Even though society has evolved a lot, most of its institutions follow a culture that confines the freedom of self-expression. That is sad, because not being self-expressed means not being happy.
Image copyright James Yang
The rise of agriculture and industry, shaped work and education as contexts that required individuals to be punctual, follow directions and tolerate long hours of tedius work. Your own sense of progress, higher purpose and autonomy were concepts that didn’t resonate quite well with the thinking of the leaders of that time: “Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?” - Henry Ford. In many places around the world, educational and professional environments stil follow the same philosophy.
My belief is that self-expression is fundamentally connected to happiness. Unfortunately, even if the educational and professional environment allowed for more self-expression, it would still be challenging to trully be yourself. We live in a complex environment and there are many contexts that influence natural self-expression - most of the times in some of the most ugliest ways.
Discovery is an approach that fosters self-expression. Being in a discovery mindset allows you to expose yourself and the surrounding context to the light of awareness. Even though awareness is a huge shift that most of the time allows you to carefully craft a response rather than mindlessly react to a certain situation, it is not enough. Sometimes the response that you have to give requires courage, authenticity and integrity. Being a discoverer is about finding the path but also about walking the path.
You can quickly recognize people that express themselves naturally by simply asking “What do you do?”. They’ll answer your question enthusiastically, pasionately and authentically. They’ll tell you a story about their work or about their life and they’ll even share the lessons that they’ve learned along the way. They’re good “friends” with the status quo but they always take one step further, discovering, inventing - not for the purpose of fame and fortune but rather for offering better, more effective alternatives to what already is available. Healthy profits (or benefits - call them however you want) come along as a natural consequence of helping people to solve a problem more effectively.
I love these people. To me, their dynamism, their strong integrity and their authentic curiosity, is empowering and inspiring in the same time. They are people that are truly self-expressed.
“Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one”. - Einstein
Image Credits: Octav Druta
“I used to be on Facebok a lot, but found that it left me feeling bad about my life” - confessed a friend of Stan James. Spend time on Facebook “watching” the glamorous lives of your “not-so-close” Facebook friends. It will make you feel bad about your life.
Your “not-so-close” Facebook friends are the new TV Stars writes Stan James in a thought provoking post. These people “are almost universally beautiful, live in interesting places, do interesting work (if they work at all), are unfailingly witty, and never have to do any cleaning. They never even need to use the toilet.” […]
Stan is hinting at a succulent question: Why our lives seem not-so-amazing in comparison with the lives of our “not-so-close” Facebook friends or the lives of the TV stars? Part of the answer can be found within the question: it is because we’re making comparisons. The other part of the answer has to do with desire. Let’s take a look at why comparison and desire can lead to unhappiness.
“Things are not always what they seem”. The way we make comparisons is inherently flawed. Look at the image above. Which one of the two light blue circles is bigger? Most people answer that the left one. The truth is that both circles are equal in size but they occur to us as they had different sizes. The different contexts (i.e: the dark blue circles) around each of the circles distort the reality. This means that the way people occur to us can be highly distorted simply because we’re making our evaluations within the wrong context (i.e: we don’t know them and their lives enough to create the right context to make accurate evaluations)
This type of comparison triggers questions like “What do they have and I don’t?” And so, our mind leaves on a trip to discover our insufficiencies. We wish we had all those things that are missing. We start desiring, wanting things that should exist in our lives so that we can too, be in a state of happiness, similar to those no-so-close Facebook friends of ours.
The sad reality is that no matter how fast we would cover those insufficiencies, we would always return to the same state of “i’m not happy, there’s something missing”. James Hong who cofounded hotornot.com paints this “vicious circle” very well: “When you get a Boxter you wish you had a 911, and you know what people who have 911s wish they had? They wish they had a Ferrari.”
Even though I’m not a religious person, I know for sure why you shall not “desire your neighbor’s house nor field or male or female slave or donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor”: it’s useless.
Most of the time, what leads us to unhappiness has a lot to do with the way we evaluate the world. Survival across millions of years trained our brain to evaluate and decide quickly. Speedy evaluations are also efortless. That’s because they’re based on what our brain “already knows” so we don’t have to think to much.
Evaluating and deciding quickly may be useful when you’re about to be hit by a car but not when creating your relationship with the world. Shortcuts are not always useful. Allow yourself more time before making evaluations, get to know the nature of the context around you. It might be very useful.
“By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.” - Lao Tzu
Image credits: noimpactman
Imagine living unplugged from the electrical grid, producing no trash, travelling exclusively by foot or bike and buying nothing except food (all of it locally grown).
This would mean:
For one year, the author Colin Beavan together with his wife, their 2-year-old daughter and their dog attempted to live without making any net impact on the environment. And while at it, they’ve shot a documentary called “No Impact Man” to share their experience with the whole world. I watched and it’s at least thought-provoking.
What drew me in, was the nature of their experiment: their choice to let go of their current lifestyle and reconsider absolutely every consumption habbit they had.
You know, there are parts of our lives that we live like we had no other option. Think about the people that eat meat like meat was the only option to have a consistent meal or simply the people that are violent when they get angry, again, like there was no other option. Letting go creates the possibility to put into perspective the options that we have or simply to generate options that we never thought of. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? What’s the impact of doing this or that?
The act of letting go can be applied to any area of our lives: relationships, career, health, finances, family, character, emotions, daily habits, life purpose, spiritual, you name it. There are areas where the attachment towards certain habits is so powerful that we can’t even “see” what we do, why we do it and the associated impact in a clear way - which can lead to a mindless, dangerous, unfulfilling way of life.
