The Downside of Goal Focus
by Race Bannon on June 29, 2011
Since I was a child, probably due to the influence of growing up with an over-achieving father, I have been incredibly goal focused. I am one of those people who has constantly made long-term, medium-term and short-term goal lists and tried (notice I said tried) to chip away at accomplishing them. This process has not been entirely without benefit, but as I have lived more of my life I have realized such constant goal focus has its downside.
Part of the problem has been that I, and likely most people, set goals based on performance measurements and external rewards. Career advancement, more money, material possessions, academic accolades and so on. A bit of this is fine, but focusing exclusively on such goals tends to exclude a much needed part of our lives – intrinsically motivated goals.
Intrinsically motivated goals are those objectives that have no ostensible payoff except happiness and personal satisfaction. I’ve come to realize how vital these are to my own sense of well being. Extremely vital.
I just finished reading Joe Robinson’s book Don’t Miss Your Life: Find More Joy and Fulfillment Now
and the primary theme of that book is that much of our joy and happiness comes from releasing ourselves from the performance mindset in which we are constantly measuring our success against external criteria. Instead we should be measuring our success primarily by our degree of happiness. Sounds so simple and logical, but so few of us do it.
Robinson contends that true happiness comes about as a result of honoring three specific needs in our lives: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Autonomy is feeling we are self-sufficient and that our lives are self-directed to the greatest extent possible. Competence means we feel knowledgeable and skilled in things that have personal relevance and importance in our lives. Relatedness is us feeling like we have relationships, supportive networks and a social life that engages us fully with others. These criteria for success and happiness have resonated with me deeply and perhaps they will for you too. This is how I now try to judge success in my life.
How do you judge your own personal success?
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Do It To Do It
by Race Bannon on May 21, 2011
Currently I am reading a book that’s changed my perspective more than I had imagined it would, and I haven’t even finished reading it yet. Don’t Miss Your Life: Find More Joy and Fulfillment Now by Joe Robinson offers us the all too often ignored wisdom of pursing our passions and interests in life for no other reason than because they bring us joy and full engagement with life. Common sense perhaps, but few of us do it.
I have historically been a very performance driven person. And I’ve been obsessively drawn to goals, objectives, measurements and life planning strategies that quite frankly have proven only modestly successful at best. My life is wonderful, but I can’t honestly point to my past performance or goal focused mindset as the reason. There just doesn’t seem to be much of a correlation. This book helps explain why.
As the book points out, everyone has three, basic core needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness. It is only by heeding our intrinsic motivations for our activities, interests and passions do we engage optimally with life and thus optimize our sense of fulfillment as well. This feeds our three core needs and makes us much happier.
This is a great book. Don’t be dissuaded by the abundance of personal stories or his heavy use of his experience with samba dancing as illustrative of his contentions. They all relate in a rather beautiful way as you read the book.
Highly recommended. If you read it, I’d be interested in your thoughts.
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Benefits of Writing Thank You Letters
by Race Bannon on April 5, 2011
In my Thank You Letters As Writing Practice post today on my new Write Speak Show blog I commented on how writing such letters can act as motivation to write regularly and thereby improve writing skills. But since fostering gratitude benefits us generally as human beings, I thought I’d alert my readers here to the post. Let me know what you think.
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Wisdom From My Facebook Friends
by Race Bannon on November 6, 2010
I recently posed this question to my network of Facebook friends:
If you were asked to share with others one gem of wisdom or knowledge you possess, what would it be?
Here are their responses. In the interest of not attributing the quotes to anyone who might not want their names published here, I’ve left off the attributions. However, if any of my Facebook friends who are quoted here tell me they want their names associated with the quotes, I will update this post accordingly. Enjoy the wisdom my friends have offered. There’s some great stuff here.
It’s a cliche, and a quote from a great movie but “the greatest thing you will ever learn is just to love and be loved in return” and it’s true, even if it’s not romantic love.
Never ask for something you are not willing to give.
Talk less and listen more. Most people just want to be heard.
Be the most authentic self you can possibly be.
