I yam what I yam….
I’m in the wrong age group or I grew up in the wrong country to have seen much Popeye when I as growing up, but he’s a character who’s a part of the cultural landscape that most of us share.
The quote that sticks in my mind most from Popeye is “I yam what I yam!”, and that’s an excuse that many of us seem to use (albeit not in such a cliched manner).
“I yam what I yam!” is a declaration of unwillingness to change, a statement to the universe: “take me for who I am, and screw you, I’m not going to change”
“I yam what I yam” is, at best, a refusal to grow, to change, to better yourself. It’s a refusal to overcome your limitations, a declaration of your past stagnation and your intention to continue doing so.
At worst, it’s an excuse for continuing behaviour that you know is harmful or damaging to yourself or others. It’s the flip side of the battered wife who says “He just gets mad sometimes”. It’s the guy who keeps smoking (me, 3 months ago) because it’s part of his self image, part of who he is.
To my mind, there’s only one valid reason for refusing to change: You’re perfect.
I’m not perfect, so I seek change. Because I am not yet what (or who) I want to be.
CommentsWorking a day job without it eating your life.
This is not an excuse post.
One of my personal strong dislikes are bloggers who repeatedly post excuses about why they’re not posting.
So, I’m not going to do that.
My day job is currently taking up a lot of my normally free time - which isn’t a situation I’m overly happy with. So, here’s what I’m doing about it.
1. Put a limit on it. In my case, there’s some stuff going on that requires a large volume of my attention - on top of my regular duties. This is coming to an end soon (early next week, if all goes to plan), after which I plan to drop down to a more regular number of hours per day.
2. Take some leave. Next Monday is a public holiday here, and I’m taking the previous Friday off as well, giving myself a 4 day weekend. I may even take the Tuesday as well. I find that 4-5 days is enough to give me what feels like a real break from work - it also serves to remind people that I’m not the only person who’s capable of taking care of certain things. This also gives my team a bit more freedom to grow without me there, and I think this is when they have the chance to really shine, without me being there to back them up.
3. Rearrange your workload. I’m lucky in that I have a team to whom I can pass certain tasks. As I build up their abilities, I’ll be able to pass more to them. Some tasks I can put on the back burner, and not deal with until I have time and mental space to deal with them appropriately - often, I’d rather do this than give a task less attention than it requires to be done correctly. Of course, time-critical tasks often force time frames onto things, and on these items, well, you just have to compromise your standards a bit. Sometimes it’s a simple mater of communication and prioritisation between myself, and the relevant stakeholders.
4. Arrange additional resources. There’s an ongoing conversation between myself and my manager about additional resources in my team. It’s a bit of an uphill struggle to get it into the budget, but it’s either that, or we’re going to find that some vital tasks aren’t getting completed. I’m approaching this as an opportunity cost situation:”Well Boss, if we increase the resilience of the core servers by adding hot failover boxes, then we won’t have the resource to implement the intranet Wikis or combine the two wireless networks to increase and standardise our coverage.”
5. Acknowledge that work is a part of life. I’ll often answer work related email of an evening, or on a weekend. If something comes to mind when I’m at home, and it’s work related, I’ll take the time to note it down, or deal with it then. By the same token, I’ll also do some things during work hours that are truly personal in nature - booking concert tickets, chatting with friends online. Not an excessive amount, of course, but some. My job doesn’t define me, but it does make up part of the definition - and I need to acknowledge that.
6. Set some time for yourself as part of the “Hard landscape”. The Hard Landscape is stuff you can’t change, and won’t even try. I don’t often set things in stone, especially personal blocks of time, so when I do, I mean it 100%. Thursday is my beloved’s birthday, and we have plans for that evening. There is no way I’m letting anything work related impact on that. For you, the same may apply to your Wednesday evening camera club outing, or your Sunday golf game.
I’m lucky that I’m in a position to be able to do most of these things (albeit with different amounts of success for each), and that I’m based in a country that has fairly strong employee protection. Depending on your job (or your boss), you may have to push back a little more firmly, start working only the hours you’re contractually obliged to. Myself, I’m a long way from that (and I’m angling for a promotion), so that’s not the way I’m playing things. But even with that in mind, I’m going to start pushing back a little more firmly, letting some of the less critical tasks slide.
So, that’s how my week’s been… how about yours?
CommentsLife like a great piece of art.
“I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.”
~ Auguste Rodin (1840 - 1917) French sculptor, when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues
My favourite piece of sculpture from my favourite sculptor, and a great quote to go with it. (Although, to be honest, I’d have difficulty naming more than another one or two well known sculptors without the help of Google).
Sculpture isn’t my art - photography is. Fortunately, it’s very similar, in that a good photo is more often about what you leave out than what you get into the frame. Some of my favourite photos are the simplest ones I’ve taken.
