A year ago I decided to change my life. There were several areas I wanted to change, most notably my health and my career. In order to make these changes I'd have to radically alter my behaviour. Doing the same things that had got me into my current state of affairs at the time would not be adequate to implement the changes I wanted to make.
In my case, my decisions were born out of negative emotions such as frustration and disgust. I was fed up with being overweight, unhealthy, and lethargic. I also decided that now was the time to really push my career forward without screwing it up. "Enough!", I said to myself. "I've had it, I will no longer settle for poor health and I will no longer muddle along financially from one day to the next."
How often do we hear stories of people who have reached some turning point in their lives where they would no longer tolerate some situation and made the decision to change. Whether that change is losing some excess fat, quitting smoking, seeking a new career, deciding to have a child, travelling the world... Many of these major decisions are brought about from negativity - a general dissatisfaction with things to one degree or another.
From this we can conclude that those negative emotions can be good for us if they cause us to stop and think about what is not yet great in our lives. But good will only come of it if we decide to make a positive change. There is usually some threshold that has to be broken. If you had gained 5lbs in excess weight would you be frustrated with yourself, vow to lose the weight and never to put it back on again? If you are an average person then I suspect not. However if you are a professional bodybuilder striving to keep a body fat level in the single digits then 5lb could be quite a disaster.
We all have our own thresholds for any given set of circumstances. That is one of the ways in which we are all different. I don't like to be overweight. 15 lbs or so not too much of a problem. Even 30ish I could deal with but it bothered me a bit. When I started reaching nearer 50lbs overweight something had to change. But therein lies a problem. What happens if I reach my threshold, make the positive changes and start successfully losing the weight and slowly lower myself safely below my threshold? I become contented once again and this can mean that the desire to continue losing weight is lost!
This can happen with any goal. What if you are struggling financially and you decide to start a part time business in order to make some extra money. You start out vigorously and pour every spare hour into that business and slowly an income builds but once it reaches a certain level you become comfortable and you begin to slack off. Before long you are hardly working on your business and it slowly dies along with your dream of financial freedom.
The essence of the problem is that as we set goals and move towards them we are constantly fluctuating between negative states of frustration and dissatisfaction which gives us ambition and drives us forward, and those positive (but dangerous) states of comfort and contentment. As we move towards our goal, our desire to keep working at the goal diminishes and we sabotage our efforts.
How can we break this cycle? We need to get to a place that is between these two emotional states and stay there. Obviously we don't want to be feeling extreme frustration on a daily basis as that is too painful but we need to feel that something is not quite right, it could still be better. On the other hand we must not let ourselves become complacent.
I believe that one way to achieve a balance between these two states is by constantly re-evaluating our position and also, constantly moving the goal posts. I'll go back to my weight loss issue for another example. The first goal I set was to reach 25% body fat in one year. After one year I was still over 30%. Did I just press on towards my original goal? No, I set a new one, a tougher one. I knew I could lose the fat and I also knew that I could do better than 25%. My new goal is 15% which is very ambitious. For a woman, a level that low is usually reserved for athletes so it should keep me going for a while! But if I get to a point where I am actually getting close to it then I'll set a new goal. It may not necessarily be to lose yet more fat, but I might want to increase my lean body mass so that I can eat more calories for example.
Very few people set any goals at all so if you are the minority that do then congratulate yourself! But I fear that many people who set goals put them on a pedestal and worship them, believing that any deviation from that goal is a failure. Not so. On a regular basis review your goals. Ask yourself whether it needs tweaking, or indeed if it makes any sense at all any more. Things change, life changes, we change and if we don't change our goals to match we'll be striving for something that doesn't serve us. I will talk more about goals in another post but for now the point I want to get across is that to avoid becoming complacent we must constantly re-evaluate and set higher goals for ourselves.
Friday, 13 July 2007
Wednesday, 11 July 2007
Changing my Life - One Year On
How I Messed my Life up in the First Place
In previous posts I have mentioned various mistakes I've made in my life, such as destroying my career. The loss of my career has had a massive negative impact on my life looming over me like a very dark cloud. I didn't just lose my job, I flushed it down the toilet. That one event led on to many problems such as computer game addiction, a brush with alcoholism (which I had previously dealt with and left behind many years ago), damaged personal relationships, poor health, depression and a total loss of any sense of self worth. I messed up big time and couldn't seem to get over it.
A Change in Attitude
Then in 2002 a couple of things happened. Firstly I discovered the book "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill. I didn't really understand it when I first read it but it got me thinking and I started to feel as though my problems were within me and that if I could change myself, my attitudes and behaviours, that perhaps I could find a way out of this mess. From that book I moved on to many others by authors such as Og Mandino and Tony Robbins. I started thinking positively for the first time in years.
I decided to try and get a job; until then I had been working from home scratching a living out of internet businesses that were not fulfilling. So I started to brush up on my programming skills, I took out my CV and revamped it. I made another mistake here - I tried to hide the job from which I was fired by covering it with my business. The problem with this (other than the immorality of it!) was that it took away most of my commercial experience as a software developer. I couldn't find a job - not a sniff of one. It turned out that this was a bad time for the industry as many programmers were being laid off and there were lots of highly qualified, well educated programmers out there looking for work. Nobody needed a self-taught programmer with very out of date skills.
Off to University
I was quite despondent by this point as I saw no way out of my dilemma. It looked as though my career was lost for good. Then my partner suggested that I go to University. This would not only get me a degree but give me a chance to really bring my skills up to date and show them off via my University work. Seemed like a great idea except for one slight problem - how on earth would I pay for my mortgage and my bills as a full-time student?
For once I took a leap of faith. The books I had been reading told me that if I really wanted something that I would find a way to make it work. I still had my internet business and that was pretty much sustaining itself without much effort. So I applied. I had a long wait but I was accepted. I had to wait another 11 months before starting.
I wont bore you with all the detail of Uni except for one point. Throughout my time at University I had just one thing on my mind - rescuing my career. I figured that if I studied hard and did well that I might get of well with lecturers and be able to get good character references that would help me get a job despite my 'black mark' from the past. If nothing else, it meant that I could put off the job hunt for another three years!
Well the plan worked. I did work hard, very hard and I graduated with a first class honours degree in Computer Science and the award for 'Best Student' to boot. A handy boost for the CV. The sweetest part though was that I did indeed get on well with many lecturers and one of them lined me up with a job. She knew the company well and spoke with the managers about my history and told them the kind of person that I was as she knew me. I went to the interview and was offered the job right there without once being asked anything about my past discrepancies. Until then, I had spent seven years worrying about how I was going to explain away my past in an interview. All that worry was for nothing; it never happened.
A Time for Change
That was a year ago. On Graduation day I reflected back on the last few years and thought about the next few years. Now that I had a job to go to I was in a position to really put the past behind me and start afresh. I was a little afraid that I might screw this up too so I decided that I really had to make a conscious effort to not only work hard in the job, but to continue studying the books and journals pertinent to the job in order to catch up on the years I had lost.
