One of the first things we learn in Self Employment 101 or our Small Business Independent Studies class is that we have to have something that makes us unique. This is variously referred to using terms like “USP” – if you’re attending a small business course in 1965 – or a “market differentiator” – if you like lots of syllables and corporate speak. Not that those two terms are actually interchangeable, but the thrust of both is that in order for your business to succeed, you’ll need to understand its place and the market, and find ways to cash in on its uniqueness.

So does your business have some unique quality that sets it apart from all others? Sit down and breathe calmly before you read the next two words. Probably not. If you look at government statistics like these, you will quickly realize that until you get into the  realm of companies that have over a hundred employees, there are half a million or more other small businesses out there. Of course, they’re not all in your niche, but unless you have some unique skill like blacksmithing or horse-whispering, you can rest assured that there are plenty of other people doing what you’re doing. Especially if you’re in a service-based business, which makes up about 40% of all small businesses in the US, followed by retail at 20% and construction at about 10%.

So with over 20 million small businesses active in the US, the odds that yours has something remarkably unique about it are pretty slim. So are you feeling a little less special now? Don’t. While it’s largely true that your business is probably not terribly unique, maybe you’re lucky enough to be in a specialized niche that IS unique. But more importantly, as a small business owner, maybe you need to ponder the fact that your greatest differentiator really is YOU. There are a lot of examples of how the personality of the owner leaves its mark on the customer appeal and overall success of even the hugest of corporations. There’s probably an example where you live of this type of company on the medium-sized enterprise level. In my area, the supermarket Busch’s is an example of a growing chain that has a hands-on CEO/owner, and the world-renowned Zingerman’s would be another another example of a booming corporation where the owners have infused the entire organization with their unique commitment to an elevated level of quality and service. And this can scale up too; try to imagine Apple without Steve Jobs, or Amazon without Jeff Bezos.

My associate Nick has been torturing me with this idea for a while now, first by turning me on to the book Good to Great by Jim Collins. This book was a head-turner for me, and got me started on a tough question that has been helping me re-shape almost everything I’m doing. That first question for me was: Of all the things I do, could I be best in the world at any of them? I’m still not sure I know the answer yet, but the question helped me examine a few projects that I was enthused about, but to which I hadn’t applied any rigorous and purposeful assessment in terms of their long-term meaning to me, or likelihood of exceptional success. Being a self-directed free thinker, often the simple fact that I want to do something is good enough for me. But also being a persistent “I can do everything!” kind of person, I end up mired in endless work, by working on too many projects that may in fact never reach that special level of success I’m seeking. More recently, Nick shared a question from a worksheet he’d been asked to complete at a seminar, which was “what makes your business remarkable”. I joked that it must be a nice gig going around asking people uncomfortable questions like that, but the question is powerful in itself.

So if – like me – you’re spinning your wheels on too many projects and looking for a way to narrow your scope and sharpen your focus, try asking those two questions:

What thing do I do that I could be the BEST IN THE WORLD at?

What makes me or my business idea REMARKABLE?

These questions don’t necessarily have pat answers, and the answer may have more to do with you than your business, which is merely an expression of you. But I hope the process of trying to answer the question is as helpful to you as it was to me. I’ll share the actual results of my exploration of these questions soon; for now I think I have some pruning to do.

Whenever a friend tells me that they’ve made their New Year’s resolutions, my typical response is why, why, WHY? Because this is one situation where one “why” won’t do. Why on Earth do we spend 364 days of the year not doing something, and suddenly decide we’re GOING to do something? Or quit doing something (more on the start vs quit thing further on). It’s often been pointed out that many people – if not most people – spend more time planning a one-week vacation than they spend planning their life. And New Year’s is yet another instance of this kind of behavior.

What’s On That List?

According to this USA.gov list, the most popular New Year’s resolutions are…

• Drink Less (or Quit)
• Eat Better
• Go Back To School
• Get a Better Job
• Get In Shape
• Lose Weight
• Deal With Debt
• Quit Smoking
• Recycle More
• Save Money
• Do Volunteer Work

Do you see any recurring themes in there? I do. One would be guilt. Guilt about the things we fail to do all the time that are actually fairly easy. Like recycling, volunteering, and – barring unemployment issues that are genuinely beyond one’s control – saving, and dealing with debt. At the end of the year we suddenly realize how careless or sedentary we’ve been, and make some bold proclamation that magically, beginning in January, EVERYTHING WILL CHANGE. We throw in “volunteering” as a sort of all around tool to make ourselves feel better. It’s like religious redemption or something. A second category we might take note of here is prestige. Get a better job, go to school, and maybe get in shape. All worthy goals, but when suddenly targeted for action in December, clearly another thing to attempt to make us feel better about ourselves, in this case through our good looks and net worth. And the third category is a tangle of health, addiction, and fitness. So far we have a pretty good short list right out of church as motivators:

• Shame
• Pride
• Sloth
• Intemperance

But I’m just having a little fun here. The real point I’m trying to get across is that guilt and pride are horrible motivators that will either not be self-sustaining, or will lead to an empty-feeling kind of success.

So Should We Chuck The List Altogether?

Probably. Trying to fix all the problems in your life in one fell swoop is probably a pursuit destined for failure. Which will just set you up for more guilt and frustration. So what’s the solution? Achievability. Chunking it out. Doing what you can do today, and letting things proceed from there. Most people can’t manage more than one or two projects simultaneously, and in this case, we’re talking about SELF-DIRECTED projects that we’re planning to add to whatever ELSE we’re doing in our lives. Where will the time and energy come from to do all these new things?

