Highlights from the Internet: Part 11
Below you'll find part 11 of my collection of highlights from the internet. I read and highlighted most of it in the Pocket app.
Goals of Being
When you ignore the beingness aspect of a goal, you’ll likely sabotage the doingness part as well. It’s hard to take action when you’d rather procrastinate. If you’d rather play video games, how can you bring the beingness aspect that you enjoy while gaming into your other goals? What kind of player are you being in those game worlds? Are you being that player in other areas of life?
One sign that I have the beingness right is that I smile warmly when I think about my goals. It makes me happy to think about doing them. I look forward to working on them day by day. I’m not just motivated by the end result. I can savor the journey as well.
The Boring (and Vastly Underrated) Art of Planning
Once you’ve dedicated the time to plan, the next step is to break down everything you need to do in order to move forward on a project. To be successful, the plan needs to be way more granular than most people make it.
With a map drawn, you now need your itinerary. When will you start? How many days a week will you work? When do you expect to reach particular milestones?
All of this needs to be put in your actual calendar. You don’t need to break down a year-long project into daily increments, as this can be too tedious to update once there are inevitable changes. However, you should put down all of the key milestones. You should also include a weekly horizon showing your hourly time investments.
The final step of any good plan is that it should tell you what you need to do today. Not next week. Not tomorrow. Today.
Our hyperbolic discounting means that anything that’s more than a couple days in the future isn’t useful for motivating immediate action. And immediate action is the only kind that gets anything done.
You can go a step further and commit to particular hours for your plan.
6 unconventional ways to build focus, resilience, and calm in 2021
“When people have shared values and connection they are more likely to feel positive about their work.”
What Is a Spiritual Perspective?
Courage helps you find and follow a path with a heart in your relationships with different parts of life. At some point you’ll need to break from society’s expectations, so you can explore the aspects of these relationships that don’t agree with society’s plans.
Experiential Challenges
A nice way to think of 30-day (or longer) challenges is to see them as experiential gifts you give to yourself. How would you like to enrich your life? What experiences would you like to gain? What memories do you want to accumulate?
People who successfully complete these challenges rarely regret them. The gains in self-knowledge and wisdom almost always rise above the minor inconveniences and lifestyle adjustments.
What kinds of gifts will you value in the years ahead, even if they’re temporary experiences? What do you keep wondering about? Where do you keep asking, “What if?”
Your Relationship With Unreasonable Standards
To follow your own path with a heart and to get better results than you otherwise would, you have to be willing to do what other people think is strange or unreasonable. Since some of society’s rules about reasonableness have surely infected your own thinking as well this means that you also have to sometimes do what you perceive to be unreasonable. You have to challenge your assessments of what’s really reasonable and right for you.
Consider this: If no one is accusing you of being unreasonable, you’re doing the game of life all wrong.
Standards that may seem unreasonable to other people can yield wonderful results.
Heartstorming
I rely on heartstorming more than brainstorming for making decisions about what to do with my life. I imagine what would be fun, fascinating, courageous, a little bit insane, growth-oriented, social, creative, and so on. I look for emotional resonance.
A brainstormed goals list would include things like making a certain amount of money. That’s boring as hell, Mr. Scrooge. It’s logical, but why should the heart care? It probably doesn’t care. So where will the fire come from? Your motivation to act will probably evaporate as soon as you set a goal like that. Your money goal just makes everyone yawn.
Open a new page in your journal. Write at the top what kind of list you want to make. Then start typing or writing ideas. But instead of focusing on your brain to generate ideas, put your attention on your heart. Go into your heartspace, and listen from there. Invite your emotions to speak. Tell your logical brain to shut up for a while. Invite your heart to generate ideas.
Can You Trust a Life of Fun?
Fun is an invitation, not to do one thing forever, but to engage with life with your heart, not just with your head.
A huge risk that people tend to overlook is the risk of stagnation from being stuck in your head too much. The pursuit of fun, risk, and escalation are fantastic counter-measures.