Why You Should Question the Big Plan - #82

Why not just enjoy it?

It's been some time since I've been excited about something besides big life changes. I moved, I got a raise, I spent holidays with friends and family. But lately I've tried to look closer at the seams. It hit me hard this past week when I was searching through old bookmarked websites on my computer. I found a surrealist webcomic of stick figure conversation called Choices. An existential exploration on how to live, the comic explained exactly what I needed to hear: "You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember you're always making up the future as you go." (See it here.)

And if you're reading this, I think you're curious and smart and bored too. No, it's not just because you're reading my writing, it's that I like to keep that kind of company around me and I think we gravitate to what we appreciate. All we're doing is something we've all done naturally for centuries, hope for an answer that won't necessarily come anytime soon.

So for the time being, my choice is to sit here, hitting some keys in the air-conditioning before going to a movie recommended to snap me out of not thinking of a plan: Frances Ha. Wikipedia gave me a perfectly succinct description of what to expect: "Frances Handley is a 27-year-old dancer who lives with her best friend Sophie, but Sophie decides to move out and live with another friend, leaving Frances to figure out how to live her life."

It's time to take the opportunities as they come to us and not be ashamed. We may have debt and responsibilities and endless amounts of questions as we become more and more "adult" but no one wants it to end. We just keep going and make it up as we flow.

Author Christopher Hitchens made a good point when faced with writing through his life-crippling illness: "You don’t really care about public opinion now, you don’t mind about sales, you don’t care what the critics say. You don’t even care what your friends, your peers, your beloved think. You’re free. Death is a very liberating thought."

Give up the fear of being vulnerable. You will be. Life is scary for plenty of reasons, we just have to make sure they're the right ones. Be afraid of not being yourself and not enjoying life. Be afraid of loving others more than yourself. Be afraid that one day you could wake up and realize it's close to over. And then take all that fear and do something about it.

I'm afraid of holding too closely this need to be more than myself. I'm going to enjoy as many movies as I can this summer. Hit the beach, play some frisbee. Eat ice cream. Stay up late, chatting about dreams and favorite movies, with too much beer and too much smoke and too much laughter. And I'm going to Japan in October. Just cause. 

Don't let anyone take away the good things in your life, not even yourself.

Until next time...

I explode into space.

-dan

What It Means To Be Great - #81

Alan Turing is the Godfather of Modern Computing.

Why I couldn't get that out when waxing philosophical with some new friends at work is ironic. I'm endlessly excited by the mathematician's ideas and what they mean for spirituality and human communication, and still I came up with the wrong words, talking at a pace fast enough to skate past my fumbling.

It's ironic because of a little thing called the Turing Test. We like to imagine that human beings have an unmistakable soul of sorts that makes us more than the inanimate objects and animated machines around us. With the Turing Test, that's not so clear. If you were to sit down and chat on a modern computer with a robot sophisticated enough to convince, or rather trick, you into thinking it is a human on the other end, it is no different than a human being. Why? Because, as Turing would argue, human beings can't prove any other person's consciousness. We simply gather the facts of our interactions, our art, our emotions and everything else, and decide how to perceive the outside world. I don't think my fumbling speech had my colleagues convinced I was a malfunctioning robot, but my desire to seem cool, educated, and engaging backfired when I couldn't spit out the right words to describe Alan Turing and why he interests me so much.

Somehow I was more in tune with Turing's theory when I met B and Laura at a pool party this past weekend. Once past the standard work-speak, Laura asked what else I like to do and I told her I write. What exactly, she asked, and I pieced together an answer. She said it sounded like a public journal and the more I thought about it, the more that concept made more sense. Explode into Space is my public journal for collecting ideas on how to be great. 

The new description gave me that tingly feeling when I thought of it and later heard it resonate through Macklemore's lyrics in the song "Make The Money" when he said:

"See, life is a beautiful struggle, I record it, 
Hope it helps you maneuverin' through yours."

When it comes down to questioning myself too much, though, it becomes a battle over greatness. I want to change the world and I want to change my world. When I can't prove that to everyone else around me, I make myself sick. If some weeks go by without me doing more than the routine mixture of fun, work, and journal entries, I feel like a failure. What's the catch? What's the cure?

I found myself back to taking the Turing Test when I had an ideological conversation via text-message with a friend. It was a regular thought I was laying on her; I wasn't sure how to realize my potential for greatness in this world. Quite the quarter-century dilemma. And she said this: "You don't have to be recognized to be great and you don't have to be great to be loved. All you should try to be is yourself, best, truest self. If that person writes something - cool. If not, you are still worthy of love and belonging because you are human and you exist."

It hit me like a punch in the gut. It may not make sense to everyone, but I've found it in my mind to believe that great artists and inventors and figures of all kinds have to suffer for their work. You don't have to be accidentally swallowing paint dripping from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but there is an amount of pressure it takes to be more than your average bear. It's just too easy to float through life letting other people tell you what to do while wishing to your God you were doing everything else you wanted.

And then she followed up against my defensive questioning with this: "Stop thinking that you have to be more important than anyone else." Is it a competition? Is it vanity? Is it right or wrong, we'll never really know. I was just left scratching my head. It begged the fundamental question for me whether or not some people are fundamentally more important than others. Is Einstein more important to us than Obama? Judy Garland more important than Katherine Heigl? Bourdain than Paula Deen? Carlin than Dunham? 

It's hypocritical for me. I believe everything in this world is interconnected and important, and yet I think some people can make a larger impact that it resonates with a wider community. 

With my shields up and my own philosophy wavering, the other part of me realized I'm sick of feeling wrong. If it's true I don't need to be great, why do I feel that way?  It could be comparing myself too closely to my heroes or focusing on the wrong lines on my resume. Nothing is "wrong" with me, it's just perception. I'm experimenting to find the right way to feel alive. What does it mean to be alive? I'm starting to see how my outward suffering sounds less like that of a struggling artist and more like that of a defeated person.

The challenge rears its ugly head when pushing the boundaries of normal turns to suffering. I take so seriously what Tim Ferriss echoed in his book The 4-Hour Work Week: "A person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have." There is a difference between the two: suffering and being uncomfortable.

Whether or not I need to be successful to be great or loved or anything else, I want it for me. Putting yourself in an uncomfortable situation opens the door to truly understanding who you are and sharing your true self with the rest of the world. If you hold too tightly, you'll have no idea. It might be time to let go.

My public journal will be full of hypocrisies as life goes on. I hope my challenges help to bring yours into the light and into perspective. It could be why we're here after all, right?

Until next time...
I explode into space.

-dan

How to Find Your Voice At Work - #80

When do you call it quits? When do you decide to move on to something new? When do you decide not to do something for the rest of your life - when you stop long enough to question it?

It's no big secret that the talented and successful among us are often the people with persistence. It might be part luck, it might be part looks, but from what I've learned it's always constantly hard work well worth it. The blessing and curse for me has always been the secrets in the cracks. Life is too short to commit to something of a hobby for years, and I often find myself always wandering, searching for something that might not come.

I'm in a transition state again. I admit I like my job. Never thought I'd say that. My schedule has become more relaxed and, at the same time, delivered new responsibilities for mentoring and growing. I can afford rent outside of my parent's house and enough to hit the town for some burgers and fries, or a possible trip to Japan in October. I've decided on a bittersweet hiatus from jiu-jitsu, sacrificing a part of my identity to find some new time, income and exploration. 

Writing is next on the chopping block. It took some time to finally piece together my thoughts for this one. It's been almost eighty weeks since I began this adventure and I'm curious enough to question it again. Is it an obligation? Is it worthwhile? Am I phoning it in? Am I nuts?

