The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional Strategies for Life, Work, and Travel

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Even on the path to your ideal world, things don’t always go the way you would like them to. All of us learn of bad news from time to time. The stock market will crash, or an expected job opportunity will disappear. Something that has always been easy suddenly becomes hard.

It happens all the time, and it helps to be prepared to deal with challenges before they arrive. Asking yourself the following questions will help you refocus and know how to move forward when something isn’t going the way you wish it was.

Where is my security?

This is a good time to realize that your security should not be in tangible things. If your security is money, you will always be threatened by the possibility of losing it. You will likely not be satisfied with the amount of money you have, and your emotions may be affected by the fluctuations of your bank account.

A better security lies in knowing who you are and what you want to do in life. Therefore, the next important question gets at those answers.

Where is my identity?

Who are you? What are you here for? What do you want to do, ultimately? Your identity should shape everything about you—how you spend your time, your work, your priorities, and everything else. Check out the books Finding Your Own North Star and Wishcraft for some good life planning ideas.

If you already have a good idea of who you are, now is a good time to remind yourself of that image. If you can center in on what’s important to you in the midst of bad news, and that image brings you comfort, you know you’re doing something right. Hard times will pass, but your “north star” will still be there.

Can I change the terms of this situation?

There are two kinds of challenges: those where you can take action to remedy the situation, and those where you are relatively powerless. It’s always good to know which kind of challenge you are facing. If you can influence the situation for the better, you can then make a plan for change. If you can’t, then you can move to a plan for acceptance of the bad news.

If the stock market crashes, you probably can’t fix that yourself. But you can change your investment strategy, get out of the stock market altogether, decide to be a true long-term investor and not worry about it, or do any number of other things to change the terms of the situation.

Who else is affected by this situation?

You are usually not the only one affected when something in your life goes off track. Make a mental list of who else is dealing with the effects of bad news. If you really can’t change the terms of the situation, maybe you can at least help someone else. This is especially important when the event that caused you hardship is completely out of your hands. The bad news may be out of your hands, but if other people are also affected, you can probably do something to help them.

***

Every morning I ask myself two questions:

1) How am I feeling?
2) What do I want?

I sometimes use these as journal prompts, and sometimes I just think about them briefly while writing out my projects and tasks for the day. I find that by asking myself the questions, it causes me to realize things that were not actively on my mind before I started.

I often want productivity. I want to get things done, and move ahead on projects. In those cases, the answer to my “What do I want?” question involves making a list of what I want to accomplish. I base this list on the two or three most important projects on my mind that day, and I find that if I am able to complete them or at least make good progress during the day, I’ll feel better later.

Sometimes I want something completely different, and by thinking about these questions, I may realize that I don’t feel very productive. I may need to rest, or exercise, or go to the coffee shop. I may need to spend more time reading and journaling.

When the world isn’t going your way, recognize that it’s usually a temporary state. Getting through it and back on track to your ideal world may not be easy, but if you’ve set big goals for yourself (along with goals that involve helping others), you can usually make it happen. Others are counting on you.

And you owe it to yourself, too.

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This is a lesson on how to look absolutely ridiculous in front of a crowd of strangers, and how to recover as gracefully as possible. Well, let’s clarify that a bit: the first part is easy, since I am constantly making stupid mistakes all over the world and trying to minimize the embarrassment. I have no shortage of experience in the dumb-things-I’ve-done-in-random-countries department.

The second part of the lesson is more important: how to recover from your own Most Embarrassing Moment. Anyone can do stupid things, as I tell myself pretty much every time I travel and get lost somewhere. It’s the brave ones who are able to recover.

I decided to tell this story because I was talking to a friend the other day who recently had her own Most Embarrassing Moment. I told her this story, and she smiled a little. You know who you are.

So, enough procrastinating. Here you have it – how to look like a complete idiot in a foreign setting.

The setting for my Most Embarrassing Moment was Singapore.

I arrived in the city state of Singapore from Bangkok after visiting Burma (Myanmar) for several days. The trip to Burma was good—I’ll write about it at some point later.

It terms of price, Singapore is a mid-ranged city; it’s not super-expensive like Tokyo, but it’s not as cheap as Hong Kong either. I had booked a room at the local YMCA, which in Singapore is more like a hotel than a hostel. It was a nice room with my own shower, internet access, and free breakfast in the mornings. I spent the days wandering the city like I always do, and just as in Hong Kong, a lot of the wandering in Singapore takes place in malls and connected shopping centers.