As I stood in line waiting to shake the hand of the Dean I felt happy but I also felt drained and tired. A year earlier I had undergone some surgery and hadn't properly recovered. In my last year of Uni I hadn't attempted any exercise whatsoever and I had survived on a diet of convenience food. I was at my heaviest ever weight and my lowest ever fitness level.
A had a few days in between Graduation day and starting my new job. In those few days I reflected on my life as a whole and I made the decision to change it. Not just my job and my health but everything. Though as it turns out, those two things would predominate over everything else over the coming year. I set goals, a ton of them and I prioritised them. I started thinking about how I could put those goals into action. I figured there must be a gym near my work place (there was), so I would join it and exercise daily. In my spare time I would study programming skills and so on.
A Year On - How Did I Do?
The weekend just gone was the anniversary of that change. Looking back, I have indeed made many changes in the right direction.
Health
There was a gym five minutes away from the office. On the first day of my new job I was taken down the pub but on the second day I went to the gym and joined it. I started working out on the third day and have not looked back since. We have moved offices recently but I found a new gym which is also five minutes away. My use of the gym, and my routine has changed a bunch of times over the year as I tweak things but as you'll know if you have read recent entries from this blog, I now aim to exercise in one way or another, every single day.
I took up running in July. I have struggled with that and my progress has been very sporadic but I'm still going at it slowly.
One of the absolute best things I did shortly after starting my job was to start Karate. I did karate as a teenager and I really enjoyed it but once I left home I just kinda stopped doing it and as I got older I just never seemed to get around to it - you know how it is :) It had been at the back of my mind for a while but my main concern was that I wasn't fit enough to start it. I procrastinated quite creatively by laying down some physical prerequisites such as being able to run 10 minutes continuously. Thankfully, my curiosity got the better of me and I found a class 10 minutes from my house and realised it was on the way home from work. I checked it out, fell in love, and started the following week. I absolutely love it, it's the highlight of my week. Since August, I've completed three gradings and I'm now an Orange belt.
As well as all this exercising I have of course been dieting. My aim was to lose 1lb a week but that was only going to happen if I stuck to everything perfectly which I did not do! I have blogged extensively about my fat loss on my health blog so I won't go into detail here. But over the course of the year I have lost 23lbs of fat, gained 2lbs of muscle, dropped two clothes sizes and I look and feel much better for it.
Overall, physically I have come a long way but I still have a long way to go. That really is a great place to be. When you start out on a journey like this and you're at your lowest point it's really depressing and daunting but once you've started to make some real progress it can lift your spirits and make you realise what you really can do. Ok I've made slow progress but so what? If I lost another 23lbs next year I'd be looking pretty good! At least now I enter my second year knowing what's possible.
Career
Oooh my career. This has been an interesting ride. As you might gather from the earlier sections of the post, my life has been focused around my career for some years now. If you've read recent posts on this blog you'll know that I now want out of my career! I now have a burning desire to quit my job! What on earth went wrong?
Nothing.
When I first started my job I was ecstatic. I threw myself into the job and even more so into extra curricular study of related books. Over the year I have read 8 technical books. No where near as many as I would have liked but probably more than I had read before put together. In the first few months of working I was able to put all that new knowledge into practice and I learned a lot in the job too. Many things had changed in the industry while I had been away and I had some catching up to do. And catch up I did.
After a few months I found that I was reading more and more material that I couldn't apply to my job. At the end of the day you have to just do the work they want you to do and you can't just play around with new ideas and technologies when you feel like it. I needed a pet project and so I started fleshing out ideas of a game I wanted to write that I could use as a test bed for all my new found knowledge.
As time progressed I began to experience frustration at work. I felt that it held me back creatively and that my innovative nature was being suppressed by those in authority. At first I was really alarmed. Had I just wasted all those years at University? I had resurrected my career so why on earth wasn't I happy? Looking back now I can see that I needed to get a job and be employed simply to lay to rest the demons from my earlier job. Once I had done that, my creativity and entrepreneurism started to bubble to the surface again.
I have been self employed for 8 years of my life. At age 19 I started my first business and entertained visions of being a millionaire :-) I'm sure I'm not alone with that fantasy. Deep down I am a free spirit. I like to do what I want, when I want to. I do not like having to be at work for 9am every day, I don't like having to ask permission to come in late so I can go to the dentist. I don't like being told what to work on, and being told how to do my job. Now I'm sure that 99% of people don't like these things either. But where there is a difference is that I suspect many people are not really sure what the alternatives are but for me, I know exactly what I want to do.
It took a while to get there. I first started to realise that I wasn't happy in my job around Christmas time. At first I was in turmoil because I just couldn't picture my ideal life. I wanted to write software and yet I wanted my freedom. What job could give me both the satifsfaction and freedom that I wanted? I entertained the thoughts of self employment but at first it was marred by memories of my time spent at home after I was fired. These were not good memories. But as Tony Robbins is fond of saying, "The past does not equal the future". It took me all the way until May this year to finally figure out what I wanted to do with my life from a career perspective.
When I first started my job I had the mindset of "must fix career - make up for lost years" so I immediately thought about my future in the industry. I imagined where the job would take me over a number of years and one of my first goals was a secure and big fat pay rise in the first year as I had started on a fairly low salary. I had my yearly review last week and I didn't get a big fat pay rise. I realised then that in fact I was silly to set a goal like that because it's something that is out of my control, and that is exactly what I hate about working for somebody else.
When you work for yourself, you are in charge of how much you earn, not your boss, not your bosses boss, just you. If I won the lottery tomorrow it would solve a few problems but it wouldn't make me happy because I want to make something of my life by myself. I want to build something up that is useful and say "I did that".
I sense that I am rambling and drifting off the original topic of this post which was supposed to be about my year since I decided to change things. To summarise my career then - well I got one and I've not been fired so that's a great start! I've increased my technical knowledge, I've gained a realisation about just what I want to do with my life and I've started to make steps towards it. This is all great progress and I'm happy with that.
What Else?
My career and my health have dominated my thoughts over the last year and that's been a good and bad thing at the same time. On the one hand it has been good because by focusing on them so intently I have made consistent, steady progress towards them both. On the other hand, some of my other goals have been left to the wayside to some extent.
I've managed to reconnect with my family a little. I've taken my mum out for a day trip which is something I've not done before and she really enjoyed it. I've done some fun stuff with my friends but not as much as I would have liked. I've actually had a holiday for the first time in seven years which was nice but not quite enough.
Other areas took a nose dive. I'm a gamer - computer gamer that is but this year I have completed only ONE single player game! Wow! But is that bad or good? The main reason for that is that I've been spending my time exercising, studying, spending time with my family etc which are all very good uses of time. I think I've done the right thing by sacrificing my gaming time for my 'higher' goals but ultimately I'd like to be able to have time for everything!
