I’m going to be in LA, San Francisco and San Diego from the 19th of December until New Years Day! If any of you guys who read my blog want to meet up for drinks, that would be so cool!

If so, you can send contact details to…

jevets01@gmail.com.

Let the good times roll! Dood!

]]> http://www.worklifeinnovation.com/blog/2008/12/the-english-are-coming/feed/ http://www.worklifeinnovation.com/blog/2008/12/the-english-are-coming/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Work-lifeInnovation/~3/454976687/ http://www.worklifeinnovation.com/blog/2008/11/the-art-of-the-yescapade/#comments Sun, 16 Nov 2008 15:21:23 +0000 Steve Munroe http://www.worklifeinnovation.com/blog/?p=95 “Hey Steve, want to go for a drink?” “Uh, no thanks. I’m tired and I have some work to do anyway. Sorry!”

“Hey, we are having a get together next week, you should come!” “Oh, sorry, I can’t, I’m er, …busy that day.” “But I haven’t told you which day its happening!”  “Well, I mean I’m busy all week, I don’t think I could make it, I’m really sorry”

“Steve, we are going to London on Saturday for a day out. You should come”
“Ahh, I think there’s something I have to do Saturday, I just can’t remember what it is right now. Can I let you know later in the week? Cheers”

Ever found yourself saying any of the above? Of course you have, everyone gets invited to things they don’t want to or can’t attend for one reason or another. What’s more troubling however are those times when you find yourself taking a rain check when you have no real good reason to.

A few months ago

I realised that I was tending to say ‘No’ a lot. I hadn’t realised just how much until I decided to try saying ‘Yes’ a bit more often. ‘Yes’ to invites out, ‘Yes’ to suggestions, ‘Yes’ to requests and so on. What happened was that I found myself saying ‘No’ and became very aware of the fact. The interesting thing was, I often said ‘No’ without really having a good reason for it. It was almost a knee jerk reaction. I guess I was just developing a habit of opting out. It just seemed more comfortable to stay in. It was easier to just go home and watch TV or read a book. It was a nice, easy and safe little routine. Besides, work was always busy and after a full day’s work, all I wanted to do was go home, shut the door and decompress.

The only thing was, it sucked! Don’t get me wrong though, going home and decompressing by vegging out on the sofa, or having a bath and an early night doesn’t suck - often it’s just necessary - but having it as your default does suck. After living like this for way too long I had slowly become stale and bored. I needed to change my routine, but I didn’t know how. My life seemed to be just about work and home - often involving more work. This two dimensional life became the norm - no wonder I felt bored! I was bored because I always knew what I would be doing, I knew exactly where I’d be (at work or at home), what I’d be doing and when I’d be doing it. Even though I was bored, life became a snug little routine and anything that promised to drag me out of that easy comfort zone I would automatically, but politely, decline.

So, what did I do about it?

Well, as often can happen when you’re looking for a change, one falls right into your lap. I came across a book called ‘Yes Man’ by Danny Wallace. In the book Danny recounts 6 months of his life where he indiscriminately responded with a “Yes” to any and every request, suggestion, and invite that came his way. It’s a good book, often hilarious and, more importantly, it spoke directly to where I was in my life at that time. Now, ‘Yes Man’ is primarily a funny book, and I suspect some of it has been embellished for comedic effect (in one section, Danny tells of how he travels to Amsterdam to collect the $20 million he had been offered in a random email he’d received from the son of a Sultan of Brunei! - needless to say it was a scam). So I suspect the zealous manner in which he pursued his Yes’s were exaggerated to a certain degree. But I liked the idea and thought about what it means to say yes more. I developed the idea of the “Yescapade“, a mini adventure that you wouldn’t normally agree to but that can be set going with a simple “Yes!”.

But before I give you some examples of what Yescapades I’ve recently signed up for, I want to dig a bit deeper into what saying Yes means.

Life is a mixture of predictability and randomness.

Too much predictability and we become bored, too much randomness and we get stressed. Getting the mix right therefore is important. I had strayed into a life that had way too much predictability and not enough surprise and, as a consequence I was pretty damned bored. Surprises can be good for us. They can shake us out of our preconceptions and show us a new perspective on things. Saying ‘Yes’ can re-introduce some randomness into your life and give you some nice surprises. Saying yes doesn’t always have to be in response to other people’s suggestions, you can say ‘Yes!’ to an idea you’ve had. Saying Yes has over the last few months done a great deal to get me out of the rut I was in. I have met loads of new people, generate lots of new stories and memories for me to tell (bore?) people with and has generally improved the quality of my life. It has also, I think, made me a better person for it. Strange isn’t it how three little letters can have such an impact?

