A Personal Story  AKA  Scared Out of My Mind

I was 20 years old when I started watching her slip away.  Normally during the summertime, she would spend all morning and a large portion of the afternoon out in our garden, diligently tending to every last petal, stem and root.  Her forehead would glisten with beads of sweat, but it never seemed to bother her; she seemed almost proud of it.

“Look, Ash!” she would yell from her knees, “Did ya see the size of this one?!”  after which she would pop up with yet another tomato in hand, her eyes wide with childlike excitement.

It all happened so quickly.

The first week she came in early from the garden once or twice, claiming to be “wiped,” and would head straight for the sofa, book in hand.

The second and third week it was three or four days in a row, but by the fourth week, she didn’t go out much at all.  By then, she wasn’t just tired, but had begun to complain about a stiff coldness in her feet, that soon expanded into her calves.  In very little time, the problem got continually worse, until she was barely making it out of bed at all, unable to really walk without experiencing dreadful pain.

I would sit with her in bed, rubbing her feet to make them warm again, and then layering on not one, not two, but three pairs of thick, wool socks, topped off with baby blue-colored booties made of yarn.  She described it as if her feet were constantly submersed in a bucket of ice water.

After jumping through numerous physician’s hoops, eventually I was able to get her an appointment with a specialist.  At that point, I was in college an hour away in the closest major city, had to leave school, drive an hour home to pick her up, turn around and drive the hour back to the city where her doctors were, then turn back around and take her home, and then turn around once again to return to school for classes that evening.

I’ll never forget that day, because I was moody.   I was impatient.   I was uncompassionate.   Insensitive.  Icy.  Cruel.

As she struggled with every bit of her last being to make it down the sidewalk, her legs giving out on her at a moment’s notice, I picked up my pace and walked faster, suddenly annoyed at the situation.

“Wait, Ash, I can’t go that fast,” she half-heartedly cried, as I stood at the door impatiently tapping my foot.  Instantly my mind was filled with irrational thoughts.  Perhaps she’s just exaggerating.  Perhaps she’s just looking for attention. It’s as if I wanted to test her.

On the way out, after we learned that she not only needed to have surgery done on her legs, the result of blocked arteries, but beforehand she would have to have open heart surgery, I told myself to be more sensitive in that moment.  To be more sympathetic.  To be her daughter, for christ’s sake.  Instead, I practically dragged her down the sidewalk to the car.

I look back on that day, and realize why I acted the way I did, in spite of my normally calm & caring personality:

I was scared out of my damn mind.

Inside, I was curled up like a little girl in a ball, looking out at the world with big, innocent eyes, scared of what the future held.  Not only was I scared of losing her, but I was scared of what losing her would mean.  It meant becoming an overnight adult.  It meant selling houses.  It meant auctioning furniture.  It meant inheritance taxes.  It meant lawyers.  It meant dealing with the crazy neighbor across the street, who, a couple of months later, as I sat there in shock with the note from the coroner in my hand, knocked on the door and ever-so-politely told me that she came to take the Yankee candle that, she swore, my mom said she could have.  Yes, that really happened.

But what it really meant, far beyond all of the trivial logistical details, was a deep-seated uncertainty. It was an uncertainty about life, yet at the same time, a definitive realization.  A realization that from that point on, I was entirely accountable for my well-being.  There would be no hand-holding.  There would be no gentle guiding.  There would be no motherly suggestions.  No annoying check-up phone calls.

And no sense of security.

And I’d never been more scared in my life.

Worst Case Scenarios Never Happen; We’re Just Crazy

Truthfully, that’s what fear is, isn’t it?  An uncertainty.  Fear happens when we don’t know what’s going to happen next.  And if we don’t know what’s going to happen, then we can’t control it.  And it makes us feel all sorts of anxiety, worry, and fear.  At worst, it can completely paralyze us into inaction.  At best, it might make us lash out at others, or be insensitive when we shouldn’t, for example.

At that time in my life, my mind couldn’t help but spin out of control, pondering all of the worst case scenarios and then–here’s the kicker–actually starting to convince myself that they would come to fruition. Surely I would become homeless, have to beg on the street, would be forced into prostitution and have to wear shimmery gold skin-tight dresses that didn’t go with my skin tone, and would eventually end up missing teeth before plunging to my death over the highest bridge I could find.

