Balance is about choices, and it isn’t easy. Over at US News and World Report today, I talk how you can realistically achieve work-life balance. Read it here, and get honest. This is one of my favorite posts recently.
Category: Knowing yourself
This is a guest post from my dear friend and change-maker Sam Davidson. Sam Davidson is a writer, entrepreneur, and dreamer who believes that the world needs more passionate people. To help people find and live their passion, he has written 50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need. He is the co-founder of Cool People Care and Proof Branding, and lives in Nashville with his wife and daughter.
50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need from Point House Films on Vimeo.
Finding and living your passion is a process. It’s not something you do once over the course of an afternoon at a coffee shop and are done with. It’s a journey you live deeply, repeating as necessary until you die. It’s a commitment, a lifelong pursuit, and a work of epic proportions. Once you decide that you must find your passion, you cannot settle until you do.
This is something I learned from Rebecca Thorman. She doesn’t settle. And neither can you when discovering what it is you love, who it is you’re becoming, and what it is you’re passionate about.
I’ve met Rebecca once. Nothing about her was second rate. The coffee shop where we met, the sushi place we grabbed dinner, the martini bar we went to after that – it was all top notch. Look at her blog design. Read about her boyfriend. Check out what she does for a living. Look at pictures of where she lives (or used to). What about this woman screams compromise?
Nothing.
Take heed: you can’t settle when you’re looking for your passion. You also can’t settle – once you find it – as to where that passion takes you.
For some people, a passion becomes a profession. For others, it becomes a wonderful hobby to explore after work or on the weekends. Some become passionate about a cause and others about people. Be warned: when you decide that you can’t be anything but passionate, you are beginning the journey of a lifetime.
But, what a wonderful journey it is! I firmly believe that the world needs more passionate people. This is why I wrote 50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need. Using the excuse to eliminate excess from our lives, I also detail how getting rid of what doesn’t matter can help you discover what does. The same is true in reverse: once we find what’s truly important, everything that isn’t can fade into the background.
Have you seen pictures of what Rebecca cooks? Doesn’t it want to make you do the same? Your passion will be similar. Once you find it, others will see the contagious fire within and want to find theirs. And when they do – when a friend or colleague tells you that they want to be as passionate about something as you are, make sure to warn them. Let them know that if they truly want to find that which makes them feel alive, they can’t compromise. They can’t settle. They’ve got to follow the journey until it’s logical and exciting conclusion. Your passion demands nothing less.
Serious applicants only.
Other things (actually in the book) that you don’t need:
#3: Untaken risks
#12: Pictures that don’t mean anything
#47: A job you hate
Contest:
Share your passionate story in the comments. What is it that you’re passionate about? How did you find it? How long did it take? Where has it taken you now? One lucky commenter will receive a signed copy of 50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need.
Categories
Just One Word
You know how in Eat Pray Love, the sage memoirist Elizabeth Gilbert summarizes entire cities and personalities into one singular word? New York City is predictably assigned Achieve, Stockholm receives Conform, and the word Attraversiamo, which means “let’s cross over” in Italiano, is eventually assigned to Gilbert herself.
Now there is even a Facebook group to one-word devotees, where the city Provo, UT gets Marry, and Jacksonville, FL is stuck with Ridiculous. But there’s no need to stop at cities and people. Much can be acutely summarized in one word – your dinner meal, a presidency, a TV show – and now, as the year comes to a close, the last 365 days.
I’d like to tell you my word for 2010 was Sex! or Moola-oh-la-la, but alas, my every day isn’t filled with lingerie and shopping. We can save those words for the The Real Housewives or perhaps, Penelope Trunk (I only jest).
No, this year brought about a reverie from anxious comparisons and slowly, but surely I learned to lean less on my measuring stick for support. Perhaps most revealing is that my lungs experienced the luxuriate familiarity of full and deep breaths again and again, sometimes for entire days.
People will often ask me how I like DC or what my relationship with Ryan is like, and I will reply, “I feel like I can finally breathe.” Shorthand, which I hope people understand to mean that Ryan and the city allow me to sink into more of myself. They allow me to be more of me. People will often say Comfort to describe being able to be themselves. But I think it is more than that, as it is also Challenge.
