To achieve emotional nirvana, it’s not necessary to go to a spiritual therapist; sometimes a brisk walk in the park does the trick
BACK in the old days, Jim Collins took his teachers’ advice to heart and has since reaped richness — intellectually and financially. It was not a ‘to do list’, but a ‘stop doing list’.
As a student at Stanford, Collins prided himself for his “BHAGs (big hairy audacious goals),” at the start of each New Year. Finding that his “genetic energy level” encouraged “lack of discipline” in the young business school graduate, his mentors bluntly told him, “instead of leading a disciplined life, you lead a busy life.”
Until then, the difference between a ‘disciplined’ and a ‘busy’ life never hit Collins.
Writing in The USA Today, Collins recalls how his teachers gave him an assignment: what if $20 million fell in his lap followed by the news that he had only 10 years to live because he had a terminal disease, how would he live differently and what exactly would he stop doing that he was doing currently?
“That assignment became a turning point in my life, and the ‘stop doing’ list became an enduring cornerstone of my annual New Year resolutions — a mechanism for disciplined thought about how to allocate the most precious of all resources: time.”
Chucking a cushy corporate job to return to teaching and writing at his alma mater, Collins researched 11 companies that had turned themselves from “mediocrity to excellence, from good to great.”
What ignited their transformations, observes Collins was that their “big decisions were not what to do, but what to stop doing”.
In particular, Collins names a man called Smith, who had throat cancer and decided to sell his paper mills and put his money in consumer business. He invented Kleenex and licked his cancer at the same time, because he followed his heart when answering leading questions: What was he deeply passionate about? What was he genetically encoded for — what activities did he feel just “made to do”? What made economic sense — what could he make a living at?
“Think of the three circles as a personal guidance mechanism,” advises Collins, “as you navigate the twists and turns of a chaotic world, it acts like a compass. Am I on target? Do I need to adjust left, up, down, right? If you make an inventory of your activities today, what percentage of your time falls outside the three circles?”
If it is more than 50 per cent, then the stop doing list might be your most important tool, he concludes.
It’s New Year’s Eve. The soft rain outside is turning into sleet and ice. Inside the fitness centre, young and old, atop treadmills work out with eyes fixed to the TV screens overhead. It’s not a pretty picture they see: little ones, orphaned by the tsunami tragedy, becoming victims of sex predators. Hundreds of them sentenced to a life of sexual slavery, some of them to be exported to Scandinavian countries, Japan and the United States.
I notice some women wince and then change the channel. “While it’s heartbreaking, we don’t need to watch death and destruction, gloom and doom tonight,” comments a fatty. Huffing and puffing, another oldie chips in “Yeah, let’s instead watch New Year resolutions.”
The men meanwhile switch their TV sets to sports without saying a word. They’d rather be watching a ball game than bloated bodies.
A pretty blonde with blue eyes and shocking pink jacket is babbling away about predictions for 2005 for Americans. Most of them sound rosy. I see a sense of relief flit across most women’s faces clutching to their cardio-vascular exercise machines alternating their gaze between following TV monitors and reading their heart rate on the display manifest in front of them.
Kibitzers on TV are working overtime advising viewers how to live 2005, as are the Internet gurus stopping cyber traffic with their lesson plans, from how to manage your finances to making your marriage work and keeping your boss happy.
Some warrant attention and why not? After all, haven’t we all grown old at this game, begun in childhood, when our parents and teachers, overloaded us with unsolicited advice, which had to be taken seriously if life had to be lived in peace.
As I put away The USA Today on my way out of the gym, I carry with me the definition of life that Jim Collins rounds up in his column with his mentors’ quotes:
“Make your life a creative work of art. A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally important, what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit — to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort — that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company or, most important of all, a life.”
Shivering in the freezing car, I switch on the engine and drive slowly on wet roads, lit up with fairy lights everywhere ushering in the New Year. People are out on the streets, readying to sing and dance away the night and light up the heavens above with fireworks at the strike of midnight.
Distracted momentarily by the fiesta that meets me at every corner of my ride, I let go of the awful tsunami shrieks still lodged within my soul. I chill out (as the youngsters here love to say).
But nagging me is the long ‘stop doing’ list that the mind’s inner eye has swiftly rolled out. There’s so much extra baggage; unnecessary fears and unrealistic imaginings that one collects over the years that truly need deleting (as we often do with our Internet temporary files to stop them from slowing down our computers).
Even some relationships that are going nowhere need erasing.
“I do not seek, I find” said the great artist Pablo Picasso. Everyone can find life the way he/she would like it and can live it. All it takes is some soul searching — a word that has lost its beauty and meaning with overuse, but has no carbon copy.
Bursting out on the soapbox are millions of self-help gurus, who to me are the cruelest of all creatures living in America. Why? Because they lead you up the garden path, promise you the moon and then pull the rug from under your feet by demanding a dollop before letting you in to their secrets. Especially when money is out of your radar.
Tempting you are the Deepak Chopras of this world, the Doctor Phils who have made millions selling you stuff like this: “How to stop sabotaging yourself ... and alter your self perception forever ... with a heartfelt, gentle touch ... offering a fresh new way to help you slow down, cut the trivia, and create the meaningful lives you’re all yearning for ... just pay us.”
Want my penny’s worth of advice: exercise, exercise, exercise. Just a brisk walk will get you the emotional nirvana you seek and the physical fitness you want. And the best part: it comes free.
To achieve emotional nirvana, it’s not necessary to go to a spiritual therapist; sometimes a brisk walk in the park does the trick
