Follow Your Passions

First of all, I apologize for my absence. Many things are afoot in my life that are making writing a challenge, but I am working diligently to resolve that issue and get things moving again here soon. I’m hoping to get a few posts written this weekend, I certainly have enough material floating around in my head to provide some content worth reading.

I am looking into alternatives to my ChipIn widget to collect donations moving forward. I am sad because I really like their organization, but they made the decision this month to only allow me to collect the funds via PayPal, and I… don’t completely trust PayPal. I understand the reasoning ChipIn gave me for the change, but that doesn’t change my feelings about wanting the funds to be deposited directly into the checking account I’ll use to send the money on to the chosen charity for that month.

Anyway, I think I have found a very good alternative, but it will take more time than I have right now to get it set up. When I do get it set up, I will anounce the new charity and the new goal.

Understanding who you are is a key component in following your passions, especially when you compare that person to who you want to be. Every step you take towards understanding yourself, you’ll learn better what motivates you, what excites you, what you wake up excited for in the morning – or, what it would take to get you to wake up in the morning excited about the day ahead. I have what I consider to be a pretty handy tool for gaining deeper insight into who you are and who you long to be. Once you have a decent picture of what boh of those people look like, you can begin building a bridge to enable them to meet. That’s a big part of what following your passions is all about.

But first, a story.

About eight years ago, I was in a fairly serious relationship with a woman. Things seemed to be going well, and then one day about three months in I had an overwhelming sense of what I could only describe as jealousy. I had rarely felt that emotion prior to that point, and I had no apparent reason to feel that way, but it was so powerful that it was visible to the person I was dating. When she asked me what was wrong, I apologized because I had no idea why I felt that way – it certainly was not anything like something I normally experience, and did not seem “like me”.

It turned out, my instincts were just very well honed. About a month later it was exposed she had been seeing someone else, and the day she began this coincided when I began to have my jealous feelings. The relationship pretty much ended at that point, but as I moved on and began looking back at what happened, three things stuck out at me. One, I seemed to have much better instincts than I gave myself credit for. Two, I felt like a horrible judge of character for ever getting so serious about someone that was capable of doing what she did. Three, I wondered what would cause her to choose someone else over me.

That last one was the most concerning to me, and it began a pretty serious self-examination process. Why wouldn’t someone consider me a good mate? Well, at the time I was dating her I was struggling in school because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, I had a bunch of credit card debt, I was working as a sales clerk at a clothing store (at least in the part of the relationship in which I was actually working), I didn’t really understand the value of money yet…

I could go on, but I think the point has been made. I was a long way from the sort of person I’d want to be for someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. Being able to provide a life for my future wife in which she could choose whatever she wanted to do (work, go to school, be a stay-at-home mom, start her own business, or any combination of those and others I haven’t thought of), and we’d still be well-off financially. Heck, I couldn’t even keep myself fed consistently – those were the days of Top Ramen and using my parents’ CostCo membership to go make a dinner out of free samples.

Rather than be disheartened by this comparison of who I was and who I wanted to be, I saw it as one of the biggest opportunities of my life. If I could capture clearly a few steps that would get me to the version of myself I envisioned as someone worth striving for, I would dedicate myself to the task. This is how I came up with the idea of interviewing yourself.

You’re probably in a very different place in your life than I was back then (or maybe not). Regardless, I think if you perform the following exercise, you will learn things about yourself and hopefully identify not only things you’d like to strive for, but some methods for beginning to explore that journey. The steps are going to seem backwards at first, but I think you’ll see the necessity of the order they are in as you progress.

1.) Picture your ideal self in your mind. What job are they working? What is that person really good at? How does that person spend his or her time? As you begin to get a better picture of these things, jot them down as quickly as you can. Try to make it a brainstorming session, coming up with everything you can think of in every category of your life.

2.) Now we need to take what you wrote and apply a structure to it. The specific structure I am going to recommend is – a job description. Take a look at places like Monster.com or Career Builder, or even your local newspaper, and write a job description as though someone could actually apply for the position of becoming the ideal you.

