Mind the Beginner

Do you every lie awake at night thinking about what you would wish for if you ever got three wishes granted? At some point in our childhood I’m sure we all have these thoughts. Some smart kids usually make sure to wish for more wishes. Others just end up with the cliche’s of “rich” and “famous”. A bit more creativity gets wishes like “speaking all the languages in the world” or “being able to play this or that instrument to perfection”

Some of these wishes are totally unrealistic, you can never hope to master every language nor can you master several martial arts. Unlimited wishes – or actually any wishes at all – are unrealistic.

Other wishes though are skills actual people do have. Take playing an instrument for example. To master is takes countless hours and that is where most people throw in the towel. We’re so used to getting things on a silver platter that having to work for something seems to cause an allergic reaction. So we drift off into another dream about wishes and what we would wish for.

What would you give to make those wishes come true? What would you be willing to actually physically do? Would you toil countless hours, read all there is to read and fall on your face time and time again because you didn’t quite get things right yet? No probably would not now would you, that’s why you wish for things to come to you the easy way.
But lets just be honest here, things very rarely come to us that way. Every single thing does take actual work to get. Talent is one thing, but without making proper work of it the talent will mean nothing.

You can wish for all the talent in the world and perhaps you even already have talent. What sets people apart though is the willingness to go the extra mile and work hard to develop that talent or perhaps work really really hard without talent just because they want to accomplish something.

How many wishes does it take to get where you want?

Zero

Because wishes are highly overrated. All it takes is countless hours of faceplanting. Do I hear you ask how many that should be? The answer to this one should be a constant “one more is always better” because you never know what that latest (greatest?) faceplant will teach you. Take a fall, take another one and after you dust yourself off hit the dust again for good measure. No wish will ever come true, at least none of those involving skill.

Does all this sound depressing? Lets turn things around a bit.

If aquiring a skill takes countless hours, but there are people on this planet with those skills that means those hours aren’t that countless. You’ve probably heard of the 10,000 hours idea stating that it takes that many hours to master something. All you have to do is make those hours and you will get the skill.

Now that’s a lot of hours so lets have another round of thinking: How many people really do invest all those hours? Just a few, it’s even safe to assume that investing just 1000 or 500 hours is somewhat rare. Invest 1000 hours (or should I say 1000 faceplants?) in the skill and you can be sure that you’ll be better in it than most.

Most of the skills we want, we want just so we can show them off. Faling flat on our face isn’t exactly showing-off material so we wish, and wish. Hoping the skills will come but the failure will not. Start showing off the failures and the skill will be there, its just the other side of the same coin.

Show the skills and you show the coin…

Failure is a part of every day life for without it we wouldn’t be learning at all. Failure is level zero so to speak, it’s where we start from, we have nothing, no achievements, no successes. From this starting point we embark on a journey to get where we want to be. Without exception this is “better”, “successful”, “loved” or perhaps “being worthy in the eyes of others”. (Nobody goes forth in life trying to be miserable after all, we all have our golden dreams.)In the eyes of others is a very important statement here for we usually want things not for ourselves but so we can show others that we really are somebody. If bragging about ourselves to others would not get us higher up some social ladder would we still do it just or ourselves?

The single biggest hurdle to get over is to accept that we are utter failures in life when we start out. We can’t even take care of ourselves now can we? Diaper changes, meals served to us and all kind of other things. We don’t have control over anything, not even our own body (yet). The more we learn, the more we gain control over our own actions. The more control we have to more responsibility this brings along with it. But you -as avid reader of this blog and other blogs on personal development and lifestyle design- already know this don’t you? They say knowledge is power and most certainly knowing that, with more control comes more responsibility equals more power. You’re in control of your own actions every single day. Again this is old news if you’ve been reading about personal development.

Acceptance

Accepting the current failure is the big hurdle, getting over it can be done by realizing that you have the control to change things. You’re not a victim of your own life or a victim of circumstance. With enough knowledge (power) you can change just about anything. It might not make you a millionair rock star, but you can have a very comfortable life if only you take control and not let life slip through your fingers. Life isn’t that bad actually once you get properly acquainted with the way the game is played

But still, I haven’t written anything you didn’t know already now did I? For you see, that’s the problem with all these development blogs. We keep beating about the bush on that one issue that seems so hard to grasp: You are responsible and so it’s up to you to make the change.

Same old stuff, different day

We bloggers can write all we want and you can read every single blog out there on the subject. Fact is that reading is not the same as actually taking responsibility. I could write all I want about the major changes in my life, how I made the changes and how I’m on my path to where I want to be. Many bloggers do the same and their posts are always a great hit with the readers. Reading about how we live our lives and how we do things might give you some ideas, but reading alone will not change your life. Taking (blog-inspired) action is where the control is. Even if you do manage to take control failure will always be a part of the game of life, it’s here to stay.

