When you’re doing anything, from the smallest task to the greatest feat, nothing will mess you up more than self-doubt. This is no joke. It’s easy to take for granted the power of self-doubt and the iron fist that can bring down on your sense of self-worth. I’ve seen people crumble under the weight of their own self-doubt, and it’s something that has always been a huge vitality suck for me.

Whether it was not enough attention from mom and dad or their own struggles that kept me feeling dejected and rejected, self-doubt and its fatty by-product insecurity has always played a major role in everything I do. I’ve got something to prove, usually to myself, but something to prove nonetheless. Oh, how I’ve wished I could just be a perfectly self-actualized being that’s not striving or grasping, but not in this life time, I’m afraid, or any other, for that matter, because this is all there is. The most I can do, you can do, any of us can do is recognize that creeping vitality suck that is self-doubt that leads to insecurity and nip it in the bud.

Pray, meditate, run, eat, memorize the lyrics to the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty in their entirety, or just focus on the feelings without judgment; whatever you do, acknowledge them, and know that it will pass, and it will pass faster if you resolve to move on.

It’s tough, I know. You want to dwell on it. You’re pissed, and with good reason. You’re not just feeling self-doubt because there were no other available emotions, some thing, some one triggered it. What is it? Who was it? In the scope of things it’s usually something pretty freakin’ inconsequential, because if it were truly a big deal we wouldn’t have time to dwell on our neurosis and petty feelings of inadequacy, we’d be tending to our crisis.

You know it’s true. When you look inside yourself, if only for a second, you see it passes and you move on. Help the process along, by making the conscious decision to understand and put it behind you. I know, it’s easier said than done, but that’s the only place we have to start from.

There’s a lot of struggling and resisting what is in daily living.

If you want to change your life, the life that you feel you’re supposed to have, which infers that your current life isn’t it, I say you try simple living. It’s not about what you want, or hope for, or dream or imagine for yourself, but rather what you’re actually doing – it’s not a concept, it just is right now.

True words lack eloquence and seem paradoxical, but your life is what you do, that’s the essence of simple living.

Want to change your life?
Change what you’re doing – It’s just that simple.

I just couldn’t pass up not posting some bits of this article here called Letting Things Die that I read over at Lifehacker.com, from the article:

Designer, creator of 9rules, and blogger Paul Scrivens has started a lot of projects that didn’t quite pan out. Scrivens discusses how letting things die is important to moving toward your next success.

“I have started a lot of projects in the past and many of them either aren’t standing anymore or are owned by other parties. In terms of them becoming huge and garnering me millions of dollars they all would be considered failures, but in terms of walking away and learning something I don’t think I would consider any of them to be a failure. I think that everyone that reads this site has a passion for starting a pet project and I’m sure many of you have done a couple in the past, the problem seems to be that many times we just can’t let go because we don’t want “failures” being associated with us.”

Paul hits the nail firmly on the head with this article. As many projects, endeavors, musical or otherwise, that I’ve started, I’ve always, ALWAYS learned something that served me well in the next endeavor. I say fail and fail often, because each of those experiences gives you something to look back on and learn from.

Furthermore, with any endeavor that isn’t working in your favor, or taking away too much time or money from things you’d rather be doing scrap it or let it go for a while. Don’t be worried about hanging on to it. Don’t be worried about having the failure hanging over your head or what people may think. If you want keep something let it go; classic Taoism at work; not always easy in practice, but nevertheless a deep truth to making the most out of our lives.

Note to self:
See things through.

It’s easy to walk, and give up what you’ve been working on, especially when it starts to stagnate. It’s easy to rationalize why something sucks, and why you shouldn’t continue. It’s easy to just be done with and move on because you dread it, and  it’s really a drag.

These were the things I was thinking, then I had this crazy simple idea to see things through.

See things through to their natural and organic conclusion. Like the Tao Te Ching says ‘when you intervene, you pick a fruit that was almost ripe’. Let stuff come to it’s own head. It’s easy to get up in there and mess with the junk and try to end it, but it’s more rewarding to just wait and let things take their time, and let things come to their own conclusion. That’s not to say that it doesn’t suck to wait, but it’s even possible that if you just see things through and try to find a positive attitude, that things might just flip themselves totally around, and that which looked like it was taking a crap and going south is actually better than ever. I’m just saying, it couldn’t hurt, if the thing is destined to end, then why rush it, let it happen on its own without struggle and resistance. It can’t hurt to just give it a try.