3.) Once you have the job description pretty well solidified, you are going to apply for the job. Literally write a resume and cover letter describing your experience, skills, background, etc., and just like any job you are applying for, you want to tailor your resume and cover letter to the specific job you are applying for.

4.) Finally, take your resume and cover letter, and modify them (or begin completely fresh if you prefer) and write a version of both that someone with the absolute perfect qualifications for the job of being your ideal self. What skills does that person have? What is that person’s educational background? What sort of people would make great references, that would attest to this person being the best candidate for the position?

When you compare your current resume and cover letter to those of the person you want to become, the areas you may want to apply yourself in should come to the surface. Maybe you’re almost there, which is terrific. If there is a long way to go, I encourage you to take heart. When applying for a job, one of the most critical aspect of a resume is experience, and no one on earth has more experience working towards being who you want to be than you do. Look at the gaps between the two resumes, determine ways you might be able to go about filling those gaps, and take the first step on that journey. The rest of the steps become easier as you go. And remember, when you get to that person you want to be, there’s another better you down the road a bit further. Life is a journey, and there will always be challenges to face, goals to accomplish, and dreams to fulfill. But all journeys ahead begin with one step forward.

If you light a lamp for somebody, it will also brighten your path. – Buddhist saying

If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody. – Chinese Proverb

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. – Anne Frank

Our friends should be companions who inspire us, who help us rise to our best. - Joseph B. Wirthlin

Listen to people as they talk to you through out your day, and you will quickly find that they all have problems. Colleagues who keep complaining about the way something never works right, or how a process doesn’t make any sense. Friends who are trying to improve their careers, or go back to school. In fact, you don’t have to listen to them to find out something is amiss – just watch your manager’s body language, or note a family member’s mood being unusually negative. Someone who is normally talkative and outgoing being reserved and quiet instead.

The signs are all around us, and where there are signs, there are opportunities to help. Of course, the person has to want the help or you can’t get very far in your efforts. But I have found that once I changed my approach and thought process when it comes to acting on opportunities to assist others, people were generally not only open to having my help but were very grateful for it.

My natural tendency used to be that I was being respectful by just butting out of issues people were facing. If I met a coworker for lunch, and she told me about something she just couldn’t find the answer to, or a project she didn’t know how to take the next step with, I would listen with a caring ear and process what she had said, but then drop it there and move on. It occured to be at some point, though, that some of the times people were telling me these things, they were either consciously or unconsciously asking for help to get past their problems. So I’d get back to the office, pop onto Google or some internal resource, and look up the answer to what they were looking for. If someone was trying to figure out the next step to a project, maybe I know someone who would be good to point them in the right direction and make that connection for them.

These are both small gestures, don’t take much time or effort, but could make a huge difference to someone’s day. Expand this to a way of thinking, of viewing the world, and suddenly you are helping lots of people every day, in both small and big ways. You may be thinking that this sounds like you’d spend a lot of your time helping others and not be able to get your own work done in the process. Allow me to suggest that you will find you can get more of your own work done by doing more for others. By helping others, you are building connections, and those people you are connecting with and helping have skills and contacts that can likewise help you get your projects done and your questions answered. Ever hear the phrase “it’s not what you know, but rather who you know”? This is how to really put that quote into action in a huge way.

Keep the circle going. Help others, and when others help you thank them for it. Heck, send them a little thank you card just for something small someone did for you every once in a while. Think how you would feel if someone took the time to do that for you, how great it would be to find that in your mailbox. Actually hand-write it yourself on real paper rather than an e-mail (e-mail is fine but lacks the feel of that personal touch for most people still).

You’ll be astounded at how enriched your own life quickly becomes if you have a small filter in the back of your mind constantly sifting interactions with other as they occur and looking for the gems of opportunity to show themselves.

Today as you go through your normal routine, whatever it may be, start thinking about why you do something they way you are doing it. All too often, we spend a lot of time, effort, and resources approaching something a certain way because that’s how it has always been done, and not because it is the best way to do it. You drive down the freeway with everyone else stuck in bumper to bumper traffic trying to get to work or school or home, because that’s how everyone does it. You get to work, turn your computer on, and start your daily processes. You go to the same restaurant nearby for lunch because it’s easy and safe and familiar. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Many times we’re caught up in the minutia of our work, so close to it on a daily basis, that the big picture eludes us and we lose sight of the forest for the trees. In particular, what I think we’d all be better off from is paying closer attention to what we do in our “boxes” (our cubicles at work, our cars, our homes, our computers, etc.).

