Today you get the chance to start over.

Who told you that you couldn’t?

It was probably you.

At least, it’s you buying into an industrial way of thinking – education prepares you for a life of work of producing more, cheaper, then you retire.

It used to be that a good job was one that would last thirty to forty years, but this is not how it is now.  An undergraduate was telling me it’s so hard when it comes to a future job … because there are so many things she could do.  We’re in the age of growing choice.

It’s your choice to do something amazing, something no one else can do in quite the way you do.

In the classic myths, legends, and stories, the hero must get past the the gatekeeper or guardian to progress on their quest.  The guardians of who succeeds and who doesn’t are diminishing in influence.  These are the ones who have determined whose art is important and whose isn’t.  They’ve good reason to, they need to guarantee income, but that’s not the same as encouraging great art – and it’s not to say they haven’t promoted a lot of great art along the way.

Yesterday, I mentioned a small group of people who bring their knitting to a cafe.*  They may not each start up a bespoke knitting company – or they may – but they do get to work on some great designs which excite them and thrill the people they gift them to, they enjoy one another’s company and eat great cakes, and no-one down-talks another.  I sense this group could get up to some exciting things, and their enthusiasm released in this way probably spills over into their day jobs in terms of increased energy.

It doesn’t have to be a knitting group, of course, and it doesn’t have to be a group in which everyone focuses on the same thing.  The important thing is by getting together they potentially are taking out the gatekeepers.

Who told you that you couldn’t start over and begin to do something amazing today?

It’s your choice.  You can change the inner place from which you view the world and act.

And you can begin by identifying the things which energise you – really energise you.  (Write them out, and don’t let the industrial voice tell you that you can’t do these things.)  The likelihood is you can, then find others and you’ll do even more.

(*I was checking my meet-up suggestions for different subjects and themes, and lo and behold, the knitting group’s there because I clicked Hobbies and Crafts.  If there isn’t one, start one.  And if it’s in Edinburgh, I’ll come.)

Gifting is one of the most powerful forces for good and for change we have in the world.

I found myself sitting in a knitting group yesterday.*  The conversation turned towards the value of the different things they were creating, how, they couldn’t turn it into a business because they wouldn’t be able to charge for the hours they poured into producing these items.  But if they made something for you, what a gift.

There’s always a risk.  If a person doesn’t appreciate just what they’re getting, they might not value the gift.

The art of gifting has two major elements.

The desire to give something of great value to another is the element we can control.  The other we can’t.   It is the willingness of another to receive the gift as just that, and to use it extravagantly.

Two further thoughts.

Whoever we are with whatever we have – we can gift another.  The person who spends more time to speak encouraging things to someone  in need is just one way.

The other thought is how we need others to create and shape this economy of giftedness – we are not self-sufficient.  Someone may try and gift something to you today.  Be ready to receive it.

When we enter this new economy, something deep within resonates – beyond believing it the right thing to do, even beyond feeling it to be right.  We are connecting with our deep Humanness.

(*I’m no knitter.  I was with a couple of others doing some crafting when we found ourselves in the knitting group’s usual meeting place and we hung around with them.)

To be Human is to want to make the world a better place and to feel guilty when we don’t try.

As far as we know, these thoughts and feelings are not experienced by any other creature.  It’s how things are and it’s a bitter-sweet thing.  Every day, without exception, we wrestle with this Human condition.

It causes us to take risks and to fail often.  The best leaders of movements toward a better world are those who tell us the whole story: accidental successes, numerous failures, self-doubt and sleepless nights, and the breakthroughs.  There’s no other way.  We cannot be part of making the world better without moving towards this better world ourselves.

An accidental blessing is that we happen to be  in a place and time when we’re asking what it means to be Human.  On the one hand, there are those who see pharmaceutical, technological, and genetical enhancements as the future of what it means to  be Human.   Notwithstanding what is happening in these developments, on the other hand, there are those who feel we’ve just begun to discover the unexplored depths of being Human.

These discoveries involve the more accessible-for-all opening of minds, hearts, and wills, moving us from our little worlds (what Otto Scharmer refers to as the ego-system), to a greater world (Otto Scharmer’s eco-system, from the Greek oikos – the whole house) in which we understand ourselves to be a small but significant part of something very big … and wonderful.

