Death is meant to be superfluous, but it’s not. It’s important, it’s vital, I may even go so far as to say that it’s the meat-and-potatoes of your mom’s cooking – no meal is complete without meat-and-potatoes.
Death is an angel in disguise, a miracle worker’s shadow, god’s secret power, the greatest treasure in all the world, it is a stronger truth bearer than the greek mythological messenger, Iris.
Death has a message of its own. This message is one that should never need to be delivered but must. This message, once delivered, forces you to challenge every theory you have, it makes analyze your worldview, and it eliminates your perception of risk which is made by the amygdala.
Hundreds of thousands of cancer patients get this message every week. The message is that they only have three months to live. Or six weeks. Or twenty days. And just like that, life begins for them. Honestly. Passionately. Truthfully begins.
Jim Rohn says the following in his book The Seasons Of Life,
“It’s when a human, with sufficient disgust, desire, and determination to change his life finally steps up to the bar of human justice and shouts for all the world to hear, ‘I have had it with defeat and humiliation, and I will tolerate it not longer.’ That is when time, fate and circumstances call a hasty conference, and all three wearily agree, ‘We had best step aside, because we are powerless to stop that kind of resolve.'”
Must you die early on to live a full life? A life which uses your muse, passion, and creativity as the foundation. A life absent of fear, regret, self-degradation and hate. A life that remains intolerant to failure, set-backs, or humiliation. Must we die early on to live that life?
This is not a rhetorical question. The answer is yes. We really must die early on to live a full life.
Contrary to belief, terminal cancer patients are not the only ones who are lucky enough to die early on and live a full life. A rare headcount of people are lucky enough to die early. For some people it takes half of their lives to die and that only leaves half a life left to live, really live. For most, people never die until they are much too old to live. That is the death of death.
You’re likely confused, so let me elaborate. The death in which I write about is the death of the ego. When a person is diagnosed with terminal cancer, or hits rock bottom in life from drugs and alcohol, or gives so much love to one person and then that person leaves them, there is a shift in the psyche of that person. That shift is the death of their ego.
Upon their death, they question everything: tradition, their fears, their relationships, their work, their ethic, their personality… to discover what truly matters and to live a full passionate life.
The only thing I don’t know then is whether the miracle is being told you will die soon or the fact that after you are told, the cancer goes into remission, the addict never touches a drug again, the alcoholic never drinks, and the lover begins to love themself as much as they loved the other?
I’ve eaten a lot of organic apples but it wasn’t until I pulled the label off and stuck it to a notepad at work (for no reason) where I kept looking at it that I realized something. This apple came from New Zealand! That is on an island over 8,000 miles away from where I purchased it. It got me thinking…
We are all really ignorant of how far items and ideas travel before they reach us. Sure we’re curious where the hundred-dollar bill we have has been, but it stays a funny thought and is never looked into. While that specifically may be irrelevant, the concept is not.
Every goal has an origin. This apple states that it began in New Zealand and its goal was clearly to be bought in Madison, WI. The question I was asking myself was how did it get from New Zealand to here, but the growers of the apple were thinking ‘how do we get these apples to Madison, WI from here?’ not ‘where do these apples go from here?’
Notice the difference is that a destination was chosen for the apples to arrive and the method of transportation to get them there was worked out beginning in Madison, WI, not New Zealand. They marked their origin (New Zealand), set their goal (Madison, WI) and worked out everything backwards.
If they had worked it all out going forwards they may think that putting them on the first shipment to America will get them to Madison the quickest when really, first looking at where which flights are going into Madison the soonest and having them sent there.
One thought is that the quicker they get shipped, the quicker they reach their destination when in reality when the transportation strategies begin getting worked out from the destination, the product reaches it much quicker.
Spreading ideas or products isn’t about sending them into a thousand different directions hoping they eventually land at your goal. It is about knowing your goal, what people are in closest and most constant contact with your goal and which mode of transportation best reaches them directly.
The real question arises then, is it more efficient to figure out where a product needs to go to reach its destination or how quickly will it land at its destination if it is just sent off on any number of planes.
What if we corrected all the errors in the world? Would we be perfect?
If you answered yes, do you really believe it?
Does correcting errors bring out potential? Or merely suppress it and endorse mediocre?
If we got every student to get an A in each subject, would we have a world of inspired geniuses or a world of people who are just good enough in every area?
