Generalising can be too easy. Being too general can make communication challenging. Be specific – it will change your life for the better.
If you have ever had someone give you directions, this idea will make more sense. Some people are fairly vague and general in delivering commentary on how to get somewhere.
This is in contrast to someone who is clear about where they are sending you. It’s great to get good, clear, specific direction or instructions. It makes life so much easier with less anxiety or stress.
Another good example area is the realm of gifts. Someone might say they would like a book about baseball for their birthday. Great! You think that this will be easy. And it could be.
Go to the shop or browse online for a baseball book. But it would be even better if they had narrowed down what specific type of baseball book.
Baseball books could be about being an owner, manager, coach, player of a specific position, groundsman, talent scout, admin, other office support worker, agent, hot dog vendor or souvenir shop staff, to name a few. In addition, it could be a work of fiction, an autobiography, biography, or historical analysis, etc.
When confirming the request, ask them to be specific – it will change your life for the better.
Remember to do this with your goals. Make them very specific. It might feel a bit weird at first but it’s an important skill to develop. If you don’t, the universe will find it hard to deliver on your request.
Rather than getting a baseball biography about Babe Ruth, you could end up with an autobiography written by a disenchanted hot dog vender.
This moment in time will never happen again. This is your one and only chance. Take advantage of your once in a lifetime opportunity in this unique window in time, many might say.
For some things, this will be true. For most things, however, your once in a lifetime moment happens every second, minute or hour. This is not the only time to invest in stocks, stop smoking, lose weight, clean out the garage, take a course or call that special someone in your life.
To paraphrase my friend Paul, the deal of a lifetime comes along every minute. Your opportunity to start, or move forward on something, is there at every blink of an eye. Just decide you will and start building some commitment and structure around it.
Last year I decided to get my rugby referee qualification so I could referee matches for my son’s team. In addition, the training would improve my technical understanding and skills which would be beneficial as a coach of the team.
It would be a commitment of time and money, which I decided was worthwhile. I then had to ask the club how I would go about this. They pointed me to the list of courses I could take. I assessed the options and signed up. Then I followed through.
Discover your interest, decide what you want to do, ask some questions, do some research, commit and follow through to completion and success.
You can take advantage of your once in a lifetime opportunity at any time.
So take any anxious thoughts you may have, turn them into excitement and commit! Remind yourself that it will be exhilarating and fun. Go get ‘em!
One third of the year has come and gone. If you’re like me, lots has happened and lots hasn’t. I have to focus for the next 4 months to catch up on a few things. Amazingly, four months have already zoomed past and it hardly feels like the year really got started.
We’ve had a bit of an interruption on our little planet, of course.
Now that things are settling down a little though, don’t let that interruption be your reason for not achieving your goals. You must take stock of the last four months. Celebrate your successes! Similarly, consider those items not completed.
Assess these incomplete goals and decide if you took on too much, they weren’t realistic or they’re not that important to you. Redouble you’re efforts and focus for the next 4 months, if those goals are still relevant. Be brutal and dismiss them if they are not. They must be a “Heck yes!” or a firm “No”.
I have a lot of interests. Of course, this can make it difficult to say no to various things. However, I must do it. I try to think ahead and consider whether the ‘distraction goals’ will be worth remembering in six or 12 months. Look back on your life and you’ll recognise what important goals look like.
Now is the time to focus for the next 4 months. Pounce on those goals!
From the time you are born until the time you pass, you are training your mind and body. For this reason, be mindful, because how you train, you remain.
There is a very good reason your parents remind you to shut off the light when leaving a room, use good manners and sit up straight. Additionally, there is a reasonable correlation, if only in my mind, that developing good study habits will aid in your future success.
Your mind is like ‘the cloud’ in that you can store incredible amounts of data in it. Above all, it records everything that you see, hear, smell, taste, feel and sense. Similarly, your body has ‘muscle memory’ and it remembers everything it has done, seen be done or the mind has visualised for it.
Therefore, it is so important that you train your mind and body in the most efficient and empowering ways possible. Set yourself up for success. Train your mind and body for success and life will continue to get easier. Develop good, strong and supporting mental and physical habits to help you through the tougher moments in life. Focus on positive words, people and events.
