I tell wonder-filled stories about hope and healing
Amen! And why shouldn’t this be the way that life unfolds?
Here’s my proposal: break out those yoga pants and wear them out to dinner because they ARE sexy, vow to make Mondays fun because every day is a gift, eat junk food and exercise in equal amounts, cut the drama, be clear about what you want, and stay in touch with people who matter.
Sounds like a recipe for a good life, right? Go live it!
Yesterday I watched an interview with Jennifer Lopez done by Gayle King. Gayle asked Jennifer how she stays so optimistic about love. Jennifer responded that she just can’t imagine giving up on love. She loves love and believes in its power to heal.
Love in New York is a tough game. It’s hard to find and even harder to keep. It also doesn’t help that this whole city is one big incurable romantic. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m with Jenny from the Block – I also love love and believe so much in its goodness.
Even though I haven’t yet found my guy, I know he’s out there. It’s just taking us a while to find another. But he’ll keep looking and I’ll keep looking and eventually we’ll find ourselves looking at each other. My only job is to not give up, to trust that it always works out exactly as it should.
“On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it.” ~ E.B. White
Cold enough for ya? In New York City, we are braving some serious cold and wind. It’s that biting kind of cold where you’re quite sure that if you smile too wide, your face will crack. I’ve found myself eying my new Ninja crock pot and cracking open my cookbooks to create a shopping list of ingredients to create warm, comforting meals.
This weekend, I have brunch plans on Saturday and Sunday and otherwise will be inside working away. I find that I do my best work when I nourish my mind and body with nutritious, delicious food. Additionally, I also love that cooking helps me to quiet my mind and reduce stress. When I hit a road block in my writing, I back away from my desk and head for my stove where I’m sure to get my creative juices flowing again (cooking pun intended!)
Like a good story, a good meal is cobbled together by the hands, inspired by the spirit, and nurtured with love from the heart. This weekend may you find refuge in the kitchen despite the frightful weather outside.
I have always thought that if my family got off the boat and kept going west that I would have never left the state of California. I’ve almost moved there 3 times and this summer I’d like to give life on the left coast a try by doing a house swap. Location independence is one of the great benefits of a freelance life and I want to take full advantage of it. A beach, the ocean air, salt water, and plenty of sun will be good for my soul and a couple of writing projects I’d like to finish.
Know a Californian who might want a cute apartment in New York City for the summer? Send ’em my way!
A day off. I remember those. A real day off. No thinking about my work. No emailing about my work. No time spent jotting down the work to-do that just popped into my head that I must take care of as soon as I get back to my computer. Every day for 7 months I’ve done something related to work.
This weekend my friend, Tom, and I talked about this reality of the freelance life. He is a freelancer also (9 years and counting!) and though he certainly takes downtime, he spends almost every day doing something that’s related to his work. I thought I was the only crazy who did this. Tom assured me that this is often a fact of life for freelancers. It comes with the territory.
You might think that sounds awful, but it’s not. Both Tom and I agreed that we’d rather have the flexibility in our schedule and physical location that freelancing allows in exchange for days off.
Loving the work I do also helps. Most of the time the work doesn’t even feel like work. I never groan when I have to wake up in the morning, no matter how early it is. I don’t have a daily grind. I don’t have work stress that spills over into any other area of my life. For the first time in my life, I feel like my future is entirely up to me and that sense of empowerment is priceless.
It’s no coincidence that the word “freelancer” contains the word “free”. There is no better feeling.
Have a big decision to make and unsure which way to go? If you run the decision round and round in your mind, chances are you will talk yourself into and out of every choice. There’s a better way.
Make a choice. Commit to it and walk around living your life having made that decision. How does it feel? Does the choice change your outlook on life for the better? Does it make you cringe? Do you feel lighter or heavy with regret?
The mind can play tricks on us. We are very good at convincing ourselves of something. It plays the game of coulda, woulda, shoulda like a champ.
The body never lies. We can feel, physically feel, if a decision is right or wrong. We know it – in the pit of our stomachs and at the center of our hearts. But to tap into that knowledge, we need to give a choice a fair shot. We actually need to make the choice and sit with that decision.
Sometimes, all we need is a few hours. Other times, we need a few days. Give yourself the time you need to try it on for size. Be open to the body’s wisdom and be prepared to follow its advice. It will never steer you wrong but you must give it time to work its magic.
“Writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers.” ~ Isaac Asimov
There is something magical about the act of working with our hands. Whether we’re painting, writing, creating music, cooking, or some other tactile-based project, there is a certain pride that creeps in when we look upon something we physically created. It magically makes us feel whole, capable, and empowered.
I think this idea holds a lot of promise for how we think about our careers. I recently read a post on LinkedIn about 16 words you should stop using to describe yourself. Overwhelmingly, the words that the author suggests omitting are ones that describes traits, not activities. When someone says they’re an architect, I immediately get a picture in my mind of what they actually do. They make things, structural things like buildings to be exact. I can get my head around that. It’s real to me. I understand how they spend their time.
In the next few days, I’ll revamp my LinkedIn profile and business website to better define what I do, why, and how. It will accurately describe how I spend my time and for what greater purpose. I’ll cut the jargon and popular buzz words of the day and get to the simple statements of how I use my heart, mind, and yes, my fingers, to create things I care about.