The dichotomy between comfort and challenge is where I found my word for 2010 sitting in flashing lights above my head as I pondered (and is also my sorry attempt at describing Love which selfishly eludes description).
It is not really a word to describe the entirety of 2010, but rather the result of each day following the day before it. The word is – Confidence. That is, this is the year I got my mojo back.
Hello, Mojo.
Incidentally, when I did this exercise last year, I expected the year of 2010 to be all about Friends, Social/Culture. Yes, that is how I wrote it, forward slash and all. Which is exactly what DC has been the past two months, plus a healthy dose of Family. Funny how things work out in the end.
(The year of 2009 carried the theme Ryan/Alice, Love is All Around in case you were wondering).
My choice for a feeling to carry me into 2011 is Follow-Through. It’s a dull choice perhaps, but also full of intention, continuance, and completion. And it has so many great translations from its literal definitions like “movement after the release,” and “continue until all motion of body has ceased,” – all of which are so lovely when you apply them not just to baseball or golf, but to the excruciating discipline of self.
So, cheers to that. And cheers to you, dear reader, and whatever word you have in mind for 2011.
In participation with #reverb10.
Categories
Moving to a New City
Airports are particularly filthy places, no matter who you are. No matter what seat you’re in on the plane, everyone has to sit on the same toilet seats in the airport. Or hover, if you’re smart.
I’m not a germaphobe by any means, at least not yet, but airports get to me in a way that other public transportation doesn’t. I’m always looking to count on the goodness of my fellow travelers; but it’s usually about a fifty-fifty split as to who surprises me, for better or for worse.
One of the ideas that I put out there at the beginning of the year was that I wanted to travel more, and indeed, I have taken more trips in the last year than I probably have in my life. And each time, I feel all that is more around me, all that is bigger than myself, and it makes me want.
I get that you can make any city work for you. I’ve been making Madison work for me for almost ten years (oh my lord). And when others would complain about Madison (which they did a lot), I was the one to persuade its virtues (which I did a lot).
So no, this was not my first choice. Or second. Or even third, really.
Following my boyfriend for the good of his career is not my dream. Countless friends have been picked off the career ladder for just this reason and I have always held fast to my ambition during the barrage.
I’ve never had any intention of leaving my career – or my home. But as months, and then years started to separate me from my idealism, I saw in ways that I didn’t understand before how easily people can settle. How it wouldn’t matter much what the next job was because the trappings of work would still be the same, so you settle. Really great positions and ideas and causes can supersede the trappings, but still you come to rest.
So in less than two weeks, Ryan and I have settled everything, but in a different manner entirely.
In two weeks more, with the help of UnitedVanLines.com, we will have moved and all the way to Washington, DC.
. I will work remotely – Alice.com is graciously letting me keep my position. I’ve rented out my condo. Ryan will open a new Brazen office. And we’ve found a great new place to call home. Ryan has lived in DC before, but it will all be new to me.
As I write this, I’m no longer in the airport, but on the plane. It is the time on the flight when everyone is curiously quiet – the babies are suckling, the old men are sleeping, and the young women are reading. Outside the window is a bit of how large the world is, and then, as the aerial views are covered with a blank slate of clouds, how large it could be.
We won’t be in DC long – I’m still holding out for my first choice, after all – but we will be there long enough. Long enough, I think, for an adventure.
We are told to show streaks of our soul, to be original. To show irreverence. And especially, place your mark on the world. Eschew tradition. And while you should be yourself, you should also, somewhere along the line – if you’re lucky, between high school and turning thirty – find that originality is only the beginning.
Renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright is known for pioneering one of the most important movements in architecture. His mastery of the compression and exaltation of space has little to do with inspiring awe (although that it does), and much more to do with a space that is living. That shows you how to act, impresses upon you what to feel and has a conversation with you. The building has a conversation with you, not Wright.
Which was probably a great mystery to those who knew Wright while he was living since he was quite the arrogant bastard. But his architecture lacks ego. Wright matched a structure to its environment. The infamous Guggenheim intentionally looks nothing like the home of Taliesin.
