How To Embrace And Conquer Pain

Let’s face it, sometimes you feel horrible. You feel like the universe is conspiring against you. It could be caused by an upsetting event, such as the end of a relationship or the loss of a job. Other times the feelings are elusive and unexplainable, thus attributed to the alignment of the stars or a chemical imbalance. All you want is to feel better.

Friends and coworkers may tell you to snap out of it, or find a meaningful project. As well meaninged as this advice may be, it can have a tremendous impact on your ability to effectively move forward.

Think about it. If you are angry and focus your attention elsewhere, do the feelings really go away? No. You are simply diverting your attention temporarily to avoid the experience. Even if you are not focused on the upset in the moment, you can rest assured it is still there. And it will be until you deal with the underlying issue.

Most people combat undesirable feelings by consciously or subconsciously creating a goal to feel better. However, consider the old adage, “The more you try to change things, the more they stay the same.” Trying to feel better will most often be a futile attempt.

I believe in living in the present. Although you may have to embrace something that you don’t really want, the more you deal with the now, the better the future. In college, there were moments when I would feel a little melancholy—it was typically due to women problems. Women were more important than grades. I didn’t do particularly well with either. For these occasions of sadness, I made this mix tape, aptly titled “The Depression Tape.”

When I felt down in the dumps, I would put that tape in the stereo, open a bottle of wine, turn off the lights, and allow myself to experience my sadness. Eventually I would fall asleep. When I awoke the next morning, I felt like a new man. The experience was very cathartic.

I have since learned to turn this approach into something a bit more, um, healthy. I have replaced the wine with journaling (better for my liver) and substituted the wallowing with a healthy dose of embracing the pain.

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7 Strategies For Running Your Business While Pursuing Your Passions

People often live by the saying: if you want to get something done right, you need to do it yourself. While I have heard people toss this phrase around like a badge of honor, there is no philosophy more toxic for an organization, especially small businesses. Businesses of any size are complex and it is unrealistic to think that a small number of individuals will have all of the necessary expertise. So how do you determine where to focus your attention?

To illustrate an example of what not to do, let’s take a look at how I used to run my own business.

When sales were slow, I would put all of my energy into selling. Once the sales pipeline was full, I would then focus 100 percent of my time conducting speeches and advising clients. This meant, of course, that my sales pipeline would eventually dry up and I would need to refocus on selling once again. At some point, I would realize that my products were no longer innovative—and no amount of selling will increase sales. Therefore, I would shift my efforts and deep dive into R&D mode, creating a new book, speech or product. And the cycle would continue over and over again.

This is what happens when you do everything yourself. It is inefficient. And worse, it is exhausting.

If you are a small business owner, you need to focus on the activities that are at the intersection of your passions, skills and value. That is, what do you love to do, what are you good at, and what creates value for others. For everything else, find suitable partners who can help you execute.

Start by making a list of all of the activities that your business needs to do: new product development, sales, marketing, customer service, order taking, fulfillment, IT, HR, etc. Go to whatever level of granularity feels right.

Then, for each activity, rate its passions, skills and value quotient from low to high: high passion activities are those you love to do; high skills activities are those where you have the necessary expertise to execute effectively; and high value activities are those that are strategic to your business.

The result gives you seven different targeting strategies:

Strategy 1: Target high passion/high skills/strategic activities

This is the sweet spot of your business. “Target” these areas and put most of your energies here. If this is your core business, then you have chosen wisely.

Strategy 2: Outsource low passion/low skills activities

If you neither like nor do an activity well, then outsource it to someone who enjoys it and has the skills to execute it at a higher level. This can be done through bartering, hiring employees, using contractors, summoning friends and family, revenue sharing or other creative collaborative strategies. Employ this strategy regardless of the value dimension.

Strategy 3: Minimize low passion/high skills/strategic activities

If you don’t want your job to become work, you probably want to outsource these capabilities as well. If you are starting out and finances are an issue, you may want to continue doing these activities for now then outsource at a more appropriate time. Given that they are strategic in nature, someone has to do them as they are critical to your businesses success.

Strategy 4: Learn high passion/low skills/strategic activities

If you love doing these activities, then you may wish to acquire the necessary skills. This can be done through a variety of means including training, mentoring or researching. If you anticipate a steep learning curve, consider finding a partner during the learning process who possesses these talents. This will help you move forward while gaining the necessary skills.

Strategy 5: Extend high passion/high skills/tactical activities

If you are passionate and skilled in a particular area and it is not currently strategic (i.e., tactical), consider how you might “extend” that capability. How can you make this a strategic part of your business? How can you create extraordinary value for customers by leveraging this expertise? Perhaps one way is to offer this service to others who are in a similar business. For example, professional speaking is my core business. However, something that I am both skilled at and passionate about is securing business with large corporations. I could offer this as a service to other speakers as a source of additional revenue.

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How Losing Personal Attachments Can Help You Realize Ambition

My friend Susanne and I were recently playing a trivia game, a game in which she excels. However, at one point, she got a couple wrong answers in row. “Urgh,” she blurted out, “every time I have a gut answer and change it, it was actually correct.”

This made me curious. Malcolm Gladwell, in the book Blink, said that we make our best decisions in a blink of an eye. Was this true in Susanne’s case? Or was her mind playing tricks on her? To test this out, we did a little—admittedly unscientific—experiment.

We turned to a set of trivia questions where you had to guess the year that different events took place, like the year President Ford survived two assassination attempts (1975), or the year Pete Rose set a National League consecutive game hitting streak record of 44 (1978).