There’s no reason your life can’t be the same. If you remove everything that isn’t part of your life as you want it to be, then you’ll be left with a life worth remembering.
Now, the great thing is that, unlike sculptors, we can probably put things back into our lives if we decide that removing them wasn’t the best move (sculptors probably could too, but I’m given to understand that the user of superglue is somewhat frowned upon).
Like great art, this takes time. You remove something, you take a long hard look at what you’ve done. You remove something else. Repeat, repeat, repeat, hopefully removing smaller pieces each time. Sometimes you just have to stop making changes, and let the current reality settle, then you can come back to it; You can’t rush art.
You can’t rush life either, but you can change it from something that happens to you, into something that is becoming what you want it to be.
CommentsStep outside your comfort zone, and into a whole new you.
We tend to do the same things, hang out with the same sort of people, read in the same genres, watch the same old TV shows, listen to the same music. Change is something that happens to us, not something we actively seek out and cause. It’s the easy way to live, it’s comfortable.
Change is dangerous, if you step outside your routine, outside your comfortable little niche, something could go wrong, you might regret making the change.
Not changing is boring, and it’s taking you nowhere.
So, let’s look at changing that.
Change is what makes life interesting. Inflicting change on yourself causes you to grow as a person. Life shouldn’t be something you just aim to get through, it’s something you should leap on, embrace, experiment with.
Change doesn’t have to be extreme to have benefits. Start with something small, something that really doesn’t matter that much.
Perhaps, if (like me) you’re a regular library goer, give up your usual genres, and get someone else to pick your next batch of books. Eat a type of food you’ve never sampled before. If you normally drink a latte, get an espresso instead (or even better, an herbal tea). Walk home the long way, or just go see what’s down that side street you always pass by. Wear a colour you’ve never worn before. Dress up for work more than usual (I love this, it makes my workmates wonder what I’m up to). Watch a documentary on TV or just turn your TV off for a week, and read instead. Smile when you don’t feel like it. Talk to a busker (between sets). Change your hairstyle, or hair colour. Get a massage. Have an entirely raw meal.
Nothing is permanent there, the opportunity cost is low. If you don;’t like it, don’t do it again. But be careful, you just grew. You just learned something about yourself.
You also started to teach yourself that change doesn’t hurt, so maybe you can move up a notch, do something larger.
OK, where’s the return on this? Why would you put yourself through even the smallest changes?
I don’t know about you, but pretty much everyone I admire has put themselves through a huge number of changes. Deliberately, in many cases, changing not only what, but almost who they are. People I read about, or people who have documentaries made after them - it’s all because they’ve lived interesting lives.
Watching paint dry is referred to as a benchmark of boringness because nothing appears to change. We talk (sometimes, mockingly, I’ll admit) about “the ever-rich tapestry of life” - it’s rich because of the variety, because of the different colours coming together to make a whole.
In many years time, when I look back at my life, I want to smile at the depth and variety of it. I want to see a tapestry in my mind, not a smoothly painted, even wall.
“May you live in interesting times” is oft referred to as a chinese curse, and I’m sure we can see why. I propose a variant, a blessing, perhaps a toast: “May you have cause to celebrate an interesting life”.
CommentsA 3 bedroom home - for 2 people?
My wife and I changed country recently. Before shifting, the two of us were fairly cramped in a 3 bedroom + garage home.
I’ll say that again. Two people. No kids (unless you count the three cats). 3 bedrooms.
Now, admittedly we both worked from home, so we could justify using a bit of extra space, but still - 3 bedrooms for 2 people is rather excessive.
Did I mention we had a garage, with no car in it?
Now, we’re in a 1 bedroom + study apartment. Neither of us work from home, but the way our new place is laid out, we could do so quite comfortably.
For me, the biggest thing I didn’t bring over was my library. 20+ years of CDs, DVDs, records books and comics. I’m not quite ready to part with them yet, so they’re in storage. Similarly, some of our larger items of furniture are in storage.
We also threw out a lot of stuff, although arguably, not enough - we still have things that are surplus to requirements.
Mostly, we decided we could live without these things to save money - international shipping ain’t cheap, and our budget to shift over here was fairly light.
What we’ve come to realise, however, is that we felt weighed down by our ‘wealth’ of possessions. Having a large house full of Stuff and Things felt like an anchor, it was psychic clutter.
Now, we live in a 1 bedroom apartment. Now, admittedly, there’s a semi-separate study area which also functions our main living space, but there’s also a dining area, and a living-room area, as well as the obligatory bedroom and bathroom and kitchen and the like.
How did we do it?
