Conventional wisdoms are sneaky things. Moderately useful sometimes, they often have a way of eroding confidence in one’s better instincts, even undermining the valid insights of independent thinkers.

Not long ago, while reading through a book of collected interviews with my favorite contemporary filmmaker, the late Anthony Minghella, I felt a fluttery thrill upon finding the following quote:

I think any sane person resists the idea that there is a formal and ineffable structure to films, which is what the Americans have diagnosed as the ‘three-act’ structure. They’ll talk about the problems in the second act, problems in the third act. It seems to me to be absurd that such a liquid form should be calcified into three acts.

The “Three-Act Structure” is a conventional wisdom of American film-writing. It’s referred to, sagely, as “The Form.” And while many a fine movie owes much to The Form (Robert Redford’s stellar Quiz Show comes to mind), Minghella is right. We Americans are absolutely obsessed with a screenwriting approach which is essentially, let’s admit, an industry dogma. The Form, let’s further admit, would more aptly be called The Formula.

Minghella’s words struck home because some time ago I completed my own first screenplay, and subsequently engaged with various industry people in deep and thoughtful conversations pertaining to “plot-points” and other facets of the all-holy Three-Act dogma of The Form.

These industry people had read my screenplay and liked it, but some couldn’t get around certain nagging “issues” in the script’s “structure.”

I was all ears, because I found The Form to be a new and refreshing challenge. I’d read some screenwriting guides about The Form, had analyzed some movies flawlessly structured thanks to The Form, and I was striving to get a handle on The Form myself, all in the aim of improving my script, which was, well, a quiet, quirky little comedy/drama about a father and a son, about growing up, about learning not to be one’s own worst enemy.

My script, in other words, was essentially plotless. It was about relationships. It consisted of a series of small, (hopefully) moving human moments. Characters talked to one another, had memories, felt sad, embarrassed, regretful, unsure, talked to each other some more, and finally came to feel a little bit hopeful, but no less clueless.

My movie ended there. That, in a nutshell, was it. It wasn’t a happy ending, but not a sad one either.

That’s all my movie wanted to be, and in truth that’s all it needed to be in order to live up to itself and my vision for it. Still I listened intently to my professional advisers, wholly confident in their counsel, poised all the while to “fix” the script I’d already revised about a hundred times.

For years, I had heard the gospel of The Form and believed it would be my artistic salvation.

My movie needed a plot. It needed big, unmistakable turning points. It needed a First, Second, and Third Act. That, after all, was The Form. I couldn’t expect to produce a worthy screenplay without abiding by The Form. I wanted to sell this thing, didn’t I? Absent The Form, how could I expect anybody in MovieLand to know what to do with my odd little script?

I must have been nuts—not because I should have known I’d already authored a perfect screenplay (no, though it was pretty good), but because I’d somehow failed to recognize that among my small handful of favorite films, the films that never ceased to inspire me (by Agnes Jaoui, Ingmar Bergmann, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Scorsese, and others), nary a one boasted the tried-and-true Three-Act Structure, The Form.

At the top of this private pantheon was Minghella’s The English Patient. I had watched that film forty-three times.

Here’s Minghella in that book of interviews again:

The screenplay of The English Patient was always odd. I remember I sent it to a successful American actress whom I liked a lot, not to be in the film but just as a friend. She wrote back to me saying, ‘I beg you not to make this film –- it has no third act.’ I wrote back and said I didn’t think there was a second act either. It was so far away from the hegemony of the American screenplay –- Act One, Act Two, Act Three –- there’s no way to fit it into that box at all. One of those guys who goes around ‘teaching’ people how to write a screenplay actually uses The English Patient as an illustration of how not to … He’s right, of course.

I looked up from the page, newly awakened. Lordy, it’s shocking to realize the insidiousness of conventional wisdoms. If you’re looking to lead a free and fulfilling creative life, beware “wisdom.”

The funny thing is, I’ve never been a big fan of dogmas—religious, political, or aesthetic. I hear the resounding ring of truth in these words of John Dewey, from his 1933 book Art As Experience:

Impulsion beyond all limits that are externally set inheres in the very nature of the artist’s work. It belongs to the very character of the creative mind to reach out and seize any material that stirs it so that the value of that material may be pressed out and become the matter of a new experience.

Henry James, another favorite voice, also puts it beautifully:

It appears to me that no one can ever have made a seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase—a kind of revelation—of freedom. One perceives in that case—by the light of a heavenly ray—that the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision.

You could say I’ve done my best to go my own way, do my own thing, write my own rules. Yet despite my finely tuned B.S.-detector where artistic ideology is concerned, in this case something had scrambled my instruments, burrowed into me, undermined my self-reliance.

Something had led me to look away from the organic aesthetic demands of my screenplay in search of a formula. (Is this why dealings with Hollywood are so often equated to Faustian bargains?)

Whew. Close call.

Granted, my script may remain nothing more than words on a page. I’ll likely never sell the thing. But that’s OK.

