Category Archives: LIFESTYLE

Studying Yourself

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You can make a lot of interesting personal growth gains by studying yourself and your own responses instead of trying to follow someone else’s behavioral prescriptions. Studying yourself is especially useful in the areas of health and productivity habits.

What actually creates good results for you? Quite often you’ll find that what works best for you in real life won’t be found in any book or seminar. You can learn ideas from others to inspire your own experimentation, but you may get the best gains by assembling your own unique collection of behaviors and practices.

When doing self-experimentation, it’s important to protect your self-esteem from your behavioral results. Look at your behaviors and their effects separately, and honestly assess their impacts and results. Don’t wrap your self-esteem into the effects of your behaviors because problem behaviors can be changed. Beating yourself up for having a problematic behavior will only slow you down. Let the behavior be the problem you want to work on; don’t weave it into your self-image.

As I mentioned previously, I’ve been engaging in a detailed self-study of my diet for the past 7.5 weeks. I’m raising my awareness about what I’m actually eating and how different meals affect me. Based on what I’m learning, I’m making lots of micro-adjustments and doing small tweaks to optimize my eating habits.

The main part of this is food logging, which involves writing down everything I’m eating, so I can see the rational truth as it really is. Pen and paper is far superior to memory here. I also add up the calories to get a sense of how calorically dense each meal is.

This helps me do little experiments, such as seeing what happens if I eat 500, 700, or 1000 calories before noon. Is it better to have a lighter 300-calorie dinner or a denser 700-calorie one? What happens if I mix walnuts into my steel cut oats versus a little coconut oil versus not adding any fat? Soon I’ll test eliminating the oats and eating something else for breakfast, like roasted potatoes, onions, and peppers with zucchini hummus.

Later this month I also plan to start testing what happens if I go grain-free and legume-free at the same time. I’ve done grain-free and legume-free tests before, but I haven’t done both at the same time except while I was also eating 100% raw.

One result I pay attention to, which is partly subjective, is how my morning runs feel. Do I feel energetic or sluggish? Do I feel motivated or run, or do I feel like skipping more days? I can also check my pacing since my watch records that. I’ve learned, for instance, that if I have a relatively low-calorie day (like 1600-1700 calories), I’m likely to run slower and feel less energetic during an early morning run the next day. Skimping on calories just makes me feel less energetic.

I can also see that just the act of measuring and paying more attention to what I’m eating is making it very easy to lose weight. I’ve now dropped 10.8 pounds since I started on May 14. This seems like a very easy way to slim down. It’s really about paying attention, which leads to better choices.

I like that there are no rules with this approach. I’m just paying closer attention to some of my body’s responses, and I’m making refinements based on that.

Another side effect is that I’m enjoying good food more than ever.

I’m really loving peaches and typically eat a few each day now, as long as we have some ripe ones. I’m buying 24 of them at a time to make sure I don’t run out so quickly. Costco has been having some really amazing yellow peaches in stock lately. I’m also eating lots of blueberries, strawberries, apricots, broccoli, zucchini, yellow squash, bok choy, kale, mixed greens, celery, and spinach.

You can extend this kind of experimentation to other areas of life. This can lead to some real breakthroughs.

I love the way I generate income, which I arrived at through many years of experimentation. I enjoy the combination of doing launches a few times per year plus passive income streams in the background.

I also love having an unusual relationship. I don’t know of any other couples who relate to each other like Rachelle and I do. Our relationship is rich is laughter, cuddling, affection, playfulness, and sexiness. Even after 10+ years together, the relationship still feels spicy. To make that possible, we just had to go our own way and do what works for us.

Some people resist going off script to experiment because of judgment from other people. But improving your results is a good antidote to that. If someone complains that you’ve gone off the deep end, poke fun at them for only playing in the shallow end where all the kids are peeing. The deep end is where you’ll find better results.

If you’re really worried about other people’s approval, however, you’ll likely get more of it from the people you respect if you stop chasing approval from people you don’t respect. Why on earth would you respect someone who criticizes you for using the perfectly valid and rational tool of self-study?

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Reassessing Career and Business Opportunities

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In light of the virus situation, is it time to consider a career or business change? For many people this is a good time to rationally re-evaluate your opportunities – instead of merely hoping that things will magically turn around. Hope is not a good career or business strategy.

Many restaurant and retail workers, for instance, now have to field questions like these as part of their jobs:

  • Why should I wear a mask?
  • Why are you even open right now? Do you only care about the money?
  • Can you take a pay cut and do the same work as before?