Well, that's pretty much it for this year, I wonder with eager anticipation what awaits me in the coming year. Here is a list of some of the goals I've set for the coming year:
In previous posts I have mentioned various mistakes I've made in my life, such as destroying my career. The loss of my career has had a massive negative impact on my life looming over me like a very dark cloud. I didn't just lose my job, I flushed it down the toilet. That one event led on to many problems such as computer game addiction, a brush with alcoholism (which I had previously dealt with and left behind many years ago), damaged personal relationships, poor health, depression and a total loss of any sense of self worth. I messed up big time and couldn't seem to get over it.
A Change in Attitude
Then in 2002 a couple of things happened. Firstly I discovered the book "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill. I didn't really understand it when I first read it but it got me thinking and I started to feel as though my problems were within me and that if I could change myself, my attitudes and behaviours, that perhaps I could find a way out of this mess. From that book I moved on to many others by authors such as Og Mandino and Tony Robbins. I started thinking positively for the first time in years.
I decided to try and get a job; until then I had been working from home scratching a living out of internet businesses that were not fulfilling. So I started to brush up on my programming skills, I took out my CV and revamped it. I made another mistake here - I tried to hide the job from which I was fired by covering it with my business. The problem with this (other than the immorality of it!) was that it took away most of my commercial experience as a software developer. I couldn't find a job - not a sniff of one. It turned out that this was a bad time for the industry as many programmers were being laid off and there were lots of highly qualified, well educated programmers out there looking for work. Nobody needed a self-taught programmer with very out of date skills.
Off to University
I was quite despondent by this point as I saw no way out of my dilemma. It looked as though my career was lost for good. Then my partner suggested that I go to University. This would not only get me a degree but give me a chance to really bring my skills up to date and show them off via my University work. Seemed like a great idea except for one slight problem - how on earth would I pay for my mortgage and my bills as a full-time student?
For once I took a leap of faith. The books I had been reading told me that if I really wanted something that I would find a way to make it work. I still had my internet business and that was pretty much sustaining itself without much effort. So I applied. I had a long wait but I was accepted. I had to wait another 11 months before starting.
I wont bore you with all the detail of Uni except for one point. Throughout my time at University I had just one thing on my mind - rescuing my career. I figured that if I studied hard and did well that I might get of well with lecturers and be able to get good character references that would help me get a job despite my 'black mark' from the past. If nothing else, it meant that I could put off the job hunt for another three years!
Well the plan worked. I did work hard, very hard and I graduated with a first class honours degree in Computer Science and the award for 'Best Student' to boot. A handy boost for the CV. The sweetest part though was that I did indeed get on well with many lecturers and one of them lined me up with a job. She knew the company well and spoke with the managers about my history and told them the kind of person that I was as she knew me. I went to the interview and was offered the job right there without once being asked anything about my past discrepancies. Until then, I had spent seven years worrying about how I was going to explain away my past in an interview. All that worry was for nothing; it never happened.
A Time for Change
That was a year ago. On Graduation day I reflected back on the last few years and thought about the next few years. Now that I had a job to go to I was in a position to really put the past behind me and start afresh. I was a little afraid that I might screw this up too so I decided that I really had to make a conscious effort to not only work hard in the job, but to continue studying the books and journals pertinent to the job in order to catch up on the years I had lost.
As I stood in line waiting to shake the hand of the Dean I felt happy but I also felt drained and tired. A year earlier I had undergone some surgery and hadn't properly recovered. In my last year of Uni I hadn't attempted any exercise whatsoever and I had survived on a diet of convenience food. I was at my heaviest ever weight and my lowest ever fitness level.
A had a few days in between Graduation day and starting my new job. In those few days I reflected on my life as a whole and I made the decision to change it. Not just my job and my health but everything. Though as it turns out, those two things would predominate over everything else over the coming year. I set goals, a ton of them and I prioritised them. I started thinking about how I could put those goals into action. I figured there must be a gym near my work place (there was), so I would join it and exercise daily. In my spare time I would study programming skills and so on.
A Year On - How Did I Do?
The weekend just gone was the anniversary of that change. Looking back, I have indeed made many changes in the right direction.
Health
There was a gym five minutes away from the office. On the first day of my new job I was taken down the pub but on the second day I went to the gym and joined it. I started working out on the third day and have not looked back since. We have moved offices recently but I found a new gym which is also five minutes away. My use of the gym, and my routine has changed a bunch of times over the year as I tweak things but as you'll know if you have read recent entries from this blog, I now aim to exercise in one way or another, every single day.
I took up running in July. I have struggled with that and my progress has been very sporadic but I'm still going at it slowly.
One of the absolute best things I did shortly after starting my job was to start Karate. I did karate as a teenager and I really enjoyed it but once I left home I just kinda stopped doing it and as I got older I just never seemed to get around to it - you know how it is :) It had been at the back of my mind for a while but my main concern was that I wasn't fit enough to start it. I procrastinated quite creatively by laying down some physical prerequisites such as being able to run 10 minutes continuously. Thankfully, my curiosity got the better of me and I found a class 10 minutes from my house and realised it was on the way home from work. I checked it out, fell in love, and started the following week. I absolutely love it, it's the highlight of my week. Since August, I've completed three gradings and I'm now an Orange belt.
As well as all this exercising I have of course been dieting. My aim was to lose 1lb a week but that was only going to happen if I stuck to everything perfectly which I did not do! I have blogged extensively about my fat loss on my health blog so I won't go into detail here. But over the course of the year I have lost 23lbs of fat, gained 2lbs of muscle, dropped two clothes sizes and I look and feel much better for it.
Overall, physically I have come a long way but I still have a long way to go. That really is a great place to be. When you start out on a journey like this and you're at your lowest point it's really depressing and daunting but once you've started to make some real progress it can lift your spirits and make you realise what you really can do. Ok I've made slow progress but so what? If I lost another 23lbs next year I'd be looking pretty good! At least now I enter my second year knowing what's possible.
Career
Oooh my career. This has been an interesting ride. As you might gather from the earlier sections of the post, my life has been focused around my career for some years now. If you've read recent posts on this blog you'll know that I now want out of my career! I now have a burning desire to quit my job! What on earth went wrong?
Nothing.
When I first started my job I was ecstatic. I threw myself into the job and even more so into extra curricular study of related books. Over the year I have read 8 technical books. No where near as many as I would have liked but probably more than I had read before put together. In the first few months of working I was able to put all that new knowledge into practice and I learned a lot in the job too. Many things had changed in the industry while I had been away and I had some catching up to do. And catch up I did.
After a few months I found that I was reading more and more material that I couldn't apply to my job. At the end of the day you have to just do the work they want you to do and you can't just play around with new ideas and technologies when you feel like it. I needed a pet project and so I started fleshing out ideas of a game I wanted to write that I could use as a test bed for all my new found knowledge.
