Chapter 4 of Dan Airely’s Predictably Irrational opens with the following paragraph:

You are at your mother-in-law’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, and what a sumptuous spread she has put on the table for you! The turkey is roasted to a golden brown; the stuffing is homemade and exactly the way you like it. Your kids are delighted: the sweet potatoes are crowned with marshmallows. And your wife is flattered: her favorite recipe for pumpkin pie has been chosen for dessert.

The festivities continue into the late afternoon. You loosen your belt and sip a glass of wine. Gazing fondly across the table at your mother-in-law, you rise to your feet and pull out your wallet. “Mom, for all the love you’ve put into this, how much do I owe you?” you say sincerely. As silence descends on the gathering, you have a handful of bills. “Do you think three hundred dollars will do it? No, wait, I should give you four hundred!”

This is not a picture that Norman Rockwell would have painted. A glass of wine falls over, your mother-in-law stands up red-faced; your sister-in-law shoots you an angry look; and your niece bursts into tears. Next year’s Thanksgiving celebration, it seems, may be a frozen dinner in front of the television set.

During the rest of the chapter he describes how “market forces”–using money to pay for the value of something–and “social norms”–acting out of love or honor–don’t mix. In this case, attempting to pay your mother-in-law for her socially priceless home-cooked Thanksgiving meal is a very bad idea.

This story struck a nerve. I could easily envision my family reacting this way, and it’s the kind of thing that bothers me. What’s inherently wrong with putting a price on Thanksgiving? Is it actually priceless? Why are we uncomfortable thinking about it? It doesn’t make any sense.

Our Distant Relative the Chimpanzee

A few months years ago I read Frans de Waal’s Our Inner Ape, which shows how apes exhibit many of the tendencies we think of as unique to modern humans, including reciprocity. According to the book, emotionally close chimps have a fluid relationship. Neither chimp keeps score. They help each other out when they can and don’t worry about what’s owed. Chimps that aren’t close to each other care about what’s owed. They expect payback for favors. If chimp A extends himself for chimp B who he is not close to, A expects B to help out when he needs it. If B doesn’t there will be problems.

We experience the same thing all the time. If you help an acquaintance move his couch you expect that, barring extenuating circumstances, when you need to move your couch he’ll help you out. But if it’s your best friend or sibling it feels like a different situation. When you help them out, you aren’t thinking of it as insurance that you’ll get help later. You’re doing it because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Because it feels right.

As a rule, these sort of evolutionarily acquired behaviors show up as instinctive feelings. Fight or flight is a good example. Parental attachment to children is another. So it makes sense that we feel uncomfortable when our close friends keep score of favors. It’s instinctive.

How does this relate to Thanksgiving at your mother-in-law’s? I’m getting to that. First we have to talk about money.

What does Money Have to Do With it?

It’s just about impossible to fit money into social norms… for a number of reasons:

• It’s too neat. Reciprocity is instant. The score is always even.
• Most of us don’t have the means to pay for the gifts we are given. If you calculate how much you’d have to pay at a restaurant for the quality of a well cooked home-made meal… it’d be a lot. A multi-course holiday feast would be even more. Or how about getting help moving across town? Professional movers are expensive! If we had to pay for our friends’ services, many of us wouldn’t be able to afford it. And if you added to that a tip for them doing it without expecting to get paid… yeah.
• Putting a price on a gift given lovingly taints it. It’s gone from “gift” to “product to be purchased”. Doesn’t matter if you were generous with how much you thought it was worth, it’s still tainted. We don’t like it when someone tries to buy our love. It feels icky and wrong. You have to give a very convincing explanation to have money taken as a token of appreciation instead of a form of payment.
• Giving money says “You are a stranger.” When you go to a restaurant, you pay for the meal. The restaurant staff has scratched your back by giving you food and a pleasant atmosphere, and you scratch theirs by paying for the service with money. The restaurant owner, presumably, provided you with the meal primarily so he could get paid. You paid for it so you could complete the transaction as quickly as possible. Money is how mutually beneficial transactions between strangers happen.

Going back to Thanksgiving at Mom-in-Law’s, she got pissed that you tried to pay her because she felt she was being treated as a stranger, someone who can be paid off and never thought of again. And she thought you were trying to buy the gift she gave you out of love. Sure, you didn’t mean it like that, but her flipping out was instinctive.

So that’s why no one pays for Thanksgiving. Of course, Thanksgiving is a contrived example since most of us weren’t planning to pay Mom-in-Law in the first place, but this “you don’t pay family for favors” thing has other everyday implications…

There are certain things that are fundamental to human fulfillment. If these basic needs aren’t met, we feel empty, incomplete. We may try to fill the void through urgency addiction. Or we may become complacent, temporarily satisfied with partial fulfillment. … The essence of these needs is captured in the phrase “to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy.”
~Stephen Covey First Things First.

