Four Simple Ways to Find Peace in Your Daily Life
I do quite a bit of traveling for my job. In the past when I arrived at an airport, I immediately beat feet to my next gate. If it was meal time I scarfed something down on the way or at my gate. I realized at some point that this sense of urgency, while sometimes necessary, is normally a waste of energy. Worse, it robs me of some of the best parts of traveling. Most journeys are worth savoring. The reality is I don’t really need to be at my gate until 20 minutes before departure. These days I do my best to enjoy airports. I take in the art. I research the best meal options and eat healthy. I notice people and try to help them. This realization about artificial urgency got me thinking: How else do I manufacture urgency that isn’t really there? And I came up with four ways to put urgency in its place and embrace a more peaceful way to live. Schedule it for later. I like an empty inbox, but must I respond to every email before moving it out of my inbox? Why not store the email where I can easily find it and block out some time later in the week for crafting a response? Know the timeline. I often feel urgency about a project because I don’t really know its timeline. I have a vague sense it needs to get done, so the project constantly nags at me. Better to take five minutes to look at or determine the timeline. Then schedule a day or couple hours to work on it. Drop the comparisons. Whenever my wife and I learn that some other child of an age similar to our own is doing something our child isn’t, we immediately feel this impulse to act. “Gotta get that done,” we think. “Or our kid will be missing out!” It’s simply not true. There’s a time for everything, and what’s most important is that we are present to our children—not that we are shuttling them to this that and the other thing. Cultivate simplicity and gratitude. I need that boat! That car! That house! That iPad! That smart phone! Wait, do I really? What about simplicity and enjoying what I already have? The problem with fake urgency is it robs us of being truly present whenever and wherever we are. The present is where peace is. Right here and now. Hopefully these practices will help you reduce artificial urgency and experience a little more peace today. How have you reduced fake urgency in your life? What practices help you experience more peace?
Reviewing 2012, Dreaming about 2013
I started this blog back in mid-August, 2012. I had been thinking about blogging for a while, and then these three books pushed me over the edge (I highly recommend all three; these images are attached to affiliate links): My idea was to write about writing, publishing, and creativity, and my commitment (to myself as much as anyone else) was to post twice a week. I wrote four or five weeks’ worth of posts offline to make sure I could sustain that rhythm, and I did, so off I went. Jon Acuff says when you’re starting out, measure hustle not hits. That advice was key. I managed to post twice a week throughout the year with the exception of one week when my laptop was on the fritz. I can’t say I’m equally pleased with all the posts I wrote, but I am pleased with keeping up this pace. This is my forty-first post. I’m no veteran (Rachel Held Evans has written over a thousand!), but I hereby declare I am no longer a baby. We have liftoff. I want to do a shout-out to my wife, Alyssa, and two children. The way I sustain this posting pace is to get up early two or three times a week and head to a coffeeshop or diner. This means that on these days my wife and children do not see me when they wake up. It also means Alyssa has to get the kids ready for the day by herself on these days. Their sacrifice is significant, and I’m grateful for it. I looked for guest-posting opportunities and ended up posting on Rachelle Gardner’s as well as Todd Henry’s blog. Another highlight was being interviewed on Cynthia Herron’s blog. I used four web-based tools, in addition to WordPress, that were really helpful: NetVibes, Buffer, Twitter, and Facebook. I moved my personal Facebook page to a business page to deal with the weirdness of whether to accept friend requests from folks I don’t know. I became enamored with such blogs as Copyblogger, Problogger, and Blogging with Amy. Props to Erin Ulrich for recommending that last one. In terms of my content mix, my traffic stats clearly indicate people look to me for writing, publishing, and creativity advice. I love doing the occasional “life” post too, so I’ll keep doing that. In my first post I wrote “my deep hope is that this blog will help you. What would knock my socks off is if this space became a gathering place for a community of people who helped and supported one another on the creative journey.” I’m still really energized by this vision. Following are the most popular posts of 2012: The Very First Thing I Look at in Your Book Proposal and Why Why Traditional Publishing Should Be Kissing Self-ePublishing’s Feet I Want to Be Your Book Proposal Coach The #1 Reason We Turn Books Down . . . And How It Can Help You Get Published How to Come Up with a Great Book Concept Looking ahead to 2013 . . . I can’t wait to help someone write a book proposal. I promise my next post will be about just that. I would like to do some more guest-posting in 2013. I often think about giving my site a design upgrade, which means I would need some way to monetize the blog, so I’ve been thinking about writing an inexpensive self-published ebook. I want to keep exploring ways I can generate community via blog posts. I’d like to do a video of some kind at some point in the year. And of course I want to write some awesome content that is useful to people! If there is something in particular you’d like me to write about, do let me know. Thanks to all of you who check in on this blog. Keep the comments coming! I’ll keep trying to be helpful to you, and we’ll see where the journey takes us. By the way, if you’re looking for a tool that will help you review 2012 and dream about 2013, check out this one by Susanna Conway.
