Mary Panttaja

In discussing our current (as in time) search for the next thing to do (and its current direction), a close friend commented that she didn’t know if it was the “right” thing to do. And I agree that I’m not quite sure yet that it is the right thing—though getting close.

But that’s the quandry isn’t it? What is the right thing? What does “right thing” mean? The whole point of updrafting is to find the right current (as in a moving force) and catch a ride, so getting a sense of rightness is important. But I don’t think you can use “logic” (or any set of rules) to find it—though you use logic to help you understand it.

An updraft is an established movement of potential. It flows into your life without stress, because its part of your updraft, part of you. And if you recognize it, that is, see it at all, you have to then examine your relationship to it. Why are you interested? Why has it come to you? Are you compelled? Is there any negative relationship to it? (That is, are you shifting into it from fear or dread or because you just want to get things settled. Or are you enjoying an ego trip because it came your way?)

It seems like you have to let the current play out and just bob in it freely seeing how it moves and exploring how it interplays with other currents and drafts in your life. Time will tell. Time always tells because the actual world is always presenting itself to you. And if you can be simple and honest with yourself, you will evolve your choice and find yourself in a current. And whether it is “right” or something else, it will become your life and then every new updraft will meet you there. No worries.

So, today’s post on Catching the Updraft has been a nightmare. It has so few words—but 9 images. So many things didn’t work right:

1. First, 4 of the images were missing—and I had to recapture them from a document (their source seems to be missing, but they aren’t really right and need to be redone anyway. But not today.) This took most of yesterday’s writing time.
2. Last night our sites were down. Our hosting provider is not very dependable and may have to be replaced. When I have time to write and post I am dependent on the site being up at that moment—a serious flaw in the blogging process exacerbated by the fact that I use images. 90% of my time on this post has been uploading the images.
3. Wordpress, my blogging platform, doesn’t really allow you to put open space in the post. I need it to format around the images. Therefore the ugly periods that I had to use to create some space.
4. The upload failed 70% of the time this morning, so it took an hour to get them up.
5. My “cloud” images were made for a white background and therefore look terrible on my gray background, but fixing them today can’t fit into the schedule.

So my apologies. I obviously need to upgrade some technology. I was commiserating with a colleague yesterday about the horrible state of blog and wiki editing. A truly grim situation.

All good. Done now. Fewer images coming up.

I finished the book today—read that last chapter, which might ought to be read first. WHY do you want a 4-hour work week? Because “work” is just the stuff you do to pay the bills, and you should be spending the bulk of your time on something more important—your “vocation”, your passions, living life, learning, and helping improve things around you.

Another way to spin this is that “making a living”, that is, earning enough money to meet some specified monthly financial goal is not a worthy endeavor if it does not also meet all those other needs and criteria. And maybe there are other ways to get freedom to engage in you calling than to buy it—even if it only takes 4 hours a week.

In Updrafting, we focus on finding that right thing to be doing—the most important and fulfilling activities of your life. If you find and execute on that, then you will have lived YOUR life to the utmost. Financial success may come, but it is not the key relevant goal of the story. Just as security is fine and all, but a concern for safety should not replace your life’s intentions. No one ever climbed a mountain with safety the first thing on their list of goals. One would never leave the bedroom.

This is not to say that there is anything wrong with safety or financial security, but to emphasize that we cannot let our concern for them blind us to what is really important for us to accomplish in this life.

And maybe we don’t have to buy our freedom. Maybe we just take it. Know ourselves to be free of whatever constraints we imagine—or, at least, that we recognize them as challenges to be met, not limitations on our possibilities.

Pamela Slim posted an article that gets directly to one of the problems with a over emphasis on measurement: Obsession with the competition is a luxury of the over-funded

It is great reminder for me that there are very practical ways to explain and apply the principals of AWM (the Arising World Model). If not, then it’s not very useful. It’s application needs to extend from mundane, practical problems to the spiritual and philosophic questions that we ask ourselves. Everything should work

Cycling our new “daily” loop the other day, an entire blog evolved in my head. (It’s that or a single song that pumps along with the peddles—I try to remember to chant, but often other things seem to happen on their own.) The loop runs to Geyserville on a tiny back road (actually Highway 128) and then back on a larger local road. 18 miles or so. Quite a bit of composing time—so my next “tool” is a recording device.

