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Your Ideal vs. Your Reality: Balancing the Two

As humans, we seek a higher purpose, meaning and guidance. What is the meaning of life? Who or what can show us the way? We like to know what the end game looks like and our role and purpose in the big picture.

Although there is no book with official steps on living life, society has established ideals which emphasize how things should be. As these translate into norms and are reinforced around us, they influence our vision for our path. Ultimately, we align our lives to meet society’s expectations. Looking around, and in my own life, examples of this are easy to find.

The Ideal.  Ideals are what we aspire to achieve in life and they drive us.  “If only I had _____, I would be (happier, more successful etc.).” There is always something out of reach that we seek and conclude will provide some type of satisfaction.  How do we come to this conclusion? We adopt what we hear and see around us, including what society deems “acceptable” or “right.”  For example, society’s path to a “good life” is a good education, a good job, a family and house with a white picket fence.  We hear this from family, teachers, guidance counselors, college professors, employers etc. If this idea is so pervasive, how can it not be true?  Once we subscribe to it ourselves, we adapt our own path based on decisions and actions that are confined to outside judgment, meeting other people’s expectations, seeking approval and keeping up appearances.

The Plan. In order to meet our ideals, we outline a plan to make it happen. We believe that if we take these steps, exactly as planned, we’ll get what we want. Again, society says this is the path everyone should take so why wouldn’t it work for you? This process gives our lives the meaning we incessantly crave. Each day, we wake up knowing our why. By taking each outlined step, we believe we’re working to achieve our ideals and our ultimate purpose. We’re convinced that we’ll get what we want and there’s rarely a thought that things won’t go as planned.

The Reality.  Meanwhile, life is happening and it has its own idea of how things will unfold.  This can manifest in a variety of ways: plans going awry, discovering considerations that weren’t included in the plan, unexpected issues showing up, factors that can’t be controlled for taking their own course, etc. These impediments throw off our plan and can postpone or permanently keep us from reaching our ideals.

 

 

Where does this leave us?  It creates a gap between the reality and the ideal. Society rarely prepares us for such disruptions. We’re left with a plan that is no longer effective since it doesn’t account for any of the curve balls. We no longer have the meaning our plan gave us, and we’re lost without clarity on how to navigate toward our ideals.

Since we didn’t account for things not going as planned, panic sets in. There is no way this can’t work! I can’t let it fail! Let me roll up my sleeves and fix it real-time. I’m going to focus on how I can get it back on track.  I can’t imagine it not working out as envisioned and planned. Any alternate solution is “bad.”

What manifests is intense focus to repair, fix, prevent, and control to get things “right” and reduce the probability of failure (think Six Sigma on steroids). Our reaction is in response to not reaching our personal plan, but more often than not, we act out of fear of failing in front of the world. Failure means we won’t achieve the ideals society says we should have; and we fear outside judgment, not meeting other people’s expectations, not obtaining approval and not being able to keep up appearances.

I’ve been down this path many times and after reflecting on a recent instance, I have some new insight on making it more manageable and less exasperating.

There is no tragedy, only the unavoidable. Everything has its reason for being: you only need to distinguish what is temporary from what is lasting. What is temporary?… The unavoidable… and what is lasting?… The lessons of the unavoidable.  — Paulo Coelho

Here’s how you can handle the gap between your ideals and your reality better:
  • Revisit your premise. Your premise for this entire undertaking is that you think this is what you should be doing, is right and will not lead to failure. And this is all attributed to the meaning assigned by society or you. Whose meaning is the truth or final? Arguably, neither is right, how things should be or will guarantee certain outcomes.  But you define the meaning and believe it to be true; the only reason it has power is because you give it power.  If this approach and belief system doesn’t serve you, you should stop subscribing to it.
  • Don’t label things good or bad. Whether something is good or bad is subjective and depends on who you ask. Would it be bad if half of all the money in the world disappeared?  Those with extravagant lifestyles would probably care, but those who already live modestly probably wouldn’t care as much. Let things be, without being good or bad.
  • Don’t add stress or pressure.  Even if the situation seems malleable, that doesn’t mean you need to add stress and pressure.  A rubber band is flexible, but if you continuously pull it or pull it too far, it will snap. Sometimes it is better to do nothing. Leave it alone. Don’t question or try to associate meaning. Give things space to breathe.
  • Accept the reality and what happened. What happened happened and it is in the past. Don’t obsess about it, be stuck in it or be held hostage by it.
  • Appreciate situations for what they are. Focus on the lessons the past gave you and be grateful for what you have today. You’re better positioned now due to your lessons and experience.
  • Embrace the power of now. Take advantage of the present and take action to create positive opportunities. Create your own life the way you want it to be today. Your life today is important and I’d argue more important than any ideal life you aspire to have.

