Advice

Breath out longer than you breathe in. Respond instead of reacting

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When we get stressed out, we start taking deep breaths, even gulps of air and sigh heavily. Instead of relaxing you doing the opposite and winding yourself with for a fight or flight scenario. The lizard brain is taking over. 

Catch yourself when you get into a breathing cycle like this. Slow down and consciously spend double the time exhaling than you spend inhaling. It’ll move you from a reaction mode into responsive mode. Responding to something after you’ve had some time to digest the moment is way more efficient than reactive to something at the moment. This exercise can apply to stressful moments or joyful moments. 

I remember hearing the story about the martial arts instructor who was meeting with a student when a letter was delivered to him. It was a letter from his home country and something that he had been looking forward to for a long time. He slowly placed the envelope on the desk and continued to chat with the student. The student knew that his master has been waiting for this letter offer to leave early. The master said of course not, stay and finish the conversation. I don’t want to rush this conversation, and I don’t want to rush through the letter. Both are sacred and at the right time and it’s quiet I’ll open the envelope and savor it. Reacting vs. responding. 

You can’t buy these things

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Wisdom that comes with age and many mistakes

Laughing with your kids

Old friends breaking bread and drinking wine

A loving home, with light burning on the stoep when you get home late

A supple body and a healthy spine

True grit

The joy and fulfillment of service

Class

 

 

 

 

Starve them and they curl up and shrink

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Think about all the political anger and outrage that we direct at a politician. What if we focused all that energy on electing someone better.

Imagine if all the @replies, retweets, shares and Facebook comments about the faux outrage of the day were redirected to amplifying good works and inspiring leaders.

Trolls feed off outrage. Their battery packs are recharged with anger and vitriol. Imagine these monsters standing on the top of a mountain in the middle of raging storm and holding a lightning conductor. The more lightning strikes they get hit with, the more powerful they become.

Starve these the trolls, and they curl up and shrink. They can stand on top of the mountain all day on a beautiful sunny day and won’t get one lightning strike. Next time you feel anger boiling up inside of you. Don’t engage. Redirect that energy into something constructive. You’ll starve the nasty beasts and build something great.

Quality comes out of quantity

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The success narrative is that someone cottoned onto the winning formula after the first try or it was sitting there ripe for the picking. The truth is that a killer product is born out of iteration and persistence.

Want to hire a great employee. Widen the net and meet a lot of people. Hone your focus, garner feedback, revisit the criteria, reaching more people. Hiring the right person isn’t just about luck, or the right person walking through the door at the opportune time. If you’ve met a lot of candidates, then you’ll recognize the person immediately.

Shipping successful product isn’t about a gut feeling and striking gold. It’s about relentless execution and velocity. Over time people forget the mistakes, false starts, and damp squibs and only remember the wins. That kind of selective memory is dangerous. That’s why sometimes the worst thing that can happen to someone is an early success. Early success leapfrogs the school of hard knocks which builds up the persistence muscle.

Quantity allows you to sift through the low-quality ideas and pick out the quality. It’s a little like scratch and peck.

If you don’t have a great song, it doesn’t matter what else you put around it

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This is a gem of an interview with Quincy Jones.

Question from : Is there innovation happening in modern pop music?  
Quincy Jones: Hell no. It’s just loops, beats, rhymes and hooks. What is there for me to learn from that? There ain’t no fucking songs. The song is the power; the singer is the messenger. The greatest singer in the world cannot save a bad song. I learned that 50 years ago, and it’s the single greatest lesson I ever learned as a producer. If you don’t have a great song, it doesn’t matter what else you put around it.

This was the critical line for me. If you don’t have a great song, it doesn’t matter what else you put around it.

This is true for a house. If the location is terrible, then it doesn’t matter how much money and design you pump into a home, you won’t get your money back

This is true for a product. If you don’t have a great product, then sooner or later your customers will cotton on. You can create smoke screens with marketing and PR, but over the long term, it’ll get beaten by something better.