Why the Right Motivation Matters for Your Book Proposal
Over the next several posts I want to provide a more or less step-by-step process for creating a compelling book proposal. I will do my best to make the process as practical and simple as I can. If you have a book proposal in process, or if you have been thinking about trying to get published, this series is for you. And if you know of someone who would benefit from this series, I hope you’ll let them know about it. The very first thing to look at in writing a book proposal is your motivation. Now you might say, “That’s easy. My motivation is to get published!” And that makes sense, of course, but I see two problems with this motivation. It is author oriented instead of reader oriented. Nothing is inherently wrong with wanting to get published, but do you see the difference between this motivation and one that is about serving readers? If you focus on getting a contract in the mail or seeing your name in print, you’ll write one kind of proposal. If you focus on serving readers, you’ll write a very different, and much better, book proposal. It is short-sighted. Let’s say you succeed and get published. If your vision doesn’t go beyond that, your book is likely to fail in the marketplace, and that will be the end of your writing career. Here we can learn something from the wikiHow on how to chop wood with your bare hands: “Don’t aim at the board itself; if you do that, your hand will tend to stop there. Aim your strike six inches beyond the board.” Breaking the board becomes a byproduct of striking beyond the board. Your goal as a writer is to concept and write and promote a book that performs well in the marketplace. If your proposal reflects this motivation, getting published will be a byproduct. In other words, the subtext of your proposal should not be, “Hey publisher, give me a chance!” It should be “Hey publisher, I’m on a mission to help readers, and here’s my freaking awesome plan to reach them.” Let’s start there. With this goal in mind, the next step is equally important: coming up with a great concept.
What Happens When We Write Down Our Dreams
About a year ago I read a book that had a massive impact on the way I do life. It’s called The Accidental Creative (AL) by Todd Henry, and if you’re a friend who sees me regularly, you’re sick of hearing me talk about it. Among the practices Todd commends in the book is that of weekly, monthly, and quarterly checkpoints. These checkpoints are basically way stations on the road of life where you step back and assess where you are, where you’re going, and what your priorities should be in light of such. For the quarterly checkpoint, Todd recommends spending some time answering this question: What would blow your mind if it happened? The idea behind this is that if you take the time to write these things down, they are much more likely to happen. I’ve answered with activities like running the Chicago marathon, starting a microbusiness, jumping out of an airplane, and going to Switzerland with my wife. And then there’s one that I get to check off today. Here it is: guest posting on AccidentalCreative.com It really is a dream come true. I’ll leave you with two things. First, I hope you’ll check out my post at AC. Second, I encourage you to begin writing down a list of things that would blow your mind if they happened. Because you just never know . . . And why not get started here? What would blow your mind if it happened?
Is This the Life You Want?
Recently my wife and I watched a movie called “I’m Fine, Thanks.” It’s a documentary about several people who reach a breaking point in life and respond by doing something unconventional. Several of the featured people achieve financial success but realize they’re miserable. One couple decides to pay cash for a 300-square-foot house and focus on simplicity. One man decides to ditch a prosperous career as an attorney to start a yoga studio in New York City. A family decides to drop everything and start riding their bikes; they ride from the Pacific Northwest to South America. Themes in the film include having the courage to pursue your dreams, downsizing, not delaying your dreams until retirement, getting away from the tyranny of material possessions, unconventional living, and the importance of spending time with one’s children. See the trailer below. I’m Fine, Thanks – Trailer from Grant Peelle on Vimeo. It was the kind of film that makes you think—about your life, about the choices you’ve made, about the path you’re on. It’s the kind of film that compels you to ask, Is this the life I want? The film reveals the enormous pressure we are under to live a certain way. The difficulty of coming into awareness of this pressure cannot be overestimated. It’s like a fish becoming aware of the water it swims in. Fact is, if that water becomes really polluted, the fish becomes aware of it very quickly and, I suspect, does all it can to find clean water. But if the water has a low level of pollution, the fish probably just lives with it, right? It swims on, does the aquatic equivalent of coughing every now and again, and that’s it. That’s what I do. That’s what we do. We sense the life we’re in is slightly messed up, slightly off center, but it’s not terrible. We can manage it. Cough. It’s okay. So we settle. Cough. We get up the next morning. Cough, cough. Brew the coffee and do what we have to do to pay the rent or mortgage. But there’s this little voice in the back of our minds. It’s subtle; it’s inaudible most of the time. But it’s there. And it whispers, “You don’t have to do this. There is another way.” I’ll ask you the same question I’m asking myself: What’s one thing you can do today to turn the volume up on that little voice?
