The Hard

All of it’s related this week.

Bad Times in My Head

Depression. Guilt about depression. Shame for said depression. Believing my feelings are invalid. :-/ Not good times.

Is it over? It’s not as bad as it was over the weekend, but not sure it’s over yet. We’ll see.

Feeling a bit burned out on sewing

Mostly because I’m not sure I can get it and other things I want to do done in time. I can probably get the cotehardies finished, but the hose and the hood and the shifts… not so much. Unless I take time off work, which I can’t since I’m already going to be out of days due to Pennsic. Alas.

Not really able to enjoy my me time… even though I need it

Has to do with the burnout and the guilt. How can I be spending time on me when X, Y, and Z need to get done too?! Not that I have energy to work on X, Y, and Z. It’s just bad.

May have taken on more than I can handle

Gave up one SCA position for another. The other’s more aligned with what I want to do, but it may end up being more work than I bargained for. We’ll see.

The Good

Bweesness for Blogging

Last week I thought of a way to get some valuable experience for this blog. I’d love to be able to tell people to go out and start a business doing what you enjoy doing, but as of today I’ve never actually had a side business of my own. So, I think I’m going to start one… and blog about the experience. The one caveat being that I’m already feeling overwhelmed. How can I take on more?

Also that’ll mean my life will consist almost entirely of money making or potential money making activities. I don’t know how comfortable I am with that. :-/

Still this is a good thing. It’ll be valuable life experience if nothing else.

Chore Schedule

We have a roommate now, so we came up with a chore schedule with everything that needs to be done in order to make everyone happy. So far so good, although it’s only been up for half a week. Methinks think it’ll work, though, because of the accountability. I don’t want to frustrate both Aaron and the Roommate.

The Learning

Sovereignty

Havi writes a lot about Sovereignty, and for a while I didn’t see the value of applying those ideas to my life. Respecting your capacity is over-rated. A lot of people do less than they are capable of. I don’t want to sell myself short. Etc. But this weekend I started thinking that respecting my current capacity to do things might be a good idea.

I have a hard time saying no to things I would want to do if I had infinite time and energy. So I say yes to positions, or go to events and then don’t enjoy myself because I really ought to be doing something else. At events I’ll often beg out early if I realize that’s what I did. I feel better afterward. Positions are a lot harder for me to quit for some reason. :-/

The thing is, no one is happy when I say yes to things I can’t really do or stay in positions I can’t do well. I just need to say something like, “I’m sorry, my intuition says that that’s not the right thing for me to be doing right now. Have Fun/Good Luck!” It’s hard because it’s rejection. I don’t like to be rejected. I don’t like to dole out rejections. But people still aren’t happy when I say yes when I really should have said no.

So, I need to figure out what my boundaries are. I have a lot of data to work with now. I should be able to come up with something reasonable.

No “Weekly Check-in” this week because it turned into this.

On Friday I finished the book, Mastery, by George Leonard. Very good book, especially considering how short it is. There’s a lot of stuff from it I could write about, but for this post I’m going to discuss only one thing: the mindsets people have when they learn a new skill. After reading about these mindsets I realized that I haven’t had the master’s mindset for several activities I’d like to master.

Hackers and Obsessers

A person with the hacker mindset gets to some level of proficiency in a skill and then stops doing the work to improve. As an example, someone who goes out dancing every week, but has only taken a beginner class and has no intention of increasing his skill beyond that has the hacker mindset. He’s developed a certain level of competence and is either content to stay at that level indefinitely or would like to improve but doesn’t feel compelled to do the work to get there.

A person with the obsessive mindset will try to force himself to improve faster than is naturally feasible. Let’s say our dancer finished taking the beginning dance class and jumped straight into an intermediate class. He’s struggling with intermediate stuff because he hasn’t mastered the beginner techniques. If his reaction is to force his way through it, he’s obsessive. He’s probably going to injure himself.

I alternated between the hacker mindset and the obsessive mindset in school. Most of the time I’d do the minimum amount of work to get the maximum grade… or if not maximum, at least a grade I could live with. I resented being asked to go above and beyond. I’d try to coast for as long as I could. What was the point in mastering anything when I’d get an A if I did less? If I minimized the amount of time I spent on school stuff I could spend more time doing fun things, right?