As time progressed I began to experience frustration at work. I felt that it held me back creatively and that my innovative nature was being suppressed by those in authority. At first I was really alarmed. Had I just wasted all those years at University? I had resurrected my career so why on earth wasn't I happy? Looking back now I can see that I needed to get a job and be employed simply to lay to rest the demons from my earlier job. Once I had done that, my creativity and entrepreneurism started to bubble to the surface again.
I have been self employed for 8 years of my life. At age 19 I started my first business and entertained visions of being a millionaire :-) I'm sure I'm not alone with that fantasy. Deep down I am a free spirit. I like to do what I want, when I want to. I do not like having to be at work for 9am every day, I don't like having to ask permission to come in late so I can go to the dentist. I don't like being told what to work on, and being told how to do my job. Now I'm sure that 99% of people don't like these things either. But where there is a difference is that I suspect many people are not really sure what the alternatives are but for me, I know exactly what I want to do.
It took a while to get there. I first started to realise that I wasn't happy in my job around Christmas time. At first I was in turmoil because I just couldn't picture my ideal life. I wanted to write software and yet I wanted my freedom. What job could give me both the satifsfaction and freedom that I wanted? I entertained the thoughts of self employment but at first it was marred by memories of my time spent at home after I was fired. These were not good memories. But as Tony Robbins is fond of saying, "The past does not equal the future". It took me all the way until May this year to finally figure out what I wanted to do with my life from a career perspective.
When I first started my job I had the mindset of "must fix career - make up for lost years" so I immediately thought about my future in the industry. I imagined where the job would take me over a number of years and one of my first goals was a secure and big fat pay rise in the first year as I had started on a fairly low salary. I had my yearly review last week and I didn't get a big fat pay rise. I realised then that in fact I was silly to set a goal like that because it's something that is out of my control, and that is exactly what I hate about working for somebody else.
When you work for yourself, you are in charge of how much you earn, not your boss, not your bosses boss, just you. If I won the lottery tomorrow it would solve a few problems but it wouldn't make me happy because I want to make something of my life by myself. I want to build something up that is useful and say "I did that".
I sense that I am rambling and drifting off the original topic of this post which was supposed to be about my year since I decided to change things. To summarise my career then - well I got one and I've not been fired so that's a great start! I've increased my technical knowledge, I've gained a realisation about just what I want to do with my life and I've started to make steps towards it. This is all great progress and I'm happy with that.
What Else?
My career and my health have dominated my thoughts over the last year and that's been a good and bad thing at the same time. On the one hand it has been good because by focusing on them so intently I have made consistent, steady progress towards them both. On the other hand, some of my other goals have been left to the wayside to some extent.
I've managed to reconnect with my family a little. I've taken my mum out for a day trip which is something I've not done before and she really enjoyed it. I've done some fun stuff with my friends but not as much as I would have liked. I've actually had a holiday for the first time in seven years which was nice but not quite enough.
Other areas took a nose dive. I'm a gamer - computer gamer that is but this year I have completed only ONE single player game! Wow! But is that bad or good? The main reason for that is that I've been spending my time exercising, studying, spending time with my family etc which are all very good uses of time. I think I've done the right thing by sacrificing my gaming time for my 'higher' goals but ultimately I'd like to be able to have time for everything!
Well, that's pretty much it for this year, I wonder with eager anticipation what awaits me in the coming year. Here is a list of some of the goals I've set for the coming year:
- Build a business income and quit my job
- Reduce body fat to 15%
- Run Race for Life (5k race)
- Grade to purple belt in Karate
- Learn to speak French
- Throw a surprise birthday party for my Mum
- Do a bungee jump
Thursday, 5 July 2007
Evaluating Those Tough Decisions
In my last post I explained the dilemma that I currently face regarding my job. I feel like my day job is a waste of my time and I wish to quit and start my own business where I feel I can really live my purpose. The problem is that like most people, I rely on the income from my day job to pay for my everyday living expenses so if I was to quit I would burn through my savings very quickly. As the business idea is a total unknown it makes it very difficult to make a decision.
Two Different Viewpoints
I have thought about this decision daily for about two weeks now. I read a lot of blogs and newsletters and almost every day I'll come across something related to quitting your job, or living your life as you want it and so on. Every time I gain a slightly different perspective on things. However what I am finding is that my current standing on the issue sways radically towards one decision or the other depending on the way I look at the problem.
First of all, I know that my day job is just a temporary solution. The question is, how temporary? A month? A Year? More? That's the big decision. It's not so much do I quit my job, as when do I quit? The basic problem is that if I quit now, or indeed, any time in the near future, I will plunge myself into a situation where I have no income and I have to live off my savings. The only 'safe' approach that I can think of is to start my business part time and try to build it up to a point where it earns me enough money to live on before I quit my day job. The difficulty is that I only have a few hours a week on a part time basis so I see this taking a very long time, seemingly too long to bear.
I have two fundamentally different ways of looking at the problem. Here is the one that is currently shouting the loudest in my mind: Life is precious, the essence of life is time. Time wasted is life wasted. Now that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that employment is not for me, I should not waste another day of my life doing it. I am letting my fear of the unknown trap me in a job that does not fulfill me. This is what many, many people do and they get to the end of their lives and think, "Damn, is that all there is?". I should conquer my fear, resign today and press on with what my heart tells me to do. If I work hard, study hard, read well, and keep an open mind success is sure to follow.
On the other hand there is a quieter voice that nags at me and tells me a different story. It says to me... I'm being impatient. Patience is a virtue. Yes I know I want to quit my job, who doesn't? But doing so would be reckless and irresponsible. I should stop obsessing with quitting and instead focus on building up that business income with whatever time and resources I have available. If I put my mind to it, there is no reason why I should not be able to build a sizable income part time. I should be asking myself how could I organise my time better and work more productively. By wanting to quit now I am showing a weakness - the inability to stick out the tough times in order to reap the rewards later. I want to harvest the crop before I have sown the seed.
Using Values to Evaluate the Options
Both of these views seem perfectly valid to me even though they are in total opposition to each other. Which is right? I suspect there is no right or wrong. Which is right for me? Ahh, there's the rub. One tool that I could perhaps use to help me in making this decision is to look at my values. I might make a post about values later but for now I'll just mention some of the ones that seem relevant here. I have two sets of values. One is the positive set - values I want to live by on a daily basis. The second set are the negative ones - those values (states might be a better word here) that I want to avoid on a daily basis.
On the positive side I have values such as Integrity, Drive, Focus, Growth, Freedom, Courage, and Success - in that order. On the negative side, the top emotion I want to avoid is Weakness. Then Laziness, Guilt, Fear, Constriction, and Futility, again in that order. I can immediately see conflicts there. On the one hand values such as drive, growth, freedom and courage tell me that I should follow my heart and quit. On the other hand the number one thing I am trying to avoid is weakness and which ever way I look at it I feel as though I am being weak. If I stay I am showing weakness by lacking the courage to quit. If I quit I am showing weakness by not sticking it out. Also, guilt is way up there on the things I want to avoid. If I quit, I'd feel incredibly guilty about putting my family into financial hardship. The decision would be much easier to make if I was single without any responsibilities. Both decisions push me towards both positive and negative values which is why I am so torn.