Getting a juggler to never make an error kind of defeats the purpose of a juggler doesn’t it?
If error correction is your goal, are you saying that being at a specific prescribed weight is worth giving up the slightly off track, but happy, minor error eating habits you have?
Do you think it’s fair to train one person to correctly do 10 tasks or 10 people to not only correct one task each, but to bring their creativity to that one task as well?
Only focusing on error correction kind of destroys any potential, any chance of growth of creativity and of art doesn’t it?
Stay Positive & Why Correct The Bad When You Can Amplify The Good?
The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, ironically spends the majority of the time discussing the 80/20 rule, or Pareto’s principle. Essentially it states that 80% of the best results come from 20% of the work.
If you want to become indispensable, you don’t have to necessarily leave your cubicle. First let’s look at the three types of cubicle workers.
There are the cogs that know what they need to do, their orders and instructions, and make sure to extend the tasks to take up the entire day. They do the same thing every day and are always working, but not getting anywhere.
Then there are the LOL cogs that know what they need to do, and get it done quickly. They then resume surfing the web and entertaining themselves with hundreds of pictures of LOL cats and chain emails.
Lastly, there are the linchpins in a cog position, that know what they need to do and do it quickly and efficiently. Then they proceed to do more than is asked and because they used the Pareto’s principle, have 80% of their time left over to work on maximizing their art, their creativeness. They use the extra time to be more of a linchpin.
Tim Ferriss shared a way to do all the work necessary for a factory job with minimal time in the office and other time to work on starting up a business. I’m suggesting that the same time can be used at home or in a cubicle.
Everyone has the same 24 hours, but only linchpins risk using their cubicle hours to create something remarkable.
Stay Positive & Of Course You Don’t Look Busy, You Did It Right The First Time
It’s been over a month and a half since I attended Seth Godin’s Pick Yourself event in Tribeca (NY). There’s a specific reason I waited so long to reflect on the event. I wanted to prove a point, not just about Seth Godin, but what any business must produce, whether in product or experience.
Simply put, it must be astonishingly remarkable, something so memorable it is still thought of and excites a person’s senses a month, five months or a year after the product is purchased or the service is used. Essentially, that is what Seth Godin’s Pick Yourself event manifested, so it is with easy honor that I will hit some points from it again along with my own curves and twists of ideas.
I had no inclination to write this so soon. I decided to after I created a new motto the other day, tweeted it and it got retweeted by a few people. It was just another tweet, another 140 characters that my mind spit out and that I needed to share.
My motto: Give yourself authority.
It was only after I expressed the motto on twitter that I was tapped by the memory of Seth Godin’s Pick Yourself event, which it’s theme was to not wait for someone to pick you, not wait for an authority to notice you, to get lucky; but to pick yourself, solve the problems yourself, find the opportunity yourself, to lead yourself and quite plainly, as my motto states, give yourself authority.
72 Steps To Starbucks Coffee
While in New York City every 72 steps, either if I turned left or right, I would be facing a Starbucks. In Manhattan alone, there are approximately 300 Starbucks stores. That means that out of all the registered Coffee Shops in New York, Starbucks consists of about 60% of them. In a city dominated by the outlier of the Coffee Industry, how can any other coffee shops even make it?
That’s a simple answer that you can come up with. The better question is how Starbucks was able to take a symbol from Moby Dick, use it as it’s logo, and create a brand – an understanding of when you see the symbol, you are going to smell the richest Coffee in town and get free Wi-Fi along with the absolute best customer service.
It’s A Revolution
The dictionary says that a revolution is a single turn of event. Our revolution, the one we don’t quite understand, the one we thought could be easily understood, the one that is making us question nearly everything, is not a single turn of event, it’s a million turns. This revolution is something that is a collective change in one sense, but deep down to it, it’s about the turn each one of us makes, a turn that may be different than the person next to us. While putting it in the most simple form, the revolution is about giving yourself authority, ridding yourself of the chains of tradition and following your passion to create art. Yet, to do each of these things is not something that we can do collectively, being collective is what got us in this grave. No. This must be done individually; each person must make the choice, must give themselves authority and use it. In its entirety, this revolution will turn Perfect into impossible
Instead Of Giving It Our All
Seth gave a long description about the industrial age and this new age of connection. The one take I want to share with you from the event is this.
