First, Know What You Want

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.

Walking down the street you notice a lady in business dress who is hitting herself over the head with a wooden mallet.

Every five or ten seconds. Bash. Bash. Bash. Never enough to be fatal but hard enough to hurt.

You’re curious, so you ask “Why are you hitting yourself with a mallet?”

She snaps at you:

“If my husband was more help at home I wouldn’t have to hit myself with this mallet and the children never tidy up their bedrooms so I have to keep hitting myself.”

Bewildered by the logic of this, you ask “Why don’t you stop hitting yourself with that mallet?”

She’s even more cross now “I’m a Taurus and that means I can’t help it. My boss expects so much of me, he makes me hit myself with this mallet and my parents never gave me the love I wanted. I’m exhausted and everyone expects so much of me and this mallet keeps hitting me in the head”

You persist. “Why don’t you stop hitting yourself with that mallet, perhaps you could think clearly if you weren’t hitting yourself all the time?”

She’s shouting now “That’s right, blame me. It’s not my fault, I never have any luck.” Bash. Bash. Bash. “If you weren’t here distracting me I’d be able to stop my head hurting. Why don’t you leave?”

You walk on. Puzzled. Behind you the sound of mallet on head fades into the distance.

Isn’t it time you realised that the only person who can put the mallet down is you?

What do you want instead?

Still, I think it’s not the main thing, the essential thing.I hope the message that people really take, really internalize is that being yourself, as hard as you can, is the way to have important and lasting impact on our world. That might be in the context of technology. It might be in the context of technology, or the arts, or sports, or government, or social justice — or even in the context of your family and close friends.It almost doesn’t matter.

The thing that matters most is to figure out what’s important to you, what’s core to you, and do that. Be that. And do it as well as you possibly can, every single day.

via Steve Jobs – Johns Tumblr.

Hermes saw gymnasts on TV for the first time, and he knew at once: “That’s what I want to do.”Everything since has been simply reinforcement.

via Writing Wednesdays: “That’s What I Want to Do”.

This is a great story although it’s about one of those annoying people who always knew what they wanted to do. If you are still trying to work it out (and you are in the majority) then there is this:

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