Month: December 2022

Want To Build Good Habits, Start With Routines

Neera

As I sat in my bed, earphones in my ears, listing to the calming music, I did my morning meditation.

Five minutes later, I opened my eyes, grabbed my journal and my favorite pen, and started writing the thoughts and the ideas I received in that short meditative state.

Twenty minutes later, after following an invigorating, productive, and short morning routine, I was ready to face the day.

I also had enough material to write an article later in the day.

The secret of your future is hidden in your daily routine — Mike Murdock

We need routines.

When I wake up in the morning, I brush my teeth and then sit in bed and meditate. That is my morning routine. It starts my day.

When I start working, I open my computer and check my emails and Slack messages. That’s my work routine. It helps me get into a work mindset.

We need routines to guide us.

Journaling is one of the several routines I have developed to get me straight into the writer’s mindset. Writing in a journal each morning helps me collect my thoughts so that I can become more intentional with my time.

Ending my day with a personal daily debrief in the daily diary is a routine that helps me evaluate what I accomplished in the day.

In all these routines, I learn how to be efficient with my time and how to match what I do with what I care about.

The opposite of routine is chaos.

Chaos is a deep rut leading nowhere.

It is also known as bad habits such as giving up to distractions and procrastination.

It is letting your monkey mind take over and lead you in the wrong direction to reach unimportant goals.

When we feel stressed, tired, or derailed, a routine helps us get back on course.

“The right routine gives us the equivalent of an energy rebate. Instead of spending our limited supply of discipline on making the same decision again and again, embedding our decisions into a routine allows us to channel that discipline toward some other essential activity.”

There’s a sense of well-being that comes when we complete tasks.

Routines help us form habits.

Think about driving a car. You check and adjust your mirrors, put your feet on the brake, start the car, and release the handbrake. You do all these steps without noticing because they have become habits.

Habits form when we follow a predetermined routine.

The best routines lead to the best results.

Routines set a tone for developing good habits that last your entire life.

A good habit means you’re driving in the fast lane. Buckle up and hold on for the ride! You’ll reach your destination quickly and efficiently.

A bad habit means you’re in the slow land or, worse, stuck on the side of the road. Constant distractions and derailments keep you from making progress.

The more details of our daily life we can hand over to the routines, the more capacity our mind will have to do the proper work.

A good routine is not only a source of great comfort and stability, but it’s also the platform from which stimulating and fulfilling work is possible. — Ryan Holiday

You can follow the routine at any time or place during the day. I write my journal even on holidays. And if for some reason, I can’t write it in the morning, I will write at the first opportunity I get during the day. Because journaling has become a habit.

This month I started publishing an article a day. I am still setting up the routine. Some days I get it done early in the morning. On other days, life interferes, and I have to stay up late at night writing. Slowly, a routine will form, and I will be able to perform this task like several others without thinking much about it.

Back in mid-June 2021, I wrote and published a book in one week. That was an act of extreme productivity. But it was not sustainable.

Small changes to build a routine that leads to forming habits are more sustainable.

Like John Maxwell said, “You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret to your success is found in your daily routine.”

Build routines and turn them into habits.

Don’t Just Look For A Solution To A Problem (Instead, focus on what you want.)

Neera

I prided myself as a great problem solver when a casual talk with a friend opened my eyes to another possibility — to be more than just a problem solver.

I was on the phone with a friend and after an hour-long catch-up, I made the remark to wrap up the conversation, “I am glad we found the solution to my problem.”

This friend of mine is a coach, and she opened her coaching practice recently after eighteen months of wilderness. My remark led to a full-blown coaching session with her in which she probed me to examine my thinking.

“Rather than focusing on solving the problem, think about what you really want. How and when won’t be the questions when you know what you really want,” she said.

She was right.

Problem-solving gives us only a limited range of possibilities.

Her advice reminded me of something I read in Robert Fritz’s book The Path Of Least Resistance.

When you focus on solving a problem, you can’t help inheriting the assumptions baked into it.

The focus limits you to a very narrow range of outcomes, all of them leading towards, ‘I want this problem to go away.’

