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Goals

Dying for a Good Time

January 8, 2010

This is the third time I have sat down to write this post. I keep delet­ing it.

I watched a doc­u­men­tary this week in Swe­den and I can’t put it out of my head. It was about a group of moun­tain climbers attempt­ing to sum­mit the sec­ond high­est moun­tain after Ever­est (K2). I’m not going to ruin the story for you, but the doc­u­men­tary is called “Dis­as­ter on K2.” It didn’t go well.

Watch­ing this made me angry.

A lot of peo­ple (maybe most peo­ple?) say they would never sky­dive because it’s too dan­ger­ous. And yet, the casu­alty rate of sky dives is 0.001%. 1 death every 100,000 jumps. Climbing K2 is another level of risk entirely, 25% of those who climb K2 die. (Ever­est has a casu­alty rate of 9%). I just can’t under­stand an adult being pre­pared to risk so much to get to the top of a stu­pid mountain.

So, what is wrong with moun­tain climbers?! (There are those who cheer on all kinds of risk-taking, like Chris Guille­beau, but I’m not one of them).

Adven­ture hol­i­days have increased in pop­u­lar­ity by 17% in recent years.  So there is a trend here. Maybe we crave dan­ger the more we get the rest of our lives in order. Maybe we want to feel all-powerful. We want to be fearless. What both­ers me is that the climbers who died in this doc­u­men­tary were smart peo­ple. They weren’t kids. They had expe­ri­enced suc­cess in their lives. They should have known better.

This goes back to my the­ory that goals can ruin your life.  We don’t know our lim­its.

David Zald, at Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chol­ogy at Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­sity, believes the rea­son is dopamine. “There appear to be fewer dopamine-inhibiting recep­tors,” he says, “— mean­ing that dare­dev­ils’ brains are more sat­u­rated with the chem­i­cal, pre­dis­pos­ing them to keep tak­ing risks and chas­ing the next high” (Source).

So there you have it, folks. Clear as day. Mountain-climbing is a men­tal problem.

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The right way to write a resolution

December 26, 2009

Who does res­o­lu­tions any­more? We are all sophis­ti­cated and smart enough to know we can­not be fooled. Not again. (If you’ve ever pur­chased a 12-month gym mem­ber­ship, you know what I’m talk­ing about.) We’re wise to our own ways.

Just trust me for a moment and I’ll show you that res­o­lu­tions can actu­ally work. This process can be enjoy­able; it can be pain­less and if you fol­low these sim­ple steps you’ll soon be push­ing your credit card over the counter at another fit­ness centre.

Here are the steps I’ve fol­lowed since I was 19 and they’ve always worked pretty well for me.

Step 1

Start nice. Rather than jump­ing right into it and beat­ing your­self up about that tubby waist­line of yours, we’re going to come at this from a dif­fer­ent direc­tion entirely. Let’s start with a fond look back over the past year. Ask your­self some nice ques­tions. Has this been a good year? What was the best thing about this year? What am I so glad I did? Is it kind of sur­pris­ing how much I was able to do in just one year?

Start­ing smooth like this is the most impor­tant step in the whole process. You’ve worked hard this year. You deserve a lit­tle appre­cia­tive self-talk. This will also remind us how good our lives really are, which makes us happy. And, it’s giv­ing us valu­able insight into what makes a good year, for us.

If this hasn’t been the best year, think of the best times you’ve had in your life in general.

Flora quote

Step 2

While your brain is in this happy place, notice what you’re really happy about. What kinds of thing do you really appre­ci­ate? Again, what is a good year for you?

If it helps, a good year for me involves some­how grow­ing closer to my fam­ily and friends. It involves learn­ing and shar­ing mean­ing, and try­ing to be gen­er­ous –to build my com­mu­nity. This is how I think of a good year.

Step 3

If you haven’t already writ­ten some­thing down, now’s the time. Instead of writ­ing a big to do list, try writ­ing down a cou­ple of tips for how to live a good year. Some lessons learned.

Daphne at Joy­ful Days has taken this a step fur­ther and writ­ten her own per­sonal creed: Think deeply. Speak gen­tly. Love much. Laugh a lot. Work hard. Give freely. And be kind.

Gretchen at the Hap­pi­ness Project has writ­ten down her per­sonal com­mand­ments: Be Gretchen. Let it go. Act the way I want to feel. Do it now. Be polite and be fair. Enjoy the process. Spend out (by which she means to stop hoard­ing and to ‘trust in abun­dance’). Iden­tify the prob­lem. Lighten up. Do what ought to be done. No cal­cu­la­tion. There is only love.

My creed is hid­den in Step Two.

Step 4

If this isn’t enough for you and you want to write some REAL res­o­lu­tions, then now is the time for that. Go ahead and write them.

