Pain, discomfort, shock, boredom, imposter syndrome, awkwardness, fear, being wrong, failing, ignorance, look stupid: Your avoidance of these feelings is stopping you from a life greater than your wildest imagination.*
(Ben Hardy)

There is an early adopter in each of us.

Early adopters are those who see or hear something new and, “getting it,” come on board before the mass.

We can’t be early adopters for everything but we can each be an early adopter at something significant.

The thing is, it doesn’t come without difficulty and resistance.

I have mentioned before how, when I read about Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures, I knew I had to see them “in the stone.”

They stand in the same gallery as Michelangelo’s David, but it was they that made me want to make the journey and not the finished product of David.

For Michelangelo, beneath the surface of the marble, there lay a person.  He would stop taking away the stone when he came to their “skin.”

From “Slow Journeys in the Same Direction,” my doodle from the pictures I took of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures

Here is my picture of early adoption and resistance.  To find the early adopter within, we must face and overcome the resistance.

Yet everything changes when we commit, when we not only hear or see something that is meaningful to us but we also begin:

“The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.  All sorts of things occur to help one that would never have otherwise occurred.  A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.’**

There is no other way.

We must begin.

Otherwise, you may be reading something like this in five years time and realise you have done nothing about what matters to you most of all.

Or you can take on the resistance.

(*From Benjamin Hardy’s Willpower Doesn’t Work.)
(**William Hutchison Murray, quoted in Benjamin Hardy’s Willpower Doesn’t Work.)

And why are we joyful?  Because that is who we are.  This is how the gods designed us to be.  Producers.  Makers.  Artists.  Effective.*
(Hugh Macleod)

To be given a new beginning or a start-over is something very special.

To come to the realisation that each of us, as a consequence of our humanity, is capable of imagining, designing and making new beginning, is to know what it is to be alive.

(*From gapingvoid’s blog: Don’t forget to enjoy the ride.)

Aware of what’s around us.  Present.  Seeing things clearly, hearing them as if for the first time. […] Seeking a state of awake seems like a worthy quest.  And when we find it, it’s worth cherishing.**
(Seth Godin)

The ability to say yes and no well to the challenges and opportunities requires us to have clarity about who we are and what we want to be about.

It’s hard in an increasingly distracting world and it’s becoming harder … and there isn’t an app to help us.  By all means, let’s use the technology, but alongside this, we need to develop “unwired” skills and disciplines that allow us to listen, to be aware, to know.  The things that will release our imaginations in a different way:

‘The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.’^

Imagination makes possible the creative act of turning information into knowledge into understanding into wisdom.

It opens up human playfulness as a means of proceeding, something the functional-first dimension of technology leaves behind:

‘when utility rules, adults lose something essential in the capacity to think; they lose the free curiosity that occurs in the open, felt-fingering space of play’.^^

(*The Pioneers, Let your yeah be yeah and your no be no now.)
(From Seth Godin’s blog: Simply awake.)
(^Ursula Le Guin, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Redeeming the Imagination.)
(^^From Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.  The felt-fingering refers to children playing with felt.)

Every life is precious.

Because of the wonderful things he does –
We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz.*

Dorothy and her companions were to make their journey to the Wizard of Oz because they thought he could help them.

To know why and how we do the things we do really matters.

It takes time, questioning and ongoing reflection but it can be the most liberating thing that we can do.

It is what Dorothy and her friends were going to discover about themselves.

Towards focusing on our because, Ben Hardy’s five means of forcing our function to a higher level are helpful.

Figure out how to invest more of yourself in what you do.

Use the expectations of your environment to hold you accountable.

Increase the consequences of failure.

Do things that are more difficult.

Change things, do things differently, rather than same old same old.

Each of these will help us feel the real because because because because because.

(*From the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz.)
(**See Benjamin Hardy’s Willpower Doesn’t Work.)

Here’s another saying from somewhere in my childhood: Every day in every way I am getting better and better.

I wish I knew at half my age what I know now.

As I thought about this, regret gave way to gladness: I know many things now that I didn’t know at 29 or 30.

It means I’m still moving, still growing.

Agility is important to keep moving in this journey.

Open minds, open hearts and open wills develop our agility.

Read another book.