When you take action to lessen a problem, you have less of a problem — so, of course, you are less motivated to keep addressing it.

Let’s say, we resolve to make some improvement — in our life, our relationships, our finances, and our community — it works for a while, but then it fizzles out, and we resume our old ways.

We blame a lack of self-discipline or conclude that circumstances were against us.

But there’s a more intriguing explanation for this sort of defeat.

What if ‘solving the problem’ was the reason we cannot solve the problem?

Fritz suggests:

Instead of focusing on the problem, ask yourself, what do you want to create?

If we focus on creating rather than problem-solving, we will feel less discouraged by the discrepancy between what we want and what we think we ought to do.

That is the dilemma we all go through more than we like. We face predicaments arising from contradictions, variance, inconsistencies, and expectations.

According to Fritz:

Creators have a higher ability to tolerate discrepancies than most others. This is because discrepancy is the stock in the trade of the creator.

When you create, you become a player of forces, such as — contrasts, opposites, similarities, differences, time, balance, and so on. To the creator, all these forces are useful.

When there is more discrepancy, there is more force to work with.

If there is less, there is more momentum as you move toward the final creation of the result.

Creating is no problem and problem-solving is not creating.

When choosing what to create, you do not choose what you do not want. You choose what you want.

A creator’s motivation is different. Their motivation is for their creation to exist.

A creator creates to bring the creation into being.

A creator creates regardless of his emotions.

For creators, emotions are not the centerpiece of their lives, they do not pander to them. They create what they create, not in reaction to their emotions, but independently of them.

They can create on days filled with the depths of despair. They can create on days filled with the heights of joy.

As a creator, you become a river, going through life and taking the path of least resistance.

More of life should be approached as creation rather than problem-solving.

Decide what you want, take stock of your reality, and then take the necessary actions to invent the outcome you seek.

My friend’s advice changed my whole outlook. I no longer focus on problems, but stay tuned to what I want. What I really, really want. Once I figure that out, the ‘how’ and ‘when’ take care of themselves.

Capturing The ‘Hope Moments’

Neera

I half-sit in bed in a sleepy state and let the thoughts pass through my mind.

Mostly, I am not even aware of what thoughts are crossing my mind, but now and then I see sparks. Like the one that comes out of a fairy’s magic wand and I sit up a little bit straight and make a mental note of it.

Author John Brandon calls them the ‘hope moments’.

Think of hope moments as those small, delightful insights in the morning that come from somewhere beyond ourselves. — John Brandon

I had never heard of the term ‘hope moments’ before reading John Brandon’s book 7-Minute Productivity Solution.

Brandon suggests capturing them before the realities of the day crush them.

A hope moment could be a fleeting thought that someone has called you for a job opportunity.

Or it could be the thought that you will meet someone special and end up marrying them.

You might wake up with an idea or insights or a plain old wish.

What a great feeling such thoughts bring.

They are like a spark or a light bulb, filling you up with hope because it’s not based on realistic expectations.

We all need hope in our lives. More than goals.

It’s important to mull over the joys and sorrows of life, but what we need most in our lives is — hope.

You could argue that hope is the opposite of a goal.

Hope is what could be; a goal is what must be.

Hope has no limits, a goal is confined and specific that must be tracked.

Goals are great, but hope should take precedence over goals and should drive us.

Hope fills us with drive and passion, whereas a goal is a limited and short-term undertaking.

Hope can help us overcome incredible suffering and disappointment, whereas a goal gives us an objective to finish a marketing report by dinner.

Start the day with hope.

We have more hope in the mornings before the cold hard truth settles in.

Hope moments occur before we reach for our mobile phones and start checking the news and social media notifications.

Most of us start the day with brilliant ideas, new insights, and a wonderful outlook.

Is it possible to maintain that attitude all day?

Yes, it is, by writing down the ‘hope moments,’ so that we don’t lose them when the day sets in.

Recording them helps connect the dots between what we do today and the purpose in life.

By recording hope moments, you’re making sure you’re aware of the patterns and connections in your life that lead to fulfillment. The word fulfillment means the achievement of something desired.

