Follow Your Passions

Today’s post is just personal sharing. Not sure there are great lessons to be learned from it. But it is certainly about following my passions.

I live in a condo. It ain’t bad. It’s got a reasonable amount of space, a decent floorplan, and the location is pretty convenient. The neighborhood is okay, I have neighbors that usually aren’t too awful, and I can see a few stars in the sky through the light pollution.

If I lived in this place the rest of my life, I could certainly live out a happy enough existence. I am not unhappy here. But this place does not really add to my happiness, other than it is a good shelter from elements, has all my stuff in it, and quite often does not have police chasing someone closeby.

But it is not a home my wife and I love. It was a great starter home for us, and we’ve lived hear longer than I think we anticipated originally. 2007 is a year when one of my major themes is Independence. Another is Fun. In the spirit of those themes, we have a goal this year: to buy a home we love.

We have an area we really like, and the pros drastically outweigh the cons in terms of making the move. But it is a huge change, and it will uproot the life we have known, shake it up a bit, and plant it in some new shape somewhere else. Another of my five themes for 2007 is Balance, so while we’re looking for a home we love we’re also not going to break the bank reaching that dream. I am confident we can accomplish both the purchase of a home we love and making sure we continue to be in good financial shape.

I’ll keep you updated on the progress.

I understand the major themes in my life, and I have taken stock of how I am spending my time relative to those themes (see the previous two posts for what I am referring to). So… now what?

Two summers ago, my wife and I went to a beach town in Oregon armed with a couple of pens and a stack of index cards. We each began writing every goal we individually had in life, whether short term or long, small or massive. Then we combined our individual stacks, tossed the duplicates (luckily there were a lot of those), and laid the remaining cards out in front of us. Slowly but surely, we discussed and agreed upon the priority each item held for us, and combined the results on one sheet of paper in order of priority. Once we had our list, we wrote the time frame associated with each goal, broken down into the categories of “one year”, “one to five years”, “five to ten years”, “by retirement”, and “ongoing”. Some of the items were things we both wanted to work towards, some were individual items, so we noted that as well.

We keep the list on our fridge, looking at it every time we walk by, talking about specific items on it as time passes. Keeping aware of it.

Last year, we went to a beach in San Diego and got our list out. We discussed where we were on the items. What did we accomplish? What new goals do we have? Which goals have dropped in priority or completely off our list? What has become more important? Do the time frames for any of them need to be adjusted? Once we had our answers, we wrote the new list on a new sheet of paper, brought it home, stuck it on the fridge, and kept moving towards our dreams.

I want to be clear – you do NOT have to be married or have a partner to do this exercise. Just trim it to a single person – you just pull out the part where you combine the index cards. But I do recommend once you have them done, you share them with a trusted friend or family member and discuss them. Often times, this will help you get some of them clearer in your mind, and help hold you accountable to the goals.

Also, you don’t have to go to a beach to do this exercise, but I encourage you to find some relaxing, quiet place you can be alone with your thoughts for a while in. And make sure you can stay there for at least a few hours, so you’re not stressed out about getting it done in time. This is worth spending a good chunk of time on, to make you a better manager of your time in the long run.

In my previous post, I talked about the importance of identifying what you feel are the most important themes in your life. If you have accomplished that, I think you’re on a path to living a healthier life filled with success as you yourself define success.

What I would like to suggest you do next is to increase your awareness of how you are spending your time. Keeping your self-defined major themes in mind, begin journalling your days and how you are spending your time from hour to hour, and if appropriate in smaller chunks of time. Try to capture the major things happening during each time period. If you eat dinner while watching television, those are two separate things to journal.

As you are tracking your time, compare how you are spending your time with the major themes you previously identified as the most important to you. How do the activities you are taking part in during the day match up with your themes? Are you spending three or four hours a day watching television? Is “Watch a lot of television” one of the major things you identified as important to you? If so, then great, you’re well in tune with what is important to you. If not, though, maybe it is time to start re-evaluating how you are spending some of your time.

