Do you tell yourself that someday this part of your life will move to the front burner and become a priority? How will that actually happen?

Back burner items tend to remain on the back burner indefinitely. They rarely make it to the front burner on their own. The reason they’re on the back burner is because you put them there, probably because you deemed something else more important.

At one point you may have put your career first. Or your health. Or a particular relationship. But are those priorities still right for you today? Are your current priorities still correct?

If you ask this question in a cursory way, you’ll almost always answer yes. If you told yourself a year ago that your finances must be your #1 priority, they’ll have a tendency to stay there. Whether you’ve made measurable progress or not, you’ll have a tendency to stick to essentially the same priorities year after year.

A True Priority or a Distraction

If your current prioritization tends to be self-perpetuating, how do you know when it’s time for an adjustment? You probably won’t figure it out just by asking if anything needs to be adjusted.

Generally the way you’ll notice that an adjustment is needed is that you’ll notice a nagging feeling that something isn’t right with the way you’re currently living.

Another clue is that you won’t seem to be making much progress in your top priorities. If you look at your actual results in those areas, you’ll see evidence that you’re drifting or even declining.

Often this happens because we like to assume that we can improve some area of life by making it the #1 priority. For instance, if you feel that your finances are weak, you may decide to focus on making more money for a while. But then a few years pass, and your finances don’t seem to be that much better. Overall you feel more stressed too. The main reason you failed here is that making money wasn’t a true priority. It was actually a distraction from a deeper, more important part of your life.

Blocking

When false priorities are mistaken for true priorities, some blocking is bound to occur. You’ll feel resistance when you try to move forward on priorities that seem to make logical sense but which don’t connect with your true desires. No matter how hard you push against that resistance or what techniques you try to use to get past it, it will still be present. That’s because your mistake was further upstream. Your priorities weren’t aligned with your true desires.

When you realize you’re in a blocking situation, give yourself some time to pause and reflect. Even if you didn’t explicitly write down your priorities, what do your thoughts tell you about what’s most important to you?

If it’s convenient for you, jot down a quick list of your top mental priorities. Maybe you’ll come up with something like this:

1. Making more money
2. Improving my overall health and fitness
3. Spending time with my significant other
4. Being more focused and productive at work
5. Learning new skills

But if you were to actually look at your actions as an objective observer might do, you may see that you’ve been prioritizing your day very differently in practice:

1. Communication (email, texting, phone calls)
2. Social networking
3. Consuming information (blogs, news, videos, etc)
4. Doing urgent work
5. Being entertained

These aren’t complete lists, but I think you get the idea — your mental prioritization and your real world actions are not in sync.

If you discover something like this, don’t panic. It’s quite common for people to have two lists that are clearly not aligned. Fortunately this is a fixable problem.

The False Belief You Must Release

The reason for this dichotomy is a common false belief. It’s the belief that prioritizing is a logical affair, that it’s something you can achieve with your logical mind.

In fact, an equally mistaken approach is the belief that this is something you can discern intuitively. That approach will also fail.

Your logical mind is the part that comes up with solutions like: If my finances are the weakest part of my life, then I should make that my top priority for a while. Giving my finances more attention will surely improve them, and then when things are going really well in that area, I can make something else a priority.

This sounds very believable. So it comes as a real blow to the logical mind when this seemingly sensible solution doesn’t actually work. This throws the logical mind for a loop because after all, it should work, right?

Actually it shouldn’t work. There’s an error in the logic here. The assumption that turning a lagging area of your life into your top conscious priority will cause that area to improve is a false assumption. Much of the time, it turns out not to be true.

Many times when you take a lagging area of your life and make it your top priority, that area will continue to stagnate. Sometimes it will even get worse.

And sometimes you can ignore an area of your life, and it will improve all by itself.

We could go really deep into this, but for now I just want to plant the seed in your mind that turning a lagging area of your life into your top priority may in fact be a mistake. Sometimes it’s the worst thing you can do. You’ll see why this happens a little later in this article.

Why the Logical Mind Cannot Prioritize

If you try to set priorities in a logical manner, failure is guaranteed. This is because logic cannot provide a context for prioritizing.

There’s a special class of brain injuries whereby people cannot feel any emotions, or they’re unaware of their emotional states. Interestingly, these people cannot function well at all. They might spend a whole day deciding where to go for lunch, evaluating all sorts of irrelevant details such as the lighting conditions in each restaurant or which table they might get. Such people may brush their teeth 20 times a day, thinking it was a reasonable thing to do. They don’t have a context for separating the relevant from the irrelevant.

Some companies claim to make data-driven decisions, but that’s a misnomer since there must always be an emotional context behind the usage of data. There’s no logical reason for why a company must grow or why it must sell more products or have more impact. It could just as easily shut down, and the people could go do something else instead. Even the choice to make data-driven decisions is an emotional one. The emotional brain provides the context for feeling that it’s good to grow a company; then the data can be logically analyzed to determine what avenues may support that growth better than others. But ultimately the whole decision chain begins with an emotional context, and even data-driven decisions are normally littered with emotional checkpoints.

If you were to try to prioritize your life on a purely mental/logical level, you’d find the task impossible. You cannot logically evaluate and sort the infinite possibilities available to you. In fact, if you try to go that route, you’ll surely experience bouts of analysis paralysis, where you get so caught up in analysis that you hardly get anything done.

Let the Heart Lead

The solution to this trap is simple: Let the heart lead. Use your emotions to prioritize.

This may sound like a cop-out, but there’s a more empowering way to look at it.

First, you’re going to do this anyway. If you try to use the logical prioritization approach, some part of you won’t cooperate. Your mental priorities may look great on paper, but you won’t actually follow them. When have you ever prioritized your life logically and even come close to sticking to your priorities?

The closest you’ll get will be to use drugs like coffee to try to throw your hormones out of balance and overstimulate the logical mind, but your emotions will still reassert themselves from time to time, and the signals will only be more scrambled. In the end your emotions will make you feel worse when you try to graft a logical prioritization onto your life by force. This approach will take you further away from genuine happiness, and it’s ultimately counter-productive.

Maybe someday there will be a better substitute for your emotional brain, but for now you’re stuck with it. Fortunately that isn’t such a bad thing. Your emotional brain is much older than your logical mind, being subjected to many more cycles of evolutions. Your emotional subsystem is a finely honed instrument, far beyond the capabilities of even our most advanced supercomputers.

The logical mind is good at certain things, but prioritizing the big picture isn’t one of its strengths. This is, however, a major strength of the emotional mind. These two aspects of mind complement each other beautifully, but in the Western world we often have the relationship backwards. We need to learn to prioritize with the heart and the emotions, not with the logical mind.

Physically speaking, your emotional brain is mostly in your head, but it’s also partly in your chest. Your heart actually has its own tiny brain consisting of about 40,000 neurites. It’s primitive compared to the brain in your head, but it’s also loud. The communication channel that sends signals from heart to brain is like a firehose, whereas the channel going from brain to heart carries much less bandwidth — more like a thin straw. Essentially the heart functions as a state controller for the brain. The heart can easily tune out the brain, but the brain cannot easily tune out the heart. When you feel strong emotions, those emotions will take over your thinking, determine the types of thoughts you can or can’t have in those moments. But you may find it very difficult to think your way out of strong feelings.

Heart-Centered Prioritizing

When you prioritize with the heart, it’s important to get a clear signal. I recommend that you consume no drugs like caffeine or alcohol for at least a week just to be safe. Otherwise your nervous system is likely to be out of whack, and the heart-mind communication won’t work as well. If you really want to amp it up, eat all raw for a week, or try fasting, juice fasting, or mono meals for a few days first.

You’ll want to achieve a state known as coherence, where the heart and brain synchronize their communication patterns. This is the difference between listening to music and listening to noise.

To achieve coherence, you need to focus on creating a certain emotional state. Once you’re in that state, your brain will sync to your heart. This can be physically measured with the proper equipment. Perhaps the most significant change is in your HRV (heart rate variability). When you’re out of coherence, your HRV bounces around chaotically. When you’re in coherence, your HRV looks like a smooth sine wave if you were to graph it over time. Your heart actually speeds up and then slows down in a very flowing pattern, almost like music.

Emotionally this state of coherence can be described as: unconditional love, compassion, appreciation, and gratitude. If you’re feeling these emotions, you’re there. If you’re not feeling these emotions, you’re not there. Feeling neutral or okay or fine is not coherence.

Coherence has many benefits. It feels good emotionally, but it’s also good for your health, your mental performance, your social life, and beyond.

While the heart is the loudest voice in heart-brain communication, the brain can still influence the heart. So you can create this coherence state by holding thoughts in your mind that are congruent with these feelings. You can recall positive memories or use visualization. Another method is to listen to music that evokes these emotions. I like the song One by U2.

Play around to find a method that works for you. You can do it all in your mind if you want, such as by visualizing a positive scene, but you can just as easily induce coherence through external means, such as by cuddling someone you care about.

The reason to put yourself into a state of coherence first is simple: incredible clarity. Once you’re in this state of coherence, you can trust that your heart-brain communication will be at peak efficiency. You can still attempt to prioritize outside of this state, but the results won’t be as reliable.

Now while you’re enjoying this warm, glowing heart-centeredness, ask yourself what’s most important to you in life. Create your prioritization list by focusing on your feelings. I expect you’ll find this pretty easy to do.

You’ll probably notice that the way your heart prioritizes is very different from the way your logical brain works. For instance, when you’re in coherence, it’s pretty obvious that making lots of money isn’t that important, and it may not make it onto your priority list at all.

You may come up with a list that looks something like this:

1. Feeling connected
2. Helping people
3. Serving the greater good
4. Being kind
5. Sharing my gifts and talents with the world

Please do try this for yourself. Don’t just read this article and skip this exercise.

You’ll probably notice that heart-centered prioritizing is actually faster and easier than logical prioritizing.

The heart-centered approach is also more consistent. When you use the logical approach, you’ll get different answers each time. Every month you apply hard logic to set your priorities, your answers will keep shifting, sometimes radically. But with the heart-based approach, you’ll find that your answers remain remarkably consistent. You may use different words to describe your priorities and shift the ordering around a little, but you’ll be struck by a feeling of coming home to a delightful sense of clarity each time you do this. It may feel like remembering rather than prioritizing. The answers flow with little effort.

When you’re in coherence, your logical brain will function better too, and it will work harmoniously with your emotions to help you create what you desire.

We can also see why it doesn’t work to prioritize based on logic alone. Even prioritizing based on intuition doesn’t work. The reason is that these approaches ignore the importance of coherence. Each time you try to apply your logic or intuition to a problem, you’ll be in a slightly different emotional state. That emotional state will dictate what sorts of solutions you come up with. And if the emotional states don’t match from one month to the next, your solutions will be discordant, and you’ll find it hard to create plans that stick. It’s like listening to music where each track keeps drifting off key — it may still look like music on paper… but not when you listen to it.

We can also see why turning a lagging area of your life into your top priority will often backfire. If focusing more attention on that lagging area makes it harder to achieve coherence, your results will suffer. So if you feel a sense of financial lack and then try to push yourself to make more money, you’ll probably be more likely to induce feelings of stress and overwhelm instead of appreciation and gratitude. And so your emotional brain will lead you to procrastinate. It’s actually trying to get you away from those negative feelings and nudge you in the direction of coherence. This is why you may find yourself addicted to email or social media, which may help you feel better than stressing yourself out with work you don’t enjoy. A better solution is to enter the coherence state deliberately and then decide what to do from there.

Taking Action

When you’re ready to take action on your priorities, start by returning to coherence again. Use your favorite method to create feelings of unconditional love, compassion, appreciation, and gratitude. This way you’ll be syncing to the same state you used to create your priorities, so you won’t have the feeling of second-guessing yourself.

In this state, the right actions will tend to emerge fairly easily. For me it was the desire to write and publish a new article on this beautiful Saturday morning while sipping a banana-coconut smoothie. My desire is to help you gain more clarity and experience more flow and happiness in your life.

Returning to this state of coherence when you set priorities and when you act on them is better than trying to prioritize while you’re in one state and then taking actions in discordant states. Don’t expect good results if you prioritize from a state of desperation and then try to take action from a feeling of stress. Sync your emotions to the coherence state before you prioritize and before you take action. With practice you can do this in a matter of seconds. This is a high leverage practice that makes a world of difference.

A Global Perspective

Imagine how the planet would change if more people began each day by syncing to coherence first. Imagine if governments and corporate boardrooms took a couple minutes to sync to unconditional love before they made key decisions. How many problems could we avoid with this one simple practice?

Wouldn’t this be more impactful and consistent than having each person show up with discordant feelings such as fear, greed, overwhelm, etc?

You can try this with your family and friends as well. The next time you have a disagreement with someone close to you, pause for a moment and see if you can get yourself and the other person to sync to coherence first. Then see what becomes of your disagreement.

Syncing between multiple people is like playing in an orchestra. Each individual may have a different instrument and may play different notes at different times, but their output can flow together harmoniously. When multiple people sync with coherence, they create beautiful music. When they’re out of sync, they create some form of noise.

Consider a 30-Day Coherence Trial

If you want to make syncing to coherence a habit, consider kicking off a 30-day trial. It’s really not that difficult to do, and the potential benefits are huge.

To start the trial, take a few minutes to sync to coherence, and then jot down a list of your top priorities in life. It doesn’t have to be a long list, and the exact ordering isn’t that important. Just write down whatever comes to you.

When you’re ready to begin the action part of each day, pause again for a moment and sync to coherence. Then get started by taking the next action you feel inspired to take.

This synching step only takes a few minutes at most. It can be as simple as playing a song that makes you feel appreciative and loving. Then proceed from that state as you move forward. Try to hold onto it as long as you can.

When you notice that you’ve lost touch with the coherence state and you’re drifting into discordant feelings and losing clarity, take another time-out to re-sync to coherence. Again, this doesn’t take long at all. Recall a happy memory. Play some inspiring music. Or send a quick text message to someone you love: I’m really grateful you’re in my life. I deeply love and appreciate you. <3

Since I completed my 30-day music trial this week, I’m kicking off this new 30-day trial today. My commitment is to sync to coherence at least twice per day. I started this morning by syncing to that state and feeling inspired to write and share this article with you. I hope you find it helpful. Have a beautiful day!

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

You’ll soon realize that you’re 100% committed to breathing.

Notice that you don’t make excuses not to breathe. Notice that you don’t worry about motivating yourself to breathe. Notice that you don’t need to justify your desire to breathe.

You just breathe.

Commitment is action.

No excuses. No debate. No lengthy analysis. No whining about how hard it is. No worrying about what others might think. No cowardly delays.

Just go.

What if something gets in the way of your commitment?

What would you do if someone tried to prevent you from breathing?

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

As you shift your inner self, you begin exerting new forces on your outer reality. It takes time for the various elements of your reality (your relationships, finances, daily routine, etc) to reveal the cumulative effect of these forces and to shift themselves around to achieve equilibrium with your new vibe.

Old opportunities will dry up. New opportunities will begin to appear.

Invitations that once attracted you will seem boring, while others will become interesting to you.

People will change how they relate to you. Some will become more distant while others will zoom closer.

Things you used to tolerate will no longer be tolerable for you. Things you used to merely dream about will begin to seem possible for you.

This is also a test of sorts — to see if you’re really committed to holding the new vibe. If you allow the old reality to get the better of you, and you swing you back to the old vibe due to feelings of guilt, regret, fear, attachment, and so on, you’ll simply reinforce the old reality and cancel the shift.

This can be a very chaotic time to endure, but stay the course and it will pass.

It can also be a lonely time because you’ll most likely be going through this shift by yourself. This doesn’t mean you’ll be saying goodbye to all your previous relationships, but you may be relating to those same people a little differently on the other side of this shift. How this plays out depends on the nature of the shift. For instance, if you’re shifting to a more abundant vibe, you’re likely to repel people who are deeply mired in a scarcity vibe, but some people in your life may find your shift exciting and may be supportive in watching you go through it.

Also, during the shift you may want to stay focused on the new vibe until you’ve had a chance to reach the other side in physical reality and re-ground yourself there. Sometimes, but not always, it’s just a little simpler to go through these kinds of shifts without being too heavily influenced by other people.