Not knowing where you are going, what you are doing, or why you are doing, it is the opposite of fulfillment. It leads to burnout, distracted living, and hopelessness.

Sometimes, big ambitions seem unattainable.

It’s important to step aside from our goals occasionally so that we can evaluate our bigger ambitions and decide if they are really worth attaining. — Charles Duhigg

The morning routine is not meant for mere goal setting and task allocation. It’s a way to ponder the day in an unstructured way.

When we write our ambitions and hopes in a journal, we’re attempting to catalyze the ambitions we have into attainable, bite-sized nuggets that are far more achievable — life setting, not goal setting.

A plan to turn my ‘hope moment’ into reality

I captured a ‘hope moment’ this morning — Wouldn’t it be nice if I had finished all the projects I started this year. Then I will be ready to greet the new year with a clean slate.

As the thought crossed my mind, I immediately got energized. Maybe it is possible to finish all the unfinished projects of this year. My mind immediately started making plans. I reached for a pen and pad and made a list:

  • Finish writing the book that I started in January this year.
  • Compile a mini-guide I had scheduled for December.
  • Draw 122 sketches that I missed drawing in the daily diary.
  • Write and publish 15 articles on Medium (that’s an article a day + 3 more)
  • Write 3 newsletters scheduled for this month.

These were my unachieved goals. But by seeing them as ‘hope moments’ they suddenly become plausible.

  • The 15 articles I am writing could become the chapters of the book. 122 sketches are just 12 sketches a day.
  • It will take me two days to write the mini-guide.
  • I have already started working on the newsletters. Besides, I can keep them short because readers are busy with Christmas and holidays.
  • I take 5 minutes to draw a sketch. I can knock six in half an hour. If I do two sessions, all the sketches will be done too.

I may not achieve all these, but they certainly make me feel excited.

It is possible to maintain a high level of hope throughout the day.

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Notes On Boredom

Neera

We are so scared of being bored these days.

I come from a time when there was no TV, no internet, and no smartphones. We had long summer vacations but nowhere to go. We hardly had any toys, very little reading material, and no video games.

Yet, I don’t remember being bored.

We played outdoors, invented games, and were extremely happy to sit around and do nothing. Being idle was not a taboo and the term ‘bored’ was rarely used.

The trouble is that we live in an age in which we never get the chance to be bored. All the entertainment we could ever dream of is at our fingertips, waiting on the phone in our pocket.

I think the time is ripe for us all to recognize boredom as the delicacy it is. Here’s a quote from Leslie’s piece, How Boredom is becoming anything but boring:

I think boredom is almost a luxurious thing, a decadent thing. To allow yourself to be bored is almost like a pampering thing. I think boredom might make a comeback. I can see a boredom ranch: ‘Come here and be bored!’

Austin Kleon wrote in Steal Like An Artist:

Take time to be bored. One time I heard a coworker say, “When I get busy, I get stupid.” Ain’t that the truth. Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. I get some of my best ideas when I’m bored, which is why I never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts — it’s so boring. I almost always get good ideas. If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take a really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maria Kalman says. “Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.” Take time to mess around. Get lost. Wander. You never know where it’s going to lead you.

He stole ‘stare at a spot on the wall’ from psychologist William James and turned it into an exercise in The Steal Like An Artist Journal:

Image Source

Jon Kabat-Zinn, an American professor emeritus of medicine and the creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness, says, “When you pay attention to boredom, it gets unbelievably interesting.”

Meditation can be considered an extreme form of boredom, yet everyone knows its benefits.

Henry David Thoreau used to go for long walks in the woods, something that could be an extremely boring exercise was his source of daily inspiration.

David Sedaris used to write on the back of the placemats in the IHOP in his hometown of Raleigh while waiting for food. It played such a large role in David Sedaris’s collection of diaries, Theft By Finding, that the publisher used it as promotional postcards. (The New Yorker published an excerpt with the title, “The IHOP Years.”)

Notice the circling of letters in the words WANDER and WONDER.

