Still time to order yours for that “difficult to buy for” relative. Comes without the beardy bloke.
Order Now: Amazon.co.uk
Order Now: Amazon.com
After our hiccup with the Kindle version I’m pleased to say the new, improved, version is back for sale from Amazon.
Perfect for Christmas.
“Impossible”.
What a funny word. It’s a word that creates its own reality.
“I can’t do that – it’s impossible!”
Yeah, right.
Let me tell you about some rat cages I saw in a research lab years ago.
I was the founding CEO of a company that manufactured high-frequency pest repelling equipment, and as part of my research, I had occasion to tour some animal testing labs.
I was looking for a place to do some tests on rodent hearing and behavior, and I wanted the best. At that time, Stanford Research International (SRI) in Menlo Park was one of the top labs on the West Coast.
The guy who led me through the labs was a scientist, and we had a fascinating time that afternoon. I saw my breath hatch a million flea eggs from across the room in one lab.
But that’s another story. What I wanted to tell you about right now was what I learned about rats.
We were passing some empty labs and I noticed a pile of shiny steel cages near the door.
“Are those new cages for rodents?” I asked.
“Nope, those are waiting to get recycled. They will melt them down and re-use the steel. They’re no good.”
They looked brand new to me.
“What’s wrong with them?” I asked.
“C’mere and look at this” he said. He opened one of the cages and pointed to a spot near the rear corner. It looked a little more polished than the rest of the cage.
“Watch this.” He said. He pushed his finger against the steel wall of the cage, and it poked right through like it was tin foil!
Then he explained. “You see, the rats don’t know that it’s impossible for them to get out of these steel cages. So as soon as we put them into the cages, they go to the rear corner and start gnawing.”
“That’s ridiculous.” I said, “Steel is harder than rat’s teeth.”
“Right, but the rats don’t know that. So they gnaw at the back corner, wearing their teeth down. And their teeth keep growing all during the rat’s life. And they keep gnawing, day after day, week after week, gradually wearing away their teeth, but also removing a few molecules of steel.
“When a rat dies it we replace it, and the new rat goes to the same corner and starts where the other rat left off. After a couple of years, the cages all get like this. We have to throw them away.”
He opened another cage and invited me to test the spot at the rear corner, and I also found the polished spot and pushed, and my finger just poked through.
“We have an instrument that measures the thickness of the cage walls, and when they get this close to breakthrough we remove them from service.”
There were piles of shiny steel cages destroyed by rats.
I’ve thought a lot about those lab rats during the years since I toured SRI. I thought about the mindless faith they must have had, that they could gnaw their way out of those steel cages.
Day after day, rat after rat. Until the steel finally gives in to the softer – but more persistent – rat’s teeth.
The rats never knew it was impossible. They just kept using the tools they had, their teeth, until they had defeated the most sophisticated research lab on the West Coast.
And they were just rats. But they never gave in, never gave up. They just kept at the impossible until it became inevitable.
If a rat can do that what can we accomplish, if we decide to maybe rethink our ideas about what’s impossible?
I invite you to think about what you may have dismissed – too soon – as impossible.
Perhaps you too can turn the impossible into the inevitable.
You don’t want to let a rat out think you, do you?
via Tom Hoobyar NLP Co..
Not as good as it should be
Did you buy the Kindle edition of ‘First, Know What You Want’?
If you didn’t then please ignore this entry.
If you did, then I wonder if you can help me?
We have had some trouble with the formatting on the Kindle version and despite submitting a revised file to Amazon, some people are still having problems.
Problems include places where two or three words run together or strange spaces in the middle of words. According to one or two complaints I’ve had it’s pretty bad but not affecting everybody.
I’m deeply embarrassed by this and am working with my publisher to get a corrected file loaded and sent to all previous buyers.
If your version has these problems, please find my email address in the book (it’s in the Afterword) and send me a note.
I need to know the date you bought it and a rough description of what you are seeing. Screenshots would be fantastic but don’t worry if you can’t.
Good question.