If this (or something similar) has become part of your job or business, do you really want to continue on these terms for months or years? Is the offer you’re getting from that situation still a good one? Are you still happy with the opportunities? Or are you just spinning your wheels there due to the difficulty of shifting?

Think of your current career circumstances as an offer from reality. See it as a test. When the offer shifts to something unpalatable, will you grudgingly accept it? Or will you pass the test by declining the weak offer and requesting something better? You don’t have to say yes to an offer that’s full of stress and uncertainty.

The virus is suppressing some previous opportunities, not just financially but emotionally as well. For some people the work that was once reasonably pleasant is now a lot less pleasant and more polarized. This is a good time to reconsider whether it’s still worthwhile to invest your life in the same path going forward. You could invest elsewhere instead. Sure it’s challenging to do that, but staying could be a lot worse.

You are not your career or your business. When a line of work is on the way out, you needn’t link your own survival to it. Businesses aren’t born and don’t die. They’re created and retired, and the people live on to create more. It’s not a failure to retire from a business or line of work. It’s simply a choice to reinvest your time and energy elsewhere.

Bet on choice opportunities instead of chasing after bad ones. Many opportunities that looked good a year ago have turned into bad ones these days, and that’s unlikely to change in many fields for at least the rest of the year. Even if everything clears up by 2021, which is unlikely, you still have six months left in this year. Don’t throw that away on non-opportunities and virus denial. Reinvest your time and energy where there are some truly good opportunities, which are still abundant.

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Hills

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Since I live in a very hilly neighborhood, my morning runs are basically hill training. There are many routes I can run, but the main question for choosing a route is when to do the uphill and downhill portions.

If I do the uphill first, it’s harder starting out, but then the second half is a breeze, coasting downhill all the way home – often towards a beautiful sunrise.

If I do the downhill first, the first half hour is so nice and flowing, a lovely way to run on autopilot, but then I turn the corner and have a sweaty uphill climb to return home. During the summer months in Vegas, it’s typically 80-85º F (27-29º C) around 5am.

After many years of running these hills – I’ve lived in this neighborhood since 2007 – I realized that it doesn’t really matter when I do the hills. I could do them first or second, but either way I’ll still do them.

What matters is that I commit to the hills. If I don’t commit to the hills, I won’t run.

If I do the uphill first, this commitment needs to happen when I first start running. That’s a good approach for when I’m feel energetic and ready to face that hill early. I did that this morning, and it felt great to conquer the biggest nearby hill during the first half of my run, note the beautiful sunrise, and float downhill afterwards.

But when I’m not feeling as motivated, and I just want to start out a bit easier to build some momentum, I can do the downhill first. When I face the uphill portion 30 minutes later, I still have to do it to get home. So my next choice is this: I can run uphill while resisting the experience. I can run uphill while surrendering to the experience. Or I can run uphill while embracing the experience.

That’s the nature of an action commitment. Doing or not doing is already decided. You’re going to do it. You’ve committed your body to the task. You will take the action. That part is a done deal. Once I put on my running shoes, tackling some kind of hill is inevitable.

But there’s a second layer of commitment. Have you committed your mind too? If you grudgingly complete a task, I’d say you haven’t really committed your mind, so you’ll probably be fighting yourself internally – all the way up that hill.

Why tackle a hill each day? I could say there are some fitness benefits to running those hills, but I also like what these runs teach me about framing. The challenge reminds me to choose my mental commitment, not just my physical commitment. And this benefits me in other areas of life too.

There are plenty of unpleasant tasks in life, but if we’re going to physically do them anyway – sooner or later – doesn’t it make sense to mentally and emotionally commit to those tasks as well?

You could look upon your tasks with the attitude “yuck!” Or you could look upon them and say “yum!” Finding the yucky framing often happens by default, but it’s not the only framing you have available. Surely you could find a yummy framing if you look for it, and you only need one.

Where do you procrastinate on a task, but you still end up doing it anyway eventually? Maybe it’s doing your taxes. Maybe it’s dealing with a conflict at work. Maybe it’s handling a thorny relationship issue. What’s your hill of inevitability?

You could climb that hill now, or you could postpone and climb it later, but you will climb it eventually. You know it’s just a matter of time. And perhaps it doesn’t even matter that much when you finally do it – just that you eventually get it handled.

You can look up at that hill and hate it. You could look up at the hill and tolerate it. Or you could look up at the hill with some form of gratitude and appreciation. To do the latter takes practice – it’s a different level of commitment.