An article passed on to me about young entrepreneurs caught my attention with a comment about how many of these wanted to begin businesses with social good included.  Interesting.  The world is changing around us.

Your relationship with the world, with me, and with your greater Self (what you and I can be as Human) is all changing – it’s simply part of being Human.  You wake up to it every day.  Including today.

So, to offer a question offered by Seth Godin: What are you trying to change?  Why?

Significance comes with time.

Humans are the only species with a developed consciousness which allows us to know there’s a tomorrow – as far as we know.

Time changes everything.  When you can imagine there’s a tomorrow, you’ve begun to engage your creativity, you’ve seen something which doesn’t exist.  We’ve generated all manner of things as a result: clothing, housing, agriculture, banking – the list is endless – because there’s tomorrow.

And then we want to know we’ve used our time well, that our life matters, that it’s made a difference.  It’s been pointed out that Humans want autonomy, to master skills, and have a purpose and meaning beyond themselves.

A good place to start living significantly is to take the skills we have – be they thinking, relational, actioning, or influencing skills – together with the thing which sets our pulse racing, and zoom it – take it further, abstract it, innovate it.

You still have time.  If you begin right now, you can shape tomorrow.

Seth Godin suggests there are two important things when it comes to time and doing something significant: turn up on time, and cherish the time of others.  Good advice because it highlights the best time of all is the time shared with others.

Last night I struggled to get to sleep, instead playing over in my mind obstacles and problems to something I’m working on.

(When Old Lizard Brain* gets to work we more readily imagine failure than we do success.)

It’s simply the reality of working on something bigger than me.  If you’re experiencing this, it’s more than likely telling you you’re on the right track, something having a purpose beyond you.

Your first reaction can be to go back to the same old same old – the thing which doesn’t keep you awake in the night or stretches you painfully during the day.

The problem is, you’ve seen the future, and to give up on this now is to give up on what it means to be you.  By imagining this better future, you’ve already been changed, the better world you’ve imagined makes you feel more alive.

Better to embrace the fear.

Find some way of expressing it – someone you can speak your fears out to, or some way of journalling it – perceptions change dramatically when we can do this.  And dream about the difference you’re going to make.

Daily, find ways of reconnecting to the best you – the really energised you; be grateful for who and what you have in your life; and, turn up, doing the small things which are step-by-step crucial to delivering what you’re working on.

You are the person to do this, you have all you need, and, you can do way more than you’ve so far imagined because you’ve already come further than you thought possible.

Old Lizard Brain is the oldest part of our brain, reacting most quickly to perceived threats – the fight or flight part of the brain.)

The movie Pay it Forward focuses on a schoolboy’s idea (Trevor, played by Haley Joel Osment) for a class project to make the world better: he comes up with doing something for someone which they have to pay forward to three people.

I love the idea in this film, and have just looked through my DVDs for our copy, but we’ve lent it out – go figure!

The whole thing about generosity fascinates.  What if, the more we give away, the more we have?  There’s something about giving to others which releases more within us we didn’t realise was there, which connects with the second thing.

What if we become more who we are the more we give another the possibility of finding out who they are?  In helping another person to know what they want to do and to do what they want to do, we’re defining ourselves.

Just gift it.

You want nothing in return because you’ve already received way more than the person can imagine just by their being willing to receive your gift.

And, if they insist, just ask them to gift who they are on to the next person.

Have a great 2014 figuring out how to do this more.

Creativity, Enjoyment, Generosity.

Ready to step out into the new?  True, it can be daunting.

To borrow some terms from Nassim Taleb, stepping into new possibilities can be more than a fragile experience (when we’re negatively affected by randomness and stressors), it can even be more than robust experience (when we’re able to recover from randomness and stressors), it can be an antifragile experience (antifragilistas thrive on randomness and stressors – up to a point).*

Stepping out can feel something like a space-walk into greater randomness and stress (or what I imagine a spacewalk to be like – never having been in space away from Spaceship Earth) but there are a number of anchors which secure you and allow you to thrive in these new opportunities so you are able to produce something others aren’t able to.

There is the purpose greater than yourself which calls to you (it can be to serve people in a far away place, create a beautiful artefact, bake amazing cakes to give away to people on the streets … ).  There is the anchor of your amazing skills and being able to hone and innovate these.  There is the anchor of people who get what you’re doing, and you get what they’re doing (this is an ever-growing tribe of people who are becoming easier to find – check out Meetup or VOX  to name but two).  A fourth anchor is one I’m developing for you at the moment – I know others are t0: spaces for opening minds and hearts and wills towards shipping the stuff you love.