Do let me know if you are having problems and as soon as we can get a better formatted file out to you we will – within the next two weeks I hope.
In the meantime we have taken the Kindle Edition off sale.
Instead of trying to transcribe what’s on your Kindle’s screen or, for our purposes, trying to take a photograph of the Kindle screen without it being out-of-focus, you can take an easy screenshot to pass onto friends or colleagues.
From any screen on a Kindle 2 or DX, just hit Alt + Shift + G and the screen will flash. From there, plug the Kindle into your computer via its USB cable and navigate to the Kindle’s “documents” folder. Inside the folder are all the various books you might have stored on the device, but search for a filename that begins with “screen-shot.”
Source: Ars Technica
This analysis leads to an important conclusion. Whether you’re a student or well along in your career, if your goal is to build a remarkable life, then busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy. If you’re chronically stressed and up late working, you’re doing something wrong. You’re the average players from the Universität der Künste — not the elite. You’ve built a life around hard to do work, not hard work.
The solution suggested by this research, as well as my own, is as simple as it is startling: Do less. But do what you do with complete and hard focus. Then when you’re done be done, and go enjoy the rest of the day.
Psst. Don't tell everyone but you can change it...
Last week I asked a client to describe his perfect day, an ideal day, just the way he wanted it.
He couldn’t.
It was clear he had never come across that idea before and had never even considered the question. Worse, it was also obvious until that moment he wasn’t sure he was allowed to think that way. He was behaving as if no one had ever given him permission to think about ‘a perfect day’. Am I even allowed to have such a thing?
We did get something eventually but it’s a hard question if you’ve never considered it and takes some pondering.
Sometimes it’s because your experience of life has ground you down so far the idea of a perfect day is laughable but more often it’s faulty thinking about the way your life operates that’s getting in the way.
It set me thinking again about this mystery of how hard it is for many people to articulate what they want. And also about the switch from a Driver to a Passenger. Often, what unlocks the changes you want in your life is realising something about the way our world works.
It’s plastic.
Not that hard, shiny stuff made of oil. You know, plastic; pliant, flexible, soft and workable. Ductile. It moves.
This is not how most people regard life. They view it as rigid, inflexible, something that happens to you.
When you realise this is not the case you’ll never be the same again.
The world tends to wrap itself around people who want to do something, it makes way, the waves part and let you through, then rearrange themselves around the change you have made.
It’s always been this way.
Here’s an, overused, quote from WH Murray who ran The Scottish Himalaya Expedition in 1951:
But when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money — booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”
The key here is to start, to move and more often than not, when you move, the waves part to make way for you.
Here’s a more modern example, Steve Jobs in 1994:
When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money…that’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact and that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people who are no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
The minute you understand that you can poke life… that if you push in, something will pop out the other side. You can change it. You can mould it. That’s maybe the most important thing.
You may not find it natural to think this way, and it’s easy for me to sit here typing this, so how do you start to see the world as plastic? For starters, do these two things:
• Start acting as if your choices create your circumstances — whatever they are.
• Start to act as if you have the power to change your situation by making different choices. It’s the only way to find out if this is true.
I’m not talking about the Law of Attraction nonsense here – the world moves when you act not when you visualise. It’s the acting that does it.
I don’t know whether we do create all the results in our lives but I do know that by acting as if we do, we greatly increase our ability to change all our results. And those who do this frequently discover that our soft, flexible, plastic, world will deform itself along the direction you choose.
So, what’s your ideal day and how close are you to living it?
PS – Life’s complicated. I have two or three ‘perfect day’ variants depending on what I’m doing. Yep, you can have more than one ideal day.
credit: iStockphoto.com
One of the hardest things when working with clients who want to make a change is getting them to start today.
They always agree on some changes they want to make and also agree it would be good to start. Just not today.
Many people who hate their job exhibit this strange disconnection of worrying about tomorrow and not doing anything about it today. I hate the idea of doing this forever but I’ll keep doing it because it pays the bills.
