I’m going to use a personal example, only because I know you can relate. All my life, I was told not to push it. To not do something for too long. To not over-do it. My parents knew I would burn out. If I was on the computer too long, I would get a migraine. If I lifted really heavy weights, I would pull a muscle. If I worked 10 or 11 hour days in construction, I would get muscle strain in my back. If I tried to memorize everything the night before a test, my brain would be kaput in the morning. I burned out, I crashed, essentially I failed.
Sound familiar?
You get pushed down. You get hit. You fall repetitively. You fail over and over. Yet, somehow, you never fail to get up. It’s something engrained into your character, your heart and your minds desire to constantly adapt and improve. Setback is only temporary. It may last a day, a week, a year, but it will always subside and something will replace it: Success
Down and Out
When you burn out from doing something. You’re being gets that much better at doing it. How about the time you got sick because you stayed up too late for a few nights. Yet, the next month you were up late four days in a row and turned out fine. Or what about the time you got a headache from writing at your computer for 6 hours straight. Yet, after getting 3 more headaches, your average writing time at your computer became the same as a full-time job – with ease. You will noticeably experience this at least a few times each month that you are able to perform harder, put forth more effort, dedicate more time to the things that you constantly burn out doing. In fact, this is actually the source of constant adaptation.
Stay Positive & Failure Is Friendly To Those Who Don’t Fight It
Humans in their entirety are under constant adaptation. It’s in our nature. We adapt in every form – mentally, physically, ideally, and in our hearts to the environment we are subject to.
The gold medalist outliers in athletics, in business, and in life, they got there through adaptation.
Most marathon runners have burned themselves out in at least 10 races or practice races before they successfully completed their first marathon.
The published writer, went through having 5 migraines and 20 different occasions of muscle spasms in her eyes and hands because she kept upping the dose of writing she did on the computer each day.
Almost all millionaire entrepreneurs, have had at least 30 overnighters and more than a third of their nights severely sleep deprived.
Reach
It’s impossible to bend and reach your toes if you have never stretched before. It’s impossible to write 60 hours a week while carrying a full-time job if you haven’t even wrote for 20 hours a week. It’s impossible to stay up two nights in a row working on a business plan if you have never had less than 7 hours a sleep in a night. As much as you want to fight it, life has its limits and becoming a gold medalist, becoming indispensable, becoming an artist, and becoming successful is not an overnight occurrence. It’s not something that can be reached the first try, the second try, or even after 50 tries.
The successful become the successful because they bounced back from injuries, headaches and sleepless nights the quickest. They stretched. They crashed. They adapted to it. They (now, like you) understood that their body is in a constant state of adaptation whether you want it to be or not. It tries to adjust to the moment – every moment.
Plateau
If you are not constantly improving with your muse, you are plateauing. If you are plateauing, you are getting worse, because everyone else, they are getting better, thus raising what the average is and putting you below the line. (Not where you want to be)
However, plateauing is key. Again, you can’t reach your toes the first try, even if you stay reaching for them for 5 hours straight. When you plateau, you allow adaptation to catch up and make the improvement you made the average so you can once again go after improvement. A person can reach their toes with 5 hours of effort, but only if they stretch, relax, adapt, and stretch again.
There are two variables of plateauing
1. How many times you plateau determines how excellent you will be. The more times you give yourself time to relax and adapt, the quicker you can accelerate becoming an expert at what you are doing. Who knew the amount of success is based on the number of times you actually don’t work for it?
2. How long you plateau for is the essential factor resulting in either progress or decline. If a weightlifter curls 50lb dumbbells, and then plateaus for two weeks, he is certainly not going to be lifting 50lb’s again right away. His plateau made his abilities decrease. Then again, he won’t get anywhere if he curls every single day, twice a day, leaving no time for adaptation (or improvement).
Everything is about the journey you take: how you did it, how it felt, what you learned, who you helped. It goes on. No, really, it goes on. The journey is a life long journey, it’s never ending – unless you count death as the end. Regardless, there has been a new conflict of interest in society, more specifically in the most recent (and upcoming) generations.