Wandering (physical or mental) leads to wondering.

Image Source

Here is what others are saying about boredom.

“The best way to come up with new ideas is to get really bored.” — Neil Gaiman

“I’m a big believer in boredom. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, and out of curiosity comes everything.” — Steve Jobs

“Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that’s where creativity arises.” — Peter Bregman

“I’ve noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding, or entertaining me.” — Scott Adams

“Boredom is your window… Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.” — Joseph Brodsky

“Creativity is the residue of time wasted.” — Albert Einstein:

Boredom is the birthplace of genius. —

I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. Boredom opens up the space, for new engagement. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are. — Slavoj Zizek

Boredom is what used to be called idle time.

We all need idle time.

To wake up in the morning and have that feeling that the whole day is yours. No morning rush. No usual cleanup. No tidying up to do. To slow down. To do absolutely nothing.

Being idle is frowned upon in today’s society. We are so much under pressure to keep doing something all the time that we have forgotten the importance of idle time.

Contrary to the common belief that the ‘idle mind is the devil’s workshop,’ the idle mind is the germination ground for ideas.

Creativity thrives on boredom

Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters on Life

I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spent in the most profound activity.

Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days.

In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, and possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot.

But it is Tom Hodgkinson who has tackled the subject head-on in How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto. He starts with:

In 1993, I went to interview the late radical philosopher and drugs researcher, Terence McKenna. I asked him why society doesn’t allow us to be more idle.

He replied: I think the reason we don’t organise society in that way can be summed up in the aphorism, “idle hands are the devil’s tool.”

In other words, institutions fear idle populations because an Idler is a thinker and thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations. Thinkers become malcontents, that’s almost a substitute word for idle, “malcontent.”

Essentially, we are all kept very busy . . . under no circumstances are you to quietly inspect the contents of your own mind.

Freud called introspection “morbid” — unhealthy, introverted, anti-social, possibly neurotic, and potentially pathological. Introspection could lead to that terrible thing: a vision of the truth, a clear image of the horror of our fractured, dissonant world. He goes on to say:

“Idleness is a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. The fact that idling can be enormously productive is repressed. Musicians are characterized as slackers; writers as selfish ingrates; artists as dangerous.”

Robert Louis Stevenson expressed the paradox as follows in ‘An Apology for Idlers’ (1885)

Idleness . . . does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class.

Long periods of languor, indolence and staring at the ceiling are needed by any creative person in order to develop ideas.

A conclusion I’ve come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it’s really about making work into something that isn’t drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.

Let the children be bored at times

Victoria Prooday, a world-renowned educator, and motivational speaker, writes about modern-day parenting and the impact of a high-tech lifestyle on a child’s nervous system. According to her we should let children be bored at times and don’t feel guilty about it.

“By constantly entertaining our kids, we are stealing their childhood and creating major obstacles to their future success. We are not allowing them to learn to tolerate quiet times and discover ways to overcome boredom. It is still reversible. Let them be bored at times and don’t feel guilty about it.” — Victoria Prooday

Hope you allow boredom into your life.

Some other related articles:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/what-does-boredom-do-to-us-and-for-us

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-boredom-is-anything-but-boring/

When Your Passion Becomes Your Obsession

Neera

There is a difference between passion and obsession.

Passion is a positive word that leads to growth, self-improvement, and perhaps one’s purpose in life; obsession, on the other hand, has a negative connotation about it, which could lead to being out of control and even mentally sick.

When you are passionate, everybody cheers you on, “Oh! you found your passion. Great! Be passionate! Follow your passion! Reach your goals! Live your dream!” People encourage you because they think you are on to something.

But when you are obsessed, they go, “Why you gotta be so crazy? Why do you spend so much time on [thing]?” Why can’t you be reasonable about it?” “You don’t have to be so preoccupied with it, it’s just a hobby (or a job, or a sport), isn’t it?”

When you are obsessed, people think you are nuts.

In life, you have a choice. You can either be passionate or obsessed.

Both choices are fine.

Being passionate about something is being in love with life.

