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Here are a couple of guest posts I’ve done recently ’round the blogosphere:

How to Stay Focused: Vision Maintenance and the Minutiae Vacuum

“I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to stay focused and remain productive. We all know that doing what you love reverse engineers productivity. If you love what you do, you’ll obviously be more compelled to do it, rather than trying to place a productivity system on top of undesirable work.”

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Free Career Advice From the Best Marketers, Lawyers and Politicians

“I know what you’re thinking. What could I possibly learn from the three groups that have the worst reputation? Hear me out a minute. There are a few great things I think we can learn from the best of each of these professions. After all, sometimes the best lessons come from the most unexpected sources. This advice can be applied to your career, or if you’re an entrepreneur, with clients.”

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photo by h.koppdelaney

There’s a lot of fluff floating around in the personal development blog-o-sphere. I think there are certain things that people tend to shy away from writing about when it comes to personal development. Here’s 10 of what I believe are the most uncommon things you’ll never learn from a personal development blog, but should.

1. There is is no personal development ceiling

There will never be a time in your personal growth where you can say “okay, I’m done.” You can’t grow so much that you will ever reach a ceiling. The beauty of personal development is that you’ll find whenever you grow, achieve goals or find more personal freedom, your context changes. The more you grow, the more your life will take on an upward spiral of personal growth. The more things get better, the more you realize what you thought was a 10 was really a 7.

A lot of people tend to think if you “fix” certain parts of your life, you’ll reach some kind of ever-lasting contentment. True growth, however, isn’t linear.

2. Re-framing just doesn’t always work

A lot of personal development blogs will give you advice on how to be more happy. They’ll also try to tell you how to re-frame negative situations and see the positive side of it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, for every negative there is obviously a positive. It’s just the way the universe works. But sometimes negative situations just plain suck.

If I got hit by a car, I’m not going to be thinking about how I can re-frame this experience. I’m probably going to be more concerned with whether or not I’ll be able to walk again.

3. Acceptance is more important than happiness

Many people when pursuing personal development go on a happiness mono-diet. They want to be happy all the time and will do whatever it takes to make this happen. They have a realization that their life sucked because they were focusing only on the negative parts of their life. While this is a huge breakthrough for most people, many people don’t really “get it.” They go from one extreme to the other; instead of embracing both equally important sides of life (the good and the bad) and learning from them, they become Mary Poppins delusional.

Denying your negative feelings isn’t the path to greater happiness. Ignoring all the shitty parts of your life won’t make them go away.

As important as it is to appreciate the positive, we have to acknowledge and accept the negative. After all, if white wins over black, all we have left is empty space.

4. The outside is just as important as the inside

Ninety five percent of all personal development blogs will tell you in order to change your life, you need to change the inside. You need to change your beliefs and agreements that you have with yourself. Drop dis-empowering contexts and embrace empowering ones. Makes sense right? When learning this new-fangled concept people can get pretty crazy. They’ve been searching for happiness from the outside in and this seems to be pretty enlightening. They’ve been looking for fancy products, an exciting job, new cars, and Armani shades to make them happy.

They’ve realized that no matter how much of these things they acquire, their drug like bliss is fleeting at best. So we wisely start searching for happiness within. But internal happiness will not make you fall in love with a dead end job you hate, it will not make you “come to terms” with your abusive relationship and it will not put food on your table.

Just as we go from focusing on the negative to solely on the positive, we become extremists on the other side of the fence. In truth, there is no competition. Integrated and learning from the positive and negative are equally important.

5. Happiness creates productivity, not the other way around

Increased productivity is the result of increased happiness. Placing a complex productivity system on top of work you dread will be a short lived fix at best. We’re also often the most productive when what we’re doing has no purpose whatsoever.

6. Simply reading a bunch of productivity blogs will not improve your life

Reading seven thousand ways to hack your motivation and the ultimate guide to be a productivity samurai will not improve your life alone. Reading a list about 100 things to be happy about will not make you a happier person. Passively absorbing information will not revolutionize your life.

An inner coup against doing things that make you feel dead and liberating yourself requires hard work, introspection and action. While getting ideas and advice from other people can inspire you, what matters most is how you feel about your life and what you want. The only person that can figure that out is you.

7. Doing less of what you hate is as powerful as doing more of what you love

Sometimes quitting and dropping out of society and others expectations is just as powerful as doing more of what you love. In fact, I think you’ll find in order to really pursue your dreams, you’ll have to quit a lot of things and forget unwanted expectations; ones that other people would find normal and unnegotiable. They’ll probably find you absurd and completely insane.

