There’s a serious downside to flourishing: you become a target to be dumped on. People sense your strength of character and burgeoning wisdom and find you a source of comfort and calmness - then very quickly unload their problems on you.
What they (usually) don’t realize is how much this affects you, because you’re not used to the emotional chaos and issues your heart and mind are now trying to wrap themselves around. It’s all the worse because the people that are most effective at unraveling you (family and friends) are also the people who are the most likely to dump on you.
The hard truth, though, is that you get dumped on because you allow yourself to be dumped on. To be fair, you allow yourself to be dumped on because the dumper gets through to the best part of you - the part that wants to help and knows how to solve problems. In most cases, you allow yourself to be dumped on because you think you can influence them when in fact you can’t. I’ll explain… Continue reading →
Americans both love and hate pioneers and cowboys at the same time.
Our cultural icons are those hard-working men and women who do their own thing and become really successful. Yet, on a day in and day out level, we teach people to get in line and follow the route laid down before them.
We see people work their entire lives and peacefully retire, all the while never rocking the boat. We see those hardworking but line-toeing people get replaced by younger people with fresh ideas. We don’t want to be those people quietly ushered out the door, but the majority of us show up and toe the line.
Part of the problem is that we have conceptually tied together financial security and happiness. We see artists and creatives struggle and assume that they’re desperate and unhappy because of their financial situation. We don’t see that they’re happy doing what they love - we just see their broken-down vans. Continue reading →
I like to do Food For Thought posts on the weekends here at Productive Flourishing. The particular idea I’ve been thinking about is particularly well-suited for a podcast, so here we go!
The Paradox of Fortunate Misfortune deals with the basic human phenomena in which misfortunate things happen that benefit us later on. No one wants to go through misfortune, yet misfortune and adversity build human character. Learning to ask the “what” question rather than the “why” question empowers us to turn that misfortune into fortune.
The background of the idea came from listening to the song below. It’s not required listening, but it may be helpful, and plus it helps me spread the word about an under-discovered artist. Take a listen if you’d like to hear the emotion that got me thinking:
If you’d like tips on asking yourself the right questions and turning misfortune into fortune, get FREE updates by RSS or by Email. Thanks for reading!
The pine looked at the oak and said: “All these years we’ve grown together and I’ve always been envious of you. Every year, you sprout beautiful leaves and acorns, and in the fall your leaves embellish the forest with reds, yellows, and oranges and your acorns feed the squirrels and animals that nourish us. I feel so ugly standing next to you.”
The oak replied: “All these years I’ve been envious that throughout the winter, when I’m bare, you give color to the forest and provide warmth for the animals that nourish us. I stand naked and frail, yet your beauty is evergreen. I feel so ugly standing next to you.”
Fall came, and the oak’s leaves dried and changed to hues of amber and red, much to the delight and envy of the pine.
Winter came, and the pine’s evergreen hues of green and blue gave the forest a tranquil beauty in the darkest hours of the day, much to the delight and envy of the oak.
Spring came, and the trees both flourished in their new growth. The leaves of the oak began to grow and the pine developed the rich hue of spring.
Summer came again, and they both marveled at the other’s beauty and were ashamed of their own, none the wiser that they each have their own beauty and that no amount of envy or wishing will change their natures.
How many times have you wished that you were taller?…
or were blonde?…
or were on a slimmer frame?…
or had larger boobs?…
or had broader shoulders?…
or had a smaller chin?…
or had wider hips?…
or had cuter feet?…
Nature always wins. Work with your nature and manifest your natural beauty, or continuously hack, paint, dye, augment, lift, bake, and starve to become a shade of it.
If you liked this post and would like to learn more about leveraging your nature rather than working against it, get FREE updates by RSS or by Email. Thanks for reading!
Summary: The rules for getting rid of too much stuff apply equally as well to trimming down your todo and commitment lists. Set a limit of what you can do, and don’t take anything else on until you finish or drop something you’ve already started.
If you’d like to hear more tips on how to stop carrying around your overfilled boxes of commitments, get FREE updates by RSS or by Email.
If you work from your home or would like to work from home and have a family (your partner counts as family if you don’t have kids!), stop skimming, sit up, and pay attention. This may be the most important thing you have read in a while.
A friend of mine recently quit her stay at home consulting job due to her work-life balance getting out of whack. I’ll let her out herself in due time, but let’s just say she’s no small fry and she’s very good at what she does.
The problem was that her work became the only thing that she was doing - but she’s a wife and mother, too. Her words:
“I spent so much time and effort trying to be physically present at home that I forgot about being mentally and psychologically present.”