Using Projection to help Evaluation
I need to look at this from another angle. Another useful tool is to project into the future and look again at the two directions my life could be taking. Let's say that I stay in my job and build my part time business. Now project a year forwards. How is my business doing? If I'm still not earning any money or very little then I have wasted a year of my life. That's the image that makes me want to quit right now. On the other hand a year from now I might be making almost enough to live on. Also, if that was the case I would have also built up sizeable savings. I would now be able to quit my job fairly free and the problem is solved.
Now lets take the other choice and project. I've quit my job and started working on the business full time. How is the business doing? If I'm still not making money after a year I am in real trouble. I would have used up every ounce of savings and I would lose everything I have worked for over the last few years. Does this mean that I would now have to go back to job hunting after all that effort? This is worst-case scenario for me. This is the big fear that is keeping me from quitting. The big "what if" is "what if I quit, and just never make any money??". But isn't that kind of question just fear and doubt talking? On the other hand, I might start making money really quickly, and then it could grow from there and in it's possible that in just one year I could be making more than I ever did in conventional employment.
Gathering Information & Evaluating
Looking at these future scenarios highlights one common question - "how is my business doing?" I can ask myself this question any time I like and I think that's exactly what I need to do. The kind of business that I want to create requires me to invest a lot of time up front in study and development. It cannot earn any money until a product has been developed so I think it sensible to at least wait until I have done this. Right now I have absolutely no information upon which to base my decision. In order to gather some information I need to evaluate on a regular basis. Every month I can ask myself the question "how is my business doing?".
Common sense tells me that if I consistently work towards my goals every single day, even if only for an hour, that I will eventually make progress. Of course I would make progress much faster if I could spend 10 hours a day on it which is why I want to quit now. Ideally, I would earn enough money in my day job to be able to save money every month and then over time I would be slowly building the business but also building up a safety net. Unfortunately that is not the case so I have to rely on the business alone. If I keep track of my progress every month I should be able to start making more accurate predictions about how long it will take me to make further progress.
As I evaluate my situation each month I can he honest with myself about my rate of progress. Have I made significant progress or have I just wasted another month? If I am going too slow I can take a close look at how I am spending my time and try to do better. If (when!) I get to a point where my business starts generating an income then I can keep track of that to make better projections.
So for now I'll stay in my job *sigh*, work hard on my business and look at the situation again in August.
Two Different Viewpoints
I have thought about this decision daily for about two weeks now. I read a lot of blogs and newsletters and almost every day I'll come across something related to quitting your job, or living your life as you want it and so on. Every time I gain a slightly different perspective on things. However what I am finding is that my current standing on the issue sways radically towards one decision or the other depending on the way I look at the problem.
First of all, I know that my day job is just a temporary solution. The question is, how temporary? A month? A Year? More? That's the big decision. It's not so much do I quit my job, as when do I quit? The basic problem is that if I quit now, or indeed, any time in the near future, I will plunge myself into a situation where I have no income and I have to live off my savings. The only 'safe' approach that I can think of is to start my business part time and try to build it up to a point where it earns me enough money to live on before I quit my day job. The difficulty is that I only have a few hours a week on a part time basis so I see this taking a very long time, seemingly too long to bear.
I have two fundamentally different ways of looking at the problem. Here is the one that is currently shouting the loudest in my mind: Life is precious, the essence of life is time. Time wasted is life wasted. Now that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that employment is not for me, I should not waste another day of my life doing it. I am letting my fear of the unknown trap me in a job that does not fulfill me. This is what many, many people do and they get to the end of their lives and think, "Damn, is that all there is?". I should conquer my fear, resign today and press on with what my heart tells me to do. If I work hard, study hard, read well, and keep an open mind success is sure to follow.
On the other hand there is a quieter voice that nags at me and tells me a different story. It says to me... I'm being impatient. Patience is a virtue. Yes I know I want to quit my job, who doesn't? But doing so would be reckless and irresponsible. I should stop obsessing with quitting and instead focus on building up that business income with whatever time and resources I have available. If I put my mind to it, there is no reason why I should not be able to build a sizable income part time. I should be asking myself how could I organise my time better and work more productively. By wanting to quit now I am showing a weakness - the inability to stick out the tough times in order to reap the rewards later. I want to harvest the crop before I have sown the seed.
Using Values to Evaluate the Options
Both of these views seem perfectly valid to me even though they are in total opposition to each other. Which is right? I suspect there is no right or wrong. Which is right for me? Ahh, there's the rub. One tool that I could perhaps use to help me in making this decision is to look at my values. I might make a post about values later but for now I'll just mention some of the ones that seem relevant here. I have two sets of values. One is the positive set - values I want to live by on a daily basis. The second set are the negative ones - those values (states might be a better word here) that I want to avoid on a daily basis.
On the positive side I have values such as Integrity, Drive, Focus, Growth, Freedom, Courage, and Success - in that order. On the negative side, the top emotion I want to avoid is Weakness. Then Laziness, Guilt, Fear, Constriction, and Futility, again in that order. I can immediately see conflicts there. On the one hand values such as drive, growth, freedom and courage tell me that I should follow my heart and quit. On the other hand the number one thing I am trying to avoid is weakness and which ever way I look at it I feel as though I am being weak. If I stay I am showing weakness by lacking the courage to quit. If I quit I am showing weakness by not sticking it out. Also, guilt is way up there on the things I want to avoid. If I quit, I'd feel incredibly guilty about putting my family into financial hardship. The decision would be much easier to make if I was single without any responsibilities. Both decisions push me towards both positive and negative values which is why I am so torn.
Using Projection to help Evaluation
I need to look at this from another angle. Another useful tool is to project into the future and look again at the two directions my life could be taking. Let's say that I stay in my job and build my part time business. Now project a year forwards. How is my business doing? If I'm still not earning any money or very little then I have wasted a year of my life. That's the image that makes me want to quit right now. On the other hand a year from now I might be making almost enough to live on. Also, if that was the case I would have also built up sizeable savings. I would now be able to quit my job fairly free and the problem is solved.
Now lets take the other choice and project. I've quit my job and started working on the business full time. How is the business doing? If I'm still not making money after a year I am in real trouble. I would have used up every ounce of savings and I would lose everything I have worked for over the last few years. Does this mean that I would now have to go back to job hunting after all that effort? This is worst-case scenario for me. This is the big fear that is keeping me from quitting. The big "what if" is "what if I quit, and just never make any money??". But isn't that kind of question just fear and doubt talking? On the other hand, I might start making money really quickly, and then it could grow from there and in it's possible that in just one year I could be making more than I ever did in conventional employment.