If you’re going to tackle that hill anyway eventually, why not get your mind right first, and truly commit to the experience, not just with action but also with attitude?

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Direct Exploration

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While we can learn a lot from other people, such as from books, courses, classes, and online resources, I often find it valuable to learn from direct experience, even when doing so is slower and more error-prone.

There’s something special about exploring in the dark, gradually figuring out your own ways to accomplish something instead of having ready-made solutions spoon fed to you.

You can always look up a recipe for any dish you can imagine, but it can be more rewarding to set the cookbooks aside and bumble your way through. Maybe you’ll discover a dish you really like making. One of my favorites – the ultimate rice bowl – wasn’t discovered in any recipe book. I figured it out from personal experimentation. It’s simple and easy to make, and I love making it now and then. And since I figured it out myself, I also know many different ways to vary the recipe and have it still work, and my understanding of rice bowls is more robust because of that. I feel more confident and competent in this area because I’ve mapped much of the territory personally, as opposed to relying on a guide to tell me the highlights.

The risks of experimenting on your own include making more mistakes, getting stuck in pitfalls you could have avoided, and doing extra work to “reinvent the wheel.” But even when you’re rediscovering what’s already known to many other people, the personal experience of discovery can be more rewarding, and your knowledge will likely be less fragile. Your discovery of the wheel will be uniquely your own – and a lot more special than just buying a wheel.

Many years ago I decided to build my own PC by buying all the component parts from various sources and assembling it myself – motherboard, CPU, RAM chips, graphics card, hard drive, case, power supply, etc. It wasn’t worth the effort to save a little money, but I felt a special connection to that PC for years because I assembled it myself. It wasn’t just some mass market machine I’d bought from Dell. And the machine I built worked better and lasted longer than the pre-built ones I bought around the same time.

This month I’ve been experimenting with music composition again, mostly by messing around in Logic Pro. There’s a lot I don’t understand about how to layer a composition, so some of my experiments didn’t sound very good. But even though I could learn this skill faster from people with experience, I like fumbling around to see what I can figure out on my own. The discoveries feel more rewarding when I stumble upon them versus if I learn them from someone else.

This skill comes in handy in business too, especially when diving into something new. I didn’t know how to generate income from blogging when I first started in 2004 because blogging was still relatively new. So I experimented with income generation to figure how to make my work financially sustainable. I still got ideas from other people, but I had to test them in different ways to understand how to apply them to my business. Since I directly experimented a lot, I now know many effective ways to cover expenses and then some, so I feel confident and secure with income generation too. It’s just another rice bowl to me.

When you learn from other sources, you may acquire knowledge that’s more structured but also more fragile and rigid. You probably won’t gain the range and flexibility that comes from direct personal exploration.

I have degrees in computer science and mathematics, but what I learned in school wasn’t very helpful when I set out to design and program computer games. Most of the academic knowledge I’d gained was way too narrow and brittle. I advanced faster by studying programming on my own – often just by messing around to see what I could do. I also coded in different languages and on different types of devices. I learned so much more about coding by tackling dozens of small projects than by studying techniques from others. And learning coding on my own was way more fun, engaging, and interesting than formally studying it in school.

This isn’t an either-or proposition. Learning from others can be immensely valuable too. I’ve had some wonderful breakthroughs on that side as well. Just watch out for areas of life where you lean too heavily on the side of structured study and overlook the incredible long-term value of direct exploration. Use formal study to seed your own experimentation, not as a replacement for it.

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A Minute Of Kindness: The Hotel For Homeless People During The Pandemic

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Entitlement

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A common way that people get stuck, especially in business, is that they feel entitled to success before they’ve invested in really earning it.

Maybe you did well in school. Maybe you’ve been told that you’re smart or creative. Maybe you began with some advantages that made you feel like you’re already ahead of the game.

And then you dive into the real world with your grand goals and dreams, and it knocks you on your ass.

This has happened to me and many other entrepreneurial friends. It’s humbling for sure, but the experience of being knocked down a few times helps you admit that you still have a hell of a lot to learn.

Learning computer programming and getting good at it took me many years. I started when I was 10 years old and didn’t begin working on my first commercial product until I was 22 years old. By that point I knew how to program to some extent in BASIC, PASCAL, FORTRAN, C, C++, Assembly, Lisp, Prolog, and a few other languages. I was very good at math too.