For exams I’d jump into obsessive mode in a valiant attempt to pass the tests. I’d pull all-nighters studying, or spend a week or two before the test attempting to learn everything I was supposed to learn until then. By senior year of college this often meant years of material I’d never figured out. Not fun. And not very effective. :/

I’ve, regrettably, been a bit of a hacker (and sometimes obsessive) with music too. When I had piano lessons I never got into the “regular daily practice” habit. With recorder I spent a few months learning what I needed to learn and then happily hacked my way along. I’ve gotten as good as I have just by showing up to dance practice and playing for dancers. Conscious practicing? What’s that? The thing is I’d like to master some instrument, so realizing I’ve been a hacker all these years was a bit of a shock. If I continue this I’ll never master anything.

Dabblers

A person with the dabbler mindset tries something, encounters some difficulty, and then quits. The dabbling dancer is one that takes the beginner lesson, and soon after quits because “it’s not his thing” or “it takes too long to get any good”. Often he’s too ashamed of looking like the inept beginner that he is. He doesn’t realize that in order to gain competence he has to go through the beginner phase.

I’ve dabbled in SO MANY things, but four things in particular come to mind because I keep dabbling, quitting, and going back a few years later. They are languages, stringed instruments, jazz, and drawing. With languages and drawing I quit because I’m afraid to look stupid and they take a really long time to master. With Jazz, I can’t see the path for getting where I want to go. With string instruments… they’re really hard? I’m actually making some progress on the second two right now. I’ve picked up the ukulele, and have made quite a bit of progress on it alright. The goal is to use it as a stepping stone to guitar and to jazz.

Masters

The master mindset is a lot of things, but most importantly it means that when you’re on a learning plateau (i.e. you working hard but aren’t making on progress) you keep practicing, keep trying to make progress. What’s more you enjoy the practicing. Goals aren’t your primary focus, although you do still have goals. If our obsessive dancer had the master mindset his reaction to not doing well in the intermediate class would be to quit the intermediate class and work on the foundation material he still needed to master. Maybe he’d repeat the beginner class or maybe he’d go to open dancing and practice with some of the more experienced dancers. He’d accept where he was and do what he had to do. He’d also enjoy dancing where he’s at now, or at least consider the end goal worth the temporary awkwardness he’s going through.

I’ve had the master’s mindset in a few things. Three that come to mind are swing dancing, sewing, and intimate relationships.

When I started swing dancing I had the master’s mindset. I loved every bit of it. I learned a lot in the classes. I went to open dancing and wasn’t afraid to practice with the advanced dancers even though I was an awkward beginner. I practiced a lot and I loved the practicing. I’d still be dancing now if Aaron had the same interest.*

I love the process of sewing. I love sewing a straight seam on the machine. I love sewing cuffs on by hand. I also enjoy completing ambitious projects. The combination of these two things, liking the process and being ambitious, are the reasons I keep sewing and keep improving at sewing. I suffer through the visualization and fitting and refitting and refitting and refitting of a sleeve because ultimately I like sewing and the end is worth it. If I only cared about the end garment and felt ambivalent the sewing part, I wouldn’t sew. I’d just buy all my reenactment garb or have someone make it for me.

I had only one boyfriend prior to Aaron. We dated for two years in high school. I took the relationship very seriously. I was willing to work through whatever problems we had (assuming they were workable**), and all in all tried to be the best partner I could be. Not surprisingly I wasn’t the one to end the relationship. With Aaron, I feel the same way. I enjoy the process of being in a relationship. I like having date nights, I’m willing to have awkward intimate conversations that need to happen, I’m willing to admit I need to work on my issues with housework, etc. I want us to thrive. I love the practice and I have goals. I’m on the master’s path.

There’s More to Say, but…

…this post is already pretty long. Even though I just finished the book yesterday, assigning names to the different mindsets has already been useful. I’ve realized that in some areas I don’t have the master’s mindset and I wish I did. *cough*Music*cough*

I can also see it being useful for interacting with other people. There are a lot of hackers and dabblers in the SCA, and having a name for them will make it easier for me to deal with them positively. It’s OK to be a hacker or a dabbler. I just need to not expect everyone to be on the master’s path.

So, yeah, really good book. Highly recommend it. May write more about it in the future.

* We met through swing dancing, so it’s not that Aaron doesn’t know how to dance, he’s just has more of a hacker attitude than I do. As in he’d go to workshops if I was interested, but wouldn’t be pro-active about it. It was really important to me to be able to share the same level of passion about dancing with my significant other, so rather than give up Aaron I gave up dancing and replaced it with music.