Here is my attempt to recreate the original—more thoughts on our proclivity to measure ourselves, which often means to rate ourselves against others (or even ourselves on another day). Why do we do this? So we can award ourselves with feeling good? Or punish ourselves by feeling bad? “We’re better than that” or “Look how truly sucky we are.”

The Trap

The first thing to notice is that the process itself is a trap. You are trapping yourself into a particular measurement of success. If you can measure it, it has limited scope. It’s about a simplistic measurable element of the whole: the weight, the time, the revenue, the count of customers. It is inherently not the whole thing—only a minor reflection of one element of what you are doing.

Now these measurable elements (the revenue, for example) are useful measures in their limited niche—used for precisely what they mean, but no more. They can be used to measure our skill level (how well we sell) or single facets of complex behaviors and their results. Since we learned to measure things we have used that information to evolve. This is good, useful, and challenging. Especially when we really know who we are—then careful measurement of our progress on our path can be a useful tool. But we need to remember, that the things we can measure are not usually the whole story—there are things in our lives, important things, that cannot be measured, but must be experienced and evaluated through our subjective experience.

Missing The Updraft

Last May, when I walked up (it is always up) the trail into Macchu Picchu, I really experienced how I could screw up my moment to moment life by comparing myself to others—even inadvertently.

The walking trail into Macchu Picchu is very difficult for regular folks: up over three passes, 14, 13, and 12,000 ft, with some radical descents in between. If you are lucky you’ve spent a few days in Cusco at 10,000 feet, which helps because the trail starts at 8,000. You are walking with several hundred other people scattered on the trail—the government controls the daily total—some of whom are locals (porters and guides) and do this every day. We never seriously compare ourselves to them—we can grant ourselves that leeway. But my experience was that almost every other person on the trail was stronger than I was. And walked faster than I ever do. Sometimes, it seems they walked faster than I can imagine.

As people would pass me I would find myself picking up some of their speed, unconsciously trying to keep up. I would subtly measure the difference in our speed, and my lack of capability was hard for my ego to absorb, and it would try to “pick up the pace.” Then, if I happened to walk by someone going slower that myself (a very rare occurance), I would “pick up the pace” suddenly feeling good about being stronger than someone else. Every time I walked faster I got into trouble—I would have to stop and catch my breath and recover.

What’s the problem? The problem is that when I did this I was not running my own race; I was not working with my own capacities; I was defining the challenge using someone else’s game plan. In the old fable of the hare and tortoise, it wasn’t the tortoise’s slowness that brought success, but that the tortoise executed its own game plan, ran its own race. This is how we get the most from ourselves and our organizations. And we can’t do anything more than to maximize our own capacities in the moment. So I could never walk up that mountain any faster than my capacities last May; that was all I had to work with. And to maximize my success, I had to walk my own speed, execute my own plan which acknowledged my capabilities, talents, skills, and motivations.

Choosing Our Own Manuevers

This means that we have to maneuver in our own updraft. The maneuvers we choose must be our own. They cannot be adopted from someone else—they are in a different updraft, with different skills, knowledge, and capacities. Adopting someone else’s maneuver can be a recipe for disaster—like walking too fast for your heart. Or using a particular flight plan that is working for “those guys over there” when in reality they are in a different air current than you are, not to mention that they are in a different aircraft.

The skill of getting stronger and more successful is always about knowing your own capacities and working your own plan—never about measuring yourself against someone else.

Jim and I were half way through a morning ride the other day when we stopped for quick drink of water. Jim’s report from the GPS analysis was encouraging (we finally purchased a replacement GPS for the ones missing from our bags on our return from Peru). We were two miles per hour faster this day than the previous run which was in a dastardly wind. Over just 9 miles, that is a meaningful increase in speed.

Of course, it reminded us not to pay too much attention to speed, since it would always be dependant on outside variables, like wind—elements of the world arising outside of our control. So we can’t take too much blame for slow speeds but also not too much credit for quick runs. So then we mused, if we can’t tell how well we are doing by our speed, then maybe we track time, time on the bike. But then, your “credit” is less if you go faster—which is always a seeming goal—to go faster. So maybe then it’s how far you go—how many miles you can clock.

Suddenly we realized that we were scouting around for the definitive way to measure our experience. And left staring at the question of what that was: the need in us to measure it all. It felt a little silly, and Jim said, “just ride” as we took off on the second half of the loop.