I want to say that I am not saying you need to unplug your TV and toss it out the window! My themes, as I mentioned, included my health, my wife, my family, my work, and my faith. So if I am sitting back watching mindless junk on TV and doing nothing else, then that isn’t very in line with what I say is important to me. But what if I am sitting in the living room with my wife and family, watching Joel Osteen give a sermon on TV, while I answer a few e-mails from work? Now I’m in TOTAL alignment with my passions and I’m multi-tasking extremely effectively.

And that’s one of the big things to take from this exercise. It isn’t just about making sure the thing you are doing is in line with your themes, it is adapting how you already life your life to infuse it with things that build your important themese stronger. In time, you’ll get really good at filtering your decisions on how you spend your time through the question of whether it enhances your life or is ust a distraction (and distractions, some times, are okay – we all need a little time to just chill out and unwind).

You’ll also start to get good at multi-tasking. “How many themes am I strengthening at one time? Can I be doing something right now to add a few of my themes to what I am doing?” This sort of thinking will eventually lead to becoming a much better time manager, and you will be amazed at how much you accomplish in a day’s time.

Next up: “Life is a beach”

It’s quite a bit in to January now – how are your New Year’s Resolutions going? Hopefully the next few posts will reinvigorate and refocus your efforts on improving your life.

A lot of resolutions start out sounding something like this: “I want to lose weight” or “I want to make more money”. Both are good goals, and in fact are goals that, in a form, I hold as well. But they are both questions that require more basic questions to be answered first.

You say you want to lose weight, but why? Is it for increased health benefits? Will it help you feel more attractive? Do you think it will help you advance your career?

Making more money is important to you? Is that because there are items you want, like a house or a new car? Do you want to change your lifestyle to one that demands more income? Are you trying to put away more towards retirement? (And if retirement is the answer, why do you want money for that?)

You get the idea, I hope. The more you can get a good understanding of why you want to accomplish the goals you have set, and the more you write those reasons down and review them, the better you will be at reaching your goals. You’ll have a clearer mental image of the end result. When distractions come your way, you can ask yourself “Do I want to eat this cookie, or would I rather fit into my pants more comfortably?” “Do I want to buy this new pair of boots, or would I rather press the heel of my old boots on the accelerator pedal of my new car?”

Understanding the major themes of your priorities and goals, and being consciously aware of them, is absolutely the ultimate key to success (I’ll talk more about how to do this in the next two posts). And review your themes, priorities, and goals on a regular basis. For two years I filtered everything I did through the five major themes of my family, my wife, my faith, my work, and my health. If something I was considering doing did not enhance one, some, or all of those themes, I usually declined. Now that I am in a constant habit of doing so, and have reworked my life to be strong in those five themes, I am moving on to five new themes that continue helping me build to where I want to be (those five, FYI, are “independence”, “fun”, “creativity”, “Balance”, and “Making a Difference”).

All this may sound rigid to some, but it really doesn’t have to be. It is about focusing more of your time on things that you yourself identify as key priorities for your life, and the more you do it the easier it gets (and the closer you get to where you want to be).

Next Post: “Increasing Self Awareness”

I apologize for the sudden leave of absence from the blog over the last few weeks. The silence is soon to come to an end. Look for new posts by Monday.

Thanks.

I thought it was about time I defined the mission of this blog more clearly.

The Follow Your Passions blog is my attempt to spur people into doing what they love and loving what they do. It’s about owning whatever you’re doing with your life and making the most of it. It’s about becoming a leader in the communities you are a part of, however you define those communities for yourself.

Leadership. Mentoring. Giving. Enriching our own lives and the lives of those around us through our choices, our words, and our actions. Living happy, satisfied lives as productive, contributing human beings in the time we’re given to be with one another.

Each month, I’ll be collecting contributions from anyone who wishes to participate, and donating them to an organization that embodies the spirit of following your passions. For January, the target organization is National Public Radio, which you can contribute as little as $2 to or as much as you feel like via the ChipIn widget over in the sidebar – credit card, PayPal, however you prefer. If NPR doesn’t align well enough with your interests to give, stay tuned and I’m sure one month I’ll pick an organization closer to your heart we can work together to do some good for.

