Deliverable

It just occured to me that the wealth I seek is already out there. It’s waiting for me and it has my name on it.

It’s just a matter of claiming what’s already mine.

I’m a big fan of the 30 Day Challenge. It’s been helpful to have this tool to develop consistency around the things that have been holding me back.

One drawback is that some challenges don’t fit so neatly into the 30 day category. The 7 day yoga challenge was one. There’s also my two day “9 to 5 Day” challenge from earlier this month. It doesn’t make sense to do that type of challenge for thirty days, but it’s one that I’d like to eventually make a consistent part of my life.

Enter the 1-7 Day Challenge. It’s a way to crawl before you walk. The beauty of this type of challenge is that it more easily fits into a 5 day work week. Perhaps you’d like to make gettting up at a certain time a priority for the coming week, but want to be free to get up whenever you like on the weekend…

Create a 5 Day challenge for yourself:

• Evaluate your schedule and create a specific set of wake up times for the week.
• Put those wake up times in a “5 Day Challenge” format and post it online.
• Check-in on Friday morning.

This eliminates the feeling that you have to do this habit for the rest of your life. It’s something that you’re trying out. It’s something that wouldn’t even work to do for 30 days straight. It might be something that you’d like to do every once in a while. It’s a way to set goals for yourself that are believable, and thus achievable. It’s a way to gain strength slowly but steadily.

That’s the concept. We’ll see how it works out.

Serendipity is a strange thing. I had just finished updating my 30 day question, and was checking out the recent posts at Lifehack.org.

Here’s one that caught my eye:

How to Find What You Love to Do

I know there are so many people who ask themselves a question: “What do I really love to do?”. And trust me, this question is a million dollar question – and it is tough. Once you have this answer, you will be more satisfied with the work you have done and actually enjoyed it in the process. Brian Kim has shared his useful insight on getting this answer from your deep end of your heart:

…
Step 1: You WILL find the answer. No doubt.

You will find the answer. You will find it. No doubt.

Approach the question with this mentality and you are sure to find it. How long will it take? It doesn’t matter. Bottom line, you will find the answer.

By doing this, you automatically instill an anti quitting mechanism within yourself, because you know you will find the answer. If you know what you want to do, then you will do it.

For example, if you know you want to arrive in New York, you’ll find ways to get there. You’ll hop a train, bus, or plane going to New York and will arrive in New York.

If you don’t have the cash, you’ll borrow it, or get a job and save up, or get a job as a flight attendant to get there for free. It doesn’t matter how long it will take or what you need to do because you know you’re going to New York.

All your actions onward from the decision that you want to arrive in New York will revolve around getting to New York.

Read that last sentence again.

All your actions onward from the decision that you want to arrive in New York will revolve around getting to New York.

Finding what you love to do = Deciding to arrive in New York.
…
How to Find What You Love to Do – [Brian Kim]

I haven’t finished reading Brian Kim’s article yet, but what initially struck me about this was how closely alligned it was with my “Question Update” and the way my thinking has been evolving on this issue. The obvious next question after “How do I create a million dollars for myself doing the things I love to do?” is “What is it that I love to do?”. (Ok, it wasn’t so obvious initially… thanks M.!)

It’s nice to have the universe step in with further insights.

I had quite an interesting experience this evening. I’ve been traveling the past few days, and finding the time to stick with my 30 Day Challenges has been difficult. Today was a particularly busy day, and I hadn’t found the time to do either my practice or my project challenges. I was getting tired, it was after midnight, and I’d all but resigned myself to the post I’d have to make the next day about how I’d been unsuccessful, and would be starting the 30 days over again. I decided to take a look at Deliverable to see how far I’d gotten. Well, it turns out that I was only one day away from achieving my “projects” goal, and three days from achieving my “practice” goal. (Which in fact will be 60 days of consecutive practice…). I’d gotten so wrapped up in the doing of the 30 days, that they just slipped by.

Suddenly, quitting didn’t seem as palatable.

I sucked it up, figured out a way to practice that wouldn’t disturb the entire household (buzzing), and in the process discovered a pretty cool website that I think is going to be helpful down the road. I also came up with a new exercise for the book. All this came from pushing thru, after being on the verge of giving up.

I guess my advice to anyone out there who might read this would be to stay the course. There will be difficult times when you think you’ve hit a wall. Get creative, keep the end in mind and keep plowing through. Even if it’s not perfect, the consistency will pay off in the end.

Now, if only someone will remind to take my own good advice the next time something like this rolls around!

via this evening’s fortune cookie:

I’ve completed the first 7 days of my 30 Day Exercise Challenge. I must say that so far it’s been a very positive experience. I can really see myself completing this challenge. I find that I look forward to my exercise each day, and am trying to find more and more variety in my exercise choices.