Grasping for something to write about besides my personal schedule changes, I remembered a text my buddy, Rob, sent me. He said my writing reminded him of Maria Popova' Brain Pickings. We're both fans of collecting idea from books and crafting our own spin on them, and when I went looking through her work, I stumbled on a bit about Henry David Thoreau's journal. Popova said it better than I could she described Thoreau in his journal, admonishing "against the cult of the quote as a vehicle for self-expression, and argues instead for finding one’s own voice".

I think it's a load of shit. Thoreau's brain would have popped if he knew the Internet. The astounding wave of voices we can experience in this world makes collecting our identity that much more powerful and confusing. The challenge has always been to navigate through the woods, machete in hand, carving your own path.

Forgive me, Thoreau - Ram Dass said it best: "Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it!" 

I realized this is practice. This is me working out my ideas aloud. It is not my best work, and I think that's why when a curveball comes screaming by and I'm awake on a Wednesday afternoon with nothing written yet, I feel like a failure. I'm reminded this is not my job and I've always wanted it to be and it's still not for all the reasons I think I know. The doubts are always there and even more so on a self-imposed deadline. 

Architect and visionary Richard Buckminster Fuller said, “I’m not a genius. I’m just a tremendous bundle of experience.” Eighty newsletters is plenty. Now what does the experience tell me? Where does my vehicle want to drive me? What does my voice say?

On to the next one...

Until next time...
I explode into space.

Let's Stop Learning Enough to Start Thinking More - #79

Stop. Take a breath. 

We should never move so fast we forget to do the thing that makes us human: question. Even with the break-neck pace of the world, it's normal for us all to try to keep our head above-water in our own way. We may not know the headlines of the minute, but it'll fall into our inbox just a few seconds later. Mix that constant tornado of information with the natural urge for action and we might already be in the Matrix. 

The idea remains to question. Why? What are we doing? What makes you feel alive, what floors you?

Steve Jobs hit the nail on the head for me when he said in the now-famous 2005 Stanford Commencement speech, "You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future." We need to navigate our way through life at the present moment with what drives us further. You can't always know the destination, you can only sail toward it. 

Stop, take some time to think. Figure out what's important to you.

I had to take a look back for myself after listening to an 11-year-old mathematician squeak and giggle his way through a TEDxTeen talk entitled Forget What You Know. Jacob Barnett pulled from the lives of Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton to show that sometimes we need to stop learning and start thinking to become why the world will know us. Einstein was rejected from the local university because he was Jewish, Newton was shut out of Cambridge because of The Plague. Barnett is no different, he was held back from college at the ripe age of ten for a freak accident involving dropping some coins during his entrance interview. No worry, Barnett took to his work and spent his time home battling mathematical proofs our eyes most likely never saw in undergraduate work. He had Princeton professors check his work in his childhood home. While we may not have the luxury to say so long to our adult responsibilities, like Barnett did at age 10, it could be worth it to take a few minutes and really let your mind wander. Have you stopped to really question your own thoughts? Have you tested your beliefs? What does it mean to be a friend, to be in love, to be happy?  Why, oh why, are we all here?

When I started to search myself, I realized what my brother meant when he said," You know, Dan, you consume a lot of media." When is it time to process everything we're devouring? We start to become collectors of our collaborators. We question our way out by tuning in. Going back through my writing, there was hints of this message all over. Robin Williams captivated me weeks ago with his speech in Good Will Hunting about the difference between the smart-ass knowledge of youth and the old age wisdom of experience. THNKR interviewed John Hodgman of Daily Show fame about writing and I found him prescribing good experience, too, when he said, "It's not enough to write what you know, you have to know interesting things." Regardless of your political opinion of the man, Ralph Nader is a man we can thank for saving us all for flimsy car construction and life-saving seatbelts, among other things. With the assignment of his father, Nader used to ponder a topic all day long as a youngster and arrive at the dinner table expected to debate with his siblings. Even in the book I'm reading now, Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, urges for the time to think, to ponder, to step away from the table and tablet.

When all the lessons are pointing at once, it's great to pull back and experience the big picture when you can. We're given so much, it's hard to remember to create, even if it just means our own thoughts. Make your questions your own and make your way.

Until next time...

I explode into space.

-dan

How to Die Working - #78

So many Japanese people are dropping dead from their jobs, they have a name for it: karoshi. Literally, karoshi breaks down to the characters for "exceed" + "work, labor" + "death". Overtime without pay has become the norm with some posting 80-hour (!) weeks, off the books to circumvent the the rules put in place to officially curb it. Competition has red-lined in the small country and the new workforce, in their late 20's, are dying from heart attacks and strokes. 

Halfway around the world, I'm sitting here dumbstruck. What's going on? We have something as amazing as the Internet existing in this world, and people are still dying just to find a job and people are dying on the job. Technology was supposed to be Our Savior, instead it has made it the new normal to work harder and longer, and normal has become anything but that. We need change and it's not just more jobs, it's more important jobs.

The Model T job is done. Retirement is long gone and benefits become the new gamble. Giving your life to a company is no longer enough because there is no stability in an ever-swirling world. The big question ends up being what can we do?

My mind was racing over all of this, Japanese karoshi and American unemployment, in 7-11 yesterday. As I put together the materials for my coffee, I spied on the Optimum representative pitching his plan to the manager on duty. He was playing the Buddy card, as good salesmen think they should do, and explaining how Optimum could match Verizon on service and beat them on price. They shook hands without a deal, and the Optimum guy walked behind me as I was bringing my coffee to the counter. I was so distracted by how ugly and shallow the conversation was that I walked right out the door, coffee in hand, without paying! I noticed the moment I stepped out into the open and went back in to pay, befuddled and embarrassed.

While Daniel Pink would tell you to sell is human (in his new book To Sell is Human), the new era of communication is showing us that sales can't be slimy anymore. The 7-11 manager doesn't care to be persuaded about Optimum, he can find the prices and service right online. Transparency has freed us from shady or slimy deals. And without the sincerity to truly believe in what you're selling, more and more jobs are becoming hollow shells of what the world needs. What we do need is passion, we need Life, not people playing roles about one service or another, dropping dead just to keep up with the Joneses.

We're racing to make ourselves act like technology. You cannot be as cheap and as quick as our Robot Future. Seth Godin (below) calls it The Race to the Bottom. You don't want to be. You want to be irreplaceable, undeniable, alive. 

Yes, it's much worse for the Japanese dying in the streets than the gross transaction I witnessed at 7-11, but I think the bigger picture is important here. We need some new thinking about work. It is no longer a spot to fill to feed your family or your video game addiction, it is not a moving, working piece of the machine. Just like our technology, our world has become a cloud, flowing and ever-morphing. Work has to be something of true value, there is no more timeclock punch-card. As Jason Silva puts it, "Maybe we need to look at new narratives for how to live our lives in our search to become cosmic heroes." (Silva talks here.) There is no alternative, it's the new American Horror Story. When they take away the shit jobs with fast food robots and automated call centers, what do you do? Start moving people. Fix their troubles. Lift the world up.

We shouldn't be dying for our work, we should be coming alive with it. Find it for yourself and enjoy what Alan Watts called the "real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play."

Until next time...
I explode into space.

-dan

The Number One Job Skill in 2020: linkd.in/11Ht4hj via @georgeanders

— TaskRabbit (@TaskRabbit) June 12, 2013

Should We Be Evolving? Yes. - #77

We are evolving. It is happening all the time and before our eyes. It might even hurt a bit. As a species it makes sense, we are adapting to our environment. So why then, I wonder, does personal development as a study gets such a bad rap by some. Is it the corny white dudes in suits? Is it the glorification of executive business? Or is it just too daunting to allow into our consciousness, having the idea it should just flow? If anything, my thought is, personal or societal, it's happening anyway and right now is the best time to hold up the mirror. 