Gathering Information & Evaluating
Looking at these future scenarios highlights one common question - "how is my business doing?" I can ask myself this question any time I like and I think that's exactly what I need to do. The kind of business that I want to create requires me to invest a lot of time up front in study and development. It cannot earn any money until a product has been developed so I think it sensible to at least wait until I have done this. Right now I have absolutely no information upon which to base my decision. In order to gather some information I need to evaluate on a regular basis. Every month I can ask myself the question "how is my business doing?".
Common sense tells me that if I consistently work towards my goals every single day, even if only for an hour, that I will eventually make progress. Of course I would make progress much faster if I could spend 10 hours a day on it which is why I want to quit now. Ideally, I would earn enough money in my day job to be able to save money every month and then over time I would be slowly building the business but also building up a safety net. Unfortunately that is not the case so I have to rely on the business alone. If I keep track of my progress every month I should be able to start making more accurate predictions about how long it will take me to make further progress.
As I evaluate my situation each month I can he honest with myself about my rate of progress. Have I made significant progress or have I just wasted another month? If I am going too slow I can take a close look at how I am spending my time and try to do better. If (when!) I get to a point where my business starts generating an income then I can keep track of that to make better projections.
So for now I'll stay in my job *sigh*, work hard on my business and look at the situation again in August.
Monday, 2 July 2007
Life on the Job Treadmill
A few weeks ago I wrote about my purpose in life and I concluded that it is very work oriented and that I want to find ways to provide unique services that make a difference in people's lives. As soon as this purpose became clear to me, what also became abundantly clear is that my day job does not align with this purpose at all.
I am a software developer and that is my passion. When I talk about proving unique services, the way in which I want to do that, at least for now, is via software development of some kind. The problem with my day job is that I am not doing anything that any other developer couldn't do. If I quit my job tomorrow they would simply hire another developer to take my place. Sure I now have some knowledge of the system that I work on and that would be lost if I left, but I don't bring anything really unique to the job. I am using my talents to work on somebody else's goals towards somebody else's purpose.
At my company we develop broadcast graphics software that allows other companies to create fancy graphics for TV programs such as sports and news shows. I don't care about that. Sure it's a fairly interesting job as far as jobs go but I don't care about it in a deep way, there is no passion there, it's not something that I have created and that's the key difference.
So, I can now conclude that my day job does not move me towards my life's purpose. But does that even matter? As I said in my earlier post about purpose, for many people their purpose has nothing to do with their job at all. For many people it has a lot to do with family so their job simply provides the financial means for them to live their lifestyle and nothing else. They live their purpose outside of work.
But for me that isn't the case. I feel the need to be spending my work time in a productive way and I don't feel as though I can do that in my day job. Worse still, my salary is too low and I can barely afford to live. A recent financial burden has caused me to have to cut out all of my investments so as each month passes I get a month older and make my retirement poorer! So when I look at it that way I see my job as nothing but a treadmill. I am not working towards my purpose, I am not learning anything (though I did learn a lot in the first few months, but not any more), and I am not even making any financial progress.
So what am I doing? Surviving. Getting older. Losing my skills. Becoming increasingly frustrated. I've spent many years of my life in self employment so I am not particularly used to working for somebody else anyway so its certainly not uncommon for me to just want to quit my day job and want to start out on my own again. But now I feel as though I have real clarity over exactly what I want out of life.
The difficulty I face now is a familiar to one to many people I'm sure: financial commitments. I'm in my mid thirties, I have a house, a car and a child. If I just walked out of my job I would burn through my savings extremely quickly because I still have so many things I have to pay for and if I could not make a living before the money had run out then I would have to go back to job hunting and it would have all been for nothing.
Do I take the risk and just quit? Do I suck it up and go to work like everybody else and stop worrying about higher purposes? It's a tough decision, one that I can't make today. But of course by not deciding, I am deciding! But not deciding to quit, I am implicitly making the decision to carry on working on that treadmill, getting older and more frustrated. And that is the root of the problem. This is not something that will just go away. Every day that goes by that I spend the majority of my time at work is another wasted day in my eyes. There are small things that I can do to ease the pain such as making sure that I work on my web development projects daily but it just doesn't seem like enough.
So for now at least, it's back to the treadmill...
I am a software developer and that is my passion. When I talk about proving unique services, the way in which I want to do that, at least for now, is via software development of some kind. The problem with my day job is that I am not doing anything that any other developer couldn't do. If I quit my job tomorrow they would simply hire another developer to take my place. Sure I now have some knowledge of the system that I work on and that would be lost if I left, but I don't bring anything really unique to the job. I am using my talents to work on somebody else's goals towards somebody else's purpose.
At my company we develop broadcast graphics software that allows other companies to create fancy graphics for TV programs such as sports and news shows. I don't care about that. Sure it's a fairly interesting job as far as jobs go but I don't care about it in a deep way, there is no passion there, it's not something that I have created and that's the key difference.
So, I can now conclude that my day job does not move me towards my life's purpose. But does that even matter? As I said in my earlier post about purpose, for many people their purpose has nothing to do with their job at all. For many people it has a lot to do with family so their job simply provides the financial means for them to live their lifestyle and nothing else. They live their purpose outside of work.
But for me that isn't the case. I feel the need to be spending my work time in a productive way and I don't feel as though I can do that in my day job. Worse still, my salary is too low and I can barely afford to live. A recent financial burden has caused me to have to cut out all of my investments so as each month passes I get a month older and make my retirement poorer! So when I look at it that way I see my job as nothing but a treadmill. I am not working towards my purpose, I am not learning anything (though I did learn a lot in the first few months, but not any more), and I am not even making any financial progress.
So what am I doing? Surviving. Getting older. Losing my skills. Becoming increasingly frustrated. I've spent many years of my life in self employment so I am not particularly used to working for somebody else anyway so its certainly not uncommon for me to just want to quit my day job and want to start out on my own again. But now I feel as though I have real clarity over exactly what I want out of life.
The difficulty I face now is a familiar to one to many people I'm sure: financial commitments. I'm in my mid thirties, I have a house, a car and a child. If I just walked out of my job I would burn through my savings extremely quickly because I still have so many things I have to pay for and if I could not make a living before the money had run out then I would have to go back to job hunting and it would have all been for nothing.
Do I take the risk and just quit? Do I suck it up and go to work like everybody else and stop worrying about higher purposes? It's a tough decision, one that I can't make today. But of course by not deciding, I am deciding! But not deciding to quit, I am implicitly making the decision to carry on working on that treadmill, getting older and more frustrated. And that is the root of the problem. This is not something that will just go away. Every day that goes by that I spend the majority of my time at work is another wasted day in my eyes. There are small things that I can do to ease the pain such as making sure that I work on my web development projects daily but it just doesn't seem like enough.
So for now at least, it's back to the treadmill...
Sunday, 1 July 2007
One Month Challenge - Revised and Restarted
After failing my challenge for the second time a couple of weeks ago I have now returned from a holiday in the South of France refreshed and ready to try again.