And, while I understand that with some goals, measurement is a helpful tool, it seems that we have a tendency to lose the focus on our personal living experience and grasp onto external measurements to evaluate how well the day, our lives, our work is going. Even though we know, if we think clearly, that external measures are always going to be part of the whole world’s arising into being and not simply a function of our effort. We can have done our part valiantly and, for external measures, it may look like a failure. And on the other hand, sometimes we win through the “luck” of the draw, because of the flow of events.

But what is really meaningful to our workouts is the continuing development of the strength and health of our bodies and minds. Any measurement is a minor reflection of that, a simple tool, but never the actual, useful result. Our evolving capacity for participation, whether in our exercise program, our life, or work, is really the measure of our growth.

And, okay, sometimes it is nice to go fast.

I read Seth Godin’s “The Dip: The Little Book that Teaches You When to Quit and When to Stick” over the weekend. (In about an hour actually—I was slow.)

It has some interesting approaches to life and work. Let me paraphrase:

If you (or your company) want to be “the best in the world” at something….

(Where “best in the world” is relatively subjective; that is, you define what “the world” is and your own criteria for “best”.)

…you need to work through the beginning phase of development and be able to hang on and evolve through the long development phase, which he calls “the dip”…

(Where the “something you” pick should have a substantial “dip” (so you can outlast and outsmart your competitors) and you pick a “something” where you have an advantage/talent/leadership.)

…and you need to drop any distracting investments of time and money for which you do not have adequate advantage to make it through “the dip”—this is called “intelligent quitting”…

(in some ways this idea of quitting with integrity is one of the most important ideas in the book; that we spend a lot of energy working on things we’re just working on to be working on; where we do not really have the potential to really succeed—-in my parlance, these things are called “hobbies.”)

…the long development phase, which can get progressively more difficult, might be a “dip” with success at the end of the tunnel, or a “cul-de-sac”—a place where you can work forever and never get the rainbow. And you have to learn to discern the difference…

(Most people get stuck in a rut and never figure out that they aren’t really going anywhere; successful people figure out earlier that they need to quit. The best quote in the book is: “Quit fast, and quit often.” The key is to not spend your time doing things that aren’t getting you where you want to go.)

There are big advantages that accrue to those who are “best in the world”.

For me, this is fine as far as it goes. It is about congruency of action and alignment with purpose. This all good. But for me, while this applies to some of us in some of our endeavors, it’s emphasis on “best in the world” as a measure of success is a little damaging. Some of our endeavors are not really meant to measured against others; keeping score is not the point of everything.

So as you apply these ideas to measuring your business or your budding high-tech career—it can be useful. But as a way to evaluate a teacher (she needs to be the best possible mentor to her students, and it’s not reasonable to measure “best in the world” even if you could), I think that particular concept is not useful. Also, in comparison to Updrafting, there is little discussion of really figuring out what your are “meant” to be doing, your true talents and purpose, which we think is key to finding success.

But I do love the concept of quitting early and often—we tend to spend a lot of our time working on things that are not really to the point. Or to any point. That is a key element of Updrafting, being consistently congruent in what you do and have all you do be finely aligned with your direction and purpose.

I wanted to write about how I use and keep my travel notes. Of course, not all travel is noteworthy or note-requiring, and I don’t always keep notes. But this trip, as many others, is also about research—being in a place that my characters are going, or finding subjects/stories/illustrations for other writing. Here, as previously noted, we are following my characters John and Sara to a places that I haven’t been or places that I haven’t been in a while.

I take notes in a variety of formats:

• I type when I can, as now when we are driving and I have power. I’m known to pull the computer out and type three sentences and put it away.
• I write in a notebook when I can’t have power, as in my trek in Nepal or our raft trip in the Arctic. I have a medium size one and a tiny one depending on how much weight I want to carry. These notes are fun because you can discern my travel modality by the quality of my script. Driving in a car in Nepal gives one level of readability; riding an elephant through the jungle gives another. I love the physical visceralness of the marks on the page. I always smile at the notes I took riding the elephant Santi.
• Often writing is impractical and so when it’s a vision or an object I want to note I’ll take a picture with my digital camera. I can usually recreate my thoughts from the image. I have a couple of photographs of a wonderful girl in Kagbeni and some experiences of her life and how she might/will relate to Sarah’s coming trek. (Next book.) The photograph is all I need to pull it all back.
• I have been known to call home and leave myself a message. I own a digital recorder, but can’t find it. I would really want a system that transcribed it, for when I did a lot of dictation the transcribing part was too tedious to make it worthwhile. This is an area that would be useful to research as the technology is changing.
• Some moments all I can do is try to remember. This works about half the time; the other half of the time I lose whatever it was. Sometimes I make little numbered lists of thoughts to remember, hoping that a structure will help. Again, it only works sometimes. But sometimes you just have to trust that if the idea was useful, it will come again.

