Hey guys,

I've been down for a while now, but I realized today that I'm silently waiting for a 2016 reboot. So instead of waiting for 2016 I realized, why not start building momentum for 2016 right now? We got 30 days left of 2015, and if we aren't getting everything done in 2015, at least we can build momentum to start the new year running full speed. The thought of that makes me real motivated for some reason, perhaps because I get to start something new right away, or that I'm getting a head start on 2016.

I found a video that talks about this in more detail:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPpAJyRQHP4

Clearly flashy and all but sometimes that works too, arbitrary cues to light the flame.

Truth

“Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.”
— Henry Miller

I am reading Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development for Smart People that Bytemaster recommended on his blog. This is the first of several posts that go through the fundamental principles of personal development that Pavlina outlines:



We primarily grow as human beings by discovering new truths about ourselves and our reality. We certainly learn some important lessons no matter how we live, but we can accelerate our growth tremendously by consciously seeking truth and deliberately turning away from falsehood and denial.

When we deny our problems, we turn away from truth. The lies we tell ourself spawns more lies, infecting our mind with falsehoods that weave themselves into our identity. We become disconnected from our true self, living as a mere shadow of the brilliant being we were meant to be. We aren’t here to endure such an existence. We’re here to learn how to create a life of our own choosing.

Let’s begin with an exploration of the key components of truth, then we go on to some obstacles to truth.

Perception



Perception is the most basic aspect of truth. If you want to improve some part of your life, you have to look at it first. Perception is a key component of personal growth because we react to what we perceive to be true.

The first step on your path of personal growth must be to recognize that your life as it stands right now isn’t how you want it to be. It’s perfectly okay to be in this position. It’s okay to want something and have no idea how to get it, but it’s not okay to lie to yourself and pretend everything is perfect when you know it isn’t. The closest you’ll get to perfection will be to enjoy the experience of lifelong growth, including all its temporary flaws.

Prediction



Prediction is the mechanism by which you learn from experience, thereby enabling you to discover what is true. As you observe any new situation or event, one of two things can happen: either the experience will meet your expectations, or it won’t. When an experience meets your expectations, your mental model of reality remains intact. But when an experience violates your expectations, your mind must update its model of reality to fit the new information. This is how you learn from experience and discover new truths.

There are two powerful ways you can apply your mind’s predictive powers to accelerate your personal growth. First, by embracing new experiences that are unlike anything you’ve previously encountered, you’ll literally become more intelligent. New situations shift your mind into learning mode, which enables you to discover new patterns. The more patterns your mind learns, the better it gets at prediction, and the smarter you become.

The second way to apply your mind’s predictive powers is to make conscious, deliberate predictions and use those predictions to make better decisions. Imagine that a very logical, impartial observer examines your situation in detail and is assigned to predict what your life will look like in 20 years, based on your current behavior patterns. What kind of future will this person predict for you? When you become aware of your mind’s long-term expectations, you bypass the pattern of denial and stare truth straight in the eye. This gives you the opportunity to reinforce your positive predictions and to make changes to prevent negative predictions from occurring.

Accuracy



The closer your internal model of reality matches actual reality, the more capable you become. Greater accuracy means greater fitness for life as human being. With an accurate map, you’re more likely to make sound decisions that will take you in the direction of your desires. With an inaccurate map, you’re more likely to experience setbacks and frustration.

You can try to gain as much clarity as possible about a given situation, and that’s generally a good idea, but you can never eliminate all uncertainty. So you have two basic options: deny the unpredictability of life and create your own false sense of security, or accept the vagaries of life and learn to live with them. In the first case, you’re drawing your map of reality the way you want it to be, regardless of what the actual terrain looks like. In the second case, you’re striving to make your map as accurate as possible, even though you may dislike how it looks. The second option is better. When you accept the inherent uncertainty of life, your decisions will increase in accuracy.

Acceptance



Once you’ve identified what’s true for you with a reasonable degree of accuracy, your next task is to fully and completely accept the truth. This includes accepting the long-term consequences of your predictions.

One of the most important skills to develop in the area of personal growth is the ability to admit the whole truth to yourself, even if you don’t like what you see and even if you feel powerless to change it. When you face unpleasant truths, you often encounter strong internal resistance. This resistance pushes you to avoid facing the truth, running through endless cycles of distraction, escapism, denial, and procrastination. Only by staring directly into these truths can you summon the strength to deal with them consciously. A simple rule of thumb is this: whatever you fear, you must eventually face.