** I learned later that my first boyfriend is gay, and had just been figuring that out around the time he broke up with me. Gay is not a workable problem. I stopped talking to him for reasons independent of him being gay, but that’s another story…

After I read Pillars of the Earth last summer I decided to put off reading the next book, World Without End, because Pillars destroyed my week. In a good way, mind you, but still. I couldn’t afford that kind of thing two weeks in a row. Or even two weeks in as many months. Also I wanted something to look forward to.

Now that the wedding’s over and we don’t have any TV shows to compulsively watch, I decided last weekend that I was ready to have my life eaten by a good book again. World Without End has definitely been delivering. I’m still not done with it, and I’ve had to read the book summary and skip around to the sections I was really looking forward to in order to keep myself from going insane.

Life is a Lot Better When You Want to Improve at Your Job

You’ll make more money. You’ll be more effective. You’ll more easily be able to switch jobs. People will be more able to handle it when you make mistakes. Etc.

Conversely, if you don’t want to improve at your job you won’t maximize your earning potential, you won’t be very effective, you’ll have a hard time finding another job in your field, and you won’t be very happy. It’s not fun feeling like you could be making more of your life if you were doing something else.

8 Hours Is Not Enough

I like the feeling of not being busy. I like playing with the cat, chit-chatting with Aaron, watching favorite TV shows, and spending time with friends and family. (Although sometimes the last one can feel like a chore…) I like choosing what to do based on what I feel like doing rather than based on what’s on my list.

I also like making progress on projects. I like being able to say I’m one step closer to my goals. I like making things. I like working through my mental blocks. I like practicing musics. I like learning about new things.

The 8 hours when I’m not at work and I’m not sleeping often don’t feel like enough time to relax, produce things, and do dishes. I also tend to get resentful about not having enough time to pursue worthwhile projects or having to choose between a Project and playing with the kitty (or the husband). Saying no is hard when I really do want to say yes.

I think the solution is to accept where I am… that I don’t have all the time in the world. I also need to remind myself that this state is temporary, and eventually my time will be much better aligned with my aspirations.

Online Shareable Lists are Cool

One of the reasons I wanted an iPhone was to have shared lists with Aaron. When I finally got one last fall I didn’t end up putting any list sharing software on it because there didn’t seem to be any good ones.

This week I had another look and found Listingly, which does just about everything I want. Aaron and I now have simple, shareable lists available anywhere that has internet access. Easy to update using my phone too. If there’s anyone you’d like to share to-do lists with, you should take a look at this site.

Building a Backlog of Content

I’m working on writing a backlog of well written content for TPLT. Once I get enough posts in there I’ll start posting them on Wednesdays in addition to the weekly check-in.

That’s it for now. Have a good weekend!

Self-Consciousness

When it comes to this blog I’m incredibly self-conscious. I feel like a fraud. I have a hard time telling people what I write about and feel like I need to defend why I want to write what I write. I need to get over this. The best way to do that is write about stuff I know. So that is what I will do… after the wedding.

Plans

After the wedding this blog will be my top priority. (After usual things like keeping up my current job, keeping my relationships afloat, not letting the house deteriorate too much… etc.) Basically Wedding Crapé will be replaced by Blogging Crapé.

Second to this will be music stuff. Specifically recording an album of Italian Renaissance dance music with Aaron and various other musicians from around these parts.

Third is artsy stuff like sewing myself a new Medieval dress or two for Pennsic. (I’m tired of all the unflattering cotton stuff I have, and my new Tudor Wedding Garb is too nice for camping.) Also I’d like to experiment with making period jewelry and kids clothes to sell. And maybe putting pockets in my skirts.

I will keep this order of precedence in mind.

Letting Go

Methinks I need to let go of some commitments that are weighing me down right now and will weigh me down even more if I try to pursue my already mentioned plans. At the moment, I’m holding on… doing the minimum… but I’m not growing as a leader and the people I’m supposed to be leading are suffering for it. Also I see people who would do a much better job in my place. I shouldn’t stop them from shining.

But it’s hard. I feel guilty for not wanting to grow into these positions. I had dreams for myself and they no longer fit. At the same time I know that feeling guilty about not fulfilling past dreams is silly. It doesn’t make me do what I need to do to be the right person for the job. It just makes me feel bad.

Also, it’s not like I can’t go back to these positions later. I could definitely see myself doing that at some point.

Spending to Earn

I’m thinking about spending money on this Blogging project of mine. I want a better design for the site and I have someone in mind to do it. But that will cost $$. I’ve also been looking for a community to help me get over my business/blogging related mental-blocks. I think I’ve found one that would be a good fit for me, but it costs $$. My hyper-sensitive instinct says paying money for such “help” is a scam or something, but if I view it through the lens of “it’s a class” it’s not so bad.

