Archive for March, 2009

Would you hire this man as your Life Coach?

Probably depends what kind of a life you aspire to!

Would you hire this man as your Life Coach?

Probably depends what kind of a life you aspire to!

By Seamus Anthony

Do you find yourself confused as to what your main direction in life is? Do you find yourself exploring This and then That and then berating yourself because you reckon you should have spent that time working on One Major Purpose instead of allowing yourself to get distracted?

Well, if so, RELAX!

Maybe you aren’t wasting time at all!

Maybe – just maybe – you are in the process of creating something amazing and highly original by combining different concepts and fields into One New Thing – a new category even!

READ

Can’t see how this applies to you and your disparate interests? Well, then maybe you need to explore this concept a bit more. Some good books to read are “Purple Cow” by Seth Godin, “Blue Ocean Strategy” by W. Kim and R. Mauborgne and “The Medici Effect” by Frans Johansson. All great books about the importance and methods of creating extraordinarily original offerings.

DRAW

Another awesome method of seeing where the connections lie is mind-mapping. If you are such a tech-head that you need to, you can find software to help with this, but personally I prefer a pen and the back of an envelope – this way I just bang out the ideas in my head, explore the connections, and move on to doing some real work. I don’t recommend spending hours fluffing about with this kind of thing, because it’s not real work, but a quick mind-mapping sessions can certainly help when inspiration strikes – or when it doesn’t.

Fly in the Face of Convention

This concept of combining seemingly unrelated fields of endeavor into a new original category or offering can be difficult for others to understand if you try and spell it out to them as a hypothetical theory. For example, my (always evolving) offering involves combining original music, humour, writing, personal development and entrepreneurship into my One Thing, but unless it serves a purpose (such as to illustrate my point), I don’t try to get people to understand this ambitious plan. Why? Because …

A) I don’t need the let-down when people don’t get it (because it sounds ridiculous to them) and tell me I’m crazy.I know I’m crazy anyway – and I don’t give a fuck! I like it!

B) I don’t fully understand my One New Thing yet myself! It’s an ever-evolving exploration of Self, through which I hope to help others to realize their own True Nature and/or simply to enjoy living more.

C) Because you don’t have to be able to explain it as a theory. It’s just not necessary!

Have a look around and you will find that truly original Creators are Do-ers and tend to either not be very self-analytical, or if they are, they keep this to themselves and just get on with creating the Original Work.

Then what happens? Other, not-so-original thinkers come along, formularize the original innovations, and reproduce lame Robo-Creations that have no soul and are in every way inferior.

Case in point? Jimy Hendrix. Originality oozed out of the man’s pores; he was instincively unique. Since he blew everybody’s minds his style has been rehashed to the point where it is in itself a sanitized and overwrought cliche.

Don’t do the same old shit. Try harder! Combine your different interests and see what you can come up with! Analyse everything about yourself and find what it is that makes you You.

It’s not always easy, but actually being original, then working really hard at getting that “out there” is one of the major laws of success. Good luck!

I usually steer clear of “woo-woo” superstitious stuff, but the truth of the matter is that years ago I was visited by the ghost of a recently deceased friend and he gave me some advice that I have never forgotten about pursuing your dreams.

Read the story here:

Never Gonna Be A DJ – A Ghost Story

Seamus Anthony

By Seamus Anthony

Today I had one of those “Little Kensho moments” where I just suddenly saw things exactly as they are, and in this moment I truly realised the inherent truth and power in the famous Yoda quote:

“Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.”

In my case what I was thinking about was my three main goals for this year – to lose weight/get fitter, to greatly improve my French and to re-establish myself as a regular fixture on the Melbourne live music scene.

Of the three of these, the only one I have really been doing properly is the latter; I have been getting out and playing lots of gigs, networking and getting right back into the groove of being a busy, active musician again. I am just doing it. There’s miles to go yet but I have started the journey; I’m doing what needs to be done.

