34 posts from June 2008

There are a lot of moving parts in my life at the moment, I just need to get them down on paper so that I can make sure they're balanced.

Work at the Robot Co-op.  I've been there for about 4 years, we went from scrappy beginners to building a successful and profitable network of many social networking sites.  I work with friends.  We work 4 days a week, and work on a product about achieving your life goals.  It definitely makes achieving life goals easier when you are thinking about it every day.

Work at McLeod.  It's been around for a little longer than 1.5 years, and has continued to evolve during that entire time.  I'm still just as focused on making it a home for extraordinary living through art, technology, and collaboration as I was when it started. 

Becoming healthier.  Drinking less, doing slow weights once or twice a week, running with my Nike+ once a week, bike riding, and just thinking about health for the year of 2008 has gone a long way to living a healthier life. 

Getting married to the one I love.  Kellianne is the best teammate I could ever have hoped for.  She gets excited about the things that excite me, and I am excited about the things that excite her.  Together, we're stronger than when we're apart.  We're getting married on October 4th, and I think I just finished the wedding website but it won't really be launched for a couple more weeks.

Balancing friends and the social life.  I feel like I have great friends.  People who want the best for me, and people that I want the best for.  I made a book of friends to help remind me of the importance of long-term friendships, as well as new blossoming friendships. 

Continuing education.  In my continued self-education, I've been exploring a lot of self-helpy-like books over the last few years.  The recent focus has been on emotions.  In quick succession I've read Emotions Revealed, Mastery, and currently What Every Body Is Saying.  They are really exciting and I'm learning a lot about how emotions, body language, calmness, focus, habits, patience, and expression are all tied together.  I just bought Mastery for each of my groomsmen, as required reading material.  It's a great book.

In between the rest of life's events, I've been learning a lot about running a business, about managing personalities, about accepting people for who they are, about respecting people, about the law, about getting things done, about making it up and making it happen, about branding, about financial responsibility, about enjoyment, about the plateau and the dip, about rewards in themselves, about persistence, about self-medication, about sincerity and authenticity, about living a well-balanced life, and about finding work that one loves.

A lot happening in life this year, all moving ahead.  I am going towards it, and living it is the reward in itself.

I've been thinking about this sentence a lot the last couple weeks.  My father always told me to find work that I love, and my best friend's dad always told me to find work that pays well.  My best friend and I had a bit of a rivalry based on this dichotomy... love versus material success.  Both of our fathers were computer programmers, both successful in their fields, but with completely different reason philosophies.  In the end, I ended up wanting to be an artist and my friend ended up going to law school, so it plays itself out in a pretty cliched fashion.  Except then I joined the tech world when I realized I didn't like the self-promotional aspects of being a writer. 

Tangentially, another thing that my father used to always get on my case about was the difference between the meaning of "hard" versus "difficult".  "Surfaces are hard, work is difficult."  Haha.  So when I start thinking about hard work, I can't help but hear the nagging voice of "surfaces are hard" and feel pressure to call it difficult work instead.

The concept of difficult work has been on my mind because I've lately been feeling burned out on some difficult work in my life, and I'm trying to rally back to the point where difficult work invigorates rather than punishes.  Difficult work needs to be framed in enjoyment.  The work must be done out of love and enjoyment, rather than necessity or force.  It can be the same work in both cases, but done for different reasons. 

What is difficult work?

A) Work that hurts.
B) Work you don't want to do.
C) Work that you don't know how to do.

I just found this article ("Eureka! It really takes years of hard work") that mentions an acquaintence of mine, Scott Berkun, and his book that I interviewed a tiny bit for, "Myths of Innovation".  Debunking the idea that innovation comes in a brilliant moment of inspiration, thousands of get rich/thin/powerful/smart quick books quiver in their boots.  But, luckily for them, difficult work doesn't sell.