How About A Plan?

Instead of making generic lists of positive activities to beat ourselves up with, how about using one of the many common methods for prioritizing the big picture, and then digging in on the right stuff? One example is the altitude approach suggested in the book Getting Things Done, wherein you put current actions on the “runway”, current projects at 10,000 feet, broader responsibilities at 20,000 feet, and so on. This kind of metaphor may not work for you, but there are MANY methods for prioritizing; the main idea is to have a realistic strategy instead an overwhelming list of tasks. And in this case, tasks that you’re apparently not very good at, or you’d ALREADY BE DOING THEM. You’re going to quit drinking, quit smoking, and start working out all at the same time? Really? Did you know that this could actually kill you? If you have a list like that, maybe you should slow down and do some research, and maybe even talk to your doctor. You’re suddenly going to start saving money and clean up your debt? HOW? Some people have success with Suze Orman’s material, some people have success with Dave Ramsey’s strategies, but the fact is that if you’ve been living in a way that has you in debt without a clear way out of it, you’re going to need guidance, and a workable PLAN. You’re going to eat better? What are you going to eat? If you’re also going to start working out, you’ve got some serious thinking to do, and some preliminary steps like cleaning out your cupboard and restocking it for the new diet. Now there’s an idea. When was the last time you cleaned your pantry? I know I’m overdue for some inventory control!

Spread it out. Take some time. Use your head.

One thing I personally did a few years ago has helped me tremendously. I was doing a general sort of year end review, and thinking about my goals for the next year. And then it hit me. Why was I doing this at the end of the year? I’m a very motivated, creative person, and A LOT transpires in my work in a year. So I made one New Year’s resolution that year, and haven’t made any since. What was it? I committed to doing a monthly review. It’s amazing how many things we intend to do in a year that fall by the wayside, and how many things we ARE doing that are really just helping us spin our wheels. For me personally, a once-a-month assessment is just about perfect. Maybe your time frame would be a little different, but a year is a pretty long time for the majority of the things in our lives that aren’t related to career and childrearing.

Besides, there’s more than one calendar.

Heck, at the end of the day – or the year in this case – the whole idea of when a year begins is pretty arbitrary. In fact, Wikipedia lists over 40 different calendars that are currently in use. I used to really enjoy one aspect of this when I managed a Chinese restaurant years ago. If I failed in a New Year’s resolution on the common western calendar, I’d just start again at Chinese New Year. This was all in jest at the time of course, but the truth is that every day is the beginning of of a year, if you want to measure life in years.

Me? I measure life in minutes these days. Mostly the one that’s occurring right now.

Happy New Year!

I get all itchy and scratchy when white men and men in general are the subject of denigration, unless the denigration is very funny and devoid of any attempt to try right a social wrong, however well intended. The self-conscious sniveling humor that paints white men as predatory businessmen and white husbands as oafish beer drinkers leaves me unamused. Racially and gender-based humor should be unapologetic and, most importantly, fresh – the cliches about Blacks, Whites, Asians, Hispanics, Men and Women have been done to death.

Two wrongs don’t make a right

Outside of rare, really good comedy, I think a culture has been created by those who believe they’re pro-minority and pro-women, and imbedded in that culture is the wrong-headed notion that because wrongs were done to the group they support, the situation can be balanced by doing a subtle or overt wrong to the group they view as inappropriately privileged. Hence the predatory white male businessman and the oafish white husband stereotypes I mentioned in the last paragraph.

Weak men aren’t a benefit to anybody

This culture creates an atmosphere in which a feminized man and a masculine-ized woman are the ideal. An aspirational white male role model is at once criticized for (and often prevented from) expressing its masculinity and ridiculed for failing to do so. Men who are too passionate about their life’s mission are viewed with suspicion, yet men who fail to be powerful enough in their relationships are disdained by women.

Nabobs of negativity

But what really bugs me about this mindset is that it’s based on an attitude of criticism and denigration. The undercurrent of negativity in social interactions limits our ability to appreciate one another’s power and beauty. After a while, we see only the weakness and ugliness in other people and social groups. This destructive view seeps into the self-consciousness of all but the most independent thinkers, and the culture at large, instead of nurturing great talent and passion, suppresses it.

Love, support, and success

It’s not a zero-sum game. Eva Gabor said that “Love is game two can play and both can win.” We could do a lot better by celebrating the accomplishments of all our people, whatever their gender and whatever the color of their skin. Unless a person is predatory or destructive, let’s learn to identify their strengths and unique viewpoints, and give them the social support to absolutely excel.

It’s almost as if we, as a society, are afraid of success. I suppose, like virtually all negativity, it comes from fear and insecurity, and if we’re afraid of others doing better than us, we’re going to react by denigrating them.

How much greater the world, if each of us is greater?

How much more could we all accomplish if, right from the outset, we all agreed that the success of others creates an atmosphere in which we, too, can succeed wildly? If that passionate, ambitious, productive man, who may happen to be white, wants to build a great company, let’s celebrate his vision, and celebrate all the great things that we are capable of ourselves!