Self-awareness




As you strive to bring more truth into your life, you must cultivate a high degree of self-awareness. This includes becoming aware of your strengths, weaknesses, talents, knowledge, biases, attachments, desires, emotions, instincts, habits, and state of mind.

As human beings, we’re often filled with conflicting desires. One part of us wants to be healthy, happy, and highly conscious. Another part wants nothing more than to eat, sleep, have sex, and be lazy. Without the presence of consciousness, we fall into reflexive patterns by default, living more like unconscious animals than fully sentient human beings.

A good way to build your awareness is to make your important decisions from the most reasonable thinking you can muster. The best point to make new choices is when you feel alert, clearheaded, and intelligent.

Learn to trust those higher states of consciousness. Put the decisions in writing and fully commit yourself to them. When you inevitably sink back down to lower states and lose sight of that higher perspective, continue to act on those decisions even though you may no longer feel as committed to them. Over time, your external circumstances will change in ways that reinforce those higher states. Living consciously gets easier with practice.

Recognize that when you make choices from a place of anger, fear, sadness, or guilt, you cannot be aligned with truth because your predictions will be negatively biased by those lower states. Self-awareness is really truth-awareness. When your awareness is high, you’re closer to truth than when it’s low. If you aren’t aligned with truth, your decisions will produce inferior results.

The key is to use your self-awareness to recognize when you’re aligned with truth and when you aren’t, and strive to make your important decisions only when this core principle is on your side.

Blocks to Truth

Media Conditioning



Media companies generate profits largely from advertising, and for advertising to be effective, you must eventually buy something. People who hold and accurate model of reality only buy what they actually want or need, so advertisers frequently promote half-truths and outright falsehoods to boost profits. This can distort your perception of reality if you are not careful, so try to stay vigilant or try to avoid advertising altogether.

Social Conditioning



Social conditioning is a close cousin to media conditioning. The society in which you live -.- including your family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances - contributes heavily to your understanding of reality. Through your interactions with others, you’re continually influenced by social, cultural, educational and religious ideas. Unfortunately, such conditioned beliefs often place other values ahead of truth, so you may feel compelled to do the same. In the long run, this disconnection from truth leads to self-doubt, causing you to give away your power out of weakness and confusion. Aligning yourself with truth enables you to reclaim that power.

False Beliefs



False learning occurs when you adopt a belief that’s either partially or completely untrue. Such beliefs may be acquired accidentally or installed deliberately by others. The effect is that your future decisions become more error-prone, and your results are sabotaged.

Emotional Interference



Strong emotions can corrupt your ability to perceive reality accurately. Feelings such as fear, anger, grief, guilt, shame, frustration, being overwhelmed, and loneliness block you from thinking clearly, causing your to mistake falsehood for truth. Similarly, positive emotions can make you overly optimistic, encouraging you to take unreasonable risks and make overaggressive promises you won’t keep.

Addictions



Addictions such as smoking, drinking, or excessive Web surfing make it harder to accept reality because these behaviors reinforce ignorance and denial. For example, if you smoke cigarettes every day, your pattern of behavior makes it difficult for you to accept evidence that smoking is hazardous to your health. If you fear that quitting will be too great a challenge, you’re likely to avoid seeking the truth about smoking because it will compel you to face your fear and attempt to quit.

Immaturity



A certain degree of maturity is required to fully accept reality, and this comes from experience. The more fresh experiences you acquire, and take responsibility for acquiring, the faster your thinking will mature. The more you seek shelter and comfort through diversion escapism, and fantasy, the longer you’ll suffer from immature and inaccurate thinking.

Secondary Gain



Secondary gain is a common problem that occurs when you temporarily benefit (gain) by embracing falsehood. For example, you may tell a lie at work in order to avoid being fired, you may deny your relationship problems in order to preserve the peace, or you may eat unhealthy food for the sake of convenience.

This is my draft for the Facebook post to Cryptocurrency Collectors Club (4750 users). It will be pinned to the top from 1st of October until 1st November, so please help me improve it to make our "first impression" as good as possible. I will do all further edits tomorrow night and then post it early on October 1st.

Prepare for BitShares 2.0 Launch October 13th!

BitShares has gone through one of the most painful periods of cryptohistory in the last year, but has now risen to become the best financial smart contract platform in the industry,  able to challenge even centralized financial institutions like the NASDAQ in terms of raw speed and power.