Watching your reality rearrange itself right in front of you can be a bit disorienting at first. I liken the experience to moving to a new city. When you first arrive, it takes a while to familiarize yourself to the next territory. For me it usually takes about 3 weeks before I feel like I’m used to it.

You also have to loosen your attachment to the old city and say goodbye to it in a way. Otherwise you’ll want to cancel the move.

It can be hard to predict which aspects of the old city will still be present in the new one and which you’ll essentially be leaving behind. There will be some experiences you can recreate there and others that you need to let go. You’ll also discover new experiences that simply weren’t available in your old city.

Once you’ve moved, you can still go back and visit the old city, but it won’t feel the same once you’re firmly established in your new residence. You’ve been looking at your old reality from a new perspective.

It’s extremely tempting to cancel the move along the way, especially during those first two weeks. It takes a big inner commitment to shift your vibe and let your physical reality catch up, just as it takes a big commitment to move to a new city. Some vibrational shifts are so big that they’re akin to moving to a new country with a different language. Expect it to take longer to adapt to these bigger shifts as well, perhaps months or even years instead of weeks.

If you’re truly committed to the shift, then stay the course. Your outer reality will catch up eventually. Just be prepared for a bit of chaotic restructuring along the way. Do your best to relax and breathe through it. Keep going back to your new vibe and reinforcing it, even when it seems like your outer world is screaming at you.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

When you see movies about visiting certain cities, or hear about people traveling there, does a certain part of your psyche salivate with desire? Do you have the thought, I really want to go there someday.

Do you realize that it’s absolutely possible to turn your travel dreams into reality? Those dreams aren’t mere fantasy. They’re the seeds of real experiences.

In this post I’ll share with you some lessons I’ve learned during the past couple years as I worked to transform myself from a very infrequent traveler into the kind of person who regularly sets and achieves new travel goals.

I certainly wouldn’t label myself an accomplished world traveler at this point. There are dedicated travel bloggers who post at length about all the places they’ve visited. But the unique transformation I have to share, and which I hope will be of value to you, is that I just went through this transition recently. It’s clear to me that I’ve passed my own personal tipping point, such that now I know I can maintain regular travel as part of my lifestyle. I didn’t just take a trip — I transformed my whole lifestyle to make this a reality. So these lessons are still very fresh for me. I can still clearly relate to the vibe of being a person who had travel dreams that always seemed to be delayed for a distant someday, so I can draw a sharp contrast between these two different states of being.

Stop Making Excuses

What are some of your most common excuses for not traveling?

Fill in the blank: I’d like to travel more, but I can’t travel right now because _____.

Here are some of the excuses I’ve used in the past:

• I can’t travel right now because I have kids.
• I can’t travel right now because I don’t have enough money.
• I can’t travel right now because I don’t have the time (or I can’t afford to take time off from work).
• I can’t travel right now because I have too much to do at home.
• I can’t travel right now because I haven’t finished X, Y, and Z yet.
• I can’t travel right now because I need to do more research about places to go first.
• I can’t travel right now because it’s too complicated.
• I can’t travel right now because I don’t know how.
• I can’t travel right now because my wife doesn’t want me to.

Any of those sound familiar? What are your favorite excuses for not traveling?

How about this very popular disguised excuse: I will get around to traveling someday – I just can’t get to it right now.

I encourage you to actually write out your own personal list of excuses. Now look at them, and acknowledge that the entire lot is B.S.

When you make excuses and feed them as if they’re real, you’re using your power against yourself.

Let’s review some of the excuses above and see just how nonsensical they are.

You can’t travel because you have kids? Lots of people have kids and still travel. They just don’t use their children as excuses. If you ask enough people, you’ll find someone who can watch the kids while you’re on the road. You may enjoy having some away time from the kids, so you can come back to them fresh. Traveling without them will give you a chance to miss them. Also, notice that kids are portable. You can take them with you if you want. Try it and see if it works for you. You can do this even while they’re still in the womb. So this excuse is just lame. If you want to travel and you aren’t doing so because you have children, you’ll end up resenting them as a burden, and how is that going to serve them? Is that the kind of parent you wish to be? Do you want to teach your kids that they can’t have what they desire if they become parents?

You can’t travel because you don’t have enough money? Last time I checked, money was earnable. Money is an important part of the travel game, and we’ll address that later, but just admit to yourself for now that it’s incredibly pathetic to hide behind a lack of money as an excuse for not traveling. People were traveling long before money was invented. If you want it badly enough, you’ll do what it takes to get the money you need, and you probably need less than you think. In fact, clear travel goals are great motivation to earn more money.

You can’t travel because you don’t have the time… or you have too much to do? Yeah, right. You have so much to do that you have time to read my blog but not to make travel arrangements? You have the same amount of time as anyone else, including those people who are traveling all over the place. Ferdinand Magellan somehow found the time to sail around the world, and he lived to the ripe old age of 41. It’s nonsense to say that you don’t have the time. A more accurate statement is that you haven’t made travel a high enough priority in your life. You’re putting too much lesser crap ahead of it, like watching TV or web surfing. Turn off your cable TV, and never look back. You do realize that at the same time you’re reading this article, you could be exploring another city — right this very moment. Someone else is doing that instead of you. They got there not by having more hours in the day, but by making different decisions and setting different priorities. This may sound ironic since I’m a blogger, but I don’t read other people’s blogs. I don’t have the time. If I tried to keep up with all the blogs that interest me, I wouldn’t have just spent 2 wonderful weeks in Paris. Stop making time for stupid stuff, and you’ll have plenty of time for travel.

You can’t travel because your spouse won’t let you? Not a problem — just tell your spouse I said it’s okay. You have my permission. If your spouse has a problem with that, tell him/her it’s out of your hands because I said you had to go travel. Steve’s orders. Also read My Wife Won’t Let Me Start My Own Business – same ideas apply here. Seriously, don’t be such a wimp. If you want to travel and your spouse won’t let you, then go travel without your spouse; if they have a tizzy cow about it, find a new spouse that loves to travel as much as you do. I know that sounds over the top, but it’s even more over the top — and utterly ridiculous — to try to use your relationship as an excuse for not achieving your own happiness and fulfillment. If you hold back for the “good” of your relationship, you’ll just end up silently resenting your partner. Is that really the kind of relationship you wish to have? Is that the kind of person you want to be — an inauthentic one who can’t speak up and be true to yourself? It’s better to forgive yourself for picking an incompatible partner — we all make mistakes — and open yourself to attracting a relationship with someone who enjoys traveling as much as you do.

You can’t travel because you can’t get the time off of work? That’s B.S. too. Everyone who travels could just as easily make this excuse, but they take the time off of work anyway. What if you have a job? It doesn’t matter. You Are Self-Employed no matter what. You may simply not be very good at managing your personal services business. Perhaps you did something rather dumb like taking on an indefinitely long contract job where you somehow agreed to give a third party control over your schedule. Realize that it’s not your bosses fault. You did this to yourself. You didn’t have to do that. Lots of people don’t do that. I don’t do that. I think it’s a stupid way to live. Then again, maybe your employer subtly manipulated you into a form of slavery. But now that you’re aware of those limitations, do you wish to continue? Or do you want more freedom? If you want more freedom, don’t expect someone else to bestow it upon you. You must demand it and claim it. Freedom is seldom free. Ask any former slave. Frequent travel requires that you have the freedom to control a significant part of your schedule. The truth is that you already have this freedom right now. You can buy a plane ticket and go. Whatever structures you feel are getting in the way are structures that you need to collapse and replace with better structures. Otherwise you’ll never have the freedom you desire, and your travel dreams will indeed remain pure fantasy till you die. Your employer and your work schedule aren’t real problems; you can ditch those today if you want. The problems you must overcome are your own past stupid decisions and your own wimpiness in giving your power away too easily. Fortunately these are solvable problems.

Are you beginning to see a pattern here? A common thread weaves through every excuse. The problem is always one of giving your power away, feeding energy to your excuses instead of your desires. And the solutions are the same in each case: Stop it! It’s a stupid thing to do to yourself.

All of your excuses are lame and pointless. None of them are valid. For each excuse you can name, lots of people with similar challenges are already traveling in spite of those challenges.

No doubt at this point, there will be some nudnik who feels compelled to offer up a counter-example… like What if you’re serving a life sentence in prison? How are you supposed to travel then? Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison, and he sures seems to get around. For every retarded excuse, there’s an inspiring example of using your power correctly.

If you need more help with this notion, read Feeble Excuses and How To Give Your Power Away and Abuse of Power. And then of course… Stop it!

Work Through Limiting Beliefs About Travel

In addition to making excuses, another challenge to overcome is that of limiting beliefs. A limiting belief is a perspective that prevents you from taking actions you’d otherwise like to take.

Here are some examples of limiting beliefs I had about travel:

• Traveling is selfish and self-indulgent.
• The more I travel, the more I’m neglecting my work, kids, etc.
• Traveling is difficult and complicated.
• Traveling isn’t worth the effort.
• Traveling equals taking a vacation, a break from more important matters.

And again I had to go through a process of breaking down these limiting beliefs and replacing them with more accurate ways of thinking.

Is travel selfish and self-indulgent? Of course it is — to an extent. But is there anything wrong with that? I think the underlying assumption with this belief is that if we do something that we really desire, that somehow it’s wrong. Instead of trying to frame traveling as something I do for other people, I got past this belief by accepting that for me, traveling is indeed a self-indulgent thing to do. And then I admitted to myself that I like to self-indulge in this way, and I feel good when I do so. When I’m traveling at a frequency and pacing that feels good to me, I’m happier with my life. I could say that it benefits others in some fashion, but I don’t want to overplay that because that isn’t really why I travel. I travel primarily for myself, and it’s perfectly okay to do so.

Are you neglecting your work, kids, etc. when you hit the road? No, you’re creating the balance you seek. You can’t give everyone and everything your attention at all times. The requests for your time will often exceed the time you have to give. It’s up to you to discover the right balance that works for you.

For more than a decade, I tried “balancing” my life with 1-2 weeks of travel per year at most, usually to destinations I’d already been to many times before. In 2010, I traveled about 12 weeks out of the year, mostly going to new cities. That was a huge shift for me, as I’d never done anything like that before. It didn’t take long to see how much happier I was with this level of travel.

Is traveling difficult and complicated? It may seem that way at first, but the more you practice, the easier it gets. You can learn a lot from other people who travel frequently, but you can also just ease into it and learn by doing. I prefer a mixture of both. Travel has its share of challenges, but all of them can be handled, and the process of dealing with them will help you grow stronger and more capable.

Is traveling worth the effort? I figured this one out by trial and error. For me it has definitely been worth the effort. By and large, the trips I’ve taken have been better than I expected. I enjoyed them even more than I thought I would.

A couple weeks ago, I was standing outside the Louvre, thinking to myself, This is so cool! I can’t believe I’m really here at the Louvre. It’s even more amazing than I thought it would be.

I feel so much awe and wonder as I travel to different places. There have been many magical moments, like when Rachelle and I were the last people to leave the Eiffel Tower one night and had the whole top level to ourselves for a while as we gazed over a moonlit Paris… or when we rode bikes through Stanley Park in Vancouver… or when I drove through the beautiful landscapes at Yellowstone and saw a bear, a wolf, and lots of bison.

Yes, you can feel over-traveled if you do it to excess, but when you find your balance, I think you’ll agree that it is indeed worth the effort.

Is traveling just about taking a vacation? Travel is what you make of it. If you treat it as a vacation, a break from your normal life, then that’s all it will be to you.

That isn’t how I prefer to travel through. Getaways are nice now and then, and I do occasionally enjoy them, but I can’t usually stomach vacation-style trips for more than a few days. I get bored with them pretty quickly, and I end up feeling that my time would be better spent elsewhere. But for many years, those were the only kinds of trips I took because I thought that’s all there was to travel.

Today I no longer think of traveling as taking a break or a vacation. It is a shift in routine to be sure, but the purpose isn’t to escape or take time off from work.

Travel is just as important to me as any other work I might do. Traveling, when I do it in the way that works for me, provides me with an integrated bundle of growth experiences. It pushes me and challenges me. It wakes me up to new possibilities. It exposes me to new perspectives. It inspires me.

I don’t get these benefits if I keep going to the same places I’ve already been to and repeat experiences I’ve already had. I get these benefits when I branch out and visit places I’ve never been to, inviting new experiences I’ve never had before. For me, travel is the progressive experience of the new and the unfamiliar.

I don’t feel guilty about traveling for weeks at a time because I know that for me, travel is time on, not time off. Travel is an important part of my path of growth. I love that there are so many places I have yet to visit — it means I have a long line of growth experiences ahead of me. When I’m traveling in the manner I find most fulfilling, I’m not on vacation. I’m working on myself. Travel is exactly the opposite of taking time off. When I travel I’m pushing myself to be on 24/7. By comparison when I return to Las Vegas after a long trip, that’s when it feels like I’m taking it easy.

In a similar manner, I encourage you to list out your own limiting beliefs about travel, and then work through them one by one. Step into the real truths behind these apparent limitations, and realize that the only limits are those you place upon yourself.

If you need more help busting limiting beliefs, I encourage you to use the Lefkoe Process, especially if you’re a very logical and left-brained person. Take advantage of Morty’s 20-minute videos to eliminate beliefs that hold you back from traveling as much as you’d like to.

Honoring the Call to Travel

I know that not everyone feels a call to get on the road and travel. And that’s fine. But for whatever reason, I’m one of the people who does hear this call. I love being on the road… not every day, but often.

Are you one of those people? Do you feel a stirring in your soul to get out on the road and see more of the world? And does it scare you to think about it? Fear is a pointer to desire.

If you hear this call too, it’s important to honor it. Traveling is a part of you. It’s time to awaken to this calling and to make it a part of your life, not someday… but now.

It may not be easy to make it happen. You may have to overcome many challenges and undertake significant lifestyle adjustments. It may take some time to work through all those shifts, but you can make this happen. It’s all very doable, regardless of your current situation.

I travel because it stirs something in my soul. It feels so good to me. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve enjoyed the trips I’ve taken during the past couple years even more than I expected to. Paris was even more amazing than I thought it would be. The reality of travel seems to keep exceeding my expectations.

I often find that I don’t really understand certain desires until I begin to explore them. Before taking action I can’t fully fathom why they matter so much to me. Those lessons unfold over time — only after I dive in and act. As a result of lots of trial and error, I know it’s important for me to listen to these desires and to give them outlets for expression, even before I fully grasp what they’re trying to express.

By giving myself permission to travel more, I’ve learned more about why it’s so important to me. Up until mid-2009, I’d never left the USA. I think that limited my perspective. I would occasionally see feedback on some of my articles about how “American” my perspective was. I had no idea what that meant. My blog has an international audience, with 50% of readers living outside the USA, but I wasn’t a particularly international person. Sure I studied other cultures in school, but that doesn’t come close to actually experiencing them firsthand.

I’ve gone far enough along this path to know that traveling will continue to be a significant part of my life henceforth. I couldn’t fathom going back to a lifestyle that lacked expansive travel experiences.

Traveling offers a variety of different challenges, and those are good challenges to help me keep growing. My life in Las Vegas is fairly easy. If I settle into it too much, I feel bored and restless, and I crave new challenges. Going to France and trying to communicate in French was a real challenge for me at times — a challenge I can’t readily duplicate in Vegas, at least not with the same level of immersion.

One time I was at a museum in Paris, and a woman said a couple sentences to me in French. I couldn’t consciously make out a single word, but somehow I understood what she was saying. She was asking me if I wanted to do the audio tour, which would cost extra. It was surreal to have a communication experience where I didn’t understand any of the words, yet I grasped the meaning. This gave me a different perspective on how I communicate with others.

Even if you don’t fully understand why you wish to travel, I encourage you to begin honoring this call anyway. From the outside looking in, it may appear to be self-indulgent whimsy. But once you get on the road and start experiencing what it’s really like, I expect you’ll have a profound shift in your perspective, just as I’ve had.

Give your travel calling the attention and the respect it deserves. It matters.

Place Your Travel Order

When you’ve worked through the excuses and limiting beliefs and accepted your travel calling, the next step is to place your order with the universe.

