Woot! I’m giving away 3 copies of Whitney Johnson’s new book, Dare, Dream, Do. Leave a comment or send a tweet, and you’re entered to win. Drawing closes on at midnight on Monday, May 21 (EST). I’ll announce the winners on Tuesday morning, May 22.

From my years of practicing law, I learned to love the very things that comprise Whitney’s book: precision of thought; solid arguments, clearly articulated and supported by real-world facts and meticulous research; beautiful words, carefully chosen and defined; laser focus on the real issues; and, most importantly, work done in pursuit of the truth.

Dare Dream Do encompasses all of these things. What’s more, it’s prescriptive, in that it answers these basic questions: What’s the problem? and What are we going to do about it?

What we’re all wondering

In keeping with the title, the book dares, dreams, and does – by tackling what we’re all quietly wondering:

• Who am I now and who do I want to be?
• Do I matter?
• How can I get beyond self-doubt?
• What’s possible? What would I have to learn and do to attain it?
• What are my strengths and how can I channel them into something the world needs?
• Can I do what others are doing – or haven’t done yet? Am I smart enough? Worthy enough?
• Is it O.K. to dare? To dream? To do?
• Do I need someone’s permission or approval?
• What if I figured out what it is, and then just did it?

We all wonder about some or all of these things because it’s the way of the world. That’s why this book is for you and all of us – especially if you’re a parent or a teacher, or if you play a role in coaching, leading, or encouraging people.

Double dare you to read it.

OVER TO YOU: Are you happy where you are, personally or career-wise? Do you dream? Or won’t you even dare to? What are you doing? What haven’t you done yet? What about the list of questions in this post? Which ones do you ask yourself? What answers come to you? What else do you think and wonder about? See you in the comments.

Remember – this is a giveaway! Leave a comment or send a tweet, and you’re entered to win a copy of Dare, Dream, Do. Drawing closes on at midnight on Monday, May 21 (EST). I’ll announce the winners on Tuesday morning, May 22.

The title of this post and the inspiring verse below are borrowed from the book The Gardens of Democracy, by Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer, to whom I am grateful.


Long ago, I had a cottage by the sea where I grew beautiful flowers in the sandy soil. One day I pulled so many weeds from this little patch of earth that I had to call a guy with a truck to come take them all away. Some I’d wrested, roots and all, with a gentle tug. Others were thorny, rope-like vines requiring a hand-over-fist pull from the invisible depths below. With those, I’d pull and pull, and eventually dig my pruners in and cut somewhere, releasing a winding, scratchy yield for the debris pile that eventually dwarfed me.

Is there a metaphor here somewhere?

With all the posts here lately about mindfulness and flow, you may have guessed that I’m leading up to a garden metaphor. If you did, you’re right. Here’s the gist of it: The mind is like a garden; weeds are the unproductive, depleting thoughts running through it; we’re the gardeners, responsible for deciding what stays and what goes.

Gardenbrain vs. machinebrain

A garden metaphor is useful in many contexts. The Gardens of Democracy is based on one. Liu and Hanauer liken the economy to an ecosystem that requires decision, responsibility, and action on our part, in much the way a garden does.

They call this perspective gardenbrain. Its opposite is machinebrain, or the view that the economy is a self-correcting, cog-and-gear-like machine that needs little input from us.

We can liken the mind to an ecosystem as well. An ecosystem is a community of organisms that function and interact in the same environment. If we substitute the word “thoughts” for “organisms,” we get a good working definition of the mind.

The question then becomes, are we gardenbrain or machinebrain? In other words, what do we believe when it comes to the role we play in our own thoughts, and thus, our own lives?
Read More

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who rallied in this giveaway. What an amazing response! The 10 winners are: @fromLorensHeart, @campingjewel, Jason Beck, Luke Rhodes, Rachel D, Jacqueline, Nate, Mike, Josh, and Joel. Just email me your address and I’ll send your book right out to you. Note: In case you’re new to this post, the giveaway ran from May 9−15, 2012. The comments are still active, though, so feel free to weigh in on Chris’s book or anything you like!

Missed my stop

A funny thing happened on my bus ride home from the book store today.  I missed my stop because I was busily highlighting and flagging pages in Chris’s book.  Why didn’t I buy one
at the book launch in New York last night? Because they sold out. For this giveaway, I bought out the entire stock at Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side.

Why am I doing this? Because of Chris, and what he does, and how he does it. He’s a true gentleman. Despite his massive following, he doesn’t think it’s all about him. He cares about other people and the world. He shares a huge amount of useful information for free. He teaches others how to do great things. He’s just as interested in people who buy from him as those who don’t.  Simply stated, he has really nice flow.  If you check out his website, you’ll see why he gets 300,000 visitors a month.

Really? A start up for $100?

