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I Quit My Job In 2021 To Figure My Life Out.

Ok, so it’s time to come clean and admit what I am actually doing. Up until now I have been reluctant to share this because, well, it sounds so ridiculous! I have a mortgage, a wife and one-year-old daughter – and I had a good job… until I quit it. On top of that, I don’t have another job or a concrete plan – just a few ideas and some savings to keep us going for a little while.

I could waste time here explaining why I left my job, but I am not going to. There were good reasons I can assure you, but frankly, no one wants to read about my personal problems and the issues I had with my job. The sad fact is, most of us, for whatever reasons, want to leave our jobs so that we can pursue something more fulfilling. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity, so I took it… what’s the worst that can happen?

I have been toying with an idea for a while – a Blog/ YouTube channel where I document myself learning new skills and exploring new things it order to help me find my passion. However, I never managed to get any momentum. Of course, I gave myself all the usually excuses: not enough time, money, energy etc.

The truth was, that I was never fully committed . I tried to play it safe. To not take any risks. I was trying to juggle a career, whilst simultaneously trying to find a way out of it. I felt in constant conflict and it was massively draining. I felt that nothing was going to change and that I was stuck.

So I took the plunge and handed in my notice. All I can remember is such a feeling of immense relief , like all of a sudden felt a dark cloud of despair had be lifted. I felt empowered and that It was up to me to make my own choices, right or wrong , and to live with the consequences. As of the 17th January 2021 I officially left my job.

My Aim For 2021

So what do I hope to achieve? Here is a rough Idea I what I want out of this experiment .

  1. To find ‘My Passion’ – or at least explore some of my interests.
  2. To get healthy – physically and mentally. (Both of these took a massive hit last year).
  3. Spend more quality time with my wife and daughter.
  4. Give back to community and others.
  5. To learn a bunch of new things. – some fun, some for employment.
  6. Reassess my values.
  7. Read more.
  8. Share my journey

This list isn’t as specific as I’d like. I know it would be better to set specific goals and make a plan. However, being somewhat of a perfectionist planning can very easily turn into procrastination. This idea of “having a good plan” was one of the major things that was held me back in the first place. After a while I realised that I just needed to take a risk and let the things develop on their own – sometimes you got to just jump in.

Exploring Through Blogging.

For now, the rough plan is do a bit of initial exploration and see if anything sticks. This blog is one form of exploration.

It seems like everyone out there has a blog, so I thought I should probably have one too. As I wrote last week, just copying others may not actually get you where you want to go- but I have to start somewhere. Besides, I would love to have some documentation of this year to look back on.

I plan to upload a post every week covering what I have explored and found out that week.

My hope is that in time, this blog will not only get better, but that its content can help other people. At the very least, it will act as some tangible output of my journey.

My fear is that this may end up a cautionary tale for people not to take a big risk during a global pandemic – like quitting your job!

However, I should say that my previous fear was that nothing was ever going to change. That I would be too afraid to take a risk. That I would have to have the perfect plan or wait for the perfect time to make a change. But that is no longer the case. I guess things can change if you have the courage to act.

Whatever happens, things are different now. I have taken the first step. Wish me luck!

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Does Copying The Habits of Successful People Actually Make You Successful?

As I started the research for this article, I imagined I would be compiling a list of the common habits of some of the most successful people. Googling “habits of successful people” yielded the expected articles of the same nature: ’10 Habits of Successful People’, 33 Daily Habits Highly Successful People Have and even, 50 habits of Successful People.

I guess my expectation was to find those practices that most people have in common: Waking up at 4:30 every day, Meditation etc. – Emulate those habits and bam! I am on success street! Right? Well not quite.

The Trap I Fell In To

It’s not uncommon for us to copy the people we admire. People who have achieved great things, like: Winston Churchill, Bill Gates, Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo Da Vinci. We want to know their secret ingredient. Their routines and their habits. After all Aristotle said:

You are what you do repeatedly – So your excellence isn’t an act, its habit’

Therefore, we get excited when we find out that Tim Cook gets up a 4:30am or that many famous people swear by daily mediation. Even that top CEOs read more than the average person. And of course, we should all be exercising and taking cold showers. That’s why videos with “I tried X’s routine for 30 days and It changed my life’ are so popular.

But as I read the lists of habits, I thought about my own successes and failures in trying to implement many of these into my life. I started to ask whether these were actually taking me in the direction I wanted?

The Deeper Reason We Fail

Whilst these practices can be important for living a better life and they can bring you positive results, oftentimes they don’t last. Importantly they don’t feel like they bring us closer to the success we were after in the first place – even when we maintain a good level of consistency. If we fall of the wagon, we tell ourselves that ” I need to work harder” or that “I need to be more consistent”. These are the reasons why I am not getting the success I wanted. ” I should stick at this for a least 2 years, even if it’s painful, I’ve got to have grit”.

