Rewind. Refresh. Reboot: The Moment I Decided To Be Better Again

Thanks to the dream team that planned the 2011 Millennium Conference in Toronto, I’ve found a renewed energy in pursuing self improvement. Using the word epiphany or revelation is probably overdramatic, but I genuinely experienced a “Eureka” moment.

It began with the realization that I was becoming complacent

Without school being the passive excuse of progress and improvement, I sunk into the daily motions of doing work. It turns out that self-improvement isn’t something that inherently provides instant pleasure or value. It’s a discipline that requires value from the person practicing it – for the sake of itself. Because I wasn’t actively prioritizing self-development, the logical thing to do was the path of least resistance. Do as little work as possible, not for the maximal result, but for the minimal result to avoid punishment. It wasn’t that I lost my goals or didn’t, at least in the back of my head, knew where and who I wanted to be. It was just easier not to think about it. Further, my environment didn’t require me to be better than I was. Being self-employed removed inner-office competition and it was a long time since I surrounded myself with excellent and exceptional people.

The moment all this came to me, and it did in a single concentrated dose, was when I was talking to Dream Team member Alexa Caturay. It was 2am on a Saturday night after the second night of the conference. Breakfast was at an early 8:30am the next morning, so I asked a complaint masqueraded as a question, “So when do you plan on getting up? “ I groaned. Without missing a beat, Alexa responds “Probably 6AM. I want to go for a run and do a little bit of work before breakfast starts.”

As if that’s what human being are just supposed to do.  As if that’s just the standard course of action.

The thought of waking up earlier than 10AM had never even crossed my mind – never mind doing work or, god forbid, physical exercise. I was in a hybrid state of shock and awe. I admired her. And, thanks to my father’s propaganda of competition and neurotic productivity, the feelings of awe were quickly washed over with a single question:

“Why am I not like that?”

Moreso, “Why am I not striving to be, or be like, that which I admire? “

It didn’t take long before I began listing the things I didn’t admire about myself – waking up was the least of it. The heavier stuff included my lack of discipline and patience, my inability to keep commitments and promises, and being lazier than I should about work. But this was all great news. As the cliché goes, “admitting the problem is the first step.”

The idealization of being excellent

“Be the change you want to see in the world” was the most popular quote according Google in 2006. As such, it was also the most popular quote amongst scholarship applications that year. I don’t quite think I’m there yet. Instead, I’m going to modify it a bit:

“Be the change you want to see in yourself.”

I knew I wasn’t who I wanted to be. The disconnect and distance between who I was and who I wanted to be, however, was still unclear. Mainly because I wasn’t, and am still not quite, sure of the qualities of character that define personal excellence. The only thing I knew for sure was that it was important for me to at least make an attempt at defining it.

My very close friend, RJ Kelford, suggested author Tim Ferriss a year ago. Though his claim to fame was The Four Hour Work Week, which is very much business oriented, his philosophy of life is what I admire him the most for. As an homage, I will steal his term to describe my new focus :

“Lifestyle Design”

For me, lifestyle design is the act of intentionally and actively shaping both your life and your person to the ideal notion of who you want to be and how you want to live – the understanding that one can never be complacent and that every little action, or inaction, counts towards or against those overarching goals. It seems to be that living intentionally, willfully, is a requirement of integrity, respect, and self-esteem.

On RJ’s advice, I began focusing on defining principles that I found valuable – that I would attempt to adhere to on a daily basis. They are what I will refer to from now on as: Lifestyle Design Principles (LDPs). Prior to defining them, I set-up 3 reminders:

1. Everything is a guideline, everything is fluid. Nothing is a rule, everything has exceptions.
2. Be honest with yourself about adherence. Be able to identify the differences between exceptions and incompliance, between wisdom and laziness.
3. Always be aware and integrate personal excellence into a daily format.

I am still in the process of articulating these principles, but I will be posting them on here as they come to me.

That concludes the easy part.

“Focus on the minutes, let the hours take care of themselves.”

The Game Changer: Bring Your Own Balance was a life-coaching workshop run by “Connoisseur of Life”, Joann Lim at the conference. Through it, I realized a major truism that would help me achieve a practical process of self-improvement:

1. Time is the currency of life, spend it on things that you find valuable, that will make you a better person – every minute counts.

According to this, the term “wasting time” morphed from a term to describe the presence of productivity, to the presence of value. It directed me to ask this question while doing every activity:

“Is this activity contributing to me being a better person? Is it valuable?”

During the conference, I did a quick time audit – essentially a chart that breaks down my use of time during a week. It became dreadfully obvious which activities I needed to eliminate almost entirely and, by extension, what to replace them with:

1. Watching movies or TV -> Reading
2. Surfing the internet -> Learning a Skill or a Language
3. Spending time with negative people -> Spending time with positive people
4. Lounging late at night -> Sleep

They were all dead simple, and just the mere thought of being more well read, multi-lingual, surrounded by role models, and getting more sleep was exciting. It turns out that while constantly taking the path of least resistance, I was also moving further and further away from the path of being excellent.

So I knew that a daily time audit was what I needed to do. Every day, right before bed, I would write down what I spent my day doing, an activity log. Simply knowing a log was being kept, was motivating enough to do better things.

Do a daily time audit.

That took care of what I was spending my time doing, but it was also important to know how I was doing them.

Benjamin Franklin kept an attributes list of 13 virtues. Some of them were daily do’s and some of them were daily don’t do’s. For example, “Temperance.” Or “Be Frugal.” Daily, he would go down the list and made sure he stuck to these principles while going through his daily activities. RJ introduced me to this concept and I plan to make it the second and complimentary part of my daily implementation.

Do a daily attributes list.

Finally, and perhaps the most mysterious and exciting, I’ve decided to take a shot at meditating.

Shortly after the conference, a good friend – Flo – was in town. Flo is an ageless person. She has the energy and excitement of an 8 year old at times, and then – without warning – she’s able to communicate, effortlessly, the wisdom of a Greek muse. Our meetings and talks are always inspiring, but during this particular talk, she explained to me the extent that meditation helped her change her perspective towards life.

I’m generally inclined to be skeptical, especially about the supernatural, religious, and spiritual. 4 years of Biology and Philosophy has all but convinced me that the physical world is amazing enough to explain any phenomenon and words can be contorted to persuade and convince almost anyone of almost anything. Out-of-body experiences, spiritual existence, core energies, and nirvana are amongst those. However, I respect Flo a grand amount – in both intelligence and as a person. So, if meditation is something she believes in, that’s enough vouching for me to give it a try.

Although I’m not sure the actual process, effects, or efficacy of meditation, I hope that it’ll solve two things. First, I’m hoping that it will increase my discipline over my thoughts and emotions. I find myself too excited for things and concepts sometimes – the excess defined by my making stupid mistakes while caught up in that excitement. Second, I’m hoping to be able to see my values more clearly – away from the frameworks that are very deeply entrenched in my daily life, but not necessarily valuable. I want to be able to break away from unhealthy relationships, activities, and commitments without the fear. I want to be able to see values past the immediate environmental conditioning in my life. I will begin by meditating at least 5 minutes daily.

So there it is – my next project. Myself. I’ll keep you updated.