And we all do that when we get scared (well, maybe not the shimmery gold dress, though that fear is justifiable), whether we’ve had a major life crisis, or are worried about something like whether or not people will like our clothes, our decisions, our ideas–essentially, us.

Because of the lack of certainty and our insatiable human need for answers, we make them up instead. We imagine all of the possible outcomes, and then start to believe that–surely–the worst will likely happen.  And then we fixate on it.  And then it builds in our mind, until now the possibility has become a very real fear.

But here’s the thing.

While fear is a natural human emotion, that doesn’t make it real.

What I mean to say with that is that emotions are, of course, real to us, but they don’t always reflect reality.

I once read somewhere that the only fears we are born with are the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises; the rest are socially constructed and learned fears over a period of time. Furthermore, the study noted that humans don’t just develop fears based on their own personal experience, but if they witness another human being having a negative experience, that fear is then also transferred over.

So now we’ve got all of our random negative experiences, that may or may not have just been a fluke, plus all of the random negative experiences of everyone we know or have seen on television or read about on the internet, all compiling to essentially make us a bunch of walking nutcases.

No wonder fear runs our lives.

And that’s exactly the point–we can’t let it.  If we make decisions based on ideas that aren’t even real, how sound a decision is that?

It’s said that fear is an adaptive emotion used to help us avoid dangerous or threatening situations, but I’ve got to ask: Now that we’re not fighting tigers in the wilderness, how useful is this really?

In a speech given in Phoenix in 2008, Michelle Obama made a killer point:

“Don’t ever make decisions based on fear.  Make decisions based on hope and possibility.  Make decisions based on what should happen, not what shouldn’t.”

As a strategy, I consistently and consciously try and identify my fears, and then go and dive the hell right in.  Because you know what?  With practice, I’ve noticed that–just as I suspected–most of the time, they aren’t warranted.  And once I can see that in retrospect, it helps me ten-fold the next time I face a potentially fearful situation.  With practice, I’ve gained confidence that whatever I’m scared of, probably isn’t as scary as I’m making it.  So as a result, it’s easier for me to plunge into scary situations.

Fear To Start This Website

So when my good friend and all-around Australian wonder woman asked me if I’d consider doing an interview on taming my fears when I started The Middle Finger Project, as a contribution to a bigger project she was working on designed to help people get over their fears when they first start a website, I jumped at the chance.

Today, Catherine is launching Awesome Fear Wrangling, and I’m totally not an affiliate for this, but think that many of you might benefit, based on the number of emails I get that ask me for advice on starting a website.

She’s poured her heart and soul–oftentimes waking up at 4am to conduct Skype interviews (I was one of them)–and as a result, a beautiful resource that will help anyone deal with the most common fears when starting a website was born.  Some of them that Catherine addresses are:

• fear of failure

• fear of technology

• fear of rejection

• fear of getting it wrong

• fear of trolls (The mean-commenter kind. Not the bridge-lurking kind.)

• fear of not being cool enough

• fear of not being expert enough

The resource includes 13 half hour interviews from super duper rad bloggers such as Dave Navarro from thelaunchcoach.com and rockyourday.com, Johnny B. Truant from johnnybtruant.com, Kelly Diels from kellydiels.com, and Sonia Simone, Senior Editor at copyblogger.com as well as remarkable-communication.com–as well as a host of others, including myself, discussing tactics designed to put any fear in its place in terms of building a website.

In addition, she’s included a whole bunch of mini-ebooks on topics, such as a compendium of website fears and signs we’re not managing our fears, as well as a ton of resources on how to help you light a fire under your ass and go get started.

As I said, I’m not an affiliate for Catherine, but because she’s so rad I wanted to mention it.  And also, because she was so thoughtful, she even made you guys a hello video…and and and and AND was cool enough to give any of my readers $20 off if they enter the code “TMFProject” when ordering. I thought that was just dear of her.

If you want to go check it out, you can find Awesome Fear Wrangling here.

If you want to hear Catherine’s fantastic Australian accent which will, inevitably, make you jealous if you’re from anywhere in the continental United States, then watch her wonderful video saying hello to you guys.