How Tension Can Lead You to Life
Take two breaths. I’m going to show you where one of them comes from. It all starts (and ends) with phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are single-cell organisms that float throughout our planet’s oceans. Billions of them. And they have a nemesis: viruses. Here’s what happens. Viruses try to batter their way through the outer shells of the phytoplankton. If a given virus succeeds, it hijacks the phytoplankton’s machinery for the purpose of creating more viruses. Then multiple viruses are created within the poor phytoplankton, and the phytoplankton gives up the ghost. The outer shell of the phytoplankton sloughs off, and you can actually see this from space. No joke. Check this out: The milky blue-green substance you see, often called a “phytoplankton bloom,” is millions and millions of phytoplankton shells, having rained off upon their erstwhile owners’ death. Interesting, right? Maybe a little gruesome? When I told this story to my boss, he grimaced in sincere disgust at the devilish deeds of those vile viruses. Except, as it turns out, the story has a happy ending. You see, when those phytoplankton die off, space is created for new phytoplankton to build up. And every time a new phytoplankton is born, a little puff of oxygen is released into our atmosphere. Half the oxygen we breathe comes from this process. Every other breath you take comes from phytoplankton. Thanks again to those masters of scientific wonder, Jad and Robert, at RadioLab, for their story. The whole thing got me thinking. It got me thinking about the tension between phytoplankton and viruses, and how the result of this tension is oxygen. It got me thinking about the tension between cooks and servers, and how the result of healthy tension between them is a tasty meal served in timely fashion. It got me thinking about the tension between editorial and marketing, and how the ideal result is incredible content with a title and cover that capture the world’s attention. It made me think about the tension between editors and authors. Authors write stuff, editors push back at various points, and the result of this tension is often (not always, but often) a much better book. I see a distinction between tension and stress. Tension comes from two free-standing bodies that push against one another. Stress is pressure a body feels within itself. Big difference. But it does make me wonder: Can we transform stress into tension? Can we externalize internal pressure that we’re feeling so that it becomes more productive? Notice too that sometimes (and I think this is probably more often the case than not) something has to die before the oxygen is released. You might ask yourself, what needs to die for you to move forward? A few more questions. Do you have some tension in your life right now? Are you struggling with a creative project? Are you anxious about what’s going to happen, what to do next, who’s going to win, where you’re going to go? Remember the phytoplankton and the viruses. Remember: oxygen. Tension is the precursor to something better. Tension can lead you to life. When has tension resulted in life for you? How can you “embrace the tension” right now on the way to something better?
How Imitation Leads to Innovation
A couple of years ago I decided to change the combination ceiling fan/light fixture in our kitchen. Normally this is a mundane task at best. Honestly I don’t much enjoy doing household repair work, and I’m not particularly gifted at it, either. When I take on a project like this, my goal is to finish without breaking something in the house or in my body! But this time was different. It was different because my son, three years old at the time, decided he had a project too. He strapped on his little work apron, grabbed his plastic tools, watched what I was doing, and went to it. What made the whole thing special is my wife snapped a picture that remains one of our favorites. Imitation is natural for kids; they do it all the time. And it delights us. I remember the first time my one-year-old daughter blew a kiss. She had seen us do it hundreds if not thousands of times, and finally she decided to try it herself. We were ecstatic when she reached up to her lips and made the small smacking sound. So what happened? Why are we adults so afraid to imitate? Why must we insist on being totally original? Why are we embarrassed when we look to another and do our own version of what they are doing? I think it’s because we want to be seen as more developed, more mature at something than we are. We want the world to see that we are far enough along in our craft that we do not need to imitate. The reality, though, is if we do not start with imitation, we likely will never make it to true innovation. I’m not suggesting plagiarism or copyright infringement or anything of the kind, but what I am saying is this: Don’t be afraid to be inspired by the work of another person. Don’t be ashamed to look at what they are doing and then do your own version. Maybe someday we will be so proficient at our particular trade that we won’t need to look to others. We will do our thing, and the world will jump to their feet in applause. In the meantime, look around. Find people who are doing interesting things—things that inspire you. Then grab your little work apron, your plastic tools, watch what they do, and get to it. Who inspires you?