If you’re ever bored with your life I think the antidote is to put yourself at the edge of your ability in some way.
How far can you run?
Can you talk to a stranger for an hour?
How many press ups can you do?
If you find your limit and then actively work to extend beyond it, life gets way less boring.
Do you have magic moments in your life?
A magic moment is anything you really, really enjoy. A cool conversation with a stranger. Someone smiling at you for no reason. Sitting down to your favorite show with your favorite snack and just thinking, life is good.
We have to record our magic moments.
And I don’t mean pulling your phone out and filming yourself having a good time. I mean starting a list somewhere, a note on your phone, whatever works for you. So much happens every single day in our lives that our brains simply cannot store all of it. What we want to do is train our brain to remember the things that were actually good.
Because here’s the thing: your life is just a collection of memories.
If that collection is made up of the hard things, the tough moments, the stuff that dragged you down, then you’re going to feel like you’ve had a hard life. But if you start recording the awesome little moments you genuinely loved, you’re training your brain to notice them. You start unpacking your week and suddenly you’ve got ten, twenty of these magic moments sitting there.
And what happens if you keep doing that every single week, for a whole year?
You end up with a whole list of awesome stuff.
We have to record these things. Otherwise, we’re just going to forget them.
We all know what we need to do to get what we want, more or less.
The trouble isn’t the recipe, it’s the implimentation.
Our focus then shouldn’t be on finding more recipes, but how to get ourselves to use that ones we have.
The trick is how you think about the thing you need to do.
You want to get fit, you know you need to get more daily steps in, but when you think about walking you think about dying trying to get up a steep hill.
If you can take the thing you want to do and think about it in a way that makes you excited to do it, that’s when life starts getting interesting.
There were some classes at drama school I didn’t enjoy.
I guess I was just a punk kid.
Looking back now, I bet there was something to be learned in all the classes I had mentally checked out of.
The thing I now know is that no matter the experience, it’s up to me whether I take something useful away from it.
The trick isn’t just to learn anything though, it’s about bringing your own frame along to an experience.
What are you interested in right now? What are you working on? What are you wanting to grow or get better at?
These are your frames.
Take these along with you to any experience and by virtue of you being there with them as your point of reference you will have a learning experience.
It may not be THE one you had in mind but it will be AN experience.
You decide the frame and don’t forget to take it along with you too.
It’s new years day and you have a big beautiful piece of paper in front of you. It’s got scribbles in different colours with words and sentences of all different sizes; this is you LIFE PLAN.
It’s so exciting! You can see it all there in front of you. The energy of the fresh cup of coffee coupled with the momentum of the first day of January has hit you hard and this grand plan represents your entire vision.
This was me on new years day- I had the added inspiration of being on the beach at Oakura Bay in the north of New Zealand. My inspiration quickly turned to overwhelm. I had no trouble getting all my visions and goals down on the page. But just a few hours later I looked at the page again. What was once a battery pack that charged me up with energy now seemed like the opposite- I felt drained and daunted by what lay in front of me.
Inspiration isn’t enough.
Being inspired feels great, doesn’t it? New Years Day does it, but we see these moments in other bursts throughout the year too. The beginning of term or the start of a new flashy program at school… these ‘launch’ moments have a tendency to burn bright and burn fast. The problem isn’t the vision, we need a clear direction. The problem is too much too soon.
One of the grand goals I had was for the kids I was teaching to have a full Te Reo exchange with me at the beginning of class. I barreled into our first session together and began laying out a multi-step greeting and conversation exchange… It felt exciting and new and I got some great initial progress. But the next time I went in, the kids had forgotten and each subsequent lesson I had to start from scratch. The kids were over chunked; it was too much too soon.
Out of frustration one day, I decided to drop it. So I just did the opening greeting. Some of them remembered it… cool! I drilled it again for those still not confident. The next few lessons I just did the same.
What I’d hoped would take me one lesson actually took more like six- but I was stoked.
I learned to use the moments of inspiration as the ‘lift off’ and chunk down the subsequent bits. It doesn’t all have to feel like the raging fire of a rocket taking off.
Sometimes it’s just striking a match.
And when you strike enough of them, you get a pretty bright light.
I just did the architecture boat tour in downtown Chicago.
Before the tour I looked around at the buildings and thought they were neat, impressive even.
But after the tour my relationship to the buildings was transformed.
This is the magic of education I think. Our tour guide had injected life and information to the buildings. We learned about the people who designed and built them, the context of the creations. We felt the tour guide’s personal connection to the buildings.
Without the tour we could walk right past the building that was designed to look like a giant wine bottle and never know it was designed as an architectural middle finger to the prohibition laws at the time of construction.
What a tragedy to simply not know because of a lack of being educated…
Teaching is not just about dispensing facts, it’s bringing them to life so we have a relationship to them.
How good.
How do you follow through on what you set out to do?
I love those moments of inspiration. When something is suddenly clear, you know exactly what you want and what it’ll be like when you get there.
The tricky part is how to keep that alive.
And the answer has to lie in a system. I wish I could, but I can’t reply on inspiration every day- it requires too much thinking. We need to figure out how to translate that to the systematic actions that take place daily without our constant upkeep.
I don’t visualise the perfect healthy smile every day, yet I do brush my teeth twice a day.
It’s not because I’m a powerful productivity god, I just have a simple action I do each day (and you probably do too).
So the question isn’t how do we keep motivated.
It’s how to we harness that initial momentum, wisely pick the ‘tooth brushing’ equivalent action and merely do that daily.
Our capacity will grow over time and we inch closer without the constant mental load.
It’s important to catch them…
The magic moments.
We spend so much time working, aspiring and perspiring toward outcomes. When the awesome moments happen it’s so easy to move on quickly.
I have a dated database in Notion called “Magic Moments”.
When a cool little thing happens, I put it in there- the date is already added.
It’s the best thing in the world to read back over these and be flooded by all the good:
-The stranger who smiled at me on the bus
-The unexpected sunset view from the hotel window
-That apple that was so great and crunchy.
They come and go so quickly you might miss them. Get in the habit of recording them, you won’t regret it.
People prompt Ai… why not prompt yourself?
We do it every day with the questions we ask: “Why is this so hard” tends to be a common one for people who have a difficult time with things.
“I wonder what will happen next” is a common prompt for the adventurous humans.
And the most creative? Well, It’s pretty straight forward; “What can I create out of this?”
Don’t leave the prompts for the robots- we are capable of far more than we think.
Isn’t it amazing that we can revisit, reanimate and re-experience memories whenever we choose?
When was the last time your stomach and face hurt from laughing?
Do you remember feeling so nervous you could hardly move?
When did you feel complete bliss?
All of these memories are there for us. It’s like a dormant library in our brain, waiting for us to stroll in and choose a book.
Its easy to never access these. Or to access just the same handful over and over.
And it’s also easy to simply ask the question:
“Remember when…”