In last week’s post on things to consider when starting your business I mentioned in passing this thing called the “legacy project.” This week I’ll elaborate on what I mean by the term “legacy project” and why I think it’s important.

What is a Legacy Project

A common journaling exercise is to imagine your funeral (I know, morbid) and what you’d love people to say about you. Maybe it’s that you were the best parent to your kids or that your work helped change people’s lives for the better or that you always made people feel welcome. Your answer to this exercise is a clue as to what your legacy project should be.

A similar exercise is to imagine you’re nearing the end of your life and you’re looking back on what you’ve done. What things would leave you feeling satisfied. It could be that no one else values your rock collection, but if you made that rock collection as awesome as possible you’d consider that a life worth living. Again another clue as to what your legacy project.

Your legacy project is the project you work on to create your legacy–the things you’re remembered for–be it being the best parent you can be or creating the best rock collection you can.

How Legacy Applies to Business

When I started thinking about business, I didn’t make it a priority to figure out what my legacy should be. I just wanted a way to make money that wouldn’t make me feel sick. That’s it. So I picked ideas that seemed good (Great Lakes Early Music, Music Teaching, Small Business Web Marketing, etc.) only to find I’d get stuck. Sure some of the stuckness was from the specifics of that business (not wanting to be tied to a store, not wanting to be tied to Ann Arbor, etc.) but some of it was because of a deeper, fundamental problem. The businesses weren’t making the kind of impact I wanted to make.

If I had thought of Dragon Dormant 3 years ago, I would have dropped it. Sewing on its own isn’t enough of a motivator for me.

What I hadn’t realized was that I needed to have an outlet for creating my legacy. And not just that, I needed to feel content that I was spending enough time and energy on it before I could feel comfortable seriously pursuing other less-important-to-me projects… even if those “less important” projects were the ones bringing in the cash. I know, that sounds a bit crazy, but it was true for me.

The point here is that if you haven’t figured out what your legacy is or aren’t spending enough time on it to feel satisfied, you run the risk of major distraction during the start-up phase of your business and/or stuckness. Not good.

When you do have an outlet for creating your legacy, and feel content about how much time and energy you’re putting in, you’ll be able to put your all into your business and more business options will be open to you. Now that I have an outlet for my legacy project–this blog–I can pursue other money making avenues (Dragon Dormant, music teaching, tutoring) that wouldn’t have felt like “enough” before.

Signs You Need to Figure Out What Your Legacy Project Is

You may be thinking, “*Psh* Legacy? I’m too [young/worried about paying bills/whatever] to be thinking about that. It’s not an issue for me”. I say, hear me out. See if you’ve experienced any of these signs.

• You’re deeply unhappy with your career/major. People call you cynical. You feel like there are better ways for you to be spending your time than at the office or working on school work. There are things worth your time that you’d rather be doing.
• You feel guilty doing things that matter to you. Let’s say you love reading. If you guilty for the time you spend on it, that could be an indication that you aren’t spending enough energy on your legacy project. (“I should be working on my Project, not reading Dresden Files.”) It could also mean you have some belief that reading is a waste of time. Either way, if you’re feeling guilty you should try to determine where it’s coming from.
• You rarely/never experience flow. Flow is the state of intense focus where time passes differently and you get tons of stuff done. It’s an incredible feeling, and if you aren’t getting into it it could be because you don’t feel satisfied with how much energy you’re putting into your legacy project. (“I can’t afford to lose myself in music practice because I won’t have time for Project”)

If any of these characteristics apply to you, take a few minutes to do the following exercise. It won’t hurt, and you might learn something.

How to Find your Legacy Project

Let me start by saying that you won’t know what your legacy project is after one exercise. Finding your legacy project is an iterative process. Play with one idea for a while. After a few days/weeks ask yourself if it’s enough. If not, what is it missing? If it is enough, give it another few days/weeks and ask again. One exercise can’t tell you how you’ll feel about your idea two weeks from now. What it can do is give you some ideas to try.

Here’s an exercise to start with:

Answer these questions

• If you could only work on one project today, which one would leave you feeling the most satisfied?
• What’s important to you? Why? Think things like “being a good parent” or “creating the greatest rock collection”. Dig deep. No one has to see this but you.
• When’s the last time you experienced the flow state…. and felt like it was the most satisfying use of your time?
• What would you like to be remembered for?
• When you’re old and looking back on your life, what kind of life would like to see?

The answers to these questions will give you a glimpse of what your legacy should like like.

This isn’t the end, though because your answers will undoubtedly be too vague.