Mirror ready? Good. Literally, it's often in front of that mirror, we see our flesh-and-blood bodies. If you are what you eat, and you sure as hell are, then some diets today may be taking us backwards unnecessarily. Christina Warinner drops some serious knowledge in her TED talk "Debunking the Paleo Diet" about what we know of paleolithic people and the connection to our modern food. The Paleo diet today generally recommends you consume a good amount of meat, vegetables, nuts, and fruits. No grains, dairy, alcohol, legumes, or processed sugars. But, as an example, if we're sticking with the caveman, there was no such thing as broccoli 10,000 years ago when agriculture was invented, much less before it! There isn't even broccoli as we know it in the wild today. Did you realize that? I didn't! The green stuff kids push away from them at the dinner-table is actually a genetic mutation of a bunch of the broccoli flower parts. That's right, down to the vegetables we eat, our food has been selectively bred to look and taste how it does. Vegetables in the wild are bitter, scant, and toxic, to a remarkable degree. We've evolved right alongside our foods. 

What's to learn here? This is no correct, singular diet. It definitely doesn't mean Twinkies are going to make you healthy and active, it just means we shouldn't rely on the ideas that worked in the past because they were the only ones around. I'm not knocking Paleo as an idea. If it makes people more conscious of what they're shoveling into their pie-holes, right on. I would just note that if total health is the key in this progressing chain of events, Warinner makes some damn good points for us to correct the course from fad to fit. 

Better than evolutionary advice from cavemen, we should look at where we are now and realize we're swimming in it. It's happening whether we recognize it or not. Enter Slavoj Zizek. I was captivated from the very beginning of his segment in the philosophy documentary, Examined Life. Zizek is a modern philosopher with a distinct spit-slinging lisp and enough passion sparking off his words you wonder how he finds himself calm enough to sleep. In Examined Life, Zizek speaks of the modern world, while wandering through a trash dump, analyzing ecology as ideology. "There is no Nature," he says. There is no going back to the raw, organic material of this world. "The existing world is the best possible world." If we don't believe this, Zizek offers, we don't understand the true meaning of Love. We know from greeting cards and surviving high-school sweethearts that Love is not idealization, but the acceptance of imperfections. If this is Love, why do we strive to revert to some Paradise past? Our modern existence and future is the stuff of terrible catastrophe and war; we need to embrace it and move forward. It is the psychological concept of disavowal, or denial of any connection, Zizek borrows to diagnose our modern mindset. We comprehend the inherent dangers in our modern ways and yet we carry on, do as we please. This is the true sense of our Nature; we love it and we push on to find more of it. We must not only accept the trash, the ugliness, but find poetry, spirituality, and beauty in it.

And if the modern day is where evolution is currently cranking, what are we to think of this thing you're reading on right now: the Internet? Nicholas Carr wrote The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains and questioned the simple structure of our minds against the eclectic and distracting world of technology.

Amazing benefits aside, our modern digital world is making it difficult to fully appreciate and marinate ideas that require full attention. We stumble from idea to idea never developing the mastery to implement and use them. Carr argues that the greatest thinkers of our time were those willing to sit down and think. Shocker, I know. The idea, though, is not to unplug completely and revert to the paleolithic or to dive in to the deep-end of bits and bytes until we forget how to communicate in person, it is to adapt the marvels of the modern world and compress them to improve our lives one step at a time.

In the end, that being today, right now, should we choose to make improvement, enrichment, development our priority? I think we have no choice. Even if you yourself chose to become a Zen Buddhist and sit on mountains in meditation all day, Earth will keep spinning toward The Future as we have yet to know it. The question for everyone becomes: "Where do you want to be when The Future arrives?"

Until next time...
I explode into space.
-dan

How I Found Myself Slapped

Over some Chinese takeout, we were talking about physical abuse. Just some normal, light dinner conversation with my roommate. 

I was having trouble wrapping my head around the mentality of a victim of abuse staying within the relationship. I’ve known a few close friends and family to do that and it was terrible. My roommate gladly engaged the more informed perspective from the female point of view, adding in her experience of volunteering extensively with counseling sexual and physical abuse victims.

I found myself revealing my own brand of masculinity. Personally, I never understood the mentality behind the universal law that no one should ever hit a woman. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not encouraging or tolerating violence against women; it’s disgusting. I’m trying to comprehend why there is a brick wall for that kind of behavior toward women, and not for men. Why is it perfectly unquestioned when a man is hit and, on the flip side, it’s a manic witch-hunt when a women is hit? 

Do I know how ignorant that could sound? Yes. Speaking in general terms, it’s obvious why abuse towards women is much less tolerated. Women tend to be smaller in stature and don’t have the aggression or strength to defend themselves. The imagery that comes to mind is often the stuff of Lifetime movies. I know this, and, again, I am talking in very general terms. 

For years, my mentality has been that if someone, man or woman, were to slap me, I’d hit them right back. I couldn’t imagine a situation where someone would be allowed to hit you in the face because of their feelings. Nope. Unacceptable. 

I struggled to tell my roommate where I found this idea. It could have been something I heard my father say once, or what the media portrays on a consistent loop. It could have been anything, but I didn’t think I was out of line in saying I find violence like that inexcusable. What are we really saying, after all?

She asked, “Do you really think you would hit a woman if she hit you?”

I took no time in saying yes. 

And in the time it took me to close my mouth, she stood up and slapped me across the face.

And I did nothing.

Nothing.

I’m pretty sure my fists didn’t even clinch. My eyes locked on hers and all I could say was “What was that?”

Believe it or not, I don’t believe it was a malicious act. This is not an writing exercise. This is not therapy. I have nothing but love for the girl to this day. She didn’t mean for it to hurt, and it barely did; it’s just besides the point. It was an experiment. She was testing my limits, and I’m sure you could argue that’s what some girlfriends have done to abusive significant others before. The key difference was that we weren’t arguing prior to the act. It wasn’t an attack of passion and pure ignorance.

What followed was a few relatively-quiet awkward moments where I cleaned up my leftovers, poured a glass of water to cool down, and managed a bit of pacing. Normally, when I’m wronged by someone, for whatever reason, I’m glad to give the silent treatment and have them suffer with their own thoughts. Because this happened mid-conversation, and in the middle of a good one, I sat back down. 

I knew she could see how serious I was when I said, “I’m not going to hit you, but don’t ever do that again.” I could see the uncomfortable shame in her face. Whatever the motivation before, she saw it was wrong. And really that was my thought all along.

For the nights afterward, though, I couldn’t help but wonder what happened there. I was glad to realize I wouldn’t always react with some caveman-monkey rage if someone slapped me in the face. I was disappointed too. Somehow I built up this conceptual portion of masculinity as the ability to tower over anyone who thought they might have the audacious privilege to hit me. Somehow I rooted my own masculinity in being strong, emotionless, calculated enough with my own gender-fueled beliefs. Now I’m not too sure. It opened the doors for me to question my romantic relationships, my role models, and my bullied childhood.

What I do know is I’m sick of the Swiss-cheese generalities for gender. What does it mean to be a man and what does it mean to be a woman? There are no rules outside the biological differences. Sure, men can be aggressive and women can be nurturing, but I’m sure I’m not alone when I say I know very timid guys and very selfish women.

What are we left with? It is my belief that you’re a man by how you treat women and you’re a woman by how you treat men. We all fill in the details ourselves but, in the end, we need to remember we’re all in this together. 

Keep Calm and Feel Good - #76

I've always known the story of the starving artist as something of a source of aspiration. Creative work was not supposed to come easy, only from blood, sweat, and tears. No rent money, you burn your books to survive the winter, sell your guitar to travel through the summer. The figures and stories to prove all that escape me now, but I know that expecting to suffer for your art can make you sick.