In contrast, Santiago Calatrava or Frank Gehry, two of the celebrity architects of present-day, are very recognizable. No matter where you are. No matter what city you’re in. A Calatrava or Gehry building has a distinct stamp, an identifiable arrangement with their hand apparent. An impression, of themselves.
And however distinct those buildings are from each other, they are also, ultimately, more of the same. The type of sameness that dominates strip mall suburbia where big-box retailers have stamped their own identifiable arrangement with the ease of reflecting the last box onto the next, so it is the same from town to town to town.
It isn’t quite fair to compare a Walmart to a Calatrava, of course. A Calatrava is beautiful and a Walmart is most certainly not. But it is fair to compare this obsession we have to create and stamp our brand – in all of our novel and impertinent glory – across our careers, and projects and relationships.
Maybe if we all tried a little less to leave our imprint on the world, something might rise that’s a bit more meaningful than ourselves alone. We need to concentrate less on being special, and more on matching ourselves to our environment. Success isn’t about you.
Wright did this through architectural structures. You’ll do it through a lesson plan. Or diving. Or an iPhone app. Or parenthood. Whatever.
But if you say, “That’s not part of my brand,” you are missing the point. Match your skills and talents to the environment around you – those jobs, projects, affairs, and challenges that form our lives. That is change; listening to the milieu and giving it a voice.
Dilute your brand. It’s less than you think anyway. Pay attention to what’s bigger than you. Match your rhythm to what needs to be done. Respond.
Categories
The Miseducation of a Woman
Florida at Christmastime isn’t particularly warm, but it’s near tropical for Wisconsinites (of which I am finally one), so it is not the light breeze that causes my arms to hover close to my core while sitting at the pool. In fact, it is something that exists entirely in my head, and I have to consciously and decidedly lift my elbows and hands away from my hips and stomach towards the armrests so as to appear confident.
The right to be a woman, in the finest sense, relies on such confidence.
My two-piece bathing suit beguiles a certain flirtatious composure (it’s got polka dots), and at 5’8” (okay, 5’7” and a half) and 130 lbs, I wear it well. According to my original Illinois driver’s license, that identifying information hasn’t changed for ten years. I still weigh the same as I did in high school, but there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think I feel fat.
When I look at pictures of myself, I can see rationally that I am skinny, that I look skinny. That I am healthy, and I look healthy. That I am beautiful, and I look beautiful. Rationally, these are all facts that can be written and entered into evidence.
Quite irrationally, I can tell you that the daily struggle of being a woman is that my stomach expands when I eat, my thighs are big and my hips are large. I also worry about the backs of my arms, the portion of my leg directly underneath my butt, and the meeting place of my neck to the space underneath my chin.
Necessary qualifiers: I have an active lifestyle, I love to cook, I love to eat, I don’t read so-called women’s magazines and I usually love my biggest “flaws” – my thin lips, pale skin, imperfect nose and uneven eyebrows, thin fingernails, fine hair, big feet, small breasts, large rear. I’ve been known to run errands without make-up.
But I am looking in the mirror more often lately. Ryan says this to me, over Christmas vacation, while we sit in a high-rise condo that has a mirror on every wall and round every corner. There are a lot of mirrors here, I reply, but I know what he is talking about. He is worried about me, he says.
I don’t wonder at air-brushed models but the pre-teen girl walking down the street in West Palm Beach, dressed with too many inches exposed on her sapling thighs. Or the girls at the Philly wedding whose legs are the size of my arms and whose arms are the size of my wrists. Is this sickness? Disease? Good genes?
A couple mornings later, I spend too much time getting dressed considering I work for a start-up with a casual dress code. I dress up because I like to. I try not to stand out too much from my colleagues who wear jeans and sweatshirts by wearing a cotton t-shirt fabric scarf, or nice boots over leggings. I wear a lot of casual dresses with tights. I try to match the VPs (all men), but since there are no women executives, it’s difficult to know if I’ve got it right.
I could go on.