The next step,then, is to come up with some projects that are open enough to feel fulfilling and specific enough so that it’s not hard to see what the next steps are.

Example: Let’s say one of your answers was to be a great parent. That’s too vague. Being a great parent could mean lots of thing. What does that mean to you? What characteristics do you want your kids to have? Perhaps you want them to be really creative. That’s a project. It feels fulfilling and the next actions are clear. You could enroll them in an art class or schedule unstructured creative time at home or read books on how to inspire kids’ creativity. You get the idea.

Next, take the most exciting project you’ve come up with, and start working on it… or at least think about how you can start working on it. What can you cut from your schedule to make time for it? What mental blocks to you have to address?

Now you can start the iterative process, and I’ll get into that topic next week.

How This Would Have Helped My Younger Self

My 21-year-old self felt very uncomfortable contemplating her “legacy project”. She’d been told before that thinking about such things was a waste of time, and some part of her was afraid that that was true.

If she knew what I know now, she wouldn’t have listened to those people. She’d have tried more ideas, and thus would have stumbled on the right legacy project more quickly. All that angst was totally unnecessary.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

I think we all know that it’s a good idea to take control of our lives. Ideas like independence, self-actualization, autonomy are parts of the American identity, and they’re spreading throughout the world. We want to be powerful forces in our own lives.

And yet it’s now acceptable to blame our parents for our hangups. It’s acceptable to blame the schools and the economy for our joblessness. It’s acceptable to blame fast food restaurants for our bad diets and credit card companies for our crippling debt.

Disconnect much?

Taking responsibility for our lives isn’t easy and isn’t natural, but it’s something we know we ought to do. That’s why it’s on the path less traveled.

So, what’s stopping us from accepting responsibility?

We Expect that Authorities Know Better Than We Do
I’m no psychologist, but I’m willing to bet that anyone who feels controlled by their parents believes that their parents know more than they do. Their Inner Bunny takes on the voice of the especially difficult parent and reminds them of all the times said parent was right. This time is no different! Etc. Person can believe deep down that she’s right but she wants parent to see it that way too. That’s the only way to KNOW it’s right, after all. But parent is not perfect, and does not want to admit that, so person feels trapped.

The solution here is to be rebellious. Not stupid rebellious, of course, but when your heart of hearts tells you something that your parent won’t like, listen to your heart of hearts. Be kind to your parents, though. They’re not perfect and they’re probably trying their best.

…courage to change the things that I can…

We Fear We’ll Prove We Really Are Powerless
If you don’t try then there’s always hope that you could succeed. If you try you might prove that you can’t.

I used to have this problem in school. I didn’t want to try too hard, lest my best turn out to be mediocre. I wanted to be able to tell myself that if I put in a bit more effort I could have aced some test. It’s not a good habit if you actually care about learning the material.

With school, I never figured out a good way to get over this problem. I think perhaps if I cared more about the material than I did about my ego, my life might have been better. But that’s just speculation.

With other stuff the solution is twofold.

1. See Failure is part of the journey. Everyone messes up once in while. Most of us mess up a lot. The only time you’re really a failure, though, is if you quit trying. Learn to accept that. Learn from your mistakes. Failing will get a lot easier and you might just start to redefine failure as simple learning.
2. Take Small Steps. Make your next action toward getting out of your hole something you know you can accomplish. Don’t go on a starvation diet. Find something healthy you like to eat. Don’t trying waking up two hours earlier than normal every day. Try five minutes first. This won’t help if your overarching strategy is off, but with most habits you want to instill you’ll be a lot more successful. In the end you’ll save a lot of time by going slowly too, since you don’t have to go through the shame recovery phase.

…courage to change the things that I can…

Responsibility Sounds Like Shame
It’s not that hard to go into shame mode when you realize you could have made different, better choices. It’s even worse if all that time you knew you could have acted differently. You’re a bad person for having wasted so much of your life, right?

That’s not the point, though. The point of looking back is to see how much power you had. Hindsight it 20/20. Hopefully you’ll be able to trust that you have as much power now as you did then.

Forgive your former self. She wasn’t perfect. She was doing her best. Your responsibility to her is to do better today.

Responsibility is not shame. It’s accepting your own power.

…to accept the things I cannot change…

Sometimes Outside Forces Really Are in Control

You can do everything right and still get cancer. You can do everything wrong (well maybe not everything, but a lot of things) and live ’till you’re 100 and remember where you left your keys. Life isn’t always fair.

And because life isn’t always fair, why play the game as if it is? Why take responsibility at all? The rules can’t be trusted.

The thing is, on an individual level, the rules mostly work. The person you are after you start exercising will feel better than the person you were before you started. You might not feel as awesome as your sister, but that’s besides the point. You may not start out with a trust fund in hand, but if you play the game of life right you’ll probably be able to do what you want to do.