Many people are really, really bad at this — as in pathetic. Let me save you a lot of time here and get you past all the fluff that will keep you stuck at home.

Do this: PICK YOUR NEXT DESTINATION!

This means to pick one specific place to travel to, such as a city or an island. Make that your next travel goal.

Pick your next destination based on where you most desire to visit next. Don’t base it on what you think you can get — that’s a misuse of power. Ask yourself: If I could hit the road tomorrow on a free trip that someone else was paying for, where would I most like to go?

In order to get moving on your travel goals, you need to pick a destination that inspires you. It has to be a real, genuine, heartfelt desire. If you don’t really want it, or if it’s just something you’re settling for but isn’t really your top choice, then it’s a phony, wimpy-ass goal, and you’re probably not going to put any real effort into it.

When you acknowledge the destination you really want, it’s probably going to scare you a bit. That’s good. That means it’s a stretch goal.

If you travel goal seems too easy and doesn’t stir up any fear or trepidation, chances are you’re wimping out and picking something because you think you can get it, but it’s not a deep, soul-stirring desire. If you move forward and try to take action on that goal, you’ll most likely procrastinate and sabotage yourself, and even if you do make it happen, you’ll get there and may feel bored and listless.

Recently on Twitter and Google+, I asked people what city they’d most love to travel to next. Most people seemed to have no trouble offering up their top choice. But some people gave a list of possibilities, which is an abuse of power. You can only be in one location at a time, so if your next destination is a list of items separated by the word or, have you really made a decision yet? No, you haven’t.

What if you can’t decide? Seriously… you can’t decide? How did you decide what to eat for breakfast? Use the same process to pick your next travel destination. It’s not rocket science. You just decide. If you didn’t know how to make such decisions, you’d have died of starvation long ago. Don’t overcomplicate it. You can visit more than one destination in your lifetime. All you need to do now is pick your NEXT one. It’s no more difficult that choosing your next meal.

It’s perfectly fine to make your next destination a package deal — a string of ANDs rather than ORs. Just be clear that you want the whole package, and get clear about the order in which you’ll visit each city/location. I did a 23-day road trip last year, and it was fairly straightforward to make it happen, but I had to figure out what all the stops would be. I visited Reno, Sacramento, San Francisco, Ashland, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Kelowna, Banff, Calgary, Glacier Park, Yellowstone, Salt Lake City, and back to Vegas. It was an awesome trip!

Vague goals have very little power to manifest. When I tried to set a goal to visit the Pacific Northwest or to travel to Europe, nothing much happened. It was only when I got specific that these goals started to manifest quickly. A goal to visit the Pacific Northwest is lame; you can’t take action on that. I had to concretize that goal by deciding which cities to visit and in what order. Same goes for Europe. I intended to go to Europe for many years. But it was only when I shifting to a more concrete goal and picked Paris for my next destination that I finally found myself on an intercontinental flight.

So don’t pick a country or a continent or some other vague B.S. like that. China isn’t a destination. Pick a real city. And it’s not a bad idea to get even more specific if you can, like deciding to stay in Midtown Manhattan when you visit NYC. In my experience, picking a city is enough specificity though — once I’m there I’ll probably travel all around the city anyway, so just about anything within city limits can potentially be part of the experience.

Even if you’ve already read How to Order, read it again. If it seems like I’m being excessive in constantly referring back to this article, that’s accurate. I’ll keep doing so until people start ordering correctly and stop behaving like nimnuls who walk into the universal restaurant saying, “I’m hungry. I want some food. Bring me some food.”

Don’t be one of those dolts who says, “I want to travel more” or “I want to visit Asia.” You’ll stay home if you do that. Place a real order. What city? What island?

Banish Doubt and Create Certainty

Once you’ve picked a destination, do NOT change your mind.  Poke a pin in it on a paper map, and don’t move the pin till you’ve been there and back.

Don’t consider other alternative you might visit. Remove all doubt from your mind. You are going to go to this place. And you’re going to start making it happen now… not someday. Someday is never.

This is your reality. You’re a god here. If you want to visit this place, nothing can stop you from getting there. It’s a done deal.

Pause for a moment and let that sink in. This isn’t just a dream or a fantasy. This is about to become your reality. Soon you will physically be in your chosen destination. Yes, you’re really going to be there. It’s going to happen.

If you think it’s not going to happen, if you harbor any doubts about it, give yourself a good smack. That’s an abuse of power. Stop it!

You are going to reach your destination. Period. Whatever obstacles come up, you’ll surmount them. Whatever problems arise, you’ll solve them. Whatever challenges present themselves, you’ll overcome them. You cannot be stopped.

Do NOT use your power against yourself. Direct your power in one direction — strictly towards your intended destination.

Doubting that you’ll reach your destination is the same as deciding to stay home. Don’t do that unless you’re #1 destination is to stay home.

Whenever I finally get moving towards a new travel destination, I invariably hit a certain snapping point. I may waffle and vacillate a good bit leading up to the decision, but once I’ve made the decision, I turn off all alternatives. After that snap point, I direct all my energy forward, towards making the trip to the chosen destination a reality. I don’t give myself permission to change my mind or to doubt whether it will happen. I create the reality where the trip is an absolute certainty. The odds that it will happen are 100%.

You already know how to do this. Recognize that you’ve used your power in a similar manner at various points in the past. Remember what it felt like when you hit that snapping point of making a real decision, and you never looked back. Maybe you quit a certain job or ended a relationship or decided to move to a new city. Remember what a done-deal type of decision feels like.

Notice how easy and straightforward it is to take action after you’ve snapped. And noticing how incredibly difficult it is to take action before you’ve snapped.

Until you snap yourself into 100% commitment, your trip probably isn’t going to happen. I’d bet against you. But once you snap, it’s a done deal — after that you just know that it will be done.

Before your personal snapping point, various obstacles will seem like big deals. They’ll make you want to give up. That’s because you’re allowing some of your power to leak out and feed those obstacles. Not having enough money seems like a real problem. Not being able to get time off from work seems like another major problem. But once you’ve snapped, these problems reveal themselves to be ridiculously minor challenges. Stop allowing your power to be drained by excuses, and direct all your power forward towards your destination. Solving problems becomes child’s play after that. You’re much more powerful than any obstacle that stands in your way.

Obsess Over Your Destination

Begin to obsess over your chosen destination. For now, it’s the only place you’re going to think about visiting. Ignore all other suggestions or alternatives; for now they’re irrelevant.

Concretize your goal. Bring it from the level of fantasy to the level of reality.

Use maps.google.com to look up your destination. Study the layout of the city. Check out what’s there. Start thinking about what you’ll see and do while you’re visiting. Use the street view to zoom in on some locations to see what it would be like to actually be there. Know that soon you’ll be there seeing these places for yourself.

Before going to Paris, I zoomed in on a few places like the Louvre and a some spots along the Seine. I rotated the view around and imagined that I was seeing this through my own eyes. Less than a week later, I was actually there doing it.

I recommend buying a travel book for your intended destination and reading through it. Based on a reader’s recommendation, I bought Rick Steves’ guide to Paris. Rick has been traveling through Europe for 30+ years and has written extensively about it. His company also hosts a variety of guided tours through Europe. As I flipped through the book, even just for several minutes in the bookstore, it made the idea of going to Paris become more real and concrete, shifting it further from the realm of possibility to certainty.

For many years, I’d thought about traveling to Paris, but once I committed to really going there, I started visualizing the upcoming experience differently. It took on a different flavor.

Another recommendation is to do an image search to find a nice photo of your destination, and make it your background pic on your laptop, iPad, cell phone, etc. This will help you think about it some more.

Make your intended destination a serious obsession. Be very clear that you’re going to go there. If you catch yourself thinking of obstacles, again… give yourself a good smack across the jaw. Stop it! Think only of the successful achievement of your goal. You WILL go there. It’s a done deal.

Another thing you can do to continue obsessing is to start watching movies that involve your destination. Rachelle and I watched Amelie a while before visiting Paris, and we ended up visiting the café from the movie when we went to Montmartre. Additionally, we had the surreal experience of walking up the steps in front of Sacré-Coeur, only to realize that it was also used in a scene from the same movie.

The reason this obsession process is important is that it gradually moves your goal from the realm of fantasy into the realm of reality. When you learn more about your destination and begin to study it AFTER you’ve committed to it, the goal becomes significantly more solid. You start to accept that it really isn’t just a fantasy — you can and will actually go there and experience it for yourself. This is an important shift to make because it’s so easy to fall into the trap of wishful thinking when it comes to travel goals. Wishing isn’t enough to make it real.

Some people like to create a vision board for their destination. I do have a vision board, but the only Paris-related element was a tiny cutout of the word “France.” So for me this wasn’t really necessary. I got more value from zooming in and out of the Google map for the city and visualizing myself standing there — that made it more concrete for me. Other people swear by vision boards though, so I encourage you to experiment to see if you find them helpful. I don’t see how it could hurt.

Keep obsessing over your destination till you’re actually there.

Brace Yourself for the Social Shifts

You’ll probably find that your obsession starts to polarize the people around you. I’ve been through this process countless times, so I’m used to how it plays out, but I caution you to prepare for the inevitable social ripples your newly emerging travel vibe may unleash.

Some people in your life will be turned off by your new obsession. I got a few jabs here and there for being a bit nuts about Paris at times. Some people just can’t relate. Some people hate Paris. My attitude is mostly to roll my eyes at them and tune them out. I don’t need to explain to anyone why Paris was my #1 pick. Either you get Paris or you don’t. Same goes for Las Vegas… or any other city for that matter. There’s no need to explain or justify your choices to anyone else. Let it be enough that you want them, and let other people have their reactions.

Pick the destinations that inspire you, and don’t worry if the other people in your life don’t get why you want to go there. These are your desires. That’s enough. Nobody else needs to agree with you. If people react negatively to your choices, feel free to indulge in some eye rolling, but don’t change your mind.

On the other hand, when you start obsessing over the destinations that truly excite you, you won’t turn everyone off. You’re also going to light up and inspire others who share similar desires. I’ve received some nice positive feedback from others who found my destinations inspiring too, whether or not they’ve already been there.

There’s something really cool about attracting new people into your life who share similar desires. Rachelle and I enjoy traveling together, but I also think it would be fun to travel in small groups with other like-minded adventurers. We’d have to test this at some point to see how it goes — I imagine it would depend on the people and how compatible our specific interests are.

Don’t get clingy to past connections that are no longer in sync with you. Your social life will shift. Let it. You won’t end up alone. New connections will flow into your life soon, and those connections will be a better fit for you than the old ones.

You’ll also discover that as you embrace your own travel vibe, you’ll awaken similar vibes in others. I’ve been seeing a lot of this lately, where my own travel adventures are stirring up some excitement in others. One person’s travel-mania can be infectious at times. Initially, when you encounter someone who stirs up such desires, there’s a tendency to feel envious or dismissive if you’re still repressing or denying your own desires. Try to move past that phase as quickly as possible. Yes, it will be a good bit of work to make this a reality for you if it seems like a distant goal, but you can do it once you reach your own personal snapping point.

Integrate the Travel Vibe Into Your Lifestyle

In the long run, if you want to travel a lot more than you’re traveling right now — as opposed to just taking very occasional trips now and then — it’s important to transform your lifestyle into one that’s structured to support your travel goals. You don’t want to remain stuck in a lifestyle that’s at odds with frequent travel.

I’ve made certain career choices partly because I want the freedom to travel a lot. Today I enjoy the fruits of those decision. I have a flexible work schedule that’s under my control, and I’m able to make enough money to financially support frequent travel.

None of this just happened. It wasn’t an accident or a stroke of luck. I made deliberate decisions and commitments to create this kind of lifestyle. That began with saying no to decision paths that would interfere with this goal.

I didn’t get it perfect, but I got what I wanted. My lifestyle choices and my travel vibe are integrating themselves nicely. I still have more work to do in this area, but I’m very pleased with the synergy thus far.

Recognize that if you want to travel a lot, and your current lifestyle structure doesn’t support it, then you’ve got some transformational work to do. If you’re tempted to blame your lifestyle elements or use them as excuses for not traveling, don’t do that. If you want to blame something, then blame yourself for making dumb choices in the past that led you to this point. Go ahead and give yourself a sound thrashing — you deserve it! You’re the one who made the choices that led you here, and now you’re dealing with the consequences of those choices. It’s no one’s fault but your own.

We all make stupid choices at times. And sometimes it’s not such a bad thing to smack ourselves when we come to terms with the ridiculously lame consequences of those choices. I’ve certainly made my share of stupid choices.

But realize that your situation isn’t terminal. Don’t try to make the best of a bad situation. That’s even dumber. Instead, figure out a lifestyle structure — especially involving your career and finances — that will support the kind of traveling you’d like to do.

You can start by saying no to anything that conflicts with the lifestyle you wish to create. If you desire to travel for about 12 weeks out of each year, then does it make any sense to accept a job where you get only 2 weeks of vacation time each year? Of course not. That would be moronic.

Can you admit to yourself that in light of your current travel desires, some of your past decisions have been fairly dumb? If those decisions create consequences that don’t mesh with your travel desires, then they’re stupid decisions. Don’t try to justify them. Just admit the sheer idiocy of them.

I’m not suggesting that you’re an idiot. But we all make stupid decisions at times. And in such cases, the worst thing to do is to pretend they’re smart choices with a “Hehe… I meant to do that” attitude. You didn’t mean to do that. You didn’t mean to get stuck. That was a mistake.

The good news is that once you acknowledge the stupidity of some of your past choices, you can start to release them and make some better choices for the road ahead. You can choose a new career/financial path that fully supports your travel desires. You can attract new relationships that are compatible with frequent travel.

You’re not stuck. You’re way more powerful than any situation you find yourself in. Don’t act like a baby. If you want to travel more, than snap yourself into a real commitment. You’re going to undertake all the lifestyle transformations necessary to make that a reality. It’s a done deal.

It may take time to get there, but harbor no doubts that it will happen. Again, the creation of doubt is an abuse of your power. Stop it!

Create only the certainty that you are absolutely, definitely going to do what it takes to transform your lifestyle structure into one that fully supports your travel goals. You’ll be on the road as much as you desire to be, and that will be a good thing for the other parts of your lifestyle. Traveling will enhance your career, your finances, and your relationships.

What About the Money?

A lack of funds is a common reason people give for not traveling, but like all feeble excuses, it’s a bogus one.

Your income isn’t fixed. You can go out and earn as much as you desire. There are countless ways to earn money.

The main requirement for earning more money is having the motivation to do so. Picking a clear travel destination and obsessing over it can create some pretty strong motivation, the kind that will get you off your butt, fire up your brain, and get you taking new actions.

When people say that a lack of funds is holding them back, they’re lying to themselves. The truth is that they’re holding themselves back. They’re empowering money as the excuse of the moment. They could just as easily abuse their power by blaming their spouse, their job, their kids, or their country.

The cool thing about travel goals is that they’re pretty easy to accomplish with money. You can use money to buy plane tickets, to secure places to stay, and to pay for experiences. While it’s entirely possible to travel with little money, there’s no reason you can’t earn more money. It certainly makes travel easier.

Let your travel goals inspire your financial goals. It’s not particular motivating to earn more money just for the sake of having a bigger number in your bank account. But if you translate those financial goals into visiting more cities every year and having cool adventures, then your financial goals will be much more meaningful.

In my experience, the financial aspects tend to take care of themselves when you’ve done the other steps properly. The means present themselves when you’ve properly turned the corner and hit your snapping point.

Before the snap, the lack of funds may seem like a pretty big obstacle. If you’re ever willing to use the lack of money as an excuse, you’ll always experience this as an obstacle for you. But when you’re 100% commitment, then money is no longer your enemy — it becomes your ally instead.

Whenever I set big goals that require more money that I have on hand, the money shows up pretty quickly. Either I get inspired by a new idea or project that brings in the money, or the money just shows up through some other channel, often in ways I didn’t expect. These days I even make a game of it by asking the universe to pay for my trips in creative ways. It’s fun to see how that unfolds. For my recent Paris trip, I received way more than I needed. First, I launched 4 new workshops, which created an avalanche of initial registrations. The registrations from just one day were more than enough to cover the costs of the Paris trip twice over. Then on the day I left, I received a $16K refund from the IRS; that was expected, but the timing was very nice. Then on the day I got back from the trip, I received a $6K inheritance, which wasn’t at all expected.