Dave and I went to business school together. Ever since we have talked about what it takes to leave behind a steady job for the sake of building something of our own. I made that jump in June and Dave is on his way as well with the founding of Ritc. Congrats, Dave. Welcome to the movement!
I felt it even today. The encroachment of failure. The feeling like I was losing ground, giving up, just letting opportunities pass. It’s not a good feeling, but unfortunately it’s one that I’ve been quite familiar with throughout my life. When I think about it, the feeling has been part of a larger pattern that I feel has stymied my progress many times.
Step 1 – It starts with an idea or an opportunity. I’m a fairly creative person and I find that I see opportunities and new ideas in almost everything. Mostly this is a good thing.
Step 2 – Sometimes I get very excited by whatever crazy scheme I’m thinking of, so I start pursuing it in one form or another. Usually I conduct some kind of research to test the viability. And that leads to Step 3.
Step 3 – Obstacles. The first major potential failure point.
Step 4 – Fear, Doubt and Uncertainty (FUD).
Step 5 – Give up on idea.
Step 6 – Disappointment in myself. If I didn’t become wildly successful at my idea (due to not actually trying or committing to it), I feel like a loser and I mark it as another personal failure. A failure of my own character. This is very hard to digest. You see for me, my expectations of myself have never been different from my wildest aspirations, and so I set up a system for myself where I always feel that I am an underachiever because I don’t immediately succeed.
Step 7 – Get over it.
Step 8 – Repeat the process all over again. Weirdly, I’m a very optimistic person when the time horizon is long!
Did you catch the step where it all breaks down? It’s definitely not Step 3. Everyone deals with multiple obstacles on the way to achieving anything in life.
Step 4? I used to think so, but I’ve come around on that. I mean, if that’s the problem then I’m in big trouble – I just felt it TODAY for crying out loud! I do believe that over time, I can decrease the FUD factor, but I don’t believe it will go away and I don’t believe that is what REALLY gets in my way.
Step 6? Well, this is something I definitely want to change, but I don’t think it’s the key. I don’t think the key to my success is so…self-aware.
No, it’s not the steps where I feel resistance, whether real or perceived. As I’m sure you figured out already (faster than I did I’m quite sure), it’s Step 5 – giving up in the face of FUD. Giving up is the surest path to not achieving your goals.
But over the last year or so, as I’ve been building my new product and preparing to launch a new venture, I have started to take a slightly different approach. It’s called – DO IT ANYWAY (AKA Don’t Give Up At The First Sign of FUD). I’m going to be afraid. I’m going to be uncertain. I’m going to have doubts. But I believe in what I’m doing, and I’m not going to let those things stop me anymore.
This approach has been working. It’s hard, and sometimes I take 3 steps back before I recover a few steps forward, but I’m making progress. I have a long way to go, and many more opportunities to succumb to Step 5, but I know that I will succeed on some level if I just keep going.
I know that success in my venture is far from guaranteed, regardless of whether I give up or not. In the end I’m not sure that really matters. What matters is that when my daughter asks me if I tried to achieve my dreams, I will be able to tell her yes…I gave it my best shot. That’s my goal.
Dave Goldberg lives in the Washington D.C. suburbs with his wife and daughter. He loves building products, the semantic web, and daydreaming. He is currently building Ritc, a platform to connect, automate, and build applications on the web. You can check it out at http://ritc.io.
I had dinner with my friend, Amanda, on Wednesday night. Though we are people who love and crave time in the natural world, we both made the decision to live in New York City for its cultural diversity and creative opportunities. Still, in these bleak months of winter with its heavy gray skies and meager hours of sunlight, my thoughts often turn to a different kind of life in a different kind of place that involves more trees and less concrete. You can take the girl off the farm, but that doesn’t mean you can make her forget its wonders.
Amanda and I talked about how much we miss the stars. While in New York City, you’ll gaze up at the sky to catch a glimpse of a handful of sparkly specks. Get out of the reach of the city lights and we are reminded that there is a galaxy with an infinite number of stars nestled into the darkness. I miss those stars; I miss the awe that they inspire and the perspective they provide. How can I have all the richness of the New York experience and still gaze at the stars? Is it possible to have both?
I thought a lot about this conversation as I wound my way from New York’s Little India to Times Square to catch the subway home. In a city like New York that has so few stars in the sky by which to navigate, we have to look for the stars among the people around us like my friend, Amanda.
While I miss those twinkling lights that I’ll never reach way up high, there’s something really precious and beautiful about being able to know and love the stars who light our way at ground level. We have to be one another’s True North.
“‘Irrational Personal Passion’ is the heart of effective entrepreneurship.” ~ Tom Peters
You have an idea. A wonderful, beautiful, sparkly idea. After much crafting and nurturing, you slowly begin to release it out into the world. You tell one person, and then another, and then another. You hope for praise and encouragement and much rejoicing. And there is that one person (or in my case, there are many people) who tell you your idea just won’t work because of reasons A – Z. And what do you do? You smile.
You’re on to something. You’ve hit a nerve. You’ve found a new way of seeing the world. Now you’re getting somewhere.
Some people give up in the face of criticism and negativity. You? You keep rising. You take all that energy that people put into tearing down your idea and use it make yourself, and your idea, stronger. Plow ahead. Reach higher. Go further. Irrational passion is the only thing that has ever caused true, lasting, meaningful change. Without it, we’ll never be anything more than we already are. Irrational passion is the fuel of progress.