If you get cancer (or hit by a drunk driver or laid off in spite of doing excellent work or whatever) accept it as something you don’t have control over. Then focus on what you do have control over. How you want the rest of your life to get, for instance.

…wisdom to know the difference.

As I said, it’s acceptable these days to know why you have the problems you do and then not do anything. To assign responsibility to someone else for where your life goes. That’s not a good thing. It undermines your own power. And quite frankly your life is primarily your responsibility.

Taking responsibility for your life, acknowledging your own power, is difficult, but totally worthwhile. That’s why it’s on the path less traveled.

Also, I’ve heard that people experience these things differently. Some people hear a voice. Some see an image. What I write here is how I experience these things. Your mileage may vary.

With that said, let’s get on to the terms.

Heart of Hearts: This is the part of yourself that can’t be fooled. It communicates in feelings. When you ask yourself a question it’s the flash of feeling you get before you can verbalize your answer.

Sometimes you won’t be able to hear your heart of hearts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t have anything to say. If you’re out of practice, for instance, it will probably be very quiet and you need to listen harder in order to hear it. It could also be that you can’t handle the truth.

In general your Heart of Hearts has something to say about everything, even something as mundane as brushing your teeth in the morning. Mine says “Yes, this is the right thing to be doing. Why are you asking me?” Of course, I’m translating from a feeling, I don’t actually have a little voice in my head.

Intuition: You may have wondered, how do you know when your heart of hearts has something to say? The answer is Intuition. Intuition, like your Heart of Hears communicates nonverbally, but to call that communication a feeling would be a bit strong. It’s the “something is not quite right here” “feeling”. It’s the part that tells you something you spelled doesn’t “look right”. Or says that 2 * 254 = 502 doesn’t look right.

When your Heart of Hearts has something to say, but doesn’t feel comfortable talking to you, your intuition will let you know.

Like the bunny in this picture, your Inner Bunny can be quite destructive if left to its own devices.

Inner Bunny: I haven’t actually used this term before, but I probably will in the future so here’s the definition. Your inner bunny is old old programming. It’s the part that tells you food is good, sex is good, sleep is good. It’s the part that really believes in fear. It’s the part that craves security.

Your inner bunny will have an immense amount of power over you if you don’t pay attention to it. And even if you do try to pay attention to it, more often than not it’ll run away because is it just got caught. Being found out about is scary! Like a cute little bunny, when it’s scared it needs to be petted and feel it’s secure. When Bunny feels secure Bunny will help you.

If you’re a fan of Seth Godin, you may recognize this term as “The Lizard Brain“. It’s the same thing, but has a more heartwarming connotation. And even if you want some ruthless visualization, you can always think of the Killer Bunny.

Intuition lets you know if you’re talking to your inner bunny. The big cues that you’re dealing with your inner bunny is irrational fear.

I sometimes confuse Heart of Hearts and Inner Bunny because they can answer your question at the same time. To illustrate, let’s say you’re going to give a presentation and you’re scared. You ask yourself “why am I scared”? Part of you says SCARED! FEAR! THIS IS THE WOST THING EVAR! That’s Inner Bunny. At the same time if you’re listening you’ll hear, “You’re scared because Inner Bunny says you’re scared”, and if you pay attention you’ll hear the implication that there’s no reason to be scared.

The two things aren’t the same thing. Your Heart of Hearts speaks from a place of calm. Your Inner Bunny is usually not very calm. But they do talk at the same time, and often your Heart of Hearts will point out that Inner Bunny is the one causing you trouble. Once you get used to listening to Bunny you won’t need to listen for Heart of Hearts because you’ll know what it has to say.

Subconscious: All of these things are part of your subconscious. Any part of your brain that speaks in feelings, I say is part of the subconscious. The part that controls how your limbs move or your automatic breathing function…. yeah not so much. Those things probably should have their own name, and for the time being “subconscious” isn’t one of them.

Of course, I’ve been using “subconscious” all willy-nilly like on the site, and I will fix that in the future. These parts really are different, and I intend to refer to them by name in the future.

6:30 AM: Alarm goes off.
6:30:01 AM: Kitty starts meowing because he either wants food or attention. It’s hard to tell which.
6:31 AM: Take my temperature. (Aaron and I use Fertility Awareness as birth control, so…)
6:35 AM: Get out of bed. Go downstairs to the kitchen to feed the cat.
6:37 AM: Almost trip down the stairs because of kitty.
6:40 AM: Actually feed cat. Look toward the basement and think about how good it will feel to use the exercise bike.
6:41 AM: Grab a glass of water and a book.
6:45 AM: Go downstairs and use exercise bike.