Ask someone to tell you about the things that are important in their lives.

Do something you haven’t done before.

Open your mind open your heart open your will keep moving …

This is not it.

The gravitational pull holding you down is the struggle you must learn to transcend.*
(Ben Hardy)

To the human nothing is as it first appears.

When the World Wide Web appeared we came upon blue words.  Phrases and sentences that, if clicked on – whoah, took us somewhere else.

Everything is blue.

Perhaps you were hyperklinked here from my other blog, but people, places, ideas, objects, smells, tastes, sounds and more transport us to new possibilities and experiences.

Transcendence means “to climb beyond.”

We are a transcendent species.

This is not it.

This is not who I am.

My next contribution will be …

(*From Benjamin Hardy’s Willpower Doesn’t Work.)

Struggling with one’s own shadow self, facing interior conflicts and moral failures, undergoing rejection and abandonment, daily humiliations, experiencing any kind of abuse, or any form of limitation: all are gateways into deeper consciousness and the flowering of the soul.*
(Richard Rohr)

True meaning in life is to be discovered in the world rather than with man or his own psyche.  I have termed this constitutive characteristic “the self-transcendence of human existence” [-] self actualisation is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.**
(Viktor Frankl)

We must create our most enriching environments but there is no such thing as a perfect one.  We are in danger if we believe there is.  They are all gardens full of rocks and weeds.

Then we must break out of our environment, disrupt the danger of complacency with some randomness, some practice that is different or reading someone who brings us something new or we disagree with.

It’s not easy because our environments are woven together with our emotions, making them tricky places for us, as David Brooks points out:

‘far from being a cold engine for processing information, neural connections are shaped by emotion’.^^

Journaling is always really helpful for capturing this, making whatever other means for inquiring of our lives more effective:

‘Journaling makes the other keystone activities ten times or a hundred times more powerful.  If you’re not using your journal daily, then your meditation, visualisation, and prayer will be far less effective.’^

The mythologist Joseph Campbell writes about the critical nature of our myths or big stories that we tell:

‘The ancient myths were designed to harmonise the mind and the body.  The mind can ramble off in strange ways and want things that the body does not want.’*^

Journaling becomes a way of capturing and unwrapping the myths we live within, to be able to change them when we become complacent within them and re in danger of ceasing to grow.

(*From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)
(**Viktor Frankl, quoted in Benjamin Hardy’s Willpower Doesn’t Work.)
(^From Benjamin Hardy’s Willpower Doesn’t Work.)
(^^David Brooks, quoted in Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber’s The Slow Professor.)
(*^From Joseph Campbell and All Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)

Recording your history is a crucial component of journal writing.  It provides context to your ideas, goals, and plans.*
(Ben Hardy)

Tenda began telling me how tired she was, with days full of work and studies, including extra degrees of difficulty – there wasn’t a lot of time for sleep.

At the end of hour-long conversation I simply had to mention that she had been wide awake the whole time.  The reason being, she was telling me about what she loved and that mattered to her.

Our conversation was a verbal journal.  It was a way for Tenda to be able to articulate the things that mattered to her and, through my questions, bring greater form and detail to these.

This is what journaling helps us to do.

When we get up in the morning and journal, we find ourselves joining in the story that we have been writing over many months, even years.  We know where to pick up, where to take it next, how to lay it down in the evening with satisfaction ready to pick up again the following morning.

When we do this, it’s difficult to have bland moments:

‘A key component of writing big-picture is that it re-connects with your “why.”‘*

While we may think journaling is about changing ourselves, it’s really about changing our environment.  As Ben Hardy points out:

‘Because the environment prompts your behaviour, it is the environment that needs to be disrupted.’*

If we begin the day in a bland way, we ought to not be surprised that we live in blandness.  If we read blandness, if we don’t focus our thoughts, if we connect with bland people, we shouldn’t be taken aback by blandness.

Just beneath the surface, though, there is a dynamic self simply needing a dynamic environment to surface to.

Journaling is a dynamic environment.

The books we read can come from dynamic thinkers and activators.  The people we seek out to connect with at work and in play and around our hobbies can be the dynamic people we need for disrupting our environment.

Ban the bland.

(*From Benjamin Hardy’s Willpower Doesn’t Work.)