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Do you come across gaps between your ideals and your reality? How do you balance the two? Have you tried any of the suggestions above? How have they worked for you? I’d love to hear your perspective!

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Success is at the Intersection of Your Skills

Change is happening at an unprecedented rate, leading to increased competition. I usually hear about the impact of this on companies, but it is worth paying attention to how it impacts people like you and I as well.

Why should this matter to you? The pace of technological change affects what we do and how we do it. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, 3D printing and other transformations lead to more automated and efficient processes which impacts the role that people play. New technologies result in less manual human input and enable remote work and teleconferencing with mobile and cloud technology. If workers don’t need to be local, the talent pool expands beyond geographical borders and global competition for talent increases.

This impacts all workers, including those in traditional careers, creatives and entrepreneurs.

So what can you do? If you live in an area susceptible to flood, it makes sense to get flood insurance.  If you’re investing in the market, it makes sense to diversify your portfolio. Similarly, I think you should be smart about how you plan and improve your chances of success.

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, one of the most popular and widely distributed comic strips, shared an approach that worked for him in an interview with Forbes:

The result is the Adams success formula: “Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.” Adams says you can raise your market value by being “merely good—not extraordinary—at more than one skill.” Adams told me his career is an example of the success formula in action. “I’m a poor artist. Through brute force I brought myself up to mediocre. I’ve never taken a writing class, but I can write okay. If I have a party at my house, I’m not the funniest person in the room, but I’m a little bit funny, I can write a little bit, I can draw a little bit, and you put those three together and you’ve got Dilbert, a fairly powerful force.”  Adams says the addition of a little business knowledge (he has an MBA from Berkeley’s Haas School of Business) and the sum of his “average” talents makes him more valuable than any one skill alone.

This advice isn’t conventional. In fact, we live in a world that reveres choosing one thing to focus on and we’re expected to become an expert at it. But here, Adams promotes a different approach which works for those in traditional careers, for creatives and entrepreneurs.  This is especially helpful for multipotentialites (polymaths, scanners, renaissance souls) who have a variety of interests and want to combine them all to provide value.

I’ve used this approach myself.  I layered on skills, education and experience to help people and companies at the intersection of strategy, creativity, innovation and technology.  I’ve worked on projects for companies with a variety of goals from implementing new technology, improving customer experience, or developing talent and each requires a different combination of my skills.  So this approach has been valuable to me because:

  1. I have a variety of skills
  2. I can pivot as needed and leverage different combinations of my skills

To thrive, and not merely survive, you have to differentiate yourself and leverage your intersection with your unique combination of skills.

How can you get started with using this approach yourself? Here are the steps:

Do an inventory of your interests and skills. Look broadly at the things you’ve done. Inventory your professional experience, personal pursuits and hobbies and other experience you’ve gained from volunteering etc.  Also think about what friends, family, colleagues and clients come to you and pay you for. Make sure to also assess your interests; it is important to find alignment with what you do and what you like doing.

Invest in yourself and seek to improve. Once you identify your list of interest and skills, think of how you can improve them.  You don’t have to be an expert in each but improvement will help your positioning.  For example, if communication is on your list, seek public speaking opportunities to practice.  If you’re interested in a field, study it on your own, take online classes or enroll in a university program to solidify your knowledge.   Practice and experience are essential so find opportunities to put what you’ve learned in action.

Identify your unique intersection.  Now that you have your skills and invested in improving them, think about how you can bring them together and connect them.  Ultimately, your unique intersection doesn’t need to have all the skills you started with, just the relevant ones. For example, Jake Tapper found a way to combine journalism, cartoons and writing. You can combine interests and skills in real estate, wine and engineering to design wine tasting venues or sports, travel and hospitality to improve the lodging experience for traveling athletes.

Provide value. Use your intersection of skills and experience to do what you’re uniquely positioned to do better than anyone else.  Identify opportunities that require your combination of skills and allow you to use them to help others.  Pivot as you go by leveraging the right mix of your skills and experience for each opportunity. For example, a project to build a technology solution will require more technical skills while a project focused on brainstorming new products will require more creative skills.