Here then are some Yescapades I’ve recently committed to (and some I agreed to in the past when I didn’t even know about Yescapdes)

1. Saying Yes on Tuesday to a trip to Paris on Friday simply to drink a bottle champagne under the Eiffel Tower - Awesome fun!
2. Saying Yes to Salsa Classes despite somehow having more than two left feet - work in progress but already have met a bunch of interesting new people.
3. Saying Yes to Spending Christmas and New Year in Los Angeles despite the fact that there won’t be anyone there I know! - I’ll let you know how I get on.
4. Saying Yes to being the toast master at a Norwegian wedding in Norway even though I don’t speak a word of Norwegian - Amazingly it went down a storm!
5. Saying Yes to rowing 26 miles down the river Thames in the Great River Race after doing no training whatsoever - despite bumping into the bank about 5 times, we didn’t come last!
6. Saying Yes to a weekend in Moscow with a friend I haven’t seen in 2 years - scheduled for early next year.
7. Saying yes to a project to help get a friend of mine a job at NASA - How random! But we will definitely give it our best shot.
8. Saying yes to training to run a mile in 6 minutes - gone from 10 minutes a mile to 7 1/2 minutes in two months.
9. Saying yes to losing 2 stone - done in 1 and a half months.
10. Saying yes to learning Spanish - Not sure why I did this, seemed like a good idea at the time…

Feel free to post any Yescapades you’ve had in the comments section below. i’d love to hear about them!

Fuck It!

I like these two word a lot. I especially like the first word (who doesn’t?), but I like Fuck It in particular when they join forces - oh and I love it when they come with the exclamation mark!

I like Fuck It! because amongst other things Fuck It! represents an almighty letting go of what we had previously been clinging on to so tightly - typically in the face of overwhelming evidence that we are wrong about the Way Things Are. Notice I capitalised that last phrase, and I did so deliberately. It deserve capitalisation because The Way Things Are is pretty fucking fundamental. You can’t argue with The Way Things Are, it just is that way. Sure, things will change and the Way Things Are right now will become the way things were (deliberately uncapitalised), but the Way Things Are will still be, well, The Way Things Are!  You had better get used to it, because it’s all you have to work with. Fuck It! can help you to see that - actually Fuck It! is pretty much all you can say when you do see that!

The other reason I like the phrase Fuck It! is because it represents a jumping into the unknown - in the sense of “Fuck It! I’m going to do it” (whatever ‘it’ may be to you). Fuck It! in both senses is an opening up to life and what it can show you. You might say Fuck It! to your job, Fuck It! to your relationship, Fuck It! to your worries or Fuck it! to your inhibitions. In fact you can say Fuck It! to just about anything, but its power is in the feeling that you get once you have let Fuck it! loose on your situation. It’s a powerful act of letting go - letting go of whatever it is that’s worrying you, a letting go of your fear, your anger or your sadness. Fuck it! is a loosening agent, Fuck it! unsticks you from what was sticking you. Fuck it! gets you moving and Fuck It! can embolden you to do something you never thought it was possible for you to do.

If you ever feel stuck in life, bored with your situation or stressed out by some idiot in your work or personal life, try just saying Fuck It! and use the energy that Fuck It! gives you to get up and do something about it!

I was going to write another paragraph, but Fuck It! I’m tired of this article now so I’m going to do something else.

- There are 23 Fuck Its! in this article, if you don’t like it well, Fuck It! I dont care! :-P  (make that 24!)

After a bit of toing and froing caused by me not being specific enough in my instructions (note that you might often be speaking to non-native English speakers), my VA did a superb job, completing the task within a couple of hours. I now have her personal contact details, and when I have another task for her to do I can do it directly with her, bypassing Guru.com. This can make the next task cheaper (Guru.com take a commission), but potentially exposes you to more risk, since you wouldn’t have Guru.com’s assurances and cover. It all comes down to trust and I wouldn’t advise ditching the agency in favour of directly employing your VA until you have built up a strong relationship. Ultimately though, VA’s value their reputation and if they tend to rip off their clients, word will quickly spread and they would be out of business pretty sharpish.

Anyway, my VA posted 50 of my old books on Amazon at a cost to me of £12 pounds, and since then I have had a steady stream of buyers selling around 25 books, giving me a revenue of £83 and a profit of £71. Delivery costs are covered by Amazon in the usual way (they add postage costs to the price of the item) and this is normally more than enough to cover your costs when you come to post the item.