And if you want to be a badass, make mad moves and start taking the bull by the horns, tell your imaginary friend–fear–to go take a hike for a while.  You have more important things to do besides cater to his every need.  Though it’s more likely to be a bitch in Prada.  Either way….

Have stories of times you were utterly scared?  Did you overcome the fear?  Regret letting it envelop you?  Feel free to share.

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“Quitters never win & winners never quit.”

Excuse me, divine gods of all Protestant work-ethic – inspired proverbs, *takes drag of imaginary cigarette* but I beg to differ. *Apathetically exhales and flings cigarette to ground before grinding it with the ball of not-so-imaginary fire engine red high heel.*

We’ve heard these types of statements all our lives:  Stick with it, keep your eye on the ball, never give up and if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Essentially, there’s one big, giant underlying message:

Quitting is taboo.

More taboo than going under anesthesia and having someone slice open your breast, insert large pieces of unnatural matter underneath your skin, and then sew you back up and ship you off with the Victoria’s Secret Dream Angels Collection, Size DD–while risking one’s life in the name of vanity, for example.

Weird.

Quitting has become the equivalent of committing a sin.  It has turned into a moral issue of sorts; we stick with something, oftentimes for the principle of it, rather than the value of it.  And while that may score us brownie points from the integrity fairy, the truth is that it isn’t going to do much in terms of advancement.

But isn’t integrity important, you ask?

Sure.

But the problem is that our integrity will be capped off at some point, if we aren’t living an honest version of the life we aspire to have.  Hypocrites don’t make the best integritists.  (If that’s not a word, it so is now.)  So what’s better?  Short-term integrity that keeps your wheels spinning, or long term integrity that will eventually launch you headfirst into the lead?

That’s why I’m calling for a rediscovery of the lost art of quitting.

We’ve been taught that quitting means failure.  But we neglect to add the very important caveat to that statement, which is that there are two types of quitting:  Quitting things that matter, and quitting things that don’t.  Because we’ve had it so drilled into our minds that quitting is bad, we don’t tend to make that distinction, and instead, don’t quit anything.  We persevere through the things that matter, as well as the things that don’t.  And we use a hell of a lot of energy in the process, all in the name of fear of failure.  After all, we wouldn’t want to be a quitter, would we?  It’s almost like being called a vulgar profanity.

We persevere to save face.  We persevere to avoid looking like a failure.  We persevere to prove ourselves to others.  We persevere so we don’t feel like all the time we spent up until that point was a waste.

And all of those reasons are bullshit reasons that are centered around pride.

The only reason we should ever persevere is when it matters.  And when does it matter?  When it contributes to your big picture goals.  Anything else is a waste of your time, and not quitting is extremely counterproductive.  In that case, quitting is the most intelligent move you could make.  It’s acknowledging that–hey–I can’t do everything.   There are things I’d like to do, but I am only one person.  There are people I’d like to please, but I am only one person.  There are opportunities I’d like to take, but I am only one person.   It’s about keeping the big picture in mind, focusing on it, and then aligning yourself with whatever it takes to make that picture a reality.

This notion that quitters never win and winners never quit is nothing more than a feel-good bunch of so-called inspirational malarkey, designed to give us motivation.  What it ends up doing, though, is gives us misplaced guilt.   And frankly, there’s no reason for it.

As human beings, we change.  Our lives change.  Our opinions change.  Our habits change.  Our thoughts change.  Our perspectives change.  Our ideas change.  Our goals, dreams & aspirations change.  And with that needs to come flexibility.  If, on the other hand, we are constantly in the process of change, but are also constantly trying to stick to our initial commitments & try to avoid being a quitter, we’re going to be pulled in both directions, never making progress in either.

If something doesn’t make sense for us, then retreating once we’ve started isn’t a sign of flightiness, unreliability or commitment phobia; it’s a sign of wisdom.

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My friend & fellow blogger Carlos Miceli of Owl Sparks once told me that he was relieved that I never waxed on about relationships here on the site, which I had sort of made an unspoken rule.

But what can I say?  I’m a rule breaker, baby.  Even when they’re my own.

And with that, I’m busting out the L-word.

Love.

There, I said it.