I’ve always been fond of the Hopi maze symbol pictured above. It has many meanings, but one of the simpler ones is that life contains a special dream for you, and no matter how circuitous a path you take, you will get there. If you look closely at the symbol, you’ll notice that although it looks like a typical labyrinth, all the paths in fact lead to the middle. This of course implies that if you want to get to the end of the maze, you may as well just get going, because no matter how many detours you take, you’re still going to get there.Which isn’t bad advice for how to live.

If you’re paying attention in life, you’ll probably notice that even the best laid plans may not work out as you expected, whether as a result of some flaw you yourself built into the plan, or because of unpredictable outside influences. This is probably one of the greatest single causes of a litany of the “problems” we experience in life. Stress, anger, disappointment, depression – many of the states we experience that we perceive as negative often are a result of a single simple thing: un-met expectations. So one obvious solution would be to lower your expectations, as suggested in MadTV’s Lowered Expectations dating service skits. Another would be to just hunker down and wait until the bad stuff passes, because it usually does.

Both of those approaches will work in some way, but if you really want to discover peace of mind and and genuine satisfaction from life, there’s another tool you can apply, which is some basic spiritual knowledge. I always feel compelled to point out that by “spiritual” I don’t mean “religious”; a spiritual approach in my opinion is simply a practical application of of the concept of “doing the next right thing”, utilizing the wealth of knowledge at our fingertips for figuring out what that is for ourselves. When it comes to “trusting life”, I often recommend checking out Rob Breszny’s Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia, because it has a humorous secular spin on how well life is in fact working out, even when we’re failing to recognize it. Another great body of ideas is presented in Deepak Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws material. Chopra does a great job of imparting a lot of practical tools in an engaging narrative fashion.

There are MANY ways develop a practical spiritual aspect to your engagement with experience though. My development partner Nick has pursued rigorous discipline, and the wisdom intrinsic in the various martial arts he has studied intently for decades. After years of study, he became a teacher, and in my opinion, the student/teacher evolution is one of the greatest personal development tools in existence. I experienced my own personal spiritual evolution as a result of an odd mix of growing up in a liberal intellectual college town where Eastern philosophies were pervasive, and my later experiences with addiction and recovery. But however you achieve the ability to “trust life”, there are some very simple approaches that can help you out. I’ve outlined a few below, but this is hardly comprehensive, and not exactly secret wisdom or anything. Life really is a maze, so you really should explore the labyrinth in your OWN way, the mysteries and surprises should be part of the FUN, not part of the misery!

Expect Surprises – “The Plan D” Method

The most common cause of almost all the anger and unhappiness I see people experiencing is a result of things simply not going the way they expected. The resulting anger, stress, and unhappiness then manifests not only as toxic interactions in relationships, but even diminished physical well-being, whether as physical fatigue, tension, poor immune response, or even cardiovascular issues. It is now fairly well documented that mental and emotional stress is directly connected to physical health issues. My personal approach is based on what I jokingly refer to as my “Plan D” method. Some people don’t even have a “Plan B” when they set out to do something, which is a guaranteed setup for ongoing frustration. But I add extra layers. They go something like this:

Plan A – This is exactly what I want to happen
Plan B – This an alternate plan to still achieve exactly the results I’m seeking
Plan C – This is the realization that a huge compromise may have to be made
Plan D – This is total surrender of my will to forces completely beyond my control

This requires a little extra thinking, but the energy spent on the extra thinking is more than rewarded by the energy NOT expended on frustration when things go wrong. If you want to use the war metaphor, remember there will always be another battle. And if you prefer a less hostile analogy, remember that sometimes you just need to get the house built. You can always renovate later. Plan D is probably the toughest for most of us to implement, but may be the most important one. You are not always going to get your cake. Get used to it and have a cookie instead.

Trust Yourself

This one is a continual challenge for me. My willingness to look at multiple aspects of a situation sometimes leads me to not trusting my own “gut” on something. Nick has a great approach for busting through this kind of problem. He often refers to the idea of “Don’t just do something, DO SOMETHING”, adding some extra oomph to the idea that sometimes simply taking action is the best solution to moving through doubt. I talk about self-talk a lot, because one of the greatest obstacles for trusting things to work out is simply learning that there’s a big chatterbox in our own heads that may be working against us. Over and over I find that when something went really wrong with a pursuit, I was failing to “listen to my heart”. And by that I mean a balance of rational thought and what my “gut” or instincts told me. If you have deep-rooted self-doubt issues, maybe therapy would help. But more often, we’re simply dealing with our own poor habits, and therapy can even be counter-productive. Consider a life coach. But if even that seems like too much fuss, just practice learning to TRUST YOURSELF! The solutions are almost always right there inside you. Thinking is over-rated sometimes.

Share Yourself

People aren’t typically psychic, so it’s unlikely that they know what’s going on in your head. In spite of this obvious fact, many people seem to operate on a big assumption that since THEY’RE thinking something, everyone ELSE must be thinking it. Remember that the things that you think and feel aren’t always apparent to others, even when you lay them out as a linear plan. Sharing your feelings and broader views – simply being open to others – can have a profoundly positive effect on others’ ability to support and trust you, and all this trust in life I’m talking about is really about trusting PEOPLE, not just some mysterious set of forces that we call “life”, right?

Me, I’m gonna go back to bumping into walls now. And having a good laugh when I do.