And then, on any given day, I read about why there are fewer women CEOs, that women are better CEOs, that women are less promising as candidates for promotion, that surgeons can now relocate fat from your thigh to your chest, that kids see housework as a women’s domain, just 4% of venture capital goes to women, wives earn more than their husbands, and just being a woman is a pre-existing condition in healthcare.
I find the truth somewhere, not in the piling up of research, like clothes discarded on my floor, but in accounts from real-life women, between the lines in their interviews, bluntly stated in their ethos, and shared and protected among friends.
“The truth is,” Joanne Lipman says, a former deputy managing editor at The Wall Street Journal and founding editor in chief of Condé Nast Portfolio magazine, “women haven’t come nearly as far as we would have predicted 25 years ago. Somewhere along the line, especially in recent years, progress for women has stalled. And attitudes have taken a giant leap backward.”
For the past eight or nine months, I’ve created a bubble around me of people I trust, making sweeping efforts to withdraw from drama. Through this process, I learned; the bubble always pops.
Here’s what that’s like for me: Imagine, you’re a crumb and you fall onto the sidewalk and an ant discovers you. His tiny ant friends are soon alerted and before you know it, you’re swarmed! A disgusting black blanket moves furtively and anxiously to completely and methodically chew through your every last morsel. The very thought makes me sick.
And more than anything, this is what it’s like when things are outside my locus of control. And I love control, especially in all of its anxiety-ridden devastation.
“Anxiety is not fear, exactly, because fear is focused on something right in front of you, a real and objective danger,” reports the New York Times. “It is instead a kind of fear gone wild, a generalized sense of dread about something out there that seems menacing — but that in truth is not menacing, and may not even be out there. If you’re anxious, you find it difficult to talk yourself out of this foreboding; you become trapped in an endless loop of what-ifs.”
For me, the what-ifs appear with even the simplest of situations. Ryan will inquire, for instance, if I would like to attend a concert last-minute, and my chest will immediately be gripped with all of the possible unknowns, and how all of these unknowns make it impossible for me to go.
Where is it? What time does it start? Are we going to get there late? Do we have to pay a cover? Will I have to walk in heels? I don’t have a cute outfit without heels. It’s going to be cold outside. Will I have to stand at the concert and carry my coat? Will it be hot? Will there be a lot of people? Are the people going be younger than me? Will they be boring? Will the band be good? Who’s going with? Are we going to get drinks after? Will the restrooms be clean? I can’t stand public restrooms.
No, I don’t want to go. I can’t go. Rationality urges me to do my make-up and try on clothes while anxiety grips my heart so tightly that I’m dripping with angst. By the time Ryan arrives, I’m paralyzed into doing everything I can not to burst into tears.
I distinctly remember my first such outburst in a sixth-grade hallway. After an elementary school of calm, I peeled back the doors on middle school to discover inequalities, insecurities and the bulging wart of worry – a reoccurring blemish in my otherwise untarnished path towards happiness.
Taken together, panic, social anxiety, phobia, obsessive-compulsive, post-traumatic stress and generalized anxiety disorder, make anxiety the most common mental illness in America, affecting an estimated 40 million adults, reports the Times. That’s not even counting the garden-variety worriers like mothers who fret when their daughter doesn’t call, or husbands that believe a phone call in the middle of the night signals a terrible occurrence.
My coping mechanism is to nest as methodically as anxiety chews. Withdrawing further perpetuates the vicious cycle of shrinking into comfort, into habits, into a place that is safe and away from criticism or mistakes or hurt or anger. I crave the days that are built around everything going according to plan.
Research shows that I’m good for the human race. Without those who are hyperviligant, we wouldn’t be able to leap into action so quickly. High-reactive kids are “less likely to experiment with drugs, to get pregnant or to drive recklessly.”
The Times also reports we’re “generally conscientious and almost obsessively well-prepared. Worriers are likely to be the most thorough workers and the most attentive friends. Someone who worries about being late will plan to get to places early. Someone anxious about giving a public lecture will work harder to prepare for it. Test-taking anxiety can lead to better studying; fear of traveling can lead to careful mapping of transit routes.”
But for me, the mental anguish of wearing myself ragged “with a brain that’s always on high alert” is suffocating. I long to be laidback. To be the kind of person who doesn’t wring their hands under the table. The kind of person who “gives up any notion of being guarded or protected” in order to be intimately known. A person that can arrive effortlessly to a concert.