What’s the point of being anal about capturing notes? There is the obvious answer—so I don’t forget things that I have considered. But it feels a even more organic than that to me. I feel like it is part of the process of nuturing the updraft. All those ideas and images that are flowing to me are a part of something being created. Attention on my part is necessary. My part in the process is to bring these ideas and inspirations into form and the form they take, in this case, are words. I find that the more I work this edge of flowing ideas by being present and attentive, the more it flows. And forming them into words or images is the beginning of my work with them.

Guy Kawasaki posted his interview with Dr. Philip Zimbardo this morning.

I love this concept for all of us, not just children:

“…to promote in our children this heroic imagination, to make them accept the mantle of being a hero-in-waiting for a situation that will come along sometime in their lives…”

A “lite” version of the bodhisattva vows to help others—”for those who wish to go across the waters, may I be a boat, a raft, a bridge”.*

* From Shantideva’s prayer in “The Bodhisattva’s Way of Life”.

The Clean Garage

It is key to realize that we are not trying to create a single moment in time when our goals are reality, only to have those goals dissolve into dust. We want to create lives/products/businesses where our goals are continually realized and continually getting better. (They have to evolve as our dreams and goals continue to evolve.) It will never be enough to use a short-term technique (hire 10 people) to get the garage clean—unless they stay around, of course—for the patterns of life and action that got the garage in disarray are still there.

On the other side of the coin, if you figured out the behaviors and mechanisms that would keep a garage clean (just imagine it), then you wouldn’t actually have to clean the garage. You would just have to start living those mechanisms and the evolution of the clean garage would come into being. Get that—-you wouldn’t have to clean the garage, it would become clean as a matter of course.

What we really want is a life style or set of mechanisms (actions and use patterns) that evolve a clean garage. The clean garage is the state that we want to create—and we need to create a preponderance of potential that the clean garage will always (or mostly) exist in our future.

Silly way to think about it? Maybe. But if you substitute your future career, your growing business, the ability to continually evolve your product line, it starts to become a richer idea. The truth is that what you are trying to create is a particular state of the world in the future—and that means we need to build the potential of that now, in the present. And not for it to happen just once—one moment. We want it to exist with us until we dream of something better.

So what could a set of mechanisms look like for the garage? Let’s play with some ideas, some tactics and practices.

1. I will never set anything down in the garage except in the place where it belongs.
2. As I use each thing in the garage, I will make sure it has a place to live.
3. For each project that involves items in the garage (tools, toys, storage) I will allocate a little extra time in my project to organize those items.
4. Once a month I will sweep through the garage and look for 3 things that I can get rid of.
5. At the end of each season, I will put unneeded items away properly.

Maybe not a complete list; I’m sure you can do better. You never stop and clean the garage, but your actions will slowly evolve a more and more organized work space.

And darn, suddenly we realize that we have to rewrite all the rules as “we will”, and get everyone to agree. Mechanisms for group goals are more challenging—mechanisms for individual goals in which others can mess with you can be really tough (you want the garage clean but brother Sam doesn’t really care). But that is where leadership always lives—on the outside edge of what is easy to motivate in others where you need to develop the ability to empower and inspire others to participate.

And, of course, this is a relatively easy goal to visualize. Most of our personal goals are not so direct. But what we see is that we want to be continually building the potential of our goal state, so that the likelihood is that our goal will be realized. That’s what we mean by the preponderance of potential (the potential for our goal is greater in amount or value than that which is against our goal.) If we want to create anything, that is our job.

And a kicker is to notice that whatever is today is the the state that has had the most potential created; whether you like it or not. Our world is precisely as it is because this is what we have created together. Want something else? Then your job is to change the potential of the future to be different. And no one else can play your part in that evolution.

Note: Another time we’ll discuss control and lack of control—once we realize that we’re not in control the way we thought we should be, we sometimes just give up. We have to learn that there is a kind of control we do have (it’s just more subtle) and that giving up is not really an option.