Ensure that your self talk is positive and empowering. Remember to use good posture as it signals to your brain how you are feeling. Just sitting up staight and in a strong position can highly influence how you feel. Force yourself to smile and and your brain will relax. Try both of these now.
My favourite trick to shift my mood from dull, flat or negative is to wriggle my nose like a bunny. It moves my face, and I think it’s a bit silly, so within about two seconds I can transform my mood.
Remember, you are continually shifting closer to positive or negative, the light or dark, good or bad, so be mindful of what you are thinking and doing. Even when you don’t think you are in training, you are.
Stuffocation, minimalism, the KonMari Method. It’s all there to get you to Declutter: Get it out!
Education phase:
Quite a few years ago, I found myself quite deeply involved in a decluttering phase. I was reading books, watching videos, and listening to podcasts. My days were focused on practicing the techniques and getting rid of things that I was inadvertently collecting.
I noticed that the minimalists had the right idea as far as bringing stuff into the house was concerned. The best thing to do was not to bring new things into your home. The only exception was when you knew exactly where you were going to put them.
Changing Habits:
Well, my newspaper and magazine habit had been thinning out for years before this anyway. However, now I would gather even fewer of them in a month. I also committed to throwing them in the recycle bin before I entered the house. By doing so they couldn’t lurk on a table or other surface for weeks.
If I did not throw it away on my way in, I would give myself three days to read or recycle it. If it wasn’t important enough now to squeeze it into my day, when will I ever make the time. The merely interesting must be binned quickly. The compelling will have time allocated.
Sort for Joy:
The ‘Declutter: Get it out!’ types also had a key message. Bit by bit, get rid of it. Sort out a drawer to get some momentum. Then maybe a cupboard.
As Marie Kondo would suggest, the item must bring you joy if you are going to keep it. I was a little sceptical of the term at first, but now I use it all of the time to weed things out at home and also at the point of consumption. Does it bring me joy.
Tips toward success:
Anyone who has ever been on a diet will recognise this truism: It is easier to keep it out than get rid of it later. So if you are going to put significant effort into decluttering (or weight loss), focus on being a disciplined minimalist when it comes to consumption.
One of the best tips came from the minimalists. Take a picture of the thing and then give it away. For most things, the picture will be enough to bring back the memory of the item, event or time.
Now may be a great time to declutter and give your space a little Spring clean. You’ll feel amazing clearing out a drawer, cupboard or whole room! The whole process can be quite liberating. Good luck with it!
(fyi, if you found the Coronavirus Exit Strategy post compelling, you may find its follow up article worth reading. It considers the next 2-3 years living like this, under lockdown, and some alternatives. Find it here.)
Coronavirus Exit Strategy: Use empty hotels to develop Herd Immunity
Stopping this market meltdown, and the fast growing financial and social challenges, requires two things:
1. Making livelihoods our absolute focus (while still saving lives impacted by Coronavirus and managing hospital beds) and
2. Providing a clearly defined end date to this situation. This can be done by immediately starting to develop herd immunity by creating a Government Organised Voluntary Infection (GOVI) programme, for healthy people, in all the UK’s empty hotels
The Problem:
The market, and people generally, require certainty so they can move forward confidently. Currently there is no certainty when considering the end to this pandemic*. Hoping for a viable vaccine provides no certainty. It is like hoping to win the lottery: It’s worth trying, but don’t count on it as your only strategy.
The Solution:
We need a clear, time-bound exit strategy that can show progress is happening and has a clearly defined end date. A GOVI programme would do both.
GOVI explained:
While people are self-isolating in this Suppression Phase, we can roll out a government organised voluntary infection (GOVI) programme at designated hotels (all UK hotels). The GOVI programme would be similar to the idea of chicken pox parties, where healthy children would get together with an infected child and get infected to be done with it. If 50%-80% of the healthy 6-60 population are going to get the Coronavirus at some time anyway, with mostly mild symptoms, why not get it over with?