Learn to forgive yourself.
Do what you love.
Compassion, compassion, compassion – for others and for yourself.
Assume you will leave nothing behind. Your legacy is what you did a moment ago.
If you wait for others to make it happen for you or to fix the world – you wait for ever. Life is about active engagement balanced with patience to let it simmer when needed.
The single most important long-term relationship you will have is the one that you have with yourself.
Random acts of kindness go a long way. Give freely without expecting in return, and don’t express pride for it, that’s not the point.
…and don’t forget to wear sunscreen!
I can’t tell you how to succeed, but I can tell you how to fail: Just try pleasing everyone.
Listen fully and gratefully.
When someone shows you who they are BELIEVE THEM!
There is only one of you in all of space and time, and because there is only one of you, you must be open to those things that motivate you. Because there is only one of you, you must not block your expression. If you block your expression, it will be lost and the world will not have it.
Do not be too controlled by what others think. They are more likely thinking of themselves more than you so go ahead and take risks.
Learn Buddhist philosophy, and MEDITATE EVERY SINGLE DAY. Your mind is an instrument that you must learn to control; attention controls it; attention is a power like none other, and a skill you must hone.
The thing that’s hardest for me to do – Trust those you love. Allow them to be right, give them credit for their achievements and support them in their choices. Be there for them during their mistakes.
After all is said and done, what you have is your word and your memories. Keep them both. Oh, and your sense of humor. Seriously.
This too shall pass.
While it is important to be authentic and true to oneself, true happiness is found when we focus outside ourselves.
Have you read “The Four Agreements”? It’s available on Kindle. It’s got some good advice.
Here’s a quote from my mother: “Sleeping is for the dead, so when you’re dead you’ll have plenty of time to sleep! So get off the bed and get moving now!”
Never take anything for granted, because any or all of it could vanish in an instant.
Be kind, it doesn’t cost a dime, and can have a lifetime of return that even Madoff can’t take away.
Make sure that you tell the people you care about that you love them. You never know how much time you or they have and you never want to be in a position of regretting that you didn’t tell them what they mean to you.
Talk less and do more.
If a life strategy hasn’t worked well, it’s time for self-transformation.
Don’t forget to wipe. Or in other words, if you make a mess – no matter what kind – own it and clean up after yourself.
Don’t take it out on others. It isn’t their fault.
Thirty years ago we used to say: “Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse.” As it turned out, not such a good idea.
You’ll probably regret the things you didn’t do more than those you did.
Luck comes your way every day. What you do with it determines whether it’s good or bad luck!
Ask yourself “What can I do to make a difference.” Then do it from your heart. Do NOT be discouraged by bad behavior.
Judge your life by the quality of your relationships.
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Getting Things Done
by Race Bannon on September 14, 2010
Over the years, I’ve read about and tried countless goal attainment systems. I’m sure you’ve investigated or tried some of them too. Most of them go something like this. Create your lifetime goals, then break them down to long-term goals, then break those down to short-term goals, and then break those down into immediate action items. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? So organized and detailed. Problem is this doesn’t always work, at least not for me and many folks I’ve talked to about such systems.
As I’ve found with so many self improvement systems and advice, there are always underlying basic principles that support the system or advice. When it comes to goal attainment, I think it boils down to seven keywords: think, capture, review, organize, prioritize, act, repeat.
- Think. Many people don’t really think much about their lives. They meander along letting life sort of just happen. While I’m all for “living in the moment” (a common universal principle of happiness), we all need to give some brain time to determine who we are, what we want, how we can best serve, and so on. Without some serious thinking about ourselves and our lives, how can we possibly expect anything but random results.
- Capture. When you have an idea, get some useful information, or identify a personal action item (a “to do” task), capture it. Capture it immediately. It’s amazing how quickly an idea or thought can fleetingly disappear from our brains. How you capture it is up to you. A pad of paper and a pen, a cell phone or your computer are options. How you do it is entirely dependent on how you feel you can capture such information best at that moment. The important thing is to do it right away. I always have a small pad of paper with me and a pen as well as my cell phone. Due to my work, I’m in front of a laptop much of the day. I use one of these mechanisms to capture important information and ideas. Keep your capture mechanisms simple. The more complex, the less likely you’ll do it.