Waking up with your first thought being how quickly life is passing you by is not a good morning start. It's a cruel process to compress the day before it has begun to a fast-forward failure. If I was naive enough to think I know 100% exactly what it takes to become the person I want to be, there was no stopping to smell the roses. I was burning rubber, breathing in the fumes and seeing stars.

My medicine for the week was one small decision: chill out. I caught myself red-handed, writing out impossible steps to reach who knows what levels. Trying to be better was not supposed to make me this upset. And if waking up to that realization wasn't enough, Danielle LaPorte gave me some bubble gum medicine and a pat on the back. In her latest book, The Desire Map, LaPorte proves we have goal-setting backward. It's bullshit. You're going to drown if you think swimming through lava will bring you to an island bliss. LaPorte puts it simply:  "Feeling good is the primary intention." Yes, you can still work hard and stay up late. Yes, you can still battle obstacles and go to war with challenges. It just means you sign up for it. You should be excited and driven by your thoughts, not defeated before you even start.

The main idea of The Desire Map was actually a meditation revamped and improved upon from LaPorte's first book, The Fire Starter Sessions: "Knowing how you actually want to feel is the most potent form of clarity that you can have. Generating those feelings is the most powerfully creative thing you can do with your life." Instead of drafting the bucket list we think we want to cross off, we should start with the feelings we want in the moment. What's going to make you feel accomplished? Smart? Attractive? What's going to make you feel important? Once you can nail down your core-desired feelings, you can eat up opportunities for breakfast.

Beware! You wouldn't chance it bench-pressing 300 lbs. on your first day at the gym. You wouldn't eat a kale salad for lunch one day and call yourself healthy forever. Don't think I woke up one morning all better, right as rain, and ready to go. It's a process of building muscle, chugging along, adapting to the environment. We don't just wake up successful, so why do we trick ourselves into thinking anything else can change completely overnight?

Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, made this crystal-clear discussing procrastination with Big Think. An investigative journalist cracking open habit patterns, Duhigg stated, "Give yourself permission to take a little bit of time to practice because you're building up neural pathways associated with a certain behavior. And those neural pathways just build up over time, you cant speed up that process any more than is natural." Duhigg talks about the habit of checking Facebook in a cubicle job and understanding that for some this is a habit too hard to break, so we need to exercise our focus and willpower to exorcise the silly social network.

Give yourself as much time as you need to do the things you want, the things that excite you, the things that make you you. As bestselling author and cartoonist Hugh MacLeod said, "As long as you feel inspired, your life is being well spent." With inspiration, you lose track of time. There is no pain enough to stop you. Nothing matters in the end except the feeling itself.

Until next time...
I explode into space.

-dan

Learning We Have More To Learn - #75

I bought the ticket on a whim. There was a thought buzzing around my head that I wasn't taking enough advantage of the fact that I'm living next-door to the Greatest City in the World. And since I'm in love with the mind-expanding YouTube channel THNKR, and they partnered with 92Y to produce the panel, I felt compelled to go.

While I'm no educator, The Future of Learning discussion hit hard to reinforce what I'd been bouncing around in my head for awhile - this overwhelming sense that our biggest threat to learning today is education. There is a difference. We grow up through a school system that pushes us to learn almost as a formally forced punishment, rarely considering the passion and motivation that can exist there. Learning becomes dirty, painful, something to escape from. Passion becomes secondary to work.

THNKR and 92Y brought together some amazing people fighting to make learning our means of education again. What I gathered from Jake Schwartz, Abigail Besdin, Joe Hall, and Joel Rose was that the objective should be to motivate others to learn what we need to learn and decide what we want to learn. No longer should we be launched into the world with a piece of paper and the only expectations remain to carve out a career, find a partner, and, most importantly, pay our bills. We're not expected nearly as much to learn as adults - just do your job. Hell, some of us are so conditioned by our Dorm Days we make the promise to ourselves to never cram like that again, never stay up late frantically smashing keys to put together a term paper. If we just get through this, we'll never learn again!

Of course, that's far from the truth. We learn every day, it just feels different. What we need is the motivation to learn for our own sake, not for the satisfaction of some social benchmark or progress report. Joe Hall, founder of the Ghetto Film School in the Bronx, planted the thought in my head best when he said, "If you can experience success, it moves you."

I'm not sure what psychological diagnosis would describe why I read personal development books, I just know I want success to move me and they promise it. It's enough to look past the corny white guy on the book covers, suited up and promising radical change in minimal time. David Allen was that guy on my coffee-table this week with the book Getting Things Done. I was initially captivated by his TED talk about the importance of emptying our heads of the endless to-do lists and flowing through our days, taking action with a "mind like water". Cool stuff. A third of the way through the book, though, my eyes glazed over. There were labels and folders and talk of organizational hierarchy. I jumped into this book with the thought of karate-chopping the obstacles of my day and I was starting to be confronted with the system's benefits more suited for Executive Suits at cubicle desks.

My thought is that's just how people feel when they're confronted with learning something outside of their education. They're not motivated themselves and they're met with feelings of ignorance and arrogance. When we're confronted with people telling us how to live our lives, whether in books or videos or CD sets, we're immediately on the defensive. We're taken back to detention and piles of homework. Who knows us better than ourselves at this point? We should be adults prepared for the Real World, right!? 

We're not dumb. We know we need to set regular, manageable, slightly-uncomfortable goals and success begets success and the decision to act requires some sacrifice. It's not an absence of information, we have the entire world at our fingertips. The trouble is when personal development fails to address the step beyond that. As much as I enjoyed the book, David Allen is guilty too. Often laid out is the thoughts and actions we need to take to become our own Hero and we fail to give enough space on the page to recognize motivation.  It is getting our ass up, machete-in-hand, and hacking down the big tasks.

After years of somehow missing it, I sat down today to watch Good Will Hunting, and it fit this idea perfectly. Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) nails down Will Hunting (Matt Damon) when he notices his youthful arrogance in replacing the world he has seen in books for that which is right outside his grasp of life experience. His genius is rarely tested because he doesn't make himself vulnerable, rarely goes beyond the pages. He never left Boston, he never found love. Until he does, then the movie gets Good, if you know what I mean.

It could be that that's the allure for personal development and learning outside our education all the same. All we can do really is provide each other with what we know. Free your mind and find your success. You've been a success before and you can do it again because of it. If we can learn to be motivated, we can be motivated to learn.  All there is left to do is to get out there.

Until next time...
I explode into space.

-dan

Share Like Your Life Depends On It - #74

Are you like me, do you put a metric ton of pressure on yourself? In the light of our Social Networking World, my hunch is that young Americans are finding it harder and harder to live up to expectations and the achievements of the "best" of us. It's no longer surprising to see someone discovered on YouTube launch into super-stardom before their voice changes. Millionaires are getting younger and younger. Or if you have just a bit of talent and a clean face, you can audition for a sleuth of instant reality shows. Our new, radical world leaves the door open for possibilities, and you're doing what? It's a rough reality to handle.

If you allow it.

Freezing perfection is not possible. If not today, there will always be someone superior to you and it shouldn't be a hard thought to swallow. As a matter of fact, and it is a fact, it is just as universal a truth as the inevitability of death. And when we look at the most successful among us, hard bodies, mountains of cash, shining résumés, brilliant minds, and gorgeous significant others, we often tend to see the framed photo. Like rapper B.O.B. says in the track Where Are You: 

"People only see it the way it appears, but they never see the ropes and the pulleys and the gears."

Whether you're an "artist" or not, the best of us is defined by time and effort, trial and error. Some of us may have been born with some bit of luck, but no one is born successful. We make decisions and we take risks. And to inspire and help everyone around us, we show our work.