As for the other two, well I have been learning some more French, and I have been doing some exercise and have at least not gotten fatter – but the truth is I have been making excuses. Excuses like “I find it hard to find the time to practice my French skills” or “I can’t enjoy life without (excessive amounts of) designer beer and fine food”.

And so at the end of the day, I just haven’t been “doing it”. To do it just means to do it. Simple as that. And as the wise green grommit said, you’re either doing it, or your NOT doing it, there is no middle ground.

Reading about how to do it, isn’t doing it. Thinking about doing it isn’t doing it. Talking about doing it isn’t doing it. Only doing what needs to be done in order to get the result you seek is doing it, everything else is just bullshit and excuses.

Moving Stones Around

The qualitive difference in my two experiences, “doing it” and “not doing it”, is marked. In the case of getting my music out there again, I feel a flow and a sense of satisfaction that I haven’t felt in years. In fact, yesterday and today I was even happy to do very little (in this area) for the first time in a while, without a nagging feling that I should be doing something more constructive. I felt free to rest for a bit because I know I have some good momentum going. It’s like a bike ride: it’s not all uphill, you get to coast down some hills here and there.

But in the two cases of French and Fitness, I feel blocked (or at least I did until today). I felt frustrated and like I keep trying but to no avail.

The mistake I am making? There is no try! Only Do or do not!

But why have I been “Not doing”? Well, I believe it has to do with what’s going on in my head; my internal dialouges and beliefs are getting in my own way.

The lines of dialouge directly preceding the featured Yoda quote do a nice job of exploring this:

LUKE
Master, moving stones around is one thing. This is totally different.

YODA
No! No different! Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned.

In case you don’t remember or know, this whole scene tells the story of Yoda teaching Luke Skywalker to use the Force to raise Luke’s stricken X-Wing fighter from the swamp. Luke believes it is easy to make stones levitate but that he can’t use his mind to lift up the spacecraft.

And that’s what I have been doing, moving stones around instead of “doing it” for real. I have been going for a jog here and there, I stopped putting sugar in my coffee, but really it’s not enough to stem and reverse the middle aged spread that’s been threatening to engulf my hips. And I have been learning new French words at a nice steady pace with my little 16 month old daughter, but I still haven’t been knuckling down to learn all the “difficult” grammar stuff that will really mean the difference to my French language skills.

And why?

Because in my mind, these actions are associated with displeasure and negative beliefs. I believe I find grinding through French grammar “boring”. I believe I can’t enjoy life without eating too much cheese and sweet food and drinking too much beer.

In my mind, these hurdles were too big for me to leap, to which Yoda would say:

“No! No different! Only different in your mind.”

The truth is there is plenty of pleasure to be had from both these activities – but my mind has just gotten stuck in a couple of little dead-ends. If I am going to find my way to my destination, I need to reverse the old brain-car and meander back through the suburbs of my skull until I find the way through to the destination I want to end up at. There I will enjoy the pleasure of understanding what the hell all those Frenchies in my life are always rabbiting on about so effusively. There I will not feel like such a bloated old toad when I am on stage singing my little heart out. And along the way there will be plenty of enjoyable milestones too.

“You must unlearn what you have learned.”

The funny thing is, a couple of years back I was in just the same mental dead-end with gig-hunting. I had convinced myself that the way I felt about getting on the phone and hustling up live music gigs was still the same as it was when I was a depressed, marijuana-addicted, slightly paranoid 23 year old (I hated it then). In fact this was not the case, and once I broke that barrier I have enjoyed applying all the skills I have since learned towards this task, and have had no problems at all with it, in fact I am enjoying it even more than I did when I was a gung-ho 19 year old kid.

So on the one hand, it’s all a process, and sometimes you just can’t rush things…

But on the other, that’s probably just another of those mental ideas that I need to unlearn in order to speed me on my way.

I will leave you with another pertinent bit of dialogue from The Empire Strikes Back:

LUKE
I don’t… I don’t believe it.

YODA
That is why you fail…