Do You Want Comfort or Growth?

By Steve Pavlina

At a recent visit to the beautiful Keukenhof flower gardens in Holland, I learned about the practice of topping. As flowers grow, sometimes the growers cut off the tops of the flowers, which they believe causes the plants to invest more energy into flower growth and less into seed production. The expected result is flower buds that will produce higher quality flowers.

This is a nice analogy for personal growth as well. Sometimes when we produce preliminary results in a certain area, it can be helpful to cut them off and discard them. This can free up energy for a stronger attempt elsewhere instead of settling into the comfort zone of satisfaction with the old results.

After running my computer games business for 10 years and generating satisfying results with it, I decided to drop it and leave that field behind. This freed up my energy to focus on my personal development writing and speaking. If I’d kept running the old business, I’d have become more enmeshed in that field, planting more seeds there, so to speak. This would have meant less energy to invest in my new path and weaker results.

It can be difficult to choose the topping approach because you’re taking something that’s already reasonably satisfying and cutting it out of your life, in the hopes that something even better will grow in its place. But if you don’t do this, then you can easily stunt your future growth, causing more energy to be invested in planting ever more seeds around the old path. When you decline to make cuts, you effectively say: This is as good as it will ever be, so I’m going to settle myself here.

Do you want to settle where you are right now? If so, then topping is unnecessary. But if you’d like to do better and believe you have a good shot at improvement, just like the flower growers at Keukenhof, then topping is a sensible practice. To free up time and energy for future growth in new directions, you have to drop the merely satisfactory. This gives you a shot at the truly beautiful.

When you feel like life is becoming too stagnant, try mixing things up now and then. In many cases you can apply topping on a temporary basis by dropping old routines and trying something new for a while.

As a way to mix things up, I’ve been traveling continuously since April 23, first to Germany, then Holland, and now I’m in the UK (staying in the Shoreditch part of London). By the time I return to Vegas, I’ll have been in Europe for a month. That’s not only my longest trip to Europe but also my longest trip away from my home base ever.

During this time, I’ve dropped my old routine that I would normally use at home, and I’m trying something different for a while. I arrived with a one-way ticket, with only some part of the trip planned in advance. Even though my home-based routine was reasonably satisfying, by choosing to cut it out for a while, I no longer need to invest any energy in maintaining that routine. This means that more energy is freed up for exploration and growth. That’s basically what I’m doing each day — going out, having new experiences, meeting new people, exploring, learning, and growing.

I didn’t break with the old routine because of any problems with it. The old routine was working okay for me. I broke away because I didn’t want to allow myself to get stuck, even in a seemingly good place.

When you stay relatively still for long enough, you put down seeds. As time passes, these seeds develop stronger and stronger roots. Your reality becomes increasingly solid, and this can make change more difficult. The longer you stay still, the more people will relate to you based on your current position. Your thoughts and feelings may become repetitive and circular. Your physical environment may begin to exert more and more control over your daily routine. Pretty soon you notice that as the years are passing, little is changing in your life. This is the comfort zone.

If you like the comfort zone and wish to stay there, that’s your choice. I prefer not to get stuck there for too long. As soon as life becomes a little too comfortable, and I feel like I can just relax into the satisfaction of maintaining the status quo, I feel the urge to break free of that reality and go for more growth.

Stepping outside of your comfort zone is by definition an uncomfortable experience, but it can yield a lot more growth than staying put. During my Europe trip, for instance, each day brings new challenges, like making the mistake of taking the stairs from the bottom of Covent Garden Underground Tube Station (felt like climbing up from the earth’s core). But with so much to explore and learn each day, it feels like every day includes minor victories of the sort that I seldom experience at home.

Dropping satisfaction to go for more growth is not an easy path to follow, but I do find it to be the more beautiful path. Do you feel the same?

http://www.stevepavlina.com

Be Inspired by Tony Robbins

Tony Robbins is coming to London:

 "Unleash the Power Within", ExCeL London May 10, 2013 12:00 PM


Just in case you are one of the few who have not heard of him watch the first video below. Alternatively if you just want to be inspired once again go on and click anyway. This one runs for about 6 minutes.

Once you have watched the first one you may be willing to devote some more of your time to the second video. The second one is about 22 minutes long and includes Tony Robbins high-fiving Al Gore in the front row as Tony discusses the "invisible forces" that make us do what we do. (The references to Lance of course pre-date recent events).

For those of you who live near London, if you are now suitably motivated, you can find more information about the upcoming seminar here.

Self Discipline: Persistence

By Steve Pavlina

This is the last of 6  articles on Self-Discipline that I came across on Steve Pavlina's website. As he has generously made them available to the public domain I am taking the opportunity to share them with you. The first five can be found here, here, here, here and here.


Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. - Calvin Coolidge

Persistence is the fifth and final pillar of self-discipline.


What Is Persistence?

