You're already naked

Steve Jobs once said: 

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

There is no reason to not follow our hearts. Yet we often follow something or someone else than our hearts.

We do what we’re told, we do what we think is expected from us, we do what we think we should. 

Occasionally we stop and wonder: 

Is this it? Is this what I want my life to be like?

It’s not that we don’t want to follow our hearts. 

Sometimes we just don’t know what our hearts want.

It’s easy to say “follow your passion”, but if you don’t know what that is, it doesn’t matter if you have the guts to follow it.

My Timefinder Academy is helping each participant find and fly to their Ikigai, their life’s purpose.

You are welcome to join.

After all, you have nothing to lose.

You are already naked.

Read more about flying to your Ikigai here

What's fantastic about your situation?

What is fantastic about your situation, right now?

This might sound silly to you. 

Who says that your situation is fantastic? 

Maybe in your opinion it is terrible. Or boring. Or nothing special.

The psychologist Erik Olkiewicz recommends that we ask ourselves, in any situation: 

“What’s fantastic about this?”

It can feel like a mockery if a tragic event has just happened, but with some distance to the situation we can often see that there was a silver lining.  

Many restaurants have had a hard time during the pandemic.

But then again, some were able to see what was fantastic.

Like Yalla Habibi in Kungälv, close to where I live.

They noticed that they had almost no clients in the restaurant, but the take away orders increased manifold so they adapted to that.

They also gave away thousands of meals to the hospital staff in the middle of the crisis.

Was that a great business decision? 

In the short run, no. 

In the long run? Most likely.

Did their gesture make it easier for the hospital staff to find the situation fantastic?

I believe so. 

What’s fantastic about your situation, right now?

Are you entitled to your opinion?

That might sound like a strange question.

Isn’t everyone entitled to her/his opinion?

The full quote by Harlan Ellison says:

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”

We can all choose to be ignorant of course, but as Thomas Jefferson said, ignorance comes with a price:

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, [...] it expects what never was and never will be.”

 

We can’t stay ignorant and free.

On the other hand, in a world with an endless supply of information we can’t stay up to date about “everything” and feel free either. 

 
I have clients who get stressed out by trying to be informed and up to date about news, sports, the latest discoveries in their field and much more.

That is not freedom.

That is unnecessary stress.

Choose carefully what to be knowledgeable about and ignore the rest.

Then you can be free from both stress and ignorance and soar into the sky.

Free as a bird.

"To vote, you should pass an intelligence test first!"

This was the opinion of one of my classmates when I studied at Chalmers university of technology. Or, as he put it:

 "Det borde fan krävas intelligenstest för att få rösta!"

However, since democracy by definition is:

"A government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections"

it will not be a democracy if only part of the people, those who pass an intelligence test, is allowed to vote.

So I disagreed with the comment at the time, but there was something in there that resonated with me and I have remembered it ever since.

Recently I read a quote from Roosevelt that made it all more clear to me:

"Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education."

That was it! It is not an intelligence test that is needed, it is ensuring everyone is "prepared to choose wisely"!

How do we make sure everyone is prepared to choose wisely?
Free access to education is one step of the way. It is not enough though.

Because as I wrote in this blog post: Ignorance is not the problem; pre-conceived ideas is. To not know, but behave as if we do, by spreading and believing in simplistic and incorrect views of the world is a recipe for disaster.

So if education is the first step, the second is to accept that no matter how much we know, there is always more that we do not know so we need to keep an open mind at all times.

Finally, we need to be willing to choose wisely.
Willing to not just accept the simplistic answers.
Willing to not act stupidly when in reality we know better.

Because as Martin Luther King Jr said:

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and consciencious stupidity."

I hope you are all willing to apply the knowledge you have, keep your mind open and choose wisely.