Being the idealist that I am, you might imagine that I’d be the type to wear my heart on my sleeve, doodle mini-cupids around my lover’s name and nonchalantly lounge around in vintage clawfoot tub-fulls of fine French champagne, while draped in pearl necklaces and plucking petals from fresh-picked daisies murmuring to myself, “He loves me?… He loves me not.”

Aside:  What ever happened to, “I love him?… I love him not.”  I really must be an idealist.

While the sounds of anything “champagne” and “clawfoot” make me go wild, that lovely little image couldn’t be farther from the truth of who I am.  Of all things, I tend to be obscenely practical with matters of the heart, and have always been rather skeptical that one lone person could ever possibly fulfill all of another’s needs–or should be expected to.

And isn’t that what we ask of our partners?  We don’t simply ask for their love; we expect (and demand) that person to not only be our partner, but to be our everything.  We demand they be our emotional support, our financial stability, our intimate lovers, our best friends; we expect them to be sexy but sensitive, spontaneous but grounded, romantic but practical, intelligent but not stuffy, and funny but with a serious side.

But most of all, our greatest demand is that our partner be our source of happiness.

I don’t know about you, but that seems to be a pretty tall order.

While it’s obvious that one’s partner should, by all means, be a source of happiness, they cannot be the primary source of happiness.  I won’t go into all of the feel-good literature on taking responsibility for one’s own happiness–we already know that stuff.

Most of us claim to be looking for love.  Sure, who doesn’t want late night full-body rubs and someone feeding you bon bons by the handful? (Sign-up sheet soon to follow.)  But on the same token, we seem to confuse looking for love with looking for that one person that’s going to make us complete, buy us a picket fence, pay the bills, and show up in a red cape (or red bikini, your choice) anytime the lawn needs mowing. In other words, someone that provides us with security.

Some might say they’re the same, but in many cases, they aren’t.  If we’re capable of completing ourselves and getting our own picket fence, if we so desire, then we’re free to concentrate on love–not whether or not Bachelor Number 1 makes enough money or not.  And doesn’t it seem like happiness would come more naturally that way on its own?

The point is this:  We tend to make decisions about the relationships we engage in based on some future projection of who that person will be at a later point in life.  We suss out their career choices and figure that if so and so is going to be a pharmacist, then so and so is a good catch, because to us, “good catch” = money = security.

But imagine if you were already secure, for example, and you were able to take that out of the equation.

Would you still pick the same way?

Note:  That wasn’t “obscenely practical” of me at all, was it?  Learn new things about myself everyday.

In this post, I talk a lot about my own personal journey, and how I’ve gotten to where I am today.  If you just want to skip to the end where there are resources that will show  you how YOU can get rebel against mediocrity and take your life & career into your own hands–sans boss–then be my guest.  My feelings won’t be hurt.

The Evolution of a Shy Girl Turned Outspoken Lunatic

Most of you probably have a good sense of who I am as a person; through my writing, my comment responses, my Tweets and personal emails, I’m not shy about revealing my over-the-top, zany personality.

I was recently interviewed by the infamous, surf-loving Srinivas of BlogcastFM, about becoming a blogger, and somehow even ended up talking about sex.  Surprised?  You can hear the interview with me & my self-proclaimed husky man voice here.

Yet, despite who I am today, I was once someone very different.

As a child, I hid behind my mom’s leg, only partially revealing my face whenever anyone attempted to talk to me.  Usually I just hugged her calf and buried my face into the back of her knee.  I’m sure that wasn’t annoying.

As a pre-teen, I started to slowly come out of my shell, which I owe much of to Vince Materese, my first kiss.  Vince was the popular guy that everyone knew, and one very fine balmy Friday evening when I happened to cut him off by accident at the one and only skating rink in town, he promptly nicknamed me, “Big Butt Ambirge,”–a nickname that we later joked about during our tween courtship that followed.

Later, as a teenager, I was as straight-laced as they come.  Vice-president of the class, secretary of honor society, something or another for student council, a straight A student and a year-round volleyball player, there were certainly no “middle fingers” flying around.  In the 10th grade I was elected to represent my school district at the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership Conference, and as a senior I had won a full scholarship to a private university, including room, board and a new laptop computer, given by the founder of Monster.com and based on entrepreneurial spirit.