The magnificently talented (and prolific) writer William T. Vollman put it nicely in a fascinating New York Times feature last week when asked whether he was concerned that his new, uncompromisingly long book might cost him readers:

I don’t care. It seems like the important thing in life is pleasing ourselves. The world doesn’t owe me a living, and if the world doesn’t want to buy my books, that’s my problem.

Plot-points or no, three acts or no, I like my script just the way it is.

(This post is from the Soul Shelter archives)

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“A Message of Improvement From Self-Help’s Founding Father”

I was Tokyo for a couple of weeks, working on my doctoral research and seeing family and friends between interviews and writing sessions. One night I enjoyed dinner with Brad, a longtime buddy who’s been in mobile communications for some ten years. He’d lost his job a few months back, and wanted to talk about life, work — and going solo.

“I went to see a recruiter about a month before I got canned,” he said over a Club sandwich at a basement café in Omotesando. “I told him, ‘I know I’m going to get the ax, and want to see if I can find something preemptively.’

“The guy looked at me like I’d sprouted green dreadlocks. ‘Don’t quit your job now,’ he urged. ‘Nokia just let 60 people go, and a bunch of them are showing up here. Stay put as long as you can!’

“Two months later, that recruiter’s company closed down, and he himself was out of a job.”

As I listened, I tucked into my maguro tuna garlic steak. Outrageously good. Brad continued.

“That mindset — that your well-being and success depends on an organization — just blows me away. Now that I’m older, I see how I’m the one creating value, I’m the one who makes things happen.”

He went on to detail the events leading up to losing his job, his anxiety over continuing to provide effectively for his wife and children, his unforeseen excitement about being forced to pursue career and personal goals closer to his true self.

Reflective, Brad returned to his sandwich. I told him I got his drift about the “dependency mindset,” and that it often results in too much work time spent resolving conflicts unrelated to operations. Turf battles, personality clashes, political struggles. Those things are a huge part of salaried employment.

“In fact,” I said,  “most office jobs can be done in three or four concentrated, uninterrupted hours of real work or day. It’s the attendant nonsense — plus meetings, administrivia, and commuting — that claims the rest of employee time. The key challenge of blowing all that off and going solo is securing the steady income of a conventional job: the relentless salary that rolls in month after month.”

Brad began describing possibilities for his new, non-employee career. He’d already secured a temporary gig with a mobile content consultancy, enough to carry him through the following month, and now he was looking at combining three part-time opportunities that might equal or even surpass his previous income — all the while letting him focus on areas of greater personal interest, minus the commute, conflicts, and constricted hours of conventional employment.

“I’m starting to see how losing my job has pushed me to a new level of awareness about the nature of work,” he said, bright-eyed. “When you put yourself out there, things start to happen. If you make ten tries, one or two might work out. Make 20, four or five might work out. It’s not like you make ten tries and nothing happens.”

I nodded, recalling my favorite takeaway from Rich Dad Poor Dad: The amount of revenue coming in is directly proportional to the number of communications going out.

Brad paused. “I don’t know why any of this should come as a surprise, but somehow my thinking has changed.”

Time for an epigram, I decided, and quoted from a new book by Kanye West: “Life is five percent what happens and 95% how you react.”

Brad kept talking, and I kept listening. As we parted, he thanked me profusely for the “energizing discussion.” I nodded with a smile. He had energized himself. He’d lost a job, and now was reclaiming his life.

(This post is from the Soul Shelter archives)

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A few years ago my back gave out when both my kids jumped on me at the same time. After a doctor visit and x-rays confirming the absence of serious injury, I received the standard issue medical advice for 90% of all back problems: “Take it easy and it will clear up in time.”

I did, and it did, but the experience was a stunning reminder that nothing can replace the good fortune of health. I stared in alarm at a photograph of myself: a sagging-posture “office physique” 40 pounds heftier than what I weighed in college. Without change, my physical condition would slowly deteriorate.

Well, it took time and hard work, but I’m finally back in shape. Though I’d never formally considered how I went about it, after reading Get Fit Slowly, I sat down and tried to distill the key points of my “program.” Here’s what I came up with: Four Simple Steps to Getting Fit (they’re not easy, but they’re simple).

Step 1. Stop eating while you’re still hungry

Most of us are accustomed to eating until we feel full. But if you feel full, you’ve already overeaten. Stop. Think. Chew your food slowly and thoroughly, and pay attention to how you feel as you proceed through your meal. If you attend closely to your eating, you’ll feel yourself gradually filling up. Stop eating when you feel about 80% full (don’t worry, you won’t starve. In Japan, this is known as hara-hachibun: the “80% full” policy—it helps you distinguish between eating to refuel and eating because it tastes good). If you decide to drink alcohol with your meal, eat less food to compensate for the additional volume (remember, stop when you feel 80% full). From the standpoint of losing weight, this 80% rule is the most important of the Four Steps.

