Audio Recording of the Author Reading: Pain yields to innovation
Recently, I have been thinking about pain.
The pain of the market is just one such example. Pain of the body, too. And while I have thought on this, I’ve concluded that pain yields to innovation.
“Let me explain; no, there’s too much. Let me sum up.” Inigo Montoya
There is multi-millenia of pain that our species has experienced, and for it we have become exceptionally capable overcoming pain:
cold -> fire
weather -> shelter
hunger -> agriculture
conflict -> weapons (empathy is a weapon, too)
These are only a few examples, there are many more.
And what of your pain? Do you shun it, ignore it, mask, bury or hide it?
Hone in on it. Feel it.
The source of your pain may yield wonders untold, undiscovered or unimaginable. But you must not turn your back; no, not on your pain.
To do so, to turn on your pain, is to turn on your self.
Audio recording of the post, “In between Notifications (why am I inconsistent with my work)”
Consistency has a consistent knack for breaking stride against the changes of life, and there in lies the dangers we under-go in using cell phones wth notifications turned on.
When we no longer orchestrate the act of conciousness, we become acted upon by conscious forces. And when your plans and goals are second to what interrupts or distracts you; where do you think you are going? It is obviously not your goals and dreams, that’s for sure.
If there is one thing you do to change today it is to turn off notifications on your devices:
Audio Recording of ‘Four ways to have a crappy performance, the first is the worst’
You have to be willing to make changes in your process to accomplish great things. Not every performance is going to be your best one. However, the secret to winning in the long term is knowing all the ways you can lose beforehand, and then preparing like hell before showtime to overcome those scenarios.
From what I have found, and I sure you have too, that there will always be some kind of reconfiguration in life’s circumstances to throw off the power process. And if you haven’t figured this out already, then take it from me, it is your responsibility to overcome what your life throws at you.
Still, there will be times when life gets the better of you. That’s just how it goes, and you need to prepare like hell for when it does. To be better prepared, what you need to know is that there are only a limited number of ways that life will best you. And after I list the following instances, I am going to discuss the one that I hope isn’t happening to you on a consistent basis:
The Four Performance Killers
You didn’t show up
You were late
You are in overtime
You focus only on the problems and not the solutions
Three of those instances can be overome by better preperation, more focused practice, and innovation. But only one of them is a total failure.
Let’s go through the one instance that I find most deplorable.
You didn’t show up
Look I get it, there are times when life is so powerful that there simply was no way you could have made the performance. Unsurmountable and unexpected things do happen. I am not going to be so brash as to say, ‘Just overcome, bro.’
Where most folks go wrong though is that people often confuse the unsurmountable with the meerly inconvenient.
So here’s a useful and simple metric to figure out which is which, it goes something like this, ‘Shit and stuff happens, so which is it?’
What I am talking about here are those times when you didn’t show up because stuff got in the way. Not showing up on account of stuff is just a half-hearted way of saying ‘I quit’ beforehand.
Quiting before your performance got started by simply not showing up is just plain loser mentality behavior. If improving your performance and participating in your passion is still your desired outcome, you have to ask your self why you let stuff get in the way and honestly reconsider you priorities.
If your plan is consistently improve your performance, you will show up. Simple as that. Sure you might be late, you might have to go into overtime and you might only be focusing on the problems instead of the solutions, but to not show up…
Well, here’s a simple solution to not waste any more time: reassess and recommit, or simply resign.
Alixander Court 