Austin Kleon, author of Newspaper Blackout and Steal Like an Artist, is working on a new book with that very idea in mind, Show Your Work. Analyzing the advice he gave in his old work, the process and success of his writing endeavors, and brand-new fatherhood, Kleon opened a Creative Mornings event in Austin, Texas with proof that art is not always romantic and glittery and clean. In Steal Like An Artist, Kleon's original advice was Do Good Work and Share It With Others. After questions continued to roll in, Kleon realized there was a need for more definition. "Good Work" is the foot that's out to trip you. Looking up to idols of creative masterpieces, we naturally measure our work against them. (Ira Glass caught this too.) The irony here is Kleon's success began with a writing exercise he thought was stupid (his words), blacking out newspaper articles' words to make poems of the few remaining visible on the page. He was discovered by another blog and then myself and now the rest is history. 

Doing anything in this lifetime, we want to give our best. No one sets out to be half-assed or stupid or disappointing. We handcuff ourselves to perfection and fail to let go enough to share our work - the  whole dirty, ugly, tough progress - with the world.

I'm no stranger to the artistic ideal. Aside from Explode into Space, I have notebooks filled with half-realized ideas and unpublished blog entries. And while they don't see the light of day for, what I call, their imperfections, they become failed chances to connect. I often toy with this vision of dying young, and having those closest to me cherish everything I've left behind in my journals, blogs, and scratch pads. There is no skeleton in my closet, mind you, it's way more ridiculous. I'm feeling sorry for myself. It is a grandiose and moronic idea to think you need a prescription of death for someone to take you seriously, when there would no longer be a "you" around to enjoy it.

My former boss for Rutgers Television and, since then, an even better friend, Brent, sent me a quote from the Mason Gross School of the Arts Tumblr page that has captured my driving force as of late:

"No one is ever going to ask you to do the thing you really want to do. This will never happen. So just think about what you’d like to do, and then just start doing it." — Laurie Anderson

Hoping for Death or American Idol to knock on your door and discover you will never get you as far as sharing your true self with the world. When you're able to start seeing it this way, every day is another chance. If it means you have to reveal the weakest spots of your armor, so be it. Perfection is for no one, strive for process.

Until next time...
I explode into space.

-dan

This is a Process - #73

Dear Readers,

I'd like to keep it short and sweet this week. The excitement of moving out of my childhood home again (for the fourth time) has hijacked my brain with lists of household errands to run, new habits to adopt, and a need to explore the new surroundings. Mahwah, New Jersey is now my home. Michelle and Sam are my new roommates, only after mingling at a handful of parties over the past few years, and a perfectly-timed revelation that I was looking for a new space while they were looking for a third roommate. Voila!

With all this wonderful change, I'm left to my own devices during most of the daytime while they're at work. I never expected moving out to be the answer to all my life's problems, but it's easy to see how your problems can follow you now. Thankfully, I have discovered the added benefit of controlling how to spend my time.

There is still this burning need in me to experience and complete everything. Some might prescribe it as foolishly striving for perfection. It's ridiculous, we can all agree. I can complete a to-do list twelve pages long and be hungry for more. It could be the tasks are too easy if they are simply crossed out. Hell, Success Magazine isn't banging down my new condo door to chat with me because I can grocery-shop, write in my journal, lift weights, and pour milk in my cereal better than the rest of the world. 

The trick is that, despite difficulty, there is always more. The clock keeps on ticking.

What's the solution? Although I'm not 100%, there is something to the process. Perfection is impossible and you wouldn't want it anyway. Life would be boring without the challenge of doing something new. Instead, my thought is we need to embrace the process of activity tighter, not push it away.

My solution is to stop and center myself in the joys of the present. Count your blessings, own your successes, and look at yourself in the mirror and use Dirk Diggler's powerful mantra "I am a star. I'm a star, I'm a star, I'm a star. I am a big, bright, shining star. That's right."

Just like stars and flowers, humans are bound to grow. Every day offers another chance, not to battle the list or the clock, but to find yourself in the things you do. Howard Thurman said it better than most:

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Until next time...

I explode into space.

-dan

Remember the Alamo - #72

Dear Readers,

Motion City Soundtrack sang best into my high-school ears with their song "The Future Freaks Me Out".

There is a compelling train of thought that every second we crawl closer toward it, the future is in our decisions. The advice of any personal development coach would be to believe it and you can become it. Hell, the idea of visualizing the future is the reason we have all this amazing stuff around us. But there is a sliver of this belief that becomes a bit too controlling, too convenient and too freaky. There is no guarantee that any single human can predict the future. Not one psychic, not one dreamer.

It can be a bit hard to swallow. We conveniently forget that no matter our goals or whenever or not they're achieved, the future will arrive in its own style. British writer Stephen Fry challenged me with a video entitled What I Wish I'd Known When I Was 18 when he said, "The worst thing you can ever do in life is set yourself goals." The idea behind this is either you melt into failure for an untold number of reasons or you achieve goals without satisfaction or reflection, marching onto the next. 

The danger is looking to the future for an end. Even if you conquered the world, you would still need to keep it. And then conquer breakfast. 

I'm currently halfway through Tony Robbins' 30-Day Personal Power II CD set (whew, what a title!). Goal-setting has become a much more potential reality if only because it is transforming who I am daily. While I'm currently all about the Brooklyn apartment with a balcony, Honda cruiser motorcycle, and a debt-free blogging career, it is much more about the personal transformation I need to acquire these goals. How do I know I want all that in the future? I don't. And you don't know either. For all we can guess, we may not want the trophy at the end of the race, but we can always say we ran it. 

It's the kind of present thought that had me smiling and without regret after getting a knee planted on my neck during my last jiu-jitsu tournament. (After the tournament, I was smiling, not during the chokehold. I'm not that masochistic.) If anything, it sculpted my ambition, my body, and my identity even better to throw caution to the wind and fight. 

If the future can't be predicted and we're moving toward it, whether we like it or not, the most logical thing I think we can do is build today for tomorrow. Dreaming too wild can be like fishing with grenades. There is an acknowledgement that we are not in a place we want to be and often our deepest flaws are revealed as holding us back. Hurting yourself to be someone else is the most masochistic. There is some pleasure in there but mostly you're left with scars at square one.

Ira Glass, host of NPR's This American Life, exhibits this clearly in an old interview he did for CurrentTV when he defines taste as the barometer for creative people. Your taste is the reason you want to create something of your own and it is the reason you know your own stuff is not that good when you begin. It is nothing like the pros, the experts, the famous. The success comes with the goal and fulfillment of bridging that gap and realizing your taste is on the same level with your work. This, Glass said, is what he wished someone would have told him when he was starting in broadcasting.

The simple truth is the present is all we have. You can argue the past makes us better today, you can argue that humans are uniquely capable of striving to their futures. What remains is that two very successful storytellers and thinkers, Stephen Fry and Ira Glass, used the present to throwback lessons to their teenage years. Whether you have goals or not, young or old, we're here to do stuff and sometimes it hurts to know we don't know everything. In the end, Steven Johnson may have exhibited best with this idea: "'The adjacent possible is a shadow future, a map of all the ways the present can re-invent itself".

The future is now. Make it happen, as best you can.

Until next time...

I explode into space.

-dan

To Be or Not to Be is a Bad Question - #71

Dear Readers,

It happens to me pretty regularly when I wake up bright and early on my day off from work. Without enough plans, I ask myself what to do and, quickly, the list flies off the handle. Twenty-four hours are never enough to cram this incredible amount of activities into all of them. Normally, I end up running thankless, forgettable errands, carving away a bit more at my jiu-jitsu game, and visiting my friends halfway down the state. It's still great although it seems there could be so much more to the day.