Step 2. Weigh yourself twice a day

Weigh yourself first thing in the morning and again before you go to bed at night. Do this not to obsess about results, but to see what happens when you drink a beer late at night, or how constipation or poor elimination affects your weight. Weigh consistently, and you’ll quickly see the results of Step 1 reflected in the numbers. An enormously successful Japanese diet plan consists of doing nothing but recording one’s weight—writing it down in a special journal—several times per day. Paying attention to and becoming conscious of your weight is an extremely effective strategy. Do it religiously and the rest of your behavior will fall in line.

Step 3. Drink plenty of water and take psyllium fiber daily

Drink a couple of big glasses of water as soon as you get up, and after breakfast, drink another big glass of water or juice with a hefty teaspoonful of psyllium fiber (Metamucil is an inexpensive but poor substitute—it has tons of added sucrose). The fiber will fill you up, and—to put it rather undelicately—make you crap like a horse. And no, unlike laxatives, which loosen your bowels through chemical action, fiber strengthens your guts by making them work harder. My doctor recommended this as a way to reduce my high blood pressure, and I’ve been a fiber fan since.

Step 4. Start an exercise routine

This is the least important Step from the standpoint of losing weight, but the most important from the standpoint of becoming fit. Sticking to an exercise routine—just like the routine of weighing yourself, the fiber regimen, and the habit of conscious eating—strengthens your overall program. I got professional help from a corrective exercise specialist, who immediately perceived my biggest problem—poor posture—and designed a trunk-strengthening program for me.

Well, that’s everything I know about losing weight and getting fit, and therefore my first and last post on the subject. It’s all well-known stuff, but I learned the Four Simple Steps by doing them, and they worked for me. Maybe they’ll work for you, too.

(This post is from the Soul Shelter archives. A slightly modified version first appeared at Get Fit Slowly.)

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“A Moment of Fulfillment“

In a powerful lecture entitled “Mythic Literature,” recorded in the 1960s, the noted scholar of world mythologies, Joseph Campbell, said:

Every now and then, you will face the great mysteries that mankind has been facing. The mystery of death, when it eats into you. The mystery of the magnitude of the cosmos and your own place in it and all. And the imagery that will be coming up then will be imagery that will be matched in the mythologies of the world…

Abraham Maslow [a psychologist and a spokesman of the "positive psychology" movement]…published a little paper in which he discussed the values for which people lived. He named five:

Survival
Security
Prestige
Personal Relationships
Self-Development

And I remember when I read that, I thought those are exactly the values that go completely to pieces when one is seized with a mythological zeal. If there is something you are really living for, you will forget security, you will forget even survival, you will forget your prestige, you will even forget your friends, and as for self-development, that’s gone. When Jesus said ‘He who loses his life shall find it’ he was talking about this.

And it’s that jump, from the thing that animals live for, to the thing that only a human being can live for, that is the jump [into the Heroic Journey]…

Over the past ten years or so, I’ve done a good share of reading into world religions and mythologies. These age-old story patterns and images have taught me much about the art of writing (my first novel used a mythic structure of sorts). Naturally, as any inquiry into mythology will do, mine led me to Campbell, and his powerful ideas have had a lasting impact on my life.

For the last twenty-odd years, Campbell has been criticized as a guru of the New Age movement. He was nothing of the kind, however misappropriated some of his ideas have been. Quite to the contrary, he was an eminent scholar — and certainly one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth-century.

Campbell came to public attention in the mid-1980s, thanks to the wildly popular six-part PBS series, The Power of Myth, in which he was interviewed by Bill Moyers. But Campbell’s career as a mythographer had its truer, more auspicious beginning a full three decades earlier, with the 1949 publication of the groundbreaking book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

In its pages, he presented a comparative study of mythological stories and belief systems from all over the world, and demonstrated the universality of many symbols (or archetypes) mankind has used for ages. He called this the “grammar of symbols,” and argued that every world culture produces a “mono-myth” in which the journey of a hero figure is marked by certain clearly distinguishable stages, such as: The Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Crossing of the First Threshold, The Belly of the Whale, The Road of Trials, Atonement with the Father, Refusal of the Return, Crossing of the Return Threshold.

The Heroic Journey, found in so many different myths, reveals a psychological reality common to all human beings, and Campbell showed how modern psychology can shed light on the symbology of these diverse myths.

Each of us is born, confronts life’s mysteries, enjoys its graces, suffers its blows, and must eventually face death. That experience, being universal, is a “mythic” experience. We all share it, and we all look to stories, images, and belief systems to better understand it. That’s what Campbell’s work explored. In his preface to that 1949 book, he wrote:

There are of course differences between the numerous mythologies and religions of mankind, but this is a book about the similarities; and once these are understood the differences will be found to be much less great than is popularly (and politically) supposed. My hope is that a comparative elucidation may contribute to … unification, not in the name of some ecclesiastical or political empire, but in the sense of human mutual understanding. As we are told in the Vedas: ‘Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names.’

And being a passionate humanist, and believing that his scholarly studies could be deeply relevant to the wider culture beyond academia, Campbell did not shy away from speaking in very personal terms about the “Heroic Journey” as it applied to everyone, even in modern life.

“The final secret of myth,” he said, “[is] to teach you how to penetrate the labyrinth of life in such a way that its spiritual values come through.”