I’ve also revamped slightly the layout of how I’ve been tracking my progess. I flipped the Monday-Sunday format I was using so that it’s now laid out like this:

Su:
Sa:
F:
Th:
W:
T:
M:

This way I can more easily see the progression of what exercises I’ve done over the past week. I also set up a Fitness Tracking Archives page to make it a bit easier to edit the main tracking page each week.

Having the large variety of exercises to choose from assures that you’re not going to overstress or injure a specific body part by overtraining. The other thing that helps is knowing that it’s so easy to be successful. If my schedule only allows me to walk one of my walking routes, then I’ve successfully exercised that day. If it happens to be raining that day I have alot of other indoor options to choose from. The key is choices, choices, choices and structuring those choices in such a way that “exercising” can mean spending 4 minutes doing crunches on the ball.

I think the thing that most people miss about exercise is that the effects are cumulative. A little bit of exercise every day goes much further than alot of exercise engaged in sporadically. Exercising every day is more of a philosophical life choice. We often hear ourselves saying “I don’t have the time to exercise”, but that’s just not true. More specifically what we’re saying is “I don’t have 2 hours to spend going to the gym”, which might be absolutely true. By making their definition of exercise so rigid most people rob themselves of an opportunity to be healthy and fit. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making gym membership a part of your life if it’s something that you can afford and have the time to do. But it’s much more difficult to fit that two hours into your life consistently if that’s your only exercise option.

I recently came across a series of blog posts that deal with building habits. Given the things I’ve been focusing on lately, it’s like the universe stuck them out there just for me. In the post on conditioning, he talks about the 30 Day Trial as a tool to build a habit. That got me thinking about my own past experiences with something similar, my 3 Week Challenges for Cooking, Fiber, and Television. These had been back in August, and I’d almost forgotten that I’d done them. I started to ask myself some questions:

• “What were my experiences been back then?”
• “Had I stuck with these habits, and if not then why not?”
• “How might I use this concept in my life today?”

It turns out that I was successful in all three of my challenges, and that I received alot of benefits from the process.

Of the three challenges the one that I’ve managed to integrate the most into my life has been the fiber part. I eat breakfast pretty much every day now, and recognize that I don’t feel as good if I start my day without it.

On the TV and cooking front I completely let those habits slip through. I think perhaps I wasn’t ready to give up television completely back then and I never did find an effective strategy to cook consistenly. (Though I’m still working on it!)

I plan to revisit the concept of the “30 Day Challenge” in posts over the next few days as I research it more and figure out the ways in which I’d like to challenge myself.

Adults have houses. Adults have children. Adults have car payments and lawns to cut. They have clothes to buy for the kids and gas to put in the car.

Does having kids and houses and cars make you an adult? No, but kids and houses and car payments quickly separate the adults from the non-adults. You can usually tell which parents aren’t adults by the way their kids act. If the kids are unruly and rude and obnoxious, I’d say the chances are much higher that the parents aren’t much more than adolescents themselves. If the front lawn is up to the windows and the inside looks like crap, the chances are much higher that the folks inside aren’t adults. They’ve never acquired adult habits.

My parents I’d consider to be adults. My father worked an honest job for 40+ years to put food on the table and pay the mortgage and put clothes on my back. My mom worked as well to pay for the things we needed and to raise our standard of living. The grass got cut. The inside of the house stayed tidy.

My parents have adult habits and in many ways I do not.

I spent 5 years of college building those non-adult habits. It’s the essence of college. Freedom for the first time! No need to go to bed at a specific hour. No one telling you what to do! Complete freedom! I continued and refined those habits in 2 years of graduate school. Many of them I continue to this day.

My parents never had the luxury of having the same habits that I’ve developed. (See above, re: 40+ years on the job, etc.) When you have to pay the mortgage and put food on the table “not working and letting days slip by” isn’t an option. I’m not saying that they’re perfect. I’m not saying that I’d want the type of life that they’ve made for themselves, and I’m also not suggesting that by not wanting that type of life that I think it’s less than admirable in any way.

The only thing that I’m saying is that my parents have adult habits and that in many ways I still don’t want to see myself as an adult. (To this day I have a phobia of dealing with the parents of my students because in some way I see them as adults that could rebuke me, rather than as equals.)

I need the type of habits that helped my father work a job 40+ years. It’s not that I want a “job”. What I want is to take the time he spent working at his “job”, instead investing in my own projects and my own creativity. I want to apply the type of adult habits that my parents have used to create a reasonably stable life for themselves in retirement towards creating the life of my dreams.

I’ve had some movement on how I want to approach my workflow for the book. It’ll look like this:

• Brain dump all of the sub-projects for the book onto 3×5 cards.
• Choose a sub-project to work on.
• Create a new folder with the sub-project title in the @Book folder
• Create a readme.txt file in the sub-project folder. You can leave any specific notes you have about the sub-project here (scaling settings in Illustrator, for example).

