I sat in a crowd of 45,000 about 10 days ago, watching super-billionaire investors Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger riff off each other and deliver quick wit and worldly wisdom about finances and life in general, at the famous Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting in Omaha.

As I listened to these titans of the investing world, it struck me how content they are.

Not just content because they have all the riches in the world and all their needs met (they do), but because they understand fundamentals of contentment with life, which I believe is a superpower.

It was amazing to listen to these two masters talk about investing, but learn lessons in contentment throughout the investing advice.

Today, in anticipation of my upcoming, free ebook, “The Little Book of Contentment“, I’d like to share what I learned from Warren and Charlie.

I’d like to thank my friends Jake & Lonnie of Farnham Street Investments (and Mike & Scott of Cumbre Capital) for the once-in-a-lifetime trip.

Lessons in Contentment from Warren & Charlie

The key lessons:

1. “Find what turns you on.” Warren said this in response to a question about what advice he’d give to his younger self 50 years ago. He wasn’t talking about sex, but about what you do for a living. And while we’ve all heard “Do what you love”, it’s telling that this is the one thing he’d tell his younger self — it’s that important to happiness. If you do what turns you on, you will be much further along the road to contentment.
2. Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. Charlie, who is impressively intelligent, said one of the big advantages that Berkshire Hathaway has had is that Warren & Charlie don’t need to worry about what everyone else is doing (in the investment world). Too many people get caught up in watching everyone else, and letting that influence them, that they lose their inner compass. Instead, figure out the guiding principles that matter the most to you, and let go of the need to check on what everyone else is doing, and the need to compare what you’re doing with everyone else.
3. Know your strengths. These two guys are very aware of their limitations — they almost never invest in tech companies, for example, because they don’t understand it well — and instead of feeling the need to go into their weak areas, they stay with their strong areas. They know what they’re strong at, and focus on that. Letting go of the need to do everything, and being happy with focusing on less, is an important contentment lesson.
4. Fewer and higher quality. Warren & Charlie have a “fewer is better” investment philosophy, where they aren’t nearly as active as your usual Wall Street investor … but they focus on a handful of really strong investments. Warren suggests that investors imagine they have a punchcard with 20 punch holes … once you make 20 investments in your lifestime, your punchcard is used up. If you did this, you’d really make them count. This is the guiding principle, btw, in my book The Power of Less. You don’t need more — instead, be more discerning, and happy with less.
5. Know what you like and forget the rest. Warren Buffet, one of the world’s wealthiest men, has a nice but modest house and a surprisingly modest Cadillac (that he drives himself), and eats at his favorite (but pretty ordinary) restaurants … he can afford much more extravagance, but forgoes it because he knows the simple things he likes in life. He could have much, much more, but knows that he doesn’t need it. How many of us do that? Just enjoy the things we like, and not worry about what else we could be enjoying, or what everyone else is enjoying.

There will be some who say, “Sure, it’s easy to be content when you’re rich and successful,” but I think this is missing the point. They are successful because of these lessons.

I learned that inspiration for contentment can be found in surprising places, including in Omaha, where everyone I met had a kind word for me, and a smile on their faces. I left with a smile myself.

Do you have questions about contentment? Share them with me here.

There’s a tendency to get caught up in the tasks of our day, the urgency of what’s coming up, the distractions of being online.

And we forget to smile.

In the rush of the day, the stress of wanting things to happen a certain way, we lose the enjoyment of each moment.

In every moment, there’s the capacity for happiness. It’s not that we need to be ecstatic, full of pleasure, excited or even joyous each and every second of the day. Who needs that kind of pressure? And it’s not that we can never feel sadness or anger or stress. It’s that we can feel happiness, in some form, any moment we like, even in the midst of stress or sadness.

And it’s exceedingly simple. We just need to remember to smile.

You can smile in each and every moment.

OK, maybe you don’t need a smile on your face all day long — your cheeks will feel tired. But we can smile more, and in between physical smiles, we can have an internal smile.

Try an internal smile now: have a calm, unsmiling face, but think of the miracle of this moment, and find a thought to smile about. Feel the smiling feeling inside. Isn’t that amazing?

What do you have to smile about in this moment?

Some ideas:

• You have someone in your life who cares about you.
• There is beauty all around you, in many forms.
• You are generous, compassionate, and good-hearted.
• You have someone you can help.
• You have eaten today.
• You can move.
• You can see the sun shining.
• You can appreciate the leaves of a tree, rain falling, wind blowing.
• You can taste chocolate.
• You get to spend time with someone you love.
• You have music in your life.
• You get to create something.

And so on. You probably don’t have all of these, but you might have one or two, and if so, that’s a more than good enough cause to smile.

You’ll forget to smile in some moments, because your mind gets caught up in stories about the past, stresses about what might happen in the future. None of this is happening right now — it’s just movies playing in our heads.

Instead, remind yourself of what’s happening right now, and see the beauty in it, see the reason to smile. And then smile, externally and internally.

This changes your day, because now instead of being caught up in stress and stories, we are present, and happy. We can be content with every moment.

It changes your life, because too often we miss the smile-ability of life when we are not paying attention.

