Awareness

Since I meditate daily and organize a group that meets regularly in person in Manhattan, I end up talking about meditation a fair amount. It turns out that people can mean many different things when they say meditation. To meditate can mean to sit and pay attention to your breath, to focus on a mantra, to ponder a koan, to reflect on life, to plan your day, or any number of mental activities. It may involve sitting still, walking, eating, focusing on a task or ritual. Your eyes may be open or closed, you might listen to a recording or try to create silence, you might write notes or eschew recording anything. You may follow a tradition from any number of people, places, and times.…

I have to follow up the last two days' posts with the most important results from knowing and living by your values: more free time and saving resources, especially money. I'll repeat it because nearly everyone responds to the idea of learning their values with how they respond to nearly everything that takes work. They say they don't have the time or money to, or lack some other resource. The most important results from knowing and living by your values are more free time and saving resources, especially money. Once you get the pattern, it becomes obvious. Before you get it, it might seem too good to be true. Then you realize that distraction from your values leads to chasing shiny objects and being hooked…

I have to clarify and add to yesterday's post, If you don’t know your priorities, you’re mostly moving away from what you care about most. In it I wrote "If you can’t distinguish which of your top ten priorities is the top, you’re spending 90 percent of your life moving away from what you value most. I’d bet most Americans spend most of their time and other resources on things that detract from a better life." Time spent working on low priority projects is time detracted from high priority ones. The college students I mentioned yesterday who flit from project to project are mostly not working on what they value most. They likely don't know what they value most if they work that way. You…

My book Initiative helps people learn their deepest values and greatest passions by acting on them. I'm consistently surprised at how poorly people know their greatest passions, even shocked. It makes sense, since the things we care about most are also our greatest vulnerabilities, so we often protect and hide them, even from ourselves. The benefit of protecting ourselves is we don't get made fun of, manipulated, or otherwise hurt. The cost is that we don't live our greatest values. We do more small talk, less intimacy. Combine that lack of awareness with a culture that markets everything as desirable and many people chase things they don't care about, unable to distinguish mere shiny objects from life passions. The quintessential illustration is the college student…