I never went to parties in the woods with the rest of my peers (nor did I even know about them until much later), I never smoked a single cigarette in my life (which still holds true), and I didn’t cut class, skip assignments or talk back.

I was the model student.

Later, in college, the pattern remained mostly the same.  I worked hard.  I studied harder.  I was determined to become the next biggest thing since Downy Wrinkle Release.

At the end of the day, I graduated in the top 5 of my university’s class, wore that stupid square hat, fist-pumped across stage, received not one, but two fancy Bachelor’s Degrees–one in Spanish, the other in PR–and went and consumed large quantities of alcohol that evening.

I mean, what wasn’t to celebrate?  Supposedly, I had now passed with flying colors into adulthood, having checked off all of the required items on the list-of-life that’s suppose to be the key to “success,” and had even managed to graduate college without contracting any life threatening diseases.  Awesome.

Except for one thing.

The Real World, Startling Realizations & Why Authority is Bogus

It didn’t take me long to figure out that what I had spent my entire life working for–my entire life obeying others commands, doing what I was told because I was told to do it, and generally following some pre-defined generic plan–didn’t mean $%*!.

Why?

Because as I mentioned in my interview with Srini, being competent on paper is far different than actually being competent.

The world didn’t give a damn about my fancy-schmancy gold-embossed 4.0, or how many ridiculous-looking torch-shaped pins I had on my varsity jacket.  The world didn’t care what I was president of, or how many times I had been on the high honor roll.

What the world cared about was not me, but them.  Those things on a resume are meaningless to the real world.  The real world wants to know how much value you can actually bring to the table–not what your resume says you can.

You better believe I was bitter when I would go into interviews with copies of my resume, and the interviewer would skim it carelessly before getting to the real point:  Are you a serial killer, and if not, what can you do for us?

Wait–You mean you don’t want to hear about how I was Captain of my volleyball team the year we went to state playoffs?

It’s a funny game we play.  We work hard so we can add to the paper version of ourselves, hoping to appear more & more appealing to prospective decision makers in the future.  Yet essentially, the piece of paper is nothing more than a standard formality, because the real reason anyone gets anywhere in life, be it in a career or something else, has nothing to do with their resume.  It’s about what kind of results they produce.

Usually, we sit in anticipation, waiting for someone to notice our results.  Waiting for someone to notice us.  To recognize our hard work, and give us due credit.  To give us a promotion.  To elevate our careers.  Constantly waiting for someone to give us permission to “succeed.” In essence, no matter how many A’s we get, we’re still relying on others to define our future for us, because there’s always someone ahead of you calling the shots.

Enter technology & the internet

This is precisely what I love so much about the internet; with the power of technology, we are no longer at the mercy of the decision makers to decide our fates for us.  With the internet, we take things into our own hands and create ourselves the career that we want–and with an automatic title of CEO.  The internet allows us to fundamentally take nothing, and turn it into something.  This is particularly relevant in terms of business.

Internet entrepreneurs are everywhere, and more and more are popping up every day.  My favorite example is always Chris Guillebeau, who actually provided me with the initial inspiration to start The Middle Finger Project.  I can remember way back when he first started, having read one of his posts and releasing a big sigh of relief: I’m not the only one who has these thoughts about the way we should be living life. One of my all-time favorites was titled, “100 Countries or an SUV?”

Chris managed to completely transform his life in under a year through leveraging the power of the internet, and now derives his entire income from his online business…all while traveling the world one country at a time.

He didn’t have to ask for anyone’s permission to get his work published; he went ahead and published it himself online.  He didn’t have to ask for anyone’s permission to write an eBook; he went ahead and published one–then several–himself. And he didn’t have to ask for anyone’s permission for a business loan; you can get a domain name for under $10/year.

Hence, the beauty of the internet.  You can literally take your career into your own hands–whatever it may be–and essentially become recognized as an expert and start making money doing something you love.

But that’s not even the greatest benefit.  While doing something you love is ideal, the greatest benefit is the new abundance of freedom and flexibility that the internet allows for.  By leveraging the internet, we’re now at liberty to be in any place at any time–whether it’s the Starbucks down the street, or the nudie cafe in Chile.   And that in itself is far more valuable than any little raise that an employer may be holding over your head.