In Campbell’s view, recognizing the mythic forces at work in one’s life could deeply enrich that life. He was at his most outspoken about this in The Power of Myth. And it was there, while talking about the Heroic Journey, that he used a phrase that has almost single-handedly popularized him among New Agers: “Follow Your Bliss.”

Frankly, I cringe whenever this phrase gets invoked in a twinkling, wind-chimey, neo-mystical manner, because all too often it’s being appropriated to justify self-indulgence or shallowness (it’s used in just this way by a character in the recent film, The Namesake, adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel).

I believe Campbell’s maxim is most meaningful — and useful — when placed firmly in the context of the man’s serious thought, and his lifelong work. “Following your bliss,” as Campbell means it, requires more than doing what feels good at any given moment. Being a matter of “mythological zeal,” it might require a confrontation with a dragon or two, a painful sacrifice or an embarkation into loneliness — in short: a parting with one or a few of Maslow’s Five Values. Here’s where bliss comes up in the conversation with Bill Moyers:

-Moyers: How do I slay that dragon in me? What’s the journey each of us has to make, what you call “the soul’s high adventure”?

-Campbell: My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.

-Moyers: Is it my work or my life?

-Campbell: If the work that you’re doing is the work that you choose to do because you are enjoying it, that’s it. But if you think, ‘Oh no! I couldn’t do that!’ that’s the dragon locking you in. ‘No, no, I couldn’t be a writer,’ or ‘No, no, I couldn’t possibly do what So-and-so is doing.’

-Moyers: In this sense, unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we’re not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.

-Campbell: But in doing that, you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and to become alive yourself. … There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.

The idea that following one’s bliss, finding one’s own heroic path, requires sacrifice and the abandonment of “security” or “prestige” or “self-development” rings very true with me, and I think it’s unfortunate that this elemental, recurring aspect of Campbell’s thought does not come out clearly enough in this oft-excerpted part of the Moyers dialogue (read closely, though, and you see it embedded in that last comment about not “getting any money”) .

Still, as a writer of stories, I identify strongly with the vision in Campbell’s lifelong work: the recognition of a universal human narrative, a Heroic Journey through life’s frightful and glorious moments alike, a constant adventure that demands we remain on the path which will best allow us each to confront our fears and fulfill our potential. As Campbell reiterated throughout his career, the journey may be hard, the road may be narrow, the destination obscured, but we mustn’t refuse the “call to adventure.”

I hope I’ll be brave enough, always, to make the most worthy sacrifices, to go toward the dragon if that’s what’s most necessary, to seek spiritual adventure over stagnant convention. I want to recognize true and enduring fulfillment.

Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world. — Joseph Campbell

(This post is adapted from the Soul Shelter archives)

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A Message of Improvement From Self-Help’s Founding Father

Working on a doctoral thesis has sent me on a book learnin’ kick, and the other day I stumbled across something that, to my mind, reveals much about how the world works.

It’ s a genuine sociology precept called the Thomas Theorem. Formulated in 1928 by the sociologist William Isaac Thomas, it’s been described by one eminent scholar as “probably the single most consequential sentence ever put in print by an American sociologist.” Sometimes called the Thomas Dictum, it is accepted by many researchers as scientific fact—or at least as a powerful way of comprehending the human condition. Here it is:

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

The Thomas Theorum is no armchair theory. Law enforcement agencies use it to train officers in the handling of the mentally ill, and it’s been used effectively to explain everything from beauty contest outcomes to panic runs on bank deposits.

To me, the Thomas Theorem explains a lot: The healing power of religion, crowd behavior, a leader’ s ability to galvanize, the staying power of superstitions, Henry Ford’ s famous line that “whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you’ re right.”

Closer to my heart, the Thomas Theorem suggests that self-help books advocating the power of belief are basically right.

In fact, Thomas may have gleaned inspiration from one of the Granddaddies of the self-help movement, a man who intuitively understood the Thomas Theorum decades before Thomas himself: James Allen.

A soft-spoken, retired Englishman who lived quietly in the southwest coastal town of Ilfracombe, Allen wrote a short book about positive thinking called As a Man Thinketh. The key theme of Allen’ s ground-breaking book is that one’ s thoughts determine one’ s circumstances. As Allen put it:

A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts … As the plant springs from, and could not be without, the seed, so every act of a man springs from the hidden seeds of thought, and could not have appeared without them.

And more to the point:

Most of us are anxious to improve our circumstances, but are unwilling to improve ourselves.

Oddly, Allen contradicted his own thesis when he decided that As a Man Thinketh was unworthy of publication. Fortunately, his wife disagreed, and the book spawned an industry now worth several hundred billion dollars each year.

You can view the complete text of As a Man Thinketh at sites such as the Project Gutenberg.

Allen died in 1912, long before witnessing the seminal effect his work had on today’ s gargantuan “wellness” industry. Allen wrote 19 books, many with undeniably broad appeal (it seems another becomes a bestseller in Japanese translation every year).