- Review. Take a look at all of the stuff you’ve captured and review it. Ponder it. Eliminate the stuff that’s not really important. Make notes. Add to it as you think of other things. Just spend some time with the information. There are three types of reviews I do. The first I only do occasionally, maybe weekly. That’s when I go through absolutely every capture source and organize it all. This is the mega review. I review everything pending on my paper pad, my cell phone and on my computer. Make sure to create a system that doesn’t require you to visit too many capture locations. For me it’s initially in one of three places: written on the pad, entered into my cell phone, or entered in a word processing document I use on my laptop as the initial capture location. Once I go through all these I delete, re-organize, store the information elsewhere, or possibly just let it stay right where it is for a while longer. It’s important to do such longer reviews periodically so you can be sure you’ve reviewed everything you have pending. The next type of review is the daily review. This is what I do at the start of my day to scope out what I might be doing that day. Next is the very quick review you do all day long whenever you have a few moments between tasks. Taken together they ensure you always have a full view of the information, tasks and ideas you need to be aware of at that point in your life.
- Organize. Now organize what you’ve reviewed. Did you write down a name and phone number you need? Put it in your electronic address book. Did you capture an idea for a new project? Add it to your existing list of pending projects. The goal is to take all of the information captured and distill it down to as few storage locations as possible in the most organized way you can think of. I have a single folder on my laptop drive where I keep all captured information organized in separate topic files. My address book and calendar reside on my laptop and my cell phone. Whatever I’ve written down on the pad I carry I transfer to one of those two places.
- Prioritize. Once you’ve got your information organized, prioritize a few of the most important items. These become the ones you focus on in the short-term. Short-term might be a few hours or the day. I wouldn’t ever plan ahead much more than that. I know, that’s blasphemy to the typical goal planning systems, but I find most of us become overwhelmed when we start stacking up lots of action items over a long time period. Focus on the few things you can do in the next few hours or today. You’ll be doing this entire process again over and over. So you’ll easily figure out what you’re doing tomorrow when that time comes.
- Act. Yes, this is the hard part in many ways. Just do it. If you find it hard to get started on something, perhaps you’ve identified too big of an action item. Next time break them down into smaller chunks and they’ll seem more doable.
- Repeat. This is a cyclical process. It never ends. Essentially, you should always be thinking, capturing, reviewing and so on.
Here’s a very simple example of how this might play out in real life. You wake up in the morning having thought of a great new way to do some aspect of your work (think). You immediately write the idea down on the pad of paper you’ve kept next to your bed and carry with you all day (capture). You get to work and as you scan your various capture mechanisms (review), you clean up the captured information and identify your new idea as important to try and implement quickly in your work (organize) at the same time you identify a few other things you need to do that day. You think about the few action items you’ve identified for the day and mentally order them in the order they need to be addressed (prioritize). Item number one is where you start your day (act). As your day progresses, you realize you’ve gotten the few things done you had identified and you go back to your captured information and start the process over (repeat).
OK, this is a really simplistic explanation. Don’t get caught up in that. Focus on the seven basic principles of goal attainment and adapt them to suit your needs. Personal systems only work if they’re relevant to you and if they sync up with your individual style of living. They should adapt to you, not the other way around.
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Tech Envy
by Race Bannon on September 1, 2010
Technology can improve our lives, but it’s important to use technology wisely or the technology can complicate rather than simplify our life.
Today I was having a chat on Facebook with some friends about the various mobile operating systems and phones. Such discussions can get quite heated. People are devoted to their particular operating system or phone hardware. It’s almost like a religion to some folks. And when these folks don’t have the latest technology, they develop what I call tech envy.
Technology is going mobile in a big way. So I guess it’s natural that technology that lives with you throughout your day would create such rabid allegiance. In the midst of such fervor, it’s hard to see such devices objectively, but I try.