One explanation is the phenomena of Hyperbolic Discounting — given two rewards most of the time we will prefer the one which arrives sooner rather than later.
We even have a proverb for it A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. When asked Would you prefer £50 today or £100 in a year?, significant numbers will take the immediate reward. We discount the value of the future reward to justify the present decision. In a year though your present-self may well be wishing they’d held out for the £100. In a year you’ll wish you had started a job hunt a year ago.
Individuals using hyperbolic discounting reveal a strong tendency to make choices that are inconsistent over time — they make choices today that their future self would prefer not to make, despite using the same reasoning.
We see this in our lives too. We know we want to eat more healthily, firmly convinced we will do this at some point in the future. Today, though, the doughnut delivers an instant fix. We assume our future-self behaves better and makes smarter choices, somehow forgetting when we get to the future it will be our present-self making the decisions.
Your future-self will eat mainly vegetables. Your future-self will jog every day. Your future-self will start a job hunt, save for a pension, remodel the garden.
We are unhappy in our work and see ourselves striding through the job market looking for something new. One day.
We join a gym confident our future-self will go regularly even if we don’t.
In every case we put great store in a future-self who is stronger and more focused with better self-control than we have. It’s touching really.
Instant gratification pleases the present self while delayed rewards benefit the future self. If time-dependent decisions are viewed as competition between the present self and a future self, many apparent paradoxical decisions make much more sense.
The answer? Find the smallest possible change you can make today (no, smaller than that) and make it.
Because a fantasy about tomorrow stops you acting today. You only really have today. With luck you have the next 10 mins. What will you do with them?
Either eat salad today or choose doughnuts but do not assume tomorrow will bring you the self-control you lack today. It’s still going to be you when you get there.
The most helpful way I’ve used this is in managing new technology. I did not buy the first iPhone or the first iPad. For once I was smart enough to hold off a year or so until the second model and got a better reward as a result. Now all I have to do is translate this behaviour to the rest of my life because I find it quite hard to fool myself this way. I know it is good advice, find a small change and do it today but I also know full well I’ll get another chance tomorrow so it’s not really urgent to swap to salad today.
The fallacy is obvious. Eventually it catches up with you. How dim to have a hip replacement when you could have lost the weight. How dumb to contract lung cancer when you could have stopped smoking. How daft to waste £5 a week on the lottery when you could have saved £260 a year.
When we fall short of a standard we set for our future-self it’s very tempting to administer a dose of radical change as the cure. Raising the bar on yourself rarely works unless you are one of the tiny minority motivated this way.
What works is starting the change today, preferably in the next 10 mins.
Pulling your attention back to today brings a couple of benefits…
First, it helps you sort out whether you really want this change. And if it turns out you don’t, that’s fine. Now you can stop torturing yourself with a future-self who is always going to be two dress sizes smaller. Relax and change something you really do want to change.
Relaxing is the second benefit. Postulating a pretend future self, a better version of yourself, creates tension because you are always falling short of a mythical standard. Let go of this nonsense and you’ll feel more positive.
The greatest revolutions start with small but incremental changes. What tiny change would you be willing to make today?
What tiny change in how you eat?
What tiny change in your work?
What tiny change in your house?
What tiny change in the way you are with your family?
Sack your future-self, she doesn’t exist, and YOU make a tiny change instead. Today.
Tell me the Truth
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C. S. Lewis
What lies beneath that restless feeling to know what you want, to work out finally who you are and what you should be doing?
I believe that underneath all this is a desperate hunger to be you. You and not simply a collection of habits and beliefs picked up from your friends and your culture. You long to be you, grounded in who you are, doing what you want to do with an assured sense of purpose. And yet that seems so far away, so how do you begin to get there?
It starts with telling the truth. Not becoming one of those blunt arseholes who’s always talking about themselves and being offensive with a half chuckle “I’m only being honest” or “At least I’m honest”.