Having the freedom to be able to travel or spend your time as you wish is one of the greatest benefits of running your own business online, and Chris certainly takes advantage of that fact.  It’s what I’m working toward myself, as are many others.

Want to Start Your Own?

That’s why, when I found out that Chris was offering a course on exactly how to do this from scratch, which he’s aptly titled the Empire Building Kit, I drooled with anticipation.  So you better believe that I’m spreading the word, in the name of all who have worked hard for a piece of paper, to only find out that that little piece of paper wasn’t going to launch you into overnight success.  It takes work.  And if you’re going to be working your tail off for someone, why not let it be you?

I greatly respect and admire Chris for all that he has accomplished, and the Empire Building Kit is just another example.  Not only filled with his own advice, he conducted 15 case studies of people like you and me who are now earning $50,000 – $150,000 a year in net income, and have no more than three employees.  What I like about that is the fact that they all reveal the details on their business operations, how much money they’re making, and exactly how they did what they did.  With money being such a taboo topic, that’s rare to find.

The kit also includes a behind the scenes look at Chris’ own online business operations, including income, sales figures per launch, screw-ups and advice, as well as a year-long email series that includes one kick in the ass each day related to running your business.  The reason he decided to call it the Empire Building Kit is because, like an empire, internet businesses are built slowly, step by step, day by day, and he’s living proof of that.

So there you have it.  I receive a number of emails regularly that ask me how to get started with an online business, blog, etc., and I couldn’t be happier to be able to point you in this direction.  There is a cost involved for the Empire Building Kit, but it’s 100 times worth the price if you’re serious about getting off your ass, rebelling against mediocrity and starting something extraordinary.  If you want to take a look, click here.  Fortunately, Chris took into account that there would be different people interested with different levels of knowledge, so he even went as far as to create three separate courses for the beginner, intermediate and the pros, aptly titled “Emperor-in Training,” “Hail, Caesar,” and “Alexander the Great.”  Cute, right?

If you’re looking to take control of your career & passions away from gatekeepers, I strongly encourage you to go check out the Empire Building Kit.  There’s a catch, though: Since Chris never lets the grass grow under his feet, Wednesday he’s taking off for yet another far flung destination, so he’s only accepting orders for 24 hours, after which point it will be closed. Yikes.  So if you’re serious about running your life the way you see fit, you might want to hop on over there ASAP.

Otherwise, I’d also encourage you to check out some of the eBooks he’s written; from a beginner’s manual to breaking out of the 9-5, to using social media to get your message to the world, to figuring out how to travel hack and save yourself tons of money in airline tickets, Chris has got a pretty impressive collection.  It’s where I first got started myself last year.

The internet is a wildly powerful tool that most people have no concept of its true capabilities.  To be able to take our future into our own hands and completely create ourselves into what we want to become–without relying on others to give us permission to do so–is powerful beyond measure.  By the end of this year, I’ll be writing to you from some far flung destination as well–just need to figure out where.  Let me know if you have any suggestions, and if you do end up enrolling in Chris’ course, let me know how you like it!  I’m confident that it’ll change your life forever–and that’s a pretty damn bold claim.

24 hours, baby.  You with us?

Build Your Own Empire in 1 Year

P.S.

Proud to be an affiliate.  This means that if you purchase one of Chris’ products through here, he’ll be nice and kick me back a percentage.  This is extremely cool, because it helps to free up more of my time that I can dedicate to The Middle Finger Project.  So let’s all sing a round of kumbahya and be happy, eh?

If you clicked on this post, you either:

a) Need to get a grip.

b) Want to reclaim your life.

c) Have no time to do either.

d) Googled “mating habits of porcupines” and this just came up.

e) You read everything I write because you’re secretly plotting my demise.

With the exception of letter E, I completely understand.  However, if you are plotting my demise, can you just promise it won’t include cinder blocks and large bodies of water?  Because that’s just cruel.

Permanently On-Call

Do you ever feel like you exist for the sole purpose of fulfilling everyone else’s needs except your own?  Between friends, co-workers, bosses, parents, siblings, children and the slightly kooky dental assistant who keeps trying to convince you to go out with her son as she scrapes plaque off of your molar, your time is constantly in demand.

