Mary Panttaja

An apology to my dedicated readers for disappearing the last few weeks. The flow of thoughts has been quite distracted by family, travels, and new work projects. Any day now things will simplify themselves and the updraft of new ideas will start again. Isn’t that what we always tell ourselves? Sometimes it is true. But we need to be compelled by simplicity instead of complexity so we give up the distractions as soon as they can be released.

In addition, Jim and I have stepped up our riding. 10 days ago we started targeting 100-mile weeks—and now we’ve been days with over 120 mile trailing 7 days. This can’t last as our work time grows, but it is a good transition period. (We finally did our “block”; if you leave our place and keep turning right (or left) and take the smallest loop possible—30 miles and one big-ish hill.)

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.

We have a stack of books to read. The choices have come from a lot of different directions: lifestyle, business, new technology, programming, retirement. They all feed into the thinking process: what to create next.

Our process has included: watching what is going on in the blogosphere, attending conferences on new technology, trying to identify the most important thinkers and reading what they write, watching for interesting odd-bits and following their trails.

Tim Ferriss’ new book “The 4-Hour Work Week” came to my attention when he presented at the Ignite portion of the Web 2.0 Conference. His presentation “The Low Information Diet” was voted one of the top four presentations, and so he got to deliver it again at the closing session.

As a writer with books to publish, it has been interesting watching him go through the process of publishing his book, working the publicity trail using all the marketing tricks and techniques available. If anything, he is an agressive marketer and communicator. Something some of us frown at sometimes, though we are interested in the success it produces. This week he has been spoofed by Leno and then collected all the extra marketing appearances that such an event produces.

Reading his book has been on the list for two reasons: 1) Seeing how the publishing process works for him; 2) Learning what he has to say about a 4-hour work week. (Which is, of course, an intriguing idea.)

I was surprised at some of the really good ideas in this book, though I have some issues with some of the attitudes and techniques encouraged. For myself, I can see past the seemingly inappropriate recommendations (to daily manipulate your work efficiency to prove to your boss that you should be allowed to work out of the office, for one), and see that there are some ideas that really shift something about how I think about work and business:

1. It is possible to separate the ideas of earning a living (money to live) and your life and passionate work (see my work on Updrafting). You can build a business that generates the revenue and free time that allows you to dive into whatever you are passionate about. (This does not mean that your passion is not necessarily the same as the business that earns your income, but just that there is a possibility that you can separate them.) (I have done this before in my work, but not figured out Item 3: a strategic mistake; see below.)
2. If you are going to build a business to earn your income, it is most critical to really design a powerful and efficient business model. This is everything, for if the business is not financially efficient, it will not be efficient with your time and resources, and won’t generate income without a struggle. Been there and done that.
3. You can design and build a business model that doesn’t (after it is up and running) create a full-time job for yourself. This was really shocking—I always assume that what I am doing is creating full-time work for myself along with other folks. It was a very new idea to think about creating a business in which, as he says, “you outsource yourself.”
4. You can design an operational process that doesn’t care where you are—helped alot by the current technology platforms available. And he gives a lot of really specific tips, techniques, and references.
5. He gives a few business models for creating a totally outsourced business—they mostly focus around marketing products (things you can buy and resell at a good margin, or books and ideas). They don’t really get into the creative process: some of us are really interested in creating things—which somehow really does take time.
6. But the idea of creating a business the sole purpose of which is to automatically generate the revenue to support your chosen life style is an intriguing new, to me anyway, thought process.
7. If you created an automated income producing machine, then you get to spend your time on whatever you want. Travel and living overseas seem to be his passions, so he has lots of hints on how to do that on the cheap.

One theme that comes up is that where you live is an important part of the cost structure of the lives we have chosen. It is cheaper to live most other places in the world than it is to live here—thereby the reasonableness of really traveling—vagabonding. Many of the new retirement guides also suggest that life can be a lot cheaper for us if we intelligently chose where to live. The nix in the mix is that some of us have extended families that have inhabited neighborhoods for generations (like ours in Northern California), so picking up and leaving isn’t quite as easy as for some. (And though my children don’t live very close, they are also unlikely to follow us to Nevada or Arizona or Wyoming.)