“So one quick example, just to show you how deeply ingrained this is. If you don’t mind, raise your right hand just as high as you can. Okay, now raise it just a little higher.”
Instead of giving it our all the first time, we give enough and then a bit more when told to. Some people raised their hands 20% higher, others 5% higher when told to raise it a bit higher. In a room of about 200 people there was about 4,000% of potential not being used until told to. The way I see it, even if you gave 100% and raised your hand as high as possible the first time, you would still find a way to raise it higher.
I No Longer Market To You
I had no clue what real type of marketing I was doing on my website until I heard Seth Godin say this, “Because marketing has shifted from me marketing at you, to you marketing to each other.” So, when creating a product, running a business or writing a blog, you can provide all the strong content you would like, but unless you know what you want to do with your audience, your tribe, unless you know how to give them strategies to market to each other and other people that will join your tribe, you have nothing.
Juggling
Seth Godin also inspired me to write this post: The Juggler’s Perfection. On the note of Juggling, of doing what you love, of taking that risk…
“Is it worth getting arrested for?” – Seth Godin
Bluffs, Excuses and The Promise
You think you have a hundred reasons not do something, not to take leap, not to go out on your own or start your business or take a risk to achieve what you really want. Actually, you probably only have 15 to 20 excuses, or rather, they are bluffs. When you sit down, write the list of the 15 to 20 bluffs, and work through it, you will find that either you don’t have anything holding you back, or you just need to work out a way to get around one or two excuses (a lot easier than working around 20). What it comes down to, what it really comes down to is that you want a promise it will work. You want the paper to say, after you have crossed all your bluffs out, that it will work indefinitely.
There will never be a promise that it’s going to work. Once you realize that, you realize there’s no point in making a list, not because there’s no point in achieving your goal anymore, but because you realize that you are going to have to take a risk and that there isn’t a promise, you will say “something is better than nothing” and get on with it, ship the product or start the business. As humans, if we are not promised lobster (perfection), we would rather have crawfish (anything) than nothing at all. Once you realize there is no promise of perfection, no lobster, it makes doing the thing you made a list of bluffs for, all the more easy. You may even find that you like crawfish more than lobster.
A couple of sayings to use/share
Money is a weight you can run much faster without
You will be wrong a lot, but you will be right a lot too
All you need to care about is being human
The Two Achievements I Made After The Event
Seth made a simple, yet such an extremely interesting point about entrepreneurship and freelance. A freelancer gets paid when she ships, delivers the product, finishes. The entrepreneur gets paid while she sleeps. I am happy to say that, while I still do freelance writing, I have crafted a segment of it into a businesses in which I have hired two employees already! I now sleep easier (because I know I’m getting paid for it) and I have more time to do $100 an hour work that makes a much larger impact on the world – which leads me to…
The second achievement is nearly ready to be shipped. My 30,000 word manifest on what school is for: a view from an 18-year-old graduate who received his associates degree and plans to go back for a master’s degree. Not for the diploma, but for the information and experience being within the system will produce, in order to write a 90,000 word sequel upon graduation. The eBook, Start Schooling Dreams will be released at the beginning of August, 2012, completely free. More background information to come soon.
Stay Positive & Take The Authority, Make A Badge Even
Sometimes guilty myself, I always hear people say “I need more time”.
Those who mutter these words are likely the ones doing, acting, creating and following through. When you feel that you need more time it ignites a sense of urgency, hectic-ness, and haste. It is what needs to happen before you accomplish and ship anything valuable.
There is a way to just let time flow and “enjoy” yourself. Only through mediocre, dull and banal achievements can you do this. It’s easy. You do less and you get more time to do even less. No need to worry about haste making waste.
However, there is a way to have both and that is through Early Urgency. It’s a talent that can be attained by anyone willing to take control of their efforts, initiative and mind-set and who want more time to enjoy themselves and their accomplishments.
Early Urgency is making yourself flail (sometimes confused with fail), early. It is expediting your efforts before your deadline to ship. By doing so, you have all that time, from when you finished early to the deadline, where you can relax and enjoy yourself.
Warning: For some reason, the side effect to Early Urgency is that there are more phenomenal products being shipped early, never a peep about needing more time, and rarely ever, does someone want to just let time flow to enjoy themselves. They get all the enjoyment they need out of the frequent act of shipping their creations.
Stay Positive & Quicken Your Pace To Win The Race (To The Top)
