Category Archives: Quick Thoughts

What is the Big Hurry

I just read a post by a fella who said since loosing his mother he’s been finding it harder and harder to connect with people with their challenges and goals and all that jazz. I can’t help but empathize.

I look at something like this clearcut and I ask myself: “What is the big hurry?”

I used to hike to the top of mountains with the peak in mind, and then hit the peak, slap that peak in the ass, turn around, and head right back down. This no longer makes sense to me really, as every step along the path are peaks of little miracles. Bugs, bark, blossoms… why is a view of a lake I just walked along ignoring to get to the peak better then stopping beside that lake to dip my toes in?

Of course, this is an analogy to life. Us humans have a tendency to nurture the scatter brain, the lizard brain, that encourages us to not be content with the moment, but instead be planning ten thousand things more. Sure ten thousand things are an exciting proposition, but there also exists ten thousand things in looking the person close to you in the eye and saying: “Hello, thank you,” with a smile.

What Employees are Doing Instead of Working

Leave a reply

It’s a little bit shocking – but totally understandable – to see how many people are actually not doing work at work. Of course this is nothing new, there has always been procrastinators, there have always been slackers, there will always be motivated people, there is always comfort zones.

How do you work?

What employees actually do while at work infographic

source: http://www.stopprocrastinatingapp.com/wasting-time-at-work/

Who Are We Speaking To?

Leave a reply

Who are you speaking to?

It is important to stress the benefits of identifying your target market. You’ve probably heard this time and time again with any business 101 book you’ve read.

But no matter what you’re doing; conversation, show business, marketing, exposure, proposals, shopping.. all of our life necessitates the importance of identifying who we are speaking to. Not only is it important to identify who we’re speaking to, it’s also important to think about who we would like to speak to. If we don’t know who we’re wanting to speak to, we can never know how to speak.

Social Media. The power of Facebook is that we’re assuming that we’re talking to our friends, like-minded people, people doing the same things as us. The power of Facebook is that many people believe in what you’re doing at the same time as we’re our own leads in a frame by frame super show, showcasing mostly only the good.

This means that kind of by proxy, Facebook identifies and targets your customers for you. This means that it’s never been more important to be aware of the image you’re presenting on any medium or site out there, because it’s in the sites best interest and you’re best interest to match you with like minded people!

The more advanced our algorithms get in computing, the more effective this matching will become.

The whole thing is a lot like engineering. You can engineer for good, or you can engineer for bad. What I mean is that it is important to be aware of what you’re doing. If you’re working on a nuclear bomb, don’t try and kid yourself about the moral implications. If you’re engineering a social profile, make your decision and go full beans.

If you know who you want to speak to, you know the tone and actions that will enable you to speak to the crowd you wish to speak to. If you don’t know who you want to speak to, speaking into thin air you will find quickly suffocating.

This is your tribe. Both who and how.

It’s important to identify who you’re speaking to, and who you want to speak to.

You’ll know when it’s aligned.

From Passion Projects to Stress Projects

Leave a reply

It will forever confuse me when a passion project is turned into a stress project.

(sidenote: shouldn’t all projects be passion projects?)

Yes, I understand that a lot of time has been poured into this project. Yes, I understand that the rest of life’s path is dictated by the outcome of this project. Yes, I know this is a passion. Yes, I also know somebody had to give birth to this baby.

I know it’s hard to let a project out of our hand, and delegate some tasks to others that have maybe more skill, knowledge, or experience in the necessary areas. But I also know that it does absolutely no good when we continue to grasp at that project like it’s a bag of falling beans.

Absolutely there are critical points in the next phase of this projects development that we should have input on, like the color scheme of a new book cover, or the photograph used in our bio or front page of new website.

However, when the we start telling the delegated (the SEO expert, the typist, the designer, the publisher, the artist, etc.) they’re not doing it right, it’s us who’s not doing it right.

Here’s an idea.

Delegate the stress.

Thank-God vs. Not That Way Clients

Leave a reply

Dealing with clients is a very tricky business, and I classify them into two main categories.

1. Thank-God Client: The client that worships you and your work, believes what you say, and appreciates all the work you do for them.

2. Not That Way Client: And then there’s the client who fights you ever step of the way, who knows how to do it better and demands you change everything to align with their superior knowledge.

One is a pleasure to work with and builds your self esteem greatly with spontaneous bouts of magic. The other frustrates you, leaves you pulling your hair wondering: “is this person for real?”, and will try and suck all of your time for relatively minute things.

Which type are you? Which type are you chasing?

Simplify Your Life, is it a Myth?

Leave a reply

Simplify. Simplify your life. Simply your product. Simplify your mind.

I am feeling overwhelmed with information on how to live a better life. And to compound this feeling, I’m feeling rather mis-aligned with this knowledge I now have. I’ve read the books, I’ve taken the notes, had the conversation, identified directions and milestones, but… I’m still not feeling aligned. Action is much louder than figments of my imagination.

This is a contradiction and a paradox of our modern [digital] life, and I really do want to strip down the barriers and align with the simplicity.

I think what gets me anxious is my sense of urgency, or simply put: my instant desire and my inability to accept change takes time. I am reminded daily by infographs or inspirational quotes that tell me it’s just a step away, that today is the day, that change happens now.