The trick is I need to block out the time to actually make use of it. It’s not going to be something where I just show up and have everything done for me. I’m going to have to pay money and work. But I think in the end it’ll be worth the effort. I’ll about it for another few weeks before I make any serious commitments. Plus there’s a wait list so I may not even get in.

At this point I trust myself to keep going with this blogging thing. I’ve been doing it for over a year and a half. I’d still really like doing it and want to improve at it. It’s worth throwing money at. Also throwing money at anything not related to music is a big mental block of mine so… yeah.

That’s about it for now. A week from Sunday is The Wedding. You can expect a Weekly Check-in next Friday. After that I’ll be on my honeymoon in Colorado. I’ll try to have some post ready for that Friday. It won’t be a check-in because… I won’t be there for the checking in. But it’ll be something.

Whee!

If you live like no one else, later you can live like no one else. ~ Dave Ramsey

Life is a journey, not a destination. Enjoy the Journey. ~ Anonymous

Sacrifice now; Enjoy later.

Life’s too short to not enjoy every moment.

These ideas are puzzling. How can you enjoy the journey if you’re in the sacrificing phase? Isn’t the first quote all about focusing on the destination? Is it possible to live both ideas simultaneously? Are they mutually exclusive paths?

To the last question, I think the answer is no, they aren’t mutually exclusive. The contradiction only occurs on the extreme ends of each idea.

If you’re sacrificing to the point where your life no longer has any joy, you by definition aren’t enjoying the journey. If you’re focusing so intently on the future goal that you’ve lost sight of where you are right now, you’re seeing life as a destination, not a journey.

If you over focus on the journey and have no goals, you’ll be happy–maybe–but you won’t amount to much. And if you over focus on the present moment you may develop a tendency toward reckless behavior: spending beyond your means, jumping impulsively into and out of relationships, living dangerously. It’s all about now, right?

Neither idea in the extreme is good. Ideally you want both. You want to enjoy the journey to achieving great things. You want to live in the moment AND look forward to the future. Let’s look at some examples of how to do that.

Example: Getting Out of Debt

The sacrifice here is money. If you want to get out of debt you have to spend less than you earn. You have to give up buying stuff. You have to sacrifice.

You could do this the hard way by focusing on the end goal of no more debt, trim everything away, have no life, no friends, no joy. Your life is all about getting rid of debt. If you manage to keep this up, yes, you’ll get out of debt, but it’ll be at a cost higher than the money you paid to the credit card company. You’ll probably have accumulated quite a bit of resentment for the months (years?) you spend over-sacrificing. With resentment you run the risk of overspending again because “you deserve to have fun now”. You could also go the other extreme and become a scrooge-like miser. You have no friends and no fun, but you’ve got money…

You could also do this the better way by learning to enjoy being frugal. Get the most out of every dollar you spend. Fully enjoy a single orange instead of eating 5 while watching TV. Enjoy cutting out the stuff that makes you feel guilty. Eventually you’ll get out of debt, and when you do you won’t have any resentment. The time you spent trimming your spending improved your quality of life. Why would you go back to your wanton ways?

Example: Getting to a Healthy Weight

The sacrifice here is tasty unhealthy food and a sedentary lifestyle. You have to eat healthier. You have to eat less. You have to exercise.

You could do this the hard way by going on an extreme diet. You will lose weight that way if you stick to it. But it’s not sustainable. You might get to your goal weight, but do you really want to live that way? Probably not. Do you want to spend your life doing exercise you don’t enjoy? Probably not. Not surprisingly when most of try such a lifestyle change we usually give up after a few weeks days.

The better way is to pick healthy foods you like. Slowly change your diet. Slowly change your lifestyle. Do the kind of exercise you like to do. Over time you’ll get to where you want to be. You’re still sacrificing. You still have a goal. But it’s not suffering. There’s no resentment.

Example: Starting a Side Business

The sacrifice here is time. Time for friends and family. Time for hobbies. Time for sitting around. It’s really easy to fall into the “focus too much on the destination” trap here.

There are several components to doing this while enjoying the journey.

First, love what you’re doing. If you love your work, you’ll almost automatically enjoy the journey.

Second, remind yourself that it’s temporary and enjoy the imbalance. Imbalance can be fun! Ask anyone who’s gone to a convention.

