The Factors of the Morning:

1. You have no or very little stimuli from the external world
2. You have little thoughts bombarding your mind — few business, personal, or other worries (initially).

What you can do about this?

1. Reject it and try to move faster and faster in the morning… placing a high value on getting everything done very quickly.
2. Take the time to reset yourself, your values, and your goals; and (every now and then) reflecting on whether your actions are reflective of such.  Then, powering through and achieving your aspirations!
3. Let this grand value pass you by and linger in your unconsciousness (not think about it)

My choice is easy — I’m a thinker, and I choose Option TWO!

What this means / Actions:

1. Recognize this value in the morning
2. Review my guiding principles and values
3. Stretch my mind in its understanding of the truth and a guided imaginative sense
4. Perform my duties to accomplish my goals

The Difference Between Action and Thought:

Scheduling

Scheduling is organizing everything.  Doing the scheduling, you realize that you don’t have to have all the information set.  But, I like to log my hours of what I actually do do (rather than what I said I was going to do) – allowing me to view my actual productivity.  As well, in the doing portion of implementing my schedule, I now have tasks for each day… which I plug into my calendar.  As I move to the next task, I “pin” the tab that is open for my calendar (effectively minimizing my schedule and allowing me to focus solely on this task).  Then I begin my task.  I work on it for the designated time I set for myself (*remember to check how long you designated for each task in the calender before you “pin” it).  When done, I open the calendar, log my hours and what I did, write any inefficiencies which occurred, and check it off in the “Today’s Task” list.

Interesting dynamic… implementation.  It’s weird because how you frame your situation/goal also affects what is “thought” and what is “action.”  This goes back to our definitions of terms.  If you wanted, you could say that the thought process itself is actual implementation of an action (i.e., that action being a thought).

Practice / Implementation / Experience also builds habits and links emotion with the logical understanding.

Needed once.  You don’t need to thank everyone every time.  It’s simply a good gesture, most especially when someone does something that you feel was outside of the ordinary or if it required significant effort to help you.

Apologies

1. Decide, is the apology merited?  [i.e., Were you really in the wrong?  Or, do you simply want to apologize so someone doesn't get angry (appeasement)?]
2. If YES, the apology is only needed ONCE, then get over it (whether you were the person “wronged” or whether you were the person doing it).  *If you are the person doing the wrong, then you take the steps and practice enough so that the mistake doesn’t happen again.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are nice and fantastic business practice, but serve only to fill a person’s insecurity.  (e.g., Does my boss really care about what I do?  Am I doing this for nothing?  I worked THIS hard and no one notices).  This isn’t to say that they aren’t great to do sometimes, but they are meant to fill a void in someone’s self-confidence.

MY Goal:  To never need acknowledgements for what I do; but to rather be moved and pushed by the actual love for the work.  But… it never hurts to acknowledge (esp if you run a business with employees or are in any sort of relationship) .

But, time will tell.

I’ve been at points where I was desensitized towards death, towards money, towards going out, etcetera.  It keeps switching (what I’m desensitized towards).  The key is adapting, and finding the motivation to keep going towards your passion and to put in the diligence, time, and effort.

When I graduated school (and prior), when reading books on successful companies and individuals, I read about diligence, persistence, and discipline being so necessary for success; however, I had no idea the scale which this was true.   You need to be disciplined and diligent every hour, every minute, every month, and for years (maybe even decades)!

Right Now

Right now, I am struggling with the motivation to get up in the morning, to come home and work on my business or other projects, and to not go out and have fun / relax.  I am tired, and this is natural.  I have A FEW CHOICES:

1. Quit so I can exert my energy on what I like
2. Quit and attempt to find a low-effort, high-paying job (in an economic recession), so I have money; and, work on my other goals.
3. Power through, sacrifice my health and social life (to a degree), and work full-time while coming home and building the diligence to keep on going with my other goals.

Now, right now, is when one understands why things don’t get done, why dreams wither prior to ever fully blooming, why follow-through to accomplish goals with punctuality is difficult to find, etcetera.  There are SO MANY instances where you have to make the choice to stick it through, maintain your goals, convince yourself that your goals are worth the struggle, and fight for it.  Then, you have to choose how to accomplish them.  (Be smart!  *I’m reading a book by Tony Hsieh; he had fun, he partied, he took a job which paid enough and gave him a lot of time to do stuff on the side… granted he was a Harvard graduate, with a coveted computer science degree in the heart of the dot com bubble.  However, there are stories of others, who had less opportunity, but had the diligence to push through.  Either way, diligence and discipline will be some form of your equation for success.  Luck will be there too, combined with good judgement, strategy, methodology, etcetera.  It’s the coefficients (degrees) of each of these factors that is to be determined by your situation.  Decide whether you want it, then handle it.