BitShares’ Delegated Proof of Stake is decentralized, meaning there is no central authority that governs or owns it. Instead, BitShares is self-funded via stakeholder-approved voting, meaning anyone who buys shares can participate in its governance, and anyone who gets voted into a worker position will automatically be employed by the BitShares platform.

SmartCoins and User-Issued Assets can be traded on BitShares' decentralized exchange. SmartCoins are cryptocurrencies backed by BitShares that track the value traditional currencies like USD and YEN, as well as assets like Gold and Silver. User-Issued Assets are regulation-compatible tokens that can be issued by users to serve as Stocks or IOUs.

The payments in BitShares can be recurring, scheduled, and anonymous. Recurring payments allow you to set withdrawal permissions, and scheduled payments allow you to set transfers ahead of time. Sending anonymously you can select either Stealth, creating a new address each time, or Confidential, hiding the amount that you are sending - or both.

Accounts in BitShares are alphanumeric, meaning you can register and send to account names like “John” and “1234.” It is also possible to transfer account names and set dynamic account permissions, with different levels of authority, as well as multi signature access.

To get involved you can campaign on the BitShares forum to get voted in as a worker (skilled developers wanted!), or you can sign up users with the automatic referral system to earn a cut of the transaction-fees of the accounts you sign up!

To learn more visit the following websites,

BitShares website: https://bitshares.org/
BitSharesTalk: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,16447.0.html
BitShares TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA7BGBaUreQ&list=PLjgfpSQFJTLoR_CpYDBZMQ8hUSxKSflAF
BeyondBitcoin TalkShow: https://beyondbitcoin.org/

Causes of Mediocrity
From Hal Elrod's book Miracle Morning



According to the Social Security Administration, if you take any 100 people at the start of their working careers and follow them for the next 40 years until they reach retirement age, here’s what you will find: Only one will be wealthy; 4 will be financially secure; 5 will continue working, not because they want to but because they have to; 36 will be dead; and 54 will be broke and dependent on friends, family, relatives, and the government to take care of them.

Monetarily speaking, that’s only 5% of us who will be successful in creating a life of freedom, and 95% who will continue to struggle their entire lives.

Here are three simple, yet decisive steps to rise above mediocrity and join the top 5%.

#1 Acknowledge the 95% Reality Check

We must understand and acknowledge the reality that 95% of our society will never create and live the life they really want. We must embrace the fact that if we don’t commit to thinking and living differently than most people now, we are setting ourselves up to endure a life of mediocrity, struggle, failure and regret - just like most people. Realize this will include our own friends, family and peers if we don’t do something about it now and set an example of what’s possible when we commit to fulfilling our potential.

Being average means to settle for less than you truly want and are capable of, and to struggle for your entire life.

#2 Identify the causes of Mediocrity

Once we’ve acknowledged that 95% of our society is settling for far less than they are capable of, struggling in almost every area, and not experiencing the levels of success, happiness, and freedom that they really want, the next crucial step is to understand why.

The following aspires to be 7 of the most relevant causes of mediocrity and unfulfilled potential.

Rearview Mirror Syndrome

Rearview Mirror Syndrome is the belief that we are who we were, thus limiting the true potential in the present, based on the limitations of our past.

If we are to move beyond our past and transcend our limitations, we must stop living out of our rearview mirror, and start imagining a life of limitless possibilities. Always remember that where you are is a result of who your were, but where you go depends entirely on who you choose to be, from this moment on.

Lack of purpose

The average person cannot articulate their life’s purpose - the compelling “why” that drives them to wake up every day and do whatever it takes to fulfill their mission in life. Most people just focus on getting through the day, taking the path of least resistance, and pursuing short term, short-lived pleasures along the way, while avoiding any pain or discomfort that might cause them to grow.

To defeat this cause of mediocrity, we need a life purpose, which can be any purpose you want, for instance, to find free market solutions to secure life, liberty, and property for all. Or something else entirely. You can have several life purposes, one of which is to become the best version of ourselves. It can be anything that resonates with and inspires you to wake up every day and live in alignment with your purpose.

Isolating incidents

We isolate incidents when we mistakenly assume that each choice we make, and each individual action we take, is only affecting that particular moment, or circumstance. For example, you may think it’s no big deal to miss a workout, procrastinate on a project or eat fast food because you’ll get a “do-over” tomorrow.

We must realize that the real impact and consequence of each of our choices and actions - and even our thoughts - is monumental, because every single thought, choice, and action is determining who we are becoming, which will ultimately determine the quality of our lives.