Last night I spent three hours in one of the most intense workouts a human being can experience. In the first hour, with several of my most senior black belts in judo, we carefully and exhaustively practiced a single judo throw until our minds were engaged in every detail and our bodies were able to perform them with precision. In the second hour, three of us who collectively represent over 80 years experience in judo, engaged in sixty minutes of sparring (called “randori” in judo) in two minute rounds (that’s 20 rounds for the mathematically challenged!). In the final hour there were four advanced black belts in the art of iaido (Japanese swordsmanship). We played a “game” in which we spar with wooden swords, with no other armor than a pair of safety glasses. We sparred with one opponent, we sparred with two opponents, and in some cases we fought against three!

A funny thing happened along the way. In spite of the fact that all of us are intensely competitive, when we passed the point at which our energy started to wane, each of us stopped fighting with strength and began to attempt techniques with a kind of abandon – not trying to “win” but simply to participate in an extremely high-level interaction in which one of the opponents gets thrown or touched with the sword.

Overwhelm the Analytical Mind

The whole process had a very specific purpose – to overwhelm the analytical minds of the participants and get them into a state called “flow.” This state arises from situations in which the complexity and energy level of the exercise is at or just slightly beyond the ability level of the players, keeping them engaged, slightly off balance (both mentally and physically), and completely focused on the moment. If you want a very thorough explanation of the concept of “flow,” check out the book with that title by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (no, I can’t pronounce it, either).

Achieving Flow

To achieve flow, there are a few things you have to have in place. Essentially,

• An activity you care about

• An ability to perform that activity at least at a fundamental level

• A willingness to engage in that activity for a sufficient period of time

• A way to increase the complexity, speed, or intensity of the activity

This probably sounds repetitive, but the way we try to achieve flow at the Japanese Martial Arts Center is to get students warmed up, get them to rehearse their fundamentals, and gradually increase the complexity, speed, or intensity of their practice. It’s a very reliable system because both the body and the mind are involved, and the dojo (“practice facility” in Japanese) is a predictable, safe place to explore dangerous or unfamiliar concepts. Our advanced students, especially our black belts, learn to engage in this routine until reaching a state of flow is almost automatic.

You get both fun and profit

There are two main reasons we seek to put ourselves into a situation where flow can occur: (1) the state is inherently enjoyable, and (2) more profound, rapid, and permanent learning takes place when in a state of flow than in any teaching situation we know of.

I really recommend you read the book FLOW that I mentioned above, but if you can’t, you should know that flow is inherently enjoyable because it is all-encompassing. When you’re focusing completely on an activity, you’re not worrying about what happened yesterday, you’re not worrying about what will happen tomorrow, and you’re not concerned about whether you have more or less money or social status than other people. You’re not seeking happiness in flow, you’re experiencing it, or at least you’re experiencing the complete lack of concern about it. Once you’ve experienced flow a few times, you’ll find yourself seeking it for its own sake.

Learn like a banshee

For the same reason that flow is so enjoyable – the fact that it’s all-encompassing – it is also an extraordinary state for learning. When your analytical mind cannot interfere with the process of experience, the information flows (so to speak) directly into you on a deep experiential level. You react to inputs without thinking, which means, I suggest, that you’re reacting with your nervous system and your sub-conscious mind. When the sub-conscious mind sees, hears, and reacts, it seems to retain a very deep impression of the interaction. You may not be able to explain what you did, but you still did it.

But because flow can only be experienced when the level of complexity or involvement in an activity is at or near your peak capacity, you have to increase the challenges of your peak state exercises as you get better. Here’s a restatement of that idea that helps to show what’s so cool about that:

(1) the state of flow is so rewarding, most of us will seek it for its own sake;

(2) experiencing the state of flow tends to create profound, rapid learning;

(3) the profound, rapid learning we get from acting in a state of flow adds greatly to our abilities;

(4) because achieving a state of flow requires that the challenges are at or near the limit of our abilities, we have to increase the challenges we build into our system for achieving it; and so

(5) we get engaged in an inherently rewarding activity that requires a continuous increase in complexity and ability.

Get Thee behind me, limits!

Of course there are limits to how fast you can progress. In athletic activities like judo, the speed and power of the techniques can create danger. In scientific endeavors, the requirements for proving your theories can outstrip the existing technology. In business, your market or your co-workers may not be ready to accept the revolutionary ideas you come up with when you’re in a state of flow. But every time you take the steps necessary to get yourself into this state, actually get into it, and spend time there completely absorbed in what you’re doing, you’ll get happier, better at something you love to do, and move yourself closer to mastery. That really kicks ass.

Remember those history lessons in school, when we learned about Lewis and Clark, the team of explorers who endured unimaginable trials to travel from the Eastern side of North America all the way to the Pacific Ocean? There were hundreds of settlers who followed them, but when the settlers found a fertile valley or an abundant prairie, they stopped, built a home, and found a way to wrest a living from the land. Being first would have given Lewis and Clark an incalculable advantage, but there was something about the way they defined themselves that didn’t let them stop and put down roots.

There’s two kinds of people in Business Land

Are you a settler? Do you find it comfortable to buy a franchise or a system created by a previous adventurer in your line of business? Or are you an explorer? Do you struggle with the idea of adopting pre-packaged business systems? After several decades in the Business Land, I’ve noticed that there are two kinds of people in our world – settlers, the kind who can happily plug away within the rules and networks created by other people, and explorers, the kind who simply have to find their own path no matter how much more difficult or financially challenging that might be. Though I don’t say it with either pride or shame, I can say with certainty that I fall into the latter group.