If I’ve found two guiding principles in my life, they are contentment and compassion.

With these two ideas, life becomes better.

Contentment makes every moment better. And compassion makes your connection with others better.

What Compassion Is, & Some Difficulties

Let’s talk about compassion for a few minutes, because as important as it is, very few people talk about how to actually do it.

First a definition: the simple definition of compassion is feeling and understanding the pain of others, and then wanting to reduce that suffering.

In practice, it’s a lot harder. How do you understand the pain of others? If I see anything about you, it’s based on very limited information, just what you’ve shown me — and often, based on very limited interactions. So I have to project a story that I make up about you, and the truth is, it’s probably wrong. But sometimes that’s all we have to work with, and then gain more information once we’ve started to apply it.

If you have a large group of people — me trying to find compassion for all of you, for example — that can be very difficult. How do I find empathy with thousands of people? It’s almost impossible. So you see that applied compassion can become a complex thing. Much more easily applied on an individual basis.

The Only Way to Actually Do Compassion

Let’s say you want to ease someone’s suffering, how do you do that? That’s not something you can just make happen. People aren’t just objects you can act on. Sometimes you want people to let you solve their problems, but they’d rather have control over their own lives (imagine that!).

A better way is to show them the tools that you’ve used to ease your own suffering, and let them know you’ll help them if they want help using those tools.

To practice compassionate actions, you start with yourself. A lot of people see suffering in the world and feel bad about it, but they don’t know how to take action. The best way to take action is to take action with yourself. The only person you can control with any degree of success is yourself.

There is actually immense suffering within ourselves, and we can start to ease that, and when we do, we then now have a model for applying that to others. To one other person, to a thousand, or to the world.

Your self-compassion becomes a model for everybody else. If I can be compassionate with myself, then I know how I did it. I can tell others the amazing results, and how they can do it too. Then you have a model that can be replicated, and they can apply that to themselves, and then you have compassion being made on a large scale, just by starting with yourself.

Will the same method that worked for me work for everyone else? No, but it’ll work for some people, who can replicate it and then they can show their way to others, try each other’s methods, and create new methods to try with others. Kind of an open-source compassion network.

I think that’s the only way to do it. For instance, here on Zen Habits, I constantly try to help people change habits, get out of debt, or realize that there’s awesomeness within themselves. But I start with me and show how I did it, then show how you can replicate it within your own lives.

Acting to Ease Others’ Suffering

I can also act in ways that I believe are compassionate to the people right in front of me, and you might think, “Isn’t that compassion for others?” But really, it’s compassion for myself in another form. It’s another self-compassion method.

Imagine the pain you feel when you see someone else suffering — the suffering you feel is real suffering, just as the other person is suffering. Yet, most people don’t actually ease that suffering in themselves. So, how do you ease that suffering in yourself when you see someone else suffering?

You reach out, empathize, make a connection, and look for a way to reduce the other person’s suffering, and your own. If the other person opens up, that’s great. If not, that’s OK, because you’ve reached out and let them know that you too suffer when you see them suffer. That’s a powerful thing.

And so your ease your own suffering, and it’s a selfish sort of compassion. But that’s the only kind there is.

The Practical Steps

So compiling all of the above into some practical steps, here’s how to do compassion:

1. Be aware of your own suffering. Be willing to face, and accept, the suffering you do on a daily basis. This includes stress, doubt, fear, anger, frustration, disappointment. Watch it happen, and be OK with the sensation. Don’t run from it.
2. Ease your own suffering. Learn the cause of your suffering. The cause is the ideal you’re holding onto in your mind — how other people should act, how your life should be, how you should be better, how things will turn out, how people will think of you, etc. Let go of this ideal, and you’ll suffer less.
3. See the suffering of others. Pay attention to the other people in your life, strangers you pass. Notice the signs of their pain, empathize with this pain, understand them because you’ve experienced it too.
4. Reach out to them, and connect. Ease your own suffering (that comes from seeing their suffering) by reaching out and making a connection. Smile, be open to who they are, let go of your expectations of that person, and just connect.
5. Share your suffering, and your method. Share ways that you’ve suffered that the other person might relate to, and this in itself will be helpful, because then you share suffering. Then share how you solved it, and that method can then be useful to the other person, if they decide to try it (it’s their choice). Don’t be preachy, just share what worked.
6. Learn from the methods of others. Just as you share with others your method of easing your suffering, there’s much to be learned from others. If others have solved a problem that’s causing you some suffering, learn how they did it. By sharing with and learning from each other, we can all get better at our methods of compassion.

This is a simple method that I share with you, but it works wonderfully for me. I hope it helps.

Take a moment and check in with yourself. How is your body feeling right in this moment? If you’re generally healthy, check in for subtle symptoms. Is your neck feeling tense? Does your lower back ache? Do you have a headache? Are you exhausted — again? Or perhaps you’re battling a more serious health diagnosis and you’re experiencing symptoms from your health condition.

Whether you’re experiencing the nuisance of a minor physical symptom, the more concerning stress of a serious health condition, or simple curiosity about how you might maximize your vitality and longevity, I’m psyched to share with you something they never taught me in medical school.

