Don’t Listen to your Body, It Lies!

I’ve learned that how productive I am in a day is in large part a function of how early I put on my pants. This is true of weekdays and weekends. If you work for yourself or at home then this is especially true.

I am not a morning person. I wish I was. I find that when I wake up in the morning, my body screams at me: “Go back to sleep! There’s no point in getting up now because I won’t be able to function properly anyway. Trust me, I know myself. You might as well get some more sleep so you won’t suffer through the whole day.”

Doctors always say listen to your body. I’m telling you that as it relates to staying in bed, your body lies to you. If you get up and get going you might feel like crap for the first half hour while you recover from your grogginess but after that you’re ultimately fine. Your body isn’t telling you how you are going to feel but just how awful you feel right now.

This is especially true for naps. I love naps. One, I just enjoy them. Two, I’ve been reading that they are a very efficient form of sleep. There’s a theory that the rapid eye movement (or R.E.M.) portion of sleep is the critical, recharging portion of sleep. When you sleep eight hours in a night you can expect to have 2 hours of solid R.E.M. time. This should leave you feeling well rested. If you incorporate a fairly consistent nap into your routine, your body learns that it has less time to work with during the nap, so you shift into R.E.M. a lot faster. As such, napping can provide much more concentrated sleep. So if you incorporate napping into your life, you can get away with sleeping fewer hours for every 24 hour cycle while feeling equally rested. This can be an important trick for sleep deprived parents. (Research the veracity of this paragraph for yourself. I don’t know it to be true)  

I’ve spoken with many people that say that they can’t nap because they just feel so awful afterwards. Again, I ask do you feel awful for the rest of the day/evening or do you just feel awful for the next 20-30 minutes while you’re “degrogging”. I suspect it’s the latter.

Back to the issue of putting on pants. You can start taking care of things in your underwear. You can fire up your laptop and address some emails. You can clean up a few things around the house. But are you really being that productive or effective when you’re still in this half started mode?

I find that staying in bed is a form of procrastination like anything else. You can be procrastinating from doing your morning routine or getting on with your day in general. The key thing to breaking procrastination is inertia. When you’re doing nothing, you like to keep doing nothing. When you get going on a task you like to keep going. So it can make a huge difference to your day if you choose to pop out of bed and jump in the shower right away. I find that I’m infinitely more effective and more committed to making good use of my time once I’m wearing pants.

This same notion of getting going in the morning can be applied to any task that you’ve been procrastinating on. The trick is “cracking the egg” or taking the first step towards accomplishing what you want. Momentum is very important and I find that once you take just the very first step your natural inclination will be to keep going. Avoid the excuse of thinking that you need a bigger window of time to make meaningful progress so you’ll wait till you have more time to get started. Shenanigans! Take even the most basic of first steps right away and it can help tremendously. Also once you start to tackle a task you start to know everything that’s involved. Once you know what’s involved, even if it’s a lot it seems far less daunting than the unknown.

In Sum, Don’t trust your body when it tells you to stay in bed. Put on pants early. Embrace napping. And crack the egg on tasks you been procrastinating on.

I started writing this blog in hopes that it might help improve people’s lives. In that spirit it would make me very happy if after reading this post, you take 20 minutes to get started on something, anything that you’ve been putting off for a while. Give it a shot! I think that it’ll make you happy. If you actually follow through I encourage you to let me know about it in the comments.

Embracing Failure

One of the costs of pursuing dreams is the cost associated with the risk of failure. Many People don’t know what would make them really happy. Then there are others who do know but fail to act on it. Fear of failure paralyzes people in many facets of life. People don’t even try to do or get what they want because they’re scared of the consequences of being unsuccessful. This applies everywhere. My first encounter with this was getting up the courage to approach women. The psychological hit you can take is scary when you put yourself out there and someone rejects you. A big turning point for me was when I felt far worse for pussying out than I would ever feel from rejection. There is no embarrassment in approaching a girl and getting shot down in flames. Any guy with perspective watching this will respect you for the effort rather than look down on you for the result. You’re still better than 90% of the guys out there who wish they had the courage to even try.

