How can life’s difficulties be so confusing when they can be summed up so easily?

There are are only two problems in life, (1) you know what you want, and you don’t know how to get it; and/or (2) you don’t know what you want.

- Steven Snyder, quoted by David Allen, p.251 of the incredible Getting Things Done.

I love this quote because if you begin to think about it, you begin to think about the Big Picture. Yet it is so simple. David Allen, the author of the famous Getting Things Done, goes a little farther, asserting that the solution to life’s two problems is simply:

1. Make it up.
2. Make it happen.

This makes me cringe a little, because making things up and making things happen can be incredibly complicated.

I’d rather not issue an imperative. Instead, I like to look at the questions that Mr. Snyder’s wonderful quote evokes:

1. What do you want?
2. What are you doing to get it?

Read more…

Big Questions: What is my purpose?, communing with the universe, how to make a decision, meeting goals dream right

Commit publicly to your goals. Instantly create forces that will both push and pull you towards accomplishment

What did you promise these guys?

Imagine shame.

Awful, isn’t it – something you want to avoid. For me, shame is the worst. It’s like I’m a broken machine, beyond hope of repair.

Now visualize success.

Listen to it, taste it, feel it. This should feel good.

I ask you to take a look at these two states of being to get a sense of their ability to motivate. Behaviorist psychologists explain our actions as either reward-seeking or punishment-avoiding. They have proven that the carrot and stick are highly effective. (If you want to increase your writing habit using negative conditioning, check out Write or Die).

When you tell all your friends, acquaintances, and readers that you have set a goal, you are activating the dynamic tension between your desire to accomplish that goal and your dread of having to tell everyone that you failed.

If your a people-pleaser, like me, publicly committing to your goals is probably the number one method of getting them done. I quit drinking this way…twice. (I started drinking when I was no longer around anyone who had heard me make the public commitment.)

My Public Announcement

I set my Gmail to autorespond.

Here is what it says:

I won’t be checking my email until January 4th. I am scrambling to launch my website, dreamingright.com, before I start my new job.

I hope I don’t let you down!

creating habits, meeting goals, productivity tips dream right

Note: this post, and any other post in the “30 day nephalist” category, has been moved from from an earlier blog that documented an important experiment – not drinking for 30 days.

There is a great scene from the 80′s movie, Broadcast News, where Holly Hunter’s character, Jane, has what I like to think of as a scheduled breakdown. She is in her hotel room and has just agreed to meet her co-worker in the lobby in half an hour.

She hangs up -- takes the phone off the
hook and lays it on the bed for a moment's
solitude.  She sits stiffly, palms on top of
her legs.  It looks like someone with unusually
good posture, waiting for something, and now
we BEGIN TO SEE the first signs redden and
she begins to cry.  Now she sobs -- then
miraculously shakes it off and exits quickly to
the bathroom.  This crying episode is clearly
part of her morning routine.

You can check out the full screenplay here.

Over the years, I’ve come to accept that every couple of months or so, I have a similar breakdown. It lasts longer than Jane’s, and isn’t really scheduled…so I guess it isn’t that similar, except that it feeds the same need…the need to wallow.

My Recent Wallowfest

I spent the last 3 days neglecting nearly every one of my responsibilities.

Here’s how you do it:  Let everything drop, isolate, watch TV and order delivery. Play spider solitaire for five hours. Click the “Stumble!” button on your web browser until your eyes lose focus. Watch TV. Feel depressed.

Shutting down for a couple of days is a childish, “mom, I’m sick” type of thing to do, but there is something to be said for wallowing every once in a while. I don’t want to rationalize it, but I would like to make peace with it.

Why Wallowing Ain’t All Bad

The practice of wallowing does have its benefits. Here are a few lessons I learn and relearn during my time on the pity-pot:

1. The world does not fall apart. Although some of my wallow fests have resulted in minor damage (missed assignments, appointments, or showers), most of the time nothing at all happens. Life goes on.
2. I feel better eventually.  This too passes. No matter how much I cling to the nothingness of depression, it eventually ends. This is my own experience, not meant to be universal advice, particularly for people who have chemical or neurological reasons for being depressed.
3. It is possible for me to enjoy something and hate myself at the same time. Wallowing has the same obsessive-compulsive quality that drug use has. Take the 15 episodes of Arrested Development that I watched during my most recent wallow. I enjoyed each episode, but I never quite silenced the inner voice that told me that I was wasting my life.
4. Great advice is annoying. “Buck-up”…”take baby steps”…”let go and let God”…”this too shall pass…” I’m wallowing right now, please leave a message at the tone. No matter how well intentioned, advice on how to “fix” my attitude and get out of my rut annoys me. I have learned to nod and thank the advice giver, then go back to watching crap TV.
5. Philosophy will not get me out of a rut. Big ideas tend to reveal big tragedies when I am wallowing. It’s all meaningless after all, what with us dying in the end and God being either dead or invisible. When I am wallowing, I am feeling, not thinking.
6. Simple things will - I like to work from the bottom up. No matter how stuck I feel at the beginning of a wallow, I will come out of it at the end because I’m ready and because I start doing something simple like:

• Waiting. See #2.
• Cleaning. A clean room may not give my life meaning, but it will put me in a better mood.
• Taking a shower. There is nothing more depressing than smelling your own butt.
• Taking a walk. Although I will reject this piece of advice if someone offers it, getting out of the house can often lead to miracles.
• Accomplishing a very small task. “The day wasn’t a total waste, I took the trash out!”  During this last wallow, I made an origami picture frame and caught some ladybugs to eat the aphids off my girlfriend’s houseplant. I was a whirlwind of activity!
• Making a plan. At some point, I decide that tomorrow I will reenter the land of the living. It helps to have a few tasks written down.

And oh yeah…I’m still not drinking and it is day 32!

30 day nephalist, fighting fear, honoring distraction, overcoming addictions, what it's like to be me dream right

Note: this post, and any other post in the “30 day nephalist” category, has been moved from from an earlier blog that documented an important experiment – not drinking for 30 days.

Riding habits like a king, imagination reigns.

Every grown-up man consists wholly of habits, although he is often unaware of it and even denies having any habits at all.  ~Georges Gurdjieff

I’ve been thinking a lot about habits the past three days and I think I’ve come up with a great way to look at them…

We are not merely creatures of habit, we are also riding our creatures of habit bareback, fingers wrapped in their hairy manes, holding on for dear life. We are both jungle and wild thing, kings and beasts.

Culture, genes, instinct, and chance wire our brains to trigger behaviors that we repeat. We need habits to survive and function in society. Take food. We are born with the habit of suckling, we learn the habit of eating, then get used to making food for ourselves, then buying food for ourselves…If we are conscious about our health, we learn to make shopping lists and buy healthy food. If we aren’t, we get into the habit of buying Big Macs.

The difference between a good and bad habit can sometimes be slim, but when you tame the wild ones by “staring into their yellow eyes without blinking once” like Max in Where the Wild Things Are you climb onto the back of the habit creature and regain control. Of course, staring into those yellow eyes is scary. And while your trying to tame one habit, another one is gnashing its terrible teeth and rolling its terrible eyes, holding back its terrible roars so it can jump you and kick your ass.

Here is one great way to not blink when trying to tame a habit:

• Don’t do it. Don’t try to get rid of an old habit. Create a new one. We aren’t going to dismantle any neural pathways, they are built to last. What we can do is create new pathways. For example, this month, I am getting into the habit of not drinking. And the cool thing about creating new habits is that it creates new pathways in the brain. The ability of the brain to grow new pathways is called neuroplasticity and it is yet another example of science catching up to “mystical” or spiritual traditions that have been around for ages. Here is a NY Times article about it.

…brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

If you are into neuroplasticity, check out this great episode of The Infinite Mind radio program.

Here are 18 other tips on creating good habits from Lifehacker, an amazing and award winning blog. In the past three weeks I think I’ve used at least 10.

Even better, go to Zen Habits, a blog all about creating good habits as a path to happiness. If you only click one link in this blog, I recommend Zen Habits.

Just for fun, here are some of my favorite habits:

• GTD - Getting Things Done is a productivity system that was created by David Allen. It has reached cult status on the internet, so google it. It actually requires a few habits such as: collecting every piece of “stuff” or thing that needs doing/putting/fixing in one place (I use a stack of index cards) and regularly processing and reviewing the list of stuff.
• Pacing while on the phone - What is up with this? Does the radiation in the phone affect the pacing center of my brain.
• Identifying feelings and their causes – When I was using a lot, I could identify when I was happy (high) and when I wasn’t. During the 7 years I wasn’t using, I learned that there are a few feelings, and that when you identify them, you could usually do something about them, even if it was just acknowledging that they were ok to feel. This habit is probably the greatest of all my habits, because it has spurred a lot of self-improvement. If I’m feeling angry at myself, or anxious about something, there is usually an improvement I can make.
• Cigarettes – Sweet, sweet cancer.
• Sweets - Sweet, sweet, sweets.
• Televison – I am mostly into tv series (seria?seri?) that have some sort of mystery to be uncovered. I just watched the first few episodes of Fringe which satisfied the great hole that the X-files left in my life. Another great show that I thought had died with the writer’s strike is Life.
• NPR – Or any informative radio. I love John Lydon’s Open Source Radio. This American Life, of course.
  Music – I tend to put on music all the time, sometimes in the middle of a conversation. I also collect music like a fiend. Right now I have about 230 Gigs of music.
• StumbleUpon – This is a button that you install on your browser that produces magic. If you don’t know about StumbleUpon, please do yourself and your freetime a favor, and forget that I mentioned it. Or read my post about how I turned Stumbling into a productive habit.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.  ~Mark Twain

30 day nephalist, creating habits dream right