For our experiment, we took 10 questions. I would read aloud the name of an event (like the signing of the SALT II treaty) and Susanne would instantaneously give me her “gut” answer. I marked those down She would then take a bit more time to apply some analysis and come up with a final “logical” answer. In this case, the correct answer is 1979.

The results?

Out of 10 questions:

• One of her “gut” answers was closer than her “logical” answer—but only by one year.
• Four responses were unchanged after applying further reasoning. This means that 40% of the time, her “gut” answer and “logical” answer were the same.
• Five times, when she changed her “gut” response, her “logical” answer proved to be closer to the real date, often significantly closer.

What does this mean? Well, given that our study was not statistically valid, not much. However, it does highlight an interesting point.

Humans get attached to things—in this particular case, it was Susanne’s gut responses.

Furthermore, when we change an answer that was originally correct to give a final answer that is wrong, we kick ourselves. The irony is that we are much less likely to remember the situations where our gut answer was wrong and our final answer was correct.

This correlates to a study done with college students who were given a multiple-choice exam. The test administrators developed it in such a way that they could track when a student changed an answer.

After the students received their results, the examiner asked if, when the student changed a particular answer, whether they believed that their first answer was correct more often or not. Nearly all of the students believed that their first answers, or “gut” answers, were in fact usually correct, and that when they changed their response they more often got it wrong. This was similar to Susanne’s initial belief.

However, the study showed that the students’ final answers were more often correct than their gut answers— and by a wide margin.

So why is it that these students believed that their initial reactions we more accurate?

One reason is attachment. In particular, we feel losses more powerfully than we notice gains. In fact, a recent study showed that a loss of a relationship activates the same parts of the brain that are associated with physical pain. Losses truly are painful.

The students and Susanne felt a “loss” when a correct gut answer was changed. But they barely noticed the “gain” associated with a wrong gut answer that was ultimately corrected. This is a small example of how attachment affects us, however if you really take an honest look, attachment permeates throughout our entire lives.

Human beings are like packrats. We collect everything: ideas, material possessions, and relationships. However, when packrats stumble across something new that they wish to acquire, they will drop what they are currently carrying and “trade” it for the new item. One might say that these tiny creates are free to explore the world unencumbered by the past. This is in complete contrast to what human’s do. It is rare for us to drop something once we have it. We find it difficult to let go.

What can we learn from this?

Take a look at what you have in your life. What are you attached to? Are you holding on to these things just because you already have them? Consider that these attachments may, in fact, be weighing you down and preventing you from being able to effectively operate or generate creative and fulfilling alternatives in your life. I suspect that people would love to reinvent their lives but haven’t done so because they are already invested in what they have.

How can you break free?

Take an inventory of your life: your belongings, your job, your friends, and your relationships. If you were to design your life from scratch, would you seek out these same things and people? Or, would you make different choices?

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How to Be Selfless by Being Self-Centered

I travel the world extensively. And during these jaunts I am always interested to hear of the differing points of view held by others about American culture. One commonly-held perception is that Americans are self-centered, believing that they are the center of the universe.

There is some truth to this perspective. On the whole, American culture is individualistic.

Studies have been conducted illustrating the differing impact of independent versus interdependent cultures; Americans being independent and Asians, for example, being interdependent.

An article in New Scientist Magazine titled “Self-Centered Cultures Narrow Your Viewpoint” reported that cultures emphasizing individualism fail at being able to infer another person’s perspective. Cultures that emphasize interdependence, on the other hand, are easily able to put themselves in the shoes of others and be more empathetic. A lack of empathy can certainly give the perspective that an individualistic society is self-centered.

To illustrate the difference between individualistic and interdependent culture, the study used the example of a U.S.-based company that attempted to improve productivity by telling its employees to “look in the mirror and say ‘I am beautiful’ 100 times before coming to work.” In contrast, a Japanese supermarket instructed its employees to “begin their day by telling each other ‘you are beautiful’.”

But is being self-centered really all that bad?

Perhaps I can offer up a slightly different definition for self-centered. It depicts a way of being self-centered that might actually be beneficial.

To start off, I am not suggesting that people should be selfish. I think of selfish as being “exclusively concerned with oneself.” And while selfish and self-centered are found to be synonymous in the dictionary, being self-centered—in my opinion—is entirely different.

Centering is what you base your life on—what you focus your attention on.

My parents are children-centered. For them, my sister and I are the most important part of their lives. They live vicariously through us, listening intently as we share our day’s events or track our whereabouts via Facebook.

I have friends who are spouse-centered in that they do everything to please their partner.

Many of my friends are work-centered. Their job is the most important aspect in their life. They get meaning from their career. It is no surprise that men are twice as likely to die during their first five years of retirement, than they are prior to retirement. [NOTE: Being work-centered is different than “marrying your work.”]

Others are service-centered. They give their lives to charity and others. They sacrifice their own well-being for their cause of choice.

In fact, in an apparent attempt to shed the self-centered label, I have seen the pendulum swing so far over in some areas that there has become a complete disregard for one’s own self.

As a simple illustration, several years back, I had conducted a survey for a book that I was writing covering individual’s relationships to goals. The study uncovered that 53 percent of people agreed with the statement: “I sometimes get the feeling that I am living my life in a way that satisfies others (friends, family, co-workers) more than it satisfies me.”

Is this healthy?

This leads me to the benefits of self-centering…

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Kit Kat Video on Working Hard

I love this video. I was just in Mexico on vacation and I saw all of the vacationers working hard while the locals were enjoying the sea and sun. It made me think about this commercial for Kit Kat. Ah, so true…

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