Persistence is the ability to maintain action regardless of your feelings. You press on even when you feel like quitting.

When you work on any big goal, your motivation will wax and wane like waves hitting the shore. Sometimes you’ll feel motivated; sometimes you won’t. But it’s not your motivation that will produce results — it’s your action. Persistence allows you to keep taking action even when you don’t feel motivated to do so, and therefore you keep accumulating results.

Persistence will ultimately provide its own motivation. If you simply keep taking action, you’ll eventually get results, and results can be very motivating. For example, you may become a lot more enthusiastic about dieting and exercising once you’ve lost those first 10 pounds and feel your clothes fitting more loosely.


When to Give Up

Should you always persist and never give up? Certainly not. Sometimes giving up is clearly the best option.

Have you ever heard of a company called Traf-O-Data? What about Microsoft? Both companies were started by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Traf-O-Data was the first company they started, back in 1972. You can read the story of Traf-O-Data here. Gates and Allen ran it for several years before throwing in the towel. They gave up. Of course they did a little better with Microsoft.

If they hadn’t given up on Traf-O-Data, then we wouldn’t have such rich collections of Microsoft and Bill Gates jokes today.

So how do you know when to press on vs. when to give up?

Is your plan still correct? If not, update the plan. Is your goal still correct? If not, update or abandon your goal. There’s no honor in clinging to a goal that no longer inspires you. Persistence is not stubbornness.

This was a particularly difficult lesson for me to learn. I had always believed one should never give up, that once you set a goal, you should hang on to the bitter end. The captain goes down with the ship and all that. If I ever failed to finish a project I started, I’d feel very guilty about it.
Eventually I figured out that this is just nonsense.

If you’re growing at all as a human being, then you’re going to be a different person each year than you were the previous year. And if you consciously pursue personal development, then the changes will often be dramatic and rapid. You can’t guarantee that the goals you set today will still be ones you’ll want to achieve a year from now.

My first business was Dexterity Software. I started it in 1994, fresh out of college. But after running it for more than a decade, I was ready for something new. I still run Dexterity on the side, but it’s not my full-time focus anymore. It takes me only about an hour or two a week to maintain it, partly because I designed it to be as automated as possible and to provide me with a passive income. It was successful to the extent I wanted it to be. I could have continued to grow it much larger, but I knew I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life making computer games. Creating my own game company was my dream at age 22, and after publishing a couple dozen games, I feel I accomplished that goal. 22-year old Steve is very satisfied. But today I have different dreams.

Did I give up on Dexterity? You could say that, but it would be more accurate to say that I was infected by a new vision of something that was far more important to me. Had I stubbornly persisted with Dexterity, this site would never have existed. I’d be working on a new game instead of my first book.

In order to make room for new goals, we have to delete or complete old ones. And sometimes new goals are so compelling and inspiring that there’s no time to complete old ones — they have to be abandoned half-finished. I’ve always found it uncomfortable to do this, but I know it’s necessary. The hard part is consciously deciding to delete an old project, knowing it will never be finished. I have a file full of game ideas and some prototypes for new games that will never see the light of day. Consciously deciding that those projects had to be abandoned was really hard for me. It took me a long time to come to grips with it. But it was necessary for my own growth to be able to do this.
I still had to solve the problem of setting goals that might become obsolete in a year due to my own personal growth. How did I solve this problem? I cheated. I figured out the only way I could set long-term goals that would stick would be if they were aligned with my own process of growth. The pursuit of personal growth has long been a stable constant for me, even though it’s paradoxically in flux at the same time. So instead of trying to set fixed goals as I did with my games business, I began setting broader more dynamic goals that were aligned with my own growth. This new business allows me to pursue my personal growth full-out and to share what I learn with others. So growth itself is the goal, both for myself and others. This creates a symbiotic relationship, whereby helping others feeds back into my own growth, which in turn generates new ideas for helping others. Anyone who’s been reading this site since last year has probably seen that effect in action.

The direct and conscious pursuit of personal growth is the only type of mission that would work for me. If I made it my mission to master real estate investing, for example, I’d probably become bored with it after a few years. Since I want to keep growing indefinitely, I have to maintain a certain level of challenge and keep raising the bar ever higher. I can’t let things get too dull and risk falling into a pattern of complacency.

The value of persistence comes not from stubbornly clinging to the past. It comes from a vision of the future that’s so compelling you would give almost anything to make it real. The vision I have of my future now is far greater than the one I had for Dexterity. To be able to help people grow and to solve their most difficult problems is far more inspiring to me than entertaining people. These values started oozing out of me as I ran Dexterity because I favored logic puzzle games that challenged people to think, often passing up the opportunity to publish games I felt would make money but which wouldn’t provide much real value to people.

Persistence of action comes from persistence of vision. When you’re super-clear about what you want in such a way that your vision doesn’t change much, you’ll be more consistent — and persistent — in your actions. And that consistency of action will produce consistency of results.