One of these shopping centers was on Orchard Road, right outside the YMCA. I ended up there in the afternoon after taking the metro to various places around the city. I don’t always eat lunch when I’m traveling, but I almost never miss my afternoon coffee break.

There are a lot of Starbucks in Singapore—this guy can tell you exactly how many and where they are. They’re just like “home” in most places, but also serve local items. Thus I ended up at the Orchard Road Starbucks, where I looked forward to taking my coffee back over to the YMCA for an hour of reading.

I went inside, thankful for the a/c since Singapore is usually very hot. I ordered a café au lait, which for some reason is called something different in each country in the world (what’s with that, Starbucks?), and picked it up from the counter.

Then, a funny thing happened to me on the way out of the building. A glass door came out of the middle of nowhere and walked right into me.

Some of the many observers who witnessed this attack might say that I walked into the glass, but I’ll always know better. It was a fully-transparent glass door, and I swear it just appeared there all of a sudden. One moment I’m walking out of the Starbucks into the warm sunny day, and in the next moment, I’m staring at a coffee-covered glass door that came out of the sky to block my exit. My head hurt, and I dropped my bag.

At first I was in shock. What had just happened?

Then I looked down and saw my coffee on the floor, and looked up to see a glass door that wasn’t there before. I also saw a door handle, which apparently I was supposed to pull to open instead of attempting to magically walk through. Who knew?

I swear if there was someone there with a video camera that day, this incident would be all over YouTube. Thankfully, it was just me and a bunch of surprised Singaporeans. I could hear all kinds of people talking about me as I backed away from the wall of glass that had just come out of nowhere to block my exit.

“Did that guy just walk into the door?” someone said. “Oh my God,” said someone else.

Yes, it was that bad. When people could tell I was okay, they started to laugh. I looked up at them and tried to smile as I was cleaning my coffee off the floor and the brand-new glass door. As quick as I could, and as gracefully as I could—which wasn’t saying much by then—I got out of the building and walked away.

I went back across the street to the YMCA, where I drank the remaining half of my coffee that survived the accident. This café au lait is very well mixed now, I thought.

Later that night, I went back outside, and looked at my nemesis across the street. The evil glass door. Okay, I thought. It’s over now. What can I possibly learn from this?

The 5-Step Recovery Process

It goes like this. First, admit you have a problem… no, not that list.

Okay, try this one:

1. Put yourself together as quickly as possible. I had a few napkins in my hand, so I used one to wipe up some of the coffee and milk that was all over the door and the floor.

2. Laugh at yourself even though it’s not funny at all. It’s really not funny when it happens to you, but if you laugh, other people will feel more free to laugh. And then it’s like they’re laughing with you, although of course they’re not.

3. Never go back to the same Starbucks. OR, you can do it this way:

4. Force yourself to go back to the same place in an effort to break the jinx. Just remember to watch out for the door!

5. Use your embarrassing moment to help someone else, such as I’m doing here. I hope it’s helpful to you on your next visit to a glass-doored coffee shop somewhere in the world.

***

I won’t be so cruel as to ask you to think about your own embarrassing moments. Instead, I’ll ask you to think about your goals for world domination (or whatever they are). Recovering from stupid mistakes is crucial to living a life of adventure, because if you set out to do great things, you’ll probably have a few big falls as well.

I tried to forget about that afternoon on Orchard Road for as long as I could. But when I heard my friend’s embarrassing story the other day, it came right back into my mind.

I expect to be back in Singapore sometime in the summer, and I’ll probably stay in the YMCA again. It does a great free breakfast. But as to whether I’ll visit the Starbucks across the street or not, I’m really not sure.

If you ever go there yourself, watch out for the glass door. And when you fall down somewhere else, brush it off and keep going.

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Photo credit: Selva

One of my favorite poems deals with the subject of accomplishing much in life and then not having anything to show for it afterwards. It’s called Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the text is below:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The skillful use of rhyme and meter is better explained here (and it is truly impressive). I’m more concerned with the message that Ozymandias, through Percy Shelley, leaves us with.

Is it possible to gain so much and have so little to show for it?

Shelley’s poem illustrates a scenario even worse than the old “gain the world but lose your soul” proverb, because regardless of what came of Ozymandias’ soul, he wasn’t even able to hold onto the world. Instead, he was left with nothing at all.

