Just Be And You Are

Understanding that people are driven by innumerable motivations can help you learn to see their actions as a product of their inner selves rather than taking their behavior personally. Not taking people’s words and actions personally frees you from the need to react to them. You no longer have to perceive any negativity on their part as ill treatment, nor do you have to see their responses to you as a reflection of whether or not you said or did something wrong. Other people’s behavior and reactions cease to be a benchmark of your worth. When you choose not to take the words and actions of others personally, you can feel positive today even when surrounded by negativity.

- DailyOM: Impersonal Understanding

Zorba invoked a very specific feeling for me: FREEDOM. Reading it as I got situated into life again in New York, it provided me the sense of escape from reality I had on my trip to India. The feeling that life goes on without you. And how comfortable that is, because you’re free to do what you like and truly understand how your unique ripple affects the flow of things.

Apathy has become such a vice and the majority of time I believe it is. Occasionally though, you get a glimpse of the beauty within apathy, seeing in it not despair but rather a serene peace knowing that if nothing matters, then you can simply be yourself.

Zorba keeps at this theme with a nonchalant frivolity of letting things be and being one with them by letting yourself be. You get the feeling that you can’t understand something by controlling it. Instead you must set yourself free of the biases surrounding you and understand where you personally stand. Realize where your confidence comes from so when the storm comes you know if and how you’ll weather it. You can’t understand life so free yourself to the chaos it presents. Don’t try to find order. Try to find your internal meaning because reality may change and you have to be ready for it.

I got all of that from Zorba and much more. I purposefully didn’t finish it because I want to nakedly go back in to bathe in that feeling. To come out of the subway knowing my mind will breathe fresher air for having read it for 10 minutes.

If we’re all oarsmen on a ship, who’s manning the sails?

The golden rule, both in economics and ethics, aims to find the balance with what we have today and we aim to have tomorrow. Knowing either can be very subjective; it’s defined relative to where you are in the world. It’s possible that boundaries exist for this very reason. To allow a society of individually capable members to construct a vision that balances the present and the future. To that effect, are boundaries actually working?

One of Drucker’s key qualitative metrics of success for an organization is each member having a general idea what the top three goals of the organization are. From the janitor to the middle manager to the CEO, being able to state 1, 2 and 3 without much effort. It could be the mission statement, but most often its much simpler; make money for stakeholders, increase speed of delivery, improve quality of care, educate X% of the population, and so on. That’s cohesiveness. The sails are set and the ship is moving.

The golden rule goes well beyond this in trying to optimize the decision making behind the three objectives. “Why?” do we set these goals in the first place and “How?” did we come to agree upon them. Put simply,

…if a society could choose a savings rate that maximized its own consumption, it would save nothing and consume everything. But that would leave future generations in a lurch as no capital would have been built to enhance future output and consumption. If, conversely, the current generation saved so much that future generations would in fact be better off than the current, then we are also violating “Golden Rule” as we are not doing unto ourselves what we have done for posterity. Thus, the “Golden Rule” condition is that the collectively-chosen or policy-imposed savings propensity is such that future generations can enjoy the same level of consumption per capita as the initial one.

When I studied economics, it was mathematically proven that in our current state, one generation (approx. a 25-year cohort) would have to maximize savings and reduce consumption to such an extreme point in order to create the foundation for an optimum savings rate for future generations. Implying our savings/consumption ratio in the past generations has been highly skewed to the lower end. Not much of a surprise.

I wonder now if we’re creating the psycho-social environment for that “sacrificial” generation to emerge. They certainly won’t view themselves this way and taking a step back and doing less will seem like the right thing to do. The trends towards reduced consumption didn’t just start with the recession. They’ve been building for a while, along with ethnic and gender equality, at least in some parts of the world. The global power struggle is still ongoing, but there’s definitely a trend towards the “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” philosophy. It’s certainly been repeated enough. Time to practice it. Daily.

Sound is vibration that can be translated by the delicate structures of our inner ear, but it moves more than just those tiny receptors. It is part of the spectrum of energy vibrations that affect us on the mental, physical, and spiritual levels.

Good Vibrations – Sound Healing

It’s unnerving how some songs connect us to the deepest parts of our being and provide solace when we need it the most. To translate that into a holistic method of healing is fantastic and easily applied on our own to bring us in and out of the mode of thinking we want to be in.

Modern existence is so complex, and much of what we long to do is left to wait by the side. We know what is important but tend to let the weight of worldly pressures lead us astray. To get back on track, however, we need only take a moment to consider where our thoughts will be as we take our last breath on this earth.

Your Last Breath – Redefining Your Priorities

The rest of the DailyOM goes into the last moments being composed of family and loved ones and spending more time with them is what matters most. While we’re all somewhat inclined to this notion, it’s very relative, subjective to what matters most to that individual person. Bottomline, thinking this way lets you tap into that meaning for yourself and pursue it in the here and now. Better than reflecting on it as regret (a waste of time if you already do what moves you).

**A collection of inspirational DailyOM quotes can be found here.

Step 1: Close your eyes.
Step 2: Imagine stepping out of your body and looking at yourself from above (or any direction).
Step 3: Disassociate. Label the overseer the “mind” and the body you’re looking at the “vessel”.
Step 4: Drive as you see fit.