With this routine I can, with minimum resistance, accomplish two goals: get out of bed at 6:30AM and use the exercise bike daily. The reason this routine works is that my environment is well aligned with my goals.

Kitty acts as a cute, pitiful sounding alarm clock that sits outside the bedroom door and can’t be turned off unless I both get up and feed him. This is a huge incentive to complete the first goal: get out of bed at 6:30AM.

The location of the exercise bike helps me complete the second goal. It’s in the basement, and the stairs to the basement are in the kitchen. The kitchen is where I feed kitty, so the exercise bike is only down one flight of stairs. It’s easier to go there than it is to go back to bed.

Change these two things and the chances that I complete my goals drastically goes down.

If I fed kitty in the evening instead of in the morning he probably wouldn’t bother us at 6:30 AM, meaning I wouldn’t have my incentive to get up early in the morning. On the off chance that he did still bother us, that wouldn’t give me much incentive either. There’d be no specific task for me to do. He’d just be wanting attention. I don’t need to go downstairs to give him attention. Also attention is active. I can’t use the exercise bike while kitty’s wanting to be petted and played with. Feeding kitty in the morning is well aligned with my goals. Feeding him in the evening is not.

If the exercise bike was in one of the spare bedrooms (a legitimate place to put it) it’d be much harder to get me to use it. I’d no longer be choosing between an upward and downward stair-climb. The warm bed would be just as close as the bike. It’d be difficult to choose the bike.

Action for You! If there’s some goal you’d like to achieve, ask yourself if there’s any way you can rearrange your environment to make it easier for you to achieve it.

Chances are the first time you make a change it won’t work for very long. That’s OK. Just try something else until you find an arrangement that works for you. Eventually you will, and doing the things you want to do will be easy.

Why Aren’t People More Courteous?

I think the primary reason people are discourteous is because it’s a way to let out whatever frustration we have without causing a scene and without showing our vulnerability. My guess for why the library patron didn’t drop the issue when he found out that Josh’s ticks weren’t intentional is that he was afraid of showing his embarrassment. He’d have to be vulnerable, admit that he was wrong and for some people that’s hard to do.

There’s a great anecdote from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which shows a similar scene that ends completely differently:

I remember a mini-paradigm shift I experienced one Sunday morning on a subway in New York. People were sitting quietly — some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was a calm, peaceful scene.

Then suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed.

The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing peoples papers. It was very disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing.

It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too. So finally, with what I felt was an unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?”

The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, “Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”

Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior; my heart was filled with the man’s pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely. “Your wife just died? Oh, I’m so sorry! Can you tell me about it? What can I do to help?” Everything changed in an instant.

In the anecdote, Covey is arguably being discourteous when he confronts the father. He assumes that the father didn’t care about how his kids were behaving and how their behavior was affecting the other people in the subway car. But after he finds out he was wrong, he — unlike the patron — doesn’t let his embarrassment keep him from being compassionate. It turns into a beautiful soulful interaction.

Would it have been better of Covey had kept his mouth shut and not confront the father at all? I don’t think so, even if it may have been more courteous.

What Would the World Be Like if Everyone was Courteous?

This question is not as straightforward as it looks. Courteousness is not a clear cut good trait. Someone can be courteous and be a doormat. Someone can be courteous and not a doormat. What’s the difference? Let’s examine.

The Courteous Doormat
The main characteristic of the doormat is the lack of ability to relate to others as an equal. When the doormat is wronged she takes it and does nothing about it. Maybe she fumes in private, but she does not take steps to correct the situation. She lacks courage. She lack’s strength of character. She probably lacks self-worth. Yes, she’s kind and courteous, but it’s not really all that healthy.

If the world was full of courteous doormats life would be not much different than it is now, except maybe worse. There’d be a lot of passive aggression. Kind words would lose their meaning, since you’d never know if someone actually meant them or was using them as a mask to hide their contempt. Not good.

The Courteous Non-Doormat
The difference between this person and the doormat isn’t that this person never gets stepped on. Anyone who is kind an courteous will eventually encounter someone who tries to take advantage of their good-naturedness. The difference is the reaction. The doormat does nothing. (Or effectively nothing if she fumes in private.) The non-doormat takes action. She courteously confronts the person. She asks what’s the problem is. She assumes it was a misunderstanding. If it wasn’t a misunderstanding, the non-doormat simply cuts ties with the person. If it was a misunderstanding she works with the person to fix the problem.

The courteous non-doormat is not afraid to see others as an equal. That is, she’s not afraid to confront them when she feels wronged. After all, why would you be afraid to approach someone who’s you’re equal? Also, because of her strength of character, she can act out of compassion — be vulnerable — without fear of injury. She has a thick skin without a wall.