But then I had to learn game programming… and Windows programming. There were lots of animation concepts to learn like back buffers and blitting. Then when I started my own business the following year, I had to learn game design, art, sound effects editing, MIDI, and so much more. I also had to learn new graphics interfaces like WinG and DirectX. Finally I figured I had the skills to succeed, but no…

I still had to learn some accounting, contract law, and negotiation skills, which took a while to wrap my head around. And was that enough? Nope. It was able to land some deals, but most didn’t go well. There was still way more to learn.

I had to learn better people skills and to be more discerning in choosing people to work with. I had to learn to manage a small team and to network with other people in the field. Then there were systems to figure out like customer support and shipping. Finally enough? Still no.

On top of that multi-year journey, there was learning sales and marketing. That was a huge one and really took me outside my comfort zone. For many new entrepreneurs having to learn this part of business can be daunting – and humbling. There’s just so much to learn. And once you finally learn it, your “reward” is to realize that you have even more work to do.

Finally my first business started doing well. It took several years, but eventually I had put enough pieces together to make it work sustainably.

The entitlement aspect slowed me down in the beginning, as it slows down many people. This is the expectation that surely you know enough to succeed already, especially when entering a field that you believe should play to your strengths.

Having a good head on your shoulders may help, but the belief that you should be able to succeed quickly can really get in your way. It may be better to approach new experiences with more patience and humility. Be willing to accept that the journey may be longer than you expect.

Among struggling entrepreneurs I know, I often see the same entitlement patterns that I succumbed to. Some feel that when they’re first starting out, they should have everything figured out and running smoothly within six months to a year. Some may be able to go that fast, but most won’t. I think this attitude makes a lot of people give up when they’re actually making decent progress. They have so much more to learn than they realize.

This entitlement issue can come up repeatedly. Even if you’re been doing okay for a decade, you may hit a road bump and feel like you’re losing ground. This can be frustrating. You may look to all the past efforts you’ve invested and declare that you deserve some smooth seas for a change. Surely you’ve earned it, right?

You may encounter some smooth seas now and then, but realize that the weather can still change. Appreciate the periods of wonderful flow when you have them, but try not to get attached to them.

One solution I like is to think of myself as a perpetual student. I accept that the learning game never ends. There’s always more to figure out. I can never declare that I’m finally done learning and just rest on my past skills and accomplishments. There is no entitlement to more success, regardless of how much I think I know or what I’ve done in the past.

Each day is a fresh one. Each new success must be earned. Each year of life and business brings fresh challenges to face.

This year life has thrown some big challenges at some people I know, while oddly for me it’s been one of the smoothest years ever. That doesn’t give me permission to succumb to a forward-looking sense of entitlement, as tempting as that may be. We live in a world of change.

Even if you’ve been through a lot of rough patches in your past, that still doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to a low-challenge future. You may have even bigger challenges ahead.

You have a relationship with life. Entitlement is a way of saying that you have life all figured out and know just what to expect of it. But life won’t necessarily let you pigeonhole it this way. When you try to box it in by willing it to satisfy your expectations going forward, life has a way of crushing the box.

Instead of trying to boxify life, realize that life still has some juicy mystery to it, and stay alert to the possibility of change and disruption. Change doesn’t have to feel punishing if you learn to welcome it and see it as a gift instead of a curse.

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Making Permanent Changes

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You may often get stuck in cycles of temporarily upgrading some part of your life, only to watch that area decline when you stop giving it as much attention. People especially do this with their finances and their health. When the pressure to take action is strong enough, they’ll make some improvements, but once the immediacy subsides, they return to old habits –and the old results.

Partly this is a framing issue. If you really want to upgrade a certain area of your life and have the upgrade stick, it helps to frame your efforts as creating permanent changes. Adopt the mindset that you can never go back to the old way of doing things. Do your best to mentally and emotionally accept that the old path must permanently end, and you can never return to it again.

You might have a temporary upgrade phase and a long-term maintenance phase for certain changes, but the maintenance phase can’t be the same as the pre-upgrade phase if you want to lock in some permanent gains. Whatever you’re doing now that isn’t getting you the results you want – that particular collection of habits – has to die off and never see the light of day again.

For instance, if you’re considering a dietary change to improve your health, frame it as a permanent change. This framing makes it clear that you can never go back to the way you’re eating now. If you do, you’ll undo any results you gain. Look at your current eating habits and know you must leave them in the past and that they can never be part of your future.

That’s a hard realization to accept sometimes. The notion of making a permanent change may seem daunting enough, but you also have to accept that this means the absolute end of your current practices.