My advice, as always, is: “Be good to your­self” Is, what you writ­ing down on paper, what you REALLY want to do, or just what you think you will want to HAVE DONE. Make your gains as pain­less as possible.

Step 5

Have you for­got­ten some­thing? Briefly think through the major areas of your life: hap­pi­ness, health, finances, rela­tion­ships and lifestyle. Are there any cor­rec­tions you should make?  (I.e. should you start sav­ing for retirement?)

And there you have it.

Step 6 (read only in case of failure):

If you’re back to your naughty ways again by Feb­ru­ary, don’t worry too much. (I know this doesn’t apply to you, but it might help the other guy read­ing this. Any­way, I told you only to read this part in case of fail­ure). There is a rea­son we do this every year.

If you’ve done Steps 1 to 5 and you’re sure your goals and/or creed are right for you, then yours is a moti­va­tion prob­lem. Step 6 is here to help.

Lack of moti­va­tion means either you don’t have a clear pic­ture of what you want or you don’t have a clear pic­ture of the con­se­quences of fail­ure. We’ll fix this with two more activities:

Pos­i­tive moti­va­tion:

Develop a clear pic­ture of the better-future, when you’ve reached your goal. You’re pub­lished author and you can hand out your own book as a Christ­mas present next year, look­ing jus­ti­fi­able proud of what a genius you are.

Neg­a­tive motivation:

Now focus on the worse-future if you don’t meet your goal. You feel like a com­plete fail­ure, in writ­ing as in every­thing. You are not the per­son you thought you were after all. You are unwor­thy of love. This is manip­u­la­tive, but it’s okay because you are the one manip­u­lat­ing your­self. You are only doing this to help.

Now you should under­stand why your res­o­lu­tions are impor­tant and be well on your way to los­ing that big tum of yours.

Happy New Year!

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Writing a Not-a-Bucket List

June 11, 2009

Hold a PlantI’ve gone through my life steal­ing the best ideas of my friends. Any­thing inter­est­ing I’ve done has been some­one else’s plan first. How­ever, it’s always worked for me, so I’m not about to change my strategy.

I’ve taken some time this week (and again in Decem­ber 2009) to re-evaluate my sense of what I enjoy doing and have writ­ten it down as a life list. Here are the 62 ideas I’ve had so far.

This is a list of goals, but it is NOT a bucket list. Why? it’s not a list of things I think I have to do to-have-lived-a-good-life list. It’s just a list of  just some things I’d like to do. Things are things I think I’d ENJOY doing (I think goals can actu­ally get in the way of enjoy­ment.) So this isn’t a bucket list. It’s just a list of fun things I’d like to do.

So ah-hem, I’d like to:

  1. Learn to play the gui­tar, write a good song and sing it. Sta­tus update: We just won a gui­tar in a Christ­mas raf­fle. :-)
  2. Help build a com­mu­nity cen­tre or a school.
  3. Throw a party on a trop­i­cal island (Thahiti anyone?)
  4. Write a book that I’m proud to recommend.
  5. Visit 100 coun­tries (37 to go)
  6. Become flu­ent in 5 lan­guages (5 minute con­ver­sa­tions). Update: Liv­ing in Brus­sels now, so watch­ing TV in Flem­ish and gro­cery shop­ping in French. Baby steps.
  7. Go to the Olympics
  8. Vol­un­teer after a nat­ural disaster
  9. Climb the Syd­ney Har­bour Bridge
  10. Run a marathon. Update: Done! I ran the Toronto marathon with my friend Peter Nose­wor­thy and fin­ished in the more-or-less-adequate-for-an-unfit-guy time of 4 hours and 15 min­utes. Never again.
  11. Paint an abstract paint­ing that looks expen­sive (or at least looks good). Update: tak­ing some art les­son one Sat­ur­day a month.
  12. Give a nearly per­fect speech and/or get a stand­ing ovationStingray - Tim and Bettina
  13. Scuba dive some­where amaz­ing. Update: Done! Bet­tina and I went to Figi and found a guy who let me scuba dive alone through caves and coral. He didn’t tell me he was going to aban­don me down there, but it’s hard to argue with a guy using scuba sign lan­guage, 30 feet under water.
  14. Be acknowl­edged or thanked in a book
  15. Fly a plane
  16. Build a piece of fur­ni­ture. Update: Does Ikea count?… No? Oh.
  17. Host a fun fam­ily reunion
  18. Kite surf (with­out look­ing foolish)
  19. Walk or cycle across a coun­try Update: What was I think­ing when I wrote this one?!
  20. Run for a gov­ern­ment office Update: Ditto #19
  21. Help on a sus­tain­able build­ing project
  22. Raise $10,000 for a good cause. Update: Some real progress on this one. Bet­tina and I have started to get involved in Kiva, mak­ing small donations/loans to aspir­ing small-business own­ers in devel­op­ing countries.
  23. Cook a roman­tic five-course din­ner for my wife
  24. Go on a week-long sail­ing tripPenquins
  25. Fly or boat to Antarctica
  26. Build (and sleep overnight in) a hut made of sticks and leaves
  27. Help to change a law
  28. Do an ori­en­teer­ing race
  29. Raise a chicken
  30. Have a veg­etable garden
  31. Build a wood oven
  32. Swim with sharks
  33. Spend a night in the outback
  34. Plant 1000 2600 trees Update: I real­ized I need to plant at least this many to cover my car­bon foot­print
  35. Design and build a dream house (prefer­ably my dream house, but my wife’s dream house would do)
  36. Make fire by rub­bing sticks together
  37. Read the Bible, Quran, the Bha­gavad Gita and Mao’s Lit­tle Red Book Update: So far I have read the Bible. It’s long.
  38. Sky­dive and bungee jump
  39. Make my own maple syrup
  40. Learn to spit fire and do it myself. Prob­a­bly just once.
  41. Fly over the Grand Canyon
  42. Ride in a fighter jet. Update: Appar­ently in Rus­sia and South Africa go can ride in old fighter jets.
  43. Swim with a whale
  44. Visit Machu Picchu
  45. Go hang glid­ing and paragliding
  46. Ride in a hot air balloon
  47. Make a piece of pot­tery Update: I have almost fin­ished this one! There is a sweet lit­tle mug half made in an art stu­dio in Brussels.
  48. Learn to make a pot of chili that’s so good peo­ple say “wow!”
  49. Skate out­side Rock­e­feller Cen­tre at Christ­mas time
  50. Enjoy an after­noon of surfing
  51. Swim with a dolphin
  52. Get another degree (prefer­ably an hon­orary PhD, so I don’t have to come up with any new ideas) :-)
  53. Do a fire walk
  54. Visit Vic­to­ria Falls (which I believe is some­where on the bor­der of Zam­bia and Zimbabwe)
  55. Go to Dis­ney World or Dis­ney Land (or Euro Disney)Northen Ontario
  56. Ride the scari­est roller­coaster in the world
  57. Bring atten­tion to a wor­thy stranger (i.e. see that a good per­son gets a prize they deserve)
  58. Men­tor some­one. Done.
  59. Hit a home run in a base­ball game again. (Last time I played I struck out more times than I hit the ball).
  60. Rebuild an engine
  61. Blag an upgrade to First Class. Update: Done. The lovely peo­ple at Delta gra­ciously upgraded us on our honeymoon.
  62. Go a week with­out elec­tric­ity (prefer­ably on a canoe trip in North­ern Ontario, or maybe on a sail­ing trip some­where warm).
  63. Spend at least a week boat­ing (and snorkelling) around var­i­ous islands in the Caribbean. Bar­ba­dos looks incredible.
  64. Ice Fish.
  65. Go deep sea fish­ing. Done! I just did this in Zihu­atanejo, Mexico.
  66. Take a capoeira les­son
  67. Start and develop a suc­cess­ful small business.

I’d love to get some more ideas. As I said at the begin­ning, I’m not good at com­ing up with these on my own. If you have some good ideas for enjoy­able things I could set my mind to, please share them as a com­ment below.

*Or bet­ter yet, do this for your­self and put a link to your site in the com­ment box. Doing this is quite the inspir­ing lit­tle exercise.

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To Work or Not to Work?

May 13, 2009

Would you rather get paid to do nothing?

Or would you pre­fer to have an impor­tant, chal­leng­ing job?

Tim­o­thy Fer­ris (in The 4 Hour Work Week) basi­cally advo­cates the no-work option. What could be bet­ter than doing noth­ing all day and still get­ting paid? Per­son­ally I wouldn’t refuse being paid to laze around the pool of the lux­iou­ri­ous Can­dado Plaza Hotel (which is how and where I read the 4HWW). I know if I found myself retired I would want to go to a place like that and at least take 6 months to gatehr my thoughts.

However, retired peo­ple, those who actu­ally have the option of laz­ing around as much as they want to, say they’d rather be work­ing. (Well, 78% of New Zealand retirees say that any­way.) They say they would pre­fer to work, as long as they job allowed them to work with more flexibly.

I find this just a lit­tle bit sur­pris­ing. I can under­stand want­ing to make your­self use­ful, but why not take on a non-job or two instead? I’m look­ing for­ward to retire­ment as a time to build com­mu­nity, indulge my cre­ativ­ity and maybe catch up on my life list. Not to go back to work.