I live in an area where in order to get to work, the way most people take is a freeway that is always horrible in the direction I’d be heading. On a good morning, I can expect to take 45 minutes of my morning up driving to my office taking that route. A couple of months ago, I decided to take a different route. You have to go over and around a mountain range, some land belonging to a Native American tribe, through National Forest land, and it seems if you look at it on a map to not make any sense at all. But it is all paved, at least four lanes, is the same speed limit as the freeway, and since no one takes it I am on cruise control most of the way rather than facing the tension headache of bumper to bumper traffic. The view is spectacular the whole way, so instead of getting to work completely frazzled, I’m full of energy and appreciation for the day ahead. And did I mention it takes me about 30-35 minutes to get to work that way instead of 45-60? Going a couple of miles out of my way each day has impacted my quality of life in an incredible way, and all it took was the initiative to try out an idea I had and see how it panned out.

I am completely confident there is the potential for each one of us to come up with at least one new approach to daily life that could make a big difference to our lives and the lives of those around us. Can’t figure out what to get someone on Valentine’s Day? Get together as a couple and come up with Valentine’s resolutions! They’re like New Year’s resolutions, except you do them as a couple, they are about how to be romantic for each other all year long instead of one day a year, and you stick to them. It might sound silly, but maybe you’d discover things about what each other wants or needs, or make it a point to go on a date each week even though you’re married and rekindle your relationship every weekend!

At work, your idea to make things more efficient could mean savings to the company. Your manager could take note. You might need to enlist others’ help, and by way of doing so you might learn a lot more about how your company works and who the people are in it. Maybe if you come up with a few practical ways to get things in your area more effective and efficient, your manager would be inclined to let you run with a project you’ve been wanting to create from scratch. Perhaps you can convince the right person to send you for training in regards to your profession and cover the expenses for you. Of course, in my humble opinion, the one guarantee is the satisfaction you’ll have in coming up with an idea and seeing it through as best you can.

Don’t be afraid to throw an idea out there because you think someone else might have already thought of it, or suggested it and been turned down. Even if someone did suggest something similar the year before, that was last year and someone else – today there might be budget for the idea that wasn’t there before. Or it might just take coming at it from a slightly different angle, yours, to push the idea over the edge into implementation or at least further consideration. Offering fresh perspective can be surprisingly powerful, because no one else takes the time to think inside the box.

If you’re looking and you can’t find something in your daily routines that needs fine tuning or tweaking, here’s something to watch out for. If you find yourself thinking anything like “This process makes no sense” or “Why does so-and-so always seem to be late to deliver this to me each month”, those are big clues! Take note of them, use them, own them! A good manager will often tell an employee who complains about something to fix the problem if they think there is one. It stops the people who just want to complain in their tracks, but it seeks also to strike initiative within the heart of someone who really cares about things improving to take steps to ensure improvement. Think about if you were a manager – would you prefer people working for you who just did what they were told, or would you prefer having a team with people on it that are always engaged and trying to make the work environment a better place?

This week has been particularly hectic. New posts starting tomorrow, meteors striking the earth not-withstanding…

A friend of mine got a tee shirt for me recently that has a picture of a TV set and says “Think outside the box.” If you have watched television in the last several days, you have very likely seen a saturation of news about what is happening with Anna Nicole Smith. I don’t want to be insensitive. I’m not sure if her life or her death was more tragic, but clearly she has become the focal point of a lot of negativity and turmoil. I only hope the child involved will end up in a relatively good environment to grow up in, though I’m not sure the current scenarios favor that.

But I would like to suggest that there is a much bigger issue, a much deeper tragedy entwined in the stories being portrayed in our media. To explain, let me take you back to 1994. I was in my Sophomore year of college and had just arrived to Arizona State University to earn myself a degree in Journalism. Writing and covering stories that impacted our world and communities, delivering the truth to the masses, maybe framing the news in a more positive light – these were the goals of a twenty year old Iain Hamp.