The Body Knows How To Heal Itself

Your body is beautifully equipped with natural self-repair mechanisms that are under the influence of thoughts, feelings and beliefs that originate in your mind. It knows how to kill cancer cells, fix broken proteins, slow aging, eliminate toxins, fight infections, get rid of foreign bodies, and otherwise keep you healthy. Things go awry and disease manifests when these self-repair mechanisms fail to function properly.

But here’s the kicker. Your nervous system has two operating systems — the “fight-or-flight” stress response dominated by the sympathetic nervous system and the relaxation response run by the parasympathetic nervous system. Only when your nervous system is in a relaxation response do your body’s self-repair mechanisms function!

The stress response is there to protect you in case a tiger chases you. But these days, we’re pretty safe from tigers, and yet our stress responses get triggered, on average, over 50 times per day. How? The amygdala in your lizard brains perceives negative thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, such as financial fears, relationship worries, work stress, loneliness, or pessimism, as threats equally scary as a tiger. Then BOOM. The scaredy-cat amygdala goes on red alert, and when this happens, our bodies can’t repair themselves. No wonder we get sick!

6 Simple Steps To Activate Your Body’s Self-Repair Mechanisms

You don’t have to be at the mercy of your stress responses. As I teach in my new book Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself, you can be proactive about activating your body’s natural self-healing. Try these scientifically-proven steps as a health prevention strategy or as treatment for any health condition you might be battling.

Step 1: Believe You Can Heal Yourself

Don’t believe that positive belief can cure the body? Think again! The medical establishment has been proving that the mind can cure the body for over 50 years. We call it “the placebo effect,” and it has been proven to cause resolution of symptoms- and real physiological change — in 18-80% of the patients in clinical trials who are treated with nothing more than sugar pills, saline injections, or fake surgeries.

As long as you believe your condition is “incurable” or “chronic,” it will be. Don’t believe your health condition could possibly resolve? Check out the Spontaneous Remission Project, a compilation of over 3,500 case studies proving that spontaneous remission has been reported for just about every illness out there- Stage 4 cancers, HIV, diabetes, high blood pressure, thyroid disease, autoimmune diseases, even an untreated gunshot wound to the head!

For my skeptical physician mind, reading through all these case studies was a paradigm shift. It’s kind of like the story of the 4-minute mile. Exercise physiologists used to think the body was physiologically incapable of running a mile in less than 4 minutes — and so no athlete ever did it. Then in 1954, Roger Bannister ran a mile in three minutes and fifty-nine seconds. Once that limiting belief was shattered, virtually every athlete that competes in a world-class event has run the mile in under four minutes. Today’s world-record time for the mile is 3:43:15, more than 15 seconds under 4 minutes.

What if your belief that the body can’t heal itself is like the 4-minute mile? For some mind-blowing stories about how positive belief can radically affect your health, watch my TEDx talk Is There Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself?.

Scientific data proves that once you believe healing is possible, it can be. So what do you believe?

Step 2: Find The Right Support

To say that you can heal yourself is sort of a misnomer because the scientific data proves that, equally essential to positive belief is the nurturing care of a true healer, someone optimistic who shares your positive belief, includes you in true partnership, respects your intuition, cares for your wellbeing, and ensures you that you won’t be alone on your self-healing journey.

Do you have the right healers on your health care team?

Step Three: Listen To Your Body & Your Intuition

Nobody knows your body better than you, not even a doctor. We doctors may know the arteries of the leg or the anatomy of your organs better than you, but you know what’s best for your own body better than anyone else. When my literary agent first read Mind Over Medicine, she said, “Lissa, before I read this book, I honestly thought my body was none of my business. Now I know better.”

Yes! Your body is indeed your business. So listen to your intuition and trust what it tells you.

Not in touch with your intuition? Then listen to your body, which is one vehicle your intuition uses to speak to you. If you have a physical sensation in your body — pain, tightness, nausea, clenching, dizziness — ask your body what it is trying to communicate to you. Then listen up! This is the voice of your inner wisdom and it will always lead you directly to your true north.

Step Four: Diagnose The Root Causes Of Your Illness

Your doctor may give you one kind of diagnosis- migraines or irritable bowel syndrome or breast cancer, for example. But the kind of diagnosis I’m talking about gets at the root of what might have triggered stress responses in your body and deactivated your body’s self-healing mechanisms, thereby making your body vulnerable to illness.

What aspects of your life are activating your stress responses? What relaxation response-inducing activities — like meditation, creative expression, laughter, engaging in work you love, massage, yoga, or playing with animals — have you been neglecting?

Illness is often a wake up call, forcing us to get down and dirty with what’s really true in our lives. We can either play the victim or we can use illness as an opportunity to awaken.

If you’re struggling with a physical issue, what might lie at the root of it? For more ideas about what might lie at the root of your illness, check out my TEDx talk The Shocking Truth About Your Health.

Step Five: Write The Prescription For Yourself

This won’t be the kind of prescription you fill at a pharmacy, though it certainly may include elements of Western medicine. It’s more of a self-guided action plan intended to make your body ripe for optimal health and full recovery.