I will definitely use my VA again for other time intensive tasks such as looking for flights and booking hotels. I am even thinking of asking her to get me a list of rental properties in my area for when I have to move next year!

If you are considering using a VA for some tasks you want done and want to use mine, drop me a line and I can pass on her details.

But is this true? It seems to me that taken from the perspective of an Old You, life is all about making memories. It also seems to me that memories, or memorable events, seldom just arrive; you have to go out and claim them! Think about yourself at 90 and imagine what, so far, would that person have to look back on… Are you storing up an amazing and incredible legacy that can be looked back on with delight? Will the Old You truly be able to say “Yes! I have lived! And my word! How fantastic it all was!”

Most of us, I suspect, don’t look at life in this way. Most of us spend our time thinking and fretting about the things in front of us, and rarely if ever take on a larger perspective to see what this life of ours will look like from the vantage point of twenty to thirty years or more in the future.

The things that will make you smile when your 90, won’t be the things you acquired, the money you have, the safety and cautiousness with which you made the journey. No, it will be the problems you overcame, the victories you claimed, and the failures you picked yourself up from. It will be the passion with which you lived your life that will glow in the embers of your old and faltering eyes, not the material benefits of those struggles - there may not be many after all. What you will care about and feel justly proud of will be the way you grabbed hold of life, and the manner in which you went and sought out experiences that one day would turn into the memories of an Old You. An Old you who, with those memories to reflect on, will know that of all the things that life has offered you over all those countless years, nothing has gone to waste.

If, looking back at your life right now, you don’t quite feel your doing your best by that old version of you - who, don’t forget, will want to relive the contents of your days in all their glorious detail - take a look at the list below and if you recognise any of them in your life, try to exchange them for more memorable ways to spend your time.

10 Things you won’t thank yourself for when you’re 90

1. All those countless nights laying on the sofa watching TV

2. The people you wanted to but didn’t speak to on the train

3. The mornings you laid in bed until noon

4. The cigarettes you smoked

5. The exercise you didn’t take

6. The invites you turned down

7. The pieces of work you refused because they seemed too hard/scary

8. The food you didn’t try

9. The daydreaming you did

10. The time you spent worrying and not acting

None of these are quality entries in a photo album or memoir, so why put them in your life!

What are goals?

Goals are statements or descriptions of the future state of the world that we would like to make reality. “I want to visit the Serengeti”, or “I want to lose 20 pounds”, or “I want to start my own business”. Such statements describe a future world in which we want these statements to have become true. The trouble with this is that they are words or thoughts, and words and thoughts are merely the empty shadows of emotion. By themselves words are nothing but a pale and insubstantial shadow of an underlying emotion. The mistake many of us make is that they become the main representation of our goals, when in fact they cannot carry much at all. Words can inspire us, but only if they contact something else deep inside, and the link from words to emotion is difficult, not well understood, and prone to failure.

We’re often told to write down our goals so that we can see them regularly in the hope they have an affirmatory effect on us. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve written goals down before and they tend to end up becoming stale and meaningless to me a few weeks later - it doesn’t work!

What then can we do to keep our goals alive? As we have seen, if we focus on the words we use to describe our goals (repeating them to ourselves or writing them down for regular review), this is a surefire way to let them fade and wither. Instead the focus has to be on maintaining or re-activating the emotion that gave rise to those goals in the first place.  It’s not a process of using words to active the emotion, it the other way round, we have to find better ways to contact the emotion behind the goal, then words can be used to represent that feeling or aspiration.

Goal Work

What I think is lacking is an understanding that keeping goals alive is something that requires creative work. It takes more than simply writing your goals down or occasionally remembering them.  What is needed is a regular (weekly perhaps) piece of time that you can set aside to really go into a goal. You need to give yourself enough time to really delve into the goal, imagine it, see yourself having achieved it, and fully contemplate the consequences of it if you are ever going to stand a chance of re-activating the emotion behind it. It is also important to do this in different ways each time. Your goal work has to be a multi-dimensional, multi-media recollection of the goal. This is the real reason words and simple remembrance of goals is a sure fire way to kill them - they are one dimensional. The route they originally gave you back to the emotion underlying the goal very quickly becomes inert. In psychology it is well understood that we stop noticing things that don’t change - we become blind to them. If the way you represent your goals doesn’t change, they too will become invisible to you, which is why it is important to re-enliven your goals with imagination, visualisation and ever more detailed plans for their realisation.

