In the last 12 months, I cut out working with 7 clients to work exclusively with New Media Labs. Initially, this cut my income by roughly 30%.  I hear the cries of why…

I made the changes to feel more successful.  Time will tell if I actually am more successful. Right now I am starting to see the success, but I have a longer term plan.

As you may know, personal freedom is essential to me. I ride, run and play outside as an expression of this freedom.  However, I’m searching for more than the freedom to do what I choose.  To create a sense of well-being, I’ve noticed that I need:

• A couple hours of daily exercise (1 hour twice a day seems to work best for me);
• Connection to a community (that would be you); and
• A sense that I am spending my time effectively (if I don’t, I tend to implode).

Working merely to buy more stuff I want and don’t need, being overly busy and creating busyness for myself, multitasking and the rest, these things cause me undue stress in large volumes. That said, creating space so that I can sit around in a coffee shop all day, doesn’t leave me satisfied. I did that for ages and I know quite a few people who do this currently and it creates a growing hole. I need a mission that I can do well.  It’s why I am suited to endurance athletics and project based consulting. An essential realization for me, because this in turn shifted my career from being a salesman to managing projects.

So essentially, have a mission, be a part of a community and do it well. Those 3 elements are key things to ensuring my happiness.

In my life, exercise is my meditation – it integrates my thoughts with my body; let’s me release stress/noise and stimulates my brain.  When I listen to others talk about prayer, it sounds a lot like how I feel about my training.  I have a huge connection going when I am stress free. A connection to the world around me and how conscious I actually am to what is going on around me.

+++

The following passage comes from a blog I am a passionate fan of.

The first tip that I’ll offer is a question I ask myself every-single-day. How would I live my life if I knew that I was going to die? As I think about that (trick) question, I remind myself:

Acceptance – I will not be able to get everything done in my life.  That’s OK, I’ve acknowledged that being busy works against my personal goals.

Choose – Because I won’t be able to get to everything, it is wise to make choices.  Given that “doing well” is important for my sense of well being, I’m going to identify the #1 goal that I can do well.  Given that setbacks are inevitable, I’m going to pick a defensive goal as well.

Priorities will change and shift over time.  What’s useful for me is: limiting focus; being clear about what I am seeking to achieve; and what’s required to achieve it.

Say No — we are lousy at saying “no” – to ourselves and to our communities. That’s why the first two steps are so important – realize that you can’t (and don’t want to) do everything then choose what you want to do. Then create a habit of saying “no” to attractive opportunities that distract you from your mission. My main strategies are avoidance and routine.

Write it down and share with people who are important to you. This gives a bit of backbone to your wishbone.

Most of our friends, clients and competition, will not be able to pull off what I outlined and that is OK.  However, when you come across people that can pull it off then keep them in your life — they are valuable additions to your peer group. Likewise, when it’s clear that someone isn’t fully aligned with your mission then you’ll want to phase them out — with compassion, as we never know where life will take us.

Don’t try to be perfect, just keep chipping away towards your goals.  When I find myself stressed out, I back off, rest a bit and remember my mortality.

+++

Great lessons in there today. There is a reason I am putting it out there too.

I am now accountable to you.

Backbone.

‘Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.’ ~Albert Einstein

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on twitter.

A lot of people in my field write about how to be successful, but I try to avoid it. It’s just not something I believe is important.

Now, that might seem weird: what kind of loser doesn’t want to be successful?

Me. I’m that loser.

Obviously, the first problem with success is how you define success … is it becoming famous, rich, creating a world-changing business, coming up with an idea that changes people’s lives, helping others, being happy? So many people with values similar to mine would reject the traditional definitions of success: being rich or famous or having a best-selling book or creating a huge business is not all there is to life.

And those people are right, in my book. If all you’re striving for is money, you’ll do horrible things to get it. If all you want is a successful business, you’ll screw people over to get it. If all you want is fame, you’ll give up your dignity to achieve it.

I could probably get a book on the New York Times best-seller list if I really tried, but it’s not something I care enough about, and I know I’d have to do things I wouldn’t be happy doing in order to get there. I’d have to make promises I couldn’t deliver on, sell something to people who are looking for answers I don’t have, trick them into buying the book.

I could make a lot more money than I make now, if I capitalized on all the readers I have and pressured them into buying more things. But I don’t think buying a lot of things is a good thing, so I’d feel crappy doing that. It’s not worth it.

Snake oil

So those who teach you to be successful … they’ll share methods that are a bit shady sometimes. If not, often they sell you platitudes that sound good but are too vague to really mean anything.