Many of us are busy building monuments just like Ozymandias. Our monuments are often made of material things—cars, houses, bank account balances. While we probably do need some money to do many of the things we like to do, it’s easy to see how a monument to money will be ultimately unfulfilling.

If not money, many of us are building monuments of power. The perfect career will bring us access to more perceived power, so we spend years training in a modern-day apprenticeship program (college) to become accredited to an exclusive guild. For example, several of my law school friends are graduating this year. One of them told me recently, “I’m more scared than ever that I’m going to join the kind of practice that I said I never would. That I’ll just to be a normal lawyer slave like everyone else in our class.”

I told her it was good she was scared. Once you stop being afraid, I said, that’s when you know you’ll end up doing exactly what you were worried about.

There are other monuments you can build–my friend Gretchen Rubin has written a user’s guide to the four most common monuments—or you may have even crafted your own. They work just fine as long as you don’t think about them too carefully, but when you do, you may feel a little flat.

How To Fight Against the Ozymandias Mentality

If you look for a way out of the trap, you’ll find it in making your life count for something greater than yourself. A few suggestions are listed below. Feel free to take them or leave them as you see fit.

• Volunteer somewhere. The location isn’t that important. If you have no idea where to get started, look here.

• Serve on the board of a local non-profit. This is also an exercise in volunteerism, but requires more responsibility. Non-profits need money and wise stewards with some basic business experience. If you can help with both of those areas, you may be a good fit for a local board.

• Set up a charitable giving trust, and make a will to ensure that your physical assets end up where you want them. That way they won’t be stuck out in the desert, waiting for a poet to come by and make fun after you’re dead.

• Check out the Death Clock. This one is admittedly a bit creepy, but there are a number of sites out there in the crazy internet world that will tell you roughly how many days, minutes, or seconds you have left to live, based on what country you live in, how overweight you are, and so on. One of them, Death-Clock.org, even has a free Myspace applet you can use to advertise your forthcoming day of death to all the other 13-year olds on Myspace. Okay, as I said, it’s bizarre. But on the other hand, any reminder that life is short is always helpful.

• Pick up the legacy project you have neglected for too long. We all have big ideas from time to time. An idea for a trip, an idea for a business venture, an idea for a book, or for something else. Think about the ones you’ve had and discarded.

One Life to Live

That’s what it all comes down to, right? Each of us has a certain amount of time on earth, and we can spend it as we choose. Each moment is precious and can not be regained.

(Thank you, by the way, for spending these moments reading my essay.)

Looking back on life towards the end, most people regret things they didn’t do much more than things they did. I worked on the outline for this project for nearly a year before I started. In the month or two before I set up the design work and started telling people about it, I really struggled with letting it come to life.

Travel has been getting more and more expensive at the same time as the U.S. dollar continues to fall around the world; there was no clear financial motive for my beginning this project; I’m not even sure what city I’ll be living in after this summer, and so on.

I had all kinds of good reasons to delay or cancel, but what pushed me over the edge of going forward was the knowledge that if I didn’t at least give this project a chance to have a life of its own, I would always regret it. So here we are, and I’m glad you’re along for the journey.

That’s my example– what’s yours? What is your neglected legacy project? What do you care deeply about that will outlast you?

Why not spend some time on that today?

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After you make a decision to be remarkable and recruit a small army, you need a plan of attack. How will you accomplish your world takeover goals?

There are lots of ways to formulate a plan of attack. My own planning is usually constructed through mind-maps and process-oriented thinking. I work backwards from the goal, considering the step I need to take that directly precedes the desired result.

You Can Start Planning Right Away

I use Mindjet software (free trial here) to help with this, and you can see a real world example below of how I first began brainstorming the development of this web site.

Click to enlarge any of these

My plans have changed somewhat since this original outlining, but that’s normal. What’s important is to get a good outcome in mind and start planning towards that. Think through all the aspects of your goal — what you need to do to make it happen, how you’ll define success, what you’ll need to overcome, and whatever is appropriate to your own plans.

This can be extremely useful in clarifying what you want and how you’ll get it. However, before you spend the rest of your life planning, make sure you understand that thinking about something will only take you so far.