Doing more of what you love will always involve quitting things that are really negotiable (but seem like they’re not) and dealing with some major critics. Don’t worry, your courage to live authentically just scares them. Who knows, maybe you’ll inspire them to come to terms with the fact that they’re living in drudgery and denial too.

8. The “Golden Rule” is flawed

Everyone knows the golden rule, do to others what you would have done to you. While this obviously has good intentions, it doesn’t work in all situations. Particularly, in relationships. If you do to your partner what you would have done to you, you’ll probably annoy them, piss them off and leave them feeling neglected. Real meaningful relationships are built on trust and interdependency.

If you really care about someone, you’ll do everything you can to find out how they would like to be treated.

9. Your search for happiness, can often make you miserable

Searching for happiness will often mean that you have to face a lot negative aspects of your life you’d rather ignore. You’ll have to deal with all the negative experiences you’ve had in your past and try to find ways to learn from them. Moving forward sometimes means taking two steps back in order to take a step forward.

10. Addiction to self-improvement can ruin your life

You would think if you’re all gung-ho about self improvement, there’s no chance your enthusiasm can back-fire. Unfortunately, addiction to seemingly positive pursuits can be just as detrimental to negative ones. Addiction to self improvement can cause you to spend all your time trying to improve, but never actually living.

The goal of self improvement is to learn and grow, not to get sucked into a vacuum of obsession. There are many ways self improvement can ruin your life. We just need to keep in mind that self improvement is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

This list is obviously not exhaustive. What do you think people tend to shy away from talking about? Let’s start a discussion. =)

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photo by phitar

I have no shortage of ability to dream big. When I think about what I want I imagine working from home, managing my own time, having the freedom to do what I want when I want. I would love to travel the world, learn how to tango, become a martial arts master, produce an album, and write a best selling book.

Thinking big has always been easy for me, I’m sure you probably don’t have an imagine deficit either. But if you’re like me, the action part probably hasn’t always been as easy.

Unfortunately, contrary to what some Law of Attraction cultists would have you believe, thinking about what you want all the time doesn’t accomplish much. I used to smoke pot every day and think about writing music and starting a prolific band. 5 years later, I can still barely play the guitar. Which leads me to a little story I’d like to share with you…

An irreverent tale

A couple of years ago, I was at the local bar across the street from my old workplace. Anyone who knew me or worked there could attest that I was a little more than a regular there. At the time I drank around nearly every week day and smoked pot daily. This was a few months before my catalyst for change. Anyway, I was sitting at the bar and happened to start talking to a guy I had never seen there before. One of my favorite bands was playing on the stereo and I made a comment about how much I liked them. It turned out he liked them too, so we got to talking about music.

This guy (can’t remember his name) let me know he was a record producer. I told him that I was a musician, but hadn’t really recorded any songs yet. I don’t remember word for word, but I’ll never forget what he said to me: “You look like a thinker. Am I right? (I confirmed his hunch) I have some advice for you. What do you do when you take a shit? (I told him, I never really thought about it) Exactly. You just shit. That’s what you need to do with your music.”

While my new friend didn’t exactly deliver his wisdom in the most elegant way, it was so compelling that I remembered it several years later.

The reason I wanted to share this story with you is because I think there’s a slight flaw in the way most people attack goals. They think big, they want to lose 50 pounds, buy a new house, pay off $30,000 of debt or run a marathon. These are all great aspirations, the only problem is thinking this big when taking action tends to paralyze most people. Running a marathon or buying a house is a daunting task. Especially if you’ve haven’t even run 3 miles or even purchased a car before. I’d like to suggest a different approach…

Think Micro, Act Macro (but still think macro)

Most people say, think big, act small. Think about your project and break it up into smaller, digestible chunks. If you want to run a marathon, it might mean making a training plan, setting a goal to run 1 mile a day and gradually increasing the distance you run monthly or weekly. The part where most people go wrong is when they break up their goal into smaller chunks, they’re still focused on the daunting completion of their larger goal. This usually gets people frustrated because they’re not performing as well as they think they can, or their goal is so far off in the future, it seems they’ll never make it.