If you work from home, ask yourself whether you’re fully present or just physically present. If you’re planning on working from home, ask yourself whether you’ll be able to separate work from life.
Summary: Life choices are so hard to make because there’s a Gap between important questions and their answers are filled with things that can’t be quantified. To answer important life questions, you have to start asking different questions.
It’s a long one, folks (almost 17 minutes!) - but I think it’s worth a listen.
As I was uploading this screencast to YouTube (last week), I checked Twitter and saw that Duff released the second part of his interview with Clay in which they touch on learning to ask the right questions. Great job, guys!
@Duff: Great job with the podcasts. Thanks for allowing me a spot with the PowerUp! tip - I can’t believe the cheesy one made the cut! I really enjoyed the conversation last week.
@Clay: I feel like we’re swirling around the same ideas from different perspectives. You provide some really good insights in the series. Keep it up, my inspiring friend!
I would’ve commented there, and I may yet, but I did such a good job of screwing that up last time that I decided to make somewhat intelligible comments here.
Summary: Are you struggling to keep your desk clean because having a clean desk makes you happy or because you think you should have a clean desk? Is the simplicity of having a clean desk a need you have, or are you making someone else’s need your own? True wisdom is knowing what you need, and finding a way to solve that need - not fabricating a need to solve or finding a solution for a need you don’t have.
I hope you enjoy it. If you’d like to hear or see the future podcasts and screencasts, get FREE updates by RSS or by Email.
What’s the difference between offline friends and online “friends”?
(If you answered that online friends are ones you made online, you get 10 Smartass points. Proceed directly to the university nearest you and sign up as a philosophy major with said points.)
Sure, it’s a Web1.0 type of question, but I think in the digital world we live in, it’s become an even more pressing question. We now have so many ways to connect with people we’ve never physically met, and our connectedness gets tighter and tighter every day.
Yet many people think there’s still some qualitative difference between the types of friendships such that offline friends get the status of true friends and online ones are “friends,” with the quotation signifying something like people we’ve met online, talked to, and like - but not to be confused with friends sans quotations.
Here’s the deal, though: through blogging, I’ve met more people that I actually like than I generally do in the real world. It’s also much easier for me to get to know people online than off - you don’t have to worry with sometimes-inhibiting social factors like gender, status, and race.
But there’s also the weird feature with online “friends” that I know more about them and less about them at the same time. I can tell you how old their kids are, what their kids like, what their favorite type of music is, what they’re most scared of, and all sorts of very personal facts - yet I don’t know what they’re kids’ names are or whether the name they use is actually their real one.
It’s strange, really - we expose more of our inner selves through online relationships at the same time that we hide more of outer selves.
I find this interesting because it’s the exact opposite of what we do in offline relationships.
I was reading an offline friend’s Facebook page the other day and he mentioned some things that he liked and disliked. I’ve known this guy for thirteen years and I didn’t know some of the stuff - and it was pretty basic stuff that should’ve come up in the course of our friendship. That happens to me quite often, and I don’t spend much time crawling around on Facebook and Myspace.
Something else to consider for those with blogging “friends”: consider how much time per week we spend reading each other’s writing. Sure, a lot of the stuff can be very impersonal - my blog being no different - but in some ways those are conversations that we are a part of sometimes on a daily basis. I don’t talk to my offline friends on a daily, or sometimes weekly, basis - yet I leave comments and shoot emails to my online friends everyday.
I should note that one of the things that makes blogging “friends” so nice is that they are dealing with the same issues and you don’t have to introduce them to the blogosphere at the same time you’re talking about something you’re thinking about. They get it because they’re doing it - so you can get down to the meat of the conversation without trying to explain what RSS is so that they understand why RSS subscribers matter.
My point: many of us are spending more time and attention on our online “friends” than our offline friends. From one perspective, that would seem to make their friendship more important to us than offline friendships.
Yet, at the same time, most of us place more weight on the offline friendships, and they still remain friends sans quotations.
For many of us, this issue is not merely an academic point any more. The online world is a critical part of our reality - and part of that reality has a very social component. Our lives are enriched by people we have never, and likely will never, physically meet - yet they still get second-class status as far as the type of relationship we have with them goes.
Is it time to drop the quotations? Is it time to stop the favoring of physical friendships over the non-physical ones?
(The worry here, of course, is that the people reading this blog have a much higher likelihood of saying “Yes” because they are already on the blogosphere. But consider what the answer would be if you were answering someone who wasn’t already part of the choir.)
