How do you know what"s important to you?

How do you know what"s important to you?

Just look at your actions. Words are cheap. Only what you do counts, only what you do testifies about what is important to you.

Do all actions count? Talking, thinking, watching videos?

Only to a certain degree.

One of the people who have inspired me for many years is Werner Erhard, despite his many shortcomings.

What did he do?

He had hundreds of projects at different stages of development. Some were just ideas, others were ready to run on their own without much input from him.

What he did is this: he "injected" some energy, with some action, into each of them, at least a few times a week.

Tiny actions. None taking longer than two minutes of his time.

This two minutes thing is, by the way, from David Allen of Getting Things Done fame. I have been following this "rule" for two decades, and it is a life-saver.

Your mind, your spouse, your emails will suggest actions all the time... ok, some of them even DEMAND actions.

These demands fragment your life and make you run around like a chicken without a head... the rhythm and design of your day is gone, and you are gathering the pieces.

Nothing needs to get done in that same minute, unless it is a broken water main, or a fire. On most tasks, projects, ideas, you can separate out a tiny piece that takes less than two minutes to do. And do that... Two minutes is not long enough to destroy your day... especially if you can remember what you are about... and that may be an issue when it comes to your life. You don"t remember what you are about. You are rudderless, drifting...

So if that is you, your most important task is to take two minutes many times a day, and close your eyes, and dis-identify yourself from the thoughts, the voices, the noise in your head. Two minutes is often enough to get preset that you are none of that... and even if it doesn"t happen inside the two minutes, diligent practice will take you there.

Of course if you are one of those people who think that your thoughts are important... then I can"t help you. You are on your own. Until you get that thoughts are automatic, and have nothing to do with you, you cannot be saved from the meaningless rushed life you are living.

You are going fast nowhere.

Sometimes all you need to do is remind yourself of who you said you have chosen to be. So you pull yourself out of the horizontal and default life you have as an alternative.

I have two projects that are so many steps, one can"t know where to start.

And when that is the case, doing one small 2-minute task on it is all it takes to keep it alive.

For example my 10% increase plan... I am stuck on the first step: drive more "suspects" to my site. I don"t know how... So instead of being stuck there, I have been doing 2-minute mini tasks on the six other areas of business... while one directly related is: asking myself the question: so how do you drive suspects to your site? And while I have been doing this every day for the past week, I had an insight: the way I drive people now is a dead end... so there is time to do something different. That is a result I would not have gotten to, hadn"t I asked the question every day.

One of my students who is an amazing idea machine (generates new ideas fast!) is stuck on a kind of idea generation for a week now. I asked him: generate different question for a while, instead of generating answers to questions someone else has asked.

Asking questions is very counter to many people"s nature: with questions you expose yourself to getting killed... so you have learned not to ask deep questions...

But you will never become all you can become if you are afraid of getting killed. In fact, 99.999999% the fear of the idea of getting killed... losing a relationship, losing a client, losing a friend.

You don"t eat the porridge as hot as you made it... There seems to be no equivalent of this Hungarian saying in English. But the meaning is important to know.

There is always a fear when you do anything that it will be harmful... but unless you are utterly stupid and have no control of your mouth, you won"t burn it... you can allow some time to see what you cooked up.

In reality, stews are better the next day... and that should teach you something.

Fear is exaggerated and inhibits asking question.

I often ask questions about severing relationships with using, abusing clients, students, and then let the question hang there.

Only a small percentage of the time do they remain relevant enough to require some action... even though when I cooked up the question, the answer was a definite: kick them out... lol.

Obviously one of the feared answers to your new question is that you are no good, you"ll never amount to anything, and it is all in vain to do this work... or some other work.

It is never true, or not 100%. You always have choices... but it"s a process, and may take years to change something about yourself that you hate.

One of the books on my bookshelf in my bedroom, an orange book, talks about the plasticity of the brain. You are, your brain, is designed to change itself. Just challenge it differently and it will do the job.

It"s a process, of course.

If your whole world view is about magical instant changes, you"ll be very discouraged, because that is not the nature of reality.

And if you hope in miracles, you"ll never be consistent enough to reach any worthwhile results, because the brain is looking for consistency, and discounts campaigns or sporadic weak attempts.