For simplicities sake, I will refer to the group of people as Generation Destination
Generation-D loves a journey. They love the process, the failures, the mistake, the lessons, the connections, the ups, the downs, the progress, and all the unrelated interesting things they learn during the journey. In fact, they love a journey so much that one, just isn’t enough. Gen D produces more creativity than any other generation. Their instinct and ability to adapt is so inhuman that they deserve to have more than one journey. In fact, they are so far out of the status quo that instead of having 1 journey, they have 1,000 Destinations.
Generation-D is so talented –not born with, but created talent– that they have the power to manipulate the time a journey takes. Actually, it is not so much manipulation as it is the fact that the more creative, the more passion and the more busy (productive) a person is, the more time they have. In Gen D’s case, they use the extra time they have to make more journeys. Because they follow their heart, invest in their art and connect with everyone by offering a gift to all who they meet, they reach the end of a successful journey the quickest, resulting in a smile and a start of their next journey.
What Generation D is not
If Gen D could spit (some of which can and do), they would spit on two things. First they would spit on anything that is not art and anything that impersonates art. They don’t follow the status quo, they don’t do as their told and they don’t like mediocrity. They spit on anything that is unoriginal, factory made and has a set of instructions on how to make.
The second target, which you can bet they would really build up for, is anything average. Unlike, the people who live one journey (the average) instead of a thousand destinations, Gen D does not work, work some more, and keep working only to attain minimal amounts of progress. They don’t stand in the assembly line, they don’t walk down a hill, they run up it. They don’t create anything that if someone breaks, they wouldn’t be fined or go to jail for. That is how remarkable of content, creation and value they enforce and produce.
Generation D Statement
To create 1000 times the value in a 1000 different ways. (It’s not just a statement, it’s personal, it’s a pledge, it’s a declaration)
They aim to make 1000 destinations because they not only do what they love, but they do it efficiently, quickly and precisely. They can reach a 1000 destinations because they create art that has and adds value wherever it goes. The saying that you can be successful when you want it as bad as you need air to breathe doesn’t have a say here because the air Gen D breathes is success; it is art, it is passion, it is value, it is originality, it is everything we need.
Quick question, who do you think is going to gain the most interest in society?
The generations of mediocre, average, incomplete, held back, ill rewarded, humdrum, and unexceptional
or Generation D?
Stay Positive and End The Conflict Of Interest, Be Indispensable
Success is really what you call “Mastered Creativity”. What you will find below are some constructed writing challenges and exercises to push your creativity. They are formed in a way to apply practice to parts of writing (and thinking) you have rarely practiced before. The goal is to get your creative mind to push limits, stretch its imagination and to give it a game to play.
To have an open and expanded mind that is capable of using objects, sounds, movements, etc., and turn them into something solid and applicable is exactly what the most successful creators do. So why not start with the basics – Creative Writing. You might just realize that there are some life lessons to be learned from the writing exercises.
1. Newspaper Headline: I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of reading all the negativity in the newspaper. Old Zig Ziglar always said that the reason foreigners can come to America and become millionaires within a year is that they can’t read all the negativity in the newspaper. For this challenge, write your own headline article for the newspaper and share what you think is important enough for all to know. Lesson: Make sure the positive is what remains on the front page. Focus on the good, the happy, the love and remember to share it with everyone. Put all of the negativity in the obituary section.
2. Oddvertisement: You have seen great advertisements that may have even gotten you to buy something, but you have also seen terrible ads that feel like a continuous prod in the ribs. Advertisements are only fun when you see an advertisement for something odd. That’s why I call it an Oddvertisement. Open up your pantry or closet and dig for something in the far back that never gets used. Now it’s time to sell it. Write an oddvertisement that is creative and encouraging enough for someone to consider buying it. Lesson: Anyone can make a sale, but only the creative make a living off of it. There is always a different way to look at things, you just have to have the right mindset.
3. MadLib Promotion: While MadLibs are extremely fun. The joy can be even more fruitful when you are the one who created the MadLib for someone else to complete. Lesson: Challenge others by giving them the authority to choose what word goes in a certain spot.
4. Word Of The Day Stories: Dictionary.com has a Word of The Day every day. For a beginner writer, try freewriting and using the words from the last seven days. For a more expert writer, create a story using all of last months words. To take it a step further, you can even start your story by using the time and setting of the actual month that you are using the new words from. Lesson: Time really does go by quickly, yet it’s still possible to learn something new everyday and apply it to your life.
