I’ve been wondering for a long time when it would be important to clarify this, and as it turns out, now’s the time. This is very important:

You’re the one who decides whether I’m talking to you.

You’re the one who decides whether the things I say are relevant, whether they apply to you and your circumstances. It’s up to you to decide whether it’s right and appropriate for you to act on them. The fact that I’ve said them is a very small part of the equation. (In fact, it pretty much means nothing at all.)

You’re the only one who can make decisions about how you live your life. I can’t do it for you—I couldn’t if I wanted to. (And I don’t.)

The truth is, most of my blogging here is an exercise in talking to myself. I started out doing this for me, and I still am—even though there is now an amazing group of incredibly appreciative people that I keep in mind when I think about what I should write next. Still, I’m writing for my own sake.

If you’re listening, please listen for yours.

So if we’re talking about obligation, yes, I do feel obligated—in a truly positive way—to experience bonkers, amazing growth in a whole ton of different ways. I realize that the strange contrast between that positive obligation and other “obligations” I perceive as negative is absolutely nuts. But for now, that positive obligation is important to me. When I write here, I’m speaking to the people who resonate on my frequency. If you don’t, find something else that makes you feel good, helps you solve problems, teaches you more about yourself, and leads you in the right direction (for you).

My job is to say what I think. If it’s useful, run with it. If it’s not, let it go. If you get something out of it, stick around. If you don’t, go on about your business. We’re cool. :}

Ironically, these days I seem to be all about obligation.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m totally anti-obligation when it comes to the little unnecessary things we put on ourselves, trap ourselves into, or let rule our lives. I have to, I need to, I’d better. It’s been hard for me to balance that dissatisfaction with my very urgent, very powerful visceral certainty that there are some things we are in fact, obligated to do. That we must do. Things that change the world. Biological imperatives, you might call them.

I think it might be that I realized what obligation is for. It’s not for guilting you into doing somebody’s homework. It’s for identifying truly amazing opportunities for growth and happiness… and SEIZING them. Making your place in the world worth the carbon, oxygen and nutrients that built you. Moving forward.

And all of that is just my prelude to saying this: If you applied for Seth’s Alternative MBA and won’t be going to New York in January, you have an obligation to do something just as incredible. (I sure as hell do.)

Part of me is doing this familiar, boring little dance. Now that I’m home, it wants me to settle back into the status quo, do all the normal things, whine, fear, routine. Go back to old habits, pick up my old life. But that thing that it wants is stale. Broken. Easy, but stagnant. It’s not what I need—not what will help me grow.

If you hear me saying it to you, chances are I’m saying it to myself, too. Do NOT let your life “go back to normal”. Do NOT relinquish the mad drive that got you this far. You can stay in the brilliant space you’ve been occupying for the last few weeks—you don’t need the !MBA to do it. You don’t even need Seth to do it. (PROMISE.)

Come on, folks. Let’s get some shit done.

“It is much worse than that. The constant reminder of “a million things to do and no time to do them” can worry you not only into tension and fatigue, but it can also worry you into high blood pressure, heart trouble, and stomach ulcers.

Dr. John H. Stokes, professor, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, read a paper before the National Convention of the American Medical Association—a paper entitled “Functional Neuroses as Complications of Organic Disease.” In that paper, Dr. Stokes listed eleven conditions under the title: “What to Look for in the Patient’s State of Mind.” Here is the first item on that list:

The sense of must or obligation; the unending stretch of things ahead that simply have to be done.

~ Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Like you needed statistics or hard evidence to convince me!

Have you noticed the running theme? We are presented with a mountain of obligation and instead of spurring us on to deal with its massiveness, we are cowed into inaction. There’s nowhere to start, so we don’t start. But this thing is bigger than just our wont to procrastinate. Banishing this monster may also banish the source of our worry and misery. We want to banish this monster!

The first thing I’ve done is implement a Usual Error technique, to be discussed in-depth in a future post: language reform! If I express obligation in any way, one of several potential helpers (including myself) may say, “Would you like to rephrase that more positively?” And immediately the landscape of my brain is changed, and I do not say “I have to do this thing… I should do this thing…” I instead say, “I want to do this thing! I would like to do this thing!” And then I find out if I really want to do it.

And sometimes I don’t do it.

But most of the time, I do do it. And when that happens, it takes on a completely different feeling, not a feeling of obligation and entrapment and inevitability, but instead this feeling of control, a feeling that I hold power over myself and my destiny and, well, my work day! Even the ickiest responsibility is transformed because I have actively made a decision to do that thing, I have decided that I want to do that thing.

And if ultimately I really, truly didn’t want to do it… it was not important enough to be done.

In the Carnegie book I linked to before I got excited about the Usual Error material, above, he goes on to talk about useful ways of dealing with the mountain. For instance, he presents various evidence and his strong suggestion that our personal environment, at home or at work, contributes dramatically to our feeling of obligation (and therefore our undoing!). A clean desk occupied only by the specific, immediate work at hand is a huge solution. A time of day to plan your strategy is also mentioned over and over. My time of day is the early hours of the morning, I’m beginning to notice. When I work late and sleep late, I seem to muddle through most of my day… but when I go to bed at a reasonable hour I tend to wake up, ping, at a certain early hour, and immediately focus my mind on what needs to be done. This morning I woke up and outlined a project for each hour of this fabulous Wednesday, feeling gleefully clear and concentrated, wanting to do this and that and the other thing. For you, it might be better to plan your day the night before, or a few days in advance. What is your particular rhythm? Doesn’t that sound like it might be worth finding out?

In addition to all that, it may be worth sitting down once a week and looking at the goods and bads. This has never been something I wanted to do all that much until I realized how clear it made my thinking. I made a meme-like post not long ago that feels related now. What did I do well? What did I fuck up? How will I do better? Hell, I might like to do this sort of thing every day! It could have an incredible effect on the way I deal with everything under the sun. That feeling you have when you distinctly recall a past reaction, or something you read, and then you all of a sudden change what you usually do into something new and brave, I could have that feeling all the time if I just paid a bit more attention. It’s worth thinking about. And every time I succeed, I want more to succeed again. And suddenly things I felt obligated to do before, I actually desire to do now.

I know I go all evangelical and rambling on you when I make these posts. But this material makes me so excited. It’s such good stuff! It makes me feel good just thinking about it. Well, obviously—I’ve spent the last half hour telling you about it, ha ha. :P