To thrive, and not merely survive, you have to differentiate yourself and leverage your intersection with your unique combination of skills.

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Are you someone with multiple interests and intellectual pursuits? Have you figured out how to combine them to your advantage? Have you tried an approach similar to what is described above? How has it worked for you? I’d love to hear your perspective!

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What Do You Call People with Multiple Interests?

I’ve had an eclectic mix of interests for as long as I can remember.  Two key ones – business and art – always surprise people because they see them as opposites. I find it amusing; I know my interests are paradoxical and span my left and right brain. I’m also interested in technology, innovation, interior design, photography to name a few.  Similarly, I move through life in an eclectic way. I’m risk averse but I enjoy motorcycle rides, I like comfort and luxuries but I really enjoy travel where I “rough it” while figuring out the new place on my own, and as much as I plan for tomorrow, I love activities that are spontaneous and adventurous.

I find that this mix of interests adds a lot more experiential opportunities in life. I can dive into a topic I find interesting and research it, follow my curiosities, change my thinking based on new information, and there’s always a new perspective to gain when I take on a new project.  It makes me flexible, versatile, open to change and more well-rounded.

Naturally, my fascination with this ability to have and pursue multiple interests led me to research it. There are many others out there who also describe themselves as being this way.  But in order to find them, I realize you need to know the different terminologies used to describe such individuals.

Here’s a summary of the key terms I’ve come across so far:

Renaissance man / woman.  This one has a special place in my heart because my high school art teacher called me a “Renaissance woman.” I excelled in art along with all my other subjects.  This term emerged during the The Renaissance which was a cultural movement that profoundly affected intellectual life. One key tenet of the Renaissance was that humans are limitless in their capacity for development, which led to the notion that people should embrace all knowledge and develop their capacities as fully as possible. The term “Renaissance man” was applied to the gifted people of that age who sought to develop their abilities in all areas of accomplishment: intellectual, artistic, social, and physical.  Leonardo da Vinci has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man for his artistic and other contributions.

One key tenet of the Renaissance was that humans are limitless in their capacity for development, which led to the notion that people should embrace all knowledge and develop their capacities as fully as possible.

Here are a few other definitions:

  • Dictionary.com:
    • A cultured man of the Renaissance who was knowledgeable,educated, or proficient in a wide range of fields  
    • A present-day man who has acquired profound knowledge or proficiency in more than one field
  • Merriam-Webster:
    • A person who has wide interests and is expert in several areas
    •  A man who is interested in and knows a lot about many things

These definitions are gender-specific but I will continue to use Renaissance man / woman as needed since I believe this description applies to both! 🙂

Scanner. This term was introduced by Barbara Sher, author of I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What it Was and Refuse to Choose. According to Barbara in Refuse to Choose, “scanners love to read and write, to fix and invent things, to design projects and businesses, to cook and sing, and to create the perfect dinner party. (You’ll notice I didn’t use the word “or,” because Scanners don’t love to do one thing or the other, they love them all.)”

Multipotentialite. Multipotentiality is an educational and psychological term referring to the ability and preference of a person, particularly one of strong intellectual or artistic curiosity, to excel in two or more different fields. It also refers to an individual whose interests span multiple fields or areas, rather than being strong in just one.  The term emerged in relevant research on giftedness. For example, in 1972, R.H. Frederickson et al. defined a multipotentialed person as someone who, “when provided with appropriate environments, can select and develop a number of competencies to a high level.” Most recently, Emilie Wapnick used the term “multipotentialite,” as a shared identity for her Puttylike community and in her book How to Be Everything.

Polymath. This word is of Greek origin where polymathēs means “having learned much” and describes a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas and is known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve problems.  Philosopher Johann von Wower published the first work with the word in the title (De Polymathia tractatio: integri operis de studiis veterum) and defined polymathy as “knowledge of various matters, drawn from all kinds of studies . . . ranging freely through all the fields of the disciplines, as far as the human mind, with unwearied industry, is able to pursue them.”

Polymathēs means “having learned much” and describes a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas and is known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve problems.

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Are you someone with multiple interests and intellectual pursuits? How do you describe yourself and your interest in multiple areas? Do you use terms other than the ones above? Share them below! I’d love to hear your perspective!

