Be Yourself

Early this morning I sat in bed with my laptop. I  was frustrated by the sentences emerging from my brain, so I stopped writing and looked out the window. Bit of grey and black covered the sky as it was about to rain.

Bozley, our crazy(mostly lazy) dog, was laying on the bed. He looked up at me a little perplexed and tilted his head. He could tell I was annoyed with something. I was over-thinking as usual. I needed to take a few steps back and understand what my 1,300+ readers want from me- be yourself.

Be yourself. It’s a powerful reminder and it’s not easy to do in writing or in life. The key is practice.

As you go about your daily routine, think about what makes you unique. Are you putting on masks or being the real you?

Best,

Chris

Present

“Add drops and then it will be a sea!”

This is a beautiful translation. Simply stated doing small things in life do add up to something important for the future. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I do know a great deal about Trial and Error. I have failed numerous times, but in all honesty, I don’t remember the majority of them. What I can share with you is some simple ideas on being a better person now! Below are a few examples:

Never settle with ideas, with knowledge, with your accomplishments. Every day, every moment, is a fresh start. Keep the rebel in your heart alive until the day you die.

People need you. Help them.

There are so many people in this world who need help. Whatever you end up doing in your life, remember them. Remember those people at every corner, every crossroads, and every intersection. Let them guide you. You won’t be here for much longer and they are the ones who need the most help, so do what you can to help them. Remember that what you take goes with you when you’re gone, but what you give is forever.

Always remember, you did not get where you are today without dreams and the people who believed in you.

Best,

Chris

High Expectations

At 5 am I was lying in bed, awake, thinking. Actually, thinking is too generous a word for what I was doing. I was perseverating.

I was about to buy a new laptop, and I couldn’t decide on which model. I tried to visualize the laptop and I weighed the options, hoping one would rise as the right choice.

I’d already gone online numerous times to look at the laptop, even interrupting important work to do so, and I’d gone back to the Apple store twice. I’d asked countless people which Macbook they thought I should get, pulling out my iPhone to show them the options.

I’m embarrassed about this. I’m supposed to be efficient and productive. I’m supposed to be confident. But there I was, wasting time, asking other people to help me choose my Laptop for me. This is not who I want to be.

But, clearly, it is who I am. Much as I’d like to deny it, I am often indecisive and insecure.

That’s hard for me to admit, so I tried to avoid facing it.

I blamed others: Maybe it was my parent’s fault — they made so many decisions for me that I never learned to have confidence in my own choices. Or maybe it was the bike company’s fault for offering so many colors — there’s compelling research proving that the more alternatives we have, the harder it is to choose.

I minimized my struggle: I make lots of important decisions, so who cares if I can’t make the insignificant ones?

And I tried to follow a process: First eliminate the obvious no’s, then if it’s still unclear, they all must be fine and I’ll just choose any one of the remaining colors.

None of this worked. A week later, I had still not decided.

Then, something hit me: My expectations of everyone, including myself, are counter-productively high.

High expectations can have a positive effect; people need a high bar to stretch towards. But I think many of us take it too far. We slip so easily into criticisms of ourselves and those around us — family, friends, coworkers, public figures — that we no longer expect people to be human beings. And when we shame ourselves and others for failing, we make things worse. We contribute to pain while nurturing impotence.

When we face weakness — ours or someone else’s — it doesn’t help to blame someone or something, pretend it’s not important, or simply decide to change. And it’s not sufficient to identify a three-step process to fix the problem. So what does help?

Here’s the best I’ve come up with: compassion.

As far as I can tell, for advice to be useful at all, it needs to be preceded by compassion. As the saying goes: Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. That certainly includes me. And, I’m betting, you. Being compassionate will probably make us better, more effective people. If not, at least it will reduce the suffering that accompanies weakness. And it will most certainly make us nicer to each other and to ourselves.

Eventually, I bought a brand new Macbook Air. I brought it home. Then, the next day, I woke up at five in the morning again, second-guessing my decision, thinking I should have bought the Macbook Pro with the cd/dvd drive, ethernet port, and a larger HDD. I berated myself momentarily and then I remembered: This is who I am. It’s not perfect. I don’t even like myself sometimes. But it’s the best I can do. Hopefully, it’s good enough.