This pattern keeps popping up in my life. Whenever I set stretch goals and commit to them before I can see how they’ll work out, the universe backs me up. If money is needed to achieve the goal (or even if I don’t need more money but playfully request it anyway), the money just shows up.

If this sounds like a completely alien experience to you, then stop feeding your power to excuses. Try doing the opposite to test how it works for you. Commit to doing something that really inspires you, even when you can’t see how it’s going to work out.

How do you commit to pursuing a path when you can’t see how it’s going to turn out? How do professional athletes do it? When they show up for a game, they don’t know how it’s going to turn out. They show up anyway and play full out. Do the same.

The point is to play full out — because that’s how the game of life is meant to be played.

If you need more money to travel, go make more money. Quit acting like a baby about it. It really is that simple, but it only becomes simple when you snap into 100% commitment. If it looks complicated, that’s because you’re letting your power leak into excuses. Stop doing that!

Who Are You?

Look within and take note of what you see. Are you a traveler, or are you a homebody? There’s no right or wrong answer per se, but what are you? What do you see?

Do you believe as Cervantes said, that “the road is better than the inn”? Or would you rather be the innkeeper?

Where do you fall along this spectrum? Where do you see yourself?

How many weeks out of the next 52 weeks would you ideally like to be traveling away from home? When I asked this question on Twitter and Google+, the answers were all over the place. Many people gave answers in the range of 8-16 weeks. But some said 0-2 weeks. One person actually said 53 weeks.

For me I’d say that 16-18 weeks feels about right on average, but the exact amount of time I’m on the road isn’t as important as other factors like the specific destinations and the new experiences I invite.

What kind of person are you when it comes to achieving your travel desires — or any other desires for that matter? In your heart of hearts, are you the sidelined spectator who will watch others achieve their dreams? Or are you the achiever who will commit fully to your own dreams and desires?

How much longer are you going to make excuses? Is that who you truly are? Do you really think it’s right to keep blaming external factors like your empty bank account, your debt, your family, etc? Is that the real you?

Isn’t it time you placed the responsibility for achieving your desires squarely on your shoulders? Aren’t you the one who made the decisions that resulted in the reality you now experience? Didn’t you invite it to happen, either by your own choices or by your silent approval?

It’s not up to me to tell you who you are on the inside. Only you can determine that. You’re the one who must determine whether or not you’ve been living up to your own ethical and moral code.

As for me, I think it’s wrong to blame my lack of results on external circumstances. Deep down I know I’m stronger than that. I can’t possibly blame the failure to achieve my desires on a lack of money, unsupportive relationships, lack of time, etc. I know I created all of those things by own choices. If I don’t like my financial situation, it’s up to me to change it. If I feel my relationships aren’t supporting me, I’m capable of releasing or transforming them and seeking out more empowering connections. If I lack the time to achieve my goals, I can reassess my priorities and stop putting lesser concerns ahead of more important desires.

When I make excuses for not living up to my potential, I give my power away, and I don’t feel quite myself. When I remember that this is my reality and that I’m not some powerless weakling who has to accept the whims of fate, I reclaim my natural creative powers. Then I can change whatever I desire to change, and my life zooms off in a new direction of my choosing… with results that are even more rewarding that what I imagined.

How do you feel about yourself when you excuse yourself from setting stretch goals and achieving them? Do you like letting yourself off the hook? Does that align well with your personal moral code? Is that the kind of person you truly wish to be?

At the end of the day, would you rather accept what you don’t want and try to make peace with it, or would you rather reclaim your power and commit fully to creating what you do want?

Obviously these concepts go far beyond mere travel goals. Your travel goals are part of your personal training program to fully embrace your power. They’re going to continue dangling in front of you for the rest of your life, teasing, coaxing, and daring you to pursue them. Will you step into your power and claim them, or will you live passively till you die?

Will you live as a person who reaches your destinations, or will you continue to push them away, deny them, pretend you don’t want them, and excuse yourself from doing what it takes to experience them?

Let me say that the view from atop the Eiffel Tower at midnight is indeed more glorious and inspiring than the tiny portal into which you’re currently staring.

Why did you summon me into your reality anyway? You did it to keep reminding yourself not to settle for less. You can have what you want. You like watching me figure out what I want, come to terms with it, commit to it, and achieve it. You live vicariously through my experiences because you want to integrate similar vibes in your own life. Your desires will be your own of course, but you keep coming back here because whenever you’re tempted to settle, you know that I’ll make it more difficult for you to do so. Settling isn’t you, and you know it. You’re way stronger than that.

When you’re ready to snap, you’ll snap. And the universe will back you up — you’ll see. Your challenge is to snap before you’re able to see the avalanche of support that awaits you on the other side. There’s very little support on the pre-snap side; all the good stuff is post-snap.

Next stop: London.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Sometimes they screw up and accidentally do something right. They’re usually able to sabotage these unwanted successes in short order, but they like it best when they can prevent these positive experiences from ever happening in the first place.

If you count yourself among this under-acknowledged and under-appreciated group, here are some suggestions for how you can do a better job of staving off success and ensuring absolute failure till you die.

Wrong Road

Notice the paths that happy and successful people take, and avoid those paths. Favor the popular paths since those will help you achieve average results at best, and average results should safely prevent undesirable feelings of fulfillment. The best roads are those that leave you feeling like you’re walking in circles till you’re too tired to walk anymore and must retire. Roads that are flat or which slope downhill are often good choices, and they tend to satisfy the popularity requirement as well. Avoid any paths that lead over hills or near mountains; the elevated views are disturbing. Head towards terrain you dislike since it’s easier to hate your life when you hate your surroundings. If you can manage to get lost as well, that’s wonderful.

Wrong Tendencies

Take stock of which habits are creating the best results for you, and abandon them. Replace them with habits that ensure no forward progress. Even better are habits that cause backsliding. Watch lots of TV. Eat fast food. Avoid exercising. Make Facebooking the highlight of your day.

Wrong Place

It’s important to live in a place that emanates a going-nowhere vibe. Look for spots that attract people with average or below average incomes, and favor surroundings that are so ugly, even Shakespeare would succumb to writer’s block. Live with people who will encourage you to take paths you clearly don’t want; living with your parents for as long as possible can be very helpful here.

Wrong Time

Never take action when you can justify delay. Stay on the sidelines for as long as you can, and avoid the field for as long as possible. Be non-punctual. Eventually the opportunities will pass. There’s less pressure in showing up late since no one will expect much of you. If you act too soon, you’re risking success.

Wrong Reason

People are notoriously nosy, and sooner or later they’ll inquire about your plans. There’s an unfair assumption that everyone should be looking to improve their lives, so you’ll need to get good at deflecting their queries with false responses. When they eventually take note of your seeming lack of forward progress, put the blame on external factors such as the economy, how unfair your boss is, how unreasonable your ex was, etc. If you tell people the truth, they may try to motivate you to make some changes, and you definitely don’t want that.

Wrong Day

Get up late if you feel best as an early riser, and drag yourself out of bed early if you feel best sleeping in late. Throughout the day, strive to do the opposite of whatever makes you feel happy and productive. Most people find it helpful to get a job doing work they dislike. This ensures that even if they manage to enjoy a nice morning and/or evening, the hours spent at work will drag the whole day down, ensuring an unpleasant overall experience.

Wrong Week

String several wrong days in a row, and you can create a very mediocre week — perhaps even a downright bad week if you work at it. It’s important not to do anything genuinely restorative on the weekend — burn up the time with laziness, inactivity, and pointless entertainment as much as possible. You want to head into Monday morning feeling disempowered from the get-go. If you can manage to maintain feelings of stress, depression, or boredom throughout the whole week, you’re golden. Once you’re locked into such a pattern, don’t do anything to upset it.

Wrong Method

Learn from other people’s failures, and copy them. Use methods that have proven ineffective in the past, ensuring that you’ll get similar lousy results. Look to your own past as well. Notice what has never worked for you, and keep doing it. If it didn’t work back then, it will continue not working today.

Wrong Technique

Don’t be too creative or try to innovate. Copy someone else’s technique if you can. Fitting in with the crowd is safer than standing out as a distinct individual. It’s easier to stave off success if you favor the popular techniques of the masses — don’t do anything too fancy. Style is too close to success.

Wrong Mix

Make sure the key ingredients you’re putting into your life don’t mix well together. Get a job that doesn’t pay enough to cover your expenses, so you can’t make ends meet. Get a relationship partner who can’t get along with your friends. Stock your kitchen with foods that keep you feeling slightly sick much of the time. Keep yourself off balance.

Wrong Genes

Disempower yourself by blaming your problems on your DNA. Let your genes serve as the ultimate limitation. Ignore the truth that your thoughts largely determine how your genes express themselves.

Wrong Ends

It’s hard to avoid setting goals altogether because part of your brain will want to fill this void. Keep this spot filled with analog pseudo-goals that will attach to your goal receptors and effectively block real goals from accidentally falling into place. These have been proven to work well: make more money, get a relationship, find a job, etc. The lack of specificity makes procrastination go down easier.

Wrong Means

If you ever do get sucked into working on a goal, take the most circuitous route you can. Instead of starting a real business that provides value and makes money, keep yourself occupied with pointless busywork like fussing over the design of your logo and business cards. Switch projects frequently so that nothing ever ships. Create the illusion of progress without causing anything quantifiable to occur.

Wrong Plan 

Create flawed plans to reach your goals, plans that any reasonably intelligent person would be able to poke full of holes. Be sure that at least one crucial step requires a horcrux.

Wrong Hands

Avoid becoming too good at anything. Skill is a recipe for success, so keep yourself as unskilled as possible. Avoid books, audio programs, seminars, and educated people. Your education ended a long time ago; don’t try to resurrect it. Let your unskilled hands fall further behind with each passing year.

Wrong Eyes

Use a perspective that disempowers you. Rule out the angles that would make your problems look too easily solvable. If you blow problems out of proportion, it’s easier to stay stuck. If a problem looks too solvable, you might be tempted to actually solve it, and that’s only going to speed you along the path of success — bad idea!

Wrong Prize

Set goals that others expect you to achieve, even if you don’t really care about them. Surely everyone else is right, and you’re wrong, so get with the program and pretend you like it.

Wrong Questions

Ask questions that cannot possibly provide you with helpful answers, such as Why can I never get ahead? Why are people always mean to me? Why am I such a ‘fraidy cat all the time?

Wrong Replies

Now take those lame questions, and try to answer them anyway. Be as disempowering as you can. I can never get ahead because I’m stupid. People are mean to me because I’m a loser. I’m a ‘fraidy cat because I have no social skills, so I know I’ll embarrass myself as soon as I open my mouth.

Wrong Drum

March to the beat of someone else’s drum, never your own. The best advice for you to follow is that which comes from people who seem to care about you but who are too incompetent to know what they’re talking about. Seek health advice from overweight smokers. Consider money advice from people who can barely pay their own bills. Relatives are often great choices for this.

Wrong Scum

Hang out with disenchanted losers regularly, elevating them to buddy status. Better yet, swear loyalty to them as your peer group. If anyone shows the slightest hint of ambition or brilliance, accuse them of being crazy, and either numb them with sufficient quantities of alcohol, or boot them out of your tribe. Openly welcome new members who demonstrate their adeptness at sarcasm and who wield a video game collection that rivals your own.

Wrong Energy

Keep your vibe intentionally out of sync with happiness, success, and fulfillment. Visualize failure whenever you get a chance. When you feel pissed off, amplify it into rage. When you feel sad, feed the sadness into a mopey numbness that you can drag out for weeks. Worry a lot. Know that things are always going downhill for you.

Wrong Signs

Determine that you’ve consumed a sufficient number of venti lattes that your dormant psychic abilities must have finally awakened. Interpret every incoming text message as a sign that you’re on the right path, even though the only people who seem to care that you exist are just as lost as you are. Interpret the seeming lack of forward progress in any quantifiable areas of your life as spiritual growth. Inner growth is always invisible.

Wrong Intensity

Be a hapless couch potato for 28 out of every 30 days who thinks that getting up at 7am is the height of ambition. Then follow it with a 48-hour mania spree where you tell everyone you can about an inspired idea you’re never going to implement. Blow your wad with excited talk once a month; then return to the cozy comfort of inaction.

Wrong Tune

You know you’re on track to misery when you listen to the overall song of your life, and all you can perceive is discordant noise where everything sounds like it’s out of tune. If something starts working, and you begin to hear something resembling music, then figure out what’s creating those nasty harmonies, and break it.

Wrong Too Long

If you’re already applying most of the above, then you shouldn’t have to worry about success, happiness, and fulfillment infecting your dreary existence. You can relax and coast to the coffin from here. Keep it up! :)

Incidentally, this post was inspired by the song “Wrong” by Depeche Mode. Watch the video on YouTube.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Dr. Wayne Dyer says, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” I hope you realize just how profound that statement is. But just in case you don’t, let me share a personal story about it.

During my first 5 years in business (1994-1998), I lost money every year, turning my $20K life savings into $150K of debt. That’s a net loss of $170K, or $34K per year on average. In 1999 I finally went bankrupt when my credit ran out.

Every year since then, my business made a decent profit.

So I suffered a negative cashflow each year from 1994-1998, and then from 1999 – present (12 years in a row and counting), I enjoyed a positive cashflow each year.

What the heck happened in 1999? What was responsible for this major change in results?

Learning How NOT to Make Money

I can actually pinpoint the exact moment when I felt the shift. I underwent a radical change in my perspective. I turned the way I thought about business upside down. My attitude and my motivation changed.

Obviously there were some catalyzing experiences that led to this epiphany such as getting kicked out of my apartment and going bankrupt, but when the conditions were right for it, the actual mental and emotional shifts happened fast — in a matter of minutes. It was like flipping a switch, partly in my mind… but mostly in my heart.

Here are the main before-and-after differences:

During my first 5 years in business, I focused on making my business successful. I pursued deals, money, and projects as if they were things to be acquired. I wanted to create hit products that sold well (computer games at the time). My motivation had a lot to do with proving myself, with making my mark on my particular field. I visualized my games getting glowing reviews, and I imagined seeing them selling in software stores. Money was a big concern. I always went for the deal that I expected would put the most money in my pocket and lead to the greatest success.

During my last 12 years in business, I focused on having fun, enjoying life, and creatively expressing myself. I stopped worrying about whether or not I was ever going to be successful. The bankruptcy supplied plenty of proof that I’d already failed dismally, so I didn’t see any point in continuing to pursue the same priorities that led me there. I was using a cardboard box as a piece of furniture, a symbol of just how much financial success I’d been able to achieve. Since I’d been soundly thrashed while playing the success game, I decided to change the rules and try my hand at the “let’s just play for fun” game.

A Tale of Two Mindsets

My initial motivation for starting my computer games business was to make more money. For several months before that, I worked as a contract game programmer on the side while going to college. I completed a 4-pack of Windows games, doing all of the programming and much of the design work for a local games company. When the games got published, I received about $1 in programmer’s royalties for every $7 the company received. Other people at the company contributed artwork, music, and some design work, and of course they closed a deal with a publisher too. But these were fairly basic games from a resource standpoint, and it was clear to me that I was doing well over 50% of the actual production work, probably 70-80% in terms of sheer hours invested. I even wrote the help files and instruction manuals.

I recognized that with a bit more effort, and with the help of the right people, such as an artist and a musician, I could essentially do what this company was doing, and I’d get to keep a lot more of the profits. Finding talented people to work with wasn’t too difficult, so soon I was off and running.

I had the technical and design skills to create more games at least as good as those I created for the local game company, but after years of trying, I was never actually able to make a profit.

While running the business for the first 5 years, I was constantly looking for ways to make money. If I smelled potential dollar signs, I’d chase after them. I ran after a lot of elusive deals that fizzled, fell apart, or collapsed, even after some advances were received.

I worked hard, hard, hard, sometimes even sleeping at the office. But I could never get the money coming in with any consistency. Ironically the harder I tried to make money, the faster I lost money. Instead of the Midas touch, I somehow mastered the Medusa touch.