In the words of T Harv Eker, “How you do anything is how you do everything.”

Lack of accountability

Accountability is the act of being responsible to someone else for some action or result. Very little happens in this world, or in your life, without some form accountability.

Accountability is generally something we feel like we had to endure when we were younger, and as it was forced upon us by adults, most of us grew to resist and resent accountability altogether. When we turned 18 any of us embraced every ounce of freedom we could get our hands on, continuing to avoid accountability like it was the plague, perpetuating a downward spiral into mediocrity, developing detrimental mindsets and habits as laziness, deflecting responsibility, and taking short cuts - hardly a recipe for success.

Yet, the link between success and accountability is irrefutable. Virtually all successful people embrace a high degree of accountability. It gives them the leverage they need to take action and create results, even when they don’t feel like it.

Mediocre circle of influence

Research has shown that we become a lot like the average of the five people we spend most time with.  Who you spend your time with may be the single most determining factor in the person you become and in your quality of life. If you are surrounded by lazy, weak-minded, excuse-making people, you’ll inevitably become like them. Spend time with positive, successful achievers and inevitably their attitudes and successful habits will reflect on you.

ONe of the most important commitments you will ever make is to proactively and continuously improve your circle of influence. Always seek people who will add value to your life and bring out the best in you. And of course, be that person for others. You must actively seek out such people to improve your circle of influence - they rarely just show up by chance.

Lack of personal development

“Our levels of success will rarely exceed our level of personal development, because success is something we attract by who we become.” - Jim Rohn

In other words, our level of success - in every area of your life - will rarely exceed, and usually parallel our level of personal development (i.e your knowledge, skills, beliefs, habits, etc.).

The problem is that most of us aren’t investing time each day into developing ourselves into the people that we need to be that are capable of attracting, creating, living, and sustaining the levels of success that we say we want.

Always remember that when we fail to make time for personal development, we are forced to make time for pain and struggle.

Lack of urgency

Arguably the single most significant cause of mediocrity and unfulfilled potential, which prevents 95% of our society from creating and living the life they truly want, is that most people have no sense of urgency to improve themselves so they can improve their lives. Human nature is to live with a “someday” mindset and think life will work itself out. How’s that working out for everybody?

Remember this truth: now matters more than any other time in your life, because it’s what you are doing today that is determining who you’re becoming, and who you’re becoming will always determine the quality and direction of your life.

#3 Draw your line in the sand

“One of the saddest things in life is to get to the end and look back in regret, knowing that you could have been, done, and had so much more.” - Robin Sharma

We’ve acknowledged and embraced the reality that 95% of society is struggling - and that if we don’t commit to thinking and living differently than most people, we will end up struggling, like most people.  We’ve identified the causes of mediocrity that we absolutely need to remain aware of an avoid.

The third step is to draw you line in the sand. Make a decision as to what you are going to start doing differently from this day forward. Not tomorrow, not next week, or next month. You’ve got to make a decision today that you’re ready to make the necessary changes to guarantee that you will be able to create the life you really want.

Your entire life changes the day that you decide you will no longer accept mediocrity for yourself. When you realize that today is the most important day of your life. When you wake up and decide that now matters more than any other time because it is who you are becoming each day based on the decision that you are making and the actions that you are taking that is determining who your are going to be for the rest of your life.

The reality is that if we don’t change now, our life won’t change. You can decide that mediocrity is no longer acceptable for you.

Talent and Success - Part One

What makes someone talented? What makes someone successful? Typically we think of this in terms of nature and nurture, where talent is in our nature, while becoming successful only occurs with sufficient nurture. However, there’s much more to it than that. In this first part we will look at three of the key ingredients that make someone successful.

1. Nurture: Encouragement

The first ingredient is to have an encouraging mother, mentor or coach that drives you to achieve your best. This is nurture in the most literal sense, in that they take care of you and provide you with the nourishment to grow, be it food, education or coaching. This theory became popular in the 1980s “Talent Project” that examined 120 people, all under the age of thirty-five who demonstrated the highest levels of accomplishment in one of six fields: swimming, tennis, sculpture, piano, mathematics, and research neuroscience. Few had demonstrated any great promise as children. The one commonality found in this study was that top performers got an extreme amount of encouragement. Exceptional circumstance (nurture) instead of exceptional conditions (nature) ruled the day.