For WWII, people volunteered to fight in the war effort knowing that there was a significant risk of death or serious injury. These recruits were checked for being in good health (i.e. no underlying conditions) and then sent off to battle the enemy. With more than 700,000 (mostly empty) hotel rooms in the UK alone, the government could pay hotels to host people who are 20-50 years old, and with no underlying conditions, who volunteer to contract the virus under supervision. They would get checked out by a GP, and if ok, they would go to a government designated hotel where they would contract the virus and stay in the hotel for 7-10 days, until ‘immune’. The volunteers are then checked/tested by a doctor before leaving the hotel to confirm their immunity. Once immune, the volunteer gets a document and badge noting that they can re-enter society.
The government would need to authorise and organise this phase to maintain a controlled spread of the virus. They would need to set out the plan of action, acknowledge the challenges and risks involved and call out for suitable volunteers.
GOVI benefits :
In theory we could have c.700,000 very low risk people gaining immunity every 10 days. Over the next 12 weeks (84 days), we could have roughly 5 million people gaining immunity. This could be happening while the 70+ group and the Underlying Condition (UC) group are protected through self-isolation. Additionally, we could continue to have strong social distancing/lockdown policies in place (Suppression Phase), continue testing and encourage scientists to search for and progress a possible vaccine: all concurrently.
It’s more Churchill D-Day then Chamberlain “Peace for our time”. Let’s take the battle to the enemy rather than try to avoid the inevitable. Advance on the enemy rather than simply shield the citizens from harm.
A war time army of volunteers is required and I believe many would be willing to do this. Since there seems to be an overwhelmingly high recovery rate for healthy people aged 18-50 (99.7%), let’s get it and get on with it.
The ever-growing Immune Army can then help high risk people, relieve care workers, support hospital workers and others, or just get back to work. Ever more volunteers will spend a week in the designated hotels until huge swathes of the population are immune.
Within one year, about half of the young and healthy population (25 million people) in the UK will be immune, without having overrun the NHS. In 2 years, most under 70’s and those without known underlying conditions would have immunity (c.55 million). After communicating this plan, normalcy will start to return in weeks to months, demand will return, markets will stop the slide and maybe reverse, and the world can start to mend.
Summary:
Without creating certainty with a credible exit strategy, the markets will continue in meltdown, workers will be laid off, industries will collapse, and the government will have to finance the entire economy, possibly for years. Adding a GOVI programme in parallel to the other strategies/phases being employed, could greatly improve our chances of saving the most lives, from all causes. In addition, the GOVI programme will also put a floor in the economy with a certain and time-bound exit strategy, which will stop the markets sliding. Finally, this additional strategy could save billions of people from suffering through the severe, drawn out, Depression era future that the trends seem to indicate we are heading for.
Link to Mervyn King on CNBC, on Monday, referring to no viable exit strategy, from minute 8:45 to 9:20 (so 35 seconds long).
* Link to Mervyn King on CNBC, on Monday, referring to no viable exit strategy, from minute 8:45 to 9:20 (so 35 seconds long).
FIND MORE DETAIL:
I have added several follow up thoughts for you on my blog website page called Coronavirus Exit Strategy: GOVI. Points covered consider the next 2-3 years and our options. I’ve also added some sources and supporting detail,
For some, this is a great time to take stock and think through what they truly want to do in this life. For others, it may have become so crazy busy that they don’t have a moment to pause and think about anything other than the next government announcement and its implications.
Without all the usual kids activities and appointments to arrange and get to, some people may have a few extra minutes (hours) in their day. Or maybe you no longer need to “get ready and commute”, so you may have a little more time now.
For those of you with a little extra time, this is a great opportunity to consider what kind of life you want to look back on when you are 85 years old. What do you want to remember when you are going through your photo albums or chatting to friends or younger relatives. Life flies by quickly, so don’t delay.
Block out an hour in your calendar on a day this week. Be specific with exactly what hour and day it is. It is an appointment with yourself. Then, when that time comes, do nothing else other than reflect and write out a list of things you would love to do, be or have in your life, between now and 85 (125 if you’re already well up there).
Just write all the things that come to mind. Ideally you will do an electronic list which you can save and sort out later on. But it could also be written on a sheet of paper or in a journal. You can always take a photo of it and file it on a device for easy finding later on.