Third, figure out what’s essential to your life and keep doing those things. For me that’s family and friends, music, and deep thinking. Focus on maximizing the value you get out of the time you put in. As in, skip the chit chat about the weather when talking to your Significant Other. Don’t zone out when playing music. Don’t read feeds while attempting to write a blog post.

So yeah, you can definitely do both if you want to. And when you do try to do both, you get the benefit of sustainability (i.e. you’ll be able to maintain your destination state when you get there) and avoiding resentment. Is it easy? Not usually. Most of the time it’s a lot easier to think of the extreme way to get something done or to not do anything at all. Is it worth the soul searching to try? Absolutely. Don’t we all want to make and keep our goals and enjoy life the whole way? That’s why enjoying sacrifice is on the path less traveled.

9 ) Sometimes People Need To Be Shut Up
No one likes sitting at a 3 hour meeting where the main topic ends up being “whether or not we should require everyone to wear nametags”. Also no one likes being at a meeting where one or two people have the floor and 98% of what they say is meaningless.

On the other hand, a meeting that moves from one topic to another in which everyone has a chance to speak, but not too much time, is great. Everyone feels productive. No one feels that someone’s monopolizing the floor. We want this kind of meeting but most meetings I’ve been to (and unfortunately quite a few I’ve presided over) have been like the first type.

The main reason why my meetings tended to cater to the longwinded was that I’ve had the belief that interrupting someone is the GREATEST SIN EVAR. This is bad and makes all of the succinct people irritated. If this is a problem for you, here are a few simple solutions (some of which I’ve even tried!).

• Send out an agenda ahead of time and ask the longwinded people to send you a summary of their thoughts before the meeting.
• Limit the responses of everyone. Use a timer. This is kind of harsh for the 98% of people at your meetings who don’t have this problem, though.
• When you’re notice someone’s taking a while to get to the point, interrupt and ask them to get to the point, or interrupt and see if you can sum up for them. Ask if your summary is accurate in their eyes. The glory of this kind of interruption is that you aren’t really cutting them off. They still get to have their say, and even more than that they know they’ve been understood.

10 ) Calmness Trumps Defensiveness Every Time
If you get emotional at your meeting, you lose. If you freak out and have a tantrum… you lose. Calmness about your rightness is important. People will respect you more.

11 ) Sometimes People Just Want To Be Told What To Do
Compulsory democracy isn’t necessarily a good thing. The pace of choir practice is a lot slower when I try to get the choir to lead themselves. Not everyone has the time or inclination to spend time pondering how to sing the music or how to pronounce the lyrics. Heck, a lot of the time I don’t really want to put in the extra time/effort either.

Encourage people to be proactive, but don’t force it. Don’t worry too much about being too totalitarianism. If you take it too far, people will let you know and forgive you for it if you fix it.

12 ) Fully Think Through Your Proposals
Going back to that major proposal I passed for Swing Ann Arbor, the fact that I thought everything through helped a lot with getting people on board. People trusted that it would succeed since I’d thought about just about everything.

Another thing I wanted to do was to change the tone of Swing Ann Arbor. I started going swing dancing in Ann Arbor, it was right after I got back from Austin. The Austin swing is (or at least was… I haven’t been there in years) incredibly friendly. I made lots of friends easily and was remembered by a few of the good dancers. It was a great experience. When I got to Ann Arbor, things felt different… and not in a good way. After months of going regularly people I danced with every week still didn’t remember my name… yeah… it just wasn’t that fun. As president I wanted to fix that.

Few people on the board agreed with me that there was a problem, though… and in my mind they were part of the problem. I had no idea how to convince them there was a problem, nor did I have any proposals for how to systematically fix it either. Also, any ideas I did have required more time than I was willing to give. Unsurprisingly, between my trying to cut corners and my inexperience I damaged some relationships. Alas. The main point here is if you don’t have a lot of clarity on an issue, you should be wary about attempting to deal with a problem directly, especially if you can’t convince people on your team that there’s a problem.

13 ) Pass Proposals That Take Sense for Your Group Where It Is Right Now
The SAA proposal to add more classes was a bit overambitious and didn’t fully address the issues the group was facing. I tried to arrange a track of advanced classes so that intermediate dancers, like myself, would still benefit from going to classes. What we really needed, though, was a strong base of dancers who were confident with the basics first. Unsurprisingly the classes that did that were the most successful. The intermediate / advanced classes… not so much.