The last time I missed my stop was on a subway ride downtown, reading Anything You Want by Derek Sivers. It’s long been a favorite, along with Rework by Jason Fried. These two books, along with Chris’s, comprise what I strongly believe are the top 3 best reads for people who want to transform an idea into a professional endeavor.

Chris takes a different approach from Derek and Jason, though. His book is a true blueprint for creating a microbusiness on a shoestring, complete with charts, graphs, stories, and, best of all, case studies of real-life instances where people have found a way to do what they love, on their own terms, using their current skills and very little money.

As Chris explains, thriving microbusinesses are built on convergence, or finding the intersection between: 1) what you’re good at – even if you you don’t
consider it an “expertise” – and 2) what people will pay for.

His basic principles: action beats planning; improve what works and ignore what doesn’t; partner with others so you can be in more than one place at the same time; stay
small or scale up; it just keeps getting better.

Fish & Oranges

Summing up, without giving anything away, it’s all about fish and oranges.

Intrigued? Hope so. Once you have the book, you can read it in one sitting, as I just did, or take your time with it. Once you do, you’ll be on your way to turning your ideas into something very real – and changing your life through your own actions.

OVER TO YOU: Are you happy with where you are professionally? Do you have an idea for a product or a service? Have you ever thought about building your own business around it, or have you actually started? What’s helped, or held you back? Have you read Chris’s book? If not, how does it sound to you?

This post is the first in an ongoing series.

Welcome to the human mind, where things are seriously out of whack. We take the good with the bad all right, but we do so asymmetrically.

Whenever we attempt something, we experience setbacks and progress. The problem is that setbacks resonate more. Way more. They’re more noticeable to us than progress, and their emotional impact is greater. Specifically:

• Setbacks decrease happiness twice as powerfully as progress increases it.
• Setbacks increase frustration 3 times more powerfully than progress decreases it.

What this means

Consider these examples:

• If you’re trying to lose weight, the scale readings that show you’ve plateaued will deflate you more than good readings will encourage you.
• If you’re learning a new skill – like cycling in a pack, for example – falling behind at one point will stand out more in your mind than the hours you spent doing a great job keeping up with everyone.
• If you’re running a business, losing a client or getting hit with criticism will crush you more than a new client or glowing testimony will rock your world.

Is it really that bad?

Yes. Here’s a brief synopsis of the mind, from guru of flow, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi:

Contrary to what we tend to assume, the normal state of the mind is chaos. Without training, people are unable to focus their thoughts for more than a few minutes at a time …. Unless a person knows how to give order to his or her own thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment: it will focus on some real or imaginary pain, or recent grudges or long-term frustrations.

To avoid this condition, people are naturally eager to fill their minds with whatever information is available …. This explains why such a huge proportion of time is invested in [TV, Facebook, web surfing, etc.]. …. The better route for avoiding chaos in consciousness, of course, is through habits that give [us] control over mental processes ….

What to do

According to Csikszentmihalyi, there is no trait more likely to improve the quality of our lives than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge. He refers to this trait as the ability to cheat chaos, or transformational coping, for short. Like all skills, this one comes more easily to some than others, but we all can practice and improve at it over time. So let’s get started, shall we? Its 3 components serve as a list of things to work on:
Read More

This post is part of the 30 Day Challenges series. The how and why of these challenges is explained in this handy primer. There’s no set start date for any challenge. Begin whenever you like.

Fast track to enlightenment

This challenge lets us practice the basic skill that underlies the Search Inside Yourself course taught at Google. As I wrote earlier this week, S.I.Y., as it’s called, has rocked the Googleplex. It’s been the fast track to enlightenment for scores of employees who’ve clued into mindfulness and gone on from there to do and experience great things.

Like what? Well, they’ve gotten better at their work, become more creative, learned to listen better, and ditched their tempers. They understand situations better, empathize with people before jumping to conclusions, and feel more connected to colleagues and clients.

And, so they’ve discovered, it all carries over into your personal life. It changes your take on happiness. Happiness is no longer something you pursue – it’s something you allow. Happiness comes from neutral things because you make it so – just by appreciating whatever is there, in the moment – from people you like, to work you enjoy, to food that tastes good.

Mindfulness – what it is

The course is accessible to everyone now via the new book by Chad-Meng Tan (Meng), Google’s resident enlightener. But we don’t need the book to get started. We can begin right now, just by getting a taste of mindfulness.

But first we need to know what mindfulness is. It’s very simple. Mindfulness is paying attention moment to moment without judging.

Hmmmm – looks like this is going to take some practice, given that we’re often pretty distracted or judgmental (or both). The trouble is that our attention naturally gravitates to things that are either very pleasant or very unpleasant. With practice, though, we can train our minds to do something better, namely exist in a state of relaxed concentration. When we can do that, happiness can become the default state of mind.

Mindfulness – how to get there

The good news is that are two ways to practice: the Easy Way and the Easier Way. Chose one or combine them.
Read More