I’ll admit that I cheated. I did it the easy way. I left the country (to find a new place to live, and a job) while my beloved other half did the hard work, selling off and storing the ‘wealth’ we’d accumulated, and shipping over those things we wanted to bring with us.
Once we got over here, we had to wait a month or so before those possessions we decided to bring over arrived. During that time, we bought some of the basics - a bed, a desk, some chairs, a couch. This was an educational time for us - apart from a mild lack of variety in clothes, here was really nothing we went without. Since everything else arrived, we’ve added a dining table, and a couple of bookshelves, and arranged what came over to make the most of our small space, and we’re still feeling pretty much uncluttered.
How do we avoid the clutter?
Firstly, we put some rules in place. We have 2 bookshelves, no more. One of those is dedicated to my books, the other to sundry paperwork, cookbooks, that sort of thing. If we run out of space for books, some of them have to go into storage. We have limited space in the bedroom, if we use all of that, we have to find some things to remove. The same applies in the kitchen, in the living room, in the bathroom. We can’t add more without finding space for it.
We both have a certain tendency towards hoarding, by putting some rules in place, we hope to avoid that.
One of my mother’s mantras used to be “A place for everything, and everything in its place”. That’s our aim, and we’re getting pretty close to it.
What we have learned, is that we didn’t need everything we had. The wealth that we built around our lives didn’t hold the value we thought it did.
Now, we’re actively avoiding adding to what we own. What I’m finding most interesting, is that this is helping me curb my spending. I don’t buy that book, that DVD or that CD that catches my eye, because I know if I do, I’ll have to find somewhere to put it.
Now, I’m almost to the point of slightly regretting what I have bought. There are a few impulse buys (Damn You Borders!) that I could live without having to store. I’m looking forward to being able to conveniently buy books in an electronic format (if I was in the US, I’d SO have a kindle right now)
CommentsPut a limit on it - avoiding “Forever”.
Some things are just too hard. You contemplate them, and something deep inside you rebels.
Me, I had this for years with smoking. On top of the physical addiction, there was a pile of self image and emotional content attached to smoking, and this was something that I clung to, for reasons I didn’t fully understand. I still don’t, to be honest - I’m still feeling around the edges of them, and it will take me some time to get to the centre
Suffice it to say that removing smoking from my life was one of the harder things I’ve done. One of the things that made it so hard was the concept of forever… the idea of never smoking again.
So, I got rid of that idea. I didn’t quit smoking forever, I quit for a month. I gave myself an escape clause - if I still really wanted to be smoking after a month, I could start again. This was just a deal with myself, I didn’t announce it to anyone, but it’s what I kept in mind - for the first couple of weeks.
After the first couple of weeks, the whole thing became easier. I’d broken the back of the habit, I was feeling some of the (obvious) health benefits
The same applies with any change you want to make - put a limit around it. For most things I think a month is about right. Forever is just too much to face, too much of a barrier for you to see yourself being able to get over.
If you’re trying to get fitter, and you’ve decided you need to hit the gym four times a week - go 4 times a week for a month. That’s long enough to see the results you’re trying to see, long enough to get into some good habits, into a good routine, but short enough that the end is in sight.
Getting started (see previous post) is one thing, and probably the most important thing. But for lasting change, you need to reset your attitudes. I find a month is long enough for the major reset - enough to get you out of the rut you were in, and to have started building a new rut.
CommentsStarting - Productivity advice.
Most people are full of potentially great ideas, things they want to do with their lives. It’s all too easy for some things to fall into “some day”, and never get done.
The following is a piece I wrote a year or so ago, on an earlier weblog. I still think of this piece from time to time, to motivate myself to get something started.
Start.
That’s it. One word.
If you don’t start, you’ll never finish. You’ll miss every shot you never take. Just Do It (you know, like Nike). The journey of a thousand smiles starts with a single step. etc., ad nausem.
Start.
I don’t care if you don’t know where to start - pick somewhere, and start there. Even if it’s wrong, you’ve made progress, you’ve learned something, you know where not to start next time.
Start.
If it’s too big, then break your project down into smaller pieces that you can understand.
There. You just made a start, and now you’ve got a pile of little projects to do.
Start on one.
Finish it, or get stuck on a bit, I don’t care which.
Start on the next one.
Repeat.
If you get suck somewhere, there’s a future starting point for you. You’ll probably find that when you come back to it you’ll have another approach, you’ll have solved it.
Start by selecting the music to listen to while you work. Once you’ve done that, move on.
Start by clearing your desk of distractions.
Start by clearing your mind of distractions.
Clear the way for starting well by finishing well. Make tomorrow an easy start by leaving something easy to get started on, an easy win to kick off the day. You just helped yourself start again.
