Some of the techniques and mindsets that I have found professionally or personally useful have become habitual or second nature to me over the course of time. One example is daily aerobic exercise. These days, if I wake up in the morning without a plan for when I will work out, I almost always figure out how I will do so by the time breakfast is over. There was a time when I dreaded working out and seemingly spent more time finding excuses to avoid exercise than I spent actually exercising. Those days are long gone. Good riddance!
Others continue to require a degree of effort and intentionality to ensure that I practice them regularly; for instance, thinking big or “going for broke” in advancing my priorities. What do I mean by that? Most of the time, I work hard, even relentlessly, to reach my goals through incremental approaches. I play “small ball” (to use a baseball term) very well, but sometimes to such a degree that I lose sight of the opportunity to occasionally “swing for the fences” and attempt to make a lot of progress with one bold stroke. To counter this tendency, I push myself on a regular basis to brainstorm “big ideas” – even if many initially appear unrealistic, unaffordable, or impractical. I then try to identify a few of them to refine and then put time into on a regular basis on the chance that they might surprisingly and delightfully come to fruition.
To make this more concrete, I spent years publicizing the breakthrough work of Dr. Muhammad Yunus before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize about 15 years ago. Most of my efforts reached dozens or hundreds of people. A colleague named Jacki Lippman took a different approach. She had a vision of Yunus appearing as a guest on Oprah Winfrey’s show, and in one hour reaching millions with his hopeful and pragmatic message about economically empowering the world’s impoverished women. She put in a few hours every week on that idea, and after eight years of work, it finally happened in early December 2006.
A recent attempt to channel my inner Jacki was writing down 40 bold ideas to make my two recent books, Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind and When in Doubt, Ask for More, best-sellers. I worked with my coach, someone I found through a terrific company called A-plan Coaching that my brother Michael and Sara Ellis co-founded, on this list. With my coach’s prodding and assistance, I will ultimately select a handful of these ideas and keep plugging away at them for a year or so like Jacki did on her Yunus/Oprah obsession. Of course, I’ll still spend a lot of time on “small ball” attempts to incrementally get these books out there.
One tangible example of the strategy of swinging for the fences working was my pitching the Stanford Social Innovation Review to run an excerpt of the revised edition of Changing the World. They were my first choice, but SSIR had declined to run an excerpt of the first editions of any of my books, and I was told they rarely even considered doing so for later editions of any books. But I prepared an excerpt with the help of my brilliant editor Karl Weber and submitted it anyway. To my astonishment, they agreed to publish it -- and then did so without editing a single word of my submission. It ran last Tuesday. To think I almost didn’t pitch the idea!
Another technique that I still need to push myself to regularly practice is avoiding ruts by being open to new experiences an even seeking them out. This is a variation of an important idea in both of my recent books – the power of always being deeply invested in something that I am a novice at. Much research suggests that openness to new experiences, trying new things, and gaining new skills leads to greater happiness and a longer life – something that the book Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning by Tom Vanderbilt reminded me. In my own life, I have found that venturing into the unknown often releases creativity, reveals hidden talents and desires, and creates joy.
The new experience I have planned for myself this week, which will last 72 hours starting at around 3pm Monday, is to go on a silent retreat alone in a house I am renting (for an astonishingly reasonable amount of money) in rural Maryland. For three days I will abstain from phone calls, television, the Internet, emails, news, social media, alcohol, caffeine, motorized transport, and anything else involving speaking or writing to others.
Instead of these things that take up an inordinate amount of my time normally, I will instead focus almost entirely on cooking, eating, sleeping, reading books, thinking, journaling, staring into the distance, contemplating nature, and going for long hikes on the 200 acre property that the house sits on.
I am approaching this experiment with a mix of excitement and apprehension – something I typically feel as I gear up for a new experience that requires me to change some ingrained behaviors, even for a short time. I don’t know what it will lead to, but I suspect I will gain some insights about myself, how I function in society, and how I want to spend the rest of my life.