ambitions

The Art of Showing Up

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Raptitude Experiment No. 8

I’m finally settled from my return to Canada, with a permanent apartment and a permanent job, so I feel ready to dig in and make some strides in the self-improvement department.

Self-improvement is about habit change, I know that now. But I have a poor track record for habit change. I have been ping-ponging between two different strategies, and neither has worked too well.

My old strategy was to summon all my enthusiasm, pick a day and try to change everything at once: begin exercising, meditating, staying organized, and practicing guitar every day. Usually I start this on a Monday and it lasts till about Tuesday.

It’s too much. There is too much of a sudden schedule adjustment, and the habits have a tendency to get in each other’s way. Any new habit makes ripples in your life that you can’t really predict until you’re doing it.

For example, if you’re in the new habit of working out with kettlebells after work, when you sit down to play guitar you may notice your hands are sore and tense, your mind is a bit dull, and it’s just not conducive to playing guitar. Your practice is an uninspiring one, and it’s getting late anyway, so you don’t do the next thing right either, if you get to it at all. Getting even the first day right is hard when you take on multiple new habits.

Many people suggest never trying to change more than one habit at a time. My problem with this is always the same: I have some initial success and then I can’t help but think about other habits I could be forming. I want to ride the momentum. If there are five or six habits I want to form, and I’m not allowing myself to begin on the second until I’m 30 days into the first, that means I can’t even touch some of those habits until I’m five or six months down the road, and that assumes that I’m successful in my first attempts.

I don’t know about you, but when I want to make a change, I don’t want to put my inspiration on hold for six months. In my life it seems I am either comfortable and complacent, or I want to make a dramatic change (a revolution!) in how I spend my time. Right now I want to make several changes at once, and I’m determined to find a way.

The Plan

I have a suspicion, and I’m going to test it out.   Read More

by David on September 13, 2010
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Insight Is Not Enough

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candle flame

Recently I hinted at a huge goal I’m working on. It’s been on my mind for a few years now, but two weeks ago it graduated from wishy-washy “dream” status to concrete “goal” status.

In previous articles, I’ve made clear what I think about supporting myself by working for an employer. Having been at the mercy of the fickle and disorganized kiwifruit industry for my income for two months, I’m remembering how strongly I yearn to be free of arrangements where somebody else decides when I work and don’t work, how much money I can make, and what I can wear, say, or do at work. I no longer want to have sell my weekdays to somebody else’s purpose.

By my 31st birthday, I will be completely self-employed. That’s less than 18 months from today. Mark it on your calendar: I will cease to be an employee by October 8, 2011, and I will never get a job again.

I know I can do it a lot sooner than that, but 18 months will give me the option of maintaining a more-than-decent lifestyle in the mean time. I always knew I wanted this, but I did not actually believe it was within reach until a recent insight made it clear that I can pull it off in a relatively short time-frame. I’ll explain what that insight is below.

Now, I have made similar “Okay things will change from this day forth” resolutions before. Typically, I come up with a thrilling new project, and enthusiasm mushrooms until it has crowded out all my other concerns of the moment — like that afternoon I became infatuated with the idea of tracing my family tree. I dropped everything I was doing and lost myself in dozens of blogs and articles about genealogy. By 8pm I was quite over it, content again to sit on it for a few years. But at 4pm it still felt like I was turning a giant page in life, undertaking this huge, rewarding project.

That same jilted-project pattern should have happened with this blog, too. I could have just as easily devoured Problogger articles for a few days, registered a domain name and written half an article, only to drop it all and start something else when the initial excitement faded.

That “honeymoon period” for new projects always fades. You need something to keep it moving after that. Willpower might work for a while, but it’s not sustainable either. Read More

by David on April 27, 2010
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Where Does The Time Go? — Experiment No. 6

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hourglass

You are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun

~Pink Floyd, “Time”

Something big is brewing. Life has been telegraphing this particular development for a while now, but last week I was smacked with a stroke of clarity about it, and now it is happening.

I am undertaking a massive goal. It’s the biggest goal I’ve ever had. I have no doubts I will complete it, on time, and that it will change my life dramatically. I’ll save the details of it for an upcoming post, because the whole thing hinges on my ability to overcome one of my lifelong weaknesses. This experiment is the first step towards my huge goal.

You may have noticed a conspicuous absence of posts about personal productivity here on Raptitude. I do write about how to improve your quality of life in all sorts of ways, but I am no authority on getting things done in a timely manner. There are 14 posts in the archives tagged with the topic “Productivity” but they are only peripherally related.