To be a courteous non-doormat is without a doubt a positive trait. If the world were filled with this kind of person life would be much more pleasant. There’d be a lot more happiness, openness, and understanding. ^_^

See! Way too long for a comment!

First: What is detachment? Why is detachment a good idea?

Detachment is not letting your primitive brain get emotionally involved with a situation. It’s not letting emotion be the sole driver of your decisions. It’s pretending that you’re an outside observer watching what’s happening. Here are some examples to illustrate the concept and show you when it’s a good idea to be detached.

Buying a house When you’re buying a house (or making any large purchase or big decision) it’s a good idea to not be too attached to it. Meaning it’s a good idea to not care about what your buying or at least remind yourself constantly that it’s not yours yet. If you fall head over heels in love with it you run the risk of not seeing the flaws it has or of getting incredibly disappointed when it fails the house inspection or when your lender refuses to give you the money you need to buy it. On top of that, the house is a physical object. It could burn down. A meteorite could crash into it. It’s impermanent. The more attached to it you are, the more unnecessary disappointment you risk.

Your kids Or more specifically, the dreams you have for your kids. The truth is your children are not what you dream, hope, or wish them to be. You may envision them as captains of industry when really all they want to do is teach. You may envision them as staying nearby forever when they really want to travel the world and go on adventures. The more attached you are to what you want your kids to become, the more difficult your life will be. Your kids either won’t fulfill their potential and will resent you, or they’ll go off and live the life they were meant to live and you’ll mourn the loss of something you never had. The less attached you are to the dreams you have for your kids, the more able you are to help them flourish. By being less attached, I mean you still care and love your kids but you’re willing to put aside your expectations of them. You’re willing to remind yourself that your hopes are not necessarily reality.

Beliefs Your beliefs are based on the experience you’ve had until now. In the future you may find that beliefs you’ve had no longer make sense to you anymore. The less attached you are to your beliefs the easier it will be to live in keeping with where you are at any given moment. This is where things get tricky. What does it mean to be detached from your beliefs? They make up your identity, after all. The trick here is to be attached to truth. That is, be attached to what’s real, to what is. Our understanding of what is true changes over time, but the commitment to truth doesn’t have to change. All of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, want truth in our lives. Identify yourself as a truth seeker, and you’ll almost automatically be detached from your beliefs.

Proposals Let’s say you’ve made a proposal for some project that you need to get approved by an executive board. The more you attached you are to each of the details in your proposal, the less likely it will get passed. And if it does get passed it’ll be with a lot of changes you feel uncomfortable about. On the other hand, if there’s a goodly number of aspects you don’t really care about and only a few things you can’t compromise on, the more likely your proposal will get passed and the more likely you’ll be happy about what got passed.

Detachment is not about suppressing emotion

Whenever I heard or read about detachment I’d always felt uncomfortable about it because I was afraid it meant I was supposed to be totally and completely rational. That my having warm attachment feelings was bad. That it was a bad idea to let those feelings have any say in my decision making. Whenever I thought about it I’d see that actually doing what I thought detachment meant would be stupid. If you’re choosing your career based solely on what’s practical you may find 9-5 schedule unbearable. If you’re choosing a partner based solely on practical rational things (How much debt does he have? How much money does he make? Do I like her parents?) you’ll find your home life lacking. It’s often an excellent idea to follow your intuition.

On further examination and after practicing detachment anyway, I realized that’d I’d misunderstood what was meant by detachment. Detachment is not the same as not feeling anything at all. When you’re detached from your emotions, you still feel them. They even can play a part in your decision making (Acting on intuition, anyone?), but your emotions do not control you. They’re a source of information.

Take the house, for example. Aaron and I are buying a house right now and it has been a fairly emotional process. For one thing the house I’d sort of been eying since the summer turned out to be in our price range, was still available in the fall, was one of the first houses we looked at, and when we went to see it it fit a lot of our wants. I basically fell in love with it. But I didn’t let that attachment feeling drive me to make an offer right there. I acknowledged the feeling, made a mental note, and then Aaron and I got a buyer’s agent and looked at 20 more houses.

Waiting to get a buyer’s agent and looking at more houses was a great idea, and something I could only do by forcing myself to be somewhat detached from the strong warm feelings I first had toward the house. By getting a buyer’s agent that meant that we weren’t the ones doing the negotiating, and by looking at all those other houses we really appreciated what the house had to offer. Also by being at least somewhat detached, I was mitigating the disappointment I’d feel if the house failed the inspection or we couldn’t get a loan or something. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still be disappointed if it doesn’t go through, but it won’t be nearly as bad as it would be if I let myself be totally attached to it.