As you may have seen in the news recently, Time Magazine has named “You” as the Person of the Year. 

“But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes. The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.”

I could not have asked for a better summary of what my experience at the Social Media Club Phoenix meeting last week was like.  The primary objective of the club is to continually explore the ways in which new internet technologies, particularly those wrapped up into the “Web 2.0” label, are changing the way we can connect, interact, influence, and inform one another.

If you are in the Phoenix area, or one of the cities where the Social Media Club is meeting, I highly encourage you to attend an event.  Even if you’re not near a meeting though, check out their website and do some research on what is going on in the internet world.  Reality is changing in really interesting ways, and understanding them can be a powerful asset.

“There’s no doubt or worry – it just absolutely feels like the right thing to do.”
- a friend and former colleague

I used to work for a really terrific manager at one of my former employers. She consistently encouraged me, never held back on expressing the potential she thought I had, and always created opportunities to succeed and learn even when her plate was overflowing with work of her own. When I moved on, I made sure to let her know how much I appreciated her as a mentor and a friend, and I remember wanting to do something for her because she seemed… well, perhaps not defeated, but certainly not like what she was doing was in line with her passions.

On Sunday I was at a holiday party one of my old coworkers invited me to, and my old manager showed up. Without getting into details, she shared with me that she was moving on to a new opportunity, and that it was far more in line with what she wanted to do. My wife, who had only briefly met this person a couple of years ago, told her “You look like you’re glowing, like you’re really happy.” And I thought about the last time I had seen this mentor compared to how she radiated at the party, and it was… inspiring. Seeing others follow their passions in life is wonderful anytime, but seeing someone I have built a relationship with heading off on an exciting adventure filled with potential like that brings a smile to my face every time I think about it.

“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”
- Immanuel Kant

“When it comes to getting things done, we need fewer architects and more bricklayers.”
- Colleen C Barrett

Intelligence is knowing it is raining outside. Wisdom is coming in from the rain.

Without possessing the wisdom to do something with knowledge, it really matters very little how much information an individual accumulates. Have you ever known people who could soak up information like a sponge, ace every exam in school they took, but seemed to have so little common sense it was almost pitiable?

In a sense, ideas are like knowledge. Without actions to implement the ideas, there is very limited value to the ideas. I have known for some time that I am an “idea man”. Every day that passes, I get better at seeing the possibilities in something, I see opportunities when they present themselves rather than walk by them blissfully unaware. And even though I have changed significantly in my ability to take action on the ideas, it is still extremely frustrating sometimes to have all these unimplemented ideas inside my skull.

I say that I have changed as far as my will and ability to take action is concerned. At first, I would simply be too lazy to go about trying to get much done with them. I’d have them, then I’d put a plan in place to play a bunch of video games with friends, and leave the idea cold and alone, desperate for a nice cozy scarf or something. Then I got up the gumption to actually take a stab at implementing the ideas, but I wouldn’t have any real order or foresight about how to properly go about it. It would come out half-baked, I’d get frustrated and bored with it, and I’d move on. Finally, I reach the current stage in my life, where I have a pretty high success rate of implementing ideas, but I’m always tempted to take on too much at once, and I either burn out or some of the balls I’m juggling get dropped and fall through the cracks.

So I’m in the process of scaling back my life, and trying to be very aware of my limitations. I’ve learned to just say no, and I’m focusing on just the things I feel the most passionate about, where I can do the most good with the particular strengths I possess. But that doesn’t mean I stop having all these other ideas come my way. I just don’t have the time to take them anywhere near an implementation stage at this particular point in my life.

Stay tuned in the months ahead for tools to help you manage your ideas, take them into action, and recognize what your limits are and when you’ve exceeded them.

“The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives.”
- Anthony Robbins

It is my hope that by communicating with others through this blog, we can all determine the quality of our lives to be improved.