Because my life is a whole lot happier since I accepted the fact that I can’t get passionate about a path that’s already been blazed, I thought I’d share a few thoughts about how to get comfortable if being an explorer is just the way God made you!

And let me get this out of the way right at the beginning of this little soapbox speech – I don’t believe that one way is inherently better than the other. I have a bunch of friends who have bought existing businesses, franchises, or business systems, and many of them are doing very well. In fact, most of them seem to have a lot more free time than I do. The thing is, I don’t really know if that’s because they’re running systems that are designed to be run in only 50 – 60 hours a week or because I’m running or helping to run seven businesses* and my average work week is about 90 hours. But, as my accountant likes to say, I have “entrepreneurial ADD.”

* Just for the record, the businesses I’m involved in are as follows: the Japanese Martial Arts Center, the Law Office of Nicklaus Suino, the South Side Business Association, SEO Ann Arbor, the Shudokan Martial Arts Association, Ivanhoe Apartments, and Master and Fool, LLC, the company that owns this blog, thewellnessaddict.com.

Everybody explores, but not everybody’s an explorer

By the way, one way NOT to tell if you’re an explorer in the land of business rather than a settler is by how much business education you consume. The most successful business people I know, regardless of their “Biz-O-Type,” are rabid consumers of books, seminars, videos, and classes. They are constant students of the game. But the settlers, the folks who can find a program, adopt it, and make it work, seem a lot better at simply digging in and getting to work using the information they’ve found.

Those of us who are doomed to be explorers, try as we might, seem unable to accept the idea that somebody has already explored the region we’re in and mapped out the best way to get around. We simply have to explore it for ourselves. If there’s a fort built on the highest hill in area, we’ll look for another hill. If there’s a road from one valley to another, we’ll take a detour through the woods.

The thing is, most explorers I know have experienced a lot of angst about the fact that so many of the settlers are making a better living than they are and seeming to have an easier time doing so. I’ve experienced this same angst, but at 50 years old, I’ve gotten past that, and along the way I figured out a couple things about it. One is that though you CAN change who you are, it’s usually a lot better for you to live a life in accord with your true nature. The other is that, once you embrace who you are, you’ll waste a lot less energy trying to act like a settler, and that energy can be put to good use in exploration.

You might be an explorer if …

Regardless of which type you are, if you’re entrepreneurial you’ve certainly experienced the intense feelings of hopelessness and boredom when you worked as an employee. However well paid you might have been, you’ve no doubt had to practically stab yourself in the tenderloins with your breakfast fork to get yourself to go to work. I recall thinking at those times something along the lines of “this is really stupid and I just can’t get myself to do it.”

If you then quit working for others, as many of us have, you may have found some really well written business systems and tried to adopt them. Most settlers I know have successfully adopted all or part of many pre-existing systems. Besides being incredibly generous with their knowledge, they are happy to tell you “this is really smart and you should do it, too!”

But the explorer, who has not only quit working for others but has seen many of the same business systems as the settler, and often many, many more, just can’t seem to get excited about those systems long enough to put them fully into practice. Their response to some really terrific pre-existing opportunities, even when they completely understand the benefits, is something like “this is really smart and I just can’t get myself to do it.”

Hey, some of my best friends are settlers!

If you’ve had that experience several times, or many, many times, as I have, I’m here to tell you to stop agonizing about it, and recognize that you are probably hard-wired to be an explorer rather than a settler. It does NOT mean that you can’t be successful or that other people are inherently better business people than you are. What it probably does mean, however, is that you are going to have to find your own way in the world of business, so you might as well buckle down and start doing stuff. If you’re an explorer who’s not exploring, you’re acting like a settler, and the only thing you’re going to find on the road more traveled is hopelessness and boredom. You don’t have to abandon common sense, but you do need to see the possibility of new discoveries before you to keep you engaged and motivated.

And when you stop worrying about how the settlers are doing in the settlements, you can focus on your exploration. After all, if they were explorers, they’d be finding unexplored new territories instead of building ramparts around the forts in which they live. You need to keep your eyes on the horizon to see what’s ahead of you, and be able to recognize the beauty in the sunset beyond the next mountain range. And remember that sometimes being the first person to find a new valley can give you an incalculable advantage. Nobody says explorers can’t spend a little time figuring out how to help the first wave of settlers find their way to the valley. If the valley is beautiful enough, those settlers will be willing to pay handsomely for an accurate map!

I’m always happy when I see someone cruise through college, get a job they love, and live a happy life well into their forties. Of course, if that were the only measure of my happiness, I’d probably be bummed out a lot, because honestly, how often do we see that happen? Much more often, people choose a degree for the wrong reasons – prestige, employability, or high income – and end up changing jobs soon after graduating. I couldn’t find hard statistics, but this Indiana Wesleyan University page  says that according to the U.S. Department of Education, 40% of college graduates end up working in careers unrelated to their college major four years after graduation, and it’s common knowledge that many people end up in a career unrelated or only loosely-related to their college degree. This becomes more of a pitfall with the rising education costs and sluggish economy of the last several years. So what can one do to avoid this kind of meandering path through misguided expectations and later dissatisfaction? Well, as is often the case, a little balance and self-knowledge go a long way. Unfortunately, our consumer-driven culture doesn’t encourage much balance, and the guidance we receive when entering college is often much more based on measurable achievement, and test-driven aptitude assessment. The entire system (in the opinion of this non-graduate) tends to be skewed – as I already suggested – toward financial reward and prestige. And most of the best-intentioned advice we receive as we enter college is from people who have bought into the same belief system. So we’ll serve up some fun ideas for taking a new look at who you are further on, but first a little background on why a person like me – a non-degreed person pursuing what he humorously calls his fifth career – has anything worth saying about the topic.