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Mindset Is Everything: Believe and Achieve

Getting started can be so hard!  You know what you want to do and you know why, but taking the first step can be daunting. You create stories in your head of how things are and will be. These stories, combined with fear, self-doubt etc., cause paralysis and you take no action.

I’ve been wanting to run a race for a while.  But I hadn’t taken the steps to sign up and begin training.

A couple of months ago, I learned about an upcoming race and thought:

Why not now? Why not sign up for this race?  After all, it is only a 5K!

The race was a for a good a cause with the Back on My Feet (BOMF) organization. All the proceeds from the race would help provide support to BOMF’s services to improve the self-sufficiency of those experiencing homelessness.  I also looked up the weather as the time got closer and saw the high would be in the 70s!  Of course that wouldn’t be the temperature when the race started at 8 AM but this was a plus for the early part of spring (and because I’m not a fan of the cold).

I signed up.  I ran more frequently to train for the big day but I wasn’t following a formal training plan. It had been years since I ran the one-miler in high school so I knew I had to put in some work to prepare.

The Friday before the race, I went to the website to get last minute information.  That’s when I realized the race was a 5-miler and not a 5K! I had to process that…  How did I miss this before?! Did I let my wishful thinking trump the reality?! There wasn’t much I could do at that point.  I definitely wasn’t going to train for a 5-miler overnight but I still planned to participate in the race.

Mindset is Everything

I focused on my mindset. I told myself that it was better to learn about the 5-miler the day before the race versus on the day of the race. Imagine knowing you’ve reached the 5K distance but everyone is running beyond it and now you have no idea where the finish line is. I was grateful for not being in that situation.  I told myself I could complete 5 miles.  I hadn’t been training for that distance but I had previous runs around the city that were just under 5 miles.

Believe and Achieve

Race day arrived. After forgetting my headphones and going back home to get them, I arrived just in time for the race to start.  The first mile was fine.  Then we got to a steep incline.  I tried to push myself and stopped midway to walk.  Once back on leveled ground, I saw parents with strollers pass me by.  I used that as my motivation.  I couldn’t have all of them pass me! I continued to push through.  During the second half of the race, I saw a sign that said “Believe and Achieve.” This helped me finish the last two miles strong.

Here are my final stats:

  • Gun Time – 48:30
  • Chip Time – 47:14
  • Pace – 9:27
  • Placed 574 overall out of a total of 1192 runners (men and women)
  • Placed 110 out of a total of 258 women in my age group
  • Placed 283 out of a total of 706 women across all ages

My results surprised me!  Once I realized this was a 5-miler, I thought it would take me at least one hour to finish. So anything short of that was awesome!  I also googled what a “good” pace is for a 5-miler and learned that a pace in the 8:00 range is good and for a professional runner, 4:00 to 5:00 is good.  All things considering, being in the 9-minute range wasn’t terrible.  I didn’t think I had any of my running abilities left after competing in high school so many years ago!  This was when I realized that achieving anything and exploring what’s possible starts with my mindset.

What if…?

I reflected on my experience.  I accomplished something I didn’t even set out to do.  What if I did things differently and with more intention? I thought about the actions I could have taken and how that would have changed the outcome:

  • Take the race seriously – This would have been a great starting point… I would have known that I signed up for a 5-miler, not a 5K!
  • Follow a training plan – I could have easily googled and followed a formal 5-miler training plan
  • Time myself along the way – I didn’t set a timer at the beginning of the race so I had no real gauge of how fast I was running. This would have been helpful for motivation along the way.
  • Get to the race earlier – Arriving earlier would have allowed me to get to the front of the line. Unfortunately, since I forgot my headphones and went back home, I arrived just before the race started.
  • Pace myself with more serious runners – I’m assuming the more serious runners were at the front of the pack.  I could have paced myself with them. I definitely saw people walking and running back in the opposite direction as I was finishing up the last two miles of the race.
  • Train outside – I only ran on a treadmill. Running outside could have helped me get a better sense of my pace when I’m not on a treadmill and my strides are less restricted.
  • Dress better – I didn’t want to be cold so I layered up.  I could have given myself more flexibility with this, especially to remove layers as needed.
  • Preview the course – I had no sense of what the course would be like.  So I didn’t expect the incline after the first mile. Getting familiar with the course in advance and practicing on an incline would have helped.

Have you had to do something that you didn’t believe was possible? How did you overcome this? Do you still struggle with having the right mindset and believing you can achieve anything you want? I’d love to hear your story below!

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