2. Effort: 10 000 hours

The second ingredient became popular from a study on top performers in classical music in the 1990s. What they found is that an even stronger predictor to success, beyond nurture, was that none of the top musicians had practiced less than 10000 hours. Even when they examined what appeared to be prodigies with inherent talent, they found that they had compensated for their age by starting younger and putting in more hours per year. The conclusion was that the people at the top don’t just work harder than everyone else, they work much, much harder.

3. Self-Control: Delayed Gratification

Finally, the third ingredient came from the famous 1972 “Marshmallow Test,” that revealed a need to be able to delay gratification to achieve success in life. The test, if you have not seen it is as simple as this: giving kids a Marshmallow and telling them that they will get another one IF they wait five minutes before eating it. When interviewed 14 years later, the kids who could wait were more self-confident, hard-working, and self-reliant. Notably, the ability to delay gratification at four is twice as good a predictor of later SAT scores as IQ.

Elimination Part 3: Interrupting Interruption and the Art of Refusal

Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. - Ralph Charell

An interruption is anything that prevents the start-to-finish completion of a critical task, and there are three principal offenders; time wasters, time consumers, and empowerment failures. Let's look at each in turn to see how we can help prevent interruption.

Time Wasters

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace. - Robert Sawyer

Those things that can be ignored with little or no consequence. Common time wasters include meetings, discussions, phone calls, web surfing, and e-mail that are unimportant.

These are the easiest to eliminate and deflect: Simply limit access and funnel all communication towards immediate action. Try to avoid meetings that do not have clear objectives.

Time Consumers

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. - Annie Dillard

Repetitive tasks or requests that need to be completed but often interrupt high-level work. Here are a few you might know intimately: Reading and responding to e-mail, making and returning phone calls, customer service, financial or sales reporting, personal errands, all necessary repeated actions and tasks.

Time-consumers consume time because they tend to interrupt other activities, leading to inefficiencies associated will small scale actions. Batching such tasks to the end of the day avoids distraction and makes the process of completing them more efficient.

Empowerment Failures

The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what's going on so they can do a lot more than they've done in the past. - BIll Gates

Instances where someone needs approval to make something small happen. Here are just a few: fixing customer problems, customer contact, cash expenditures of all types. Both being micromanaged, or are micromanaging someone else, costs your time. In general it’s not scalable because there is a decision bottleneck.

To solve this try to empower others to act without interrupting you. Limit access to your time and force people to define their requests before spending time with them. Going further, by using automation (and out-sourcing) you can empower automata to make decisions in your place.

Elimination Part 1/3



This is a three part series on Elimination, from Tim Ferris’s book The Four Hour Work-Week where he tries to argue that cutting work is one of the most essential things to make progress in productivity. So for instance, when working on a business the goal is not just to increase revenue, but to decrease the amount of work required to increase that revenue.

Being Effective versus being Efficient

Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is a common way to get our priorities wrong. It is possible to be efficient on some perverse work-for-work’s sake (W4W) level while still being far from effective.

Two things to keep in mind:

• Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
• Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

What you are doing is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.

The primary goal is always maximum value from minimal necessary effort. But how can we improve on this objective? Two common “laws” are worth stressing: Pareto’s Law and Parkinson’s Law. Let us take each in turn.

Pareto’s Law

Pareto’s law states that for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Putting 20% effort into something will often generate 80% of the results. Imagine working one day each week instead of five and getting 80% of the results. Or keep working five different jobs each week and doing 80% of a full week on each one. Clearly this sounds absurd, but in many instances Pareto’s law has been found to be valid, where businesses get 80% of their revenue from 20% of their clients, and 80% of their leads from 20% of their marketing efforts, and so on.

Naturally, the default mode is to do work 100% and not notice that the the 80/20 rule is in effect. However, if we constantly keep reminding ourselves that this is likely to happen, we can evaluate our work with this in mind by asking appropriate questions:

• Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?
• Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?

Take some time to go through these questions and answer them as honestly as you can when you have time. In the answers and actions section below, there are more questions to help you clarify your answers. Don’t expect to find that you’re doing everything right, I certainly realized a lot of things, and remember that it can be uncomfortable to face the truth.

Being busy can be a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and far more unpleasant, in addition to being unsustainable and harmful in the long run. Being selective - doing less - is the path of the productive. Focus on the important and ignore the rest.

Lack of time is often just lack of priorities in disguise.

Parkinson’s Law

Parkinson’s Law states that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. When we have a short deadline there is something magic about our ability to execute in time compared to our reveling in complexity and distractions when the deadline is further away.