No, not one of those. Instead one of those people who knows themselves really well because they always tell themselves the truth, good and bad. This is hard and doing it is both very rare and refreshingly original. It’s bad to badmouth someone, to tear at them and talk them down and equally bad to fail to talk the good you see, to discount or minimise strengths in others. And of course it starts with you consistently telling the truth to yourself. The truth mind, not too bad, not too good, simply how you are.
And then venturing out with this truth into the real world. Starting very small and very slow. You’re out for a meal. Tell the truth to yourself – “I want chicken” and then say it out loud “I want the chicken”.
When you’ve finished the chicken notice what you’ve done. You told the truth to yourself, you trusted your instincts you said it out loud and made it into a physical reality. Where else could you use this pattern?
Just the blank ones. There's more part used.
Choose your tools carefully but not so carefully that you get uptight or spend more time at the stationery store than at your writing-table. Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down The Bones
Listen to your longings for they are trying to tell you something.
In the 1980s Stephen King was battling a drink, smoking, painkiller and cocaine addiction. As he tells it, his wife gathered concerned friends who searched the house and brought what they found to his study. There, on the carpet, they poured his beer cans, cigarette butts, cough and cold medicines plus various drug paraphernalia and confronted him with his habit.
I recently decided to confront one of my habits in the hope it might help you to find your inner compass.
Here goes. I have, gulp, an untreated stationery fetish which I’m not getting help for. It’s a very particular kind of habit and my drug of choice is an empty notebook. Earlier today I decided I could hide it no longer and, waiting until the family were out, unearthed all the empty notebooks I had hidden around the house and made a pile.
I knew it was bad but not this bad. And these are just the blank ones. Oops.
You might be wondering how this can help you. Fair enough. Here’s the thing. I’ve always had this obsession but never knew why. It’s taken me over 40 years to work out why and now I know, I figure my story might help you.
Because you have longings too. And they are pointing loud and clear. But you may not know it yet.
So, let me tell you about my obsession, my longings, and lay out a trail of clues for you. See if you can work what they were pointing to before I did.
I’ve always loved notebooks. For me there is something mystical and sensuous about a notebook. They speak to me of power, answers to mysteries and arcane knowledge. Blame Disney and books of magic. Blame my parents and teachers for showing me how a book had the power to create new worlds and transport me away from my Dad’s cancer. Growing up, it was my brother who got all the creative ability (or so I thought), wood, metal and stone took shape under his hands while turning to landfill under mine. I was just someone who read all the time and what use was that?
I’ve always touched notebooks. I cannot pass a stationery store without going in, looking for the notebooks. I touch them, feeling their heft, examining the quality of the paper, the ruling. And I’m very particular, always looking for the flawless one and they must smell good too. Yes, I’m a book sniffer.
Since childhood I’ve wanted to own notebooks but I never knew why. On the odd times I’ve mentioned it or someone has noticed, it’s been a bit of a joke. Nobody spotted the obvious clue and neither did I. Have you yet?
As I got older, having money gave me a chance to explore my obsession and the internet led me to others, stationery nerds, in perpetual search for perfect combination of cover, paper and ruling. Bliss.
But like all habits it brought frustration too. I wanted them badly but they remained empty. I ached to own them and buying gave me a high but after they would sit there, mocking me. Why was I so driven to own them but not knowing what to do with them? By now I was hiding them around the house or in the car. There was the odd comment.
Distinguished at school by a lack of work, widely expected to fail exams, even by me, I managed to pull the words out and onto paper, doing a lot better than anyone predicted. Of course, I completely missed the significant skill I was using.
I have always read compulsively. I read all the time. I’m constantly scanning. I even have to have something to read while I’m eating. I’ll read bottle labels if there is nothing else. Always got to have something to read. I love words and I love good writing. I like a wry, amusing take on the world or a writer who challenges my point of view, teaches me something new. Reading compulsively has given me an encyclopaedic knowledge about half an inch deep. I often wondered about this — what is it good for? What am I good for?
Reading and owning empty notebooks — useless. These longings were leading me somewhere, shouting even. Can you see it yet? I never did.