Looking back, I didn’t do that initial contract programming work for the money. I did it for the love of game programming. I was in college at the time, and a friend pointed out a flier about a game programming position. He suggested I take a look at it because he knew I was into computer games, and we were both computer science majors close to graduating. It seemed like a wonderful opportunity to me.

I went for an interview with the company. I felt confident about getting the job, and I really didn’t care how much they paid me. I just wanted to work on games. So when they asked me how much I wanted to be paid, I said “$10 an hour,” which was a ridiculously lowball amount. Game programming may not pay as much as some other types of programming, but it certainly pays more than $20K per year, even for a starting programmer who’s still in school.

That company hired me on the spot, and I must say they got a great deal. I hit the ground running and threw myself into the first project they assigned me. They were stunned that I had a prototype up and running after only 9 days, and they actually pulled me off that project and assigned me something more ambitious.

One time my project manager asked me how many hours a week I was putting in. This was during the summer when I wasn’t attending classes. I told him about 40 hours, which would have seemed reasonable because I worked at their offices Mon-Fri during normal business hours. But I actually lied. In truth I continued working on their game projects at home on evenings and weekends. Realistically I was probably putting in 60-80 hours most weeks. And those hours were dedicated to solid coding work, not to email or any other distractions. I said that I worked 40 hours a week because I didn’t want to make the other programmers in the company seem less dedicated. I was on good terms with them — and I wanted to keep it that way.

I wasn’t working hard and fast for low pay to impress anyone. I did it for the sheer love of the work. I was enthralled by the technical challenges of each game. There was nothing else I wanted to be doing. I probably would have done that work for free.

Within a month or two, I think the management of the company could no longer stomach seeing me do such high quality work for so little, so they voluntarily doubled my pay. I didn’t request it, but I received it with gratitude. $20 per hour is a lot for a college student.

By the time the royalties were added in (after the game hit store shelves the following year), I probably ended up making about $50 per hour for programming those games, even though I only asked for $10 per hour. Plus it was really cool to walk into software stores and see something I created on the shelves.

That’s rather beautiful, isn’t it? I certainly thought so. It’s a classic example of sowing first, then reaping.

And then over the next 5 years, I proceeded to take this beautiful model and completely screw it up.

I underwent a perspective shift that seemed intelligent at the time. The potential for greater success hit me, and I began seeing dollar signs. That local games business immediately offered me another project to work on, and I turned them down so I could start my own game development business. I did that specifically because I wanted to make more money.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was simply expressing the American entrepreneurial spirit, right?

Getting My Ass Kicked by Kolrami

After 5 years of total failure, I finally had to admit that my great plan wasn’t working. Going bankrupt was a hint and a half that something went awry. The more I chased after money, the faster it ran away from me, as if screaming, “The horror! The horror!”

So in 1999 I finally gave up. I didn’t enjoy living this way. It wasn’t producing the results I wanted, so for that reason alone I could justify declaring “game over.” But beyond that, those 5 years were very frustrating. I did my best to be positive and optimistic, but seeing some great projects canceled after years of work were serious disappointments.

In my moment of epiphany, I realized that my decision to pursue money was when everything started going kittywompus. Becoming more financially ambitious simply did not work.

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Peak Performance,” the master strategist Kolrami competes with the android character Data in a game of Strategema. The crew expects Data to win, just as you’d expect a modern chess-playing computer to kick your ass at chess. They confidently advise Data to take the shortest path to victory in order to put a dent in Kolrami’s smugness. However, Kolrami soundly defeats Data without breaking a sweat. Data is stunned by the loss and assumes he must have some kind of programming defect, going so far as to remove himself from active duty until he can figure out what’s wrong with him.

Later in that episode, Captain Picard informs Data that it’s possible to make no mistakes and still lose. This leads Data to challenge his assumptions about the game. He accepts Kolrami’s offer of a rematch, and this time he plays Kolrami to an endless stalemate, leading Kolrami to eventually surrender in disgust. The crew celebrates Data’s victory and asks how he did it.

Data confesses that he couldn’t defeat Kolrami by playing to win because that’s what Kolrami expected him to do. Every advantage-maximizing move that Data attempted was blocked by a superior counter-move from Kolrami. So in the rematch, Data used a different strategy. He bypassed obvious avenues of advancement and played for a draw instead of trying to win. This visibly frustrated Kolrami and allowed Data to theoretically play the game indefinitely, rendering defeat impossible.

This episode may contradict game theory and minimax algorithms, assuming that Data could search ahead more moves than Kolrami could, but setting aside that issue, I found tremendous value in this lesson. It seemed like the perfect analogy for my own situation. I felt like I’d made no serious mistakes, but I still lost. When I reviewed my previous moves, they still seemed reasonable even though they led to failure, and pondering whether I might have a defective brain proved as unhelpful to me as it did to Data.

During my first 5 years in business, I played to improve my financial score. I saw each business negotiation partly as a competition. If I got more money out of a deal, it meant that the other party got less. The more I succeeded in setting things up to maximize my financial score, the more I had to diminish the scores of others. In order to maximally win, someone else had to lose, at least a little bit. The harder I tried to win, the more friction I created that would ultimately cause me to lose.

Maybe some people are good at playing this kind of game. I wasn’t. Someone always had more resources, more time, or more expensive lawyers. The more I pressed for gains, the more I felt an opposing force pushing back against me. This led to many problems such as delays and cancelations. I could blame others for it, but the truth is that I was responsible for creating that reality.

When Internet marketers treat you as a dollar sign, can you sense it? Can you feel that tugging sensation — the sense that their main motivation is to get something from you? How does this ultimately affect your relationship with them?

Bypassing Obvious Avenues of Advancement

In 1999 I decided to stop trying to make money. I stopped trying to achieve success. I had 5 years of failure to convince me that it was time to change my approach. The bankruptcy was like a bonk on the head that told me I’d better not live the next 5 years like I lived the last 5. I had no more credit and no more cash to burn, so I had to make immediate changes. I had little choice but to try a different path.

When I tried to succeed, Kolrami always showed up to kick my ass. I could never defeat him no matter how hard I tried. The harder I tried, the more vigorously he thrashed me.

So I surrendered to his superior skills. I stopped trying to win. I accepted the irony that trying to get a higher financial score actually doomed me to a negative score. The opposing force was always greater than anything I could overcome.

I decided to apply Data’s lesson to my business. Instead of trying to win, I began to play for a draw. I bypassed what seemed like obvious avenues for financial advancement, recognizing that it was exactly what Kolrami expected me to do. If I made those self-maximizing moves, he would simply knock me back, and I’d be worse off than when I started. Again, I had 5 years of experience to drill this lesson into me.

In practice what this meant was that I stopped trying to maximize revenue or profits. In each business transaction, I opted to give more than I received in return. I always sought to leave extra value on the table.

For example, in mid-1999 I priced my next game release at only $9.95, even though I believed a competitive price would have been $19.95. I began writing articles for free. I committed hundreds of hours to unpaid volunteer work. I hosted free discussion forums on my website to help other game developers succeed. I spoke at conferences and hosted roundtables for free. I made it impossible for Kolrami to counter my moves because my moves weren’t competitive.

Last year I uncopyrighted all of my articles and podcasts and donated all of them to the public domain. I also committed to placing my new articles directly into the public domain (including this one). I encouraged people to republish, translate, and/or sell my work for their own financial gain if they wanted to.

I deliberately and intentionally earn less revenue and less profit than I feel I’m capable of earning. When it comes to income generation, I hold back when it seems like the logical move would be to advance. While Kolrami expects me to play to win, I’m actually playing for a draw.

Playing for a Draw

When I played to win, I lost for 5 years in a row. I never actually won. Even when it seemed like I nailed a winning move, it always turned out to be a mistake that led to my being checkmated several moves later.

When I played for a draw, I was able to make money for 12 years in a row. And I didn’t have to work nearly as hard to make that happen.

When you play to win in a competitive game, you’re playing for someone else to lose. If you want to maximize revenue or profits, you need to maximize the amount of money your customers or clients pay you. The more money you make, the less money they get to keep. You can only go so far down this path before you start meeting serious resistance. And the more tactics and techniques you use to try to combat that resistance, the stronger the resistance becomes.

How many businesses have had to learn this lesson the hard way? The more they try to extract the maximum amount of money from you, the more you feel driven to resist them, such as by resorting to piracy to cut them out entirely.

Which businesses do you dislike most? Do you feel those businesses are playing to win at your expense? How does that affect your ongoing relationship with them?

What are your favorite businesses? Why are they your favorites?

One of my favorite businesses is Google. I like them because I feel they give me a lot more value than they ask in return. They provide me with a free search engine, free email, free calendar, etc. I benefit from their engineering expertise every day, and I’m grateful for it. I’ve paid them back in some ways over the years, such as by generating hundreds of thousands of dollars of business for them when I had Adsense on my blog… and probably millions if you include all the referrals I must have sent their way, such as other bloggers who signed up for Adsense after learning about my results with it.

Facebook, on the other hand, left me feeling used and abused after two years as an active user of their service. So I shut down my personal page and my fan page and wrote multiple articles about why I had to abandon them and take my social networking to greener pastures. Ironically, one of those articles racked up 2000+ Facebook likes.

Of course these evaluations are being continually refreshed. Google might screw up, and I may have to bid Larry and Sergey adieu. Facebook might correct its problems, and I’ll have to refriend Zuck. But for now, my perception is that Google is still playing with me, while Facebook still wants to play at me.

Becoming an Enigma

What does it mean to win? What does it mean to succeed? Does it even make sense to pursue these ideals?

I learned the hard way that it’s actually easier to enjoy an abundant and fulfilling lifestyle by playing for a draw instead of playing to win or succeed.

When you play for a draw, you change the way others relate to you. They may not understand this consciously, but they’ll behave differently towards you nonetheless.

Some of your decisions may confuse people at first, especially if they’re used to dealing with businesses that play to win, but generally people seem to respond positively. A business that plays for a draw is a breath of fresh air.

When you leave extra value on the table without trying to extract it, that value rolls over into goodwill, which is the lifeblood of a sustainable business.

For example, by giving away so much free content, my business receives a massive number of referrals. New referrals happen every single day — passively and with zero marketing costs.

I’ve done okay financially too. Not counting income from my workshops or my book, my blog alone has generated well over $1 million in revenue since I started, mostly from joint-venture promotions and affiliate programs. That’s plenty for me to sustain a positive cashflow and to enjoy an abundant lifestyle.

What about the economy? I live in Nevada, which has the highest unemployment rate of any U.S. state, according to the U.S. Dept of Labor. Lots of people here are looking for ways to make money, and they’re getting thrashed by Kolrami. They’re trying to beat a game that they can’t win. The odds are better in the casinos.

The irony, however, is that I perceive my actual income as much lower than it could be if I put more effort into it. There are lots of ways I could potentially earn more money, and some are dirt simple. For instance, for about an hour’s work, I could immediately start earning at least an extra $10K per month in passive income just by putting up Google Adsense ads, which I used to have on the site for several years. See this post if you want to know why I dropped Adsense. I deliberately choose not to earn this money.

Now you might be wondering, What kind of idiot would pass up an easy $10K/month in passive income? The kind of idiot who’s had his ass kicked by Kolrami way too many times.

You see… I don’t run my business to optimize revenue or profits. When I tried to do that, my real-world results were the exact opposite of what I wanted. So these days I deliberately make business decisions that leave significant value on the table, untapped and unextracted. Kolrami cannot make sense of these moves, and therefore he cannot counter them. Consequently, any potential competition with him remains in a state of perpetual stalemate. He cannot defeat me, and theoretically I can keep playing indefinitely.

Instead of seeing me as a competitor, my peers in this field tend to regard me as a bit of an enigma. Many of them became very curious when I did the whole copyright giveaway thing last year. From their perspective it seemed like a very risky thing to do, perhaps even foolhardy. Some regard it as very brave, while others simply don’t know what to make of it. Most aren’t willing to go down a similar path, preferring to keep all their work copyrighted so they can control it. They know that I’m an intelligent and strategic thinker, but since this action doesn’t really make logical sense from the standpoint of maximizing revenue, they don’t perceive me as any sort of competitive threat, so by default I’m treated as a non-threatening ally. And the truth is that I’m not a competitive threat of any sort because I’m not playing this game to win. I’m still playing for a stalemate with Kolrami, and I plan to continue doing so indefinitely.

Making money is very easy now. I don’t consider myself uber-rich, but I’ve achieved what I consider to be functional abundance. All my bills are paid, and I have sufficient income to enjoy the lifestyle I desire. I can work when I want and take time off when I want. And I feel I can keep this going indefinitely.

Even though I’ve made plenty of money from this business, I always have the sense that I could be earning many times more than what I’m actually earning. But I deliberately avoid that level of success, not because I’m resistant to success but because I recognize that the pursuit of such success is a trap.

It was a major lesson for me to learn that I can actually make more money by trying to make less money. I can achieve more success by trying to succeed less. This is what has actually worked for me in the real world.

The path of abundance isn’t the path that maximizes velocity. It’s the path that minimizes friction. If you try to maximize velocity, you end up maximizing friction too, thereby causing massive amounts of heat. Ultimately, you burn up.

If you race to every destination by driving as fast as your car will allow, is that the optimal approach? Or is it better to intentionally hold back a bit, driving at speeds well below your car’s maximum potential?

Success = Sustainability

Instead of seeing success as some kind of accomplishment, victory, or conquest, I think it’s wiser and more effective to define success as sustainability.

This isn’t just about how we run our lives or businesses. It’s about how we relate to each other and to our planet as a whole.

Is the most successful energy company the one that extracts and sells the earth’s resources as quickly as possible? Is a successful relationship one in which you extract maximum value from your partner, leaving them drained at the end of each day?

I like Stephen Covey’s analogy of the goose and the golden eggs. If you try to maximize all-out production by extracting as many golden eggs as possible, you eventually kill the golden goose, thereby causing your production capacity to crash. For long-term sustainability, you must nurture the golden goose. Getting greedy with the eggs will cause Kolrami to swoop in and turn your goose into foie gras.

The game of business isn’t winnable. No matter how hard you play to win, you’ll always lose in the end. Even if you become an extremely cunning player, laying waste to all who oppose you, eventually you’ll die, and your deathbed score resets to zero. Kolrami always gets the last move.

But if you largely ignore the score and play for a draw instead of trying to win, Kolrami cannot defeat you. You can play the game for as long as you like.

When you seek sustainability, the games of money and business are transformed. Instead of competing for survival and success, you can relax and enjoy yourself. Playing for fun is a whole different ride.

When you play for fun instead of trying to win, most people will relate to you in the same manner. Some players may initially assume a competitive posture with you, but once they realize you’re playing for fun instead of trying to win, they’ll quickly lower their shields, and they’ll begin to play the game with you at your level — for fun. Even highly competitive players naturally sense there’s no honor in thrashing an opponent who isn’t trying to beat them. No real victory can be achieved against a player who stands no chance of winning. Players that try to overwhelm defenseless opponents simply make themselves look ridiculous.

I’m not saying that you’ll never encounter a stubborn victory-minded person who seeks to trounce you anyway, but it’s a lot rarer when you decline to resist them. Competitive people tend to expend more energy on those who resist them. If you offer no resistance, they’re more likely to consider you a potential ally.

When I tried to win in business, I experienced frustration and failure. When I played for a draw, I had fun and enjoyed sustainable success.

If you’re still trying to win, maybe it’s time to give it up. Kolrami is just too good. You cannot hope to beat him. He’ll take all your best moves and turn them against you, causing you to end up worse off than when you started.

As for defeating Kolrami, in the strictest sense, I did not win.

I busted him up.

Thanks for the inspiration, Gene. You are still loved. <3

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Watch the videos here: A Life That Matters

Once you’ve watched the first video, follow the link at the end of the text below the video to view the next video in the series. There are 3 videos in total, and each one is a little over 10 minutes long.

These videos will give you a good overview of the more detailed process you’ll experience in the Life on Purpose Virtual Video Coach program that helps you discover your life purpose and begin living in alignment with it.

If you feel you’ve been drifting lately and would like to have more meaning, focus, and centeredness in your life — or if you’ve been thinking about a career change to do work that’s more aligned with who you truly are — these videos are a good place to begin.