Don’t Wait Too Long to Act

When it comes to acting, I prefer the Ready, Fire, Aim model. With this model, you don’t wait for everything to be perfect before you start working towards your goals. In fact, you don’t wait very long at all. (You can read what some others have said about this here and here.)

Here’s some real-world examples you can use to get started on your world-changing vision. If none of these apply to your own plans, well, make your own ready, fire, aim strategy.

Small Business – Put something up for sale on eBay right now. Register a domain for $10 right now. Contact someone in your field about a joint venture right now.

Personal Development – Buy some good books on Amazon right now (or visit your local library). Listen to a good language podcast—with 20 minutes a day, you’ll make a lot of progress within just a few weeks.

Art – Finish the painting that’s been taking so long. Start another one. Go outside and draw something. Register for a class.

Exercise – Go outside and run three miles. If you can’t run three miles, run as much as you can and walk the rest.

Writing – Write your short story and send it in to the publisher. Start a blog. Write a book proposal. Order up some good books on writing.

International Travel – Think of somewhere you’d like to go, and buy a ticket. Don’t spend too much time on the research; you can always go somewhere else later. If you don’t have money for the ticket, maybe someone will give you some.

School or University – Finish the paper you’ve been putting off even if it’s not as amazing as you’d like it to be. If you haven’t read the books you need to read to write the paper, skim them.

Public Speaking – Think of an event you’d like to speak at. Then think of someone you know who is somehow connected to the event. Ask them to recommend you.

World Domination – Invade somewhere small, like Lichtenstein or Lesotho. You can always scale up and march on Canada later.

Starting is usually the hardest part.

After you have ran the first three miles or set up the first web site or invaded the first country—or whatever you’re trying to do—then you can sit back and ask yourself the kinds of questions most people ask before they begin the attack.

• What’s my target market?
• What can I ultimately achieve with this?
• What sacrifices will I need to make to do this?
• Am I really good at this?
• What’s the next action?

These are good questions, but without any experience they can often sidetrack or intimidate you into doing nothing. Nothing is almost always the worst thing you can do.

In the long term, your three-mile run will enable you to run a marathon. You just have to keep repeating it, and then start expanding it over a series of months.

If you don’t invest much to begin with, your business project won’t fail even if it isn’t a huge success. You’ll learn something, and have something to show for it. Even better, you might end up with a sustainable project that does far more than you expected.

***

Process map planning is great, and will help you think through where you want to go and how you’ll get there. But don’t wait to get started with your plans to take over the world. You can always refine the invasion later.

I like this quote from George Bernard Shaw:

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.”

A life with mistakes is also a lot less boring than a life doing nothing. How will you formulate your plan of attack? Don’t wait until tomorrow.

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Entrepreneurs are a diverse bunch of people, but when you ask them to tell you the greatest benefit of being self-employed, you’ll usually hear the same answer over and over. That answer is FREEDOM, and rightly so. When you work for yourself, no one tells you what to do—at least not in the same way a boss would.

Even if you freelance or have clients or customers, those people don’t usually set your hours for you, tell you what to wear, approve your vacations, or any of the other hassles you deal with at a “real” job.There’s no time sheet to fill out, and no H.R. department hounding you for staff reviews. Presumably, there are a lot less useless meetings too. (If you set your own useless meetings with staff, suppliers, or clients, that’s your fault!)

It is absolutely true that freedom is the greatest thing about self-employment. Make no mistake—I personally wouldn’t trade this benefit for just about anything.

However—you’ve probably guessed this was coming—there is another side to the freedom that successful self-employment brings. Here are several problems many entrepreneurs encounter as they step out of traditional employment and into their own vision of work.

• Your friends and family members who work at traditional jobs won’t understand. They see only the benefits of your entrepreneurial life and none of the costs and risks.They may expect you to be available all the time. If you don’t take personal calls or use Instant Messenger during the day so you can focus on your work, they may get annoyed and wonder “what else you could be doing.”

• Once you achieve initial success, it’s tempting to coast for a while. If you freelance and just had a big project last month, you may feel worn down and need to take it easy for a while. The key lesson is not to let this down time go on forever. Business markets, especially markets dependent on Internet services, can often change rapidly. You need to find a way to keep advancing, even if the pace is slow.