When it comes to personal productivity, I blow. I have had so much spare time this last three weeks that I could have written twenty articles and a book of limericks, but I was able to squander nearly all that time, and just get my bare-bones tasks done. This latest mismanaged stretch of free time is typical.

I am not lazy. That isn’t the problem. I never sleep in, I don’t watch TV, I don’t play video games, I don’t get horizontal on couches. I love doing. I have loads of exciting projects ready to go, and I want to work on them. But I am highly conditioned to get very little purposeful work done. The fact that this website even exists is a small miracle. My inefficiency is so consistent it’s almost comical. Read More

by David on April 19, 2010
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A Thought From My Hero

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the path

A political victory, a rise in rents, the recovery of your sick, or return of your absent friend, or some other quite external event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “Self-Reliance”

It seems to me that circumstances, when they are agreeable, make it feel like we’re on the right path. Everything looks good and there seems to be no reason to make adjustments. Needs are hard to notice while they’re being met.

When circumstances go awry, we look for what we’re missing.

Maybe agreeable circumstances can be found, much of the time, along the wrong path too.

So maybe agreeability and ease are not such good signposts for finding the right path.

The path we’re on, then, isn’t what we do, or where we are. It’s why we do what we do, and how we got where we are.

Our principles define the path that’s right for us. We don’t choose them, we uncover them.

If we aren’t living up to our principles we are wandering off the path, even if circumstances still feel quite agreeable, for the moment.

When circumstances become disagreeable, clear principles will illuminate the right path. If better days happen to arrive on their own accord, they may only make you forget to look for it.

What do you think?

Photo by David Cain

by David on March 11, 2010
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3 Pieces of Advice I’d Give My 18 Year-Old Self If I Could

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Lockers

Once upon a time…

At 3:45pm Friday afternoon, the corner of Fermor and St Mary’s was a busy place. The intersection is dominated by Glenlawn Collegiate, a brown brick complex that happens to be my alma mater. It’s one of the division’s two high schools, virtually unchanged in the eleven years since I graduated except for the addition of red LEDs on the sign outside.

I happened to be passing by right at that time for no particular reason.

The teenagers in the giddy mob at the bus stop looked a lot younger than I remember being in high school. At the time I figured seventeen was about a year away from being a proper adult, but these kids were definitely children. Loud and aimless. Maybe we were too.

The number fourteen and the number fifty-five rolled in one behind the other, brakes whining, and most of the mob funneled in. When the light changed, both buses pulled away, and that’s when I spotted him.

His identity didn’t register for a moment, but his hurried, self-conscious gait appeared so shockingly familiar to me that I froze. He was wearing grey, baggy cargo pants with ragged bottoms and a drab green t-shirt that was too big for him. His hair was a half-messed mop of gel-hardened spikes.

He was walking towards me, looking over at the departing buses, and we almost collided. When he caught my bewildered stare, I realized who he was.

It was me. At eighteen.

He was stunned too, but clearly knew who I was. Suddenly I felt a lot older than my twenty-nine years. Knowing him, I knew I would have to take the initiative here. I recovered, and smiled. He didn’t.

“You missed the fourteen.”

“Yeah I know.”

“We’ve got twenty minutes or so till the next one. We should talk,” I said, hopeful.

“Sure.”

***

Imagine if you had a golden opportunity to talk to your eighteen year-old self. Read More

by David on February 11, 2010
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Forget About World Peace

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world peace

Despite the earnest efforts of sixty years of Miss USA contestants, world peace has not arrived on our doorstep. The UN has not managed it, nor did John Lennon or Oprah or The Secret. Religion sure made a mess of the effort altogether, and I don’t hold high hopes for China to pull it off, despite their latest efforts.

Something tells me it’s not coming at all.

If that’s true, could we live with that?

I say let’s forget the idea of world peace. Let’s admit it will never happen and get on with our lives the best we can. It is naive to think that progressive government policy, awareness campaigns, and heartfelt pleading will bring about this holy grail of achievements, and that is because human beings are not capable of world peace. There, I said it.

Let’s get real here. Humanity will never co-operate. It’s far too big and varied for that; there is no way to even communicate amongst the whole populace, let alone get everyone on the same page at the same time. Just trying to get eight people on the same page to organize a camping trip is trouble enough for most.