Can you identify a part of your life where you’ve demonstrated a pattern of long-term persistence? I think if you can identify such an area, it may provide a clue to your mission — something you can work towards where passion and self-discipline function synergistically.


http://www.stevepavlina.com

A Personal Fairy Tale

By: James Kyle

Once upon a time in a country far far away, there was once a new born baby tree. The infant tree cherished the newness and richness of life. A life full of first time experiences. He delighted in the refreshing sensation of sap rising through his veins, the rustling tingle of a breeze in his branches, and, most of all, the crackling of his leaves as they reached up to catch the nurturing sun. Every morning he thanked the sun for his nurturing love. The tree, caressed by the sunbeams, lived each moment of the day in a spirit of joy. At night, when he went to sleep, he knew his dependable friend would show up the next morning ready to share his infinite gift of light once more. Many days and nights passed. The tree continued to be very very happy. 

One morning, however, the tree woke up in the middle of a dream. He had been dreaming that his friend, the sun, had abandoned him. The tree, shivering at the thought, looked up to greet his friend in the sky. His friend had risen before him as always. But today, he seemed more distant, less available somehow.

More days and nights passed. With each passing day the tree began to fear more and more that the warming comforting rays of the sun could no longer be relied upon. The tree began to feel colder and colder. The tree realized that his terrible dream was coming true. The sun had decided to abandon him.

As the cold season took its grip, he resigned himself to the fact that the once nurturing sun had turned his back on him. His feelings of abandonment turned to despair as his leaves, his beautiful leaves, lost their vibrant color, and, one by one, began to fall off. Time passed. All his leaves were gone. Winter had arrived.

The tree passed the winter mourning his loss.

Eventually the cold season came to an end, and, at last, the sun once more dominated the sky. However it was now a different sun. A sun that could not be trusted. Even when the sun began to shine brightly, the tree knew that betrayal was to be expected. It came as no surprise when, several months later, the sun turned his back on him once more. The tree began to feel very very sorry for himself.

The seasons passed. The tree grew taller. For the first time he noticed, in the valley below, a forest of trees. He looked around the small hill he stood on and suddenly realized how isolated he was. The trees in the valley seemed so alive, their branches swaying in harmony in the breeze. On the ground, squirrels and chipmunks were playing games of endless tag. In the air, birds were singing, and flying back and forward, building nests in their favorite trees. The tree looked at the rocks who were his only companions and sighed. The rocks, who rarely spoke, made no comment. The tree felt very lonely and depressed. He fell ill.

Time passed. The tree felt more and more abandoned. Birds and animals who might have been attracted to the growing tree avoided him all together because he was no fun to be with. All around the tree was a depressing silence.

Never ending silence had replaced never ending joy. How could this have happened? How can I be happy once more? What can I do to end this isolation? The tree lost in his own self pity paid no attention to the world around him. So it was with a start that he realized that someone was standing in front of him. He had not noticed anyone approaching. The wizard, for that’s who he was, began to talk gently to the tree. But the tree, used to his isolation, cowered inside himself not listening at all. The wizard, with compassion and understanding, completed what he had to say, smiled, and moved on.

More seasons came and went. The wizard visited once more. This time the tree was so desperately lonely that he was determined to listen to the wise man. He did so, but could not understand the meaning of his words. The wizard finished with a smile, and some final words of encouragement, and went on his way. The tree was confused and forlorn. He pleaded to the rocks, “Rocks, rocks, what am I to do?” The rocks said nothing at first but then in a quiet deep voice one spoke out, “The wizard is offering you his love. Do not concern yourself with the words, just accept the love and let it grow inside you.” And then there was silence again on the hillside.

But something had changed.

When the wizard came again the tree remembered the rock’s advice and, looking at the wizard, was surprised to see how easy it was to see the love. One only had to look. The wizard stopped talking, but the conversation continued. The tree grew strong inside. Night came and the tree fell asleep.

The next morning the wizard had left. But then again, he hadn’t really gone. The tree realized that a part of the wizard was still alive, inside him. And so it came to pass that the tree stopped looking for others to nurture him.

As each day passed the tree became healthier and healthier. Small buds started forming on his branches which became beautiful fruit that was the tree’s gift to his new friends. Because of course, as the tree once more connected with the joy of life, different animals came to the hill to play, and many birds came to build nests in his branches.

The tree sat on his hill contentedly. He watched the squirrels play games in his shade. He listened to the birds sing beautiful songs. He felt joy as he shared his fruit with his new companions. As he sat in the sun nurturing his new found friends, he looked down at the trees in the valley below and, suddenly, he understood. He realized that, of course, he was part of the forest. But he had been given an extra gift, an extra blessing: he had been given a bit more space to expand and grow.

And it should come as no surprise to you that the wizard, on another journey far far away, chose that moment to stop and smile, before continuing on his way.