Or how about being on call for the entire world?  Between phone calls, text messages, Facebook, Twitter, Skype and email, the entire world can essentially reach you anytime, anyplace, and furthermore expects to be able to get ahold of you at any time, any place.  Worse, we feel obligated to respond.

At times, I worry that if I see my Blackberry flash red one more time, I’ll be forced to do something I might regret later, which may or may not involve the throwing and subsequent smashing of said Blackberry.  Note to self: Disable flashing red light ASAP to avoid giving some unlucky bystander an undeserved concussion one of these days.  Unless, of course, that bystander happens to be the person who performed a solid hit and run job on my car the other day.  In that case, may all technology fly haphazardly and with brute force.

The Neverending Game We Play

The truth of the matter is that at times, we secretly resent the expectations that are placed upon us.  We give and we give and we give, we run and we run and we run, and even when we feel like we can’t anymore, we continue.  We continue because we’ve always continued, and continuing is all we know how to do.  We continue because we feel like we have to continue, or the world will fall apart around us.  And we continue because we fear that if we don’t, we might be a bad friend/employee/spouse/parent/fill-in-the-blank.

So rather than take that risk, we dole out, hand over & ante up (and up and up) until all that is left is a weary, threadbare silhouette of ourselves.  At the end of the day, too often a mere shadow of ourselves is all that we’re left with; there simply isn’t time to replenish what we’ve divvied out in an attempt to make ourselves whole again.

And we get exhausted.  And burnt out.  And cranky. And throw Blackberries.

And while the resulting perpetual under eye circles are no big deal thanks to the 8th wonder of the world otherwise known as concealer, being in a never ending state of whirlwind is more harmful than it may seem.

It’s pretty difficult to fulfill ourselves when we’re too busy fulfilling everyone else.  But here’s news:

SELF-FULFILLMENT IS IMPORTANT.

Taking time out for ourselves is not something we should feel guilty for. It doesn’t mean we’re lazy.  It doesn’t mean we don’t care about our work, our friends, our family or anyone else who needs something from us.

It’s necessary, like eating and sleeping and drinking water.  And you don’t feel guilty for taking time to eat or sleep or drink water, do you?

In American culture, constant productivity is one of our greatest values.  Coincidentally, another one of our greatest values is money.  Higher productivity usually translates into greater monetary reward; what higher productivity does not usually translate into is greater personal reward.  Mind the gap–one does exist.

Solution?

It’s common to hear “Do less,” but I’m going to take it a step further and risk sounding like an insensitive jerk by saying, “Care less,” which I say with the best of intentions.

Perhaps it can be better stated as, “Care less about things that aren’t as important as your health & well-being,” in which case, there shouldn’t be much to debate.

We have this nagging tendency to look at our lives through the lens of a microscope, closely fretting over every day-to-day detail.

However, in the big picture, many of the things we spend great amounts of energy worrying about are largely irrelevant.  The big picture is everything.  What’s truly important here?  What things will matter in 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the road? We’ve all heard that before, but do we actually take the advice?

Worry about those things first; everything else is secondary.

It’s a good idea to start asking ourselves these questions and being more proactive in our quest for self-fulfillment.  If you’re not on a quest for self-fulfillment, then this will, at the very least, help you not become a great big, giant, grimacing grump.  The situations we’re in are, to a large degree, a reflection of the collection of choices we’ve made over a period of time.  When making decisions, try to start thinking on a broader scale.  The big question is:

What’s truly important versus what just seems important now?

That said, if you really are plotting my demise, I hope you’ll take that question into consideration.  Offing me in order to never have to listen to me wax on about personal development topics ever again may seem important now, but later when Booth & Brennan find my killer, it wouldn’t be so important compared to having to spend the rest of your life in prison.  See what I mean?

On the other hand, if you were here by googling the “mating habits of porcupines,” there are others far more qualified to speak on topics of personal development.  Find them.  Now.

For the rest of you, go on.  Get a grip.  Your life is yours.  Act like it.

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NB788VP5G32W     <–Ignore that. Techy bloggy stuff.