The list does not have to be realistic, believable, conventional, exciting or anything really. What it should be though is a specific list of things on your mind and in your imagination. It could be things like: Spending two weeks on a golden sand beach in the Caribbean, helping your grandson learn French, walking on Mars, writing a funny novel, buying some art from a local artist, becoming a pilot, writing a letter to a loved one, collecting rare stamps or watching The Bucket List (enjoyable movie to get your thoughts flowing – good for most kids too).
This list-writing can be a challenge. Some find this exercise easy and some difficult. Either way, I suggest you do it. Now is a good time. It will give you a focus on things you are looking forward to, once we get life back to something approaching normal. It also helps you clarify what is important. Have fun with it.
Do we allow up to 264 million people to die worldwide while trying to maintain livelihoods globally or do we attempt to save those people, while corporate, government and personal finances, and therefore all livelihoods, are shredded beyond recognition?
Save lives or save livelihoods? That is the big picture, tough decision that Governments, and their citizens, need to consider, and fairly quickly.
I outlined some of the key considerations in my post the other day which you can access by clicking here.
Most people will have an automatic gut reaction to what is the ‘right’ answer. Try putting that reaction on pause, gather some info, and really think through the next year of unintended consequences. Think like a President or Prime Minister who has to consider millions of others in all their different circumstances.
Building a discipline can be a wonderful feeling. That daily routine of getting up early for some quiet time before the day gets going. Or maybe you go for a run, like I do. Some people head to the gym.
There are other healthy and beneficial disciplines too, such as standing up straight, having good posture, drinking 8 glasses of water every day, eating appropriately, getting 7-8 hours of good sleep at night, reading something positive, having positive thoughts and self-talk, and journaling. ?✍️??♀️?♂️
There are even disciplines we completely take for granted such as breathing. Thankfully our body takes care of this one.
Having some positive disciplines, like those listed above, can keep you mentally and physically strong and healthy. These disciplines all take a little effort and they can be harder for some people. But you always have a choice of which pain you are willing to endure. Short term pain for long term gain? Or vice versa? You can push back on the discipline, and think you have cheated the system, for a little while. But the harmony in the universe will snap back into place at some point.
”We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.”
Jim Rohn
Without some good disciplines things can go in the wrong direction. We can see this with our physique and hear our minds’ challenges through the words we speak. This is when regret creeps in. It takes some time before we notice the changes, but by then, less helpful habits have joined us and impact our every day. We start to regret those little indiscretions, those one off moments where we let our discipline lapse. ?????
The good news is you can turn this around! You just need to apply your disciplines again – little and often – until you are back on track and seeing and hearing that better version of you again.
Take a few minutes today and commit to one of the actions above and do it every day this week. Next week try adding a second one. Continue with both disciplines for a couple of weeks before trying to add in the third and forth ones. Good luck! ?
I was watching a Diddy and Dalio chat on YouTube this morning, while doing some exercise, and I was interested to hear that they both have this philosophy – that there is always a way. It’s always nice to hear other people say things you believe, whether they are famous or not.
This point of view reminded me of a quote that is on a plaque I bought when I was about 16. I had it on the wall in my bathroom at my Mom’s house back then, and it is still there today. The quote is, “The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.”
There is always a way to get closer to your goals. Start with getting better informed. This can begin with a Google search, a magazine, a book, YouTube or a conversation. Then use that information to grow a little more and gather more wisdom and connections in your space. When a door shuts, look for an open window. Keep pushing forward on your quest.
I’ve used this philosophy to go from growing up on a dairy farm in rural Ontario, Canada, to having lived and worked on four continents before I was 30. Twice I have taken time out, for a year or more, to travel and explore the world: Once while at university and again in my mid-30’s.
Start living with this philosophy when you are young. Know that there will be speed bumps but always continue on towards your goal. If you are reading this, and you are not as young as you once were, even more reason to focus and go after your big goal with concentrated action and determination.
Try this today on one or two things that you feel is very important to you. Find a way to move it forward, even with just a phone call. Sometimes you’ll be amazed at how a little effort can get the universe on your side. And that is sure to get you smiling. ?
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