Gretchen Rubin over at the Hap­pi­ness Project got some insight on this from Amer­i­can Jus­tice San­dra Day O’Connor. O’Connor says that the secret of hap­pi­ness is sim­ply this: Work extremely hard at some­thing worth doing. That’s it. It’s not rela­tion­ships. It’s not peace of mind. Do good work and the good life will fol­low. I’m not sure I agree entirely. State­ments like that remind me of the episode of Cheers where one of them sagely explains what life is all about, “the mean­ing of life my friends: com­fort­able shoes.” Comfortable shoes are good, but maybe there is just a lit­tle more to life.

But I still can’t com­pletely fig­ure out why New Zealand retirees don’t want to stay retired. A recent 60 Min­utes news show dis­cussed the fact that Mil­len­ni­als (Gen­er­a­tion Y) make excep­tion­ally dif­fi­cult employ­ees. They are a new breed, say the com­men­ta­tors. They refuse to work if they don’t under­stand the pur­pose of the work. They won’t do busy work, even when work­ing for min­i­mum wage. They need to be nego­ti­ated with. The show, clearly appeal­ing more to the over-40 crowd, pre­sented this as entirely unrea­son­able. Where do these young peo­ple get the nerve to try to work on their own terms?!

No one wants to waste their lives doing mean­ing­less work.

It seems that the answer is not about work­ing hard or not; it’s the rea­son for the work that matters.

Maybe it’s not actu­ally free­dom that we long for at the sum­mit of our careers. For most of us it’s not really about money either. The real chal­lenge is about find­ing work that we feel is mean­ing­ful, so we don’t waste our time  –in retire­ment, and even before we retire.

So the ques­tion becomes: how can we find or cre­ate some mean­ing­ful work?

A good place to start is to try to lead a tribe, try to gather around you peo­ple who have sim­i­lar inter­ests and work with them toward some­thing worth­while. Or, if you’re more of a lone wolf, get stuck into your own cre­ative prac­tice. We should all make sure that, by the time we reach retire­ment, we are seri­ously involved in work we find exhil­a­rat­ing and important.

(Image care of Rebel Shoots).

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Goalism: The Dark-Side of Target-Setting

May 9, 2009

Photo by PippoWasHere

I love talk­ing to peo­ple about their aspi­ra­tions. I really do. But there is a dark side to goals and what we often think of as “motivation.”

I have a lot of goals. Last week I con­fessed that I wanted to be a doc­tor, a pilot, a CEO, and a Sen­a­tor before I die. I admit that I was at the pub at the time. But I am sure that I will likely not do any of these things. I don’t have a prob­lem with this though. I like list­ing these as goals anyway.

The prob­lem I have with goals is some­thing dif­fer­ent. I have a prob­lem with their power.

Grow­ing up I learned a lot form moti­va­tional speak­ers like Tony Rob­bins and Steven Covey. I learned from them that:

  • Any­thing I wanted to achieve, if I really wanted it and I was will­ing to sac­ri­fice what­ever was nec­es­sary, I could achieve. For this rea­son they say quite rightly that the hard­est part of achiev­ing some­thing should come in the decision-making, right at the begin­ning. When you under­stand the power of goals, you real­ize not to set them lightly.

Many peo­ple go wrong by set­ting too few goals. Many peo­ple under­es­ti­mate them­selves and there­fore set goals half-heartedly.

But for those who have con­fi­dence in them­selves and set chal­leng­ing goals, there is a  hid­den dangers.

Tun­nel Vision

Focus on one thing, necessitates less focus on other things. Busi­nesses expe­ri­ence this all the time. A recent Boston Globe arti­cle dis­cussed how Gen­eral Motors’ fail­ure was partly the result of com­pany goal set­ting. All of GM doggedly focused on regain­ing the 29% mar­ket share they had once held. Focus­ing on this meant they ignored prof­its. They slashed sales prices when they should have cut costs. Every­thing became about achiev­ing the almighty 29%. So, part of the power of goals is that they are non-reasonable. Once agreed the goal itself becomes the rea­son. Naysay­ers at GM (and there must have been a few) weren’t heard because by ques­tion­ing the goal they seemed to be talk­ing nonsense.

I had a friend who was so obsessed with her goals that she seemed to be run­ning on autopi­lot. It got in the way of her see­ing other pos­si­bil­i­ties, much like what hap­pened at GM.

Don’t get me wrong. Goals can be great. And I really do want to achieve every­thing I can list, that I might enjoy. I would like to gain every pos­si­ble skill. I would love to  speak Span­ish for exam­ple. And maybe one day you’ll find me per­form­ing surgery on a fel­low Sen­ta­tor, in Spain, while fly­ing. Maybe.

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