Truly, no man is an island, but some times the best thing that you can do is as much as you can by yourself. Of course, the sacrifice is that you’re not going to grow as much as you’d like as quickly as you’d like, and you’re doing it alone. However, I would say that sometimes that’s a fair trade off because growth comes with its own sacrifice.

As you grow you’re forced to add more people, more productive ways of doing things, and managing all the perspectives that those new additions bring. Of course, thinking about doing something small-scale only is contrary to the American way, but often times, bigger isn’t better, it’s just more complex and cumbersome.

What’s the happy medium? I would say that the happy medium is doing as much as you can by yourself, and then bringing people in on an as-needed basis, preferably short-term if that can be arranged. This is something that I’ve had to learn the hard way, through experience, both in my corporate work and my creative work.

A quick example: Let’s say you’re the leader of a band, and the group gigs very actively with most of the group making their living from music. One day you have to take a leave for some kind of surgery, that’s going to leave you recovering for awhile unable to go on stage or do lengthy van rides in the back of a Ford Econoline. Your band will feel that it’s your responsibility to get them paying work or to pay them something to maintain their open schedule while you’re out of commission. Sadly, you have to make a choice, cut them loose and try to regroup once you come back to things or pay them something to keep their schedules open, or even try to use your connections to find them work. I’ve done both, but fortunately, I’ve always had small groups.

And I’ve always had a small groups precisely because of this conundrum. You want to have loyal players, and employees, but loyalty is a two-way street.

So again, no man is an island, but the more you can do by yourself the more successful you’ll be simply because you’ll be able to focus more on the work and less on the management of the thing that started with your idea.

It really could be, but we’ll never know unless we try.

It’s too easy to play it safe. It’s too easy to go with the flow and maintain the status quo. That sucks. It’s boring. What fun is predictable living? Not much really, but unfortunately, the human animal is a creature of habit and too often we’re stuck in the routine, the grind, the minutiae of daily living.

Whatever the reason is, be it fear of failure, fear of success, the unknown, it’s so easy to get caught up in the nets of routine, and then rather than trying to break free just settle in to the mundane details of daily living. At some point in our lives all of us are faced with this reality, and it makes me think of the Charles Bukowski book title What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire. You can’t be alive and avoid the flames of failure, or maybe you can, but man, what a boring and unlived life that would be. Dead man walking.

I say get out there, and fail at lots of stuff, eventually you’ll learn what you’re good at. The magic, the absolutely golden moment, though, is finding that place where your success, and what you’re good at intersect. It’s there my friend, right there, that you’ll find your life’s work.

We come into working life doing just that, working. Sometimes, though, in the daily grind of trying to make a living and trying to make something happen for ourselves on a personal and professional level little opportunities present themselves.

It’s funny when I think about the work that I do now: electronic communications, Web and multimedia work; such jobs didn’t even exist when I was coming up. I sort of stumbled into what I do.

I was thinking about this a few days ago as I sat at my desk composing music for an internal video I was working on. To think that I’ve had the chance to get into electronic communications, Web, etc… is one thing that I feel really lucky for, but to be able to sit in my cubicle, in a corporate environment in 2009, when a lot of my fellow workers don’t even have jobs, and I get to compose music, man that just blows my mind!

Anyone who reads my posts regularly knows that I’m not prone to gushing optimism, more like cautious realism with slightly pessimistic undertones… But seriously, I, a guy of average intelligence, and not particularly gifted at much of anything, have been able to create these kinds of opportunities for myself.

What’s my point? Here’s the point: In the grind of the day to day it’s easy to lose track of what’s important, it’s easy to lose track of your goals, and your ideas, but if you’re passionate, and care about what you do, man, the universe will meet you half way sometimes, and give you what you’re looking for even if it seemingly comes out of thin air. Truth. Can’t explain it.

We all ride the Suck Express from time to time. For whatever reason, relationship issues, job troubles, existential angst, whatever… The Suck Express pulls up and we hop on “All aboard…” This is inevitable, we all take the ride, but some stay on this ride longer than others, hell, some stay on the Suck Express for their entire lives, but many reach a point when they’re ready to get off.

Getting on the Suck Express was easy. Usually, we had just taken a sucker punch in the gut from the universe, or a kick in the backside from the cosmos. When things are that bad, the existential cluster f#!k, it’s easy to get on the Suck Express, if only to sit down, and watch life go by for a while. For most of us, though, as we ride our sense of self, and our will to live deteriorates, and there are precious few moments when the joy of life comes through like slivers of light into the darkness. We realize that if we’re ever going to get back into the light, we have get off the Suck Express.