I know I really enjoy reading about others traveling, about Leo planning to move to San Francisco, Alan’s latest adventures, Carl’s new blog, Sean’s escape from the 9-5 and all those other cool people out there. But the fact remains I’m not traveling, moving or having adventures. I’m just a blogger and a dreamer. I’m not where I want to be so in that respect I’m a failure. But at least I know it and want to change things. I’m not a victim, I’m responsible for my own life and so it’s up to me to make the change… I got myself into this mess, now I’m getting myself out!

Nothing new to report here, you know all this stuff

…so turn off the screen, get off your behind and start acting responsible. And you know what? It’s not about being worthy in the eyes of others. It’s about being who you want to be, regardless of others. I have nothing new to offer you, nothing that deep inside you don’t already know.

Are you with me? Let’s see what’s next. A new adventure is never far away, that’s life for you.

Some time ago I started a blogchallenge. My challenge was to grow my blog by 1600% in three months, which ment the following

• OR I have more than 500 pageviews a day for 7 consecutive days.
• OR I have more than 300 subscribers to my RSS feed

This challenge is the reason why I’ve been writing those weekly updates you’ve come to expect every saturday. The deadline for the challenge was last monday and as expected, just extrapolate the numbers in the weekly updates and it was very clear. I didn’t reach either number. Things went slow and even backwards a times. Maybe I hexed myself by choosing the snail theme for all the updates. (You did notice didn’t you?).

Subscriber number is hovering around 60 and pageviewnumbers are a roller coaster between 100 and 450 a day (rough estimates)

So, am I now a failure? I’ll leave that to you to decide. I’ve learned so much these months and have been reaching more people every week. A few have been around since I started and have been commenting on a regular basis either through twitter or on this blog.

The challenge is over, although I still want to reach those goals. I was planning on transferring this blog to it’s own domain but someone bought it, this was what actually started the challenge, he would give it to me for free is I made it. There is one huge problem however, the guy who bought it seems to have dropped off the face of the planet so I can’t get the domain I wanted. Although this does suck a bit it’s not the end of the world. I will reach those numbers, and beyond.

I’m currently on vacation but when I get back home next week I’ll start working on several things:

1. Getting this blog on it’s own domain
2. Writing more posts (of course)
3. Project Mojave, I’ve been slacking A LOT
4. The blog side-project with CN & LP
5. Buying a new computer (A desktop windows system)
6. Picking up the guitar
7. Something I haven’t done in 10 years: go fishing
8. Prepare for university
9. Writing guestposts for several blogs and hopefully receiving some as well (hint!)
10. Finishing that “bucket list” I talked about a while back

I’ve got a lot to do and as always so little time to do it in, good thing I have a “black belt” in productivity and am a master of the upside down swan. So if I seem busy I’m actually not, or am I truly busy and not to be disturbed…

I would like to thank everyone who has helped me to get this far. Thanks for all the diggs, retweets, linkbacks, comments, stumbles and what not. This blog wouldn’t be the same without you!

Cath Duncan from mineyourresources.com made a comment a while back on one of my blogposts (What all the “get rich” Blogs don’t tell you) I’d going to have a closer look at today:

I totally agree that action is what makes the difference in results – even imperfect action. In improv storytelling they have the mantra “it’s all about having as many goes as possible, rather than trying to have 1 perfect go,” and I think this is a great mantra for life, and one of the foundational ideas in Agile Living. – Cath

If you’ve been reading about personal development for a while this will sound very familiar. It’s true in all paths of life actually. Practice makes perfect but better yet failure is the way to perfection as paradoxical as it might seem at first glance.

Embrace failure as the path to success and don’t get paralyzed by your thoughts while waiting for things to unfold and happened like you want them to. They almost never happen like you thought they would.

Failure to meditate

Somehow this all makes me thing of my every day practice of meditation. More often than not it seems a total waste of time. I’m sitting there and thinking of all sorts of things while counting my breaths on auto pilot. The thought crosses my mind to just get up and stop this charade. Stop pretending to be meditating and doing it perfectly. But you know what. I’m actually meditating, although not perfectly. I just fake it untill I make it. There you have it. My meditation is fake, I’m a fraud, I’ve been meditation for little over a year now, spending roughly 130 hours in meditation so far. Can I call myself an expert on the subject? Hardly… Have I failed miserably to meditate the way I want to be meditating? Most certainly!

You could call me an expert at failure. I have over 130 solid hours of failure under my belt, and that’s only in meditation. Or you could call my entire life a failure, in which case I’ve had over 2 million hours worth of experience on the subject. By Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hour theory I’m an expert at failure many times over.
And guess what, so are you!

