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Thinks about it this way: as long as you’re not making a living doing what you love, then you’re still someone else’s bitch.

It doesn’t matter if you call it a “job” or a “client,” if it’s what you do to pay the bills so that you can use what little of your free time you have left doing something else, then it’s not yours. You’re relying on someone else to put food on your table and a roof over your head, and you are not free.

The flip side to this is that if even you have a “boss” and are “employed” by a “company,” as long as you love what you do for them, then you are free. This is the path you’ve chosen and, if given the chance, would choose again, because the time you spend putting food on the table and a roof over your head is time spent doing what you love.

So this is what I want you to do. Take a second to forget the labels that people like to put on things to make themselves feel better or someone else feel worse about what they do for a living, and ask yourself this: Who do you work for?

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Guess what: I’m not a mind reader. I have no idea what you’re thinking, and if you don’t tell me, I won’t know what you want.

I’m not talking about relationships, here. I’m talking about life.

Take business: in business, we have contracts, and these contracts outline the commitments of both parties. Okay, fine…

But you can’t have everything drawn out in a contract. There are hundred or thousands of tiny little things that we deal with everyday that don’t merit a contract — and where asking for one would make us seem unreasonable and paranoid.

So if you’re going to be dealing with someone for some reason, be perfectly clear about what you’re expecting from them — and make sure they tell you what they’re expecting out of you. It might be a strange and awkward conversation to have, but pushing your comfort level an laying it all out on the table in advance will save you all kinds bullshit office-type politics down the line.

This is something that happens with couples all the time. One of them expects the other to be sensitive to their needs, preferences, and expectations just because, and then when they get let down, instead of saying something, they bottle it up and get passive aggressive. Then, if their partner calls bullshit on them, they deny that anything is wrong because they think it’s easier to resent their partner for not reading their mind in the first place than it is to simply tell their partner what think and/or want.

Now is that the way you want to go through life? Having everyone of your interactions feel like a dysfunctional relationship?

If not, be perfectly clear with everyone you deal with: “I’ll do this or that, but I expect this or that out of you.” It’s that easy. Plain and simple.

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Maybe you should stop being so passive-aggressive. Maybe you should stop blowing smoke out of your ass.

Maybe you should stop beating around the bush and just tell people what you really think.

Maybe you should have the courage of your convictions. Maybe you start calling bullshit on whatever looks and quacks like bullshit.

Maybe if we were all honest with each other, the world would be a better place. Maybe we’d make fewer bad decisions. Maybe we’d waste less time and money.

And maybe if we all stopped thinking about ourselves, communism wouldn’t work only in theory. Maybe if we weren’t all so selfish, capitalism would work, too.

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I’m not a big guy, but I’m not a small one either. I’m 6’0″ and weigh in somewhere around 175lbs. If I was a boxer, that would make me light heavyweight. As I said: not big, but exactly small.

I am big enough that I’ve managed to avoid trouble most of my life. Alexa Clark thinks it has something to do with how I carry myself, and maybe it does, but even when I lived in East LA, no one ever gave me any trouble.

But recently, I got back into martial arts and I noticed something: I can’t hit nearly as hard as some guys who are a lot smaller than me.

What it came down to was balance.

These guys not only knew how to throw a punch, they knew how to control the weight that they were throwing behind that punch. This meant that they could hit harder and faster, and then regain their composure and be ready to strike again more quickly.

Balance is something that’s important in a lot of things — like in work and life.

If we focus too much on one thing, we lose site of the bigger picture. We confine ourselves to a fishbowl. We can no longer see the forest from the trees.

You see this mistake in big business all the time. The people calling the shots and making the decisions have devoted their entire life to their career. They have lived and eaten and breathed their career for a long time, and they know their industry inside out.

But they’ve lost their balance.

They end up making decisions that are grounded in their “organization’s goals” but are completely out of touch with the outside world — the marketplace and their customers and what their “organization” is actually capable of. And the decisions they make almost (or do) end up killing them.

This is why it’s so important that we actually share in physical community spaces. It reminds us that there are other people out there, that there is a world beyond our niche interests.

Because if we are what we do, and all we do is act as if, then we risk becoming one-trick ponies who can’t see the forest from the trees or establish meaningful relationships with other human beings. We risk a fate worse than that of the pancake people. We risk becoming mindless automatons whose sole purpose is to repeat a series of steps that can bring us no true happiness or fulfillment.

To me, that sounds like a lot of career-track jobs I know of.

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You probably know about 1001 Rules for My Unborn Son. If you don’t, then you should check it out. It’s a book now, and is full of great one liners.

Well, as a father, this kind of thing resonates with me. As a father, I’ve also had to look at myself through different eyes. So I’ve come up with 5 rules of my own.

It’s amazing what you can learn from your own mistakes…

1. Never comment on the beauty of a woman. Stating the obvious makes you seem foolish.

2. Never be the last one to leave a party. It’ll make you look desperate and lonely. Get out while the gettin’ is good.

3. Keep a journal. It will surprise you how much you forget, and how it important it will be to remember it later.

4. Don’t take your work home. And don’t shit where you eat.

5. Observe the sabbath. Even God rested on the seventh day.

My heroes have always been cowboys,
and they still are it seems.
– Willie Nelson

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Whether we realize it or not, most of us have heroes. They might be relatives, famous athletes, or great leaders. But we all have people we admire for their achievements or their resolve or their example.

The thing about having heroes, though, is that we’re not supposed follow in our heroes’ footsteps. We’re supposed to do our own thing, find our own path, and set our own course.