One of the important goals of a challenge such as this is to honestly evaluate the habits that are being formed and see if they work and if they make sense. My original challenge had three components:
Reading of personal development material is important to me because it keeps my mind in a positive state, it encourages me to continually think about what is important in my life and so on. However, I have found that recently I get a lot of this kind of material in the form of email newsletters and blogs. I am easily spending around 20-30 minutes a day just trying to keep up to date with my blogs and one of the benefits to this is that I am getting material from a wide variety of sources so its always fresh and interesting.
I'd like to read good books as well but as time is at a premium for me at the moment I've decided to cut the books for now and just read the blogs - but they do not form part of my challenge.
Also, I'm making one small tweak, well a simplification really. My original challenge required that I exercise for a minimum of 30 minutes a day. I'm going to simplify that to simply "Exercise Daily". The reason for this is that many of my exercise sessions are pre-determined by their content rather than time spent. For example, if I go and do my run (as I did this morning yay!) and it takes me 25 minutes to complete my route and return back home it would be silly to try and do some other kind of exercise to fill out the extra 5 minutes. Instead, I'll just plot out a longer route for next time. Similarly I do weight training several times a week and I do a handful of exercises in each session. The sessions usually take around half an hour but I'm not going to try to fit something else in if I get through it a few minutes early.
The important aspect of challenges like these is to identify the reasons behind the activities that the challenge contains. In the case of my exercise routine, what I am really trying to achieve here is to make exercise a part of my daily lifestyle so that it doesn't feel like an effort to do it. Whether I do 20, 30 or 40 minutes actual activity is not really the goal - the underlying objective is to form the exercise habit.
To summarise then, my new challenge, starting today the 1st July (oh, how convenient!) is as follows:
One of the important goals of a challenge such as this is to honestly evaluate the habits that are being formed and see if they work and if they make sense. My original challenge had three components:
- To exercise for 30 minutes per day
- To do web development for an hour a day
- To read a personal development book for 30 minutes a day
Reading of personal development material is important to me because it keeps my mind in a positive state, it encourages me to continually think about what is important in my life and so on. However, I have found that recently I get a lot of this kind of material in the form of email newsletters and blogs. I am easily spending around 20-30 minutes a day just trying to keep up to date with my blogs and one of the benefits to this is that I am getting material from a wide variety of sources so its always fresh and interesting.
I'd like to read good books as well but as time is at a premium for me at the moment I've decided to cut the books for now and just read the blogs - but they do not form part of my challenge.
Also, I'm making one small tweak, well a simplification really. My original challenge required that I exercise for a minimum of 30 minutes a day. I'm going to simplify that to simply "Exercise Daily". The reason for this is that many of my exercise sessions are pre-determined by their content rather than time spent. For example, if I go and do my run (as I did this morning yay!) and it takes me 25 minutes to complete my route and return back home it would be silly to try and do some other kind of exercise to fill out the extra 5 minutes. Instead, I'll just plot out a longer route for next time. Similarly I do weight training several times a week and I do a handful of exercises in each session. The sessions usually take around half an hour but I'm not going to try to fit something else in if I get through it a few minutes early.
The important aspect of challenges like these is to identify the reasons behind the activities that the challenge contains. In the case of my exercise routine, what I am really trying to achieve here is to make exercise a part of my daily lifestyle so that it doesn't feel like an effort to do it. Whether I do 20, 30 or 40 minutes actual activity is not really the goal - the underlying objective is to form the exercise habit.
To summarise then, my new challenge, starting today the 1st July (oh, how convenient!) is as follows:
- To exercise daily
- To do web development for an hour a day
Tuesday, 19 June 2007
Answering the "Why Me?" Question
I'm sure that all of us at some time or other ask ourselves the question, "Why Me?" in response to some event or situation. There is a certain undertone to that question; it suggests an air of victimisation and generally speaking, that is not a good place to be coming from. Most personal development writings will say that you tend to get more of what you focus on and if you think of yourself as a victim, you will continue to be one.
Tony Robbins, one of my favourite authors, likes to talk about questions a lot. In his book, "Awaken the Giant Within", he has a whole chapter dedicated to the Power of Questions. Have you ever noticed that when you ask yourself a question, your brain tends to come up with answers, even if not directly - you think of thoughts and memories which give you answers.
Here's an example: Suppose you want to lose some excess flab and you do the traditional thing and start some kind of diet and take up some exercise. However you don't stick to it for too long and you start to ask yourself the question "Why can't I ever stick with it?" and you might start to remember times in the past where you have tried and failed and this might trigger you to think "...because I am weak willed", or perhaps "I'm just no good at diets", or maybe even "I was just born to be fat" and so on.
So, the "Why Me" question can be a very dangerous one because if you ask it coming from a place where you see yourself as a victim, your brain will come up with ways to verify that thought and before you know it you'll have a whole bunch of reasons why this has happened to YOU, why life is so unfair, why you never get the breaks and so on.
Last week, I caught myself doing this. I received a massive financial blow which has dropped my income by a huge amount and slapped me with a large debt. I've been employed for almost a year and yet I am struggling. I am an intelligent, well educated person working as a software engineer. I am thirty five years old, and here I am, still struggling just to make ends meet. And then there came the question... "Why Me? Why am I still struggling? I should be doing better than this by now. I have every reason to be successful, why am I still failing?".
For an hour or so I wallowed a little bit but luckily I soon snapped out of it. Then I decided to try and answer my questions, but from the point of view of an independent observer rather than as a victim. I found answers.
One of the reasons I am struggling financially is because I was sensible when I bought my house and took out a 15 year mortgage rather than a 25 year one. I am paying now in order to save massively later on. Another reason is that the fees for my sons nursery are astronomical. But this is simply a fact of life. I knew I would have to pay the fees and that is that. It is also not permanent. In two years time he will be at school and a big burden will be lifted.
Job wise, I simply don't earn very much and that's because I only recently re-entered the job market. If I had been working in the industry for the last seven years like my partner, I would probably be earning a lot more by now. Business wise, I have no other income simply because I have not started any other business endeavours yet. So there you have it. I have answered my question and got practical answers back. I no longer feel like a victim and furthermore, because I have identified the true reasons behind my predicament I have a pretty good idea of the kinds of action I could take to rectify it:
Very often, when a situation comes up that causes us to ask the question "Why Me?", what starts as something fairly specific can end up being generalised and this too can be very dangerous. For example, imagine the following potential internal dialogue:
"Why am I still struggling financially at my age?"
"I have always struggled, will it ever change? Am I doomed always to be poor?"
"I never get anything I want, why do I always fail?"
"Why am I such a failure?"
If you ever hear a little voice in your head having a conversation like the one above, STOP RIGHT THERE! Snap out f it, stop being a victim, don't do that to yourself. Instead, imagine you are an outside observer. Re-evaluate your original question and see if you can find an honest answer without the emotional baggage that's usually attached to it.
It can be a valuable learning experience to answer your "Why me?" questions, but only when you approach them with the right frame of mind.
