passion or money? Take a cross-over path

You hear it all the time- especially on self-help blogs- go after what you are passionate about and money will follow...er, right, but what if you're skint?

I have said similar stuff- my solution, for myself, was to work for money at weekends or downtimes and use my primetime- the day- to do my own thing.

But what if you have a family to support? You can't do that easily working a couple of nights.

You need to be both self-supporting and also, preferably, on what I call a cross-over path.

If you earn your bread at a call centre and spend your free time doing what you are passionate about the passion will probably fizzle out. You'll be so pissed off you'll want to spend your downtime doing other stuff.

A cross-over path is one that earns money, reasonable amounts, but allows you to cross over more and more to what really interests you. Journalism is a good cross-over path to writing and film making. Think of activities that are congruent with your ultimate ideal way of earning a living/spending your days. Take a long term approach. Look for other people who are doing what you want to do and see what cross-over path they used.

the simple and the subtle

Broadly speaking, formal, ‘public’, or, if you like, ‘modern’, life presents things as significant the louder more shocking and in your face they are; it also presents things that are super complicated as being more significant than that which is very simple. 

But I wonder if the opposite is true: that life is better appreciated by looking for, and showing a preference for, the simple and by being better attuned to the subtle.

When people start aikido they quickly get into very complicated discussions about foot placement and angles and such like. The real masters tend to say the same things again and again: it’s all about stance, for example. After a while you realise it isn’t the actual words that matter so much as the importance you attach to them (if that makes sense). The better you get at aikido the more importance you attach to something seemingly very simple that is ignored by a beginner who prefers more complicated (an by implication, truer) explanations.

Becoming more aware, building awareness builds an appreciation of subtleties. All wine tasters know this. Having the courage to stick with the simple also helps. I wonder if a preference for over-complication is a dry intellectual substitute for subtlety.

Be Extraordinary

What do self-help books offer? The promise of wealth? Success? Happiness? I remember a gut shot of recognition when I saw Anthony Robbins first book on the shelves: Unlimited Power! Isn’t that ultimately what the punter wants? Us?

All of us believe that we do indeed have a slumbering colossus within, waiting to do incredible things, if only we could just find the key…We firmly believe we are only using 5% of our brains, as in the movie Limitless, the only problem being in the details ie. accessing the other 95%.

Then there was The Secret- if you worship what you want to achieve you will achieve it.

I have a friend, the most successful entrepreneur I know from my callow days in academe, he’s a multi-millionaire and a very nice chap. Thirty years ago when he was a just a (highly successful) salesman he’d have a self help book on his desk next to his phone. “You don’t read them to get the answer,” he told me, “You read them to get re-energised when you’re feeling down. Then you can make that call and sound like you mean it.”

The father of another friend was also a very wealthy entrepreneur- he had a whole bookcase of self-help books. Maybe he, too, was using them to get some kind of lift. In any case it made me sceptical of the nay sayers, those who pour scorn on any attempt at self betterment using a book that screams: Go For It!

Naturally, there are some crap self-help books out there. But even the crappest has one thing, or perhaps two things, of value in it- usually stuff that they are repeating, or a lively quote they’ve borrowed from another righteous tome of personal development. There’s an awful lot of recycling going on in the self-improvement field.

Anthony Robbins, despite his nutty NLP ideas and simplistic pleasure/pain motivational schemas, hits the nail on the head with his titles: The Unlimited Power I’ve mentioned, along with Awaken the Giant Within. He understands that it is a FEELING we want NOW not some nebulous future state.

Stephen Covey with his worthy ‘Habits of highly successful people’ pushes, as many do, the concept of SUCCESS as the ultimate goal. Gawd knows I’ve been suckered down that alley a few times. Just what is it exactly I now ask? Being on telly? Having people stop you in the street? Lots of cash? And when does it start? Or end? The world is littered with successful people who think of themselves as failures because they aren’t as successful as someone else a notch higher up the bed post; Napoleon torturing himself because he hasn’t got to India as Alexander did, Steve Jobs thinking he isn’t Bill Gates, Bill Gates whinging that he isn’t Steve Jobs…

Success- as I’ve written elsewhere- is an exercise in framing an enterprise. Frame it so that it succeeds and you are a success. You have bragging rights. But you’ll still be disappointed unless you’ve grown to recognise the warm feeling in your midriff that success gives you- that’s what people want, cut to the chase and get the feeling direct from pills, the bottle, a line of cocaine. Which is why so many successful people turn to such things. Success, is, literally, in your head.