In all sincerity though, I believe this is a romantic idea of what a happy life really looks like. There’s something logical and calculated that I believe holds me back from immediately taking that step towards this romantic idea, and I think it’s this that becomes overwhelming.

Am I distracted? Perhaps it’s getting to that point.

I’m currently reading The Art of Happiness where the Dalai Lama puts it bluntly about his thoughts on romance. Now, this may just be because as a monk he’s sworn to celibacy, but he believe that the whole idea of romance isn’t healthy for a human to believe in as it leads us up to false ideals and misconceptions built upon commercialized concepts and unattainable, unrealistic lies we’ve been fed. One that plays on one of our most primal instinct as an animal in finding a life partner.

I’ve been thinking that perhaps the Dalai Lama is right, that the infomercials that look really nice and pretty that I’m trying to believe in are not really that attainable and it’s leading me straight down a path of disappointment.

Perhaps it’s this fact compounded with the fact that this path is never supposed to end, not dissimilar to the path to enlightenment.

What do you think? Are you also feeling overwhelmed?

Expressing Creativity

Leave a reply

Creativity. A catch all, fun to use word.

“Hey me too! I like to be creative.”

How do you do it? What gets it out?

I think a big problem in our hyper culture right now is that so many of us believe in creativity – believe in expression (which is an absolutely beautiful thing we do have the time and awareness to understand this) – but then flounder or deliberate when it comes down to shipping, to expressing creativity.

It is a hard thing to identify. I am sitting here right now reading and reading and reading one of the many brilliant articles coming into my inbox, thinking that I’m just staying on top of things. But am I? Or am I squandering my opportunities to really create?

I guess another beautiful thing about this hyper culture is that this power is our own, it’s our choice.

Igniting Passion

Leave a reply

Igniting passion is a very valuable skill to have. To be able to tap into this essence that seems to live in the ether but still very valid and so thick it’s almost tangible.

Regular monotony in a daily thought pattern to inspired passion

There’s a pattern to this though, there’s some secrets to regularly igniting this inspired passion to have it become more and more prominent as days go by.

How, you may ask? How do we take our regular monotony, our tedious schedule of daily life and turn it into a passionate and inspired life? The answer is simple: modify and carefully select your daily thought patterns.

Kim Anami calls it following your bliss. Seth Godin talks about the process. The truth is, it’s continual thought patters that are as dynamic as the changing weather seasons but just as reliably there.

I refer to this as awareness and commitment and intention. The Art of Manliness calls this concentration training. What do you call this?

The skill you need is simple: intention. Know why you’re doing what you’re doing. Know why you say what you’re saying. Know where it is that you want to get to, and how you plan to get there so that you can identify when you’re not following those plans to get there and you can re-map your path back onto that path.

Everybody has their own strategy to mapping this. Creating a personal mission statement, defining effective goals, slowing down, check lists… Perhaps you have some tips for me?

Accomplishment

Leave a reply

It feels good to do. Just do. To put in a good days of work getting further towards that plan. To itemize and destroy that list of hurtles getting on ones way.

As a human coming into adulthood and maturity, I am starting to realize that there is a difference between a) planning, deliberating, conceptualizing, developing, & shipping and b) thinking, talking, reading, believing, and getting distracted.

I understand how easy it is to get sidetracked with seeing what other people are up to on our favorite social networks – and the motivation they’re sharing with me. I understand how easy it is to find a good movie on and just feel comfortable with it. I understand how easy it is to get immersed in a good bit of fiction -or- non, and feel like it’s at least better than watching television.

But nothing feels like my own personal or collaborative accomplishment does.

True accomplishment, the kind of accomplishment where pride is found.

True accomplishment doesn’t necessarily come hand in hand with success, unless you consider success learning; when you’re pushing yourself to do things, to work, to deliver, you most certainly are going to take home a few lessons learned at the end of the day.

This is where pride is found. This is where contentment is found. This is where belief in oneself is found.

This thought came to me today as I sat here after designing and soldering a new circuit board prototype together. I have been deliberating and thinking and talking about it for so long, always finding excuses like not being able to afford to buy the parts (which is another mind hurdle I’ll leave for another discussion), or that I didn’t have my equipment here to do the work…

Though these may each be valid and hindering me from doing what I must do – budget considering – I want to point out that actually getting down to business, real business and executing… that’s the stuff that feels right and good and is usually just a different angle or viewpoint on the task. I’ve learned that this is the stuff that makes me believe believe in myself, this accomplishment.

Accomplishment. Yes, today I have truly and really taken one step closer to my dreams.

Thinking about this deeper, I think this might be where shoppers get the feeling of accomplishment. Something physical to show for a days work – funny as that may sound to some of us. I think this is also the euphoric bliss one gets after a bout of meditation or yoga. Not only is it a spiritual nurturing, but one comes out feeling like something meaningful and soul building was accomplished.

Whether you find that motivation to accomplish or not is your choice. It takes effort and patience and there are most certainly going to be things that get done and prove to be lessons learned, not successfully completed tasks.

In the end however, the only way I’ve ever found this feeling of satisfaction with myself, with accomplishment, is to actually get out there and do it, to have that moment in time afterwards where I sit and reflect upon what I’ve just done and tell myself: “I’m here, now I know.”