"What to do?" is not specific and not helpful. Asking the big question of what to do is easy to answer with plain old stuff to pass the time. You can keep yourself dusting the whole damn house to answer that busywork question. What I find more appealing and fulfilling is a practice I re-discovered trying to slug through Tony Robbins' Personal Power II CD series again: Ask Better Quality Questions.

Whether we notice it or not, our brains are exploding with questions from the time we jump out of bed. Trouble can always begin here. Ask yourself the wrong question and you'll get an answer. Ask your brain why your day sucks and it finds an answer. Ask your brain why you feel awesome and it finds an answer. The truth of the conclusion doesn't matter nearly as much as what state your mind and body are left to survive in.

Turning the gun on myself, I realized just asking about activities was not going to cut it. I decided to ask a better quality question for my day off: "What can I do today to pull my dreams closer to the present?" Now, the scope narrows its focus. My dream is to make a living off my ideas. Dusting is not going to do it. Writing? Possibly. Better question, better answer. 

Too often life feels like a failed experiment. We can remind ourselves that mistakes are to be made but sometimes it doesn't always feel so great. Whether we are measuring ourselves against celebrities without mortgages or desk-jobs, or we're unable to manage our time to sleep, exercise, and eat properly in the span of a day, why not take a moment to really appreciate what is a success in your life right now? Don't bullshit yourself, there is plenty to be happy about in this life, right now. I'm not talking your favorite television show or after-dinner dessert. I want to know what in your life lifts you up. Are you learning to cook? Are you getting better at your Zumba routine? Are you soaking up the Spring weather? Are you a kick-ass friend, or sibling, or significant other?

Often questions like this end in The Happiness Trap. Pardon the heresy. After doing my daily exercises with Tony Robbins, I've been devouring Daniel Gilbert's skeptical and inquisitive Stumbling on Happiness. The more pages I turn, the less certain I am that I know what happiness is in this life. And, you know what? It's cool. Side-step the question of happiness, it's too subjective. Tim Ferriss may have made it clear to me, albeit temporarily, a long time ago, when in The Four-Hour Work Week he said, "Happiness can be bought with a bottle of wine and has become ambiguous through overuse."

The idea is perspective and you can have it, like Journey sang, any way you want it. Sharpen your questions and answer them with everything you have. Let the sparks fly!

Until next time...
I explode into space.
-dan

Why Bother? - #70

Dear Readers,

If achieving your ideal life and your wildest dreams was as simple as setting goals, putting in the work, and succeeding, we'd all be over and done with it. We'd be sitting on tropical island beaches, rockin' supermodel bodies and supermodel partners. The weather would be warm enough for a tan and we could wake up to do our most fulfilling work whenever we felt like it. And then, pancakes.

Of course, it's not that simple. 

The search is where it all begins.

Somehow we get caught up in thinking that the life of our dreams is only something someone special can start to realize. You think you need to be a prodigy of immense skill or a non-stop working machine or a lucky inventor for Paradise to fall into your sphere of influence. The reality is it can be yours too.

Stumbling back into my copy of Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide, I kept thinking about how this happens, how our world tricks us. Only a few chapters in, Lehrer outlines a study where NYC fifth-graders were split into two groups of test-takers. Students individually took an IQ test of sorts and, with one sentence of recognition,  the moderator praised half of them for either their intelligence or their effort when they were done. It was along the lines of "You must be smart" or "You must have worked hard". Of those praised for their efforts, 90% decided on a harder test when given a follow-up choice of difficulty for their next test. And a third and final test, identical to the first in difficulty, showed a significant increase in scores for those praised for their effort, raising the average score by 30%!

Just one small sentence. Just one shift in perspective.

You do not need to see yourself as failing to be automatically intelligent. Or rich or talented or connected or anything. As long as you are putting in the effort and fighting.

Pull back the lens from New York City schools and the big picture makes sense for our chaotic big kid lives. We have to deal with all the troubles of adult life, like debt and dinner and what to do Friday night, and we build up unreasonable expectations that we should just know how to have our dreams arrive at our front door. Or worse, we think the time and place has already passed up by. 

All you need to do is acknowledge the search and get on with it. Think of your life as an exercise in effort. 

As exhausting as it may sound, doesn't giving up on what you want sound worse? Why wouldn't you fight for and deserve the life you always wanted? 

Assuming we have to be innately talented will get us nowhere. As a matter of fact, the kids in the NYC study praised for their "intelligence" ended up choosing the easier option for their second test, and scored significantly less on their final test. The theory is that the pressure of thinking we have to know everything, we have to be smart, we have to be great, right off the bat tumbled them and tumbles us.

Why does personal development strike such a chord, negative or positive, with people? If we can consciously tell ourselves that the life of our dreams will require setting goals, putting in the work, and succeeding, why don't we follow through? Why can the search be overwhelming constructive for some and down-right stupid for others? l'm curious, what do you think is wrong with working hard for everything you want in life?

Until next time...

I explode into space.

-dan

Explode into Space #69 - Why Choice is Our Biggest Battle

Dear Readers,

The secret formula to blogging, some say, is teaching the world about your obsessions. Whether it is makeup tips, dessert recipes, book recommendations, life-hacks, or gadget reviews, we're helping each other out and feeding our addictive curiosity for slivers of life. When it comes down to an obsession of mine to share, though, the more I dream, the longer the list grows. It's not that I've been diagnosed with any kind of attention disorder or that I'm just so damn good at mastering things, I'm just afraid to commit. If the world has so much to offer, why focus?

What I'm left with, writing each week and striving for more, is a tornado of indecision. And I'm not alone. Psychologist and author Barry Schwartz wrapped my mind around this concept when I first heard his theories on the Choice episode of WNYC's Radiolab (still my all-time favorite). Schwartz wrote The Paradox of Choice, insisting on the dogmatic belief that the idea that endless choice will bring us freedom and happiness is bullshit. 

Ok, let's cram this paradox theory. The thought is that the abundance of choice my generation has been able to celebrate has also dropped two very negative consequences on us: paralysis and regret. Choice paralysis is the anxiety of choosing from too many flavors, too many movies, too many potential romantic partners. With too many choices and too many factors to play the Pro/Con game, we're physically pained to decide. Heaven forbid you get past that enormous series of hurdles, you're left with regret. You can easily imagine the possibilities of the alternatives because they are no longer within your grasp. It's the equivalent of the thought that the grass is greener on the other side, except we just had the chance to walk on it and now there is a gate, a lock, and a big, mean, scary dog keeping you in your yard. And you can't help but dream how great that green grass must be. 

For years I've been trying to find a theme both specific and broad enough to encompass my obsessions, of which are endless, and grab a specific slice of people. And all along the great burden of deciding held me back from putting my foot down. I've been afraid of the vulnerable commitment it is to start a blog. Paralysis and regret. As ridiculous as it may seem, I'm certain I'm not alone. Some of the greatest and most challenging accomplishments we all want to achieve start with that first step and we fail to take it because it doesn't feel perfect, because there are so many paths, because there is always tomorrow. Makes you wonder how long Neil Armstrong hesitated before he touched base with the moon.

Slowly, the vision is coming into focus, though. The beauty is the irony in this case. How I can help, I've asked myself. I'm starting to think my battle with choice holds the key. What does that mean? If I'm not alone, I know we all have struggles taking that first leap of faith. Where I found weakness in settling on a focus to my writing, I now am finding strength in knowing that expanding my range for curiosity and existing with that indecision is something to share. I want to collect stories and methods for getting past this struggle and finding the confidence to say that a decision is better than none. 