So ask yourself, “What does my body need in order to heal?” Your Prescription may include diet changes, an exercise regimen, and a conventional medical treatment plan. But it may also include getting out of a toxic relationship, quitting a soul-sucking job, adding a meditation practice, taking steps to get out of debt, or following a passion.

Be as specific as you can. Then muster up the courage to put your plan into action!

Step Six: Surrender Attachment To Outcomes

What if you’ve adopted a positive attitude, found the right healer, tapped into your intuition and your body, diagnosed the root cause of your health condition, written The Prescription for yourself and put it into action- but you’re still sick? Are you doing something wrong? Is it your fault you’re still sick?

Absolutely not — and any talk of guilt, blame, or shame for someone on a healing journey only activates more stress responses and harms the body.

So what’s the deal? This is where the art of surrender comes in. Some patients do everything “right” and spontaneous remission happens. But others are the proverbial choir- and they’re still sick. Why does this happen? Honestly, I don’t know. The only real answer is a spiritual one. Perhaps our souls come here on this earth to learn lessons, and illness can be a spiritual practice, a way to learn our life lessons and a part of our soul’s destiny.

What I can say is that if you’ve followed the 6 steps, you’ve done everything within your power to make your body ripe for miracles — and the rest is out of your hands. So take a deep breath, trust The Universe, surrender attachment to any particular health outcome, and let any health condition you face be an opportunity for spiritual awakening.

Ready To Heal Yourself?

Are you motivated to put each of these steps into action? Will you do what it takes to reduce stress responses in your body and increase relaxation responses so your body can repair itself?

Read more from Lissa Rankin, MD on her blog, LissaRankin.com, where you can download the free eBook 10 Secrets to Healing Yourself. Her book Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself, offers all the scientific proof skeptics will need in order to believe the mind really can heal the body. It also guides you through a series of exercises to help you implement the 6 Steps To Healing Yourself so you can make your body ripe for miracles.

One of the most common problems I hear from readers is the difficulty in finding calm and peace in the middle of a work day.

Work for many people is stressful, full of too many things to do, too many meetings and emails and incoming information and interruptions and irritations and distractions and decisions and confusion.

Putting “Zen” into the workplace — some calm, some mindfulness, some letting go of that which stresses you out — is not a simple thing for most people.

To help those who’d like to find a more peaceful way of working, I’ve teamed up with San Francisco Zen Center to create the Zen of Work online course.

Zen priest Robert Thomas (former president of SFZC) and I will be co-teaching the class, which lasts for four weeks and starts this Sunday (May 5, 2013). Space is limited so please sign up by Saturday (May 4) if you’d like to join us.

What will the class consist of? Four weekly modules, each with:

• Videos with Robert and me
• Articles and podcasts with other great Zen teachers
• A weekly live video webinar (with me and Zen teachers Robert Thomas, Susan O’Connell and Marc Lesser on different weeks)
• A Q&A where you can submit questions to be answered
• A weekly mindfulness practice
• A forum to discuss the material with other course members

This will take a daily commitment, so if you’d like to do it, please set aside at least 20-30 minutes a day to view/read course materials, do the practice, and interact with the teachers and other members (through the forum, Q&A, and webinars).

Sign up for the Zen of Work course here.

Course Contents

Here’s what we’ll be offering during the four weeks of the course (starting May 5):

Week 1

1. Course Overview
2. Core video lesson: – with Leo & Robert
3. Core lesson: Week 1 mindfulness practice: sitting (with meditation instruction video)
4. Core lesson: The Mechanics of Habits, and How to Change, by Leo Babauta
5. Audio lesson: What’s a Mindful Workday Like? By Robert Thomas
6. What is mindfulness? by Susan O’Connell
7. We Are All Zen Students, by Marc Lesser
8. Live Webinar: Robert Thomas & Leo Babauta, Thurs. May 9 at 3pm Pacific/6pm Eastern
9. Ask the students: why are you here?
10. Forum Q&A on Friday May 10

Week 2

1. Core video lesson: with Leo & Robert
2. Core lesson: Week 2 mindfulness practice
3. Core video lesson: Using Slogans to Remember Mindfulness – with Robert Thomas
4. Core lesson: Expecting things to be perfect, by Leo Babauta
5. Article: Practicing in the Mud – ideas about perfection, by Susan O’Connell
6. Audio lesson: What’s a Mindful Workday Like? By Susan O’Connell
7. Live Webinar: Susan O’Connell & Leo Babauta, Thurs. May 16 at 3pm Pacific/6pm Eastern
8. Forum Q&A on Friday May 17

Week 3

1. Core video lesson: The Cessation of Suffering – with Leo & Susan
2. Core lesson: Week 3 mindfulness practice: computer ritual
3. Core Video Lesson: More Slogans to Remember Mindfulness – with Robert Thomas
4. Core lesson: How to Remember Mindfulness, by Leo Babauta
5. Audio lesson: What’s a Mindful Workday Like? By Mark Lancaster
6. Busy and Not Busy, & Resting in the Moment
7. Podcast: Shame, Regret & Forgiving – by Susan O’Connell
8. What We Can Learn from the Zen Students of Tassajara, by Leo Babauta
9. Live Webinar: Robert Thomas & Leo Babauta, Thurs. May 23 at 3pm Pacific/6pm Eastern
10. Forum Q&A on Friday May 24