The only station the Suck Express has is the one you get on at. Once you’re on the only way off is with the wind in your face, all that you can carry in your hands and a quick, faithful jump and tumble to the ground below and the hope, the belief in yourself that you’ll clear the wheels of the Suck Express and only end up with some scrapes and bruises.

Don’t think about it, the Suck Express will keep you there forever, when the urge to jump strikes you, even if you can’t take anything with you, jump! Get off the train. Once you’ve decided to get off the Suck Express and you’ve actually done it, you’ll have all you need to do what you need to do.

It’s human nature to see what other folks are doing and wish for their success or wish our own lives were more like theirs. Our lives have no precedent, that’s what Joseph Campbell used to say. You are who you are, the story of your life is yours and yours alone to create as you go. Sure, you’ll probably still look at folks and envy them or wish you were doing some really cool stuff like they are, but they had to work to get there, and if what they have is something you want then you’ll have to work to get there, too.

It’s also true that some folks make work look so very easy, and I would submit that when you align your work with your life purpose then things definitely come together with greater ease, organically, rather than having to force or manipulate things to get what you want. As well, nothing that you force or manipulate will last so that’s the loser’s game. Let whatever you want to build unfold slowly, take your time with it. There will be times when there’s anxiety, and you have to rush, but when you’re initially trying to go after that goal, that thing you want, plot the course. Often, the course is just an intellectual exercise where you can see the bird’s eye view of what you hope for; this will make you feel better. But the universe makes the rules, and can both increase and decrease the rate at which our plan unfolds. We don’t have control over much, but the plan helps the self feel like it’s running the show.

Stay focused on the end goal, but enjoy the work, the ride, the process, because all we have is now. If you’re not enjoying the now, the actual work of getting to that end goal then you’ll lose interest and after a while abandon the goal. This is the hardest part to starting anything, but also the most important part. The goal becomes ancillary or just an extra bonus to the work.

Don’t set goals around work you don’t enjoy (really enjoy, can’t wait to do it kind of enjoyment!) otherwise you’ll give up the next time you see something that somebody has and you want. Also, take your time; life is short, but time is relative, there’s good time and bad time. If you’re immersed in something that you love doing that’s good time, and it will fly by, even while you’re “taking your time” with the endeavor.

Or as a plaque in my grandfather’s office read: Don’t let the bastards grind you down. You can read more about the origin of the quote here. The funny thing about that is that I read that quote so many times through my childhood that I started to use it whenever people were in a bad spot, or a tough position. The earliest that I can remember using it was when I was 13 in my first band, and a friend was having trouble with his parents, and unable to make practice.

I don’t recall my father or my grandfather ever saying that quote to me, or around me, but I certainly remember that plaque that hung in my grandfather’s office. I would say that quote is as timely as ever now. It’s easier than ever to take a look around at unemployment, bankruptcies, home foreclosures, and think it’s someoneelse’s fault. Somebody else is to blame for my situation, or my predicament, but the only thing that we can control is ourselves, and to some extent our situation.

I believe that through attitude, and foresight we can create the trajectory for our life. If we want to be bummed out, rejected, and unhappy with what life gives us, we can, but we’re in charge of that. That’s not to say that this is about some kind of happy, happy, joy, joy affirmation perspective, but it is to say that if we want to ride the suck express, then all aboard, because there’s always room. However, it’s the hope train to tomorrow that’s going to get you off on the right foot and creating a trajectory that’s going to keep you moving forward towards life-enhancing opportunity and joy.

In fact, that’s one of the craziest things that I’ve noticed in life. When I start doing something, and I’m working at it, the endeavor takes on a life of its own. It becomes less about you and more about taking care of the thing that you’ve created. The first couple times I realized this it threw me, because I was on a trip and I wanted to get off. Sometimes, though, there’s no getting off. You have to ride the whole trip. Which, on the one hand, prevents you from beingwishy -washy with the things you build, but on the other hand a sort of synergy is created where the process of what you’re doing intersects with some kind of unseen energy, or current that just keeps flowing out from the thing you created.

The take-away is that if you want to put yourself on a positive life trajectory then be prepared to build something. Even through the tough times, don’t let the bastards grind you down, and eventually things will take off on their own.