Enjoy!

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

One of the top requests in that survey was for a product on the topic of Life Purpose. In reading through the many hundreds of comments, it became clear that a lot of people still feel they’re drifting, and they need more help bringing a sense of purpose to their lives, so they can feel centered and at peace with themselves — and so they can feel they’re on a path to making a meaningful contribution instead of being stuck in unfulfilling situations.

Another thing that stood out was that people want more than how-to information. They need help motivating themselves to go through the process. So even though I’ve written a good deal about life purpose in the past, and many people have found it extremely helpful, it isn’t enough to get everyone to the place they’d like to be — the place of having a deep-rooted connection to one’s life purpose.

I started working on a product along those lines because it seemed like a good place to start. Many other aspects of self development stem from clarifying your life purpose. I completed the product outline, which I expected would become a 6-10 hour audio program. But when I reviewed the outline, something didn’t feel quite right about it to me. It didn’t feel like this was really “my product.” I felt like I was using a semi-forced process that wasn’t my normal process for creating inspired content.

I acknowledged to myself that I was out of flow, so I put the product on hold for a while, worked on other projects, and took a weeklong road trip through California, intending to come back to the project a little later with a fresh perspective. I pondered whether I should take the product in a different direction. I didn’t want to scrap it because I know there’s a need for it, but I’ve learned over the years that it’s important to trust my intuition when it comes to such matters.

Synchronicities

During this time I received an email from Dr. Brad Swift about a new product he was releasing on the subject of… you guessed it… life purpose. I was already familiar with Brad’s work because I reviewed his book Life on Purpose: Six Passages to an Inspired Life in 2007, and we’ve kept in touch over the years. Life on Purpose is simply the best book on life purpose I’ve ever read, and it deserves the rare honor of maintaining a solid 5-star average rating on Amazon.com.

Brad’s new program is called the Life on Purpose Virtual Video Coach. It’s an online video-based course where Brad personally guides you through his 6-step Life on Purpose process one lesson at a time. All the videos can be streamed online, and the course includes a PDF workbook and some bonus material.

I went through the entire program in May, and I loved it. I had to chuckle at the synchronicity because this was essentially the product I was trying to create. My ideas and processes were different of course, but the end benefits would be the same — to help you bring a clear sense of purpose to your life and to fully ground it in your daily actions, so that you’re truly living on purpose.

I also thought to myself, Well… that was easier than I thought. I intended for the creation of a certain product, and here it is. I didn’t even have to record it.

So first, I received the lesson I seem to keep needing to learn — to create from a place of inspiration and not to try to force creativity. But beyond that, I also got a lot of value from Brad’s course. If you visit his website, you’ll see my testimonial there. That was actually part of an email I sent to him to tell him what I thought of the course, and I was happy to have him include it on his product page when he asked if that would be okay.

Life on Purpose Virtual Video Coach

I don’t think of this as an info product because it’s not primarily a course to put new knowledge in your head, although that is a part of it. The program guides you through a process that’s all about you, so it has more to do with gaining self knowledge and understanding.

One step at a time, you’ll be guided to reveal your inherited purpose (your fear-based false purpose that masquerades as your true purpose), then to discover your true purpose, and finally to ground your true purpose into your life so you can enjoy more happiness and fulfillment.

This course goes well beyond the point of forming a clear statement of purpose. It provides many tools and techniques to help you begin living congruently with your purpose and to shift away from stuckness as well as your inherited purpose.

I read Brad’s book and loved it; however, I gained much more value from his Virtual Video Coach. I was a bit surprised because I figured it would simply be a video version of his book. It does cover a lot of the same ground as the book, but I experienced the material in a totally different way. Brad has a very centered and peaceful way of communicating, and watching him on video is (in my opinion) a much better expression of who he is than words on a page.

I’m not going to go into detail about all the features and benefits of the course because you can find all of that information on his website. I think it would be more authentic to simply share how the course affected me.

Doing vs. Being

For many years I’ve had a pretty clear sense of my life purpose, and I like to think I’ve been doing a good job living it. I feel fulfilled most of the time, and I’m very pleased with my current direction. My normal experience is to feel that I’m in the flow of inspiration, and I seldom feel stuck. My life has been working very well, and it seems to be getting better each year.

Here’s the purpose statement I currently have on my About page:

to care deeply, connect playfully, love intensely, and share generously;
to joyfully explore, learn, grow, and prosper;
and to creatively, brilliantly, and honorably serve the highest good of all.

It may not mean anything to you, but I still get a surge of emotion each time I read it. I think it does a job of succinctly summing up how I wish to live and what inspires me most.

This purpose statement has worked well for me over the years, but Brad’s course gave me another way of thinking about purpose. It didn’t replace my current purpose statement, which I still love, but it gave me another perspective I hadn’t considered.

Instead of thinking about purpose in terms of doing, Brad encourages you to think about it in terms of being.

I think one of the reasons my purpose statement has worked so well for me is that it incorporates beingness, and it isn’t heavy on the doingness in a way that might make me feel pressured or stressed. If your purpose is only about doing, then when you aren’t taking action, you aren’t on purpose; that creates a pressure to be doing, doing, doing… even when you’re feeling burned out. I agree with Brad that it’s better to define your purpose in such a way that you can feel happy and fulfilled at all times, not just when you’re taking a lot of action. I figure I must be doing something right because I often feel very grateful even when I’m just running errands or hanging out with friends.

Fortunately my current purpose statement translates fairly easy to beingness. “To care deeply” means to be a caring person. “To connect playfully” means to be a playful person. “To joyfully explore” means to be an explorer.

I liked considering my purpose statement through the lens of being. It helped me recognize that no matter where I am or what I’m doing, I can always be living on purpose. I don’t always have to be doing something specific.

But there was a greater benefit beyond this. Brad’s insights encouraged me to reinterpret my goals, projects, and tasks from the perspective of beingness. I reviewed those items and asked myself, Who am I really desiring to be here?

My original purpose statement addresses the questions of what and how. I also have an intuitive understanding of the why. But it doesn’t really address the question of where. Where do I ultimately see myself living on purpose?

This is a fairly general question, but it gave me a lot of clarity. I thought about why I’m in Las Vegas and what I can do here specifically. I thought about where in the broad field of personal development I most enjoy working. I thought about what kinds of situations and positions I enjoy most.

There are so many facets to this exploration that I’m still exploring it — which is actually a part of my purpose: to joyfully explore. But I’ve already gained more clarity about some “locations”, or states of being, that I enjoy most.

One place I enjoy is being in the increasingly overlapping space between technology and personal development. I feel perfectly comfortable in both fields. I liked being one of the first people to leverage blogging technology to spread personal development ideas. Now it’s commonplace, and there are lots of people leveraging tech to promote PD. I think that’s wonderful.

I feel right at home in this tech-PD space. I like having an online business, and I regard the Internet as my digital home. I also love exploring personal growth and sharing it with others. Brad’s course gave me the clarity to see that positionally speaking, I love having one foot in the tech world and the other foot in the PD world, and I look for ways to further connect the dots between them.

Another location I love is the space of connecting deeply with people face to face. I like that I can discuss topics like life purpose or subjective reality with people shortly after I meet them. I like “breaking the ice” by recognizing that there never was any ice to begin with. I enjoy maintaining an open and approachable posture; I can’t always do that online due to the overwhelming numbers, but I’m at least able to do it in person most of the time. To me, being in the space of an intimate connection with someone is a very joyful place to be.

When I remind myself to simply be in these places, my life flows very easily, and I feel happy and fulfilled. Interestingly, this focus on being has led to a lot more action.

For example, by reminding myself that I love being in the overlapping space between tech and PD, I’ve been devouring tech company biographies lately, coming up with new ideas for how tech and PD could continue to merge. I’ve also made some tweaks to my website, so it’s serving up pages more efficiently than it was a week ago.

By reminding myself that I enjoy face time with people, I arranged a meetup in a local park last Sunday. About 14 people showed up. I brought a bunch of my discs that I use for disc golf, and several of us had fun throwing them around; that was my way of expressing “to connect playfully”. I’m also working on booking more workshops for the Fall, which will bring even more people together in the same physical location, where all of us can connect playfully and learn and grow together.

The irony is that I don’t feel like I’m really doing much, but I’m getting a lot more done than usual. I’m not trying to force anything. I just focus on where I want to be, and action flows effortlessly from there. I’m enjoying this really nice flow right now.

A few days ago, I was talking to Erin on the phone and she said something like, “I can tell you’re in a really good place right now. I’m not sensing that you need to change anything. You seem really happy right where you are.” She’s right.

Being in the right place is very powerful. When you’re in the right place — for you — the doing part follows naturally from it. You don’t have to push yourself to take action or fight against procrastination. When you’re in the right place of beingness, life automatically supports you.

More Distinctions

What I shared above is only one of many powerful distinctions I got from Brad’s course. Although he presents a 6-step linear process that’s easy to follow, I personally found that the course had a very nonlinear, expanding-in-all-directions effect on me.

If you watch the videos and do the workbook exercises in a straightforward manner, you’ll arrive at the point of having your own statement of purpose and a deep grasp of what it means. You’ll also begin living in alignment with that purpose, watching your life take on a positive new direction.

Don’t be fooled by the seemingly linear nature of the course, however. It’s a lot more than a step by step process. I found that several points really stuck with me, such as Brad’s coffee mug analogy, and got me thinking in new directions about other parts of my life such as my goals, projects, and actions. I started thinking less about to-dos and more about “Where do I want to be right now?” Once I figured that out, I discovered to my delight that the right actions flowed rather easily from there.

Let me conclude simply by saying that I highly recommend this course, and I think you’ll gain a lot by going through it — even if you think you’re already pretty clear about your purpose.

If you want to bring more purpose, meaning, and fulfillment to your life, you can’t go wrong here. Brad is definitely one of the good guys in this field, and I genuinely expect you’ll gain a lot from his program. It even includes a better than money-back guarantee, so you have nothing to lose by trying it.

I completed the course in less than a week, although you can certainly go through the lessons more slowly if you want time to integrate them one by one. An hour or two a week would be a very reasonable pacing.

To learn more, visit the Life on Purpose Virtual Video Coach page.

Well, that was an easy product to get out the door. What’s next?

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Let me share some perspectives that should make it easier to understand the process of waking up.

The Cellular Perspective

From the cellular perspective, you can see yourself as an individual person interacting with other individuals. You’re like a single cell in the larger body of humanity, which is comprised of billions of other people-cells.

For example, I could say that I’m a guy (a cell) who’s dedicated to helping people (other cells) live more consciously. I may communicate with many people during my lifetime, but each person is a unique individual, so the impact is different for everyone. We may all be part of some larger body of humanity, but our interactions mainly occur at the individual cellular level.

This is similar to one of the cells in your body noticing the other cells around it and deciding to do what it can to be of service to those cells. It may help a lot of cells, but it still regards itself as an individual cell helping other individual cells. And it won’t help all cells equally, nor could it do so even if it tried.

The Holistic Perspective

From the holistic perspective, you see yourself as an integral part of the universe as a whole. The overall intent is to help universal consciousness grow and evolve, particularly the human consciousness of which you’re a part.

This would be like one of the cells in your body recognizing that it’s part of a larger physical body, whereby it stops thinking of itself primarily as an individual cell and begins to see itself as being of potential service to the greater whole. Its fate isn’t as important as the fate of the larger body.

So with this perspective, instead of thinking of myself as a guy who helps people live more consciously, I can see myself as a servant of humanity helping to create a more conscious humanity, or as a servant of universal consciousness itself. My primary role here is to serve conscious evolution, which isn’t necessarily what’s best for any particular individual human in the short term.

Other Perspectives

Of course there are other perspective too. We could discuss identification with community, nation, all life, the cosmos, etc. These perspectives are equally valid, but exploring them would add complexity without adding much substance to the core ideas. So for now I want to keep this simple.

On the atomic side, you’re an individual, and other people are individuals too. On the holistic side, we’re all part of a greater whole.

I’m not suggesting that any one perspective is best. All of these perspectives are valid. But I will suggest that it’s important to integrate the holistic perspective more fully into your life if you wish to experience a healthier flow of abundance.

“Waking up” basically means that you consider and integrate the holistic perspective as part of your daily life. Of course there are degrees of waking up, depending on how aware you are of the holistic perspective and how fully you’ve integrated it into your life. In the same manner, the cells in your body may have varying degrees of awareness that they are in fact part of a larger human body.

Alternatively, to be “asleep” is to be unaware of the larger holistic perspective. We could also define this behaviorally by saying that someone is asleep if they’re aware of the holistic perspective, but they don’t attempt to act congruently with it. In terms of semantics, I’d say that the first group is asleep, while the second group is trying to sleep.

Fairness

At the individual level, fairness seems to be about equality. But of course we don’t see that much genuine equality in the world. It’s quite obvious that some individuals have more resources than others. Some people seem to be luckier too.

Does your own human body care about fairness when it doles out resources like oxygen and sugar to its individual cells? To an extent, sure. When resources are abundant, there’s plenty for all, but even then the distribution isn’t perfectly equal. And when resources become scarce, the body will starve cells that are less important to its survival to divert more resources to the most crucial cells.

So the question is, are you an essential cell in the larger body of consciousness? Or are you superfluous? Well… look at the resources that life sends your way. Do you feel all your needs are well met — your physical needs, emotional needs, social needs, self esteem needs, etc? Are you a highly self-actualized individual? Or do you have strong unfulfilled cravings for things that are important to you? Have you possibly given up on meeting some of your needs? Are you flourishing or are you stuck?

If you’re struggling to get your needs met, that’s a hint and a half that life itself isn’t particularly concerned with your well-being. Don’t fret though if this describes your situation. It’s a problem that can be fixed. Just don’t try to fix it by clamoring and complaining — that doesn’t work and will often backfire.

This may not seem fair, but in a way it is reasonable. You may be a very nice, kind, and generous person, but if your focus is at the cellular level, you’re probably missing so much of the big picture that in the grand scheme of things, your contribution just doesn’t matter that much, at least not from the perspective of universal consciousness.

You may be doing what could just as easily be done by someone else, which means you’re highly expendable. You may be playing follow the follower. You may be genuinely helping, but only at the cellular level. You may be doing nothing much, which makes it easy to ignore you.

If you live in such a way that doesn’t really contribute much, don’t be too surprised if it seems like life is starving you for resources. After all, life doesn’t need you as much if you aren’t actively helping with its expansion and growth.

Consider the cells in your own body. You may scratch an itch on your arm and kill lots of cells in the process without even thinking about it. Individual skin cells just aren’t that important to your overall survival. But you’re less likely to scratch off a patch of critical brain cells. A cut on your finger is no cause for alarm, but a cut on your eyeball is something you’d do more to avoid. Your body is even designed to protect some parts more than others. If something flies at your face, you’ll automatically throw up your arms to protect your head. But you won’t normally use your head to protect your arms.

Do you think you’re among the critical humans that the larger body of humanity would move to defend and protect? Or are you among the sacrificial parts?

What Does Consciousness Want?

What do you want as a human being? Think about your goals, dreams, and aspirations for a moment.

Now consider what an individual cell in your body would want. It wants oxygen and sugar. It wants to eliminate waste. Is this on the same level as your goals? Do you aspire to breathe, eat, and take dumps as your primary goals for the year?

Hopefully not.

Now look at this from the other side. From the perspective of the consciousness itself, your human-level dreams and goals seem petty. It’s important to keep people happy to an extent, but the fate of any one human is largely insignificant. Universal consciousness really doesn’t care if you have a job or an income, if you get the house you want, if you have a good relationship or not. It doesn’t care if you get laid or remain a virgin.

Well, it cares a little, but it’s not a major concern, just as you aren’t overly concerned about the fate of any individual cells in your body. It’s the body’s overall status that matters. And you probably identify more with your mind (your collective cellular intelligence) as opposed to your physical body anyway.

Similarly, universal consciousness is more concerned with the evolution of consciousness itself (our collective consciousness) as opposed to the fate of any individual human or even of humanity itself. Now the loss of humanity would probably be a setback, but consciousness may eventually recover in other forms.