If you want to upgrade your health, your current health practices must end forever. If you want to upgrade your finances, your current financial practices must end forever. If you want to upgrade your social life, your current social practices must end forever. To usher in the new and make it stick, you must be willing to accept the death of the old.

Eating animal products is dead to me. It was part of my past, but I don’t expect to ever have it be part of my life again. When I went vegan in 1997, I began with a 30-day experiment, but I also leaned into the expectation that if those 30 days went well, there would be no going back. That helped the change stick.

Even if you frame something as a permanent change, you still retain the option to undo or modify that change later on. You’re still free to make fresh choices. But if you frame it as permanent from the beginning, it can help you invest more deeply in making the change stick. You can still begin with a 30-day challenge mindset to get started, while also using those 30 days to say goodbye to your old habits.

If you quit smoking, it would be best if you never ever touch a cigarette again in your entire life. The love affair with the old addiction has to die for a new life – and a new identity – to emerge.

There’s a certain sadness when we do this. I suggest that you accept the sadness and let yourself feel it. Go ahead and grieve if you feel some genuine loss. Let those feelings flow through you as you say goodbye to the old.

Say “thank you” to the old habits as well. Take stock of what you learned and how the old experiences helped you mature. Consider what you discovered about your character. At the very least, you may have learned to feel some compassion for those dealing with similar challenges. Being able to feel gratitude (instead of resentment) for the old life can make it easier to flow into permanent changes.

Framing your lifestyle and habit changes as permanent can help you bypass the yoyo phase, so you can make a change stick once you’ve gone through the effort to transition. And remember that a key part of this is to say a real goodbye to the old path and then to require that henceforth the old path may exist only in your memories.

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Don’t Let Labels Limit You

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How many different assessments have you taken that classified you as having a certain personality type, strengths, and so on? Maybe you did a Myers-Briggs assessment, the Strengths Finder test, the Kolbe test, or other assessments, and they told you something about yourself.

Perhaps this started with learning your astrological sign and discovering that you were supposed to be a certain way because of when and where you were born.

When I was in high school, I took a test call the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey. It said that career-wise, I was most aligned with becoming a computer programmer. Second was a forester. And third was a math teacher. I did roll into game programming after college, but I wasn’t just a programmer. I also became a game designer and an entrepreneur. It was close at least. Today I wouldn’t classify myself as a computer programmer though. I still have some of those skills, but it’s not a major part of my work these days.

When I first took the Myers-Briggs test, it told me I was an INTJ. Years later after I got into public speaking, I retook it, and it told me that I was an ENTJ. Somehow I’d flipped from introvert to extrovert. If I were to take that test again today, it might drift even more from the original result.

Assessments can provide interesting insights that may help you decide what to explore next, but don’t let them dictate what you expect of yourself. You don’t have to honor those limited expectations.

Regardless of what an assessment tells you about yourself, you can still make your own choices. You can develop entirely different leanings. You can train different qualities into your character by embracing different experiences and developing different habits.

And this assumes the assessments are accurate to begin with. While taking one of those tests, haven’t you ever felt that you could have answered some of the questions differently? What if you would have gotten a different result by taking the test a month later? Good tests try to build in some extra validation, but they can’t prevent you from changing.

You can live and work in ways that defy the tidy boxes of assessments. You can sometimes behave like an introvert and sometimes like an extrovert. You can act like a Cancer or a Leo.

Sometimes it’s wise to step back and see yourself as a tabula rasa – a blank slate that’s receptive to fresh input. Instead of clinging to the labels that have defined you in the past, let them float away, and realize that you have many more options beyond those labels.

One of the lamest ways to label yourself is to say, “I’m a non-techie person.” Well… there’s nothing stopping you from becoming one other than laziness and ignorance. Throwing around that label just makes you sound more empty-headed than necessary, as any techie person would love to tell you but probably won’t – guaranteed they’re doing an inner eye roll whenever you use that excuse.

Another weak form of self-labeling is to say, “I’m not a people person.” Oh really? Sure, you could go live in the woods by yourself. But the world is full of people, so maybe you ought to learn how to interact as if you are a people person. It’s learnable. And saying that you can’t do it sounds just as lame to social people as the non-techie refrain sounds to those with good tech skills.

Be very careful about turning your current skill set (or lack thereof) into a permanent label. You can always develop new skills that break your old labels.

I often cringe when people ask me what I do for a living. I don’t have a good elevator pitch for that – I’m not an elevator person. 😉

I think the reason is that I don’t like labeling myself because labels feel so limiting. Even if I rattle off a collection of labels like blogger, speaker, author, and so on, I still don’t like it. A bigger box is still a box.