In short, detachment is a really good idea. It gives both sides of your brain a chance to work out a problem. It lessens the pain you feel when things change unexpectedly. It makes you feel happier because it aligns your life with truth. Yay detachment!

So really what you need is a compass. You need a way to tell if you’re moving in the right direction. Here’s one way to develop your own.

Step 1: Brainstorm Places You Might Want to Go I’m using places in the broadest sense possible. One place could be the parent of 3 children. Another could be travel the world. Another could be to grow your favorite club into a powerful organization. Another could be to have a very musical family.

Don’t be picky here. It’s brainstorming after all. Everything you can think of is worth writing down.

Step 2: Reread your list or your mind-map and note your reaction to each item When you read “Big family” do you feel good? Disgusted? Scared? What about being at the top of the career ladder? Excited? Anxious? Put an emoticon by each of them.

Step 3: Try to find a pattern Do you notice a lot of smiley faces by the family options? By the work options? Do you notice you have a lot of work and wealth options but they all have unhappy faces. What about your hobbies? Is there a giant smiley by music or dance or writing?

Group the items that can be grouped together. All the family in one. All the work in another. Each hobby in its own.

Step 4: Figure out what subsets to spend your time on If you had to cut one out of your life, or spend only a little time on it, how would you feel about it? If it’s highly important, is it something you’re making progress on right now?

Step 5: Use your compass When presented with something to spend your time on, figure out if it feels intuitively like a good thing to do. Visualize the list you evaluated in Step 4. Will this action get you closer to the things that are important to you? You don’t have to limit yourself to just tasks that get you closer to your goal, but you should be making some steps in those directions.

Step 6: If you think your compass is broken or out of date go back to Step 1 This is an iterative process. As you grow and learn, you may find that things that used to be important to you just aren’t any more. Or maybe you’ve found something that actually is Really important. Update your compass. You’ll be much happier for it!

Does this sound familiar? Are you afraid of what people will think of you if you actually lose weight? Or more importantly, what you will think of you? Does that mean you’re the kind of person that’s focused more on physical appearance than inner beauty? Does that mean you’ll have to sacrifice something that’s important to you in order to make the time to eat well and exercise? Does that mean you’ll be the kind of person that sacrifices spiritual things for the physical?

Or what if you’ve always wanted to be an artist or an actor or a comedian? That culture has a reputation for promiscuity, ungodliness, and other not so wonderful traits. Does that mean you’ll have to develop those traits? Do you want to be that kind of person? Do you want to be thought of being that kind of person?

Or what about money? What if you were rich? How would you feel about being a wealthy person? What would that say about you? Is it something you want to be? Is it something you’re OK with being?

All of these things are fears of success, or more accurately fear of the kind of person you’ll become if you succeed.

There are a few ways you can tackle the problem depending on both your faith in your decision and your faith in your ability to deal with problems if it was the wrong decision.

Superman You have strong faith in your ability to fix problems associated with your change if they arise.

If you’re in this category, it doesn’t really matter how much you believe in your decision. Just dive in and see what happens. No matter how much of a hole you dig you’ll learn a lot, and you can climb your way out afterward if it’s not really where you want to go.

If you’re in this category, you probably don’t really have this fear of success thing either.

“Compass say that’s the right direction, but the clouds are ominous” You’re fairly certain this is the right direction for you, but you’re a bit scared about what it means to be that kind of person. An example is the would-be artist who’s afraid of being the sinful person he envisions all artists to be.

There’s a few things you can do to ease this block:

• Identifiy what scares you Is it that you’ll be a bad person? That you won’t have time for what’s important? That you’ll have to drop all of your friends and family?
• Visualize yourself having your cake and eating it too Figure out how you can do the new thing, be the new person and still do what’s important to you.If you’re trying to stay your pious self, maybe while you’re pursing your art and getting to know artist type people you also spend extra time at Church or with people who keep you honest and good. Maybe find someone to talk to about the challenges you’re facing, someone who can honestly assure you when you’re still on the right track or who can warn you when you start veering off.
• Do it When your safeties are in place, start taking action to achieve your goal. If you’ve thought of everything, you should be able to make progress without your subconscious nagging you. And if you notice you still have the nagging feeling, figure out what it is and tackle it. Eventually you’ll weed all these issues out.

“My compass is broken” You aren’t even sure why you’re considering this goal.

This is deserving of its own post, but the short answer is:

1. Figure out what’s important to you and where you want to go with your life
2. Figure out what appeals to you about this goal
3. Do those thing fit together?

If you can answer “yes” to question 3, then your compass isn’t the issue. Move on to the “Ominous Clouds” section.