What does consciousness really want? Like you and like your individual cells, it wants to get its needs met, and it wants to grow and evolve. But the level on which it’s capable of doing this goes way beyond what you’re capable of as an individual.

Look around at all the amazing — and accelerating — achievements of consciousness. It’s expanding in many directions simultaneously. Consider what’s evolving on earth. Humanity itself is becoming smarter and faster and more connected. And it’s having some health issues to deal with as well. And consciousness wants to keep going.

Living Small or Living Large

You can spend your life fussing over your own piddly cellular needs, but in the grand scheme of things, it won’t be anything to write home about. No matter what you do or don’t do as an individual, it’s just not going to matter that much.

The same can be said of any cell in your body. At the individual level, a single cell isn’t particularly important.

Imagine asking a cell in your body what he’s doing with his life, and he talks about the Bloodstream Marketing course he’s taking and how excited he is about all the extra sugar he’ll earn from his efforts. Oh boy!

But will his efforts pay off? Probably not. If he isn’t getting his needs met, there’s probably a good reason for it. The larger body will see that his needs are well met if there’s a good reason to do so. Otherwise it will divert resources where they’re needed.

This is how silly we humans appear to universal consciousness. It still cares about us and wants to see us happy for the most part, but it finds our cellular perspective to be rather limiting. If you push to get your individual needs met, but you do so in ways that the larger body doesn’t care about or which may interfere with its bigger plans, it will either ignore you, or it will swat you down like a mosquito.

Imagine if a cell in your body said, I just want to eat food and reproduce like crazy. That might seem fun from his perspective, but then the larger body has a tumor to deal with. Send in the white blood cells.

If you feel like some greater force keeps knocking you back down every time you try to get ahead, you’re not imagining it. It really is knocking you back down, and it will continue to do so until you stop trying to get ahead like a cancer cell would. Have you ever noticed, for instance, that as soon as you try to make progress on cancer-like projects, you keep getting distracted, so your attention has to turn somewhere else?

Quite often we cry “Life is so unfair” when from a larger perspective, it’s a no brainer that life is either going to ignore us or attack us. Humanity’s white blood cells will come after us and make life unpleasant for us when we forget that we’re part of a larger whole and that its well-being is more important than our individual well-being.

Now imagine if an individual cell in your body said to you, “Wait a minute. I get it. I may be just a tiny cell, but I’m a part of this whole body. That’s cool. Is there anything I can do to help?”

What would you say to it? You might wonder what one conscious cell could do for your whole body. Not much most likely. But then you might think, What if this cell could wake up many others, and what if those cells could awaken still more? Eventually you could have a body filled with cells that were aware of the whole body and seeking to serve it. This would fix a lot of your problems. You’d have much better health for starters. Cancer wouldn’t be able to take root. Most diseases would be eradicated easily. You’d always be able to maintain your ideal weight.

So you might tell that one conscious cell, “Go around and wake up more cells. Gather them together. Then we’ll talk.”

Being a Conscious Human

A conscious cell is aware of the whole body and realizes that the body matters more than any individual cell. The cells are there to serve the evolution of the body and mind, not merely themselves. There’s obviously a connection between the good of the cells and the good of the body, but it’s easier to have a healthy body if on some level, the cells are aware that the body’s health is more important than their own. A cell that works against the health of the body is a disease cell.

A conscious human being is aware of the larger body of humanity and has a sense of a greater consciousness that’s unfolding and evolving at a much higher level than any individual human can.

There is value in the lower level perspective. It’s not a perspective to ignore but rather to integrate with the holistic perspective. For example, through relaxed meditative breathing, we can connect with the lower level perspective of our own cells. Breathe in. Breathe out. We’re getting plenty of oxygen. Life is good. This cellular level perspective can help to ground us. Many meditations are essentially about tuning back in to this cellular perspective, while other meditations involve expanding to a more holistic perspective. The ideal is to be able to consider all of these perspectives as valid.

If our cells aren’t healthy, our bodies can’t be healthy, and so humanity itself can’t be healthy. And of course the opposite holds true as well. But there are ways of meeting our needs on different levels that are in alignment with all of these perspectives, and there are other ways that are out of alignment. To live consciously, we need to shift towards the ways that are in alignment, so we can meet our needs as we also meet the needs of the cells in our bodies and of the greater body of humanity.

I’m certainly not the first human being to have the experience of “waking up” and becoming aware of this. Other conscious humans helped wake me up and continue to help me stay awake… or to reawaken me when I lose that perspective. I also endeavor to do my part and help other people wake up to the realization that jobs and money and marriage and retirement just aren’t that important. There are more important things to attend to here. Meeting our cellular needs is still important, but we don’t want to fuss at that level too much. We have more significant work to do here, and we could be experiencing life at a much higher level of existence.

Living your life as a part of humanity will take your experience to a level that’s far beyond life as an individual human being. Even if your intention is to help people, try expanding it to a vision of helping humanity, as if humanity itself is a conscious entity. It’s a whole different level of being.

Now what I’m seeing is that the gathering phase is well underway. Many years ago, it seemed like conscious people were very isolated. Now they’re coming together in bigger and bigger groups. I’m involved in multiple groups of this nature, and it seems like every few months I’m hearing about new groups forming. The conscious humans are clustering, and these clusters are growing larger and more organized. It’s as if new organs are incubating with the larger body of humanity. Something is definitely happening, and it’s a wondrous thing to behold.

Consequently, while I know some people are worried about where humanity is headed, I’m not worried at all. In fact, I’m excited about it. I have the privilege of being able to see what many of these conscious people are up to, and they’re starting to create transformational ripples. If you’re reading this article, then these ripples have already reached you, and you’re being impacted by them.

Some conscious cells are still isolated, however. Others are in very small groups only. And of course there are lots of people who still primarily think at the cellular level (go Bloodstream Marketing). But this is changing.

Perhaps the simplest way I can explain what’s happening is that humanity’s Power has been increasing by leaps and bounds, and now its alignment with Truth and Love desperately need to catch up. Otherwise humanity will eventually crash and burn. For instance, the first atomic bombs were dropped only 66 years ago, yet now we must somehow ensure that they’re never used on a global scale, not even 1000 years from now. One serious mistake or lapse during any minute that we have nukes, and it’s a major setback for us all. That’s a tall order that cannot be satisfied at the cellular level of consciousness. We’ve had too many close calls already (see the documentary Countdown to Zero for details on that). The larger body of humanity is aware of this challenge, and it recognizes that we need more people who are Truthful, Loving, and Powerful to deal with this existential threat.

You’re going to start picking up on this at the individual level, if you haven’t already. For instance, you’re going to feel far less tolerant of political leaders who lie to you. We’re going to see different kinds of leaders emerge, the kinds of leaders we truly need in this day and age. There are plenty of people like that, but in order for them to become popular enough, we just have to continue waking up more individual people. Once enough people are awake (or stop trying to sleep), we’ll see some major shifts. These shifts are already happening in the world of business, where popularity with the masses isn’t as necessary.

The Flow of Abundance

What we’re seeing is that on some level, this higher consciousness is taking note of what’s happening, and it seems to be assisting and accelerating the process. It wants human beings to wake up because a body of conscious cells can do much more than a body of unconscious ones. So if you’re concerned that there are too many crises in the world, recognize that there’s an upside. These major challenges are helping more and more people to finally wake up. We can’t even begin to address these challenges with cellular-level thinking, so we have to wake up in order to solve them.

There’s a lot of rebalancing that’s occurring as universal consciousness and individual human consciousness communicate with each other about how to best meet each others’ needs. How can humanity continue to evolve and expand while keeping individual humans happy and healthy? For humanity to be at its best, enough individual humans need to be at their best as well. You’re going to see this reflected in your own life too, as you grapple with the challenge of how to serve some greater life purpose while also making sure your individual needs are satisfied. In a way, you’re helping humanity experiment in order to find good solutions, which it can then spread to other cells. This is why cells like me feel an undeniable urge to pass on what we’ve figured out thus far.

As I’ve seen in my own life, this higher level consciousness is clearly listening. Somehow it can perceive the level at which we’re thinking, and it responds in kind. If you keep thinking at the cellular level, this higher consciousness will keep trying to wake you up. You may lose your job and other possessions, for instance, until you finally realize that those things don’t matter. We have more important things to deal with right now.

I’m far from perfect in this area, but I’m gradually getting the hang of it. I’m noticing that whenever I slip back down to cellular level thinking, I get a good smackdown. I feel like everything slows to a crawl. And when I shift back up to a higher level perspective, it’s like I’m back in the flow again. The phone rings with fresh opportunities, money just shows up, loving relationships flow into my life, and more. Fortunately perfection isn’t necessary. We just have to shift the balance far enough to achieve critical mass.

For those who are stuck at the cellular level of thinking, I suspect that life is going to become increasingly difficult for you. You’re going to see your worries, fears, and frustrations magnified. Life will seem to be getting worse. It may seem like important aspects of society are falling apart around you. This is happening for a reason though. These old systems are going to be dismantled. That’s actually a good thing. They’ll be replaced with better things.

For instance, you may be worried about debt, either your own or your country’s or someone else’s. But from the larger perspective of humanity, debt is meaningless. Humanity really doesn’t care if our financial system collapses or not. In fact, it may be better for it to collapse and be replaced by something else. So if you’re really attached to the current system and the money in your bank, you may get scared. But if you’re looking at the big picture, you’ll probably feel excited instead.

Be willing to lose what doesn’t matter, so we can all gain what does matter. Jobs don’t matter, but creativity does. Paying our bills doesn’t matter, but keeping our bodies healthy does. Getting good grades in school doesn’t matter, but preserving and passing on our collective knowledge does. Start reorganizing your life around what matters, and be willing to shed what doesn’t.

Try not to be too attached to remnants of the old cellular consciousness, like the money you have, the job you do, and the home you live in. The more you cling to those things, the more stressed out you’ll be. Just notice that these are all artificial cellular level concerns. What’s important is that humanity is evolving in a very positive way. You can resist that change and see your old goals fall apart, or you can flow with it and actively participate in the process of change.

For those who are waking up, life is going to become much easier in a way. Your life will explode with opportunities to learn, love, share, and grow. The good stuff will come from your alignment with the expansion of universal consciousness. But it’s important to keep the perspective of what really matters. Money doesn’t matter. Bloodstream/Internet Marketing is pointless and shallow. Waking people up and consciously co-creating something amazing is what matters.

When you align yourself with this higher level consciousness, abundance will flow through your life with relative ease. However, this type of abundance will be universal level abundance, not human level abundance. It doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily have more money, a more luxurious home, or more possessions. That kind of stuff just doesn’t matter and represents artificial needs, not real needs. This level of abundance means that you’ll be experiencing the benefits of being in a healthier body. You’ll get more of what really matters — more growth opportunities, more love, more joy, more inner peace.

Focus on your true needs. What do you need to feel abundant? You need to keep your body healthy with healthy food, sunshine, and clean air and water. You need a reasonable degree of safety. You need love and belongingness. You need self esteem. You need an outlet for your creativity. Your true needs are quite simple in fact, and they’re easier to satisfy than your artificial needs. You don’t need the latest tech gadget. You don’t need a job or an income. You don’t need to get married. You don’t need to master Bloodstream Marketing.

Your artificial needs may not align well with humanity’s larger concerns. But your true needs certainly do align. It’s in humanity’s best interests to keep its best servants healthy, happy, and prosperous. In that sense, it you dedicate yourself to serving this greater body, it will surely watch your back.

Aligning With Higher Level Desires

In order to tap into this greater flow of abundance, you have to tap into higher level desires.

First, recognize that your human level goals are beginning to bore you. No matter how important you try to make them, you can’t get motivated to work on them. You just can’t get that worked up about making money beyond a certain point. People may tell you it’s important to have specific financial goals, but when you try to do this for yourself, it makes you feel yucky inside. You can’t get motivated to work on those kinds of goals. They don’t inspire you. And so you procrastinate and then beat yourself up. It’s time to end this cycle. It’s time to re-align your desires with something that actually matters to you. You can set better goals than the human equivalent of stockpiling oxygen and sugar.

Stop thinking about what you want for yourself as an individual. Start thinking about what you want for humanity as a whole.

In the past, you may have been hesitant to even think at that level. Start thinking at that level now.

What do you want for humanity itself? Where would you like to see this larger body go during your lifetime and beyond?

Do you want us to clean up the planet? Explore outer space? Improve our educational systems? Stop fighting wars?

Let yourself dream about what’s possible for humanity. Notice that these dreams are much more impressive than anything you could possibly do as an individual.

Become a billionaire? Who cares? Start a charity? Big deal. Discover a new planet? Nice try. When will you be ready to work on a real goal, a goal for humanity itself?

Receiving Guidance

The best part is that you don’t even need to figure this out yourself. All you need to do is wake up to this higher level perspective, and then simply ping this universal consciousness to tell it you’re awake and ready to serve. Ask it for guidance, and guidance will come.

Just be aware that universal consciousness is frakkin powerful. It’s way more powerful than human level consciousness. When you tap into this resource and align yourself with it, your life is going to speed up. At first it may seem like drinking from a firehouse. It will take some time to get used to it.

If you feel that the flow is too much for you, you can ask it to slow down. I do this all the time. When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I say to the universe aloud, “Okay… this is too fast. Let’s slow this down for a week or two and give me a chance to catch my breath.” Then when I’m ready, I ask it to speed up again.

With practice you’ll get used to this faster pacing. You’ll get used to things showing up when you need them. You’ll get used to experiencing synchronicities almost every day.

A synchronicity is no accident. Universal consciousness knows what you need, perhaps even better than you do. You really don’t even have to ask for your specific needs to be met once you ask to be a better servant of humanity. As Jesus said, just say, “Not my will, but thy will be done.”

Lately I’ve been holding off on setting specific goals for myself. Instead I’ve been saying to the universe, “Bring me what you want me to work on, and also please bring me whatever you know I need for optimal health, happiness, and flow.” And then I do my best to remain open-minded and detached from outcomes. I let the universal consciousness guide me instead of having to set specific goals and intentions. I still have an intention, but it’s simply to do what’s best for humanity as a whole.

Partly I’m doing this because I’ve reached the point where any individual-level goal would bore me, and I wouldn’t be able to motivate myself to work on it. I just don’t care that much about oxygen and sugar to make it the central focus of my life. So I’m willing to risk things like losing my money, losing my home, having my relationships disrupted, etc. just for the opportunity to see where this flow leads. And yet somehow when I move past this fear of losing stuff, I seem to gain much more than I lose. As far as meeting my human needs goes, they’re all nicely satisfied and then some. Bloodstream Marketing just can’t compare.

Effect on Relationships

When you begin to align yourself with the perspective of higher level consciousness, your relationships with other people will shift. Try not to be too attached to what happens here. Your pairings with any one or more individuals aren’t necessarily going to be stable. It’s how your relationships affect the whole of humanity that matters. What ripples are you and your relationships co-creating?

People who aren’t compatible with this new perspective will fade from your life. At first you may fear that you’re going to end up alone, but there’s no cause for alarm. New relationships will come into your life, relationships with people who have a similar perspective. And these relationships will be much better for you than the old ones. They’ll help you hold the new perspective.

These new relationships will be different than what you’re used to, however. There will be less rigidity and more flexibility in this part of your life. Such relationships may defy traditional labels. You may feel a bit ungrounded in this new space. It takes time to get used to it.

Eventually you’ll realize that happiness and love can come from anywhere. You may have your emotional needs met equally well by a long-time partner or with someone you just met. Universal consciousness will guide you to whatever it is that you need to sustain your emotional health, as long as you don’t get too attached to how it shows up. If you remain open and flexible, your emotional needs can be satisfied with relative ease. Trust that universal consciousness knows just what you need, and it will deliver it right to you if you’re ready to accept it. Again, you don’t even have to ask once you’re on this path. It will satisfy your emotional needs because doing so makes you a better servant. You can’t serve humanity so well if you’re feeling lonely and disconnected. You’ll be more motivated if you have love in your life, so love will be delivered unto you.

