Validate Your Life

I’ve given Goal-Setting a lot of thought….and experience…..and saw it lead to a lot of failures…and occasional successes….but ultimately I’ve learned tha goal-setting is a fail agenda and a behavior that denigrates clarity and induces self-doubt all while unnecessarily increasing otherwise-avoidable stress.

Some of these may sound like semantics, but it really isn’t.  These different ways of looking at achievements changes the way your brain interprets goals and then achieve the outcome(s).

Here’s Why and How Goal-Setting is Fail:

• Inadequacy.  Goal-Setting is BY DEFINITION intrinsically and inextricably intertwined with INADEQUACY!   If you say “I must achieve xyz goal”, you’re setting yourself as someone who needs something, who currently isn’t complete.  Sure, improvement is an essential part of any success and progress, but this act of “goal-setting” is like sitting around and constructively moping about a state, thing, attribute, or quality and it pinions you in a state of inadequacy from the get go.  Bad times.  There’s many ways to improve without making oneself inadequate.   Just acknowledge your investment in achieving an outcome.
• Inefficacy.  Goal-setting, the very process and act of goal-setting just doesn’t bloody work!  Here’s a fantastic example: David Tennant.  Brilliant british actor possibly most known for his character the time lord Dr. Who in the television series by the same name.  Did Tennant land that role by goal-setting?  No, he became “absurdly single-minded” as he said in his own words about achieving that outcome he wanted, the outcome that he achieved.  And he OWNED his outcome.  The Dr. Who television series has  been on-going for over 26 years casting over a dozen people in the main role.  Tennant was by far the best Doctor.  People achieve things by occasionally focusing on them and working gradually towards them or being absurdly single-minded.  None of those achievement approaches involve goal-setting.
• Implies no plan.  This is related to programming.  If you want to achieve something, you’ll need a plan.  A procedure.  A sequence of steps, if-statements, and a sequence.  Goal-setting seems to make someone think they’re done when they decide on the outcome.  If you abandon goal-setting, you’ll put more time into devising the plan, sequence, intermediary progresses, and the programming to achieve an outcome.

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Analysis of Discarding and Keeping

1. Pain Potentially Consequential of Discarding Clutter
   1. Cost to Repurchase something I discard — Repurchasing something I discard rarely happens.  Additionally, the cost of storing and transporting something is probably equivalent the cost of repurchasing but discarding it doesn’t have any of the psychological baggage effects.  TRUE!
   2. Time to refind the item to repurchase if feel need it after discarding the item.  – This is probably equivalent to finding the item amongst heaps of clutter, but true some items cannot be found but some items that discard, you don’t want to ever find again!
   3. Fear of discarding something unpleasant will cause me to repeat that unpleasant experience.  — This is the “vacuum” idea that if I discard the flyers from Los Angeles rubbish apartments, or psychology meetings, or the like, I will then repeat those to “fill the void” of that negative space.  This idea is that if I keep the unpleasant reminder, it won’t happen again.  To some extent this may be true, but it would be very painful to keep and so many unpleasant reminders that you dont’ get away from the spaces that caused the unpleasantness and make pleasant memories.
   4. Erroneous thought that discarding something may discard a “part of me”.  – This is unlikely because I put so much scrutiny into discarding items and it is illogical because some random book doesn’t define my identity.  True!
2. Pain Consequential of Keeping Clutter
   1. Physically trapped — can’t move as easily
   2. COST — cost of storage of keeping clutter and the cost of moving vans or even cars of moving clutter is abominable and gross.
   3. Overwhelm — massive stress simply from keeping track of all the clutter and sorting it and storing it and transporting it! It’s a massive headache and overwhelming source of pain!
   4. Doubt Self — Yes, keeping so many clutter belongings does cause self-doubt because you start to become uncertain if those past bits of rubbish are “me”, when of course they are not. If I pick up a book that turns out to be absolute rubbish, I am not that book.
   5. Anxiety and stress of keeping all the stuff.
   6. My digital files go neglected — THIS IS THE BIGGEST Incentive for eliminating clutter.  I live in my computer.  I’ve written a ton and I study and take tons of notes and almost everything is digital for me. If I have a ton of material space clutter, my digital files naturally (because of their being a constant amount of time in the universe) go

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The whole “work hours” thing is a foreign concept to me. Maybe because I just don’t make a distinction between work and play, or (most likely) I just always work.  Sometimes I wake up and start work at 2am. Sometimes I just don’t ever go to sleep and take a nap in the middle of the day.

It’s easier for me, I realize, to just say my sleep patterns (the times where I’m not working) than the times I am working;  I sometimes sleep around the 12ish to 3ish zone. I like exercising at night (moonlight runs).

So it’s strange, I work about 80-90 times harder and am more demanding of myself than I would have been if I worked for an employer other than myself.  This increase in work motivation, results, and demands is probably inherent to any freelance work or “business owner” work.  That’s an interesting pattern and managing the work that you do as an entrepreneur is what we’re talking about today. You have to develop this weird relationship with yourself where you’re the administrator who decides what we need to do (as a business) and then you put on the “employer cap” and do the stuff that you decided to do while wearing the administrative hat. Finally, you clean it all up by wearing, possibly a “customer hat” and test-running for the purposes of debugging your business feature.  This works with websites, products, services, expansions of any kind.

Having access to multiple outcome frames from multiple hats (points of view and angles) is a must for any entrepreneur. How do you do this? How do you don and even design the array of chapeaus you have to wear to be a successful entrepreneur? (more…)

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