In my view, James Allen was to the self-help industry what Chuck Berry was to rock n’ roll music. Berry was influenced by many musicians, but he was the first to combine numerous traditional elements into an original, enduring new form.

Similarly, writers preceding Allen by decades—even centuries—covered comparable topics, but Allen crystallized the “power of positive thinking” concept in humble, poetic language utterly devoid of hucksterism (I haven’t read most of The Secret’s source texts, many of which preceded Allen and seem more focused on money-making—if you’ve read any, please share your thoughts).

Later self-help gurus—Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer and many others—owe a huge debt to Allen. And the industry is poised for even more explosive growth, analysts say. Economist Paul Pilzer, in a book entitled The Next Trillion, predicted the U.S. wellness industry will be worth a trillion dollars by 2010. So there’ s plenty of opportunity to do good by helping others be well.

But most important, the Thomas Theorum suggests that our own fortune and fulfillment are, indeed, largely the result of our beliefs. In fact, I feel a new Clark Rule coming on … wait a minute … yes, here it is! And with an easy-to-remember acronym: TTTTT™ (Tim’s Take on The Thomas Theorum):

Make it real in your mind first, then real in fact.

Or as Mark and I put it in The Prosperous Peasant, our book of success parables: Conceivable Means Achievable.

(This post comes to you from the Soul Shelter archives)

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In the Absence of ‘Yes’

Once upon a time, a young Apple Computer attorney named Randy Komisar negotiated a deal that might have turned the personal computing industry upside down—and changed the world.

Komisar struck an agreement with Apollo Computer to license the Macintosh operating system. The move was the very embodiment of “Computing for the Rest of Us,” Apple’s Big Idea, the grand and good mission that inspired Apple employees and fans alike. Later Komisar would write:

Along with many others inside Apple, I was a strong proponent of licensing the Macintosh operating system in order to preempt Microsoft in setting the standard for user-friendly computing. After all, it was Apple’s birthright, its overriding mission. It would mean cannibalizing our own model, sacrificing margins for volume and market share, but it seemed better than circling the wagons and defending an ever-declining piece of the PC business.

But at the last minute, John Sculley, the brilliant Pepsi-Cola executive who at Steve Job’s behest famously gave up “selling sugar water” to lead Apple, scuttled the deal. Sculley undercut the company’s greater mission in order to preserve Apple’s high-margin end-to-end hardware/software business model.

Apple’s share of the worldwide personal computer market subsequently plummeted, and today it stands at just under three percent (3%). Would Sculley have made the same decision if he could have known that, years later, the reality of Apple’s vision would be Computing for Three Percent of Us?

No one knows, of course, what might have happened had Apple stuck to its ideals and licensed its operating system. But in The Monk and the Riddle, the best-seller detailing the episode, Komisar illuminates the point by distinguishing between passion and drive. Passion and drive are not the same at all, he writes:

Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do.

Passion pulled Apple Computer toward its mission of making computing available to everyman, but drive forced management to choose predictable profitability and lower risk. Here’s my takeaway: Drive arises from will, passion from the soul.

The distinction is useful. Komisar goes on to make the key point of his book, a rejection of what he calls the “Deferred Life Plan.”

The Deferred Life Plan consists of two steps:

1. Do what you have to do, then

2. Do what you want to do

To achieve the “promise of full coverage under the plan,” writes Komisar, you should divide life into two distinct parts. In Part One you do whatever it takes to become financially secure. In Part Two, you retire and do exactly what you want (it may hardly be necessary to note that the Deferred Life Plan is fueled by drive rather than passion).

The problem, of course, is that those who achieve financial security through drive rather than passion often discover the hollowness of victory. To use a self-help cliché, the success ladder they struggled so hard to climb was leaning against the wrong building.

I experienced this for myself when I sold my company in 2000. I’d started my firm in 1994 based on a passion: exploiting the Internet’s ability to convert high variable communications costs into low fixed costs on behalf of Japanese consumers, who’d long suffered from expensive metered-rate telecommunications services. The Internet also promised a curiously powerful mix of intimacy and anonymity, something perfectly matching the Japanese communication style.

That passion sustained me through the tough early years. Later, as our services were sought by higher and higher profile customers, the exigencies of business—and my drive to succeed—steadily overtook passion. Soon my business became one of helping online retailers sell more, more, more into Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. By the time we sold out, I, too, had “sold out” my Big Idea—my original vision—while fatigue and world-weary “success” blurred my recognition of that very truth. Maybe that’s why Komisar’s story struck me with such force.

Received Western wisdom continues to enthusiastically endorse the Deferred Life Plan, as it has for more than 200 years (see Mark’s post about Charles Lamb’s surprisingly mixed feelings upon his “deliverance” from a life of office drudgery in the early nineteenth century).

Opting out of the Deferred Life Plan is no easy task. It’s a struggle demanding discipline, not just of the will, but of the soul.

(This post appears from the Soul Shelter archives)

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Soul School

This month, adding another candle to the cake, I find no room for doubt: I am now conclusively lumbering upward through my thirties.

Older readers may chuckle knowingly. Yes, according to life-expectancy metrics in the developed world, I’m still snugly cooped with the spring chickens.

But the thing is, my body, which I don’t abuse, has started whispering alerts to my mind and soul. Already, the unforgiving realities of my few decades are with me. Irksome physical complaints, small but various, hint that somewhere in the last few years I crossed an unavoidable threshold, unnoticed though it was at the time.

On this side of the threshold I’m starting to learn a few things about the realities of age. Three examples:

1: I now know what “throwing one’s back out” really means. Most of my life I’d regarded the phrase as the arcane intellectual property of middle-aged, potbellied, aspirin-popping, Alka-Seltzer-guzzling men. But alas, creeping across the years is much like crossing borders. My body — or more particularly, my vertebra — must pay its duty-tax.

2: I’ve started to notice that many people in the world are younger than I am. Especially alarming are encounters with twenty-something doctors, policy analysts who resemble high-schoolers, and radio show hosts, film directors, or composers born in the mid-eighties. Seeing that they’re doing what they do at such an early stage slaps me awake to all I might have — but haven’t — done.

3: It actually matters what I eat. …

But there’s something else — something I’ll call Shrinking Selves Syndrome: the feeling of facing a seemingly inevitable narrowing of possibilities.

One of my favorite moments in contemporary cinema comes near the close of the movie The Weatherman, starring Nicolas Cage and Michael Caine. A powerful film by turns visceral and hilarious, The Weatherman unconventionally explores conventional coming-of-age themes, seating them in the context of Chicago TV-weatherman Dave Spritz’s dysfunctional, divorcee existence.

Spritz’s wife finds him repulsive, his teenage son might have a drug problem, his adolescent daughter lacks self-confidence and direction, and his father has lymphoma. To top it off, Dave’s high-paid TV job seems more like a fluke than the outcome of any actual talent he might possess. Being a weatherman supplies him with no sense of accomplishment, fulfillment, or self-worth (what he really wants to do is write novels like his Pulitzer-Prize winning dad).

Dave’s life seems to demand his overdue answer to the question: What do you want to do when you grow up?

Late in the movie, we see Dave Spritz walking down a crowded snowy street. He narrates reflectively:

I remember once, imagining what my life would be like, what I’d be like. I pictured having all these qualities — strong, positive qualities that people could pick up on from across a room. But as time passed, few ever became any qualities I actually had. And all the possibilities I faced, and the sorts of people I could be, all of them got reduced, every year, to fewer and fewer, until finally they got reduced to one: To who I am. And that’s who I am: The weatherman.

The sequence ends with a wide shot of Dave. He’s standing alone at an intersection of streets entirely empty of other people or cars.

It’s a bit of cinematic art that haunts me unshakably. For, young as I remain today and for some years to come, I feel an urgency to embrace the innumerable possibilities afforded me, to see clearly the myriad selves I might become, to recognize life as it happens.

Years ago, on the day I reached my quarter-century mark, I wrote a note to myself. Today I write it again:

Presence is important.

(This post has seeped up from the rich artesian waters of the Soul Shelter archives)

You might also enjoy:

“Art Awakens Us”

“The Rainbow Vanishes”

“Soul School”

“Let Us Begin“

(This is a special guest post by writer and Soul Shelter friend John Bardos)

I recently turned 40 years old, just sold my small business in Japan, and am about to embark on a nomadic lifestyle with my wife. We have no particular destination or plans. We are just going to go.

I had a successful business that offered a decent income on 30 hour workweeks with three months of vacation per year. What would make a sane person give up that security and stability without another income source? I don’t claim to be sane, but the ultimate answer is that life is short.

When my wife and I first started our business everything was exciting. Money was tight. We were worried about how we would get customers. We experimented with many different prices, ways of advertising and constantly adjusted everything. It was nerve-racking and a lot of work but it was the happiest time of our business and life.

When customers came more easily and our bank balance started growing, our time become more valuable. We stopped caring about delivering increasing amounts of value for our customers and instead started to focus on minimizing our work and maximizing profits. Relationships and connections with real people slowly turned into business transactions. We used to celebrate new customers. Then we started thinking of them as necessary nuisances.

I changed from being an entrepreneur to a manager. I love being an entrepreneur, but I hate being a manager. We had a good decade with our company, but now we’re managers, and it’s time to move on. More money and more things can provide fleeting happiness, but the challenge of overcoming obstacles and creating something from nothing made memories that I cherish more than anything.

Japan is a fantastic country and we definitely plan on returning regularly, so it is not the country we are leaving. The quality of food, richness of the culture, and overall safety are unrivaled anywhere else in the world. I don’t view our journey so much as leaving Japan, as simply striving for change.

Coming to the Japan for the first time almost 13 years ago was one of the scariest and most exciting things I’ve done in my life. Life is meant to be lived at the edge of precipices. That’s what keeps everything challenging and interesting. There is no better way to get that adrenaline rush than to move to a new country and fight for a way to earn a living. I need that tension in my life again.

Everyone asks what we are going to DO. My answer is, “we are going to travel.” Of course, the “DO” they are referring to is the “what do you DO?” variety. They want to know what I am going to DO for work. We are still all defined by our jobs. In that sense, I am going to DO cool projects that interest me. I love to work, so I’m not after a life of leisure. I’ m also not rich, so I will likely have to earn some money, sometime in the future but I have a modest amount of savings and investments that can sustain us for several years at least. I’m going to work on projects that I want to DO.

I guarantee, though, that I’ll thoroughly enjoy everything I choose to focus on. This entrepreneur has turned vagabond, and it’s time to journey on, destination unknown.

Entrepreneur-turned-vagabond John Bardos blogs at Jet Set Citizen.

You may also enjoy:

The Value of Travel: One Household’s Mild Manifesto

In Defense of “Aimless” Learning

You’ve Gotta Jump

What Purpose Work?

Entrepreneurship Hints From Overseas

Hazards of Career, Rewards of Vocation

What the Seeker Ultimately Discovers

One of my favorite tunes from decades past is Whip It, by the technopop unit Devo. I used to play Whip It in a cover band (along with Uncontrollable Urge), and it always made partygoers jump to their feet.

Back then, I could hardly have known that I would later run into Devo founder Mark Mothersbaugh at a Tokyo art show, or that years after that, I’d be referring to Devo in a blog.

But here I am, facing a daunting task (designing and executing doctoral research) and I find my mind casting back to days of playing music, and drawing on the wisdom so neatly described by Devo’s lyrics.

Some listeners thought Whip It is about kinky sex; it’s actually about problem-solving:

When a problem comes along, you must whip it.
Before the cream sits out too long, you must whip it.
When something’s going wrong, you must whip it.

Now whip it! Into shape. Shape it up! Get straight!
Go forward! Move ahead! Try to detect it. It’s not too late! To whip it! Whip it good!

When a good time turns around, you must whip it.
You will never live it down, unless you whip it.
No one gets their way, until they whip it.

Maybe because I played Whip It so many times, and maybe because I happened to meet Mothersbaugh in person, something about the song struck me deeply and stayed with me over the years. While pondering my approach to daunting tasks recently undertaken, I came up with seven steps that have worked for me. Take a look, and see if they might work for you, too.

1. Abandon Either the Task or the Result
Read The Underachiever’s Manifesto and know that it’s okay to give up before you start. You don’t have to set the world on fire. Undertake the task only if it’s truly meaningful, and you have the time, energy, skills, and psychic bandwidth to handle it. Sure you want to proceed? Then abandon attachment to the result and immerse yourself in the process. The value of completing Daunting Tasks lies in the journey theretoward, not in the end state of accomplishment. Still on board? Then on to Step 2!

2. Start Now
Start right away, “before the cream sits out too long.” Immediate action, even baby steps, generates momentum and confidence.

3. Enlarge Yourself
In your mind, make yourself bigger than the task. You are huge and powerful: you look down on this puny job like a towering giant who twiddles trees like matchsticks. Grab your Daunting Task by the, er, family jewels, and squeeze until he begs permission to shrink to a manageable size. Grant such permission. Now kiss and make up. You’re friends, but you had to show who’s in charge.

4. Brainstorm a Quick & Dirty Plan
Quickly write down a strategy for dealing with the Task. Don’t think hard about it, just jot down whatever thoughts come into your head. Write badly and don’t edit. Later, look over your notes and rearrange the order of your thoughts. Try to see how the job might be broken down into manageable sub-tasks.

5. Draft or Rehearse
Based on your notes, write a draft plan for accomplishing the Daunting Task. Alternatively, if it’s a job interview, presentation or the like, “rehearse” the task: shut yourself into a room (preferably with a video camera) and let ‘er rip. Who cares if you sound goofy or your draft plan reads terribly? By blurting out the words you need—whether on paper or by voice—you’ll start to understand what you want to say, and perceive the gaps in your plan. And by blundering through one “dress rehearsal”—sloppy as it may be—you’ll feel like you’re 50% of the way home. See how your confidence has jumped?

6. Be Confident and Be Friends
You can do it! View your task as a challenge, a job, a project—anything but a problem. Thinking of something as a problem from the get-go immediately positions you to fight the Daunting Task rather than collaborate in achieving the promise of its purpose. Remember, you bought into tackling the job during Step 1. So be friends with it. Let the challenge of your work create curiosity rather than despair. If you feel stuck, read a book on the subject, or seek out and approach an expert for advice.

7. Do First What You Want to Do Least
Clark’s Rule About Priorities (CRAP™), the first of Clark’s Rules, says Do First What You Want to Do Least. It’s based on the difference between urgency and importance. Even though you’re friends with your Daunting Task, somehow you may find it easier to start each day by responding to e-mail, browsing the Web, and accomplishing little, “urgent” errands. Resist the temptation. Stick with the important task: the Daunting Task.

Finally, celebrate the process as much as the end result by treating yourself as you pass through major milestones. You’ve earned it!

The foregoing is hereby formalized as Clark’s Axiom Regarding Daunting Tasks (CARD TASKS): Abandon either the task or attachment to the result. Earlier this week, Mark put it beautifully as “Think Progress, Not Completion.”

As always, read the disclaimer, and be advised that Clark’s Rules may apply only to Clark, who can barely follow them himself. Here are a few others you can check out:

“Clark’s Law of Work” (Attractiveness is inversely proportional to compensation)

“Clark’s Communication Potency Theorum” (The power of communications improve exponentially with proximity, either physical or psychological)

“Clark’s Option on Opportunities Theory (COOT^TM)”

(This post has bubbled up from the deep blue Soul Shelter archives)

I work entirely from home, and unless I make a concerted effort I can go weeks without seeing other human beings face-to-face, save my wife (and soon my child). But because this weird lifestyle helps me remain prolific, today I’ll share a few habits that keep me keeping on.

I believe each of the following points may be applicable to the lifestyle and/or profession of anybody seeking to increase and maintain productivity, whether in the workplace or in some as-yet uncultivated personal or creative aspect of life. So even if you don’t stay at home alone everyday dreaming up characters and writing novels and short stories, take a look.

1. Wake Up Early (Engage the Process)

I get up every weekday at 6:45am. I make my wife’s lunch and see her off to work, then settle into my daily rhythm at the desk, amidst my books and papers. Now, most people have to rise and shine and be at the workplace by 7:30, 8:00, 9:00 a.m., so this may not seem like news. But I include it because for me, waking up early is about more than the literal act of rising from bed in order to arrive at my desk “on time.” It’s about consciously putting my day before me, giving myself the time to envision its many possibilities, then easing into all that possibility with a sense of purpose and an awareness of each day as an incremental accomplishment on the way to a larger goal. The process is more important than the result; without the former there can be no latter.

2. Get Dressed & Put On Your Shoes (Establish a Ritual Act)

I never sit down at the desk without first changing out of my pajamas and slippers. For me, this outer preparation facilitates an inner one. I guess you could call it a ritual act. It helps me feel more focused or centered. Somehow it also validates or elevates my sense of the work I’m going to do. I arrive at the desk feeling put-together, more equal to the challenge, the seriousness, of what’s before me. “Look the part,” they say in the business world. Translated: If you seek a high-powered executive job, you’d better arrive at the interview dressed like a high-powered executive. That’s one element of my meaning here, sure. But more importantly, I’m talking about establishing some active personal ritual, however simple, by which you prepare yourself, body and mind, for immersion into your work.

3. Use an “Isolation Booth” (Nurture Concentration)

There is no greater danger to productivity than distraction. I suspect this is true in many professions. And silence (sometimes soft music) is to the writer what a steady hand is to the surgeon. Concentration and productivity are symbiotic. I believe that the buzzword “multitasking” is merely a benign-sounding synonym for distraction. I’m a big proponent of mono-tasking, and for that very purpose I’ve set up a detached writing studio in my backyard. This studio is unprofaned by the telephone or Internet. It’s my sacrosanct creative space. All one really needs is a designated area, preferably shut off from everything about, where one may focus exclusively on a particular task.

4. Write Longhand (Go Analog)

The advantages of an analog working method are nearly countless. I usually write my first drafts on paper (I filled nine notebooks while working on my last novel). Word processing programs are invaluable later in the writing process, but early on, the backspace key imperils productivity. I produce far more by opening a notebook than by switching on my laptop. Surrendering to the imperfection of the first draft, I escape writerly paralysis. On paper, there’s no “highlight and delete” function, hence no compulsive scrapping of text. Sentences, paragraphs, pages are allowed to accumulate in all their lovely inadequacy. A book takes shape this way, flawed at first, and later sculpted and refined. And I suspect that for all those insufficiencies of the early draft, I am a better writer on paper, because my thoughts move more slowly and each of my imaginings is allowed to deepen in that process. Nuances come to light that I might have missed altogether in the hurried tapping of a keyboard. As a bonus, paper productivity allows me to retain a visible record of all my deletions, in case I should later rethink my first impulses; i.e. ‘This sentence didn’t work in this particular place, but it will go nicely over there!’ Check out Tim’s preachments on the value of avoiding e-mail and turning off your computer.

5. Think Progress, Not Completion (Stay in the Rhythm)

Avoid overwhelming yourself with the magnitude of the task before you. Trust your process. Novelist E.L. Doctorow said:

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

All one can do is orient oneself to the daily act. By putting one’s focus into each moment at hand rather than far out ahead at some hazy eventual destination, one does better and more meaningful work–or, to amend Doctorow’s analogy, one avoids crashing the car.

The Lonely Novelist’s Five Point Productivity Plan is simple, but works for me. Allow me to cap it off with a favorite quote (which you may have seen in a previous post):

Be intent on action, not on the fruits of action. Avoid attraction to the fruits and attachment to inaction.

(This post has resurfaced from the deep Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

The Four-Letter Question for a New Year: WIRU

The World According to Tharp

What’s Wrong With My Desk?

Understanding the World Through the Thomas Theorem

Redefining Rejection

Two Books to Encourage & Console Creatives