Creation

We’re in the midst of a publishing boom, where everyone is pushing pushing pushing. It’s as if there’s no time to listen. We’re on five social media platforms, pushing our links to five different worlds, where very few people are paying any attention.

“Paying attention.” Notice the paying part. We use the same first word for paying for coffee. I’m exchanging something I value (my attention) for your work. Attention is an economy, very similar to our monetary one. A few years ago, it was a lot easier to convert attention into dollars. Then social crash happened at the end of 2010 or beginning of 2011

As in capitalism, when there is a large amount of people providing a thing, and very few people are buying a thing. The first person in my area  to sell something of value was a pioneer, the second guy was copying him – the fifth guy was diluting the market, and so on…

So what do you do to stand out in an attention economy where everyone wants attention but very few people are giving it?
I have theories, but no answers right now.

One of those hol-I-Days…..

There’s another holiday lurking  around the corner- Valentine’s Day.  We’ve programed ourselves to give and receive gifts on this and many other holidays to show our love for one another.

We’ve even been told that gift-giving is one of our “love languages.” This idea is utterly ridiculous, and yet we treat it as gospel: I love you—see, here’s this expensive shiny thing I bought you.

Gift-giving is a vapid, pernicious cultural imperative in our society, and we’ve bought it (literally) hook, line, and sinker. We’ve become consumers of love.

The grotesque idea that we can somehow commodify love is nauseating. We often give gifts to show our love because we are troubled by real love. Buying diamonds is not evidence of everlasting devotion. Commitment, trust, understanding—these are indications of devotion.

Gift-giving is by definition transactional. But love is not a transaction. Love is transcendent—it transcends language and material possessions and can be shown only by our thoughts, actions, and intentions.

To love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

This doesn’t mean there’s something necessarily wrong with buying a gift for someone, though I believe giving an experience over a material object is a better route to go. But don’t fool yourself by associating that gift with love—love does not work that way.

Nobody Else

Now more than ever we need to stop listening to everyone else. We need to stop reading articles and books, watching videos, and listening to interviews where other people tell us what to do and what to think.

If you want to be a writer, stop reading about writing and start writing. If you want to build a business, stop looking for business advice and start failing. If you want to get in shape, stop saying you want to get in shape and start pushing your body beyond comfort.

Do you think anyone could’ve changed themselves, or the world, if they had spent their lives snacking on social media, devouring stories of how other people changed the world, and thinking about all the things they could do?

We should all aspire to be great, not to imitate others but rather to discover what greatness exists within each of us. Empower ourselves to the fullest!

So, stop reading and start tinkering; stop talking and start being; stop dreaming and start doing; stop listening and start exploring.

In this life of never enough time in the day, we all have things to do and complete, but the important things are what make us who we are. Remember, now is the time to think of you, which you were born for.

New Era

Technology and social media have empowered customers. Like it or not, they can give us their feedback both privately and in a public forum. They expect companies will be easy to contact, respect their comments and reply thoughtfully.

Providing the kind of customer service that will generate loyalty and profits in our high-tech world isn’t fundamentally different than it was a decade ago, but it’s faster and more transparent. When companies foul up, customers are unforgiving, word spreads virally and the consequences are magnified.

Here are five ways to offer high-tech service that keeps customers coming back–and sending their friends.

1. Invite their comments. Customers have round-the-clock access to the social airwaves. So make sure that their first impulse is to reach you directly–day or night. You can do this by offering “chime in” forms; direct chat links when your FAQs haven’t answered their questions; and an easy way to reply directly to every corporate e-mail you send.

Outbursts on social media tend to occur when customers are left stewing because they can’t reach a company immediately. It’s important to avoid these public battles: Once a customer publicly stakes her ground as a frustrated opponent of your company, it will be hard to ever get her–or her friends–on the path to company loyalty.

If you make yourself easy to reach around the clock, you let customers know you value their business, input, and loyalty. Customers won’t need to write negative comments on Twitter or on their blogs if they can use e-mail, the phone, or a feedback form on your website and know that it will be answered—immediately and with empathy.

2. Shoulder their burdens. Companies that are thriving today realize that they can take on what were once considered customer responsibilities. This is why your bank now tells you when your mortgage payment is due, your pharmacy reminds you that it’s time to refill your prescription to avoid running low on medication, and your credit card issuer alerts you that your bill is looming.