The sub-project will more than likely require several next actions, so…

• Staple the 3×5 card to a piece of lined notebook paper. Work thru the next actions on this piece of paper.
• Take the next action you have on your list

Some of the next actions might actually be another sub-project in themselves. If so, bump the sub-project over to a it’s own separate 3×5 card.

Other things to consider:

• Keep all of your associated Sibelius and .eps documents in the same project folder

• Don’t slack on naming things. Be specific, either in the way you label the folder, or the way you label the file. This will keep you from redoing work that you don’t need to.
• Don’t be slack in setting up templates. A well set-up template in the beginning will make things go much faster when it comes to repeating tasks.

I think that this should cover alot of the oranizational problems that I’ve had in the past that have led to duplication of work. It should also break things into manageable chunks. It just occurred to me that this is what I’m asking my students to do when I have them break down a song for practicing: “Why practice 50 things when you can practice the 5 things that will help you play the 50?”. I think that I can repurpose this into how I work on the book… just have to think through the possible connection a bit more.

I have rather large ambitions. I think that when I combine my ambitions with my tendency to jump around in my thinking it has the potential to derail me. I don’t want to be small, so I end up doing nothing at all. I become faced with the enormity of the task, and I melt down. My brain locks and I become paralyzed. I’m unable to see the whole of my ambitions as the necessary small chunks required to make it all a reality. Or perhaps a better way to put it would be to say that I get glimpses from time to time and I make small steps forward, but overall I’m unable to build the necessary momentum to hit a tipping point.

• I want to be a good guitar player.
• I want to be a good bass player.
• I want to be a good singer.
• I want to be a well respected trombone player.
• I want to have a record of achievement as a trombone player that is more than just “plays club-dates”.
• I want to be a well respected actor.
• I want to direct and make movies.
• I want to be a singer/songwriter.
• I want to have my own rock band that I lead and front.
• I want earn enough money to create a foundation that will help solve some of the problems we’ve created for ourselves in this world.
• I want to write a Broadway show.
• I want to be on Broadway as an actor & a singer.
• I want to work with great actors and directors.
• I want to publish a groundbreaking teaching method that changes the way people learn music.
• I want to create enough assets so that I never have to worry about money again.
• I want to move out of this shitty apartment.
• I want to travel the world and have really cool experiences.
• I want to build a place for myself that is an oasis… my retreat from the stresses of the world.
• I want to help in the fight to stop the current administration from raping the constitution.
• I want stop the religious right from taking my rights away from me.
• I see wrongs in my life every day and I want to make them right. I see lying politicians feeding at the public trough and it sickens me. I want to put and end to this.
• I want to help in the fight to keep monster corporations from owning everything and running everything
• I want to have the financial resources to take care of my parents when/if that becomes necessary.
• I want to use all of my talents and all of my creativity to create a life that has meaning, and passion, and joy, and pleasure, and all of the wonderful stuff that life has to offer.
• I want to make full use of myself.

All of this stuff is rattling around in my head, and that’s alot of stuff. Maybe it’s the perfectionist in me, but I’m not willing to let any of it go. I’m unwilling to be mediocre. I’m unwilling to settle for less than I can be. The problem is that I can’t see the A./B./C./etc. progression that is necessary to get all of this stuff done. Or maybe I sorta see it (I know the damn book must be finished if I’m ever to move forward) but I’m afraid to just finish the first step because I’m afraid that the first step will be the only step.

I’m willing to accept that there are things on my list above that perhaps are there because I think I “should” do them, or that I “could” do them. I know that I have a tendency to hero worship a bit. I know that I respect Robert Rodriquez and that I love his approach to filmmaking, for example. I know that I have made short films in the past and have been successful at it. I added “direct and make films” to my list above. Maybe this is just a wish right now and will never move past that, but at least it’s something to latch on to.

Right now I feel like alot of the things on this list are “if only’s”. “If only I could get my shit together and consistently do -insert item here-, I’d be a hell of alot better at it”. Maybe that’s part of the problem. The question that I must focus my energy on is this:

I believe that the universe is infinite, and that within each of us is infinite potential and depths unimagined. If we begin with the premise that all things are possible, then only question we need concern ourselves with is “Which thing will I do first?”. This allows us the freedom to begin (and complete) things without fearing that we’re making the wrong decision.

This is where I am now with this stuff. I have to say that it feels good to get all those ambitions out of my head and “out into the universe” in a concrete way. I know that right now there is only one person reading this blog, but still it’s helpful to put this stuff out there. It makes it more real and forces me to more honestly assess things. They’re no longer secret possible things in my head, but things that I could be called out on at a later date by someone reading this blog. That helps in an odd kind of way.

Having this out there forces me to say “Ok, if I am indeed serious about wanting to do these things, then what the hell is the next step? How the hell do I organize things so that these things become reality?”.