I’ve read many, many things on how to be successful (I can’t avoid finding them — they’re everywhere), and rarely will any of them really show you how to get where you want to go.

And when you don’t get there, you blame not the success system, but your own inadequacies.

The deeper problem

There are other problems, though. Whatever your definition of success, it’s something you’re looking for … something that exists in the future. It’s based on your desire to achieve something, your feelings that you’re not where you want to be.

That’s why the snake oil salesmen are so “successful” … they capitalize on the feelings of inadequacies that other people have. I think that’s horrible.

But beyond that, the trap of striving for this future “success” … it’s never-ending. You strive for more, and then when you get it, you strive for more again. You’re never satisfied. People who have a billion dollars, for example … they’re successful, right? Why don’t they stop trying to make money, then? Why would they possibly need more than a billion dollars? How can you possibly spend that much? They strive to make more because there will never be enough. They’ll never be successful enough.

That’s true not just of the rich, but of anyone who strives for success. Striving is a condition that doesn’t have an end, unless you give it up.

The real success

I might have a lot of readers now on Zen Habits, but I don’t feel that’s what makes me a success. I’ve been a success since Day 1, because even when I had zero readers, I was doing what I loved. Even when no one else would have called me a success (I really was a nobody then), I absolutely loved writing my posts, and though I don’t agree now with a lot of what I wrote back then (in 2007), I was happy.

Success isn’t about achieving something in the future, but about doing something right now that you love.

So doesn’t that mean I care about success? Well, sure, if you define success as whatever it is you care about, then of course you’re going to care about success. But then “success” really doesn’t have a meaning, does it? If it can mean anything, then it means nothing.

So forget about “success”, and just find joy, passion, love, awesome-ness right now, in this moment. *That* is a success you can achieve, without any self-help course, without any method. Just go out and do it.

Have it load and watch a great man do what he does best. Keep rollin.

It would be a waste to comment on the video, I purely want you to watch it.

Motivation. It’s that most fleeting qualities. With it, you have the power to dig deep in training. Every day is another opportunity to work toward a better you. It is the savings account from which you draw the fortitude to bury the needle for another few seconds, to refuse the slice of cake, to head out for the ride in the dark.

It is as mysterious in its presence as it is in its absence. Its switches are nonsensical, ironic. One bad run can light a fire that melts the asphalt beneath your feet two days later. Or it can lead to a sense of futility causing you to skip runs, fall off the program, pig out, even.

When the well is empty life is duller for it. There’s no spring to your step, 2 kilometers in the pool can seem long and cleaning the bike when it looks like the dogs breakfast is just a chore that can be put off for another week. Forget about intervals. Why go hard? What’s the point?

And there’s the mystery: We know why. We know that the feeling that comes from doing anything (beyond triathlon, all physical activity fits this discussion) well can kill office stress, melt daily disappointments and enable us to ride with the lead group in Kona. Okay, maybe not that last, but you must admit, when the well is full you feel totally pro. You ride with wattage to spare.

But the empty well can be depression itself. It is the cycle of disappointment that feeds on disappointment, the snake that eats its tale, but instead of winking out of existence, it grows. How we reverse that vicious cycle is anyone’s guess. A blue sky that moves one human back to the saddle can fill another with shame for the days missed.

For those who’ve had the well run dry, you know the revulsion you feel for the big ring, the empty pool or the cold run, a stomach-turning horror that makes overtraining seem like simple recovery between intervals. The dry well is the existential crisis that causes you to ask the unthinkable: “Why do I even bother?”

And yet, the reprieve is always around the corner. Whether it’s the ’89 Kona race, a rerun of the Olympics watching Conrad Stoltz break away on the bike in Sydney or a warm day too beautiful not to ride, we all have our triggers. Thank heaven. And for all the heartache of the empty well, we can suddenly find ourselves seeing once again the natural order of the world. Sport is a thing of beauty, a potent antidote to the world’s ills, an eternal E-ticket to happiness.

As if we were hawks out there on the thermals, one good experience begets another and another. We’re easier to live with, if utterly verbose about our exploits. We conduct our days more efficiently as we divide the day between being out there and the activities that support it, and all the rest.

So powerful is the full well that we find cues to even more motivation in elements as simple as the open road/field/pool. That shouldn’t strike us as a surprise, though. It was always thus: Half our love of sport is a love of the open road/field/pool itself and that ribbon of real estate is life unfolding in an ever unexpected way.