Difficult work means that a book isn't going to solve your problem, therefore why buy a book to try to learn this?  But I wonder if there are any good resources out there that generalize the anatomy of what good work is... a discovery process that leads to a learning process that leads to an action process that cycles back to more discovery, learning, and action processes.  In the meantime the ability to focus, notice distraction, and re-focus becomes essential.  Also, a reward and cost balance must be negotiated... you have to know why you're doing something, and know what it will cost to do it, and have resources to take on the unknown factors that will become apparent as the processes proceed.  Flow needs to be achieved.

The symptoms of true flow are outlined in the book, Flow, which is essential reading for pretty much everyone.  Here's the list, taken from the Flow wikipedia page.

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities).
2. Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time, one's subjective experience of time is altered.
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

Not all of these symptoms are necessary for an experience to enter the flow state, but they're all present sometimes.

Another way of saying it might be to find work that requires you to pay a lot of attention to it.  And, that work, on some level, must be a reward in itself.  A learning experience, a growing experience, something that makes you feel like you belong in the universe.   An experience that becomes richer and richer as you dive into it.

Where to start?

A good place to start is at the discovery phase.  The task of finding difficult work that you enjoy is in itself a potential candidate for the difficult work.  Finding difficult work that you enjoy is in itself difficult.  So, the discovery process of understanding what you enjoy and why, what you love and why, could be the first piece of difficult work.

What is difficult in your life and do you enjoy it?  I know that we can't always admit publicly when there's work we don't enjoy, so you don't have to admit that stuff publicly.  But privately, admit what work you don't enjoy and set out on a task of finding out what you do enjoy.

12, 12, 10, 7, 16.  This is the first time I did them in the morning.  Not really feeling stronger than last week, but maybe my expectations are just going up.  I'm also trying to use better form each time, slowing down a little, and not letting the turn-around at the bottom be lazy.

Kellianne bought a bike yesterday, with a basket and a bell.  Today we'll go on a test drive through Myrtle Edwards Park, assuming my bike still works.  Health is in the air, apparently.

the largest dump on earth

http://www.momgogreen.com/2007/03/lar...

A juvenile albatross amid plastic debris that has washed up at Midway Atoll. East of midway and the Hawaiian Islands is what is perhaps the world's largest garbage dump: a floating, rotating patch of trash-laden water about twice the size of Texas. (photo by rick loomis for LA times)

There's a swirling mass of plastic debri the size of Texas in the middle of the ocean between San Francisco and Hawaii.  It's where all the currents come together.  I wish there was a picture of it from space or something.  Very disturbing, in any case.

Put the mind on the object.

Periodic placement. Staying on the object for short periods of time.

Withdrawal and resetting. Ability to go back to the object.

Staying close. Don't lose the object in forgetfulness. Laxity and excitement.

Disciplining the mind. Medatative stabililty.

Pacifying the mind. Introspection fully developed. Danger of subtle excitement.

Thorough pacification of the mind. No longer concerned about laxity and excitement.

Making the mind one-pointed.

Mind placed in equipoise. Mind places itself on the object effortlessly.

We're all neurotic in our own way.  I think of the collection of all of our emotional triggers, especially the ones we don't like, as our neurotic handbag.  We carry it around with us all the time, and depending on our daily path, different events cause a series of emotional triggers to hop out of the bag like Mexican jumping beans.  We trip and stumble over them, and realize that they are out of control and need to be managed.

We'd rather keep all of our emotional triggers in the bag rather than jumping around, so over time we've developed a number of treatments that neutralize, cover up, or distract the emotional triggers.  These are the self-medications.

If you take our neurotic handbag full of emotional triggers and our catalog of self-medicating treatments for those triggers, you've got our unique personality.  Our set of biases, tastes, preferences, likes and dislikes. 

Emotional triggers are habitual ways of responding to things that happen to us (usually something that obstructs us from a goal or intention).  Self-medication is our attempt to learn how to control our emotional triggers, and resulting moods, with actions like drinking, eating, shopping, exercising, etc.  The  whole package is our neurosis.  Yay for neuroses.