After all, they probably would’ve never made it into our hero books if they’d spent their lives trying to be someone else. Rather, part of what’s made them our heroes is that they did it their own way — they blazed their own trail.

Heroes are for when you’ve headed out on your own and you come to a crossroads and don’t know which way to turn. They’re not there to answer all the questions for you. They’re there to help you with the questions that you’re having trouble answering for yourself.

Heroes are for when you don’t know what to do, you can ask yourself what they would do.

After all, they become our heroes because they help save us, and we don’t need saving everyday. We only need saving when we’re lost.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game
– Ice-T.

Credit: Neil-Parker

It’s easy to hate the rules. And it’s even easier to tell everyone what’s wrong with them. What isn’t easy is getting everybody to listen to you. And that’s because it’s so easy to find fault with something. What’s not easy is coming up with solutions or proving that you know what you’re talking about.

Take professional sports. Sometime rules change. And when they do, it’s a long time in the making. And who are a lot of the people making changes to the rules? They’re former players. They’ve proven that they know what they’re talking about, they’ve made a career of it, and they’ve successfully retired to become coaches and managers and commentators, and now they’re f**king experts.

They know what they’re talking about because they’ve been doing it a long time, they’ve done it a lot better than most, and now they make a living showing other how to do it right. So when they talk, people listen.

This is why change doesn’t come over night. It takes time for people to prove that they can play well enough by today’s rules that we should listen to them about changing the rules tomorrow.

The same thing goes for doing what you want with your life. It’s hard to do what you want because you have to pay the bills. You have to listen to the voices in your head and you have to make money. And a lot of the time, what we want to do isn’t always that lucrative — unless, of course, all you want to do is make money.

But if you pay your dues and get really good at doing something that makes money, then you have more free time to do what you want. You can make art or save the world or just stop giving a shit.

That is, of course, if you don’t get caught up in the cycle of making money just to make money. At some point, you need to let go and stop trying to own stuff and just enjoy the ride because, really, that’s what we all want to do — enjoy the ride.

One ought to hold on to one’s heart;
for if one lets go, one soon loses control of the head too.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Credit: Hugh MacLeod

This is what I want you do to. The next time you’re at the office, I want you to stop listen in on your colleagues. I want you to eavesdrop on a conversation that you’re not part of. It can be a couple people discussing a project or having a meeting, or it can be just one side of a phone call.

I want you to listen in on what their talking about and what’s being. Pay attention to the words and the vocabulary. Listen to the vernacular and all the “action items.”

Then, I want you to think back to your childhood, when you were young and there was nothing but possibility ahead of you. Now, I want you to ask yourself if you ever thought this is where you’d end up. Did you ever imagine that this is what you’d end up doing with your life?

When we’re young, and there’s nothing but possibility, we have ideals. Our hearts are filled with love and hope and dreams. But somehow, somewhere along the way, we lose touch with that. Life happens, we get distracted by coping, and we lose sight of the bigger picture and all the beauty within it. We become vain and start seeing only what’s in it for ourselves.

I’m not into fashion, but I am into advertising (even though I never thought I’d be), and one of my favorite lines comes from one of Kenneth Cole’s ad campaigns: “Today is not a dress rehearsal.”

This is it, ladies and gents. We get only one shot at this. We are what we do, so we better make the most of it because there are no reset buttons or second chances.

The Japanese have a saying: “A man is whatever room he is in.”
– Burt Cooper, Mad Men

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The average American sleeps about 7 hours a night. That leaves them 17 hours in a day.

Now, if ‘re not a workaholic or don’t put in a lot of overtime, you probably spend about 8-1/2 hours at work (half an hour for lunch). And then there’s the commute back and forth; assuming that you don’t fight California-like traffic there and back, that probably about an hour. When you put those together, you have 7-1/2 of your day left.

Then there’s getting ready for work: showering, grooming, and maybe even make-up. Let’s say that also takes about an hour. Now there’s only 6-1/2 hours left in the day.

So on average, 10-1/2 of our 17 waking hours revolve around work. That’s about 62% of your day. And that’s not counting all the time you spend thinking about work when you’re not there.

With at least 1o-1/2 hours, 5 days a week going into work, that’s about 44% of your waking week. And when you consider how the other 56% is divided up among erands, chores, family, and friends, you realize that work governs way more of your life than anything else.

Whether you like it not, work plays, by far, the most important role in who you are because it takes the lion’s share of your mind share — your moods, your thoughts, your personality. So if you hate what you do for a living, how do you manage to not hate yourself?

But more importantly, if you love yourself, how do you settle for doing something that you don’t love?

We are all raised in a different family with slightly different definitions of every word.
– Lulu Lemon Manifesto

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And you know, the funny thing about corporate culture is that starting somewhere new is a lot like moving to a new city or country. There people are different, the clients are different, the values and goals are different, and there are very different ways of doing things.

Submersing yourself into something like that is quite an experience. It’s like learning to walk and talk all over again.

No matter how sure of yourself you are, no matter how much you know, it’s impossible to avoid how much you don’t know.

You might have a lot of potential. You might have a lot to offer clients. And you might have even more to contribute toward the company’s goals.

But you don’t know the landscape, you don’t know who the rising stars are, and you don’t know who are the best people to help you get certain things done.

You’re completely disoriented. You’re lost.

The steepest learning curve is getting your bearings. But at the same time, you have to hit the ground running. So the best that you can hope for is that you can trust your instincts to know what the f**k is up, and that they send you running off in the right direction.