5. Improv Writing: Improv, Improv Character Building, Improv-ing Writing SkillsLesson: People-observation skills and the ability to make a correct judgement can be critical in some situations. In others, it’s necessary to keep an open mind about a person since truly, you don’t know where they come from, what they are thinking or where they want to go in life.
6. Who’s Quote Is It Anyway?: Have a list of famous quotes you absolutely love? Create a story that implements them word by word, as the theme, or by using your own derivative of the meaning. Give the quote an all new definition and background. Who knows, if you switch it up enough, you just might be quoted for it. Lesson:Emulating The Successful Through Quotes.
7. Poetry Walk Or Meditation. While walking and becoming aware of all that is around you, carry a journal and write down notes and ideas to create a poem from. Lesson: Living in the moment and remaining aware.
8. Connect-The-Sentences: Either pull random sentences from different books or use sentences you have recently heard someone say. Make three columns and in the first and third, write down the sentences that you gathered. The middle column is for you to write your own sentence that can connect the first and third sentences. The more challenging you want it, the more columns you can add, making every other column blank. Lesson: To achieve anything in life from where you are, you have to create a bridge. There is never skipping steps. You can’t just skip the middle column of this writing game or skip the work you need to do to get to where you want to be in life. It’s also great to realize that you can make the bridge as interesting and be as creative as possible.
9. Word Jump. While freewriting, start every sentence with the word that you blindly land your finger on in a book or newspaper. Lesson: You never know what’s going to pop up in your life to knock you off track. Are you creative enough to adapt and overcome?
10.Guest Post: Instead of getting a guest to write a blog post for you, you write it. Open up the post like you normally would on a subject of your choice (preferably controversial, but it doesn’t need to be). Then introduce your guest that will be writing a post on the subject (Create an alias for yourself). Now begin writing from a different perspective, as the guest blogger. Lesson: Getting different perspectives.
11.Word Play: Write a poem with word play… wait, weight, waste, waist, hole, whole. Lesson: Simply just fun!
12.I Write Dead People: Open up a newspaper to the Obituary section and write a story about how a person died. Lesson: Makes you happy to be alive doesn’t it? Life’s too short to not be creative.
13. Telephone Book Tale: Open to a random page of your yellow book, placing your finger on a part of the page and using what is written in that ad, put it in your story. Did your finger lie on a Muffler shop? Has there been a recent murder there? Was all that was left at the scene a piece of paper and the phone number which has been disconnected? Big yellow phone books don’t do any good unless you can write a story from them. Lesson: Nothing is ever as it seems.
14. Where Do You WANT To See Yourself In 5 Years?: Simple as that. Write every detail, every dream come true, every aspect of the life you want. Get crazy with it! So many people will ask you this throughout your life. Create an answer that will blow them away.
Stay Positive & Then Follow Through To Make That 5th Year Come True
TaoSports for Extraordinary Performance in Athletics, Business, and Life is the one sport that if you were to become a professional in, you should pick. Although, I would add or change the word extraordinary because the lessons taught and experiences shared in this book are the ordinary techniques that are used by the extraordinary. The way I am going to regurgitate this book to you is by first sharing everything that I actually wrote down while I was reading it. These items are the most important parts of the book that sparked the brightest ideas and concepts in my brain. Then I am going to list the chapters in the book to let you know of all the different lessons that you can learn and improve on. The reason for this process is that the book can be picked up and started from anywhere you choose: the beginning, the end, or a random page. My advice for you is not to go and purchase the book, but to go and flip it open to a chapter that you think you want to improve in your life, read it and see if you want to read the other chapters. Lastly, I will share some of my favorite affirmations that were shared in the book that hopefully you can use.
Garth’s Dancing Mind
Why fight your way to the top, when you can rise to it? There is no such thing as a victory in an uphill battle; there is only a plateau and it’s never at the top.
Having a winning attitude is a defiance to the expectation of feeling the thrill of victory and agony of defeat. Both of which are detrimental to any possibility of being successful in the future. To have a winning attitude is to break down the process to moments. Thinking and feeling that you have won each moment. Success is relative to the quality of the process. There is more than one finish line in a 5k race, there are actually 6,200 finish lines. Every step is a victory and should be viewed as one.