Do I recommend the book? Yes and no. Some really challenging and useful ideas that I have not previously considered, but mixed in a bit with some shortsighted behaviors that are a little too manipulative. But that’s okay, take what’s useful and leave the rest. In general, it is a new angle from which to examine your life and make some decisions. What do you really want to do?

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.

We did a couple of things over the weekend that made our exercise more fun by making it a part of another activity. Like one would naturally do if we lived in the city and walked to the store. (Here in the country, I just hike down to the garden before dinner.)

We still needed to buy two more replacement boats and we managed to turne it into an diversified activity. To try out the boats, we rented them and took the first pair off to Sailor Bar on the American River and paddled around 40 minutes in the current. We swapped those boats out for a second pair and set up a river run from Sailor Bar to Elmante—about 4 miles on the river. We only brought one car, so we set the shuttle up with our bicyles. You have to think it through (bike routes AND river routes) and decide whether to bike first (and have the car at river’s end) or bike second (and have to go after the car).

So here’s how it went:

• We drove to the boat take out and dropped the bikes off—locking them up of course.
• We drove to the put-in and parked the car, packed the boats, and headed down river.
• We took out, swapped the boats (locking them up with the bike lock) for the bikes (changed shoes as well) and headed back up river to the car.
• Then we loaded the bikes, drove back to the boats, loaded the boats and were ready to go.

It was a four mile paddle and a seven mile ride. The drive was a little longer because of the roadways, but not too taxing. It’s an economical way to do river runs, but you could also use it for any paddling—across a bay, along a beach, or around a lake. We’ve used this technique on the Snake River to great effect. It would be more challenging in hilly country where the bike ride could become a real challenging part of the day. (One secret is that only one driver has to actually do the bike ride! Everyone else could rest. We don’t let ourselves know that.)

Yesterday we rode into town (normally 7 miles, but we added 3 miles to the trip to make it more work), had breakfast, dropped off prescriptions, and rode back (added a hill). We got our exercise, but also got some chores done.

All good and the bike riding gets to seem like an normal part of the day.

As we get to a certain age in America, thoughts move towards the concept of retirement. This is traditionally a movement towards less: mostly less work and less responsibility. But the second half of life isn’t primarily about stopping anything, it is now about transforming life to meet a new set of criteria. And the change in critieria, what we need and want from life, can be the most liberating concept of all.

My husband and I have arrived, with much pluck and luck, at a new frontier, likened only to a few moments when we, as young college singles, had every choice in front of us and few, if any, determined responsibilities. We then proceeded to choose and commit and engage in projects that seem to take a lifetime—all worthwhile, but in many ways determining who we were and what we needed to be doing.

But now, the children are moved on to their own lives, our one remaining parent is well and thriving, our business associates and former employees are otherwise occupied, we have our health and our capacity to work, engage, and explore. So now we have reached one of those key moments when all the choices are again on the table. No one needs us to be someone particular. Nothing requires us to be anywhere specific. No activities—except those we choose—demand our attention.

Who are we when no one needs us to be any particular thing? What are you free to be? Free to do? It seems that there is a entire world of choices that can be chosen, an entire palette of life styles that can be fashioned.

One of the keys to a whole realm of freedom is the realization that it doesn’t take much to live on the planet if one is a healthy, functioning adult with few responsibilities. Then, every responsibility you take on is either a choice or a bad habit. Sifting the bad habits from real choices is the path to freedom. Identifying what is truly meaningful beyond what is merely customary is the task. We have learned to think that freedom comes from permanent financial security, by which we used to mean a lot of money in a money market account. But nothing is certain and real financial security comes from being able to create just enough income to live the lightest (least costly) life you can imagine enjoying. So reducing what you need, reduces the number of constraints or responsibilities you have have to support, creating more freedom to do whatever it is you want.

Who do you want to be today? What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? If you let go of your constraints, untether yourself in the arising updraft of your life, what happens next?

Well, that’s the experiment we are embarked on by hook or by crook. And we intend to be writing about our experiences, how we got here, what we are discovering, and what’s interesting.

It is truly an exercise in catching the updraft.

PS. Still looking for the catchy title, theme, category for these posts. I wanted to use American Sanyasi denoting that it is the time of life beyond the requirements of a householder enabling one to walk away from some of our tethers—but that name is in use already and so I’m still searching.