Much like the rest of life, there are some basic principles of personal technology that seem to work for me. Maybe they’ll work for you too.
- Figure out what you really need your technology to do. Think about all of the devices, operating systems or software applications you use. How many of the features do you actually use? I’m guessing only a fraction of their capabilities. It makes no sense to keep upgrading the technology you use, especially at a high cost, if you really don’t anticipate using the new features. So often we buy the latest stuff just because it’s new.
- Itemize what you do. This is related to the above bullet point. Think for a moment what you actually do with your technology. Do you write? Listen to music? Edit movies? Create presentations? Make a list.
- Determine the depth of functionality you need. Once you have your itemized list of tasks, how deep must that functionality be? If you edit movies, are you a casual hobbyist or do you produce professional videos. If you’re only a casual hobbyist, why would you spend thousands on professional movie editing software if basic movie editing software will suffice?
- Keep it simple. When you do buy technology, whether it’s a laptop, cell phone or software, determine the simplest technology you can use to get the job done. Nothing more. You’ll hear all sorts of people try and convince you to buy the most advanced technology you can. Don’t. You won’t use much of it and it will cost you a lot more.
- Maintain consistency. What I mean by this is try to maintain common operating systems, user interfaces and feature functionality. For example, why buy separate word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications when a bundled suite of applications present a consistent interface and functionality logic that makes them all easier to use.
Keep these ideas in mind and you’ll be on your way to using technology intelligently rather than simply adopting the latest technology marketers tell you that you must have.
Do you have any ideas you can add to mine?
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Our Obsession With Stuff
by Race Bannon on June 22, 2010
A friend of mine recommended The Story of Stuff website and I think you’ll be well served if you decide to view this site too. Watch the 20-minute video of the inspiring Annie Leonard. She clearly and brilliantly walks you through the chain of events in our current consumerism society, highlighting the downside of continuing on that path. Then she points out what we can begin doing to make a difference in our lives, the lives of others, and our planet. Please treat yourself and spend 20 minutes viewing this video. It’s worth it.
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Beautiful Flowers That We Are
by Race Bannon on June 20, 2010
Last night I was watching a recording of the brilliant musical Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim. What an amazing work of theater it is. If you like musical theater and haven’t seen it, I recommend it.
One of the lines in the show struck me as quite beautiful in its clear summation of why our individual uniqueness is so beautiful.
The prettier the flower, the farther from the path.
Isn’t that great? It says it so nicely. Flowers are all unique. No two are alike. And to point out that the most beautiful flowers (people) are those farther from the path (conformity) really made the point in a meaningful way to me. I thought I’d pass it on to you. Enjoy your day, and remember you too are a beautiful flower and you shouldn’t fear straying from the path of conformity because that’s where your beauty will blossom best.
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Feel It, Don’t Count It
by Race Bannon on June 12, 2010
Achieving Happiness by Moving from a Quantitative to a Qualitative Mindset
Western society is obsessed with counting. We count everything. Money. Personal and business achievements. Educational recognitions. Possessions. And what we don’t count in specific amounts we judge based on a scale that is, essentially, counting. How attractive is someone? How prestigious is a job? What is the class level of our friends? These are all ways to count things in order to assign value to them. I contend that this it not the way to live if you want to be happy.
Rather than count things (quantitative thinking), I propose another perspective on living by instead placing more value on the actual experience and how something feels (qualitative thinking). It’s more important that you like your job and feel it has value to society than having a fancy title and getting a huge salary. It’s more important that you enjoy your home and the possessions it contains than how much they’re worth monetarily.
There are some things in life we already tend to judge qualitatively rather than quantitatively. Imagine you’re eating a wonderful meal. When you describe to someone how much you enjoyed it, do you assign some sort of quantified number to it? No, you simply describe it as a wonderful experience. When you have great sex, do you rank and rate it against other sexual experiences? Hopefully not. Hopefully you embraced the sexual encounter completely and enjoyed it for the experience it was.