14 ) Preparation is Rewarded
The days I’ve fully prepared for choir rehearsal have always been the best rehearsals. I’ve gotten a lot done. The choir’s learned a lot. Honestly, I’m amazed that I don’t prepare regularly given how much better things go when I’m prepared.

15) Preparation is Hard to Do
Preparation is kind of like exercise. While you’re doing it you sometimes feel good, and after you’ve done it you feel excellent. But it’s really hard to get up the willpower to do it in the first lace. Convincing myself to focus and figure out a day or two before rehearsal what I need or want to to do at the next rehearsal is not trivial.

Having compelling goals helps this. (Huh, who’d have though…) Having a lifestyle setup that supports this is also immensely helpful. If you and everyone in your household knows and respects that every Friday after work you spend an hour on preparing for rehearsal, it gets a lot easier to take the time to actually prepare. Funny that.

16 ) Leadership Takes Both More and Less Time Than I thought it did
In certain respects, leadership doesn’t take all that much time. With being SAA president I didn’t have to be at every weekly swing dance. I only had to organize the monthly meetings, preside over said meeting, and make sure all the administrative stuff with being a student group was taken care of. Really it wasn’t that much.

Similarly with choir, I only really need to figure out the day of what we’re going to sing, and then be there every week to facilitate the rehearsal.

MOAS, I have 4 reports a year I have to send in, and then I have to organize the weekly workshop, most of which are recurring ones anyway.

At the same time, if you want the group to flourish you will have an invisible weight on your shoulders all the time. You have to coordinate with your executive board. You have to prepare for choir practice. You have to encourage people to come to the weekly workshops. Writing emails can take a while. Doing publicity can take a while. And these are the kind of activities where it’s hare to measure how long they take. Some don’t actually take that long, but they can feel like they take a long time. Some zap your mental energy. (How do you quantify that drain?) In short, it’s complicated.

Do I think Leadership is Worth it?
Absolutely. When something I’ve worked on turns out well it feels immensely wonderful. Working with other people to create something big and cool is also great. It’s a great way to develop yourself and come face to face with your limitations. You meet a lot of people. You become a better person for it. (Hopefully) Really, I’d recommend leadership to anyone who wants a systematic way to improve themselves and the community around them.

1 ) Easiest Way to Make Connections
As a leader, you are visible to your group. People are more likely to remember your name. You’ll have to interact with others in order do complete your projects. Really, it’s a no brainer. As a leader you will meet people.

When I was president of SAA, I presided over meetings. That alone got people to recognize me. I also acted as a bridge between SAA and the other Ann Arbor swing group, so I interacted with the other group too. To this day, I’m still mostly remembered by the Ann Arbor swing people that were around during my tour of service even though I haven’t been dancing in months. More than that, I wouldn’t have any reservation about asking them to help me organize an event or something.

2 ) People who never talked to you before will all of a sudden take an interest in you
This is something that’s sort of distressed me, but seems to come with the territory. People who wouldn’t give you the time of day when you weren’t in a position of power — even if you were an active member before — will now remember your name and talk to you. This happened both as SAA president and as MOAS. If you’re anything like me, you’ll wonder how to treat these people. Is it that they’re attracted to power or something?

I struggled with this for a while until I realized something: Unless you’re in a leadership position you personally aren’t vital to the functioning of the group. You aren’t someone that a general member of the group ought to know. There’s only so much time and energy in your life, it’s best to spend it on important people (and people who you likely to like). A leader qualifies as an important person. I don’t totally agree with this philosophy, but I can understand it… and may even unconsciously act on it too. So, yeah, just because someone gives you the time of day primarily because you’re a leader doesn’t necessarily make them bad people.

3 ) Service is King
People will love you and want to work with you if you do service. With the MOAS position I volunteered to take care of room scheduling and that’s done a lot to endear the other leaders to me. Same thing with being choir director. The more you give, the more get. The important thing here is not to do service with the expectation that you’re going to get anything out of it other than the joy of seeing something work well. People will sense your ulterior motives and won’t like you all that much.

4 ) Detaching Yourself from Your Ideas is a good thing
I mentioned this in my last post on detachment. Basically if you want to get a proposal passed you have to be detached from most of the details. For example, in SAA I wanted to try a totally new schedule for classes. I wanted to turn SAA into more of a teaching organization than a social dance organization. That took quite a bit of doing. I made an extensive proposal that took account of everything, but most importantly I left lots of areas open to adjustment. I didn’t care how we phased it in or where the extra practices took place. What I cared about was that that there were more classes and that we changed things fairly soon.

The proposal got passed, and of all the things I tried to start while President, I think that was the most successful.