Can you identify some areas of life where you or the people around you could benefit from having, generating or seeing more options?
We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for selfishness. When I say we, I’m talking about any kind of living organism. From an evolutionary standpoint, selfishness is fundamental for survival.
Image credits: Anonymous
So then, why is generosity the new selfishness? Or, why it isn’t but it should be? Explore the words of Stephen Hawking a bit: ”Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth, are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million.
Our only chance of long term survival, is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space. We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space.”
Moving into space shouldn’t be just a way to increase the probability that we are going to survive in case of a disaster provoked by man. After all, it’s not the selfishness of our genes that drives us to be destructive but the selfishness of our “selves”. That’s why it would probably be useful for us to look beyond the possibility to run from disasters. I am talking about working with our “selves” to transform selfishness into something better. Perhaps generosity? Starting now?
I’ve been thinking a lot about mountains and rivers. No, I’m not planning to go camping any soon, but it would still be a great idea. What I was really thinking about is the fundamental difference between two approaches to life.
Photo credits: Stuck In Customs
The first approach has to do with investing hard, constant, willful effort in order to succeed. Think about climbing a tall mountain. The trek is hard and not everyone can make it. Also, the mountain’s peak is quite narrow, which means that it can only hold only a few people at a time. You can recognize “climbers” when they say that “You can be anything you want to be, if you just try hard enough”.
The second approach has to do with flow. Michaly Csikszentmihalyi defines flow in a pretty formal way but I’d like to invite you think about flow as in “flowing in a river”. Flowing requires a lot of attention. The stream can be pretty fast and you need to pay attention to unexpected obstacles such as rocks and eddies. Rivers flow into oceans which are quite different than mountain peaks because they can hold a lot of people in the same time. You can recognize people that practice flow when they say that “You cannot be anything you want to be - but you can be a lot more of who you already are”.
But really, these are just two metaphors and there are no rules. Living our lives the way we want is a must . The point that I’m trying to make here has to do with leverage. Think of Archimedes words: “Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth”. Think of your “navigation” skills, your “climbing” skills, your ability to pay attention, your capability to make a lot of effort, etc. What’s the best trait that you can leverage on?
We are what we repeatedly do. You know what I mean, right? If you do, you also know that the “picture” below is not the full one. So, if you want to add something to it, please do it in the comments section.
What am I doing now? It’s a simple question. I ask it myself constantly. Even though the answer is valuable, I find the “asking” in itself to be even more valuable. It’s a way to be aware of what I do and how I feel about what I do.
I thought of creating a visual of my most frequent actions. Being able to “see them” allows me to have a better connection myself and the world around me. You can see the result blow.
You might also find the “asking” useful. Try asking yourself “What am I doing now?” for a month and write down the verbs related to the activity in which you’re currently involved. See which are the actions that are repeating and the ones in which you invest most of your time. How does the big picture of your activity look like? How do you feel about it? These are questions that you might want to ask at the end of this little experiment.
I have quite a few friends on Facebook: 690 to be more exact. I use Facebook since 2005 when I was in college so, I was really curious to “see” how my network developed since then.
What you see in the left side of the image above is a visual representation of my friends (points) and the connections (lines) between them.
The core of my network (the red, circle-like shape) is made up of people that I met while doing my university studies. Most of them know each other, that’s why the points are so tightly connected. At the outskirts of the network there are people that I met after graduation. Because I met them in many different contexts (while working, travelling, having fun, etc), these people are not as tightly connected as my college friends.
The shape of the network reminded me about solar flares (large explosions in the Sun’s atmosphere) so I decided to do a little collage to visualize the similarity.
Well, I love my Facebook friends! I say “Thank you!” to all of you for sharing informative, inspiring and sometimes funny posts.
I think it’s a very good question and I had the chance to debate it many times with my friends and family. Recently, Vladimir, a good friend of mine posted the following on his Facebook wall: “do you consider yourself a spiritual person? and if so … what do you think makes someone spiritual?”
Here’s a visual summary of the topics that people used to reply to his question. As you can see, the conversation is associated with topics such as “God, Bible, Believe”.
I decided to join the conversation and write my answer in the form of a blogpost.
Why associations are important
Associations are important because they can define a certain range of behaviors and results. Let me share an example. If you place a simple carton box near a beggar, people will put money in it. It won’t be a simple carton box, but a charity box. People will have a certain behavior towards the box because it has been associated with a beggar.
It’s the same with spirituality. Think: what kind of behaviors and results does the Spirituality-God association create? Are they useful for your inner peace? Are they not? You should know better and if you don’t, think again. The most important thing is to be happy with the kind of associations that you make.
My perspective on spirituality
For me, spirituality has to do with awareness, inner exploration and freedom. These associations allow me to cultivate my behavior, my feelings and my relationships in a way that I consider to be authentic rather than in alignment with an external point of reference.
External points of reference can sometimes be useful and sometimes not. To better paint this argument, I’ll share with you a story that I’ve heard recently:
The Golden Eagle, a story about instilled beliefs:
A man found an eagle’s egg and placed it under a brooding hen. The eaglet hatched with the chickens and grew to be like them. He clucked and cackled; scratched the earth for worms; flapped his wings and managed to fly a few feet in the air.
Years passed. One day, the eagle, now grown old, saw a magnificent bird above high in the sky. It glided in graceful majesty against the powerful wind, with scarcely a movement of its golden wings.
Spellbound, the eagle asked, “Who’s that?”
“Thai’s the king of the birds, the eagle,” said his neighbour. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to earth—we’re chickens.”
So the eagle lived and died a chicken for that’s what he thought he was.