Tony Robbins, one of my favourite authors, likes to talk about questions a lot. In his book, "Awaken the Giant Within", he has a whole chapter dedicated to the Power of Questions. Have you ever noticed that when you ask yourself a question, your brain tends to come up with answers, even if not directly - you think of thoughts and memories which give you answers.
Here's an example: Suppose you want to lose some excess flab and you do the traditional thing and start some kind of diet and take up some exercise. However you don't stick to it for too long and you start to ask yourself the question "Why can't I ever stick with it?" and you might start to remember times in the past where you have tried and failed and this might trigger you to think "...because I am weak willed", or perhaps "I'm just no good at diets", or maybe even "I was just born to be fat" and so on.
So, the "Why Me" question can be a very dangerous one because if you ask it coming from a place where you see yourself as a victim, your brain will come up with ways to verify that thought and before you know it you'll have a whole bunch of reasons why this has happened to YOU, why life is so unfair, why you never get the breaks and so on.
Last week, I caught myself doing this. I received a massive financial blow which has dropped my income by a huge amount and slapped me with a large debt. I've been employed for almost a year and yet I am struggling. I am an intelligent, well educated person working as a software engineer. I am thirty five years old, and here I am, still struggling just to make ends meet. And then there came the question... "Why Me? Why am I still struggling? I should be doing better than this by now. I have every reason to be successful, why am I still failing?".
For an hour or so I wallowed a little bit but luckily I soon snapped out of it. Then I decided to try and answer my questions, but from the point of view of an independent observer rather than as a victim. I found answers.
One of the reasons I am struggling financially is because I was sensible when I bought my house and took out a 15 year mortgage rather than a 25 year one. I am paying now in order to save massively later on. Another reason is that the fees for my sons nursery are astronomical. But this is simply a fact of life. I knew I would have to pay the fees and that is that. It is also not permanent. In two years time he will be at school and a big burden will be lifted.
Job wise, I simply don't earn very much and that's because I only recently re-entered the job market. If I had been working in the industry for the last seven years like my partner, I would probably be earning a lot more by now. Business wise, I have no other income simply because I have not started any other business endeavours yet. So there you have it. I have answered my question and got practical answers back. I no longer feel like a victim and furthermore, because I have identified the true reasons behind my predicament I have a pretty good idea of the kinds of action I could take to rectify it:
- Lengthen the term of my mortgage, get the cash but prolong the debt
- Work hard at my job, build my career and go for a higher salary
- Start a part time business
Very often, when a situation comes up that causes us to ask the question "Why Me?", what starts as something fairly specific can end up being generalised and this too can be very dangerous. For example, imagine the following potential internal dialogue:
"Why am I still struggling financially at my age?"
"I have always struggled, will it ever change? Am I doomed always to be poor?"
"I never get anything I want, why do I always fail?"
"Why am I such a failure?"
If you ever hear a little voice in your head having a conversation like the one above, STOP RIGHT THERE! Snap out f it, stop being a victim, don't do that to yourself. Instead, imagine you are an outside observer. Re-evaluate your original question and see if you can find an honest answer without the emotional baggage that's usually attached to it.
It can be a valuable learning experience to answer your "Why me?" questions, but only when you approach them with the right frame of mind.
Wednesday, 13 June 2007
One Month Challenge - Another Failure!
After failing my challenge after only one day I decided to use a nifty web tool called Joe's Goals to keep track of my progress. My challenge was tough but I was able to stick to it for an entire week. Then it all fell apart on Monday...
Monday is one of the toughest days because I have karate in the evening so its very difficult to find the time to squeeze everything in. My plan was to get into work at 8am and doing an hour of development before starting work and to read after karate. I go to the gym at lunch times to do weight training and I did not want to miss out on that.
Over the weekend, I had made a discovery about my running ability which made me want to start it up again to prepare for a 5k Race for Life that I have signed up for in July. Something I desperately wanted to do was to plot out a new running route using another groovy web tool - GMaps Pedometer. I didn't get a chance to do this over the weekend, and I wanted to go for a run on a new route Tuesday morning so I had to do it sometime on Monday.
Here, once again I made exactly the same mistake as I did the first time I failed. I decided to make the route first thing and this took about 20 minutes so I only had around 40 minutes to do my development. Not a big deal you might think but a challenge is a challenge and mine is to do one hour a day so I would have to catch up later. I figured I could squeeze it in after karate.
Unfortunately that plan all went to pot. About half way through the karate class I started feeling ill. I was getting dizzy, shaky and I started to ache in a weird way - not in the way your muscles ache after a workout, but like you have the flu. When I got home I was feeling really bad and it was all I could do to get myself into the shower and into bed. The next day I was feeling just as bad and I phoned in sick to work.
Now you could say that being ill is a valid excuse and perhaps that's true but really I failed the challenge at 8am when I was feeling fine. I should have done the development and left the route planning until later. That wouldn't have got done but it wouldn't have mattered as I was in no condition to go running Tuesday morning anyway.
I'm still sick so I've done no exercise since. I've tried to do development but I really don't feel up to it so the challenge is on hold until I feel better.
Lesson learned: For the second time now, do not put off the important things! Don't assume you can catch up later. All we ever have is right now, this moment. Always do what is most important in that moment.
Monday is one of the toughest days because I have karate in the evening so its very difficult to find the time to squeeze everything in. My plan was to get into work at 8am and doing an hour of development before starting work and to read after karate. I go to the gym at lunch times to do weight training and I did not want to miss out on that.
Over the weekend, I had made a discovery about my running ability which made me want to start it up again to prepare for a 5k Race for Life that I have signed up for in July. Something I desperately wanted to do was to plot out a new running route using another groovy web tool - GMaps Pedometer. I didn't get a chance to do this over the weekend, and I wanted to go for a run on a new route Tuesday morning so I had to do it sometime on Monday.
Here, once again I made exactly the same mistake as I did the first time I failed. I decided to make the route first thing and this took about 20 minutes so I only had around 40 minutes to do my development. Not a big deal you might think but a challenge is a challenge and mine is to do one hour a day so I would have to catch up later. I figured I could squeeze it in after karate.
Unfortunately that plan all went to pot. About half way through the karate class I started feeling ill. I was getting dizzy, shaky and I started to ache in a weird way - not in the way your muscles ache after a workout, but like you have the flu. When I got home I was feeling really bad and it was all I could do to get myself into the shower and into bed. The next day I was feeling just as bad and I phoned in sick to work.
Now you could say that being ill is a valid excuse and perhaps that's true but really I failed the challenge at 8am when I was feeling fine. I should have done the development and left the route planning until later. That wouldn't have got done but it wouldn't have mattered as I was in no condition to go running Tuesday morning anyway.
I'm still sick so I've done no exercise since. I've tried to do development but I really don't feel up to it so the challenge is on hold until I feel better.
Lesson learned: For the second time now, do not put off the important things! Don't assume you can catch up later. All we ever have is right now, this moment. Always do what is most important in that moment.
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