About the same time I began to dive into the start of my journalism education, the OJ Simpson trial was in full swing and a media frenzy. It had bugged me a bit that there was so much coverage of the trial, when so many other things worth talking about were going on in the world, but I tended to just laugh at the absurdity of it more than anything else.

I was working as a security guard near ASU when I wasn’t in class, and a friend of mine was doing the same and lived in the same apartment complex as me. One day, in the Phoenix heat of summer, as we were walking home, my friend collapsed on the ground and had to be taken to the hospital. It turned out his lung had collapsed. I went to the hospital and waited around in the waiting room to find out what was happening with him, and the entire time life was happening around me, the OJ Trial was on the TV. People were coming in and out of the hospital for all sorts of things that needed healing, and yet we were all so worried about whether or not OJ was lying. It was a surreal moment, I turned away from the TV, and my heart swelled with empathy for the stories happening all around me.

That was the last summer of my journalism career. Of course with the advent of blogging, I can write the sorts of uplifting things and deliver the building messages I want to send out to the masses (all fifteen of you). But the mass media still delivers more and more of the same thing – news about people we don’t personally know, detailing parts of a stranger’s life I have absolutely no right or interest in knowing. And I guess I just have to ask – what good can come of it? What can we learn from it, what positive can we take away from knowing the mess that is the Anna Nicole Smith custody battle, or who Britney Spears is married to this week, or even whether or not OJ did it. At the end of the day, has it enhanced your life in any way?

Maybe I’m missing it. But I don’t see the point in me paying attention to any of it, and I found a great way to get away from paying attention to it. When the news starts talking about this sort of story, I turn it off, and I immediately go spend time doing something I absolutely love to do. Maybe that’s listening to my favorite music, or reading a few pages in a favorite book, or going for a walk, or calling a friend I haven’t talked to in a while…

Or, as was the case when I started this post, getting online and writing a blog post. Have a great week folks. You get better at anything you practice, so practice attracting positive things into your life.

I’ve had a few great inspirations for topics this week, but today, I’m in more of a mood to just share how the house hunting is progressing, and a few other personal notes.

We’ve met with our mortgage guys, our financial advisor, and our realtor now, discussing strategies with each one (we still need to meet with the accountant to chat about tax implications). The question has shifted from where we want to own a house – we have our area pretty well decided on, and there are ample houses in our price range on the market there. Now the decision to make is whether it is wise or even doable to keep the condo as an investment, renting it out to someone attending the nearby colleges and university. All signs so far point to yes, though it is a less conservative move than we’d usually make since you have to rely somewhat on having a renter in the unit for most of the time. Exciting times are afoot!

I spoke previously about my current neighborhood, and made somewhat sarcastic remarks about how you can occasionally see a star or two in the sky through the light pollution. But stars in the night sky is something I grew up with, and now I am moving to a place where I can see them again and still be ten or fifteen minutes to work most mornings.

A few other loose notes: I think it is amazing and wonderful that we are almost at the target for the month of raising $100 for Maggie’s Place, and the month isn’t even halfway over. Way to raise the bar, people. My wife pointed out to me recently that it makes sense to have my efforts tied into Maggie’s Place too, since it is a place where women are trying to pick their lives up and I am in a position to arrange for some good financial education and guidance to help them on their way. So I am likely to look into making something like that happen, and I’ll let you know how that progresses.

This week is going to be full, as I try to get a few things finished and off my plate. I’ll try to minimize the impact that has on my posting frequency. Oh, and one last thing, the charities for the next two months have been identified to raise money for via the ChipIn widget, and a few other cool opportunities have come to my attention that I will bring to yours as soon as I have more info myself.

Have a great week!

The February meeting of the Social Media Club was originally set to be a discussion of the tools that exist to implement and participate in social communities. To an extent that did occur, but the meat of the meeting ended up falling into two other categories.