Week 4

1. Core video lesson: with Leo & Robert
2. Core lesson: Mindful Email, by Leo Babauta
3. Core video Lesson: Mindful Managing – with Robert Thomas
4. Core lesson: Week 4 mindfulness practice
5. Video Lesson: Expanding Practice, and Continuing Habits – video with Leo & Susan
6. Right Livelihood, by Randy Komisar
7. Audio lesson: What’s a Mindful Workday Like? By Jordan Thorn
8. Video Lesson: Mindful Communication – with Lisa Hoffman
9. Video Lesson: Mindful To-do List – with Lisa Hoffman
10. Live Webinar: Thurs. May 30 at 3pm Pacific/6pm Eastern
11. Downloadable sheet: Mindfulness Exercises
12. Forum Q&A on Friday May 31

Register →

Today is my 40th birthday (April 30), and I decided that this year, instead of sharing a list of the lessons I’ve learned (38 lessons, 39th lesson), I’d change the tradition of birthday gift giving. This year, I’m giving presents to people I love (just small gifts), out of appreciation for them making my life better.

That includes all of you. You’ve made my life demonstrably and profoundly better, and I’m truly grateful.

So my gift to you this year is the 7-Day Vegan Challenge, a free challenge I’ve created in collaboration with some amazing vegan writers, nutritionists, and athletes.

What is the 7-Day Vegan Challenge?

• A fun challenge to try veganism.
• A way to find compassion for animals.
• A way to explore healthy eating, and yourself.
• Free meal plans and recipes from me and others.
• A Guide on nutrition, how to go vegan, and more.

It’s all free, no need to sign up for anything (though we do offer email reminders each day), no promotions of a new product line, no ads or popups. I’m not doing this to sell anything, just to offer an interesting challenge to the world.

It would mean the world to me if you would consider doing the challenge, and passing it on to others. Thank you!

How to Join the Challenge

It’s fairly simple:

1. Commit to doing the challenge for 7 days (any 7 straight days you like). Add your name to the list of challengers.
2. Tell your friends, family and colleagues that you’re doing the 7-Day Vegan Challenge — and ask them to join you!
3. Pick a meal plan in the Guide, or pick a recipe or two to start with. Buy groceries needed for the recipes.
4. Sign up for the email reminders if you like.
5. Start eating with your delicious new challenge diet!
6. Read the Guide when you get a chance. Understanding the Why and the How really helps.
7. Share your success! When you’re done, tell people how you did with the challenge. Tell people how you did on social media, or, you know, face to face.

Read more.

The Little Book of Contentment

A 2nd gift that I’d like to give you for my birthday is a new book I’m writing, just for you, called The Little Book of Contentment. It’s free, no email required to get it.

Unfortunately, I’m still putting the finishing touches on it. I hope to have it for you in the next 2-3 days.

Thank you all for reading Zen Habits. You’ve made my life better for being in it, and I will forever be grateful that we spent this time together.

One of the most instrumental changes in my life has been writing every single day.

For many years I was a writer who didn’t write that regularly. It was always on the back of my mind to write, but I didn’t find the time.

Then I started this blog in January 2007, and have written pretty much every day since then.

It was life-changing.

I recommend daily writing for anyone, not just writers. Here’s what I’ve found from my daily habit:

• Writing helps you reflect on your life and changes you’re making. This is incredibly valuable, as often we do things without realizing why, or what effects these things are having on us.
• Writing clarifies your thinking. Thoughts and feelings are nebulous happenings in our mind holes, but writing forces us to crystalize those thoughts and put them in a logical order.
• Writing regularly makes you better at writing. And writing is a powerful skill to be good at in our digital age.
• Writing for an audience (even if the audience is just one person) helps you to think from the perspective of the audience. That’s when the magic starts, because once you get into the reader’s mindset, you begin to understand readers and customers and colleagues and friends better. You have empathy and a wider understanding of the world.
• Writing persuasively — to convince others of your point of view — helps you to get better at persuading people to change their minds. Many people don’t want to change their minds when they feel someone is attacking their position, so they get defensive and dig into their position.
• Writing daily forces you to come up with new ideas regularly, and so that forces you to solve the very important problem of where to get ideas. What’s the answer to that problem? Ideas are everywhere! In the people you talk to, in your life experiments, in things you read online, in new ventures and magazines and films and music and novels. But when you write regularly, your eyes are open to these ideas.
• Writing regularly online helps you to build an audience who is interested in what you have to share, and how you can help them. This is good for any business, anyone who is building a career, anyone who loves to socialize with others who are interested in similar things as them.

And that’s just the start. The full benefits of this regular habit are, ironically, not something you can put into words, but something that must be experienced to be known.