Now what about taking this approach to failure to our professional lives? There are many reliable, non-risky ways to earn a living. Unfortunately many of these ways leave us feeling unsatisfied and generally living ordinary lives. If you’re doing something you’re passionate about and wake up in the morning with excitement then that part of your life is awesome. If that’s not you, then I ask you why not? I discussed in earlier posts that your happiness will not actually come from achieving your goal but from enjoying the pursuit of the goal. If you chase something really special, something in-line with what you really want and it doesn’t pan out you can look yourself in the mirror and respect yourself for having gone for it. I believe this type of attitude is what makes truly special people who achieve special heights of happiness and generally live awesome lives.

In the professional arena failure likely comes with financial consequence. You need to be calculated in your risk and be smart about it. However if you’re a capable person you can always find a way to earn money and bounce back from failure. In fact the key to feeling comfortable enough to take any kind of risk largely lays in being confident that you can cope with the consequences of failure. Believe in your ability to cope with and handle whatever life throws at you and you’ll expand your scope of options infinitely. 

Click here to see a related post about pursuing dreams.

Pursue Dreams Big and Small

What are some of your dreams? If you could do anything in the world what would it be? Is it possible to actually do? Many dreams are doable if you’re willing to pay the price. This is the real key: Are you willing to pay the price?

I just lived a dream of mine. I took a trip around the world. I’ve traveled a lot before but never on a trip like the one that I just took. I bought a one way plane ticket. I had no restriction of time or money. I was free to do whatever I wanted; go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted for as long as I wanted. I had no itinerary and no return date. Traveling in general is a real passion of mine. I love all the people I meet, I love seeing different places and cultures and I love that each day is a different adventure. However the biggest thing I love about travel is the freedom. There is no excuse to be unhappy. If you’re not happy with what you’re doing or where you are just change it. You can choose to do whatever you want without responsibility or prior commitments binding you. This trip was taking that to the ultimate extreme. I really loved that I was as free as I could possibly be. And for so many days I could honestly say there is absolutely nothing in the world I would rather be doing than what I was doing at the very moment. It was a dream come true!

Much more accurately it was a dream made true. It was something I really wanted and I made it so. So many people told me they were envious of what I was doing. I always told them don’t be envious, just do it. People will often say they can’t. “Can’t” is bullshit! Almost always it’s possible it’s more a question of being willing to pay the price.

For me the price was probably around $30,000 and much more importantly the complete disruption of my career. I needed to forgo all the momentum I had built up over the last 5 years of working and stop dead in my tracks. I need to deal with whatever perception others might have of me having checked out of the working world like that. I also needed to disrupt my life in general. I was away from my friends, and away from my normal dating world for 9 months. It was a price I was happy to pay and having done it I can’t imagine life any other way.

That was my dream. If you share that same dream you can probably make it happen. (It’s actually easier than you’d think. If you can cut all expenses from back home I find travel is cheaper than living in down town Toronto). It may cost you more, it may cost you less depending on your circumstances and how you choose to go about it but if you’re willing to pay the price most capable people can make it happen.

What if at 31 years old I decided I want to be doctor? I don’t want to be a doctor but if I decided that that is where my passion lay I could do it. It would be horribly inconvenient and require all kinds of sacrifices in other areas. All of a sudden I would find myself taking undergraduate classes again to get the prerequisites for med school. I also wouldn’t be earning a proper living until my late 30’s. If I really wanted to though I could find a way to do it. Again, it’s just a question of whether you are willing to pay the price.

If you have a dream that you think is unattainable ask yourself is it really unattainable or just costly? Often the answer is that your dream is possible but the cost is a bit scary. Few dreams are easy. If it were easy everyone would be doing it. You just need to decide how badly you want your dream and then you can decide if you have the commitment to make it a reality. And finally, try to make an active decision one way or another instead of choosing to maintain the status quo of forgoing your dream by default.

Click here to see the next related post about Embracing Failure.

Finding your Passion

Of all topics discussed in this blog this is the one I have the most trouble with. I am still very much in search of my passion. Some people from an early age know exactly what they want to do with their lives. I’m truly envious of these people. If you’re a capable person and you know what you want it’s very manageable to create a plan and go out and get it. If you don’t know what you want achieving it becomes a lot trickier.