But being obsessed with something is living life at another level.

I chose to be obsessed.

I don’t know when my passion for writing turned into an obsession.

When I started writing, I found the activity so calming and fulfilling that I became passionate about it. I dedicated time to it and strived to improve. As I became better and better at giving words to my thoughts, I started feeling good about my writing.

I could pour out all my frustrations, my negativity, my fears, my anger, my joy, and my daily happenings into my diary.

And that was when the problem began.

Something inside me changed. I craved writing all the time. I had to write every day. The day I didn’t write, was a day that didn’t exist for me.

I would rather write than attend a party or meet a friend for coffee, or go for a swim, or go for a walk.

My passion had become an obsession.

The Cambridge dictionary defines passion as an extreme interest in or wishes for doing something.

While an obsession is something that you think about all the time.

A passion is “extreme” but the aspect of time isn’t present.

An obsession stays “all the time”.

I think about writing all the time.

I work on getting better every day. I don’t rest. I can’t let it go. I am not content with my progress. I want to get better. I can’t accept the level I am at the moment. I know I could be better. I will continue to work on it until I reach the level where I want to be.

If you really want to achieve something worth achieving, you must get obsessed.

If you are not obsessed, you are not operating at your optimum potential.

If no one thinks you are crazy, you are not there yet.

You are not there yet until somebody in your life says, “Jee! you really care about this in a crazy way.” That’s when people see your obsession.

The weirder you are, the more committed you are to focus on your thing.

Obsession forces you to stay focused.

Obsession makes you keep going when others are partying, socializing, having fun, sleeping, or simply fitting in.

Obsession empowers you to find new ways to learn, to push your comfort zone, and to push yourself beyond what others or even you thought was not possible.

I love this quote from one of Bukowski’s numerous letters:

My dear,

Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains.

For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.

Falsely yours,

Henry Charles Bukowski

I will rather let writing kill me than give it up for a mediocre life.

Are you passionate about something?

Is it turning into an obsession?

If You Think Your Writing In Not Original, You Need To Know About Helsinki Bus Station Theory

Neera

“The secret to a creatively fulfilling career lies in understanding the operations of Helsinki’s main bus station,” said Finnish-American photographer Arno Minkkinen, back in 2004.

Helsinki Bus Station Theory had been circulating among photographers for years before Oliver Burkeman brought it to a wider audience through an article in The Guardian.

To understand the theory, imagine this:

You are at a bus station. A big bus station that is cleaner, environmentally friendly, and inviting.

There are two dozen platforms, and from each platform, several different bus lines depart.

But for a kilometer or more, all the lines leaving from any one platform take the same route out of the city, making identical stops.

“Each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer,” Minkkinen declares.

You pick a direction — maybe you focus on making platinum prints of nudes — and set off.

Three stops later, you’ve got a nascent body of work. You take those three years of work on the nude to [a gallery], and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn.

Your work looks very much like Penn’s.

Annoyed to have been following someone else’s path, you hop off the bus, grab a cab… and head straight back to the bus station, looking for another platform.

A few years later, something similar happens. This goes on all your creative life: always showing new work, always being compared to others.

What’s the answer?

It’s simple.

Stay on the bus.

Stay on the f*#king bus.

The point Minkkinen is making is when you find your work resembles someone else’s, or you’re on someone else’s bus, traveling someone else’s path, don’t go back to the bus station at the very beginning completely reinvent yourself and start from scratch. Instead, stay on the bus.

At a certain point, your path will split off into something new.

It’s the separation that makes all the difference.

Once you see the difference in your work from the work you so admire, it’s time to look for your breakthrough.

Suddenly, your work will get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.

Your vision takes off.

There are two reasons this metaphor is so compelling:

  1. It vividly illustrates a critical insight into persistence.
  2. It points out the perils of a world that obsesses with originality.

“More often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.” — Austin Kleon.

Helsinki’s theory suggests that if you pursue originality too vigorously, you’ll never reach it.

Sometimes it takes more guts to keep trudging down a pre-trodden path, to the originality beyond.

“Stay on the f*#king bus.”