The problem is we fail to look at the deeper reasons why things are not working.

The book that helped me identify this is ‘The 7 habits of Highly Successful People’ By Stephen Covey. As Covey may have put it, I had a ‘paradigm shift’ in the way I saw the value in these practices.

When I first looked up the summaries for this book, I thought it was just another 7 habits to add my every growing daily habits to follow. But in the interest of doing thorough research, I decided to actually read the book. What most interested me was Coveys importance on developing habits that improve our ‘Character Ethic’ rather than our ‘Personality Ethic’, in order to live a successful and happy life.

Character Ethic involves cultivating habits that practice Integrity, Humility, Courage, Justice etc – in other words the way we want to see ourselves. Think of the virtues that Greek philosophers or figures like Benjamin Franklin tried to live by.

Whereas, the Personality Ethic focuses on improving your public image, the way you deal with people, your skills and techniques to get out of people what you want – essentially the way we want others to see us.

So many times, I find myself trying to portray some image of success by embodying the habits of successful people. But I never dig deeper and question whether these habits were in line with who I want to be – with my values and what I find important.

It’s not that these habits may necessarily bad, or completely out of line with my values – some are probably ones we should all follow. But the driving force behind them is superficial and weak. I don’t do them because of who I want to be, but because it’s what I expect out of a ‘successful person’. Even if I spend years finding ways to persist – because I recognise the importance of grit and consistency – I might find that I have been working extremely hard to achieve something I never truly wanted.

As Covey puts it:

It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busyness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall.”

Stephen R. Covey – The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Finding Your Values

If you are like me, you may be unsure exactly what your values you are. Or you may in the process of re-evaluating them. If so, here are couple practical tips from the book:

1. Write you own Eulogy.

Describe what each of these people would say about us at our funeral: a close family member, close friend, work colleague and someone who is part of an of some organisation we attend.

We can then reflect on what we hypothetically wanted them to have said and whether those things match up. It gives us some Idea of how we wish to be seen by those closest to us, which often better match how we wish to see ourselves.

2. Write a Mission Statement

After identifying those things that are truly important to us, we can then put together a mission statement that both clarifies to us our values and also acts as a reminder. It can include things such as: plan tomorrows work today, never compromise with honesty, sharing food for friends and family is one the greatest ways to spend time, learn something new each day and give yourself time to recognise it. Don’t get busy to avoid doing the hard work.

Final Thoughts

So next time you start some new habit that apparently ‘every successful is doing’ – ask yourself are these actions and the results I want in line with what I value in life.

Behind the Blog

“In this section I discuss my own thoughts on how I wrote this blog. What I did well and why, what didn’t go so well and where think I can improve. It is mostly for me but let me know if you get value from it“.

What I thought went well?

Well, I have written another post, so that is a win. I discovered a great book, which is changed how I approach self-development. Also, I worked on the post throughout the week, researching and writing some of my first draft by Friday in time to upload it on Sunday.

What didn’t go so well

This post took much more time than I anticipated. Mostly because I got sucked into the research of reading the ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’. Also, writing it took much more time because of I failed to organise my notes in an effective manner. I just highlighted text and then flicked through my highlights on my kindle. It was difficult to draw meaning from these and I had to back and re-read passages to gain some context. Lastly, I worked on it at random times.

What I will try to improve for next week?

  • Plan my research better. If it involves a book figure out a schedule to have it finished in time for a draft by Friday
  • Structure my book notes – Create an Evernote Notebook of book notes and give context to each note I write and how it applies to my post – it will save time later.
  • Schedule more regular slots for working on this blog.

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Why No-Shows Are Killing Your Progress

Last week I talked about the importance of showing up. Just posting something every week to start to build the habit. That’s great and all but I am writing this post at the very last minute. I am showing up, but I haven’t put in the research and planning to produce a decent article.

But all is not lost. The very fact that I am evaluating the quality this post, and identifying the reasons for why It is bad, means that I have the chance to improve it.

It would have been very easy not to upload this week. To say to myself. ” I will do better next week”, and ” I will upload it once I have crafted a really decent article” But these excuses are vague. They don’t identify actions. I mean, what is doing better? presumably it means actually uploading a ‘good’ article. However, more importantly if I failed to upload this week, It would have been the start of a new habit of. ‘Not showing up’ – And that would have been in direct conflict to the habit I started last week.

This is why when starting a habit, no-shows are so much worse than just turning up and doing poorly. This is because it starts a habit in the opposite direction to the behaviour we are trying to cultivate.