            When I speak about finding your passion I’m predominantly talking about what you do with the bulk of your time, likely your occupation. I listed in my personal constitution that I either wanted to earn money efficiently and find my passion outside of work or that I wanted the following criteria to be met:

i)                My work is challenging

ii)              I am continuously learning new things.

iii)            I am able to see purpose and meaningful contribution to society in my work.

iv)             I enjoy doing it day to day and look forward to going into work.

What I’ve Learned So Far

I’ve never been able to come up with something that I really enjoy doing that someone would be willing to pay me to do. Recently I’ve been thinking that a good starting point is to think of anything I’m passionate about independent of whether someone will pay me to do it. If I am truly passionate about it, that will motivate me to find the time in my life to do it. For now, travel is the closest thing I’ve got and I continue to make sure I do fair bit of it. Also, I find travel, and removing myself from the daily routine, grind, and distractions of life clears my head and gives me perspective to assess what I care about.

            So here is what I have so far for strategies. One, try and change focus from what you want to achieve to what achievement you would enjoy the process of pursuing. The key here is acknowledgement of the fact that happiness from achievement is short lived. After we achieve a goal we get a temporary emotional lift before returning to our baseline. It’s the day to day pursuit that we have to enjoy. So this change of focus is key but it still doesn’t get at the heart of the issue of what day to day pursuit would make you happiest.

            This brings me to my second strategy. In the absence of knowing what your passion is, be passionate about whatever it is that you’re currently doing. I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “anything worth doing is worth doing right”. I used to look at many people and think they took themselves and life too seriously. I still think that’s true for many people but I am finding new merit in the degree of care some people put into seemingly trivial things.

Have you ever seen a waiter that is really enthusiastic and takes pride in serving you well? There is something really beautiful about it. There are tons of people with far more complex, potentially more stimulating jobs that don’t derive half the happiness from their day to day work. You can see it on a person’s face when they take pride in what they do. You can see it in their smile, in the energy they put into it and in the way they make others feel around them.

There is a certain degree of freedom that comes from not giving a shit but there is definite happiness to be found from caring. So I suggest this, if you find yourself spending your time doing something not that meaningful, find something more meaningful but until you find it, commit yourself to doing a kickass job at whatever it is that you’re doing.

            This strategy will have two benefits. One, you will be happier in your day to day life. Two, positive changes seem to naturally happen for people who live with passion and approach things with the right attitude. When you approach life and work with passion you tend to meet and forge relationships with the right kind of people and opportunities tend to naturally emerge.

            My next strategy is to try different things. When I was in high school I tutored other students. I started doing this because my other friends were doing it. It’s a stupid reason for doing things. However, from this I discovered that I love teaching others. Since then I paid for a trip to Asia by tutoring in College. I’ve been a baseball coach, and tennis and ski instructor. I’ve also made training and motivating others in my business career a key part of what I do. I would have never known I like it but for having tried something different.

I think it’s important to actively make choices. This is a really important one. If you don’t choose what to do with yourself and what’s important to you, your life will be guided and determined by external circumstance and often random chance.  This can work out well like in the example above where I discovered my passion for teaching but it can also turn out not so well. More to the point you are leaving your happiness up to chance. Much better is to take the time to figure out what is important to you and what makes you happy and to go out and get it.

            The last thing I’ll suggest for the time being is to find happiness from within. This whole blog gears around identifying gaps between the world you live in and the world you want. However, a key thing to recognize is that some people live in pretty objectively rough circumstances and are perpetually happy. Similarly there are others who are in pretty good shape in life but seem to be continually miserable. The point being that happiness is at least to some extent a choice (to say nothing about depression). I encourage people to work to improve their external circumstance to the best of their abilities but at the same time look to find appreciation, contentment and joy in their existing circumstance and any circumstance that may come about in the future.

“It’s no matter if you’re born to play the king or pawn for the line is thinly drawn between joy and sorrow.” Simon and Garfunkel