• There’s no time sheet, but there’s also no IT department to fix your computer problems. When the network stops working, it’s your problem. If your emails aren’t being sent or the web site goes down, at the very least you have to get the process in motion to fix it. In fact, virtually none of the support structure you are used to at a traditional job will not be there when you are on your own. You have to figure out health insurance, which is no small problem. Even if an accountant prepares your tax return, you usually have to think about taxes more than you would probably like to.

• The crises are all yours for the managing. Ideally, you should minimize the crisis management and focus on important work that builds your business, but this is easier said than done. When you are responsible, there is no one else to turn to. If you’re not careful and don’t build good systems for your business, you can easily become a full-time crisis manager. Even if you’re a great crisis manager, crises don’t usually pay very well compared to the normal activities of a business. When no one else is doing the sales and marketing and you spend your time putting out fires, income will go down and stress will go up.

• Too much flexibility in scheduling will kill your productivity. Some entrepreneurs are uncomfortable with the idea of structure because they are naturally opposed to traditional models of work. But structure that enables you to excel is a good thing. Figure out what this is—when do you do your best work, and what do you need to do it?—and set up your own time schedule. You can always adjust it to meet changing needs, but don’t throw it out entirely.

Thankfully, there are several ongoing steps you can take to offset these challenges. A few of them that I have focused on in my life and work, to varying degrees of success, are below.

1. Simply decide to stop doing stuff. It seems paradoxical, but if you keep putting something off, you may be better off to just decide not to do it at all. The mental energy you use to keep looking at it all the time will take away from other activities that may be more important. Do yourself a big favor when confronting an activity that stresses you out: either deal with it and get it done, or make an active decision not to. You may be surprised how often this works. Ask yourself, “What is the worst thing that can happen if I don’t do this?”

2. Understand what motivates you, and structure your work around those motivations. If you are doing work you are passionate about, which is usually pretty important, this should be easy. Be aware of “why” you are working each day instead of doing something else. One warning: be careful about choosing money as a primary motivation. There’s nothing wrong with earning money, but it’s more important to understand what you really want and how your work contributes to or takes away from the path to achieving your goals.

3. Improve your personal productivity skills, including planning and implementation. Both of these skill sets are critical when you are self-employed. Planning skills include both short- and long-term goal setting. What do you want to accomplish this year? How will you make divide the progress toward those goals each month, each week, and then each day? Implementation skills are often known as “getting things done” tactics, and you need these to know how you will move closer to your goals in the midst of many competing demands on your time. Making improvements in these areas will usually make a measurable difference on your work.

4. Delegate or outsource. Find others to help you and pay them for it.There’s no good excuse not to, although there are lots of bad excuses that I have used before. Delegation is the art of assigning tasks or projects to a subordinate. Outsourcing is the practice of assigning entire responsibilities to an outside contractor. Both of these practices can make self-employment life a lot easier. (There is also a flip side to outsourcing, however, and we’ll look at that later.)

5. Take a vacation. When I’m in the U.S., I usually work at least six days a week, although I don’t work the whole day on Saturday, and I include time during the week for activities that help me relax. However, from time to time I feel my energy and focus slipping, and I find that I need a longer time away from work. I travel to more than 20 countries a year, and not all of my travel is for vacation, but I do try to take at least one week of “real vacation” every year, usually in December. This also serves as a natural time of reflection on the past year and planning for the next one.

6. Build a better working environment. If you’re working from home, you need a personal, comfortable workspace. It should not be shared with anyone else whenever possible. You need a good computer, a good chair, a good printer, good lighting, and anything else that you know you need for your business. You are the best judge of what you need, so figure it out and get it.

***

Freedom is truly the greatest benefit of being self-employed, but don’t forget to address the challenges that go with it.

I get up at 6:00 a.m. most days, but last night I was out with some friends and didn’t get to bed until after 11:00. I slept a bit later than I had planned, and didn’t make it in to my office until 8:30. No one was waiting for me and I had no explanation to give.

At 2:00 p.m. most days this week, I’ll probably stop working and go to a coffee shop to read and journal until 4:00. This is the normal routine for me, and not a nice exception in a week of full-time work. Later in the week I’ll take off a whole day to help a friend with moving. It’s no problem at all, and as long as I structure my projects well, my income should not suffer as a result.

But to create this ideal world, I have to watch out for the flip side to self-employment freedom. The flip side involves all kinds of distractions that threaten to hinder our efficiency and effectiveness. If you’re self-employed or interested in being self-employed in the future, take care that you do the same. The rewards are too great to lose.

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