If you feel like you’re stuck in life’s waiting room, here’s what to do.
We are in a constant state of change. As our cells replenish, our bodies are recreated.
As our life experiences affect us, so we become new beings, with new desires, new needs, new curiosities.
Living through these changes, however, can be painful and frustrating.
Are You Stuck in The Waiting Room?
We often don’t give ourselves enough credit for persevering in the face of difficulties.
Cutie and the Boxer is a fascinating documentary about a married Japanese couple who are both artists and scrape a living by in New York.
The film really shows the hardships that the couple have gone through in order to keep making their art and living the life they wanted. And yet they kept going and were still together. (It’s available to watch on YouTube for a small fee and is well worth a watch.)
It made me realise that nobody achieves anything without some…
The world needs your truth
Being creative is in many ways about having a voice and wanting to express ourselves.
We all have a unique perspective, and we can share that with the world through our creativity.
Don’t underestimate how important it is that you do this.
Turn on the news, and you’ll likely hear about something bad that’s happened. It only seems to have got worse in the last few years, months, weeks.
Let’s face it, a lot of the bad things that happen in the world are down to two things — ignorance and hatred.
Those of us who stand for something more…
Deep down, we all know we have (real) work to do.
You may not even know what your purpose is yet.
But if you’re anything like me, you‘ll have a strong drive to create in your heart. A longing in your gut to do something great.
You will instinctively know that you have the potential to create something meaningful. Something that moves people, and maybe even helps them or changes their perspective in a significant way.
Deep down, we all know we have (real) work to do.
There’s only one issue: how do we take our life’s work into our own hands if we don’t know what it is? For most…
Five easy pieces of the marketing mix
Over the past week I’ve been making some very short videos highlighting gems of wisdom from Seth Godin’s book ‘This Might Work’, a humungous collection of blog posts he wrote between 2006 and 2012.
And I noticed he explains the five basics of marketing by referencing one of Jack Nicholson’s great early films, Five Easy Pieces. And it just so happens, that the film includes a memorable scene of Jack’s character reacting to a poor customer experience at a roadside diner.
So I thought I’d dive into what Seth says, and illustrate it with some choice clips from the scene…
Welcome to part two of The Art of Taking Action series. In part one I wrote about the central ideas in the book The Art of Taking Action: Lessons from Japanese Psychology, by Gregg Kech.
As well as Kech’s own writing, the book also features essays by other contributors which also have some great insights on the topic.
One of these essays is by the late musician and educator Shinichi Suzuki on the topic ‘To Merely Want to Do Something Is Not Enough’. Suzuki really gets to the heart of how we end up with the habit of procrastination and…
“Consider the implications of a life in which you don’t have the power, focus, or single-mindedness to do what you say you will do. Imagine the countless times your wiser self decides on a particular course of action, only to be blown off course by the merest breeze of immediate desire. There’s a helplessness, a scattered, drifting quality about such a life.”
Dan Rosenthal
Did you start the new year, or the past week, or even this new day, with a clean slate? Unfortunately, I didn’t. I started it with a long list of overdue tasks.
I like the idea…
“Each day should be devoted to miracles. The purpose of time is to enable man to learn to use it constructively.”
A Course in Miracles
Every year, we, collectively as human beings on earth, take another trip round the sun together. How immensely exciting is that?
What an amazing opportunity we have to make something of our lives and change ourselves and this world for the better, if we can only learn how to harness each day constructively.
It’s also scary, right? …
‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’
A bit of faith, every day. And I can be happy.
I don’t know about you, but I tend to hold myself to high standards, and often fall short of them.
I want to practice positive habits every day and am pleased when I manage it for a reasonable stretch.
But not accepting that I am human, and flawed, and will inevitably fall short of my own ideals — that’s perfectionism, and it’s counter-productive to happiness.
To smugly go where no man has been before
How quitting drinking for 12 months (to raise money for Charity: Water) changed my life.
At the time of writing, there are only a couple of days left until what I’ve been calling my ‘Year of Clarity’ or perhaps more accurately — ‘Year of Sobriety’, comes to an end.
I plan on celebrating with my ‘first beer for a year’ live on the internet.
But before then, I thought I’d share how the year has gone.
Why I Decided to Quit Booze for a Year
As I’ve already shared on my blog Clear-Minded Creative and in my Kindle book The Ditch The Day Job Diaries, it all started when I attended the 2012 World Domination Summit in Portland, Oregon.
As well as having the…
Milo McLaughlin
Deep Thinker. Ex-Drinker. Tiny Dancer. Content Writer for a marketing agency. Editor at Large, www.clearmindedcreative.com.
