A friend recently told me about Tony Robbins. I had heard the name but didn't appreciate who he actually was. This extended interview of Robbins by another productivity guru, Tim Ferriss, is well worth your time. I'm only half-way through and much of what Robbins says is resonating with me.
Eric Barker offers some excellent advice on how to stop being busy. I'm really appreciating and implementing many of the ideas he so succinctly presents. This article urges that you stop being busy and start being productive. Here's the nutshell:
Just because the other people at the office are overscheduled and the other parents are doing 1000 things doesn’t mean you need to.
We all only have 1440 minutes a day. Accept you can’t do it all, focus on what’s important and do that well.
We’re all jealous of the people who are calm and cool under pressure. Be that person.
Next time someone asks how you’re doing, don’t talk about how busy you are. Don’t get sucked into thinking busy means important.
Busy doesn’t make you important. Doing the important things you need to do makes you important.
People work an average of 45 hours a week; they consider about 17 of those hours to be unproductive (U.S.: 45 hours a week; 16 hours are considered unproductive).Lots of good advice on how not to fritter away one's time.
I've really enjoyed receiving posts by Eric Barker. Recently, I received this post on How to Have a Great Relationship. He really boils things down, peppering his posts with links to the research and more expansive articles. Here's an excerpt:
Love isn’t an emotion, really. When you look at fMRI studies of the brain it shows up more as a desire. A craving. And that explains why it feels so good. As far as the ol’ gray matter’s concerned love’s right up there with cocaine and cash. All three activate the same area of the brain — the dopamine reward system . . . So, yeah, even neuroscience agrees that love is intense. But can anything that powerful last? Doesn’t it eventually have to fizzle? Not necessarily. Research shows some couples are very much in love 40-50 years later. Want your marriage to last more than 30 years? Just “being married” often isn’t enough: you also need to be good friends.But this is only the entry point to dozens of clearly written text loaded with links. Really smartly outlined and inviting. I find myself looking through many of the links, including this way to shortcut to romance. Here are a few more links that spun off the main article: John Gottman's four things that kill relationships.
Criticism – Complaints are fine. Criticism is more global — it attacks the person, not their behavior. They didn’t take out the garbage because they forgot, but because they’re a bad person. Contempt – “…name-calling, eye-rolling, sneering, mockery, and hostile humor. In whatever form, contempt – the worst of the four horsemen – is poisonous to a relationship because it conveys disgust. It’s virtually impossible to resolve a problem when your partner is getting the message that you’re disgusted with him or her.” Defensiveness – “…defensiveness is really a way of blaming your partner. You’re saying, in effect, ‘The problem isn’t me, it’s you.’ Defensiveness just escalates the conflict, which is why it’s so deadly.” Stonewalling – Tuning out. Disengaging. This doesn’t just remove the person from the conflict, it ends up removing them, emotionally, from the relationship.
Here's a gem from the same article: 69% of a couple’s problems are perpetual. These problems don’t go away yet many couples keep arguing about them year after year:Most marital arguments cannot be resolved. Couples spend year after year trying to change each other’s mind – but it can’t be done. This is because most of their disagreements are rooted in fundamental differences of lifestyle, personality, or values. By fighting over these differences, all they succeed in doing is wasting their time and harming their marriage.What is one of the best predictors of the well being of a relationship? It's how much you THINK you are similar. What's the best time efficient way to enhance your relationship? Share your favorite part of the day with each other. I realize that none of this is rocket science in the abstract. As a man who recently became divorced, however, it's not easy to put these into play every day. Keeping these ideas in the forefront would seem to be a good way to making it easier to put these ideas into play.
They were marched into the classroom, single file, and lined up along the blackboard to face the roomful of white faces. It would be sheerest invention to say I remember everything about that day. The only things I recall had to do with questions about how my own situation was about to change.
I rarely write poetry, but I'm finding myself in new territory these days (divorce, new home and several other related changes), feeling some angst when it would seem that I mostly have cause to celebrate new perspectives and opportunities. I've often joked that I experience this sort of distressed happiness because of my gypsy roots. Friends tell me that this is the plight of control freaks and that I need to loosen up. This is my response to them. I've long been fascinated with the writings of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. I made his theory of the flux the focus of my poem.
The Joyride of Becoming Erich Vieth (2014)
Heraclitus wasn’t fooled when people talked about “permanent” things. All is flux, he proclaimed. “You cannot step into the same river twice.” Now that Life has hurled me out of my self-conjured comfort, Every moment whispers that Heraclitus is correct; the world is permeated with universal acid. This is not a philosopher’s word game. I feel it in my ever-morphing bones. Everything. Every thing is a nonstop dance of destruction and creation. Every cloud, creature and canyon a ghostly multiverse, a sprawling swirling that runs through our feeble stop signs, ignoring these empty-shell words we try to use as hooks to stabilize our vivid imaginings. Even my steadfast dog threatens to become an ontological metaphor. The SuperFlux gives rise to joys that will inevitably threaten and dangers that will someday delight-- A roiling process that moves in and on in a thousand ways On both sides of our skins and skulls, whether we are ready or not. Failure to heed this fact that all nouns are verbs tempts us to walk with undue swagger and blurt out false promises. Yes, some things change less noticeably, mostly things that don’t cry, though all things eventually crack, crumble and re-assimilate. It is our friends, lovers and central truths that are the fastest fire and water: Even though they look the same from day to day, they are self-extinguishing works in progress that we struggle to know only through sparks and splatters. Trying to possess them is to try to embrace dancing flames and swift whirlpools. Act, we must. Judge, we must, or we would quickly die. We are told that to live well we must know well, though we are irretrievably smeared across all that is. Even that magic three-pound organ in our head cannot wrap itself around the impossibility of this daily task. Taking this plight seriously risks sanity. If only I could better convince myself to go with the flow. As we pause to drink water molecules previously drunk by Jesus, Cleopatra and Heraclitus, we become Fatigued. We summon up courage as a substitute for knowledge and we have faith that all Motion is Progress, whistling while rearranging our decaying deck chairs, convincing ourselves over and over that it is the Blobs in this lava lamp that are stably meaningful, rather than the process.