Chances are you fall into one of these three categories. Hopefully this advice will give you some insight on how to deal what you’re facing.

At some point I’ll expand on the “broken compass” category, since a functioning inner compass is useful and not all that trivial to set up.

1. Organized People are Not Good people There are two things you need to do in order to be organized and stay your same sweet self. The first is to make sure organization/cleanliness stays as a means to an end. Using organization as a means to do the things you want to do keeps your mind focused on what’s really important to you, whatever that may be. Being organized is not the goal. Doing the things you want to do is.
   
   The second thing to do is to avoid identifying yourself as an organized person. If being organized really gives you an ego boost it’s only a small step to looking down on people who don’t meet your cleanliness standards.
   
   It’s really not that hard to do either of these things. When your projects are important to you, it’s hard to see organization as anything but a means to an end. And when you see it as a means to an end it’s hard to identify yourself with it. It’s like identifying yourself as a person who brushes her teeth daily. It’d just be silly.
2. People will make fun of you for having changed It’s true that this could happen to you, but does it really matter? Their discomfort with your changing is their problem, not yours. If you’re confident that you’re moving in the right direction, that organizing your life is the right thing for you to do, to hell with all of the nay-sayers.
   
   Once you’ve been living this way for a while, people will get used to it. It’ll be your new normal.
3. Identity Crisis The truth is people change. You will change. The question is not whether or not you’ll be you, but is this the right direction for you? Is an organized life more preferable to a disorganized one? If yes, then go for it. You’ll get used to your new skin after a while, especially since it’s something you develop for yourself. Your system will be uniquely you. How could that feel strange?
4. You can’t be spontaneous anymore If you’re following a rigid schedule, then I guess this would be true, but if you’re going to have a system that really works for you it’s going to have to be flexible. Few things go exactly as planned anyway. If you want to be go somewhere on a whim no organization system can or should stop you. It’ll just make you aware of the consequences of that whim and how to get back on track.
   
   A key aspect of a good organization system is the ability to renegotiate commitments you’ve made to yourself and others. If it’s for the sake of some random fun time, all the better!
5. You’ll have to face your limits Yep, you will. But is that bad? Knowing the truth of what you’re able to do right now is important for your personal development. If you can commit to the system, then you’ll have to exercise courage to say no to the unimportant. You’ll be a better person for it. And over time you’ll be able to do more of the things you want to do.
6. You’ll look funny You’ll look even funnier when you either have a hard time keep your commitments or do very little with your time. And after a while, you’ll get used to the weird looks anyway.
7. You’ll spend your whole day doing stuff you don’t want to do I used to feel this way a lot when I was still in school. If I made a schedule of things I was supposed to do or needed to do, I’d end up spending my whole day doing unpleasant things. I’d never get around to having fun.
   
   The truth is, the amount of unpleasant stuff you have to do is totally up to you. Also you don’t have to get it all done in one day. Spread the work out over several days. Don’t do mind intensive work when you’re tired and you’ll go a long way toward avoiding burnout. Or make fun things a higher priority.
8. You won’t have time to do what you want to do The solution to this problem is the same as above. Let your to-do list last over several days and only do mind intensive work when you have the energy to do it. When your brain is tired do something that you want to do.
   
   Of course, if the kinds of things you want to do are mind intensive–taking a leadership position in a club for instance–you may find yourself in a more difficult situation. But you’d be there with or without a planning system. At least with a planning system you can make a more realistic assessment of your ability to succeed in all the things you do.
9. Actually implementing the organization scheme will take more time than it saves When you first implement a new organization scheme, for the first few weeks it will take a lot of time to use. You haven’t come up with ways to streamline the system, nor is it set up to your satisfaction. There’s no getting around the growing pains.In spite of that, even in the early stages a good planning system will give you piece of mind. You’ll know what you have to work on, what stage projects are on, what stuff you’re waiting on, what you need to buy at the supermarket. That piece of mind, I think, is worth the extra time it takes to use the system. And in the end, once you’ve set it up to meet your needs, using it should take little time at all.
10. You don’t have time to get organized If you really believe this, then you don’t have time not to get organized. Seriously. There’s only so long that you can run on empty before you burn out. Things will slip here and there because your mind isn’t really meant for the task of keeping your life in order, and if you have trained your mind to do that task you wouldn’t be disorganized, would you?

So, as you can see, the excuses don’t really hold up to much scrutiny. (At least they don’t stand up to my scrutiny ) There is only one good reason I can think of to not implement a planning system, and that’s if your life is simple enough not to call for it. If you already know at every moment what you need to be doing, then you’re all set. That’s the main purpose of a planning system, after all: to confidently know what it is you should be doing right now.

Are there any reasons you have to not get organized?