How to Write Daily

There are various ways to get into the daily writing habit, but here’s what I’d recommend based on my experience:

1. Commit to writing daily. Many people try to write a few times a week, or once a week. That’s too infrequent and it won’t become a habit that way. Instead, tell yourself, “I’m going to write every single day, no exceptions”. And then actually stick to this commitment.
2. Set aside the time. Really important. You have to block off a small chunk of time for this, or it won’t happen. I suggest morning, as soon as you can, so that other things don’t get in the way. However, if you’re a night owl, late nights are fine too, as long as you’re not too tired.
3. Start small. OK, you knew I was going to say this, but it’s really important. All you have to do is start writing each day — you don’t have to write 1,000 words or anything. Just start, and how much you do doesn’t matter. Once the habit is in place, you can lengthen it, but for now just start.
4. Blog. You can write in a journal or text document just for yourself, but I highly recommend blogging. Get a free account at WordPress.com or Tumblr, and just start. Why blog? Because it really helps you to write regularly, and forces you to think in different ways, when you have an audience. Even if the audience is small. It’s scary, I know, but just do it. You’ll grow comfortable with it over time, and you should never let fear stop you from doing something amazing.
5. Shut down distractions. The writer is best friends with distraction. He knows its powerful call, and must master the urge to follow it. So shut down everything that isn’t your writing tool, all tabs, all email programs and social media, and just write.

That’s all you need to get started. Over time, you’ll learn the power of interaction with your audience, and draw inspiration and lessons from the audience. But for now, just get started.

The Sea Change Program: Daily Writing

If you’d like help forming this great habit, I’d like to offer my Sea Change Program, which I’ve created to help people form habits and change their lives.

In May, we’ll be focusing on the Daily Writing Habit, and I invite you to join us. More info on the program here.

In addition, I’ve just added the Beginner’s Habit Program to Sea Change, for those who would like to learn the basic skills of habit formation. I highly recommend it if you’ve had trouble forming habits.

Have you ever had a long amazing conversation with a friend, that took all kinds of turns neither of you could possibly have expected when you started the conversation? Wasn’t it awesome, to riff off each other, to explore unforeseen territory, to be free to wander and enjoy the time together?

What if, instead, you had a definite goal for how the conversation should go when you start out? A definite path and outcome of how you want the conversation to turn out? Let’s say you have an agenda, and every time one of you wandered off the agenda, you forced yourself to get back on it.

Would the conversation be better or worse, with a set outcome? Is it better to be free to wander, or to be set on one predetermined path?

I submit that the wandering is much better, much more amazing.

This is the goal-less path.

Why Work Without Goals?

For many years I was fixated on goals, but at the same time was also simplifying my work life and working on being more content. I realized two things:

1. Goals (wanting to improve) are not consistent with contentment (being happy with where you are).
2. Goals are not necessarily necessary (I thought they were for a long time, but they’re not) — and so using my minimalist philosophy, they should be ruthlessly eliminated.

And so I decided to experiment, and see whether goals were really necessary. I found out that they weren’t.

Here are the results of my (mostly) goal-less experiment:

• We often think goals are necessary to achieve something, but in reality they’re not.
• Goals, as I define them, are having a set outcome … but why is that outcome the only good outcome? There are many, many great outcomes, and being fixed on one is very limiting.
• Goals are completely made up, with not a lot of information about what will happen in the future as we work on them. We invent them, out of some fantasy of how we want the future to go, but in truth they’re not realistic. And we can’t predict or control how the future will go, so setting goals is a useless activity.
• When we fixate on goals, we shut ourselves off to new opportunities that open up in different directions — opportunities that we couldn’t have foreseen when we started out. But because we’re fixated on the goal, we don’t allow ourselves to go in this new direction.
• When we fail to reach this fantasy outcome (which is often), we feel bad. But if we let go of the fantasy, we can just enjoy the work.
• When we are fixated on achieving a future outcome, we are not looking at where we are, nor are we happy with where we are. We can’t be, because we are looking at the future goal, and this is what motivates us (not enjoying the moment).
• When we have a future-oriented mindset, it doesn’t end if/when we achieve the goal. We achieve the goal, then immediately look to the next goal.

That’s just the start of the discussion — I could go on and on about this, but essentially this is a big illusion that our society believes in.

The 4 Principles

So how do you work without goals? Do you just do nothing? No, of course not … people who love what they do will wake up wanting to do something fun, something that benefits the world. I know this because even without a set goal, I am always excited to work on something.

How does this work? Instead of working with a fixed outcome (goal), work from moment to moment, using principles that work for you. Each moment, don’t ask “am I doing something to move me to my goal?” but instead ask, “Am I doing something right now that’s based on one of my values or principles?”

Your principles will differ from mine, but here are the ones that I’ve found work for me:

1. Love what you do. This seems obvious, but so often people do things that they’re not excited about. I try to find things that I love doing, and if there’s some mundane task I have to do for some reason, I either eliminate it or find a way to enjoy the hell out of it.
2. Help others. I am strongly motivated by the desire to do things that will help people — my readers, my friends, my kids, people in need. And so this principle guides everything I do, including all of my writing. I highly recommend it.
3. Build relationships & trust. Each thing you do, personally and for your business, should be building a relationship. I build relationships with my readers by being authentic and trying my best to help, and build relationships with friends & family in the same way. Being trustworthy as much as humanly possible is a great way to build relationships, so these two go hand-in-hand.
4. Be curious. When you’re curious about other people, and about life in general, you tend to be a better listener, a better friend, more informed, and have fun each step along the way.