5 ) Contempt is Bad
In Gladwell’s book Blink he has a chapter that discusses an instance in which a scientist/psychologist type person takes a look at a video of a newly married couple and can tell in an instant whether or not a couple would stay married or get divorced. The primary factor he looked for was contempt, a state where one partner does not respect the other.

Unsurprisingly, if you have contempt for the people you’re working with you’re in for a bad experience. Within a few months of being the head of SAA I developed contempt for my fellow board members, and unsurprisingly things went downhill from there. Ah, hindsight. Whatever you do, when you notice yourself developing disrespect for your anyone in organization WATCH OUT. Chances are there’s been some misunderstanding.

6 ) Criticism comes with the Job
When you’re in a leadership position, someone’s inevitably going to criticize you. It’s OK. It doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It doesn’t mean you’re doing a bad job. What it does mean is you need a method for dealing with it. If you take it personally, feel sorry for yourself, and ask why they aren’t attacking other people in the group… you’ll be doing a disservice to everyone else you’re serving.

7 ) No matter what you do not everyone will be happy
Going on #6, not only will you be criticized, but not everyone will be happy with your decisions. Even your good decisions. The way to know if your decisions are actually good is to ask yourself “is this aligned with where the group wants and/or needs to go?” You also need to look at the criticism you receive, see the criticism.

If you’ve determined the criticism is misguided, should you try to convince the other person of their wrongness? It depends mostly on how much you need to have them on your side and how much time you have. And even then, if you explain your position carefully and well and explain why their response doesn’t make sense and the response is to reiterate their position… it’s probably not worth your time to pursue it further.

8 ) The Loudest Person does not necessarily represent the whole group
This can be really hard to remember. In the choir the majority of the people there don’t have a strong opinion on the music, but one or two people do. I want people to feel welcome to give their opinions and know that it will be heard and acted upon. At the same time I know that it’s not always a good idea to obey what those one or two people suggest just because I’m trying to be amenable to other ideas.

It’s a balancing act. Sometimes it’s wise to listen. Sometimes it’s not. Again, this is best when you have a clear idea of what to measure up suggestions to. Is it aligned with what the group wants to do? How much time is being spent arguing points that don’t have clear answers? Etc.

More to come on Monday!

I used to take this to mean that the true hero was the antithesis to the characters in those stories. The poor person who has lots of people to share his joy with is better than the businessman. The person who has a small social circle (but incredibly close!) is way better than the woman with lots of acquaintances. The stay at home parent is better than the working parent.

Then I read lots of books and blogs which told me otherwise. Or at least discussed in great deal how to obtain large amounts of wealth, how to make many weak ties, and how to be successful in the workplace. On top of that these same sources mention ideas that are also important to me: service to others, changing the world to be a better place, living life with passion and fervor. The people that write these things don’t sound particularly depressed with their lot in life. What gives?

On top of that I realized that the people I thought were the heroes didn’t have the greatest lives either. Being poor means you’re unable to do things that enrich your life. For instance, a poor person doesn’t have the freedom to choose to eat healthfully. Nor do the poor have the freedom to send their kids to the best schools (or homeschool them), to private piano lessons, or whatever. A poor person can’t live in safe neighborhoods because he can’t afford it. It also probably indicates that he isn’t really doing a lot of service for the world. (Although, of course, there are plenty of exceptions to this rule.)

The person with only a few close friends is not in all that great a position either. She’s dependent on them to help her out, since that’s all she’s got. After a while they could become resentful of her frequent calls, and if one of them changes who they are (for better or worse) she’s stuck either changing with said friend or risking losing said friend. Also she doesn’t have the freedom to become all that she can be because there’s a good chance she’d lose her close friends. And when she needs a new job her close friends can’t really help her out because they all share the same social circle. So yeah, have too small a circle of friends (even close friends!) is not all that awesome.

Being a stay at home parent has its drawbacks too. It’s a funny situation in the home since the stay at home parent is dependent on his/her partner to put food on the table. The stay at home parent may develop an unhealthy attachment to his/her kids since he/she sacrificed 18 years of his/her working life to them. Etc.

The Middle Way
The truth is all of these observations are true. Neither the storybook path nor it’s opposite is optimal. What’s optimal lies in the middle, where the positives of both are combined. The successful business person who also has a rich personal life with lots of close friends is in a better position than the poor person who has lots of close friends. The person with lots of weak ties AND a close circle of friends is better than the one with just the close friends. The person who manages to spend lots of time with their kids and give to the community is in a better position than the one who’s solely focused on their kids.