This is true for people. If their core principles are rotten then when the pressure is on the true colors will come out. It’s doesn’t matter about clothes, cars, entourage.

It’s the same for shitty songs, shitty products, and shitty people. Develop a knack for spotting the great ones early, and you’ll have a happier life.

 

 

The Field

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Is there something or someone on your mind, something in the past or a problem you are working through that’s making you anxious? The following exercise won’t answer any specific questions you have or offer up a solution, but it will help you.

Take ten deep breaths through your nose and imagine a field. See it bathed in the late afternoon sun, or maybe it’s early morning, and you can feel the dew under your feet as the sun starts to warm up the ground. Feel the breeze on your face and take note of the different smells.

Now take the problem or memory that’s on your mind and release it into the field. It’s now standing in front of you. Sometimes it’s a person, an event or both. Let the sun shine on it and release it from your mind. Don’t try to solve the problem and don’t intellectualize it. It’s free to go. Give it up to the sun and the warmth of the field. If the person you’ve released wants to come back to you, then gently tell them they are free to go with your blessing and love.

That’s it. It’s an exercise in release and surrendering whatever you are holding onto the field and leaving it there.

When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there – Rumi

Side note: It’s incredible how many people imagine a green field. It’s a little uncanny and cool.

Zen before Zen

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I think AA Milne was tapped into Zen before Zen was a Western thing. His writing is simple and profound at the same time. It reminds me of Rumi who was a 13th-century Sufi mystic and William Blake, the English poet and artist. AA Milne was an author but also a mystic.

Here are my top four lines from Winnie-the-Pooh:

“Sometimes,’ said Pooh, ‘the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”

“‘How do you spell love?’
‘You don’t spell it…you feel it.'”

“I think we dream, so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.”

Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them

Enjoy

Thought ruts

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Have you ever ridden a bike trail and got stuck in a rut. It’s a deep track made by the repeated use of other bikers. If you aren’t concentrating, then the bike finds it’s way into the rut and it’s pretty hard to bounce out.

Thought ruts are the same way. I have thought tracks that I return to again and again. It’s like they are on repeat. I’ve got to catch myself, or I become unconscious and slip into autopilot. I’ll revisit last silly mistake I made, wrong decisions, woulda coulda shoulda. Specific locations like the shower, washing dishes, commuting home trigger this thinking. It’s the mindless work that drops my guard and before I know it I’m back in the rut.

Call it out when it happens, click the reset button and get out of the rut. The trick is to admit you are stuck on repeat and get back into reality.

Come alive

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“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”― Howard Thurman

I bet the morning commute would be way easier if people were heading to a job that filled them with passion and joy. Are you doing what makes you come alive or are you doing what you think needs to be done? It’s scary to ask the question because if you ask, you might not get the answer you want.

If money didn’t matter, where would you be spending your time? Removing money from the equation eliminates the fear of scarcity and gives you clarity. I suspect most people know the answer to the question; it’s just hard saying it out loud because then you have to admit you are doing something out of fear.

Who moved my fish?

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Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

I was at a talk on 2018 education methods and the speaker referred to this favorite Chinese proverb. She was comparing this to education in 2018. This maxim sounds perfect, and we all nodded our heads when we read it.

But then her next question to us was what happens if there aren’t any fish anymore, or what happens if fishing is no longer allowed or practical. How does the proverb sound now? It’s not about what you’ve learned, it’s about understanding how to think and explore a problem.

Amazon is replacing cashiers at supermarkets. Telsa is building a self-driving truck, bots are writing news stories and opinion pieces. The general rule is that if you can be trained, then a machine can be taught as well.

The education system and employer / employee system drums the creativity out of us and trains us like machines. Humans weren’t meant to have masters. We are creative beings who are wired to explore and create with the assistance from machines. Time to jailbreak our young people or they’ll be sucked into the same trap of past generations.