I stand by this - it’s working for me, I’m trending in the right direction. I start, every day. Every day, I get closer to where I’m heading.
One day, I might even figure out where that is, but for now, I’m just enjoying the journey, it feels like the right direction.
Comments“But I don’t have time to…” = Worst. Excuse. Ever.
“I don’t have time” has to be one of the most common excuses ever.
You know, it’s just not true.
If you don’t have time, you just don’t want it badly enough. If it really matters to you, you’ll find time somewhere in your schedule, you’ll trim something else out, something less important.
When you say “I don’ have time”, acknowledge, if only to yourself, that what you really mean is “Other things are more important to me than this is”.
There’s nothing wrong with that.
One of the concepts that really stuck with me from studying economics was the idea of ‘opportunity cost’. The cost of doing one thing is not doing something else. The cost of spending $20 on a DVD is not spending that same $20 on going to see a movie. The cost of spending the day surfing is that you’re not spending the day rock climbing.
“I didn’t have time” is an excuse I’m trying to eliminate from my life. “I was doing [other task] instead” is far more honest and accurate. Even better, it’s not an excuse. When dealing with my boss, it gives him a chance to adjust my priorities to match his own (something he’s not always the best at communicating).
Now, I would write another post, but it’s time for my regularly scheduled Warcraft session… and frankly, I choose to do that instead. See? It’s easy!
CommentsSans-stress
Stress: difficulty that causes worry or emotional tension; “she endured the stresses and strains of life”; “he presided over the economy during the period of the greatest stress and danger”
Stress is something I used to struggle with.
I’d get wound up about things going on in my life, and take it out on people around me (or myself), I’d drink and smoke too much (attempting to relieve the tension), I’d be short on sleep, eat all the wrong foods, and generally make things worse for myself.
Eventually, I figured out some simple facts about stress - and these helped me let go, and generally live a happier, and comparatively stress free life.
Firstly, there are two sorts things that cause stress. There are things you can do something about, and things that are outside of your control.
Let’s deal with the second sort first, because that’s the easiest by far: If I can’t do anything about it, if it’s outside my control, why should I stress about it? It’d be like stressing about being hit by a meteorite, or about not winning the lottery.
If I can do something about them, then I do it, and the stress goes away. I find that even if I can’t finish whatever it is straight away, even if it’s going to take some time to get dealt with, the very fact that I’m making movements towards solving whatever it is mean the stress recedes to the point of not being a factor in my life.
Do I completely avoid all stress this way? Not at all.
Some stress is useful - perhaps even necessary, but only if you act on it in order to make the stress go way. What I can do, using this method, is minimise the length of time I feel stress, and compartmentalise things a bit better. If there are stressful goings on at work, and I’ve acted on them as much as I can, I can go home at the end of the day with a clear conscience, and not be stressed at home.
Stress builds on itself, it mounds up, and you can build the proverbial mountain of it from a small collection of molehills if you’re not careful.
Learning to live without constant stress has to be one of the best moves I’ve made in my entire life.
CommentsLife without negatives
OK, let’s be honest, that’s never really going to happen. Something will go wrong once in a while, there’s nothing you can do about it.
What you can do, however, is control your reaction to whatever it is.
If you dwell on the negative, it increases in size, it takes priority in your day. It takes up mental energy that you can better use for something worthwhile.
One trick is to look for the silver lining in the dark cloud.
Example: Last night, I went to bed about the usual time… but then the alarm on my phone went off just before midnight (stupid setting on my part). Then I woke up again just after midnight from some kind of bizarre dream about samurai style sword fighting. My old method would have been to lie in bed, perhaps doze a little, then get up when my alarm goes of and be tired all day. Worse than being tired, I’d probably dose up on caffeine as well, which makes me feel alert for a while, but also slightly queasy(when consumed in large quantities), and be complaining about how tired I am all day (mostly not verbalising it, I’m not that bad… but the voices inside my head, they complain a lot), and end up feeling more tired, getting less done, and feeling justified in basically being useless all day.
Today, I got up (not straight away, but still, sooner than I would have), and instead of dwelling on how tired I felt,started my morning meditation a bit earlier, did some reading, a little bit of writing (this, in fact), and generally got my day off to an earlier start than usual. After I finish this, my usual day will start, and I’ll be humming along like normal.
Some negatives don’t have a silver lining - there’s not a lot you can do about that. What you can do, however is simply move past the event. Deal with the consequences, and put it aside. Beating yourself up over it, or revisiting it in your mind only helps keep you in a negative ‘flow’, and if you’re anything like me, those can go on for a couple of days.
Today, I’ve got a new little voice in my head. It’s the one that shouts “get over it!” at the other ones when they start complaining about feeling a little tired. I’ll see how that works out for me.
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