Compared to where I was a few years ago, my relationship life might seem a bit strange these days. I have many relationships that would be difficult to label, but they seem to be healthy and flourishing in ways that are hard to get my head around. I can’t really define what they are, and I can’t predict where they’re going. But it seems like these connections are good and healthy for all involved. My biggest relationship challenge is unloading the traditional-minded baggage that nudges me to lock down and label each relationship, so I can feel like I understand it. But whenever I fall into that pattern, things get worse, not better. Conscious relationships don’t seem to like being locked down and labeled. They require more freedom and flow.

At first this sort of situation could make a person feel insecure. You may be accustomed to having a sense of security based on the stability of predictable interactions with people close to you.

However, when you align yourself with universal consciousness, you’re likely to move around a lot more relationship-wise. You’re going to meet and interact with a lot more people than you’re used to. Your social life will be rich and varied. Your stability has to come from trusting that no matter where you are, your emotional needs will still be satisfied. You’ll have the opportunity to share love, intimacy, affection, etc., and it can be more abundant than what you experienced at the individual level of being. I assure you that you won’t have to go it alone. This isn’t a lonely path — it’s actually an incredibly social path.

Effect on Work

Your work life will be transformed as well. You’ll probably need to stop thinking of your career in terms of having a stable job and earning a set income. Serving humanity requires a lot more flexibility and flow than a traditional job can provide. Thinking of starting or running a business is equally limiting. This is human level thinking. What does humanity need?

Humanity is more concerned with things like creativity, purpose, and expansion. It would love to see you contribute to the ongoing expansion and evolution of consciousness. That’s what matters. The other stuff is too trivial to fuss over.

I don’t really have a job title. Sometimes I make one up like President or CEO when it’s required for social convention, but the title is meaningless to me. When people ask me what I do for a living, I don’t really know what to say. I don’t do anything for a living. I just live. In certain situations I might say that I’m a blogger, author, or speaker, but that’s mainly what I say to people who are asleep and I don’t have time to wake them up in that particular moment. If I’m talking to someone who’s awake, then either they won’t ask such a silly question, or they’ll understand my honest answer… and they’ll probably share a similar feeling about job titles.

My business cards have the wrong address because I haven’t updated them in 5 years. My website obviously isn’t the prettiest one out there. I’ve never spent money to market or promote my website, book, or workshops. I don’t think it would be a bad thing to do so; it just hasn’t ever been necessary. Humanity takes care of all my marketing and does a better job than I could.

Last year I uncopyrighted all my blog posts and podcasts, so you have just as much ownership of this article as I do. From a cellular level, that might seem like a foolish decision. But that isn’t the level at which I made the decision. What does a copyright mean to humanity? Of course it’s meaningless. What would you think if one of your cells tried to patent the Krebs Cycle? Silly cells…

Some people are repackaging and selling my work for money. Does that bother me? Of course not. Even though they may be operating at an individual level of consciousness, they’re actually helping. They’re spreading ideas that humanity wants to spread; after all, humanity gave me those ideas to share in the first place. They’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. I think some of them have been donating back to me as well, since I’ve seen a modest increase in donations lately. But I didn’t do this to get more donations. I did it because it should help the ideas spread and get more people thinking about living consciously. It really doesn’t matter which humans get credit or make money from it.

I think my business actually works better because I don’t manage it with a cellular mindset. Millions of people have been drawn to my work, and it’s been translated into more languages than I can track. People keep sharing it, with or without my permission. New opportunities keep showing up. Money keeps flowing. Everything works. Well, aside from my web server, which I may have to upgrade yet again due to traffic growth. But that’s a good problem to have, isn’t it?

Why does my business work? Because it’s not really a business. It’s a service, not primarily for individual humans, but for humanity itself. The purpose is to help enough people wake up and live more consciously, so that humanity itself may continue to survive and thrive. And by performing this service for humanity, it takes care of all my needs. It’s really good at it too. I barely have to lift a finger to attend to such things. I rather appreciate that.

Individually speaking, there are some humans out there who don’t particularly like my work. But that’s largely irrelevant because humanity as a whole has made it abundantly clear that it appreciates what I’m doing and wants to speed things along with further expansion. These days I largely ignore cellular level feedback because it comes from people at varying levels of wakefulness, so of course they won’t all agree. But I pay close attention to feedback from universal consciousness, such as whether my life is flowing well or not. These days it’s flowing amazingly well, so I figure I’m on the right track.

Is humanity making it abundantly clear that it appreciates what you’re doing? If not, any guesses as to why? Could it be that you’ve been ignoring humanity’s needs, and thus it’s been ignoring your needs? Try doing the opposite and see what happens. I think you’ll like it.

Conscious Business

Recently I’ve been listening to an audiobook about the history of Google. Google began as a fairly idealistic company with the grand mission of organizing and providing access to all the world’s information. Does that sound like an individual level goal or a goal for humanity itself? Of course Google has since become a giant, besting all other search companies. Interestingly, one of the reasons it succeeded is because it attracted some of the brightest minds in the world, people who were inspired by its mission and who would not have worked for the company if it was just about the money. You could say that humanity diverted the best resources to Google because Google’s mission served the best interests of humanity. In fact, Google has helped to create a smarter, more self-aware humanity.

Microsoft used to be a similar purpose-driven company, with the mission of putting “a computer on every desk and in every home.” That was an expansive goal that served humanity. But a lot of people now believe Microsoft has lost its way, and sometimes it acts more like a cancerous tumor than a servant to humanity. Do you believe that Microsoft is here to serve humanity, or mainly itself? Is it working with the expansion and evolution of humanity, or is it working against it? Probably a bit of both. Hence its mixed results and recent stagnation. Microsoft needs a new mission that aligns with humanity’s expansion. So far its current attempts at a new mission have been fluffy and noncommittal. It wastes too much energy on trying to defend its turf, failing to recognize that there’s only one turf, and it belongs to universal consciousness. If you happen to work for Microsoft, do what you can to wake more people up within your company, and eventually the culture will shift, as will the company’s results.

The irony is that companies that care less about quarterly returns and more about service to humanity can often achieve amazing growth. Why? Because humanity wants those companies to succeed. It sends them whatever resources they need to succeed.

Notice which companies appear to be serving the expansion and evolution of humanity and which are only here to serve themselves and their stockholders. If you were a genius, which kind of company would you want to work for? If you were humanity itself, which companies would you support? Which would you ignore? Which would you wish to tear down or transform? Now what kind of company do you currently work for?

* * *

Martin Luther King, Jr. said that we have guided missiles and misguided men. Let’s change that. Guidance is available to you whenever you want. You just have to be reasonably awake to receive it. Then you’ll have all the inspiration you could possibly want.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

It would be nice if effort equaled results, but it’s very common to apply effort without generating measurable results.

Let me share a personal story to illustrate this…

Based on my efforts at studying and practicing the game of blackjack, I could make a case that I’m an expert blackjack player.

In my 20s I read a dozen or so books about the game of blackjack and a dozen more more about casino gambling in general. I did some independent study on games of chance in college, both for fun and as part of my education for my math degree. In high school I even programmed my Casio fx-8000G calculator to play blackjack, including drawing all the cards pixel by pixel.

However, I soon learned that it’s one thing to hold this knowledge in my mind, and it’s quite another thing to apply it as a real-world skill to get positive results.

Shortly after my 21st birthday, I made my first adult trip to Las Vegas with some friends. Before we left, I practiced counting cards just as I had learned from books. It took hours to memorize the correct play of every hand and to practice counting down a deck until I could do it in 13-14 seconds consistently (about as fast as I could physically flip through all the cards). I felt very well prepared before I ever set foot in a real casino.

On that first trip, I played the lowest limits available, mostly varying my bets from $2 to $10. I won $125 total, giving me a nice reward for my efforts.

This positive result encouraged me to keep playing. I made the 4-hour drive from L.A. to Vegas dozens of times, taking advantage of the cheap rooms and food that were in abundance at the time. I continued to invest in learning more about blackjack. I studied advanced techniques that could add a bit more edge. I learned more about the social aspects of the game. I started betting a bit more, usually $5-25 or $10-50 ranges, sometimes $25-125. I got used to bigger swings, such as losing $700 or winning $900 in a single sitting. I got kicked out of a casino for winning $200 in a few minutes, so I learned to disguise my play better. I learned how to get comps. I was very disciplined and never risked rent money or went on tilt. For me it was mostly about the challenge. I loved the combination of mathematics and emotional discipline that was required to do well.

Now fast forward 20 years. I’ve been living in Vegas since 2004. There’s a popular casino just 5 minutes from my house. I can walk there if I want. I could go play blackjack at any time of day. But I rarely do these days. And if I do play, I don’t count cards. I would only play for fun, and only at a betting level that’s so far below my means so that it can’t possibly make a difference in my finances. I would never go as high as risking even half a percent of my income over the course of a year.

So on the one hand, I can claim that I have a lot of expertise in this area. I invested a lot of time in learning, and I have many hours of real-world practice. But what are the actual results? I certainly didn’t do anything like the M.I.T. blackjack team did. Given my low betting levels and infrequent play, I wouldn’t even earn enough to reach minimum wage. Over the long run, my results were insignificant from a financial perspective.

If I evaluate this pursuit through the lens of study and effort and practice, then I could argue that I’ve grown tremendously in my skill at blackjack. But if I use the lens of real-world results, then I must admit that I have virtually no results to speak of. I never did what would have been necessary to generate serious results from this pursuit. It was merely a side hobby that I explored for fun.

So can I claim to be an expert blackjack player? That may be an issue of semantics, but I certainly can’t claim to have won any serious money at the game, which is generally how a blackjack player would measure their long-term success.

Evaluating Your Progress

How do you assess your progress?

Do you feel you’re making progress if you’ve studied and practiced a great deal? Or do you only give yourself credit for real-world results that other people can perceive as well?

I think that both types of assessment are valid. I don’t think we should completely discount learning, study, and practice as ends unto themselves. However, I also think many of us need to move our evaluation criteria further in the direction of measurable, real-world results.

Here are some questions to get you thinking about the differences between study and results…

Study: Do you think you know a lot about relationships? Have you read books or attended workshops on relationships? Do you know how to approach people and start conversations? Do you know how to build rapport? Do you know how to communicate well with people?

Results: Are you currently enjoying positive relationships in your life right now? Are you happy and fulfilled in this part of your life? Do other people notice how happy you are with your relationships? How many people would name you as a friend? How many invites do you get in a typical month?

Study: Do you think you know a lot about making money? Do you have ideas about what you can do to increase your income? Do you have goals, plans, and to-do lists? What financial skills have you acquired?

Results: How much money have you earned so far this year? What does your financial balance sheet look like? If an independent financial consultant looked at your balance, would s/he say you’re wealthy, average, or pretty much broke? Would s/he see evidence of positive change over the past 3 years?

Study: Do you believe you’re a caring and compassionate person? Do you care about people, animals, and the environment? Do you have ideas regarding how to make the world a better place? Do you ever wish more people would think as you do?

Results: What is the measurable evidence of your ongoing contribution in the real world? What results are other people now getting that they weren’t before, thanks to you? Which specific people will testify that you’ve helped them, and how will they say you’ve helped? Which parts of the environment are better off now, thanks to you, and how are they better? Is your caring and compassion flowing out into the world and affecting real people, or is it just a feeling you have?

When you look back at how your life was 3 years ago, which areas would seem to be about the same if examined by an impartial observer? Where would this observer testify that you’ve made measurable progress? Where would s/he testify that you’ve failed to make any discernable progress?

Have you been assessing your progress as objectively and fair-mindedly as this impartial observer would? Have you been giving yourself credit for non-existent results? Have you been failing to credit yourself for results you really did achieve?

Results-Orientation

If you’re beginning to realize that you have a strong bias towards over-crediting yourself for study, effort, and practice as opposed to real-world results, I’d encourage you to shift your evaluation criteria to the results side. This may feel a bit alien at first… perhaps a bit harsher than you’re used to… but I think you’ll like it better in the long run.

I’m a person who loves to read, explore, and experiment, so it’s easy for me to get caught up on the learning side and convince myself that I’m making real progress simply by making an effort. But I’ve learned over the years that my study tends to flow much better when I’m working towards a results-based goal.

During college I got a contract job to program some computer games for a local game company. At the time I only knew DOS game programming, and they were developing games for Windows 3.1. Windows game programming was a whole different animal, so I committed myself to the project before I really knew what I was getting into. But as “luck” would have it, I got jury duty right when I was supposed to begin working on the first game, so the start of the project had to be delayed. I went to a bookstore and bought a stack of books on Windows game programming. Since there was so much downtime during the court case, I was able to go through those books in a matter of days. Since my learning was results-driven from the get-go, I was able to learn a lot faster. I could focus on the concepts that I would need to apply and ignore the irrelevant bits.

Consequently, I had a working demo of the first game running only 9 days after I started the project. About six months later, I got to see the 4-pack of games I had programmed selling in stores like Comp USA and Software Etc. I also received royalty checks for more than $20K in addition to my contract pay. My learning efforts generated measurable results. I wasn’t just learning for the sake of learning. Later I applied those skills to design, program, and publish other games as well. And I helped teach other independent developers how to do the same.

When I engage in learning just to learn something new, I almost always learn more slowly. I learn fastest when my learning is results-oriented, such as if I’m figuring out how to implement some particular feature for a specific project.

Learning just to learn can be very seductive. Read any random nonfiction book, and you may be able to convince yourself that you’re doing something valuable and worthwhile. But what are you going to do with that knowledge? Will it be largely forgotten a year later? Or will you apply it in the real world?

I’ve read so many books that it’s hard to keep them all straight. I have bits and pieces of knowledge about a great variety of subjects. At the time I studied these topics, they usually seemed important. Yesterday I was reading a fascinating book about the history of Goldman Sachs, a powerful investment bank that started in the 1800s and took a lot of flak for its role in the recent financial crisis. But what can I do with this knowledge? How will it generate fresh real-world results? It may be an educational, eye-opening read, but since I’m not reading it with any results-orientation in mind, I could say that I’m better off learning something else that I can apply right away.

Learning for the sake of learning can indeed be pleasurable, and it can offer up hidden benefits over time. But my experience suggests that learning for the sake of creating real-world results can be just as pleasurable — and a lot faster too. You not only enjoy the learning process, but you also get to experience new results. All else being equal, doesn’t it make more sense to learn with a strong results-orientation in mind?

What are the results you’d like to achieve next? Can you direct your learning to help you achieve those results faster?

The Best of Both Worlds

Study, effort, and practice needn’t be in opposition to real-world results. The truth is that we can enjoy both.

A straightforward way to do this is to clarify some new results you’d like to achieve, and then focus on learning what you need to learn to achieve those results.

While I enjoyed learning to play blackjack, my blackjack knowledge doesn’t do much for me or anyone else in terms of real-world results; it never did. On the other hand, learning how to create a web business has allowed me to enjoy life without the hassle of a regular job, to provide a worthwhile and sustainable service for people around the world, and to give me sufficient freedom to keep learning and growing.

Never say “I don’t know how” to excuse yourself from pursuing a particular result you desire. “I don’t know how” is the mantra of fools. It’s okay to say, “I don’t know how yet,” but better still is to drop such phrases from your repertoire altogether. Just dive in and start learning what you need to learn. Don’t excuse yourself due to a lack of knowledge. If you don’t know how, learn how. You learned how to walk and talk. Surely you can learn other skills too.

I like Jack Canfield’s advice to “lean into it.” When you don’t know how to achieve a particular result, don’t worry about learning everything overnight. Just lean into it. Get one book that seems remotely relevant, and read it. That book should give you new leads to follow. It might turn you on to other books, teachers, workshops, or experiments you can try. Keep following the trail of breadcrumbs as you gradually learn how to achieve the new results you desire. But be careful not to fall back into the seductive trap of learning merely for the sake of learning.

Again, learning for the sake of learning is still perfectly okay. I think it’s well and good to broaden your horizons, and not everything you learn has to be so results-oriented. But when you’re pursuing a particular goal, stick to results-oriented learning, and don’t let yourself get sidetracked.

When you look back on the past several years of your life, are you pleased with the results you’ve achieved? Can you see that your investments in personal growth and learning are paying off in terms of measurable results? What is the evidence of your real-world progress? Is your “progress” all in your mind? Are you happy with your current balance between learning for the sake of learning vs. learning to achieve specific results?

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina