For most of us the ultimate job would be to collect a huge salary for doing something fun. My penultimate idea of the ideal job would be surfing. No, not competing, that’s hard work. I just mean just soul surfing at say, Launiopoko Beach Park in Maui every time the urge hit. A woman would stop by my two-story beachfront hut and hand me a million dollars each month. That would be the ultimate job and no, it doesn’t exist.

But an acceptable, close to perfect job does exist for me and for you though you may need to accept a lower income for a while (or forever). See the “How little do you need?” series if you’re having trouble coming to grips with that concept.

Straight out of college or high school and looking for work most of look for a job working for someone else’s company. It’s safe. Sometimes it’s too safe, the money is good enough and complacency kicks in. A person in this situation might stay in that same job until they retire in 40 years. Others will get bored and try another job probably again working for someone else.

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We go after everything we want - the best of everything in so many areas, but not our jobs where we spend eight to ten hours a day doing something we probably don’t want to be doing if we had a choice. We DO have a choice, but we continue on mindlessly accepting it.

WHY is that?

In one word, fear. Fear of the difficult path. Fear of not making enough money. Fear of trying to get the job you’d love and being rejected over and over or facing ‘insurmountable’ difficulty trying.

Everyone knows what their ultimate job is. We’ve all spent time thinking about it. But most of us haven’t taken even one step toward it. Usually our self-talk is that there are so few people doing it in the world or we’d need to take a profound pay cut. Maybe your idea of the ultimate job is skydiving out of planes and filming a team doing aerial stunts. Not many people in the world are making that happen for themselves. But I know one thing, YOU could be one of them.

The world is a big place I’ve been finding out the last 10 years. Even if you exhaust your efforts to find the perfect job in the USA you could go abroad and try there. I think the USA provides opportunities for anyone that is motivated to get their ultimate job. If none exist, you can make the opportunity yourself. A driven person can do anything. Look at this guy who strapped jet engines to his back and flew around in circles at almost 200 mph. Since being in Thailand I’ve met other full time bloggers and two guys that had fishing guide businesses in Alaska. Their ‘job’ was to take tourists fishing in some of the most pristine natural streams and lakes in the world. How strange is that to meet two different guys doing that across the planet in Thailand? There must be more of those opportunities than I ever would have thought.

Over time my idea of the ultimate job changed a lot. Currently my idea of the ultimate job is what I’m doing. You’re reading it. Blogging is my ultimate job and I’m making it work. I’ve written in a journal since grad school and I never stopped writing fiction, e-books and long articles for web sites I’ve had. I decided about a year ago to focus on blogging full time and that would be it. This is my ultimate job but I’ve sacrificed a lot to make it work… for instance, I’m not living in Hawaii where the cost of living is outrageous, I’m living in Thailand where my electric bill was $3 this month and water bill was $4.50. Rent was $100. Food was about $100 this month. Gas? I have a motorbike so, at $5 a gallon gas was just about $40. Will I ever make enough money blogging to move from Thailand back to Hawaii? I don’t know. Does it matter? No, not really. If I can just continue to write articles and survive - that’s what I’m doing. I’m happy as a turtle in mud.

Some Ultimate Jobs:

Blogging about anything you love.
Fishing guide, anywhere.
Hiking guide, Maui, Oahu, Kauai, Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, Western USA, Alaska, Canada, Swiss Alps, Thailand.
Test driver for new sport super-cars.
Dressing room attendant for Charlie’s Angels movie set.
Travel photographer.
Travel writer.
Actor, Actress. Seriously - this must be the best job in the entire world. Nobody on the planet gets paid more for doing less.
Movie extra that acts only as the recipient of massages.
Professional sports player (any sport).
Astronaut.
Artist of any sort.
Comic strip writer.
Joke writer.

If income was the only area you had to sacrifice to be doing what you really want to be doing, could you make it work?

Best of Life!

Vern

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My good friend from Sweden is doing Hawaii Appraisal of residential real estate on Oahu, Maui, Kauai and the Big Island. He is living his dream. He came to the USA with little and has carved out a niche for himself in a very competitive market. If you need an appraisal in Hawaii - contact him!

Flow is something that’s talked about by aspiring zenists, Feng Shui practicioners, archers, golfers, chess players and those addicted to computer games. In the flow state time passes without being noticed. Activity is effortless. You may not remember all the details of the state. There’s nothing interfering with your brain and the activity. Quite the opposite, you’re perfectly meshed with the activity. You ARE the activity.

Creative flow is when you’re developing something or creating something and it’s a time of very high productivity. You’re in an optimal state where you are accomplishing much more than you usually do per minute, and there’s no boredom or sense of “work” being done. It may be fun, or there may be no sense of fun at all - you’re just so focused that you ARE whatever you’re doing.

This state of optimum creative flow happens often for me as I’m writing, and I’m glad it does. Over the past year I’ve written over a million words at my blogs and web sites, not to mention comments and questions at other blogs and through email. I’ve learned about the creative flow state just by needing to enter it on a daily basis. I’ll do my best to pull everything together that I’ve learned and share it with you here.

Last year I decided to blog full time. Before that I’d always just been happy to have the flow state visit me when it came. I thought I was just a lucky recipient of it. I didn’t think that I could initiate or control it. I played soccer for many years and on occasion I’d have flow occur during a game. It was as if I was two levels beyond everyone else. My passes were crisp and my timing impossibly perfect. This state usually visited me once per game for a few seconds, a minute… or, if I was extremely fortunate it would last most of the game.

I thought the creative flow state was just like that - when it came, it came. Now I know differently. Now I know how to OWN the creative flow state. It’s available when I want it to be. Or, more appropriately, when I need it to be. Gaining entry into the state when you need it is an almost god-like power. Imagine being able to choose when you enter the state and for how long.

Owning the creative flow state is not as hard as you might think. Like anything, there are antecedents that, once in place help foster the development and then prolong this awesome experience.

How to OWN the creative flow state?

1. Go to your Cave. You, like everyone else that needs to create have a preferred place to work where you can control the environmental conditions like air, noise, chair, table height, space around you, and the rest of it. Only you know what you need in your cave to make you happy and productive. If you’ll be there for hours you will want to arrange sustenance to keep the energy flowing. For me, pretzel rods, the Bull, cashews or pistachios (no red dye) canned coffee and a big water bottle does it. My cave has a toilet, air conditioning, fan, stereo and a place on the floor with a thin mattress and pillows in case I need to get cozy with my notebook on the floor for a change of position and perspective.

Ensure you have your creative instruments in supply and close at hand, exactly where they should be. If I’ve got a project that doesn’t require the notebook (rare) I need those thin lined markers (blue, black and red) and a ream of blank white paper so I can draw sketches, write symbols, text or whatever else - color coded in a way that only I could figure out.

Ambiance. Depending on what you’re doing you’ll want to choose the right music. Eighty percent of the time I’m in the cave creating I like to have something on. Other times I want absolute silence as I’m working on a very detailed idea which demands silence.

Ensure everything is exactly as you like it. The purpose of this is reducing the extraneous fook that can pull you out of the state and into mediocrity. All it takes is one stray thought to germinate in your mind about not having the ruler where you thought it was and all hell could break loose as you systematically fly through every drawer, closet, pocket and puppet to find it. Nothing destroys creative flow faster than thoughts about why something isn’t the way it should be.

Use the restroom before you begin. Take a mental inventory. Anything else that isn’t quite right? Fix it before you sit down. Usually this is when I crank up some Prodigy, English Beat, Beastie Boys, Pixies or Chili Peppers to rev me up. I need to be in a special state of mind to get the creative juices flowing. Nothing less than euphoria works best for me. Upbeat songs rattling the walls works best, but I can be considerate and use headphones when it’s in the interest of social harmony.

2. Inform others that for x hours you won’t be available. That means people in other rooms of the cave. That means turning your phone ringer off. SMS beeps off. Flash phone messages off. Browser messages off. Instant messengers off. Email notifications off. Close your blinds if you’re in an office. Kick the dog out.

3. Label a motive for starting this creative project. It might be very clear, like - if you don’t finish this 50 page paper by the morning you’ll fail Psychoanalytic Theory 6020 and need to repeat the class. Notice how you spontaneously enter the flow when you absolutely MUST get something done and you’re completely out of time and excuses?

A strong motivation is the number one factor for inviting a creative flow session. In college that student mentioned above was me. I left projects to the last minute and then completed them with amazing efficiency and quality. I did my best work that way, so why change the equation? Now it’s a little different as every night is a mental deadline for some blog article to be written. I enter the creative flow state daily for hours, banging out articles out like popcorn thrown in a cub scout fire.

If your motivation isn’t so clear, make it crystal clear so you know exactly why you need to create a masterpiece over the next few hours. I keep defining the why until I feel very confident about the need for the project. I like to picture little things that will come later as I blog toward greatness: Dinner with Lance Armstrong or maybe a playful wrestling match with my favorite Charlie’s Angel.

4. Brainstorming. I brainstorm first - scribbling fragments of ideas all over some blank A4 sheets, I’m chicken-scratching what appears to be gibberish to the rest of mankind, and honestly I can barely read it myself - but, it’s part of the process. If I slow down to write it nicely then I lose the speed at which things pour out of my head. Sometimes i use the computer to write as I can type faster than I can write with a pen - but sometimes the strict format of text on a screen is too limiting and I need to see it on paper, diagonally, curving around the edges, in different sizes, shapes and colors.

5. Planning. Plan the chapters of your project or the general outline of what you want to create by choosing from the bits and pieces you just brainstormed. It is a masterpiece and you’ll know after looking through what you’ve written if it’s comparable to Ludwig Van’s glorious 9th or not. You may need to brainstorm some more. Brainstorming might take 10-30 minutes. Planning might take another 10 minutes. Usually I’m so excited by the time I have half an outline together that I need to either force myself to slow down and finish the complete plan - or, run with it immediately and finish the plan as I go. Sometimes I’m so tweaked about getting started and seeing it come to life that I don’t finish the planning. But, that’s just me.

Usually I don’t catch myself realizing that I’m in the creative flow state for hours after it begins. At some point inevitably I’ll need to use the restroom or drink a coffee and I’ll notice that a chunk of time passed. When I wrote my first book I wrote over 10,000 words at one sitting. Time just flies when you’re focused!

For me, the first session is basically a huge right-hemisphere memory dump from my brain in “Vern-logic” digital format. I spill everything at once almost like a brainstorm but I’m fleshing out details in the general ideas, usually corresponding to paragraphs that will form in the project later. I type like a fiend until my wrists, fingers, elbows and neck hurt.

The first spill is never a completed masterpiece. The left hemisphere needs to make Vern-logic mesh logically with a critical mass of readers that will be reading it. Word substitution, spell checks, graphics and page formatting takes place next.

I’m never in a creative flow during any editing process. It’s something that doesn’t come natural to me. Dumping it all is easy, it’s just like breathing. Editing it is seriously difficult work that I wish I could call on a flow process to help with. Anyone have a remedy? Outsourcing, yeah, I know… I know…

Owning and extending the optimal creative flow state is an amazing skill to put in your bag of productivity tricks. It’s simple really, requiring nothing more than an optimal environment, confidence in your skills, and a really strong and lucid purpose and motivation for tackling the project.

When you own the flow, you’ve got it all and a bag of chips.

Best of Life!

Vern

Flow while exercising:

Flow, pseudo-flow, and mind-tweaking during exercise >

I studied psychology during my undergrad and graduate program in the USA. I was fascinated by persons with mental disability, having worked in a seniors care home and interacting with elderly with Alzheimer’s disease and many other maladies. I was even lucky enough to have an elderly aunt, 87 stay at my family’s home while I was there saving money to attend college in Miami.

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My aunt had a bit of dementia, I’d say “moderate to profound”… but she also had these hallucinations and delusions that occurred once in a while to bring a little excitement around the house. The devil was on the left shoulder and Jesus was on her right shoulder and both were telling her what to do… Quite an exciting time during these episodes, I don’t need to tell you.

My aunt could be the subject of 17 whole blog posts by herself, but that wouldn’t be appropriate for this blog!

Psychology is so fascinating to me because it WORKS. It absolutely works in most situations to either alleviate the problem entirely or to lessen it to manageable levels. I’m not a proponent of drug therapy too often, but there are definitely cases that call for it. There is no other way to treat chemical imbalances in the brain sometimes than by adding chemicals. That’s the way it is and I’m OK with that. It is a horrible thing to see a relative zombied out on Lithium or it’s substitutes, but would you (and the person) rather live with the alternative?

I love the idea of psychological intervention because it’s “talk therapy”. It’s one person saying something to another… or maybe even one person saying it to him or herself that can cause change inside the mind. Changes in mood, behavior, actions can all be affected just by talking.

Going through my grad program I was introduced to some rather radical psychologists. One that stands out in my mind was “Milton Erickson”, an M.D. who lived between 1901 and 1980..

Dr Erickson was a proponent of the “Prescribing the Symptom” methodology of psychological treatment. It’s an incredibly simple and effective idea that has worked for me countless times both in therapeutic relationships and personal relationships throughout my life.

Dr. Erickson’s first official client came to him because he was addicted to pornography and masturbation. He already was masturbating 10 to 15 times per day, so Dr. Erickson told him to “double it”. He told the client he wanted him to do it a minimum of 30 times per day.

The poor client called the next day with problems of impotence. PROBLEM SOLVED!

The technique is THAT powerful. Why it works in my opinion is that by prescribing the symptom the subject is getting permission to do something even more than he / she was before. That takes the power away from the behavior… in this case, the masturbation. Things we “shouldn’t” do have power in our culture. But, the behavior could be overeating, over-smoking, over-sleeping, anything. The technique can be applied in creative ways and to most behaviors that you wish to eradicate.

Exaggerating the behavior can have the effect of making the individual more aware of just how damaging the behavior is. NOBODY does a negative behavior so much that it’s too much to stand. This is one way to approach therapy to get rid of a behavior. Prescribe more of the behavior that the person wishes to be rid of to bring it up to the level of serious hurt, pain, disgust, or other negative threshold that becomes too much to bear.

Here is another case from Dr. Erickson’s files. A 24 year old man came to him complaining that he couldn’t get accepted into the Army because he wet the bed every night between 4 and 5 am. Dr. Erickson told him that he must set the alarm clock for 3 am. But, there’s more… He told him at 3 am. when the alarm clock sounds, he needs to stand up and relieve himself all over the bed and sheets deliberately for one week.

The problem disappeared completely.

In an earlier post on this blog I wrote somewhat humorously about how someone could go about stopping smoking using Aversive therapy in an extreme way. In a sense this is similar to prescribing the symptom because you are going to do the action that you wish to stop MORE, not less.

Doesn’t it make sense that if you are trying and trying to stop something that you should try the opposite and see what happens? Applying the same kind of treatment over and over and getting no results, something must change. It can change radically or in small ways, but it MUST change, yes? It may not make logical sense to change your attempts and go in the complete opposite direction - and along the same lines as what the malevolent behavior is… But, it works!

Can you use this for anything? Think about it!
I’m going to set aside some time in a few minutes after posting this to my blog to come up with some areas of my life I can apply this incredible concept to.

Best of Life,

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I wrote a post recently about the types of people that I meet and interact with when I’m trying to get an online venture going. I noticed that there are people that are set apart from the rest of us. They are people that are on TOP of the game, whatever particular game they’re playing. I wrote about the online world, but there are many other games people of the world are playing…

What about people that seem to be on top of the big game? You know, the “Game of Life“. Do you know anyone like that?

I know just a couple of people that seem to be at the top of the Game of Life… and you know what? Not all of them are wildly successful at business. What I mean by being on TOP of the game of life is this…

People on Top of the Game of Life:

Wake up nearly every single day in a happy mood. Unless there is a specific and terrible tragedy that occurred recently they are, without fail in a good mood every day they wake up. Seem to wake up earlier than the rest of us too.

Are optimistic about the future every single day. They realize that the future holds the key to continued happiness and being on top of the game. They realize that the future is changeable. The future depends entirely on the actions that one takes in the present. They know that and they love that idea because it gives them power, control over the future.

Are realistic. They understand that, according to probability - which NOBODY escapes, there are both positive and negative events that happen that are outside of one’s control. As much as we want to control EVERYTHING, we cannot. Some things are beyond that. One can choose to attribute these things to a higher power, or, like I do - as just probability. Accept reality and the Game of Life is that much easier.

Love to take action. They like to be doing something that is leading to more happiness, more optimism, more possibility in their lives.

Love to encourage and help others. They love to share something of themselves to help make others’ lives better in some way. It might be just with a certain group of people (family), or it may be that the person has the same attitude with everyone he or she meets. What a wonderful person THAT is, right? Have you met strangers that seemed like they wanted to help you - and you couldn’t understand why? I have. It’s scary, because initially I’m trying to figure out - what is this person’s agenda? And sometimes, there just isn’t one. Some people love to be helpful to everyone they meet. I like that kind of person myself!

Reduce daily stressors. Nothing has the power to bring someone down, bring your life to a lower level than when you face repeated (daily) stressors that don’t seem to end. People on top of the game will eliminate these stressors as quickly as possible, realizing that they are taking valuable time and effort to keep facing day after day. If you have this type of stressor, take steps to eliminate it immediately.

Take care of their bodies. They found a balance between eating what they want and exercising to keep the body in decent shape. They might eat whatever they want - and exercise often to keep their weight steady. Or, they might eat little and exercise little. They might work out on the weight machines at the gym 5 days per week or 1. They might ride a bicycle a couple times per week, walk, or jog. They have found the optimal state for them which allows them to feel good about their body and not have it be a concern that stresses them out day to day.

Take care of their minds. Our minds need a rest to function at maximum level. People who are at the Top of the Game of Life have found a balance between work and stressing themselves out. They allow the mind to recoup when it needs it. These times of relaxation might be some sport, walking, laying down with eyes closed, meditating, yoga, listening to music, or even watching television.

Don’t put much focus on money as providing the ultimate happiness. Maybe in most people’s lives there is a time period where money seems like the most important goal. It seems like, if we just sacrifice everything in pursuit of this goal we’ll find happiness in the end. It’s like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow idea. There probably is no pot of gold, and attempting to create one for yourself is going to take shovel fulls away from the other areas of your life… and the lives of those that are important to you.

Are typically over 50 years old. I’ve noticed this to be true. Rarely does someone in their 20’s or 30’s figure out the key to being on top of the Game of Life until they are in their 40’s or 50’s or older. Why is this? Something to do with having tried a lot and learned a lot more. By the time one gets older there is a life intelligence that kicks in. It’s kind of a reality check that puts things in the right perspective. At 50, if you’re the average male you’ll die in about 25 years. There’s not much time to keep getting it wrong. Naturally the mind has matured and put things in perspective at about this age. Is it possible to be on top of the game of life at 20? YES!

Are eager to share the secrets they’ve learned over their lifetimes. Just ask! When I think of how many times I had the chance to ask people on Top of the Game of Life what they thought about certain issues, or the most important things they’ve learned in their lives… and I didn’t… well, it makes me want all the more to do it now!

If you know someone that seems to have it all - not just money and financial success, but a real peace within themselves and a happiness that is present every single day…

wouldn’t it be cool to ask them…
“WHY are you on top of the Game of Life?“

Best of Life!