Money- well- there’s never enough and then you’re approaching the later stages of your life and you realise that hey, you don’t need that much, and actually time is rather more attractive as a commodity, and health isn’t bad too…

Beyond the functional requirements for money it becomes a ‘success token’. A kind of substitute currency for success. And success can likewise be turned into money.

So the books offer chimeras. Or they offer the equivalent of a day dream.

Real self-help is about building the exterior self, making it work better in the world, enabling you to be happy. Happy enough to pursue, probably at the same time, worthier goals of inner evolution. The two help each other, but it’s hard to concentrate on becoming a better person if you’re just not happy.

As Idries Shah suggests: first make yourself happy. Then think about higher studies.

Hitching yourself to open-ended concepts such as ‘being a success’ is a recipe for unrelenting toil and unhappiness. You need to be happy NOW.

I give lectures every now and then at Universities- I love doing it- but the message I find myself putting over time and again is: travel. Travel while you have no financial burdens and responsibilities, travel while you are still automatically open to new experiences, travel while you can still enjoy roughing it, travel while you can still be mentored by people along the way. With a bit of recalibrating, people of any age can do all of the above, but they can do other stuff too. People aged 18-30 often can’t- but they can travel.

And while I was on my own travels recently I connected travelling with ‘Being Extraordinary.’

When you come back from a trip- and increasingly I have ceased to use the word holiday, trips seem to offer more than that nugatory term seems to supply, when you come back you have this altered energy. Probably you are more relaxed, but usually you are more focused- things you have ignored for months you quickly achieve. In fact there is a curious parallel with the week BEFORE a trip when your productivity soars and you get everything finished in time and the week when you return when you blast through all the things you’ve been thinking about on the trip…what if you could just have the week before and week after and cut out the trip altogether?

Keep the trip. What I am circling is the idea that travel allows ANYONE to be extraordinary- by definition you are taken out of your ordinary and put somewhere new and challenging. That’s where your special energy comes from, and that’s where your special powers come from.

Special powers? Yep- all travellers know that after a few weeks you become a sort of superhero out there on the road. You can talk to anyone. Shyness goes- it has to- as you need to talk to lots of people each day just to survive. Of course you have your ups and downs, but basic extroversion becomes the order of the day. And talking to anyone you find a strange equality pervades the world of travelling. Just moving on- the downsides of class, race and sect just don’t drag you down. What other powers? Coincidence, happy chance encounters, miraculous meetings- all that becomes…expected. You become the beholder of strange sights, strange experiences, incongruities that seem to offer the key to a place, amazing rushes of energy.

Of course, all the time your money is running out, so, eventually, and probably rightly, you head home.

A week or two later you’re ordinary again.

Unless you decide to Be Extraordinary…all the time.

That, I have decided after long consideration, is the real deal. My next post will outline how…

Objection

What we object to in a thing may simply be its unavoidable yang or yin elements. Nothing can be 100% one thing or the other. And for yang and yin read 'outgoing' or 'inward looking' if it makes more sense to you.

Day FOUR of three day fast

Still on 4kg weight loss. I wake up at 5am and sneak downstairs: eat a tiny bit of banana- Ok but nothing special. I then make a soup and add some sauce from a curry- it tastes brilliant- though very strong and salty. I eat some curried carrot- a few slices and that is enough. Back to bed.

At 7.30am I have a tiny bowl of bran flakes and two oat cakes. It is these that really taste marvellous, the fast having sharpened every nuance of their flavour. The instant coffee is great too.

Then- what I have been planning for two days: Canadian pancakes, bacon, maple syrup and cappuccino at a local café. That bacon! Pity they took so long bringing it but perfection is made to be marred.

In conclusion- I want to keep doing a fast day a week- maybe Sunday afternoon to Monday afternoon plus a day when I only eat breakfast. It may change but that is the plan.

Aches and pains come back after a few hearty meals…it really does seem as if fasting helps the body deal with these and aids repair of them. It's a great mood booster too. I feel great.