And still some voice somewhere deep inside me shouts, "Fraud!" Some circuit in that computer on my shoulders stalls me and warns me that I have no right to do any of this. Leave it to the experts, it says. But who the fuck is an expert? Is there some sorcerer out there that has conquered the dilemma of choice once and for all?

Where others are qualified by their remarkable life stories, I'm an expert in being me - an overthinking dreamer with the audacity to claw after greatness.

It is my life story and I'm sure it could be yours too. We're all completely capable of choosing our own adventure and we're afraid. And I think that's ok, as long as we keep fighting. If it at all sounds enticing to you, I'm here to help.

Until next time...

I explode into space.

-dan

Explode into Space #68 - Impressed with the Future

Anything I can help with?

— Chris Guillebeau (@chrisguillebeau) March 28, 2013

Dear Readers,

Chris Guillebeau tweeted me. Twice. The author of The Art of Non-Conformity and The $100 Startup was, first and foremost, a blogger with the bucket list goal of visiting every country in the world. Now an author famous to me particularly, he asked on Twitter, bluntly and generally, if he could help anyone, and I figured, "What the hell, why not ask a fellow writer about my audience?"

It was a glimpse of the bigger picture. It's no big secret that Twitter is a great way to connect closely with others you'd never imagine talking to and here was a more successful author/blogger/world traveler than I that was opening his inbox to anyone willing to crank out 140 characters. What seemed wild at the time now shines of brilliant strategy and generosity. Guillebeau pointed me to his free manifesto, 279 Days to Overnight Success, already taking the time to craft a beautiful and effective e-book of sorts to teach others how to develop a blog following without sleazy advertisements or compromises. In a world where everyone can write, a personal touch is the quickest way to gaining a true fan and Guillebeau has me. 

With the feedback to my own writing, I've come across two fairly obvious themes: you like me and you like my ideas. Simple enough, right? The challenge is getting a small world to know me and my ideas. What is Explode into Space? Why, as a reader, would I waste my time here? They are the questions we barely bother to ask ourselves when something like The Onion or Perez Hilton or Reddit just fits. It's subtle but effective. You know what to expect from each and you don't mind wasting time cause you don't imagine doing anything else.

Jason Silva is another name I thought had to have some Internet pull. When he tweeted that he'd be chatting with author Daniel Pinchbeck in NYC the next day for just $10, I thought it was a joke. I bought a ticket without thinking, which I rarely do, and made my way across state lines. 

Formerly an employee of CurrentTV, Silva has exploded onto the Internet scene with his viral videos, or shots of philosophical espresso, as he calls them. They are simply two minutes of enthusiastic buzzing from Silva, quoting technological minds like Ray Kurzweil and Kevin Kelly, and radically beaming about the epiphanies of life. I highly recommend them.

Amongst the great conversation Silva and Pinchbeck shared with a crowded bar of fifty or so people, a sharp criticism was made of hipsters for the right reason. Forget the fashion and trust-fund support system, Silva criticized the hipsters we all know as being unimpressed by everything, dead to the world around them. It's a slap in the face to life itself. There is awe and inspiration around every corner, and it's something that deeply infuses my writing.

How can we not be impressed with a world where we can contact our favorite authors via Twitter in minutes? How can we not be impressed by the amazing technology you're reading this on right now? No one is reading Explode into Space on paper and pencil. How can we not be impressed that more and more people don't have to drop dead to make the world run?

I'm happy to look on the bright side and this past week I've connected with some great people: authors, filmmakers, new friends and old. The world is ripe for the picking and I'm going to start my collection.

Until next time...
I explode into space.

-dan

Explode into Space #66 - The Treasure & Trouble of Owning Your Story

Dear Readers,

Like the hard-boiled detective dodging tricky dames and whizzing bullets or the sci-fi hero traveling to the ends of the galaxy to roll out justice, we're all searching for our story while we're creating it. We are the stories we tell ourselves and others. You can't deny that everyone loves a good story, it almost seems within our nature. As Jason Silva quotes Douglas Hofstadter in his latest video The Mirroring Mind, we are "miracles of self-reference". 

Stories keep us equal-parts sane, providing structure and context, and advancing forward to The Next Best Thing. Would we aspire to anything if we didn't first see those achieve it before us? Would Tyson have been anything without the existence of Ali? Would Louis CK exist without George Carlin? Would any astronaut ever exist without Neil Armstrong? We adopt stories and tweak them as our own, pushing the corners of possibility.

The trouble comes when real life is not the fantasy we constantly imagine. Life coach Tony Robbins put it this way in a video entitled Create a New Story: "We live in a culture in the West that teaches people that you're not enough unless you're doing something really special and unique and we define special and unique in interesting ways." We can't all be rock stars and supermodels, just by telling ourselves it can happen overnight. Dreams only work if you do. Nothing new, right? We fall into it anyway. Personally, I've always had this blueprint of independent wealth and success at a young age. Lord knows I've tried with random adventures and they failed for whatever was a number of reasons. The trouble that keeps me up at night is finding the way to push myself, my stubborn, comfortable self, up a hill, in the snow, both ways, to realizing I am my dreams. Life can feel so inauthentic until you're happy every day giving everything you can to become the person you want to be.

On the flip side you have to imagine that Life can throw a curveball. You can get hit by a meteor, slammed by a drunk driver, or diagnosed with cancer. The pain you experience, besides physical, is learning that this is now part of you, no matter what you do. I'm not a big comic guy, but if I remember correctly that's how most superheroes begin their transformation, with bitter rejection and delusion of their great responsibility. There is the beauty. You have to own your handicaps as quickly as your strengths, and write your story like no one else. Sure, it's not always cut and dry, clean and simple. Sometimes, we need to go outside ourselves to understand the story. Psychotherapist Philippa Perry delivers a gut-check with this warning: "We need to look at the repetitions in the stories we tell ourselves [and] at the process of the stories rather than merely their surface content. Then we can begin to experiment with changing the filter through which we look at the world, start to edit the story and thus regain flexibility where we have been getting stuck." 

The road to being extraordinary is paved with more than your normal stories. When someone asks what's up, is there really nothing to offer? When someone says FML, are they not just noticing the negative aspects of life? And while Emerson and Dr. Schuller and Napoleon Hill all had the idea that you are what you think about all day, I think it's more than that. You are everything you breathe in. You are the thoughts you think and the actions you take, and the story your thoughts and actions unfold. And as Joe Rogan notes, "You have to be the hero of your own story." 

What is your story? What is that fantasy in your head that's just not coming true? Can you change it or can you change yourself? There is no other way. Think about it.

Until next time...
I explode into space.

-dan

Why Suffer for What You Love

Isn't it a bit ironic that the generation indebted to college loans and handcuffed to the stigma of a bad economy has been given the prescription to find happiness by doing what we love? 

No one takes into account the sick, twisted nature of love while they're in it. Our brains hijack the definition. An infinite dopamine loop makes us think Love is sugar and catnaps and television, forever and ever. We can't get enough, and our jobs, our loans, our economy just happens to stand in the way.

Even with all the reminders in our lifetimes of dying love, though, we conveniently forget it's a ton of hard work. And we're not at fault, it's a human reaction. Taste a bit and we want the whole thing for free and now, no interruptions. That's the dangerous idea Tiffany Shlain includes her documentary Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology.

I think I've found a solution, though, and it exists in the connection of two unlikely parts: my vague understanding of Buddhism and the rock band Queens of the Stone Age. Buddhism exists with the acceptance that Life is Suffering. While there are moments of happiness, suffering is inevitable and we can work to transcend past it into Nirvana. Queens of the Stone Age have a great lyric in their song "Go With the Flow" that says, "I want something good to die for, to make it beautiful to live."

