail before I start , somebody might have sent me something important’, you check your e-mail and you see an e-mail from Jim Bob, that makes you wonder if Joe Bob has posted a response to what you wrote on his wall on Facebook, then on Facebook you see that link from Bobbi Sue to the video on YouTube of the pug licking the glass, that makes you wonder what was the name of the pug in the movie ‘Men in Black’ and so you google that and that takes you to wikipedia and at this point it is all over because pugs lead to House of Orange which leads to Dutch Revolution then to painters and so on.  Four hours later you are well on your way of becoming a real life Cliff Clavin, still have not completed one important item on your to do list.
The solution is remove and or manage distractions by forming habits and using tools that help you avoid them.  The central key is to remove anything that may pull your attention away from the task at hand and create an environment where you can focus on the task that you need to accomplish.  There are count techniques on doing this.  This article is just one of countless and lists ten things to do to avoid distractions which I think are effective, if practiced.
But you really don't need ten or twenty or even five techniques to be less distracted, you need to apply one.  My personal favorite techique to aid in the fight against procrastination is time blocking (apparently this term is outdated because an article in FastCompany, but it fits and I like it). Many times the task at hand is so daunting that you simply won't start.  You can a technique called time blocking by deciding to only work on the task for a predefined period of time.  For example, you have to write a report, you know its going to take you hours and you avoiding starting.  Simply decide to work on it for thirty minutes and then take a five minute break.  I honestly think this is one of the best techniques for improving your focus when working on a task.

Now stop being distracted by my amazing prose and witty , pick something that you NEED to get done today and do it! 

Procrastination

Procrastination is probably the single worst habit that keeps us from our passions. There are countless articles, blogs and books published on the subject. And yet we still procrastinate, we wait until the last minute to do everything, from important tasks like starting that new exercise program to seemingly unimportant items such as getting up on time in the morning. Why would anyone allow such a bad habit to persist? There are two reasons in my case, fear and laziness.

Now I think that the motivation or the lack of motivation in fear and laziness are the same. You value the current state more than the perceived out come. For example, I know I do better on a sleep schedule of going to bed early (10 pm) and getting up early (5 am). I am more productive, refreshed, and energized on that schedule. Then why do I constantly slide back to a schedule where I stay awake until midnight or later and then sleep until the last possible second to get up? The simple answer is laziness or lack of discipline and that is correct, but to be more specific it is because at the moment it is time to get out of bed, my brain tells me that the warm bed I am lying is better than moving, or if I stay up late I can get a particular task accomplished (the irony is that the task never gets done and if I attempt to tackle the task I am not as affective).

When you do not do something out of fear the reason is similar. When there is something you are scared to do whether the feared outcome is real or perceived it is easier to stay put than to try and move forward. People, like water, will always follow the path of least resistance and fear keeps us from pushing to change our current path.

Brian Tracy wrote a book on overcoming procrastination called Eat That Frog!, which gets its name from the Mark Twain quote:

“If you eat a frog first thing in the morning, the rest of your day will be wonderful.”

Tracy’s advice in the first chapter is to identify the thing that you need to get done and that you are most worried about doing and do it first (I have only read the first chapter of the book, I haven’t gotten around to the finishing it, its bad when you procrastinate reading the book on overcoming procrastination).

My goal for the next couple of weeks, to overcome procrastination. My next couple of posts will be about procrastination and the techniques you can utilize to overcome it.

A Voice Whining In The Night

Yes another blog in the blogosphere! As if there wasn't enough noise in the Intertubes, I have gone and made it louder. But unlike most of the monkeys hacking at their keyboards, I really don't expect anyone to read this tripe. Except for maybe two people, my wife and my mother.
Then why am I adding to the noise? I want to write about stuff that interests me and things I am trying to accomplish on a personal level. And it is a lot more fun writing something when you pretend there is actually a readership. I have another blog at technacool.com but it is a technical blog, which currently needs updating, and doesn't afford me the enjoyment of rambling on about nothing. But I have other things I need to say to myself and that is what I am setting out to do, write what I want to write about and not care who is reading.
Now to explain what interests me and what am I trying to do. First the second part of that statement, I want to get over the mid-life crisis that I have been suffering from since I was 14 and actually do something that I am impressed with. So I will use this blog as a bit of therapy or better yet a personal thought organizer. You see, I have yet to reallydo anything to the best of my ability, meaning I have never looked back and thought, I did the best that I could, except for maybe the first half of the year 2000. And so I plan on changing that, I hope to use this blog to flesh out the ideas that I am trying to apply to my own life and maybe in the process inspire someone else.
And that brings me to the second reason for this blog. I love things related to productivity, self improvement, Christian living and other life hack subjects. I have read countless books on the subject by all the great authors of the space Napoleon Hill, Zig Ziglar, Stephen R. Covey, Andy Stanley, Denis Waitley, Rick Warren, even Larry Winget and Anthony Robbins. My problem is I have never really been able to make anything really stick.
Now that I have established all that it is time to start whining, constructively mind you but it is still whining.