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There’s an interesting trend going on in the productivity niche. For the longest time, the focus of productivity has been on how we can get more done. Here recently, the trend is on quitting.
That we’re at this stage in the dialect is fairly predictable. After years of being led by acolytes of the corporate masters into thinking that we need to get more done, we’re tired. We recognize that we can’t get it all done - so now we’re quitting.
Another reason we’re at the quitting stage in the discussion is due to the overwhelming popularity and influence of Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Workweek. Tim makes a very strong and persuasive case for quitting - and the quitting bug has bitten many people.
But I think we need to think about something here. While I completely agree with Tim and the Quitting Cult that quitting is a logical option and, in some cases, the most reasonable course of action, let’s be real here - not too many of us are in the position to quit.
Take a second to consider that many of the disciples of the Quitting Cult share an important feature: they’re single.
Before I get tons of comments (okay, my readership is not that big) that cite many cases of married people with kids quitting and becoming happier or accusing me of blatant ad hominem, let me just submit that quitting and facing the prospect of not making ends meet for a few months is fine when you’re making that choice for yourself. When you’re making that choice for others, though, the consequences take on a completely different weight.
So, I think the Cult is right that many people are afraid to quit, but I also think that many people choose not to quit because they have obligations to others that they feel they need to see through reasonably, and quitting, often times, is not conducive to filling obligations to others.
But the Quitting Cult is also right that something has to give. We can’t continue to live the lives we live the way we live them, and something has got to give.
Rather than being taught how to get more done (being more productive), we are in serious need of being taught how to do fewer things that are more valuable. What the rest of us need to be taught is the art of the strategic withdrawal.
What’s the difference between strategically withdrawing and quitting? The former is a program that allows us to fulfill the obligations that are value-added or important while not taking on any more that aren’t. It recognizes that there are some obligations that we have that we really don’t want, but that it’s nonetheless important to see them through. The starting point for strategic withdrawal begins with internal conditions, i.e. it starts with the type of life you want to live, rather than external conditions, i.e. being in a job you don’t like.
To be fair, Tim does a great job of designing a program that allows us to strategically withdraw without simply quitting. Those following in his footsteps may be stressing quitting more for the rhetorical point, and, if that’s the case, we may be advocating the same course of action.
At some undetermined point in the future I’d like talk more about the steps for strategic withdrawal in detail. But since I hate critiquing without supplementing it with an alternative, I’ll make some preparatory suggestions.
Don’t take on any more externally-motivated commitments from this point forward
You’ve already made commitments in the past. Whether or not you’ll be able to see them through is not quite the point yet. The point is to stop taking them on. Learn the art of saying “No.” Your default answer for all future externally-motivated commitments should be “No.”
Figure out what living from the inside out means for you in your context
So few of us have know how to live our lives from the inside out, meaning that we let our talents, desires, and goals rather than societal standards dictate how we live our lives. Until you figure that out, you’ll continue to do the wrong things unless you get lucky through experimentation.
I stress in your context because being homeless while starting a new business may not be for you and your family. So it may turn out that you can’t live from the inside out right now - but you’re making a plan for what it looks like so that you can start acting on it.
Determine which of the obligations you are actually important to your vision for yourself to complete
You may find that it’s important for you to finish something you’ve started even though you don’t like that task or don’t want to do it. The important thing is to do this on a case-by-case basis and not to decide that, holistically, you are going to be the type of person that fulfills obligations. Commitments are not all on par - some really do need to be let go.
Get out of commitment debt
Okay, you’ve figured out what needs to go. If it’s something that you can quit - do so NOW and don’t lose any sleep for doing so. If you can’t, figure out which of those obligations you can get out as soon as possible with as little work as possible. What’s most important here is that people know that you are downscaling and you want to see things through, but you’re not taking any more additional work than you need to.
Take the resources you gained from quitting or fulfilling your commitments and put them to completing the other unwanted commitments.
Not what you were expecting, eh? It’s better to clear the plate of unwanted crap rather than leaving it on there to irritate you as you start your new lifestyle. The sooner you can get rid of the unwanted, the sooner you can start living your life commitment-debt free.
The key thing throughout the program is to quit making commitments in the areas you’re trying to get out of. The reason people are recommending quitting is because it immediately gets you out of the tug of the future from those things you quit. The truth is, continually withdrawing is hard because so few of us know how to say no and we’re all too likely to keep committing to things we don’t want to do.
Quitting may be the route to go for some people. But strategic withdrawal is the way to go for the rest of us.
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Amos Lee - “Careless”
. Tim makes a very strong and persuasive case for quitting - and the quitting bug has bitten many people.