Those four principles work well for working with no goals. They also work well for having a goal-less conversation, or wandering the world, or collaborating with people.

So wake up in the morning, and instead of figuring out how to further your goals, ask what you really feel like doing right now. What will make you happy now, instead of some distant time in the future? I submit that long-term goals, some nebulous fantasy in the future, aren’t that motivating — we’re more motivated by something that can pay off now, which includes things that make us happy as we do them.

As you figure out what you feel like doing right now, consider these four principles. And then take action, knowing that you’re helping people, building trust and relationships, making yourself happy, and satisfying your natural curiosity about others and the world.

Then repeat that, each step along your daily journey. Each step along the way, you’re doing something you love, something in line with your principles. You’re not just lining yourself up with some predetermined outcome, but you are already there.

Questions & Answers

Some common questions I get asked a lot:

Q: Isn’t having no goals a goal?

A: It can be a goal, or you can learn to do it along the journey, by exploring new methods. I’m always learning new things (like having no goals) without setting out to learn them in the first place.

Q: So how do you make a living?

A: Passionately! Again, not having goals doesn’t mean you stop doing things. In fact, I do many things, all the time, but I do them because I love doing them.

Q: Isn’t it easy for you to give up goals now that you’re successful?

A: Sure, that might make it easier, but really it’s not the success that has helped me give up my goals … it’s my contentment with who I am. I know that I’m a good person, and am happy with who I am, and know that I’ll be OK no matter what outcomes turn up. That’s true for pretty much everyone reading this, no matter how much “success” you have.

Q: Don’t you really have goals when you do something, like write this article or try to follow your 4 principles?

A: Sure, you can call them that if you want. The terminology isn’t that important — the principles are. My definition of goals is having a predetermined outcome (something you want to happen in the future), and most people don’t call “write an article” a goal. Their goals are more along the lines of “get a lot of readers” or “make a lot of money” or “complete X”. So if you want to say I have goals, that’s fine, but just realize that for me, the process itself is the goal.

Q: How do you start down the path of no goals, if you’re used to having goals?

A: Just start following the four principles (or your own principles) right now. Like, in this very moment. When you find yourself coming up with a goal (and I do all the time), recognize that, and realize that it’s a fantasy, and let it go, gently.

Parenting can be stressful. That’s probably one of my bigger understatements, but as the father of 6 kids, I’ve learned a little about handling these stresses so that it’s not such a big deal anymore.

Kids throw tantrums, demand to have their way, don’t see anything but their own point of view, break things, always need something, get hurt, fight with each other, start to rebel and become disrespectful as teen-agers, and so on.

But there are good bits too.

The truth is, dealing with the stresses of kids is the same as dealing with the stresses of anyone else. The stress is just magnified because 1) we are responsible for their lives, education, values and everything else, and 2) we are more emotionally involved with them than we are with most other people. Still, the basics of dealing with the stresses of others apply, and what we’ll talk about here can apply to anyone, not just someone with kids.

OK, let’s tackle this problem … we’re going to look at two areas: 1) how to deal with the stresses of others, and 2) how to make managing kids easier.

Stresses of Others

In her book Everyday Zen, Charlotte Joko Beck tells a story that I’ll paraphrase here:

Imagine you’re rowing a boat on a foggy lake, and out of the fog comes another boat that crashes into you! At first you’re angry at the fool who crashed into you — what was he thinking! You just painted the boat. But then you notice the boat is empty, and the anger leaves … you’ll have to repaint the boat, that’s all, and you just row around the empty boat. But if there were a person steering the boat, we’d be angry!

Here’s the thing: the boat is always empty. Whenever we interact with other people who might “do something to us” (be rude, ignore us, be too demanding, break our favorite coffee cup, etc.), we’re bumping into an empty boat. We just think there’s some fool in that boat who should have known better, but really it’s just a boat bumping into us, no harm intended by the boat.

That’s a hard lesson to learn, because we tend to imbue the actions of others with a story of their intentions, and how they should have acted instead. We think they’re out to get us, or they should base their lives around being considerate to us and not offending us. But really they’re just doing their thing, without bad intent, and the boat just happens to bump into us.

When we see things with this lens, they suddenly become emptied of anger and stress. Our boss was rude? Empty boat, just respond appropriately, don’t imbue with a story. Kid throws a tantrum? Empty boat, just breathe and find the appropriate, non-angry response.

This is detachment. It’s seeing the actions and words of others as just phenomena happening outside of us, like a leaf falling or the wind blowing. We don’t get angry at the wind for blowing, and yet the blowing does affect us. Let the actions of your kid be the wind blowing — you just need to find an appropriate response, rather than being stressed that this phenomenon is happening.