If Life is Suffering, why not suffer for something beautiful? Why not contribute something amazing? Why not become a Buddhist rock star? To do what you love means to suffer through it, even when you hate it. Love is not easy. Love is not sugar and catnaps and television.

And if the only way out of debt and joblessness and my generation's woes is what the world tells me, I'm going to search for love wherever I can and believe in my reason for suffering.  

Explode into Space #65 - Why Revealing Your Weakness Opens Doors

Dear Readers,

Vulnerability, I keep finding it in the bits of life I dabble in. I finished reading Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape, taking in as much as I could with it. In terms of vulnerability, I've learned best that there is opportunity for men to come to terms with the aggressive, sexual predator mentality we usually slide into and we can understand there is more possibility than being a bulldozer wrapped in armor. Like in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, you don't get better if you don't lose constantly. You're always vulnerable to get choked, to break a limb, to smash your back on the mats. You're vulnerable and it makes you stronger.

The simple act of giving makes you vulnerable. I'll give you an example. I'm trying to move out of my hometown (for the third time since graduating college) and I'm trying to live Spartan. No need for anything much more than my books, journals, films, and bed. Regardless, I've salvaged tons of junk. I made the vulnerable decision to post on Craigslist to give items away for free to someone who took a second to tell me why they'd love Family Guy DVDs or some books from the 1970's. Some people might be leery to open their home to a stranger but I didn't even think to second-guess it. I screened people via email to know they really wanted the random stuff and could use it for something worthwhile. No incidences so far, knock on wood.

The best thing yet to come from the Craigslist postings was meeting Amber. She is the cute bibliophile that showed up to grab a box of any books I had lying around. She was also the only person to email again after meeting to say thank you. Naturally, I kept the conversation going and we both discovered we had a passion for books on psychedelics. I'll admit I've never used them but they fascinate me and she hit me with an awesome recommendation I can't wait to dive into: The Beyond Within: The LSD Story. 

Like the Japanese swordsman for hire, Musashi, said in A Book of Five Rings; The Classic Guide to Strategy, "From one thing, know ten thousand things." Master being vulnerable, opening up, giving, and being human in one discipline and you can do it everywhere. Be genuinely vulnerable in all walks of life and you'll be that much more capable, that much more alive, that much more real.

We've all heard the whispers of secrets to a better life. You know you can eat clean and build a community and do what you love for money or not. We know all this, and life happens regardless. One lesson I could never gather to understand and follow closely enough was the concept of giving. Nothing feels better than giving to those in need, they say, and by all accounts there is no denying charity. Volunteering time, donating clothes, and contributing to a food drive are well enough but the true concept of giving didn't hit me until I listened to ex-footballer Bo Eason's talk 3 Most Critical Steps to Storytelling. He brought it around eloquently and excitedly to the concept of giving not of time, money, clothes or anything else, but giving of yourself. When you give of yourself, you're vulnerable and you connect with everyone else. When you're giving of yourself, you raise people up, you make them feel loved and better about themselves. You recognize that life is worthy of living cause it is here to share, no one does it alone.

The kicker of the whole big vulnerable story comes back to Amber and the Craigslist gifts. With our back and forth messages, I started to half-feel like she was stalking me somehow, recommending books I had already read and loved, and telling me about TED talks while I'm eyeballs-deep in watching another speaker on stage. When I decided to share Bo Eason's talk with her, in exchange for Graham Hancock's TED awe-inspiring talk about psychedelics, The War on Consciousness, she called him "over the top". My heart hurt to disagree with my new bookworm friend and therein lies the beauty. I was vulnerable enough to share what moved me and it didn't land. The great part about it was I was willing to share and glad to do it, and nothing should ever stop that. 

Until next time...
I explode into space.

-dan

Explode into Space #64 - How to Take Charge and Be Extraordinary

Dear Readers,

"A thousand endings, you mean everything to me,
I never know what's coming, forever fascinated" - Benny Benassi "Cinema" - remixed by Skrillex

I was staring down a cardboard box full of movies yesterday. They were the films that fueled my screenwriting courses (Tape and Sex, Lies & Videotape), they were the movies I used to relive my childhood (The Pest and Masters of the Universe). There were the Film School flicks (El Mariachi and Desperado ). There were the gems (the original Inglorious Bastards, Rob Zombie's El Superbeasto and the entire Jackass catalog). I was suffering through the perils of trying to live a more Spartan life and slim the collection. Logically, in a world of Netflix and Amazon, any movie could be in your hands for a couple dollars and in a couple of days, not even. My problem with moving on from owning the movies was the fragmenting of my personal identity - the proud purveyor of some weird cinema.

I'm convinced the economic theory of loss aversion is a psychological disorder of our generation. The basic theory says loss hurts twice as much as gaining feels great. Think gambling. It's the reason in regular life why we put the things we cherish on a leash, in a strangehold and constantly strive for security through paychecks, car parts, relationships, retirement, and diet. And on the other side of the coin, we want to loss things. We dream of Everything Better, which means moving onward and upward from the norm. Some of us would even sell our right kidney just to vacation like Rihanna. And yet, if knowledge is power and we know loss hurts a ton, shouldn't we be able to look in the mirror, accept it's not us, and let go?

No. In the end, I could only part with seven. Getting rid of movies still sucks for me. It's uncomfortable to come to terms with the fact that they make up a part of my identity. The reality kicks in, though, at least I made some progress. I thought, if I want to watch, say, Faces of Death six months from now, guess what, I just gave myself the quest of finding a new copy if it is something I really want to see in the future. 

"Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results." - Rita Mae Brown (questionably Einstein and definitely AA meetings too)

The whole reason for the cinema dilemma has been a pattern of my adult life. My thought is if you keep holding onto the same shit, you'll never have room for something new. If a cardboard box of movies defines who I am, it's time to trade in. I've welcomed change often in the form of big moves, smart or not. It happens just about every 3-6 months. Since graduating college, I've moved out three times and moved back home three times. I've been laid off once and quit two others. Actually, I quit two jobs but one of them twice. I've started countless blogs and some consequence-less goals. I drove 10,000 miles to San Francisco and then down through Austin. Now, I'm staring down another escape from my childhood home and it's why I'm taking a new, hard approach to my collection of junk. 

"Somewhere along the line we seem to have confused comfort with happiness." - Dean Karnazes

Whereas I've been dying to live back in the City since I left it, I'm moving in a different direction, deeper into New Jersey with some great friends bound to become even better friends. I've dealt with my questions and doubts. Yes, it's scary to move. It's unpredictable and it's super fucking exciting. Will I, as an adult, finally start a life, living outside of my family's home? God, I hope so. Where the big question mark revealed itself in my pile of possessions, I found something more important to me: spontaneity. I'm moving because the opportunity produced itself at the best time. Why not, I thought.  Life should be a collection of experiences more important than material goods. To be extraordinary, you have to live an extraordinary life. 

“People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing - that's why we recommend it daily.” - Zig Ziglar

It takes more than just some slacked-together decisions to make it, though. Sure, you might get lucky, I just think, more than most, in a world of endless distraction, focus is priceless. And focus doesn't come from sheer willpower either, like everyone thinks. It's not squinting eyes or a hand on the chin, it's repetition  You can have the best of intentions and dreams at a single moment and find yourself face-first in failure one night's sleep later. It's not a matter of memory or strength or wanting, it's a nature of habit. Talk to yourself, don't rely only on others or things.

Without the tuning fork or the mantra, the Livestrong bracelet, or the question WWJD, we kick back. Without remembering daily what we are all about, we flat-line to our animal brains and simply rely on our impulses. We have the power to question. Have something consume you. Think for yourself. And worse comes to worse, you can always ask, "What's next?"

Until next time...

I explode into space.

-dan