So don’t let your goals die. If they mean anything to you, try to spend some time with them every week to keep them alive. Without them, your life may stay exactly as it is right now…until your too old to do anything about them anymore.

“In this day and age it’s becoming ever more important to manage the perceptions that others have of us. This is even more true in an age of ubiquitous media, social networking, insta-uploads, tagging and blogging. Before you know it, that heat of the moment comment or deed can be captured by someone’s digital camera or video and broadcast out to the whole world via, Facebook, twitter, or blog posts. And once it’s out there it’s out there for good. Understanding how much of ourselves is online for public viewing is itself difficult to determine - who has time to trawl all the social networking sites trying to track down any personal content we may have had ’shared’ to the world by our unwitting friends (or ‘witting’ [is that a word?] foes).”

Here is a link to the full post.

Look at it from another angle, anything we do that’s creative is defined as such because its a creative use of materials, musical notes, shapes and/or colours - but within some form of limiting set of rules or physical realities.  We recognise music when the sounds we hear conform to strict sets of rules that determine which notes can follow previous notes; the artist must work within the constraints of the materials she uses, and the businessman must try to make his profit within the rules of commerce as defined by his society. Even people who attempt to break the rules do so in full knowledge of the rules they are trying to break - their behaviour is still defined by the rules they are resisting.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that in fact, limitations and constraints provide the framework within which we can be creative and innovative. Without them we would have nothing to work with - imagine Nureyev in zero-G, or Callas in a vacuum, or Branson in Cuba! Sure, I’d love to have enormous sums of money and no demands on my time, but I suspect if I really did ever manage to get myself into such a situation, I’d either be bored rigid or, more likely, find a whole new set of limitations and constraints I’d have to work within.

I think there’s a lesson here. Instead of looking at constraints as bad things or even necessary evils, we should see them as opportunities for creativity. I don’t have much money, I’m not the best looking person in the world (though my Mother assures me that I am), and I’m not born with any god given talents that will make my fortune (notwithstanding my world class ability to procrastinate), but when I look around, I see many little ways that I can tweak things to do better at what I do. Yes, I’m surrounded by limits but, like the musician faced with just 8 notes and a handful of chords, perhaps I too can create my own personal Sgt Peppers. I bet you can too!

Here’s someone who knows all about constraints…

Time will take away everything you have…

This is both its blessing and its curse.

At the risk of spoiling the simple and beautiful phrase above, what I mean by this is that whatever your suffering from or enjoying in your life right now it will eventually be replaced by something else. Understanding this will help you through the bad times and accept the ending of the good times. Nuff said.

]]> http://www.worklifeinnovation.com/blog/2008/08/the-straight-up-truth/feed/ http://www.worklifeinnovation.com/blog/2008/08/the-straight-up-truth/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Work-lifeInnovation/~3/355717916/ http://www.worklifeinnovation.com/blog/2008/08/making-the-world-better-one-random-act-of-kindness-at-a-time/#comments Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:52:47 +0000 Steve Munroe http://www.worklifeinnovation.com/blog/?p=75 How to make the world a better place? You could form a charity, or dedicate your life to finding a cure for cancer. Perhaps, organise or attend rallies to world peace. Maybe you could lobby your political representative to get us out of Iraq. All of these are great steps you can take to make the world a better place. But there’s also a bunch of simpler stuff we can all do. Easy, spontaneous small actions that we can take to improve the day of the people around us. A wonderful little book by Danny Wallace called Random Acts of Kindness lists many many such things and I’d like to share them with you here. So read on and perhaps you will be inspired to make a small difference today by doing something small for those around you.

• Give old socks or gloves to a homeless person

• Take a morning coffee to a receptionist

• Offer to swap seats on a bus or a train so two friends can sit with each other

• Write a cheery hello on a banknote and then spend it

• Give a disposable camera to a group of people you see having fun

• Lay some flowers at an otherwise bare grave

• Pop a sugar cube next to an ants nest

• Take old toys to a maternity ward and tell them to give them out to whoever needs them

• If you see a homeless person with a dog, pop into a nearby butcher and buy the dog a bone

• Leave your pound in the shopping trolley

• Buy a bar of chocolate then give it to the person who sold it to you

• Buy a bunch of flowers but then tell the flower seller to give them away to the next person that comes along

• Give a lollipop to a lollipop lady

• If you see an incredibly cheap flight, buy it and offer it to your friends

• Buy a copy of the Big Issue then give it back to the seller

• Hand out a packet of wine gums to anyone you see doing a boring job, such as a car park attendant.