Note: This was originally a guest post for Sam’s Appreciation Revolution. You should check it out.
I’m an extremely lucky person. Really. Sometimes I can’t even believe how lucky I am. I have the best mother, best job, best boyfriend, best condo, best everything.
And yet still, I want. I still have that hunger for more. Selfishly, I am often found in dark corners brooding over the infallibility of life, the unfairness, the annoyances, and over that stupid guy who cut me off this morning in the white Dodge Ram with a ladder strapped to the top and a license plate forever seared in my memory. I did not feel lucky that I didn’t skid off the road to my untimely death. I just wanted to hurt him.
In retrospect, I do feel grateful, immensely grateful, that when I sped up, tailed, and yelled obscenities at the man in the Dodge Ram, that we were going sixty-five miles per hour and there’s no way he could have heard me. I’m grateful that at the last moment I decided not to show him the slender nature of my middle finger. I’m grateful that my exit to work arrived before I really gave him a piece of my mind. I imagine – as he well should be – he was grateful as well.
This is the ugly side of appreciation, the not so fluffy and pillowy kind. There are chapters of my life when I am overcome with the sweet and sugary kind, when I am surrounded by rainbows and treats and sparkly revelations. But mostly, I have little patience for swaths of gratitude to envelop me.
Gratitude is hard for me sometimes.
I imagine it’s hard for most people, even the big teddy bears of appreciation. It means accepting a whole litany of injustices and bending your eyesight towards what is beating both in and outside of you simultaneously to which, I’m sure, only the heartfelt natures of Gandhi or Mother Theresa have fully mastered. It means not being afraid of the past, the future and the ever-so vast present, because really, gratitude is about living in the now.
So, you could write about the things you are happy for daily – which I do. Or, you could take a moment every Monday morning to reflect upon the previous week, which I do. Or, you could look up at the ceiling occasionally, through the drywall, up through the six floors above you and up to the roof, all the way through the clouds and at the sky and say, “thank you.” I do that too.
Or you could just drive to work like you do every day, embracing the good, the bad, and the dick in the Dodge Ram. Sometimes, that’s gratitude too.
Oh, crap.
My adrenaline starts to pump and the anticipation in my stomach rises so quickly that a little laughter escapes. But at 10:03 pm on Monday, the 22nd this is a bad time to laugh.
I yell to my boss Mark, “Tech Crunch just published!”
“What?” he yells back.
I run into his office, “Tech Crunch just published their post!” The rest of the sentence, that they published an hour early, an hour before they were supposed to, an hour before the embargo lifted and we were going to launch the site doesn’t need to be said. Hundreds of people are already on the site. Are we ready? I’m not ready! I thought we had an hour.
Around me, I feel like everyone is running and rushing. Mark and Brian meet instantly and make a split-second decision.
“We’re going live!” Brian exclaims. “Right now! Go! Go! Go!”
He sweeps through the office as excitement sweeps through our fingers. It’s bad that Tech Crunch published early, but their article is good. I’m shaking a little and smiling. Mashable emails me. They have to publish their article now too and I tell them it’s okay. We’re turning on the site now. We’re opening the doors. It’s starting. Alice.com is launching in beta.
The rest of the night is quick, blurry, surreal. When new press comes out, we yell, “CNET is up!” “Business Week!” “Financial Times!” and I throw the links onto Yammer. I refresh my screen every few minutes to watch the bar on the new customer graph rise. I work more than seventeen hours, my co-workers even more, and none of us really notice.
Some of the developers bring sleeping bags, the customer service girls bring a blow-up mattress, and the rest plan to sleep under their desks. At Alice, each employee is assigned an animal. I am a crane, which means, in part, that I’m particular. I want my own bed, so I drive home in the middle of the night.
The highway is completely empty, black and shiny. I own it. The asphalt, everything beneath and all the buildings lined up along on the side are mine. No other cars or people or lumbering trucks. I drive fast because I’m tired, and I want to sleep, and I want to get up and do it all over again.