What Not To Be –
Struggling for external recognition
Measuring self-worth on outcomes
Focusing on perfection
Establishing unrealistic expectations
Blaming others
Condemning yourself for mistakes and failure
“You don’t dance to get to the other side of the floor” – Alan Watts
There are three visualization processes that I have taken from the book (which probably has 30+ in it). The first is a visualization of your sanctuary that you can retreat to based off a trigger (mines putting my index finger and thumb together to create a circle). You get to create your own place of ritual and relaxation. My place was based off a picture of a monk sweeping in front of his hut that was cuddling the base of a mountain, the monk is my guide, as you will read more about when you open the book. The second visualization process was to imagine a steady beam of sunlight coming down on top of you, entering your head and circulating it’s power throughout your body, delivering energy, healing powers and enlightenment.
The third visualization example was actually the first in the book which goes like this:
“For example, close your eyes right now and imagine a juicy, sour lemon. In your mind, cut a big wedge from the lemon and place it in your mouth. Bite down, and let the sour juices permeate your entire mouth. Did you find yourself puckering or salivating?”
It simply goes to show how powerful visualization can be. With consistent practice, you can have the same trigger affect to visualizing winning a race, visualizing closing a deal or whatever will help you succeed.
While visualizations are confirmations for your mind, affirmations are confirmations to your heart. “Affirmations are not self deception, they’re self direction.” At the bottom of this post, I will list my absolute favorite affirmations from the book. It is loaded with them! You can also create a list of perfect affirmations for yourself by turning your favorite quotes into affirmations.
At every moment remember: Be positive, Be present, Be concise, Be rhythmic.
Adaptation is the hallmark of champions.
Remember to pace yourself. Progress is two steps forward, one step backward.
To trump fatigue, you can either focus on one aspect of the process or at the end result, ignore all else and let the fatigue bypass you.
Concentrate on what you have control over.
What you believe you become.
Handling a negative event in a positive way is an experience that can become a touchstone for future encounters.
Fear: is a natural part of life. It can either paralyze you or give you an opportunity to assess the risk your facing and prepare for it properly. Fear can also make you respect your comfort zone.
When in a slump, go with the flow because you will slingshot back.
5 Stages of Injury: – Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. (When you read this section under the chapter titled Injuries, you will agree at first, but then you will disagree because when you finally realize the process you take, you are able to shorten and change it.)
Challenge: Find the book at the bookstore and read the beginning of the chapter on page 76. (Half a page) By far the most “Woa” moment in the entire book.
One of the most important excerpts I took from the book is that you, me, we – are never as great as our greatest victory or as bad as our worst defeat. We are above it all, we are apart from it because we have a winning attitude.
Reevaluate life while in downtime. Just because your body may be down, does not mean you can allow your mind to go down with it. You need to focus on what made you lose balance, what you are going to do to achieve balance again and what you will do to prevent from ever entering downtime again. Oh, and remember, laughter is by far the best medicine to get out of downtime, I suggest George Carlin.
Committed to truth no consistency – Buddha
“According to Mark, when you become totally engrossed in your sport, you over-analyze everything.” Contributing to the saying that analysis is paralysis. Ironically, I had just written a blog post about this called The One Quality You Need To Be A Successful Expert
I will top of my Dancing Mind with something I loved most about TBDM. At the beginning of each section, and sometimes within, a chapter of the Tao Te Ching is shared. The characters associated with it were so aesthetic that it made me want to study them. The reason being that the greatness of them is that they are meant to make you visualize and feel their meaning when you meditate on them. The Tao Te Ching inserts reminded me of a post I wrote a long time ago on a particular chapter:An Accord With Greatness
Tao Te Ching no.1
Thus, without expectation,
One will always perceive the subtlety.
And, with expectation,
One will always perceive the boundary.
TMDB Chapters – If you think a topic is appealing, pick up the book and just read the chapter
Those who it may seem that they don’t, are just the ones who are better at preparing you for the success.
Anyone can show you the “right way” of achieving what you want, but you will not feel the power of having succeeded if you did not jump through the flaming hula-hoop that is spinning in air above a tank full of sharks.
Like many games, Super Mario taught us an important lesson. When you reach the top of the ladder, you can always jump to another and get even higher. – Success.