There was an interesting debate begun around whether social media has a dehumanizing effect on us. When you build a community completely virtually, isn’t there a certain level of connectedness that is lacking which only being able to interact face-to-face can produce? The general consensus was that, as with so many other tools, it is up to the user who wields it to determine how to use it appropriately. It was pointed out that whether you are offline or on, you can affect a different version of yourself for different situations and put on personas as you desire – it may be more challenging to be a completely fake version of yourself in person, but it doesn’t take technological advancements to allow humans to put up different veneers. Additionally, some felt the web could have the opposite of a dehumanizing effect, wherein someone who feels socially inept in a crowd of people might be able to come out of his or her shell in a web-based environment, grow social skills, and apply those to be more able to connect to new people IRL (In Real Life).

My personal take on this discussion is that things like blogs, IM clients, discussion forums, and so on are simply additional ways to communicate, much like a telephone or writing a letter and sending it through the post office via “snail mail”. They each have their usefulness, they each have their limitations. For example, if you’re on a conference call and need to communicate something quickly to another person on the call, rather than interupt that call you can send them an instant message. Just yesterday I was on a call where we were both on AOL Instant Messenger too, and the conversation went “And then earlier I got an e-mail with this link,” I sent the link to the site via IM, paused, then continued “and as you can see on the left side of that web page, you could use that concept to…” and so on. The more you explore different ways to communicate, the easier it will be to get information out and the more powerfully that information can be delivered.

The other largest amount of time spent on a particular subject during the meeting was an around the table introduction of all of the attendees, what they did, and what they were there to hope to accomplish regarding social media. There were a few that had little knowledge and were just intrigued as to how the concept might enhance their business, life, or whatever they were trying to accomplish. As the discussion progressed however, I took note of some of the more intriguing personalities and social media efforts being shared.

• HOA Freedom dot com – a discussion forum to come discuss the good and bad aspects of HOA living (judging by the title, I suspect I can guess which side of the fence most people using the site will be on)
• Helloworld, a company focusing on video e-mail and other video-based social media tools.
• IT people from the Rich Dad company
• The VP of Jobing.com, which recently launched a blogging feature
• Business Blogging Pros, which helps businesses understand how blogging might enhance their efforts.
• An Account Executive from Business Wire
• A woman who takes old home movies and slides from the 40s – 60s (primarily) and transforms them to digital formats that can be shared over the web, e-mail, etc.
• A reporter from the Business Journal of Phoenix

The most interesting idea to me that someone was working on involved using social media to provide small businesses with a sort of virtual board of advisors/directors, bringing the possibility of expertise to them that larger businesses with bigger coffers normally can afford to obtain via an experienced board of directors.

A final thought – I shared with the Social Media Club that many moons ago I played Everquest, a big online game that many people find very addictive. I mentioned that what I thought made it so addictive was it gave you a false sense that you were accomplishing something, when in a sense you weren’t really accomplishing anything “real”. The discussion turned to Second Life, a similar game people have actually used to make a living by creating products and offering services within the game environment.

I think that Stagecoach Island, Wells Fargo’s venture into online gaming, is a great next step in this particular social media concept, because it creates an environment in which you actually are accomplishing something – increasing an individual’s knowledge of how to invest money and use it in different ways to increase wealth. I’m excited to see what other ways people come up with to provoke positive social change in different communities through the myriad of unique tools that make up social media.

I had the opportunity to get involved in pursuing one of my main goals this evening, mentoring others. Three hours of being able to directly connect with people trying to take the next transitional step in their careers. It was… awesome. Phenomenal. It also meant shifting my time around a bit and making some short term sacrifices, one of them being I will likely not have time for a post on Thursday. I will do my best to be back on track for Friday – Thursday night will be the Social Media Club meeting and between that and tonight’s experience, I will be bursting at the seams to share with you all.

I love my job, I love my life. Have a beautiful day.

WHAT: Social Media Club of Phoenix Meeting

WHEN: Thursday, February 8th @ 6:30pm

WHERE: La Madeline (in the wine room)
3102 East Camelback Road (NW of Camelback & 32nd Street)
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=3102+East+Camelback+Road,+Phoenix,+AZ

RSVP’s: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/45582338
Social Media Club: http://www.socialmediaclub.org
Social Media Club Phoenix: http://www.smcphoenix.com