Customers also expect you to shield them from their own mistakes. One company that’s doing that well is Amazon.com. For example, if you try to purchase a title for your Kindle, you might get a prompt reminding you that you already bought that e-book two years ago; you can’t accidentally pay for it again.

3. Offer self-service. Customers have come to appreciate–and sometimes demand–self-service because it offers them round-the-clock convenience, a level of autonomy and the ability to apply intimate knowledge of their own problems to the task. In their minds, no live customer service representative, no matter how empathic, can match that.

Companies that ignore the trend toward self-service will be left behind, while those that embrace it are thriving. Royal Caribbean, for example, enhances the customer experience on their new ship, Allure of the Seas, by augmenting its human concierges with interactive kiosks on every deck. These kiosks offer immediate answers to two crucial questions: “What activities are happening now?” and “How the heck do I get back to my room?”

4. React quickly. As far as speed is concerned, your business isn’t just competing against others in its industry. You’re competing against expectations created by Amazon, Starbucks, and smartphones that offer instant information and gratification.

No matter how otherwise perfect your product is, in the eyes of the customer it’s broken if you deliver it late. And what seemed speedy last year may now seem like a snail’s pace. In today’s marketplace, companies need to come up with solutions that stay in step with customers’ ever more extreme perception of what ‘‘in a timely fashion’’ means.

5. Anticipate their needs. Great customer service–the kind that builds loyal customers, brand equity, and sustainable profits–relies on what I call “anticipatory customer service.” This means finding (and fulfilling) the unspoken request or desire.

Anticipatory customer service can be accomplished by technological or human means, or a combination of the two. For example,  Southwest Airlines, is well known for gate agents  going above and beyond during layovers,etc.

Technology-driven examples include Gmail, which warns you that you’re sending out an e-mail that lacks an attachment, when you’ve typed in the body of the e-mail, “attached is.” And, of course there’s Siri, the new go-to guide on your iPhone. This morning I confided to Siri, “I love you Siri.” She replied by ” let’s just be friends.”

Caged

I realized something that  makes us unique: When the outcome seems hopeless, we test the impossible.

As soon as it becomes blindingly obvious that our current path isn’t getting us anywhere, we do something unheard of in nature. We attempt to  put aside the one thing that all other creatures cannot: Fear.

When all seems hopeless, we don’t give up. We shake our confining boxes. We break free of patterns. We revoke our commitment to the status quo. We evolve.

This ability to overcome fear and spontaneously evolve is part of what makes us human. It allows us to recognize when something is detrimental to our well-being and then take steps to circumvent it.

The metaphorical cages exist everywhere, but two places they can usually be found are in our patterns and commitments. Habits can make patterns not only hard to break but also hard to detect. Commitments can become so much apart of our identity that we forget we have the option of changing them.

If a pattern or commitment is preventing us from growing, if it’s holding us back from experiencing our full potential, or if it’s detrimental to our overall well-being or sense of inner peace, that pattern or commitment is a cage.

I often catch myself running around, stuck in a pattern that is neither getting me anywhere nor contributing to my overall well-being.

I might be clicking through Twitter looking for something interesting to read, rereading emails to make sure I didn’t miss anything, or planning my daily routine instead of actually changing my daily habits.

There comes a time when we need to stop thinking and start doing. We need to stop planning and start taking action. We need to stop succumbing to the resistance that fear pushes onto us and accept that right now, this very moment, is as good as any.

There’s a time for thinking and planning and there’s a time for action. When we sense the current cycle of activity isn’t doing anything, that’s a signal it’s time for action.

Simply stated; Doing gets things done! It fosters change and gives us the strength to shape the future. The only change that running in circles fosters is that of creating a deeper rut.

Put your fears to work people. We need to use it as motivation to escape the cages of doubt that are constraining our full potential before it is too late.

Life

“Life lives, life dies.
Life laughs, life cries.
Life gives up and life tries.
But life looks different through everyone’s eyes.”

Time

“Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time’, is like saying ‘ I don’t want to.”

-Lao Tzu

Time cannot be stored it can only be used.

Spend it with those whom you cherish, without an image of how they should be.

Spend it on those endeavors which make your heart sing, not a moment with regret.

Spend it in places which open your eyes and cause you to pause.

Spend it on experiences that will grow you, not all of which shall be what you expect.

Time is just your partner to spend with in this moment of forever.