If you have these things in place – which you do (you’re reading this so you’re connecting), then the spacewalk is going to be an experience of focusing on what it is you MUST do.

(*I wholeheartedly recommend Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile in which he lays out the significance of his triad of  fragile/robust/antifragile.)

Has the stuff you love to do and ship just become harder?

When deadlines and expectations kick in you can get stuck and find your the joy draining away … and then the voices begin.  How stupid was I to think I could do this?  I should have kept below the radar.  Everyone else can do this better than me.  I’ll never have another idea.  

Don’t stay paralysed.  Now is the time to remind yourself of a few things.

You know who you are and what you love to do – this is way more than a lot of people have.  It’s what’s brought you to this amazing place.

You have everything you need right now to produce even more amazing stuff.  In fact, you have more than you need and you have to find ways of giving this away because it’s going to keep on coming.

Because you’ve turned up, you’ve given yourself a head start on doing even more – not to mention learnt a whole load of stuff along the way which could change the world – at least someone’s world.

What you have right now is enough.

Trust me.  Better still, trust yourself.

No  one is headhunting you today for that thing you do .  At least, it’s unlikely.

But you can headhunt yourself.

It’s unlikely anyone is looking for you because they’re focusing on being headhunted themselves, and they’re missing the point that the universe is set up for abundance rather than scarcity.  This changes everything.

Whether you have a religious worldview of being created for something, or you prefer to hold a worldview that life can be significant simply because we’re here, what are you going to do?

I’m suggesting the universe is set up in a way which makes it possible for everyone to thrive – the problem is, there’s always someone who gets in the way of this (think dictators, revolutionaries, thieves, egocentrics, apathetics, pessimists, bureaucrats, politicians – unfortunately the list has many more to be added before being exhaustive).  There is something about being lost in work* which is chosen by us and meaningful to us, to develop mastery in skills,and to have purpose.

What totally absorbs you?  There are clues in this.

All of this may sounds self-absorbing, but when you think about it, it’s the path towards making the world better for everyone.  You can check out whether you’re on track if you experience success in the thing you love to do, whether you do it instinctively, if you grow through doing this thing, and if you need to do it.

I’m not saying the universe is perfect; we’d never do anything if we waited for things to be the way we think they ought to be.  Which brings us back to where we began.  Don’t wait for someone to find you and ask you to do the amazing stuff you do.   The universe has already found you and is waiting for the thing you do.  Now help someone else to do the things they do.

Have fun.

*Think about work in it’s biggest sense – the art you are able to produce through your imagination and skills for the sake of others.

26,000 times a day, moving 14,000 litres of air we breathe.

The odds are, we won’t breathe very deeply.  We breathe in shallow fashion – 16+ breaths each minute when 6 deep breaths are enough.

Most of the time we breathe without noticing, we breathe in shallow fashion without noticing..

Try it.  Slow your breathing down, both breathing in and breathing out, from your stomach rather than your chest.

And in-between, did you notice the pause – the moment neither breathing in nor out?

If we were more aware of our breathing, we’d realise we’re breathing fast and shallow at times of anxiousness or distraction, when we’re overwhelmed or feeling pushed to move way too quickly.  We’re often too busy and tired to breathe deeeeeeeeply, to notice more, to understand more, to see the other person more, to begin to see all that is from within this bigger world rather than from our little world.

We breathe in soooooooo deeeeeeeeeply when we are curious about the world around us, when we stop thinking what we see is all there is, when we see the invisible connections with the people who fill our days.  We breathe deeeeeeeeply, when we allow what we see and understand more to change who we are – pulling us out of our small world into a bigger world.

And when we have breathed as deeeeeeeply as we can, before we breathe out, a pause, a thin|silence in which we know and hold  what our lives are to be about, the shape and colour and smell of our unique art we must breathe out, to know this as we have never known it before and to realise this is standing on holy ground, where your life speaks to you about your future.  To know there isn’t a work life and a leisure life, a sports life and a relational life, there is only life, and you you know how you must live it.

And tomorrow you breathe deeply again.