I first did this when I got an MRI done about 10 years ago. The nurse told me to hold my left leg still for 45 minutes and not move it at all, otherwise they would have to reschedule the test. I took her literally. I stepped out of my body and let it lay there and wandered mentally to wherever I wanted to go. I took a trip around the room, went outside, felt like I was flying and then all of a sudden the nurse was nudging me awake. 45 minutes felt like 5.

I read about this later in Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein where Michael discorporates and steps out of his body similarly but because he’s a Martian of course, he can affect his surrounding while being separated from his body. I’ve heard that yogis in the Himalayas do something similar and by disassociating have the ability to lower their pulse during meditation and block out the cold. This must take decades of practice and is impractical for the average person.

This is about control. Your body has needs and wants that originate from the balance of various biological, chemical and electrical components going on every millisecond. Mix in the surrounding environment, the weather, the people around you and the permutations are endless. By learning to separate yourself from this chaotic uncertainty, you reduce the instances when your mind is affected by your body and the cycle that ensues from it.

On a lighter note, I think of Robocop as a perfect example. The machine is on the outside and the person driving is on the inside. Ultimately the machine is under the person’s control, but it requires a lot of practice to learn how to drive that machine. The corollary suits well in this case.

The benefits are very personal and as far out as losing sense of time and place and as simple as maintaining a sense of internal peace. I imagine David Blaine used this as one of his methods to perform his amazing feats. There’s no substitute for doing it yourself.

Work is about learning a language. Anyone can teach themselves the various work languages; programming, business, science, art, etc. Developing the personal skills to learning them is more important than knowing the languages themselves. Losing a job is much easier to handle when you know you have the ability to learn another language as opposed to thinking you have to prepare yourself to figure out a whole new job.

I’ve seen too many curious and adaptable friends work endlessly at grueling, unfulfilling jobs when they already have the natural skills to do something else. Money, always the quoted scarce resource, is only as limiting as your desire for change. That desire – an ache for more- is powerful enough to influence how you handle your money to make it work for you (rather than you working for it). When you flip the desire switch, the movement to a new you progresses at blinding speed. Potential goes from being a word to becoming a realization.

The hyperlink is amazing. It’s pay-it-forward in action. It reduces the six degrees of separation. It connects us to people and ideas we may never have heard of simply because we stumbled upon a site.

It also contributes to trends and groupthink. Hyperlinks sometimes remind me of the buzz and gossip of the overvalued blue chips that ultimately bubbled out at the start of the century. The value of what you’re being linked is your own judgment call, but so often we empower the person that’s linking us with that judgment. Take it to the extreme. If Al Gore – as opposed to Joe Schmo – recommended a green company, you’d check it out. Al Gore certainly has the credentials, but is he becoming outdated? Maybe his personal branding campaign has started outweighing his community service message? Your call.

Too often we allow others to make judgment calls for us. The blogosphere is ruled by professional marketers and those that already have celebrity value (think Ashton Kutcher vying for 1,000,000 followers on twitter). It’s not a collusive atmosphere, but there’s a “club” mentality emerging with friends linking to friends. I still click on hyperlinks, but just like I look for conflicts of interest and financial disclosures when reading scholarly articles, I evaluate the information trail of the link itself. It’s really easy to do with any generic rss aggregator (i.e. google reader).

Why bother? Because when you open your mouth to talk about the cool thing you read or saw on the net, you’re voicing your support of it. You become a representative. Your word-of-mouth sponsorship is as much a hyperlink as the digital url hiding behind the attractive text. The value of the link is up to you.

Hierarchy is directly correlated to intimidation. The higher you go up the ladder, the more imposing the person becomes in our minds. We end up equating the position and the person. It’s a powerful effect. Even after meeting with a person and getting a consistently negative vibe, we play it down because that’s the president of so-and-so. The fear – like the title itself – is man-made. The only meaning it has is the value you give it.

When you call up Verizon or Apple, you expect great service. When you meet with the CEO of a company or a high-level politician, you expect professionalism. When you go to Bolo or Tribeca Grill, you expect amazing food. Certain brand names, like certain titles, convey a quality proposition that we grow to expect. All of which is upheld by each and every person that works for that company or embodies that role.

It really hits you when you get bad customer service from a company you expect more from or meet with an asshole corporate executive (tell him/her to check out Bob Sutton’s blog).

You realize that it’s the person, not the position that deserves your respect.

Leadership for me is about the simple living of our own truth and then manifesting it through an external work that can share it with others.

That’s from Zainab Salbi in this video in an online series called “On Leadership” at The Washington Post.

Realization – an awakening to what needs to be done and how you can do it – is key to being this kind of leader. Very few get there. I’m glad she did.

Why don’t you take a good look at yourself and describe what you see, and baby, baby, baby, do you like it?
There you sit, sitting spare like a book on a shelf rustin’,
ah, not trying to fight it.
You really don’t care if they’re comin’; oh, oh,
I know that it’s all a state of mind.

- Led Zeppelin from Misty Mountain Hop

It breaks old habits. Especially those learned in stress, during times you couldn’t control and reacted to instead.

Personally, I’ve made great strides stopping myself from biting my nails and cracking my knee. These simple but annoying habits were a natural part of my day and signaled various emotional states; nervousness, hunger, exhaustion, so on. The sabbatical has eliminated the cause – the root stressors – which in turn got rid of the effect – the bad habit.

Will they reemerge? Most likely. Yet I have a deeper understanding of how relative a state of mind really is. It’s a matter of time and place. Your context affecting your self. Change your setting and you change how you react, how you feel. I’m counting on this to make a difference.