  • A poor workout in the gym is better than no workout at all.
  • A bad blog post is better than failing to upload.
  • A poor video is still another video for your audience to watch.

In fact, I was go as far to say as that those days where you show up even is you do poorly are more important than the good days. This is because it breaks the notion that you have to always produce perfection, and that any thing less is not worth it. Nothing can be farther from the truth. If nothing else, a lesson can be learned.

So keep turning up and keep learning from the process and just maybe, something will grow out of it.

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Start New Habits By Simply Showing Up In 2021

This is not the first blog post I wanted to upload in 2021. I wanted to write something of value, something well written and hopefully something great…. and I actually wanted to upload it on the 1st of January!

But this post is me showing up. It may not be the post I wanted but its a post nonetheless.

It’s not like I haven’t put the work in. I’ve done lots of reading and research. I have even written two well researched and unfinished drafts.

But all that researching, all that thinking started to pile on the pressure. I started to think “This first post has to be great. I need it to offer value to the reader. I need it to be well written – with no mistakes! It has to be as good as all those other blogs I read”

Yes… I was striving for perfection. And the overwhelm made the thought of writing any blog post not only daunting, but actually made it something I no longer wanted to do.

As Voltaire wrote:

The Best is the Enemy of the Good”

I’ve made this mistake so many times when I starting new things I’ve lost count. I want to be amazing right from the word go.

Instead I should:

  • Just start and accept that I will make mistakes;
  • Allow myself to be a beginner and accept I won’t be great Initially;
  • Know that practice improves you not only theory.

“But most of all I need to focus on showing up.“

Without showing up nothing can change. but don’t take my word for it. These two books are from Habit experts and they explain that consistent small efforts can compound over time. If you interested in starting a new project or habit this year, check out these two books:

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Mini Habits By Stephen Guise

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A Simple Trick to Start Any New Habit

This cup may look like any ordinary cup, but what if I told you this cup has mind control powers..

Ok, that sounds a bit out there, but it’s true. This cup has the ability to trigger a behaviour in me. Specifically the behaviour to drink water. 

Every evening I would clean our kitchen counter and leave this cup out on the side. In the morning I would wake up, and like most people go down to the kitchen to make my morning cup of coffee. I would see this cup and think “oh yeah, thats my water cup – I will drink a cup of water whilst I’m making my coffee”  

Change Your Environment. Change Your Behaviour

It’s seems an exaggeration to say that this cup changed my life, but it did have a profound effect on me. It made me realise the importance of cues or triggers in our environment. We all like to think we are in control of our behaviours but most of the time we are on autopilot. Our brains like to be in this state because it is energy efficient and produces predictable results.  Our environments are filled with triggers for all sorts of behaviours, some of which we would like to stop.

When trying to start a new habit creating an obvious trigger is an important first step. I advise putting an object, to act as cue, in a prominent place where your will come across during your daily routine. It will help remind you to start/continue a habit.  Secondly, if you use an object/ tool  that is used to perform the habit (e.g. the cup in my case), then it makes the behaviour easier to do, and therefore more likely that you will do it.  This is why I prefer an object, rather than a note reminding me to do the behaviour.

A couple of years later, I would discover that I was following the ‘1st & 3rd Laws of Behaviour Change’ from James Clear’s superb book ‘Atomic Habits’: 1. Make it Obvious and 3. Make it Easy.  By doing both of these things I was triggering the new behaviour whilst simultaneously making it easier to do .  

Examples:

Want to go for a run in the morning?

Place your running gear beside you bed for when you wake up. 

Want to read more?

Place a book on your coffee table or your pillow.

Want to play less video games

Put away your games controller and games and console. *

*Note that this final example is the reverse of the rule. Remove the triggers of bad habits to make it less likely that you will do them.

Key to Success

The key to making this work is having a trigger item that is specific to the task. For example, I ONLY drink water from this cup. If I used it for coffee, fizzy drinks or alcohol it would create multiple cues and I would get confused over which behaviour to perform. I may end up getting drunk first thing in the morning… With the cup having one specific use, I don’t need to think, I just fill it with water and drink from it. I am using my brain’s auto-pilot wiring to my advantage.  This is especially important when using locations as triggers. For example, if you associate your lounge with playing video games then it will be harder to start a habit of reading at that location. You will have to use a lot of will power to overcome the conflicting cues. Instead, pick the book up and go to a new location: the kitchen table, a chair by the window or even go to your favourite coffee shop. Soon these objects, locations and behaviours will become linked and performing your new habit will be automatic.  

I hope you got value from this article. If you want to know more about habits I recommend checking out these: 

Books:

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg 

Atomic Habits by James Clear 

Videos:

The Power of Habit: Charles Duhigg at TEDxTeachersCollege