One of the best papers I wrote as a student was written over the course of 3 days while I had high fever and could only muster a couple of hours concentration per day. Because of the limited time and ability to focus, I had to limit everything to the most essential, writing one or two sentences at a time and making sure they were exactly what I wanted to say.

It is fruitful to combine Pareto’s Law with Parkinson’s Law:

• Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (Pareto’s Law).
• Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law).

Using both together you can identify the critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines. If you haven’t identified the mission-critical tasks, the unimportant becomes the important. And even if you know what is critical, unless you have set very short deadlines that create focus, the minor tasks will swell to consume time until another bit of minutiae jumps in to replace it, and so on.

In sum, most inputs (causes) are useless and time is wasted in proportion to the amount that is available.

Questions and Actions

The point of this section is to get you to think about these two questions and help you think of answers and areas of your life where they might be relevant.

Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?
Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?

• If you had a heart attack and had to work two hours per day, what would you do?
• If you had a second heart attack and had to work two hours per week what would you do?
• If you had a gun to your head and had to stop doing ⅘ of different time-consuming activities, what would you remove?
• What are the top three activities that I use to fill time to feel as though I’ve been productive?
• Who are the 20% of the people who produce 80% of your enjoyment and propel you forward, and which 20% cause 80% of your depression, anger, and second guessing?
• Learn to ask, “If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?”
• Remind yourself during the day of this question: “Are you inventing things to do to avoid the important?”
• Ask yourself, “Is multitasking really helping me right now, or am I victim to “task creep” because I have not prioritized what is essential and what is not?”
• Ask yourself, “How can I use Parkinson’s Law both on a Macro and Micro level?”

Take some time to think and write down what you think. Even if a 4h workweek is impossible, the very idea can push us to see the problem of time and productivity in a new light, forcing us to think in new ways to get more done with less time.[/list]

CONTRIBUTION

“We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.” Winston Churchill

At our deepest depths rises a drive to contribute. We want to know that we’ve given of ourselves and played a significant part in shaping the world around us.

When we feel as though we’re contributing to the world, we gain a profound sense of meaning and purpose. In fact, contribution can be the main source of meaning and purpose in our lives. If we’ve contributed something significant to the world, we feel that our time here was meaningful, that we’re making a difference, that it matters.

We can think of contribution as giving something to the world, and that in turn as either giving of ourselves, or giving to something. But first, lets give ourselves some credit:

Activator #1 Giving Credit

Contribution often brings up a lot of guilt. We generally feel that we don’t contribute enough to our families, friends, colleagues, and greater community. This is especially true in today’s überbusy and connected world, where we don’t have time to address many pressing issues and yet are constantly reminded of them.

Take some time to complete the following sentences, and from now on, everytime you finish a project or get a compliment for a contribution you’ve made to the world, take a moment to let it all in.

• The ways i’ve contributed to and made a difference in my family’s life this past year include ...
• When I think of my best friends, I know I’ve made an impact in their lives in these ways: …
  
• A creative project I’ve finished in the past few years that I never really gave myself credit for was…
• If I started giving myself more credit for the ways I really do give and contribute in this world, my life would change in these ways: ...
  

It’s time you finally allow yourself to sense the impact and contributions you’ve made in the world. You have made a difference in this world, regardless of whether it’s as large or lasting as you would hope.

Activator #2 Giving Of

By being ourselves and giving the best of ourselves to everything we do, we exert our highest and strongest selves, and doing that alone can make us feel that we are contributing. Forming our energies in a way that matters alone is a difference that makes a difference.

For instance, consider the singers, dancers, writers, designers, and so on - who may not be creating with an eye toward giving to anything in particular but, rather, with the intention of living their truth and following their own creative expression. Perhaps the singer may sell millions of copies of her album and contribute to the musical genre, or perhaps not - the intention was simply to give of oneself creatively and express truthfully.

Activator #3 Giving To

Another kind of giving is the variety of giving to others and broader causes outside ourselves with the direct intention of making an impact. You can give your time, energy, effort, resources, skills, connections, attention, and love to your company, your family, your favorite nonprofit.

In giving to we should take care to find the endeavors that resonate with our own motivation and health, focusing on the things we find deeply meaningful, creative, novel, challenging, and that connects us socially. When we give to causes that also helps satisfy our deepest human drives, we can sustain the effort and our whole being will conspire to push for greater and greater levels of contribution.