Perhaps one label that I actually like is explorer, and that’s because it’s a label that gets to leave the old boxes behind.

I’ve found that my most interesting friends tend to have a lot of fluidity to them. They’re hard to pin down and classify in a tidy way. I have to understand them holistically and see them as always evolving because they won’t sit still and obey their labels. If I try to understand them on the basis of how they might be labeled, they’ll violate those labels soon enough.

What labels do you often apply to yourself that might be limiting you? Why not deliberately violate one of those labels and see what happens? You could have some really interesting growth experiences just by taking a label and exploing its opposite for a while.

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A Minute Of Kindness: The YouTuber Teaching You How To Do The Simple Things

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Fun Is a Personal Standard

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Whatever you’re currently doing to earn money, is it fun for you?

Would you still enjoy your income-generating activities even if they paid half as much?

Still fun with less pay? Or does the fun depend on the money?

Earning money can be fun. Spending money can be fun too.

But what if earning money isn’t fun? Then to earn more, you have to push yourself to do even more work that isn’t fun. Your reward is very mixed then – more money perhaps but also less fun. That creates a drag that will likely cause your income – and your ambition – to stagnate.

A lot of the world’s offers for income generation aren’t particularly fun. In fact, many of them seriously suck. Do this boring-as-hell work for a paycheck. That’s a crappy ass offer. Who’d be desperate enough to say yes to that? Lots of people apparently since most people don’t like their jobs – don’t become one of them.

You don’t have to accept a crappy ass offer that isn’t fun. You can either keep looking till you find a fun and inspiring offer, or better yet, create your own offer.

Safe Isn’t Fun

To bring some fun into this picture, I think it helps to choose income generation strategies that challenge you to grow. If you make it too easy, you’ll be bored.

A fun game is at least semi-challenging. Challenge alone won’t make the experience fun, but it will surely help.

Many people look to their past hobbies and strengths for income ideas. That tends to be a relatively weak approach that can easily lead to boredom. What if instead you develop income ideas based around what you’d like to explore and experience? Why rehash the past that you’ve already explored when you could lean into something new and adventurous?

What new challenges fascinate you? What seems a bit out of reach?

When I created my current business in 2004, my background was in programming and game design, having already invest 10 years in that path professionally. I could have generated income from my programming skills, but I saw that it would be more fun to figure out how to earn income from writing and speaking instead. Those income streams would be more challenging, growth-oriented, rewarding, and fun.

The edginess of making money from communication skills made the process more fun. Getting paid for my first professional speech was more fun and rewarding than getting paid the same amount from leveraging my programming skills.

Programming was safer, and speaking was scarier. Safe isn’t fun. Scary is often fun. Would you rather safely sit in your car in the parking lot of an amusement park… or would you prefer to go on the rides?

Earning decent income isn’t that hard if you’re having fun and enjoying fresh growth experiences from your work. Then it’s largely a matter of finding and testing the right strategies. But it can be really hard to earn good income if you don’t enjoy and appreciate the work you’re doing.

The Standard of Fun

You can earn income doing what isn’t fun. Or you can earn it doing what is fun. If you want the second option, don’t be a person who tolerates the first option. You get the lowest standard you’re willing to tolerate.

Fun work is essential to me. In Conscious Growth Club yesterday, we did a two-hour group coaching call, and it was fun, not just for me but for many of the members too. We shared a lot of laughs and silliness along the way, which actually enhances the coaching experience and doesn’t detract from the value. Would you rather be on a fun coaching call or a boring one? Don’t you think that fun is more motivating and inspiring than boredom?

Does your work spark joy for you? Do you look forward to showing up? Do you get excited when Monday morning comes up again, and you get to sink your teeth into some juicy and interesting projects? If that’s not your reality, then why the heck are you still showing up? Are you doing it for the income that will be perpetually held back by your lack of motivation? That’s a lame investment of your time and energy. What’s the long-term payoff? Sadness and regret? Step off!

Work doesn’t have to be a dreadful slog. You can choose to make it edgier and more fun. You can bring more of your playful personality to the experience. If you get fired for that, I’d say that’s a great reason to be fired. If your workplace can’t handle your having fun while doing your work, fuck ’em! Leave those dreadfully dull people behind, and work with fun-loving people instead. They’re out there if you’re willing to look and if you’re willing to rise to that standard and not accept less.

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