Considering my co-workers only got two or three hours of sleep, I know they feel the same. The Alice team is more than dedicated, more than hard-working. This is the start-up life, our life.
There’s a lot of talk about balance. Some of the most popular authors preach zen-like attitudes, getting out of work, and lifestyles that are built on, well, not a whole lot. And then there are those who talk about sacrificing your health for your start-up, who talk in terms of not just passion, but obsession for your profession, and whose idea of fun is innumerable hours spent on a single idea.
Fighting balance across the fence is blur. And that is where I live. A life that should preclude me from having any sort of relationship with anybody or anything other than work, but in reality, betters those relationships. A place that makes me excited to be young and in love and working hard.
Peace, it seems, can not only be discovered in the quiet pauses of life, but also in the often forceful and uncertain flow that rushes against walls and norms and status quo.
Fancy Work.
“What did you do today?”
I cried like a druggie in rehab pleading with God and my dead father to help me. Also, I slept. Tried to sleep. To ignore. To escape. Between sleeping and crying, I tried to be normal.
“Nothing much, I ran some errands,” I replied on a Saturday night out at the bar, trying to be normal. Going out with friends for the first time in a long time. Friends that were good enough to forget that I ignored them for the past eight months. Because that’s what happens when I’m in a relationship.
Everyone likes me better when I’m single. If you lined up the town and asked them to raise their hands when they saw a cool person, and then presented Me, In a Relationship and Me, Single, the hands would most assuredly go up the second round, and I would raise my hand in line with the rest. I’m not good in a relationship. Perhaps because I don’t think I am, and perhaps because it never really mattered before now. Because when you date assholes, you can be a bitch right back. So dating a good guy is a complete shock in terms of how to act and how to behave and how to live.
So of course you push this cool person down the same worn-in path as before, and as you go, you look around and know that the two of you don’t belong there.
And I am angry that the Universe could present me with such a being when I’m not primed. I’m not prepared.
It’s not that I don’t feel worthy, exactly. But that I never saw myself with someone so all-American, so normal, so right. Because my life was messed up the moment my father died, and surely God doesn’t think I’m ready for a life that isn’t messed up. Surely, I should keep punishing myself. I am not ready for such greatness. Surely, I am not ready to lead a normal life yet, with barbeques and endless cuddling and television. Life is jaded. Always and forever. This will never heal.
Being single, it doesn’t matter. But being in a relationship – the good kind, at least – brings all this other responsibility. And I don’t really care for all that. To care about someone so deeply and they just might up and leave, or want you, or die, or get sick, or let you down, or need you, or care about you back. I get anxious. So anxious I can’t breathe.
Okay, so I have issues. The kind that should be capitalized and underlined, and you should take note of it.
But I’m working on that, and back to Saturday night, I declared that it was the beginning of “New Rebecca!” exclamation point, let’s take another shot, done and done. I was fabulous. I smiled and was totally level-headed and ingratiated myself back to the good side of the Universe through two hipster bars, three slices of bacon, spinach and yellow-tomato pizza, and a pair of four-inch heels. Cue the soundtrack as the shot pans up and fades out. Walk out of the theater with a happy ending. It was fun and I laughed.
Sunday morning, I got up and cleaned the wine bottles from the counter, threw away someone else’s cigarettes, and vacuumed the dirt from the corner. And somewhere in between, I found a little bit of normal.
Common Sense.
I like motivational talks. Like this one from Gary Vaynerchuk. I get all excited and pumped and ready to work.
Then I get stuck. Interminably stuck. Because I’m really excited and pumped to work, but for what? I’m a lucky person, but I wonder is this it? Really? Because I thought there might be more.
Marcus Buckingham of the Wall Street Journal gets it. “This is a deeply anxious and insecure generation,” he argues. “On the surface they look self-confident, [but] deep down they know that they don’t actually know what it takes to win.”
Apparently it’s going to take a decade of wandering for us to figure it out. New York Times columnist David Brooks describes this new Generation Y life stage as the Odyssey Years – a decade of exploration and experimentation (via Tammy Erickson).
“During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school,” Brooks reports. “They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another.”