The Yuppie vs. Bohemian Decade

I was of college age in the eighties, the decade that gave birth to the term “Yuppie”, and the Wall Street mentality that has shaped much of our culture for the last two decades. As a result, I’m now able to see the long-term fruits of the choices people my age made back then, and how these choices affected their financial well-being, personal happiness, and even their physical health. The youth of that era were pretty clearly polarized into two distinct camps. On the one hand, there were those that bought into the beliefs based on net income as a basic measure of success, and on the other hand, those who didn’t. I fell into the latter camp. Although I excelled in academic testing (I only missed three questions on the SAT) I was much more interested in creative and artistic pursuits, and had a poorly developed understanding of the concept of long-term financial stability. Although there is a definite continuum across this Yuppy/Bohemian spectrum amongst these people I know, now that we’re all over forty, one pattern is pretty evident to me. Those who polarized toward career climbing and wealth accumulation as a measure of success have tended to reach a period of spirtual or emotional hollowness that either leads to a re-awakening, or in negative manifestations, substance abuse problems or genuine personal crises like divorce and financial problems. On the other pole are the bohemian types like myself, who I would describe as more genuinely happy and spiritually content, but often terribly ill-equipped for their later years, with no financial plan for “retirement”, a word that will rapidly become useless as the boomers and generation jones reach their sixties and seventies and find none of that “Social Security” they put so much of their income into to over the last few decades.

My Intrapersonal Stupidity

Something that probably affected me personally to a greater extent than my socio-economic values was an issue relating to the measurement of intelligence. As I said, I kind of kicked the SAT’s ass, but at the time – although it was a handy bragging point with my academically-inclined friends – it was an otherwise utterly useless accomplishment. I simply had no interest in college, and had a number of things I wanted to DO, not STUDY. And this is where my life could have been much more rewarding, if only I’d understood one simple fact sooner. I was blessed and cursed with a genuine gift for learning, which – combined with a fairly disciplined and persistent nature – made it possible for me to excel at most things I tried. This would seem like an asset, but the fact is that for years it kept me from discovering what my real passions or gifts were, and helped keep me hopping from pursuit to pursuit, never REALLY feeling rewarded. I had a nominally successful pop music career (I turned down label deals), I ran a successful small telecom firm (and sold the accounts after two years), I had a screenplay optioned out (meaning I got paid but the film was never made) and most recently I maintained a state of barely adequate self-employment for a decade doing web development and other new media work for small business clients. I say “barely adequate” because I only maintained a subsistence income, and although I LOVE the freedom of not having a “job”, I never bumped things to the next level and created self-maintaining revenue streams, even though I was fully aware that this should have been a basic objective, and I probably had the knowledge and skills to achieve it. So why this continued near success and mediocrity? I’m convinced it boils down to one simple thing, something I only discovered a couple of years ago by exploring Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. And what was it? Well, at the core of Gardner’s work is the notion that we have seven core kinds of intelligence: Linguistic, Logical-mathematical, Musical, Bodily-kinesthetic, Spatial, Interpersonal, and Intrapersonal. I tend to test very high on all except the last one, Intrapersonal intelligence. And there’s the clincher. Imagine you were really good at everything except knowing what you were really good at! So this little insight started me on a more recent journey, which was getting clear on what my gifts are, and how my skills can help me realize them. Below are three things that helped me get a start. Maybe they’ll open some doors for you too.

So You Think You’re Pretty Smart

But what KIND of smart are you? You might want to check out the book I mentioned above – Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences – but you can also take a quick and informative quiz online at the The Birmingham Grid for Learning. It’s free, and at the end presents you with a graphical representation of how you tested. Mine is below, highlighting my “Intrapersonal Stupidity”. On the other hand, it highlights my exceptional interpersonal and linguistic skills, which, combined with some superficial Myers-Briggs tests (see below), helped me narrow in on something I probably knew all along, which is that my real gift lies somewhere in the realm of understanding people and how they communicate.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

If you’ve been through extensive hiring processes, there’s a very good chance that at some point in your life, you’ve been subjected to a test that’s based either directly or indirectly on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. I’d like to make clear that I have no genuine expertise or extensive knowledge of this inventory tool, and although there seem to be quite a few people who invest a lot of energy in applying and pondering the concepts, I only personally recommend it as a start point. I treated it more like a compass than a full set of navigational tools, but often recommend it to people who are struggling with sorting out their personal identity. Free versions of the basic questionnaires are widely available, it has its origins in the work of one of the greatest minds in the field of psychology – Carl Jung – and it is widely acknowledged as a credible tool, with only minor scientific criticism. For the record, I consistently test as an ENFJ. There are a number of organizations that offer professional MBTI assessments, but as I said there are plenty of free short-form versions available, like this one. This test is open to a fair amount of self-report bias, so be honest. No-one’s judging the results but you!