So when your kid is doing something other than what you’d like, let go of that desired outcome that’s stressing you out, and let go of the story you’ve imbued into their actions. Just think, “Empty boat, wind blowing.”

And then give them a hug. Let love guide your actions. Teach, don’t control. Set an example of how they should behave with your compassionate response. They’re watching you, not listening to your words, and that’s how they learn.

Making Things Easier

The skills above take practice, and I’m still learning them myself. I don’t claim to be the best at them, but the learning itself is a good process to go through.

With all of that said, there are some things you can do to make managing kids easier and less stressful:

• Teach them to be self-sufficient. Each step along the way, teach them to take care of themselves according to their ability to learn new skills. If they learn to brush their teeth, shower, fix their breakfast, wash their dishes, and eventually cook and clean and wash their own clothes, life becomes much easier.
• Set boundaries. There are certain lines they shouldn’t cross for safety reasons, and the earlier you can teach these lines, the better. Then there are softer lines that are inappropriate to cross — being disrespectful of others, damaging property, etc. — and for these lines, it’s good to teach them as early as possible why it’s bad to cross the lines. Repetition is key, and eventually they learn and things are easier for all concerned.
• Give them responsibility. Older kids can watch younger kids. Kids can pitch in with family chores, like sweeping and washing dishes and wiping counters and cleaning bathrooms. This is good for them, as it teaches them to be a part of a team and take pride in their work, while it reduces the load for you.
• Don’t schedule too much. Many parents overbook their kids, with practices and lessons and clubs and playdates and sports and recitals and much more. This gives the kids no time to play and invent on their own, and makes life much more stressful for the parent. Schedule as little as possible, and let them figure out how to use their time.
• Relax your expectations. Parents tend to expect the world of their kids, from how successful they’ll be to how perfect they’ll be at skills to how little they’ll mess up with things around the house to how perfect they’ll behave. Of course, none of these expectations is realistic, nor fair to the kid. Let them go. Accept them for who they are, and just have a good time with them.

I say all these things like I’ve perfected them, but of course I haven’t. I have a wonderful set of kids, and I know I’m lucky. I’m also lucky to have an amazing wife, Eva, who bears the brunt of the stress and makes things so much easier for me. But when the things above work, they work great.

Parenting can be stressful, but it can also be joyful. I choose joyful.

Changing habits, at its core, is simply a process of changing what’s normal for you.

This is something I’ve done myself a gajillion times over the last 7-8 years:

• not smoking became my new normal (lots of pain for a month or so)
• running became normal
• eating vegetarian became normal
• later eating vegan became normal
• writing every day became normal
• not having sugar in my coffee became normal
• eating whole foods (instead of junk foods) became normal
• meditating every morning became normal
• having less stuff and a simpler home became my new normal
• reducing and eventually (mostly) eliminating sugar became normal
• and so on: no car, walk and ride mass transit, do less, becoming content with myself, working for myself, etc.

In fact, you could say the last 8 years of my life has been a constant adjusting of what’s normal. Adjusting normal is my normal now.

However, for most people, changing is tough because there’s some pain in changing. When you have a problem, there is the pain it causes in your life, but there’s also a pain of trying to change it. When the payoff of trying to change is outweighed by the pay off of continuing the old way, people stick with what they’re comfortable with.

How do we overcome this problem of the pain of change? It’s the mantra of this site: Start small, start with one thing at a time, and make the change easier. You want to make changing the path of least resistance, because change usually isn’t for most people.

If you make a drastic change, it feels really hard and really different, and not something you can stick to for very long.

But when you make a change easier, it makes it easier to take that all-important first step. Once you take that first step, you have a bit of forward momentum. And it’s much easier to be consistent and stick with something for a long time.

Let’s take an example: I used to drink coffee with lots of added sugar. I used to think there was nothing wrong with that, but eventually I realized I was making an excuse for putting crap in my body. So I started by putting half a teaspoon less in my coffee. At first, it was slightly less good. But after a few days, it taste exactly like normal, like what I was used to. And then I took out another half a teaspoon, and it was slightly less good for a while, and then after a while it was exactly what I was used to.

Our minds tend to adjust over time. That’s my change process — I gradually adjust what’s normal to me. Eventually I didn’t need any sugar in my coffee, and it was just as good for me, I didn’t have all that crap, and I enjoyed it the same.

You can do this with anything — exercise, meditation, procrastination. Gradually adjust what feels like normal to you.

Here’s the process:

1. Start small. What’s the smallest increment you can do? Do this for at least 3 days, preferably 4-5.
2. Get started. Starting the change each day is the most important thing. Want to run? Just get out the door. Want to meditate? Just get on the cushion.
3. Enjoy the change. Don’t look at this as a sacrifice. It’s fun, it’s learning, it’s a challenge.
4. Stick to the change. Notice your urge to quit. Don’t act on it. Keep going.
5. Adjust again. When the change becomes normal, make another small adjustment.

This is the process of creating a new normal. It’s beautiful and simple.

The Habit Course

If you want help changing habits, I created a self-study course with Katie Tallo and Barrie Davenport called The Habit Course. We now have a $97 version that’s more affordable than ever, so feel free to check it out.