How will you know when you get there?
“Know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.” —Stephen R. Covey
If the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall, he liked to say, you’ll only get to the wrong place faster.
There’s a line in Crucial Conversations worth memorizing:
“Why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person do what this person is doing?”
Most of our behaviors aren’t irrational. Some of them are unconscious, but people rarely do things for “bad” reasons.
Everyone sees themselves as the “good guy” in the story. This means they must be doing this action for a rational reason. It’s solving a problem for them. It’s in service to something they value.
And it might be completely and totally awful to a great many other people. But the first step in fixing something is to understand it.
You might not know why right away, but it’s worth sitting with the question. It might help you find the solution to irrationality.
If we don’t know what we mean when we talk of fairness, we can’t make informed decisions on whether something is fair or not.
The first step is to set an agreed-upon expectation of what fairness means to the group.
In his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen R. Covey discusses the concept of paradigms—ways of looking at the world or a field of study.
His argument is that these paradigms are like maps of places in the real world. If we have the wrong map, then we are looking at the “place” incorrectly.
An example:
If you’re trying to navigate Chicago but have a map of New York City, nothing you do with that map will help you achieve your goal of navigating Chicago.
Another example:
In Ancient Greece, physicians believed that all medical issues stem from an imbalance of the four humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm). If this is your “map” of the world of medicine, you’ll end up with a lot of dead people on your conscience.
You’d be working from an incorrect map—an incorrect set of assumptions and paradigms of how the human body and medicine work.
We are dealing with a lot of this today in numerous fields. And that’s why the study of philosophy—the activity of working out the right way of thinking about things—is vital.
You don’t get time—to read, eat well, love your spouse, exercise, or whatever.
You have to make time. This applies to anything important to you. If it matters, you must carve out time in your day to ensure it happens.
Otherwise, life will ensure it doesn’t.
As I look into graduate degree programs, a couple of voices are bouncing around in my head.
One belongs to Cal Newport, who regularly advises knowledge workers not to get graduate degrees with two exceptions:
Then there’s the advice from my late mentor Dan Miller:
If you are going to get a degree so you can get a better job – you’re likely to be disappointed. If you are going for the personal development, the social connections, and the broadening of your options, you’ll always see yourself as more prepared and having more options.
What both of these thinkers agree on is that there must be clarity about your end goal.
If you’re going to school (or back to school, in my case) because you’re bored, miserable, burnt out, or feeling lost, it’s quite likely you’ll still be all those things after you get the degree. And if you aren’t careful, you’ll have a mountain of debt added to your list of problems.
Begin with the end in mind. Know what you’re trying to achieve and what’s required to get there. Have an idea for your life planned out before you make a major decision like this.
And if you aren’t sure what you need for the career you want or the lifestyle you have in mind, start asking people who are already doing it.
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Seth Godin wrote on Medium that knowing what the weather forecast is give us the illusion of being able to control it.
Of course that’s not true.
We seek control in our lives and settle for these illusions without actually being able to do anything about it.
You can’t control whether or not it’ll snow, but you can prepare by putting on coats and boots.
You can’t control whether or not it’ll rain, but you can stick an umbrella in the car just in case.
You can’t control whether or not a post you write will go viral. But you can write the post and ship it. And if it doesn’t, you can write another one tomorrow.
In short, if you want to control something, you can control yourself. Your actions, reactions, words.
But that’s all you can control.
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Teach.
Make videos. Write blog posts and articles.
Host a workshop or a live social media “conference”.
Teach what you’re learning and you’ll get better at it.
It’s a practice. And you don’t need permission.
(Though it helps if you know what you’re talking about.)
The same holds true for just about any other practice or identity you wish to adopt.
“Just do it” isn’t a slogan reserved only for Nike.
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One of the essential habits in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is #2:
“Begin with the end in mind.”
The premise behind this habit is that before starting something—a career, a hobby, a marriage, a life—you should project yourself into the future.
By doing so, whether three years or five (or even all the way to your 80th birthday), you can lay out a map for how you want to live your life or complete a project.
I love this habit, and the idea behind it, but it’s also the only habit out of the seven with which I struggle. Why?
Because it’s overwhelming! Sometimes I don’t even know what I want life to look like tomorrow, let alone in 47 years. (God, is 80 really that close?)
It’s also overwhelming because at times, the daunting idea I have in my head seems so impossible that I become paralyzed, unable to do anything.
I know I’m not the only one.
The negative thoughts creep in with a seeming inability to solve them.
The solution?
Start.
Decide on the very next small thing you can actually do.
Julia Cameron calls this “filling the form”—taking the next small step instead of leaping ahead to some giant thing you might not ready for.
Using the examples from above, you can…
It’s the oft-cited cliché that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
You have to put a destination into the GPS. But then you must focus on the directions and look for the next turn.
If the end in mind is too big to tackle, focus instead on the tiniest first step.
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Why can’t you organize a study group to work through a difficult Udemy course?
Why can’t you pick yourself to be a successful musician (rather than waiting for a record company to do it)?
Why can’t you organize a petition to get an environmental ordnance passed through your local government?
Why can’t you start that small marketing agency on the side and build it up to your full time gig?
Why can’t you throw together a fundraiser to help a down-on-her-luck mom keep her house for a year?
Why can’t you coach someone else to help improve their health and well-being?
You don’t need another credential. You don’t need permission.
You just need the skill… and the desire to act.
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