It’s very possible that my troubles of conceptualizing whether we have the ability to choose or not is dependent upon the system which I define.  In a similar fashion to physics problems, it is often neglected but most important to define your system and variables.  The reason for this is because your decisions/chosen actions change given your reference points, definitions of variables, and the boundaries of the system.

When thinking of whether I have the ability to decide or whether everything is predictable, it appears to be true that the answer depends on my definition of the system.  And, as an actor in this world, the system that I live with is one in which I do have a choice.  The reason is because I have the ability to speak, comprehend, have emotions, etcetera, AND, to have inhibitory mechanisms.  Combining these abilities, we have “choice.”  But, this is still a bit confusing.

To understand this, we must look at the definition of “choice.”  Choice refers to the ability to consciously withhold or not withhold a certain action.  (You can “choose” to think, as “thinking” is an action!)  Now, what is it to “consciously” withhold, not withhold, or catalyze some action?  This is a process, and it refers to the compilation of our ability to talk with ourselves (language / self-communication), deducing and analyzing situations (another part of the brain / logic), our prefrontal abilities to inhibit (inhibition), and all of the other unknowns involved.  However, the conclusion remains: we have the ability to choose!

Looking at this from the system of an objective observer of the world, we are simply amalgamates of elements/particles (no different than a wall, in this definition…).  The interactions which follow are predictable, if you take into account all the variables (factors) which are relevant.  This is a lot of data and will take A WHILE for us to ever be extremely good at predicting events and choices.  …Most especially, it is hard to predict choice because we are dynamic, closed and open-system organisms, with multiple feedback loops.

The truth:

Hence, depending upon your vantage point (system), we do have choice.  But, those choices are predictable.  Now, what SHOULD we do?  Realizing that choices simply refer to a conscious effort to impede or follow through with an action, and it is irrelevant if they are predictable, we should choose.  I make this statement partially for the reason of the benefits which extend from this choice (i.e., the decision to choose).  However, I also come to the conclusion that we have choice and should use it because we are ACTORS in this world.  Whilst we can still observe, we are actors!  In this sense, the words we speak, the thoughts which exist, etcetera, are all interactions which allot us the tool of choice (inhibition/addition..-/+).  Therefore, based upon the supposition that we should strive to improve sustainably, the understanding of the tool we call “choice”–along with what it truly means to choose–should be realized and utilized to move towards achieving such a goal.  (We have the power and should utilize the power to consciously choose to improve consistently and sustainably.)  Moreover, it’s important to understand who we are, the tools we have, and our limitations.  Choice is certainly one of these… thus it is important to understand we have this tool, despite its potential predictability.

*It’s all about scale!

I plan to implement this, but I’m not a coder… so I’ll be writing a few frameworks for my actions and weave this quality (methodical thought process) into my culture and habits, regardless of my ineptitude to code.

This is very important to understand, because it’s very different to be a leader verses teaching and emitting leadership!  To inspire and teach is a whole new and beautiful ball game (art).

However, we lose our memory when we do not repeat and strengthen the connections we have.  This is a fact of life.  So, what I have to do (if I want to remember this stuff) is set times to repeat and study it.  The question is — do I want to remember it?  The reality is, I am going about the patient advocacy/nonprofit venture a bit differently – with more of a business perspective.  Given this, I likely do not need to know everything that I do now; rather, I need to know the business side of it all (to be successful).

What, instead, I have chosen to do is to build a culture of knowing everything about a goal and accomplishing that goal.  I want to build a culture of treating every major goal of mine as an art.  I feel that, if I do this, I will be able to pick up new topics very quickly and learn how to leverage them… because I have built a rapid method of garnering information and leveraging that information to accomplish my goals (what I call “art”).  To do this, I have to immerse myself in many situations and practice, practice, practice… until I master the tools of the art at hand.  Of course, most of us best learn by doing.

Conclusion

So – I want to streamline the artistry in me.  Woooooof!  Okay.  That sounds good.  But, what do I want to be an artist in?  I want to know medicine and biology like the back of my hand.  I don’t want to have to deal with any of that bad stuff.  That’s my primary goal.  Those of you that know me (should) know exactly what I mean by this.  This means I need to learn medicine, chemistry, physics, and a few more disciplines.  This also means I must get on my game and focus on what I need to do.  I think and hope I’ll maintain this focus.  And, I have faith that I will… Because passion + logic is a hard thing to divert.  Even if you are caught in a job with benefits and opportunity to grow.  Sometimes, when life is going well, it’s hard to keep pushing.  But, that’s exactly what you have to do.  Stay focused through the thick and thin, the good and the bad.

Hope all’s well and take care!