Day TWO of my three day fast

Woke about 4.30am. drank some water. Weighed myself- an incredible 3kg weight loss- must be mainly water loss. My eyes feel dehydrated, as if with a hangover. One is red- probably all the toxins I’m liberating by not eating. But usual aches and pains- slight allergic wheeziness and stiff shoulder have gone. That is incentive enough to keep going. Back in bed I stay there until 9am. After a bracing lap sang tea I go out and chop some wood. I don’t try too hard, and what I find is that I end up using the axe properly- letting it’s weight do the work instead of my arms. I take a goodly break looking out at the view but I am not really tired…just slow. I must be running off my own fat supplies – good for a slow burn but nothing too extreme is remotely possible.

But I do spend most of the day sitting around a lot. I manage to fiddle with a website I’m helping to build. Still get waves of low level headacheyness. My eye is no longer bloodshot by the evening. Turn off a film and read a novel, but my eyes are soon tired. I have my soup which is just a teaspoon of bouillon powder in a cup. I add a small chopped up garlic. Bad idea- I’m soon burping and I can feel a small windsection of weird stuff going on in my insides. I’m sick of mint tea by now. Lemon and ginger is OK and so is lap sang.

I really hope I hit the much advertised breakthrough tomorrow as this is a medium unpleasant experience- but, strangely, one I am not regretting one bit. It’s like being on a trip, a strange and interesting journey.

Day ONE of three day fast

I had once fasted during Ramadan- it was in winter in Egypt so the days weren’t so long- you only have to go from dawn to dusk, and dusk was about 5.30pm so if you lay in bed in the morning- as I did- it wasn’t too hard. But it wasn’t easy either, for me, day after day for a month. For one thing eating and thinking about eating and preparing food and talking about food take up a fair bit of one’s day. Strip it out and all that extra time can be disconcerting. It certainly doesn’t help you remain resolute.

And then there are the headaches. Some fasters get hungry. Not me. I sometimes even felt slightly full. But I did get nasty headaches- especially at first- probably caffeine withdrawal- but still not a great thing to look forward to.

Fasting is common to most religions, in some form or another. One perspective I agree with is that some religious practice started as a health practice which then became ritualised, its original meaning lost. Could the health benefits of fasting have been known in more traditional times, and only now are we rediscovering them?

Then, after conversations with friends Ramsay Wood, Polly Gates and Rich Lisney I decided, what the hell, do a three day, four night fast and see what happens. Instead of the Ramadan style of fast where it is nil by mouth- no water even- my rules would be a little slack: I’d be allowed black tea, maybe a little coffee, diluted juice, one thin soup a day and fruit teas and of course a ton of water. No solids at all though for the whole period. I’d heard of a guy who had built a patio while on a thirty day water-only fast and this put it all in perspective. Let’s do it!

I also watched this: 

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvdbtt_eat-fast-live-longer-hd_shortfilms

But only after I’d started. It was fascinating, hard to disagree with.

My motives were to activate the self-healing properties of the body which are supposedly and fairly convincingly I think, shown to be inhibited by eating too much. I know I eat too much. I have a spare tyre- the worst kind of fat- and it’s something I wanted to deflate for sure.

So, DAY ONE:

I had a big lunch the day before I started, including wine. This made having no breakfast on day one of the fast easy. I bought two cans of readymade 'frappacino' and a small container of organic ‘super nutrient’ juice and headed home to do two hours of gardening- weeding mainly. No problem doing work but then in a wave it hit me- I felt awful! But carried on digging and then felt fine. I knew the key would be the same as dealing with any pain- wait out the waves- nothing lasts forever at the same intensity.

Working, I found I naturally moved slowly like a fieldworker in a hot climate. I planned to use the coffee and later tea to smooth away the headaches. And it seemed to work. Until after lunchtime when I again began to feel fairly awful. I drank a fizzy water and lots of still water, lay down for a bit and took an aspirin. Felt a bit better. Head was manageable. I poured a tiny amount of blackcurrant smoothie into a glass and then added ten times as much water. I could feel my brain sucking in the small sugar hit- anything that tastes that good must be wrong! I managed a few barbell lifts- about the same power as I have without fasting, but I do it more slowly. 

I read a lot and then watched a useless western on TV. My eyes hurt but it's manageable.

Glad to be able to go to bed about 10pm.