What the stories tell you is where you should err. That is, you should err on the side of close relationships rather than material gains and weak relationships.

On combining both
The fundamental thing to keep in mind when you’re trying to gain worldly success and live a fulfilling life is to make time for the important. While you’re off amassing your wealth spend at least the minimum amount of time necessary with the people that make your life worth living: your family and close friends. It’ll probably be a bit less time than normal, but it’s really not about quantity, it’s about quality. Watching TV, reading together, and small talk, while nice are not the way to keep your relationship in good shape. Master the art of getting to the heartfelt, vulnerable, and intimate part of conversation as quickly as possible. It’s hard, but it’ll go a long way toward really maintaining your relationship.

When it comes to raising kids the same thing is true (quality over quantity), I’d personally prefer to err on the side of too much time. In this case the ideal is finding a way to spend the time with your kids and still be a part of work that inspires you. Blogging, to take a nice obvious example, is a great way since you aren’t bound to an office. Other “work from home” type work is good too.

To sum up, worldly success should not be dismissed. There’s a reason people strive for it. But, you shouldn’t ignore the important people in your life either. The challenge is to make meaning with the small amount of time that you have.

Part 1: The Questions

What’s Your Favorite Thing to Do in Your Spare Time?
What do you do in your spare time? Watch TV? Read? Play golf? Spend time at your favorite non-profit? Play sports? Play music?

Would you like it if you could do it for several hours a day every day?

What Have You Secretly Always Wanted to Do?
Look back on your life and think about those times when you wished you could actually make a living doing some specific thing. What was that thing? Do you still sort of wish that was the case?

What makes you happy?
Does anything in particular fill you with lots of joy?

If You Could Retire Today What Would You Do?
I think I’ve heard or read this questions about a 1000 times in relation to figuring out what my ideal career is. It’s even mentioned in “Office Space”. Methinks its usefulness is a bit overstated since not all things you would do in retirement translate well to paid work. Just because you’d watch more TV and travel doesn’t mean you want to put in the effort to review a bunch of TV shows or start a travel blog. Still it can point you in the right direction and get you to consider turning your fun into service.

At the End of Your Life What Do You Want to Be Known For?
Do you want to be known as an excellent athlete, teacher, musician? How about as someone who’s helped a lot of people lead better lives? How about someone who has influenced others to live frugally? How about someone who loved life?

Part 2: The Preparation

Brainstorm Ways To Provide Value
How can you do the things you love in such a way that provides value to others?

If you like playing the piano, would you enjoy accompanying an instrumentalist? What about joining a dance band?

If you like teaching kids, could you be a tutor? Would you enjoy volunteering at a local boy scouts or girl scouts chapter?

Don’t feel too bad if you can only think of non-paying ideas. Also don’t worry if you don’t yet have the skills necessary to charge for your services. If you volunteer enough you’ll soon have the skills to start charging.

Reflect on your List
After brainstorming you’ll have a sizable list of things you could possible do with your life. Take a look at them and imagine yourself living a few of them. What would your life be like? Is it appealing? What does your gut tell you?

For a while I considered starting my own music shop. It was a good idea in theory, but when I seriously considered it and envisioned what my life would be like if I followed through, I realized that it just wouldn’t work for me.

Ask for Feedback
Be careful who you ask feedback from. Some people will shoot you down if you suggest anything that’s out of their realm of experience. Preferably ask for feedback from people who’ve done or tried to do what you’d like to do. You’re more likely to get accurate information from them.

Part 3: The Action

With some things there’s no way to tell if they’ll work for you until you try. Find an inexpensive way to get the experience you need so that you’ll know whether or not your current direction is the right one for you.

If you’re thinking about being a blogger, start blogging now. There’s no fee to get started.

If you’re thinking of starting your own retail shop, get a part time job at a similar one.

If you’re thinking about becoming a tutor, offer to tutor some people for free.

If you’re thinking about becoming a doctor or a nurse, volunteer at a hospital. And while you’re there make it a point to get some hands on experience. (Not just paper pushing.) You could also volunteer at a nursing home.

If you’re thinking about becoming a psychologist you could be a part of an listening program.

There’s virtually no career in the world that you can’t try out part time.

Hopefully this has given you a better idea of how to go about finding your current calling.

Step 2: Plan how to do it.

Step 3: Do it.

If the plan isn’t working go back to Step 2.

If the goal doesn’t feel right anymore go back to Step 1.