As you go through your day, try to catch yourself counting. Do you envy people who make a lot more money than you do? Do you look at a fancy car driving by and think that people would judge you differently if you drove such a vehicle? Do you look at your to do list and focus on getting as much done as possible rather than prioritizing and enjoying the important things you get done. I think you’ll be surprised how often we count and rank our life experiences. I’m going to try and stop doing this because I know it will make me happier. Perhaps it will do the same for you?
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Beware of Systems
by Race Bannon on May 29, 2010
“Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.”
Miguel de Unamuno
Everyone is out to sell you a system. Diet gurus sell countless weight loss systems. Fitness experts sell an endless array of exercise systems. Spiritual leaders sell systems to govern your views of God and spirituality. Business experts sell moneymaking and management systems. Cosmetic companies sell beauty systems. There’s no end to the systems you can buy.
What these folks don’t want you to know is that most of their systems are based on the same few principles. The systems may vary, but the principles remain the same. It’s the principles behind the systems that are ultimately what’s important, and what we should all focus on.
A simple example might help to illustrate this. Let’s say someone is trying to sell you an exercise system to build muscle strength and size. Maybe it’s a machine or device. Or maybe it’s a series of predefined movements. Regardless of the system, you can probably break down the system into its basic foundation principles. A muscle building system might look something like this when dissected to its essential and most basic underlying principles:
- Apply resistance (weight) to your muscles using good form.
- Do this consistently over time.
- Slowly increase the resistance as your muscles adapt to the level of resistance.
That’s it! Every system of muscle development will apply these same basic principles in order to attain muscle strength and size. This muscle building example is an extremely simple one I know, but I use it to clearly illustrate that the countless systems can always be deduced to a small set of principles upon which those systems are based. And it’s those principles that we need to focus on, not the systems.
Systems often don’t conform well to the uniqueness of each individual using the system, and they are often attempts at easy fixes to complicated problems. Systems are typically solutions to a problem or need from only one person’s perspective.
Notice that I never urge you to avoid systems, merely to beware of them. There’s a big difference. Rather than avoid systems, feel free to learn about them to whatever degree you believe is helpful. Just don’t assume any system will apply to your life situation exactly. It won’t. Why? Because each one of us is truly unique. Everyone has a unique set of experiences, genetics, education, family history, and personal passions. Since this is the case, how can any system apply universally to all of us. No system can. When it comes to systems, one size does not fit all.
Systems are not bad. In fact, they’re helpful and sometimes necessary to meet our objectives. The danger is assuming someone else’s system fits your particular needs. We should all create our own personal systems.
Studying other systems can be helpful. Many systems were created after some thoughtful consideration by many wise people. Dissecting systems for those things that work well for you, and discarding those that don’t, and mixing in your own personally developed approaches that fit your own needs and situation, is a great way to come up with systems that work for you. This is how you achieve personal greatness, happiness and fulfillment. Using systems in this way is an intelligent way to view systems, as guides to understanding any system, or parts of systems, that work in your life.
We all need systems. Basic personal systems for those things we do repeatedly all through our lives. More complex personal systems to achieve what we want to achieve. It’s a well put together strategy of systems that comprises most of what we’ll do with a fulfilling life. But the key is that they have to be our systems that seem appropriate and relevant for us. Adopting someone else’s system with no consideration of adapting it to meet our unique needs is illogical. Illogical, but we all do it much too often.
You might do yoga as a form of exercise (a system) and really like it. You’ve explored other physical fitness systems and have decided that yoga is the right approach for you. That’s a sensible way to go about it. Or, you might just as well have decided you didn’t like yoga in its entirety, but you chose to use a few of the principles you learned in yoga in your own personal form of physical practice. No one approach is necessarily superior. Multiple systems can be equally effective in their own way.
I guess all I’m really saying is that we all need to respect our uniqueness enough to plan and act upon our lives through the prism of that uniqueness. I am often the first to absorb a system without the necessary scrutiny. My natural inclination seems to be to assume I’m the one who needs to adjust to a system rather than the other way around.
As I work on this in my own life, I welcome comments from anyone who might have thoughts about this post.
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