Your Heart & Your Head

So these little quizzes are both fun and informative, but unless you work in human resources or psychology, they’re of limited use after a point. The whole idea here is to find YOUR path and YOUR purpose, not simply put together a tidy, externally-generated assessment of yourself so you can put it on the shelf or talk about it with your friends. To help make this self-examination a useful part of a better life, you need to take little pointers like this and put them to work! The first thing to explore as you assess what your new course might be is an approach that is consistently overlooked, but perhaps the most powerful tool in your toolbox. It’s your heart. Einstein said “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them“, making him an ironic source of some great advice. The fact is, if you find yourself at a place in your life where you’re unhappy with your work – which for most of us is more than a third of our waking hours – there’s a really good chance that you “thought yourself” into this place. We tend to make career decisions based on what we think are rational questions like “will I make enough money?” and “will I be able to get a job doing this thing?“, and COMPLETELY overlook questions like “will I have any FUN doing this?” or “can I find some real SATISFACTION from doing this?“, which in my opinion is the root of the entire problem. Many of us are heavily conditioned to ignore the best-informed source of information available to us, the things our HEART tells us. The fact that I’m going to clarify this metaphor is a perfect example of how out of touch many of us are, but when I say “what your heart tells you” I’m suggesting that you give more credence to your visceral reaction to the idea of certain kinds of work. If I say “how would you like a 100 million dollar a year job as fast-paced executive of a major corporation?“, you may like some part of the idea, but if I say “How would you like to own and operate an oceanfront restaurant in the tropics?” you might actually get a mental picture in your head and relax for a moment. What do you love? What sounds like it would be fun? Yeah, it’s almost a hackneyed cliche to say Do What You Love & The Money Will Follow, but the fact is that if you do what you love, the kind of contentment you experience makes the exact volume of income a little secondary, and you generally find you still make enough, because you’re already happy before you get a “paycheck”.

Mentors & Coaches

For me, having a trusted sounding board has been a crucial part of what has been a very rapid personal evolution. I highly recommend finding a decent life coach, even if you don’t engage in a long-term working relationship. Many have short-term and per-session packages, and for just a few hundred dollars, you will probably get a kick in the butt that equals twenty years of career counseling. A good life coach is like a therapist that kicks your ass instead of helping you dwell. If you’re bringing the right attitude to the relationship, you should be able to get all sorts of fresh strategies and the motivation to enact them in a very short time. And mentors? There are a multitude of ways to approach this. The simplest is the direct method, which is simply identifying someone in your professional life that you respect or admire, and ASKING them to be a mentor. If they’re an entrepeneur or professional worth their salt, they’ll know what this basically means, perhaps be flattered, and be capable of giving you a simple yes or no answer. If they say no, you’ve at least probably strenghtened a professional relationship through your expression of trust or respect. My personal strategy has been a little quirky. Because I give the impression that I’m more intelligent than I am, a lot of people in my professional life have a hard time accepting that I really need this kind of relationship. So you know what I do? I DON’T TELL THEM that they’re my mentor. I just allow a more humble relationship with them than I would with other people, and whenever you ask people questions and show interest in their answers, they become veritable fonts of valuable information. EVERYONE loves to show what they know. There’s no need to make the process official.

So do you know of any good self-assessment tools? Feel free to share.

Building a Better Fork

The fact is that – aside from possibly having an actual chemical imbalance that may require professional treatment – when we feel like our plate is too full, we’re probably just using the wrong utensils, or our “eyes are bigger than our stomach” as the old saying goes. Part of the problem is often that once you’re bumped up into some level of stress, there’s a good possibility that your mental faculties are slightly impaired, and the effect can snowball a little, so that things that are actually very manageable seem in our mind to be an un-tameable monster. We’ll discuss more sophisticated forks in a future piece, but one simple tool that I turn to myself on occasion, and that I’ve shared with others numerous times with instant results is what I call the Breakdown Scale. If you have a big ball of confusion in your head right now, grab a pen and paper and try the simple method below.

The Breakdown Scale

First, without prioritizing or trying to order things, list the things that are eating at you. Second, we’re going to use a scale where zero is no stress at all, and ten is a figurative nervous breakdown. Go through the list, and try to honestly assess how stress-inducing each item is. There’s nothing scientific here, but you may notice a couple of things right away. The first is that once you externalize these items, before you even score them, you may notice that the hurricane in your head was really only three or four things, and simply writing them down alleviated half of the stress and confusion. Another thing that you may notice – especially if you really DO have a lot going on – is that if ten is a nervous breakdown, the total of all the individual items could easily be over twenty, depending on the highly subjective nature of the scoring we’re doing here. So first, let’s talk about the scoring, and then we’ll touch on what to do with the numbers. As we said, this is highly subjective, so for one person, something like moving to a new home can be a 9 or 10 by itself, while for another person, moving is simply time and work, with little stress attached at all, and may be only a 2 or 3. The same applies to lots of things in life. We all find different things stressful.