Work sponsored my MBA and I started at the very bottom with a management certificate. I was never any good at the actual business of managing people but I regularly scored 90%+ in assignments with not much effort and passed years of professional exams. I used to tell people I had a knack for exams but that wasn’t my knack, I just couldn’t see it then.
I enjoyed ordering my thoughts on paper, often joking I was more articulate in writing than in person. Given a moment to think and a chance to write it out, I could be crystal clear. I remained utterly clueless about any gift or talent or what I really wanted or even what I should be doing. How could I have been so dim?
About 10 years ago, bored and in need of a change, I worked my way through the exercises in What Colour Is Your Parachute? asking over and over again, what am I good for? What can I do? What do I want? I did all the exercises, writing page after page, filling one of those notebooks. Although it was some help, nothing came into focus. I’d done all that writing and missed what was staring me in the face.
Soon after launching my business a friend introduced me to selling PDF’s online. It seemed easy to set up and I soon had some e-books, management guides and games on sale. I remember talking to other coaches and consultants mystified why others didn’t write up what they knew and sell it online. It felt easy, within my grasp and if you’d asked I would have said it was an obvious thing to do. Ironically missing the most obvious thing of course.
Two years ago, I was going through one of those restless periods and made a note in my Moleskine (yes) about my ideal day — it would be local, portable, half working alone, half with clients and involving words. I longed for this but couldn’t see what kind of job would fit that lifestyle.
Bear in mind, it shames me to admit, I was in the process of publishing a book on knowing what you want but as is so often the case I was actually writing the book for me. It’s just as well for future sales, I know I’m not alone in this struggle to ferret out what I really want. Nor am I alone in not being able to see where my longings are pointing. What’s astonishing is even with all this evidence I remained blind to it for so long.
Listen to your longings for they are trying to tell you something.
Believe it or not, even while talking to my publisher about the book I still hadn’t realised. I can’t quite remember what did it. I do remember finishing one afternoon in the library and noticing what I’d been doing had left me feeling like the happiest man on the planet. Unaccountably happy. And then it hit me.
I expect you realised several paragraphs ago what I only saw in the library that afternoon. What had I been doing? Writing of course. Because I’m a writer. That’s who I am and what I am. Foremost in everything, and because I now understand I have no choice, I’m a writer. Even as I knew I had a long way to go to develop any skill it felt like coming home.
I’d love to say scales fell from my eyes. Alas, no new vistas revealed themselves but several things fell into place with a satisfying clunk.
What you’re looking for is flow.
Two things bring me more pleasure than anything else, writing and drawing. Both put me in a state of flow — a kind of exquisite pleasure drug unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced. And it’s free, legal and clean.
Why is this so important? Took me over 40 years to see it. No one else saw it either. That’s a lot of writing not done and a lot of time spent feeling out-of-place, not quite fitting whatever I happened to be doing.
Any bells ringing?
Now what about you? What do your trail of clues tell you? What do your longings tell you?
I was powerless in the face of a deep longing to touch and own stationery but I never knew why. It took years to grasp the tug I felt was the call to be a writer and fill them. I spent years stroking them, smelling them and feeling ashamed of having bought so many without the slightest inkling of what these longings were pointing to. I tried to kick the habit many times but then I’d see one and just have to have it. And like a true addict I hid this behaviour, it felt faintly wrong because I didn’t know what it was for.
What is tugging at you? What is hovering outside your attention calling you? Late at night, after a drink or two, when you look past your current life to something else, what whispers can you hear?
What longings do you have telling you something about who you are? What do you love to touch? Any secret habits — fly fishing, old cars, Japanese dolls?
What won’t go away? And is it staring you in the face? (All the time I was writing about how I couldn’t work out what I wanted next or who I was, I was doing it without seeing it.)
What are you doing without seeing?
Listen to your longings for they are trying to tell you something.
PS – If you had asked me ten years ago I would never have imagined I was a writer, it was so far outside my conception of myself, it was not available to me as a choice. You may have the same thing. It might be helpful to find someone else who can point out what your longings mean. Ask around.