And all this unbridled choice has us delaying marriage, children, and permanent employment – accomplishments that have traditionally defined adulthood. Not for Gen Y though. Brooks reports that fewer than 40 percent of 30-year olds have achieved these things versus 70 percent forty years ago.
The consequences of our aimless wandering delay adulthood, but also our chance at genuine happiness. Generation Y’s passion is defined by our idealism, not our pragmatism. So while it may seem like we’re enjoying our freedom, research shows that we’d be a lot better off with more structure, less choice, and working through problems instead of moving on to our next big adventure.
We need more accountability. We need restrictions. Because passion needs direction. It needs filters, and red tape, and four walls. Passion needs to be challenged to be passion at all.
This is the fascinating juxtaposition that is Gen Y. We crave structure, efficiency and effectiveness, and yet, we “have a huge willingness to believe in a grand vision of things — both [in ourselves] and the world,” Buckingham reports.
But grand vision makes it dangerously easy to be underwhelmed at the banality of everyday life. Too much choice keeps us reaching and searching and never doing anything at all.
“When our ambition is bounded it leads us to work joyfully,” happiness expert Daniel Gilbert reports. So Generation Y can keep wandering. Or we can open a door and see what happens when dreams hit reality.
Life limits.
“Um… I can’t think of the word.”
I am not the most articulate person in person. It’s something that I’ve had to work on. A lot.
Mostly, it has a lot to do with my personality type. What’s going through my head sounds quite coherent to me, but I tend to say things first and think second. That makes me stumble in the middle of sentences and prefer to put words to paper instead of lips.
I didn’t really know this was a problem until my last job. A position that was all about public speaking. Speaking. Out loud. All the time. But I did well and survived. Here’s how you too can turn your weaknesses into strengths:
1. Do it small and awkward first.
I practiced my first big speech in front of Ryan. Doing speeches is actually much more difficult in front of people you know. Ryan and I weren’t dating at the time and never really hung out, but I thought he was cute and I wore a cute dress in preparation.
And it was so ridiculously embarrassing.
I don’t know what possessed me to think I could speak publicly in front of the guy that I had liked since the moment we had met, but it was awful. I was sweating. I was hot. And then cold. And I couldn’t even look at him. I looked behind him. At the corner.
Lucky for me, it worked. It totally worked and I aced the speech a few days later.
Make yourself uncomfortable before you have to perform for real. Most bloggers I know had a blog before their current blog. Companies test imperfect products with small groups before a launch. Runners do three miles before ten. You’re not the exception. No magic fairy dust for you. Only awkward, pride-swallowing affairs that give you mad confidence and oh-so-valuable experience.
2. Appreciate that weaknesses are your best asset.
The second time Ryan and I ever met and hung out, we got into a huge argument outside of the bar. And then he walked me home and asked why I was so cute when I was so angry. (And no, I didn’t let him come up.)
It’s totally annoying to fight with someone you like, but when you realize that you fight because you care things get better. You see, weaknesses are inextricably linked to strengths. They are the manifestation of fear from the things you want the most. And we avoid things that are scary to us. Like success. And love. And hard work.
But really, it’s not scary to take the first step towards being promoted to bank manager, or writing a book, or learning to swim as an adult, because then you just take another step, and then another.
3. Stop buying into natural talent.
Ryan is constantly telling me, “Relationships take work.”
I huff and I puff and then I agree. Because really, what do I know. I didn’t grow up with an example of a good relationship. Ryan did. My father died when I was in second grade. His parents are still together. My examples were happy endings. His were real people, not characters in a movie.
Nobody is excelling without practice. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell suggests it actually takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any area.
“The people at the very top don’t just work much harder than everyone else,” he reports. “They work much, much harder.”
And according to the 10,000 hour rule, I still have two or three years of serious relationship practice left before I get my happy ending. But even then, happy endings take constant vigilance because happiness is such an attention hog. Nobody ever tells you that, right? Like, usually when you reach your goals/success/nirvana the work is supposed to be over.
But since Tiger Woods isn’t taking a day off, neither can you (except maybe when it’s 83 degrees outside after a Winter in Wisconsin). The real meditation is in the constancy of habit.