Instead, I find it much easier to think micro and act macro. I think about the smaller goal that I need to achieve, but act big. If I want to write an article, I set the goal of writing an outline, or the first paragraph. I think small so I don’t let myself get paralyzed by the intimidation of the final product. Finishing the first paragraph is usually easy though and my motivation tends to snowball afterward. It’s easier for me to think “I could write one more paragraph” (thinking bigger) than it is for me to think “I need to finish this 4 page article.”

Similarly, when I’m lifting weights it’s easier for me to commit to doing a set of reps and after it’s completed, push myself to do one more. If I were to try to pump myself up to go to total muscle failure in the beginning, it might seem too daunting and I could get discouraged from even trying to start. Instead, I think micro, but act macro.

While thinking small and acting big, it’s important to remember that thinking big is still important. If I’m thinking small about my health and just focusing on working out everyday, I might lose sight of my total health. It’s important to remember the other aspects of health that are important as well, such as; spiritual renewal (meditation, reflection), mental health (reading, learning), eating right, and building relationships (social health). It’s important to remember the big picture, but to think small and act big when determining the actions you’ll take to reinforce your aspirations.

Thinking big also helps you to maintain a greater perspective on what’s really important. Imagine you’re writing a song and all you focus on is the different aspects of each instrument. You focus on the sound of the drums, the guitar riffs, the base line and the vocals. You diligently work to think small and act big. You think about how each instrument sounds and how they interact and blend together. You focus on the transitions of the song, the verse and the chorus and the fills.

Getting too obsessed with this can lead you to neglect the big picture though. Imagine you focus on all of these smaller aspects (thinking micro) of the song but you neglect to think about the meaning and the emotional impact it will have (thinking macro). You’re likely to end up with a great sounding song, that has very little meaning or impact.

So think small, act big, but still remember to think big.

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photo by Jill

People seek self-help for a reason, to help themselves, duh. But like all good things, self improvement has it’s disadvantages. Some people take it too far. Instead of improving their lives, they become delusional.

1. Tony the Tiger… err Robbins

Before I got into personal development, I always thought of people like Tony the Tiger.. I mean Tony Robbins and Richard Simmons as the epitome of self improvement. I guess like many people, I confused self improvement with motivational speakers.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Tony Robbins, I think he’s a great guy and I’m sure he’s helped a lot of people out. But it’s just not my style.

The whole chest pounding, firewalking thing always threw me off. I understand the idea is to get pumped up, but can’t you do that without burning your feet to a crisp? Also, is that really sustainable? If I have to walk on hot coals everyday just to find motivation, something is probably wrong with my life.

These are also the people that remain positive under any circumstances.

Volcano eruption? The heat will help you sweat and detoxify.

Hurricane? Now I don’t have to wash my car.

Earthquake caused a gaping hole in the middle of your house? We could make a swimming pool!

Denial Anyone?

2. Productivity is the opiate of the masses.

There are certain things you must do. This includes things you need to do to not die and stay out of prison.

Some people just have a problem with these things and turn to productivity gurus for help. But it can often be taken overboard. When you can’t enjoy yourself without doing something productive, you have a problem.

3. Self Improvement is your drug of choice

There’s nothing wrong with ferociously pursuing personal development and new contexts. The problem is when “improving” has become more of a drug than means to an end.

Some signs of this deadly illness may include:

• Lack of friends, social life, or connection to the outside world
• Improving has become more important than living
• Spending half your day reading lists such as “4,000 motivation hacks” and “12 ways to super power ultra charge your brain” but can’t recite a single sentence from any of them.

4. Hacking your life is more important than living it

Some of your favorite conversations include: a new method for color coding your to do list (purple is uber urgent, black is ninja important!), how you turned your watch into a fork slash writing utensil slash stapler, and how to turn your dishwasher into a plasma tv.

You also think that hacking your life includes using cashew butter instead of peanut butter on a jelly sandwich, using a clothes iron to make grilled cheese, and hacking your sweatshirt.

Although I do have to admit, if I could pull off the sweatshirt hack without looking extremely flamboyant, I might give it a go.

5. Um, it’s your turn. Move.

Imagine you aspire to be grandmaster chess player. You study the game, your read books, you watch other masters play. You’re so engrossed with learning and improving your game, you never actually play. You’re just stuck on “what’s next.”

When you’re so gung-ho on improving, it can be easy to lose sight of the reason for it in the first place: to make life better. But if you’re just preparing to live and not actually living, what’s the point?

Some honorable mentions were…

Not being able to feel good about yourself without listening to a tape of “Because I’m special and I’m worth it” and the guy that thinks Lao Tzu was a Zen master.

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