The vast majority of us really have to work at keeping ourselves in a stable, pleasant mood, so why do we concern ourselves with a task that is so utterly beyond us? If we think we can engineer a change in the philosophy of billions of people we’ve never met, yet most of us cannot even manage to fulfill our New Year’s resolutions, we’re kidding ourselves big time. Read More

by David on January 28, 2010
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Nineteen Days Left of Life as I Know It

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Winnipeg

Today is the first of the nineteen days I have left, before the life I know is over.

I know it sounds a bit dramatic to identify this upcoming lengthy trip as a new life, but the way I see it the life I’m leaving here is not going to exist when I get back.

If you think about what defines a person’s experience in life, you’ll find it consists mostly of variables. Take the same person, but give them a different job, different routines, different social network and different outlook, and you end up with a different life. The personality at the center of it might stay more or less the same, but it too is evolving. Under different circumstances, certain parts of it will become more active, and other parts more dormant.

For example, if I’m going to be wandering foreign countries alone, my social skillset will need to be more active, and will gradually form a more prominent part of my personality. It’s adaptation, it just happens. The more unfamiliar the environment, the more one naturally adapts.

Just the same, if I find a different line of work, my math and engineering muscles will atrophy and weaken. Woe is me.  Read More

by David on September 28, 2009
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What’s Your Problem? And Why?

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rain

A recurring theme in Raptitude is that why is a more useful question than what. Why is the mother of all whats, and tells a much more meaningful story.

A 600-foot triangular stack of stones sitting in the Egyptian desert for five thousand years is notable, but it’s the mystery of why someone was compelled to build such a thing that makes it so intriguing. If we only look at events and things, and judge them as if they were isolated entities, we can’t possibly understand them. Everything is both a cause and an effect, so there is no way of knowing what something is if you never look at why it is.

So if that isolated entity is something in your life that you want to change, such as a personal weakness or a lingering dilemma, your efforts to solve it may seem to be in vain. Your plan, at a glance, makes sense, but the problem keeps coming back. Try as you might, ten years later you still haven’t lost the weight, found a better career, or learned to play piano.

Contemporary self-improvement material seems to be concerned simply with what you should do:

To be more productive, start doing this.

To lose weight, eat this and don’t eat that.

An isolated tweak to one troublesome part of a person’s behavior can’t possibly address why they do it. There is a whole lifetime of momentum behind a person’s habits. To change the trajectory of something with as much inertia as an adult human life, we really have to understand the forces that put it into motion in the first place.  Read More

by David on September 17, 2009
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The List

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As promised, here is what I plan to do before I die. This list is now a permanent addition to Raptitude.com, and the most up-to-date version can be found by clicking “The List” tab on the top of any page.

If you want to make your own list, here is the comprehensive guide to making one that you will honor.

A few notes:

You’ll notice my list is very travel-heavy. One of my major goals in life is to achieve a location-independent income, which will allow me to move around the globe without the constraint of limited vacation days. Without the intention to live this kind of lifestyle, my list would not be realistic to me and I’d probably soon forget about it. I have tried to eliminate redundancies, but some are inevitable. I want to see the Louvre and tour Paris, but it is unlikely I’ll do one and not the other. Still, both are important and I don’t want to leave either off my list. The list is not complete. I cannot be sure I’ve thought of everything that deserves to be on it, but this is a pretty good start.

Here goes.   Read More

by David on September 10, 2009
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How to Make a Life List You’ll Actually Do: A Comprehensive Guide

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surfing at sunset

There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way. ~ Christopher Morley

The principle of the life list is simple. You list all the things you want to do in life, and cross them off as you do them. Try to do them all before you die.

It’s easy and fun to make one, but to create a list of dreams that will actually come true is not quite as simple as merely writing down what you want.

You may have made a life list before. Where is it now? Probably in a landfill, like most life lists. It’s too easy to let life get in the way. You get busy, tied up with more immediate concerns, and your dreams become less and less relevant to your actual life.

But not everyone’s list gets abandoned. John Goddard is known best for living out the ambitious life list he made at age fifteen.

Even though it includes many difficult and humongous items (for example, number 113 is “Become proficient in the use of a plane, motorcycle, tractor, surfboard, rifle, pistol, canoe, microscope, football, basketball, bow and arrow, lariat and boomerang,”) as of today he’s checked off 111 of his 127 goals, and some are partially complete.

Why did that 15 year-old boy’s list go on to define a lifetime of achievement and adventure, while most life lists are eventually forsaken?

Because he really meant it.   Read More

by David on September 7, 2009
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