What To Do With These Numbers

Well, if you only had two or three items on your list, and the scores were similar, just arbitrarily pick one item to tackle, do as much as you can about it, and whatever you CAN’T do anything about, make an achievable task list for the item, and LET IT GO for now. Then do the same with the other item or items. If your list was a little more elaborate, we’ll apply the same principle. Here’s an example I’ve recreated from memory from years ago when I learned to use this method. I was changing jobs, was in an unhealthy relationship, and was in the process of moving to a new city as well! My head was a frantic but undefinable mass of mental flotsam and jetsam. I was PARALYZED. Here’s roughly how I scored the list: Moving 8 Relationship 12 (yes, this is cheating for dramatic effect) New Job 5

Using A Fork & Knife In Unison

That’s a pretty darn short list to make someone crazy in the head, right? Simply looking at the list and the numbers immediately gave me a framework to operate within though, and an opportunity for a little humor. Of COURSE I was freaking out; my “Breakdown Scale” was at 25! I was in double-breakdown mode! The reality was that looking at the short list and the simple numbers gave me a start. Yes, from a subjective point of view the relationship score was off the scale, and yes, even if I were less dramatic in the scoring, I’d still be over ten. But what it helped me realize was that I needed to carve this big rump-roast of trouble into bite-size pieces. “Moving” was like a big piece of meat in itself. I needed to slice it into little bites like “call utility companies”, “buy more boxes”, and “take items to Goodwill”, all of which are quite easy to swallow, and can be paced over several meals. The “Relationship” score was off the scale because relationships can be like open buffets, pot lucks, or all-out food fights. It depends on what the parties are bringing to the table. I realized that with that item, I needed to sit down and discuss the menu with my dining partner before I even knew what the score really was. So how do we tackle such a wide variety of things with justs lists and numbers? With logic and and common sense. And more food metaphors to keep it amusing for ourselves.

Creating Bite Size Pieces, and Making a Diet Plan

The way to approach this list has two simple rules:

• Small achievable items first
• Break big items into little items

Nibble at the appetizer or small salad before you tackle the entrees. Make sure to clear the table and take your time between courses. If some item on your plate is unwieldy and keeps sliding around, maybe you shouldn’t be eating so fast! Put it into a to-go box and snack on it later. If you know how big your plate really is, and how big a meal you’re tackling, pretty soon you’ll be in the Clean Plate Club with no signs of indigestion at all.

So what’s your story? In my case, Nick’s request that I tell the story of my recovery as a “hero’s journey” made me aware of two things. One was that as important as this story was, it wasn’t my “hero’s journey”. And two, that in spite of having a clear idea of what my “real” story was, I wasn’t sure how to tell the story any more, and in fact, wasn’t sure if I really even wanted to take that book off the shelf at all! Let me explain. I experienced a LOT of death and loss around me as a youngster, as well as some sexual abuse experiences. This had a tremendous impact on my development, but not in ways that would be obvious to people I had just met. Often in my life, when meeting someone knew, the way things would play out would be that  in the first moderately in-depth conversation that took place, they’d make a remark like “oh, you’re one of those people who’s always looking for some deeper meaning in things”, or something to that effect. If you’re a “survivor” type, you may be familiar with this response, and you’ll immediately understand the mild annoyance that a remark like this might engender. For a long time, my response to this harmless kind of remark would be to “tell my story”, at whatever pace the listener seemed able to stomach things. This either made them figuratively run in horror, or immediately bond much more deeply, either out of kinship, sympathy, or respect. So if the story was true, and people connected with it on some level, what was the problem? Well, the problem was that by “telling the story”, I was in a way perpetuating it. In spite of all my assumed self-examination and the evolution I had pursued in other ways, the profound effect of this seemingly simple aspect of our behavior had escaped me somehow.

So how did I become aware of this pattern, and what did I do about it? Well, I first recall it coming up around the time I got sober a few years ago, in a conversation with a woman I had just met who I thought I might be interested in getting more involved with. We were talking about ourselves the way people might as they start letting some barriers down, and I started to share some of my “old story”. Suddenly, I realized I was only doing this out of habit, and that I had a NEW story I’d rather tell. A story about being excited with my life and new things I was doing, and things I’d like to still do. I shared what was going on, and she quite simply said “Yeah, we all have a story don’t we? I wonder if maybe that’s one of the things that limit us?” We then had a really long discussion exploring the importance of “having a story” as a way to define ourselves, but how once you get the story outlined pretty well, you have probably also managed to freeze your growth in a small way. I decided around that time to stop telling my “old story”, and instead remain aware that I can write a NEW story. This had a compelling impact on my personal relationships. If you’re someone who has been through the more intense things that life throws our way – loss, violence, or random misfortunes – you may have become something of a survivor, and probably attract other people like this into your life. Many of my best friends are people who had an exceptional challenge thrown their way, and grew through it rather than being beaten down. But once I took this new view that I was “starting a new book”, I suddenly realized that even the most inspiring of these friends of mine still had little footnotes of their story kicking around. One friend, who is a brilliant writer, singer, mom, and amateur athlete, will still randomly toss out a joke about her sister that sexually abused her. Another friend, who is a remarkably talented songwriter and performer, amazingly takes what are actually positive parts of his story – his previous successes in the music industry – to perpetuate a failure to evolve!

As a friend, I have no choice but to call these friends out on this, usually with some positive result. So now I’m going to call YOU out:

What’s your story?
Does your story limit you?
Does your story have useful lessons in it?
What parts of your story can you put on the shelf as an informative chapter?
What’s your NEW story?

There are lots of ways to explore these issues, and the one my friend Nick shared – the “Hero’s Journey” – is just one. The simplest way is to simply be honest with yourself and identify the themes you seem to repeat as part of how you explain yourself, see which ones may need some resolution, finish the chapter, and start a new one. If you’re living and breathing, you haven’t finished the book! Start the next chapter RIGHT NOW, it’s as easy as putting your old book on the shelf and starting a new one.

* Oddly, psychology has historically focused on aberrant behavior rather than healthy behavior. Barbara Fredrickson is one of the better known and respected psychologists who study positivism. Her books like Positivity: The 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life can give you some actionable methods for re-writing your story.