The expert failure

Yes my dear reader, you’re an expert at failing. That’s the bonus of not being content with your own life and reading about personal development and lifestyle design. You wouldn’t be reading about these things if you were totally content with your life now would you?

What’s the value you might think by now, why is being an expert failure useful in my life. Well, the failures we had in our early days were simple: If we failed in staying upright we might bump our heads. Later if we failed to write legible we could fail a test. Failing to apply the brakes when driving created a nice dent in the car. A simple failure got bigger and bigger consequences over time as we got better at spotting what could go wrong. By the time you graduated you had enough experience in failure to spot things before they went wrong and correct them.

If you didn’t learn from mistakes you’d be wearing a crash helmet, not be allowed to drive, couldn’t complete an education and certainly couldn’t develop your person or design your lifestyle. Your life might not be perfect right now, but be happy about it. Perfection would mean you can’t learn anything anymore and what a bore that would be.

• Embrace failure, it’s your best friend in life. Seek imperfection in everything you do. Learn from it and be happy that you failed.

More blogposts, related to this subject:

Taking a chance, it is worth the risk

Settling for perfection

You might have heard of this one. The quarter-life crisis is a phase you go through somewhere in your twenties or as Wiki puts it “a term applied to the period of life immediately following the major changes of adolescence, usually ranging from the early twenties to the early thirties.”

It’s a phase where all kinds of insecurities develop. Again, Wikipedia provides us with a nice list I’d like to share:

• feeling “not good enough” because one can’t find a job that is at one’s academic/intellectual level
• frustration with relationships, the working world, and finding a suitable job or career
• confusion of identity
• insecurity regarding the near future
• insecurity concerning long-term plans, life goals
• insecurity regarding present accomplishments
• re-evaluation of close interpersonal relationships
• disappointment with one’s job
• nostalgia for university, college, high school or elementary school life
• tendency to hold stronger opinions
• boredom with social interactions
• loss of closeness to high school and college friends
• financially-rooted stress (overwhelming college loans, unanticipated high cost of living, etc.)
• loneliness
• desire to have children
• a sense that everyone is, somehow, doing better than you

There are a few here I confess suffering from. Although I don’t feel the need to have children I do feel “not good enough”, an underachiever and the sense that everyone is doing better than me. With one foot I’m in the adult life, after all, I’m 26. But on the other hand I’m going back to university this September and hopefully will be busy with that till I’m 30 something. In the mean time all the kids I grew up with are now engineers, run their own practice or are lawyers and have been doing so for a few years now. I feel left behind.

I know there are more people out there suffering from this. After all, there is a term for it right? We feel we missed the train somehow and got left behind.

Advantages of the slow life

But taking things “slow” in this way has offered me with a perspective few other have. I doubt anyone who by the age of 26 is fully tied up in a dayjob and a social life, perhaps even with kids would have a chance to break free from it all. Let’s just say I didn’t get suckered in when I was not fully conscious about it and now am in the position to choose if I take that step and settle down.

Yes there is a downside, my monthly income is laughable to anyone working full time. To anyone working actually… I don’t own a car, all I have is a motorcycle I bought for 200 euro’s and maintain myself. (If you’re wondering what a 200 euro motorcycle looks like, follow this link.) I don’t own a fancy laptop/macbook pro and I don’t run a highly successful business. I do however have a lot of free time on my hands at the moment. I have few obligations and if I want to get up somewhere around noon that’s just fine. Sure, I have gaps in my resume you couldn’t fill with a dumptruck but who cares. That damage has been done already. I’m not successful according to most people, I stopped being that as soon as I decided the first major I took in University wasn’t for me and I dropped out for the rest of the semester. It took me almost six years to complete my training as exercise therapist which should take only four years. Again, failure. (Or look on the bright side: persistence)

Crystal mind

You know what?! I actually don’t care about all that. Yes I suffer from a quarter life crisis but it’s not stopping me. It’s actually my source of strength. The ideas on what I want to do with my life are crystallizing perfectly inside my mind and I have concrete steps I know I have to take to make these things come true. Take that you soon-to-suffer-a-midlife-crisis-former-classmates! You might have that nice job right now and the nice car (did someone say Ferrari?) but I’ve got a life philosophy, I’m writing a bucket list and I’m setting up a freedom business. None of these are signs of success in the traditional sense so I’m also working on that master’s degree to rub in their faces and learning skills I deem essential to become a Location Independent Professional (or LIP for short). The rubbing in is only a nice benefit by the way, I really want to learn those skills.

I’m 26 and I’m ready to take on the world, on my terms!

How do you feel about your life? Please leave a comment, I’d really like to know.

[update 20090611] I just stumbled across a blogpost that seems to fit in nicely with this post “I am a failure – The Biggest lie out there” and I would really like to share with you. Got it through @scottbradley[/update 20090611]