Overwhelm & Finding Your Passion
It’s interesting when you share honestly how you are feeling, by ezine or blog, people start sending you stuff to help / cheer you up. Or buck you up……!!
From friend & wordpress expert Steve Watson a rather pithy referral to David Risley’s blog post “The Shallow Pride Of Being Overwhelmed”
“See, the other day I was talking to somebody. This person was in the advertising business. This means she saw a lot of clients and was busy. VERY busy. We’re talking 15+ hour days. Sitting in the office until 2AM. Sometimes up and at it by 4AM.
Overwhelm. No time. Busy.
These days, people seem to wear the “overwhelm” badge with pride and I don’t know why.
We want to look really busy. Tell people we’re busy. Talk with pride about our long work hours and how we burned the midnight oil to get something done. We talk on our cell phones during the day in order to look important. Or worse, we wear the Bluetooth headset in our ears all day. The message we tell others? “I’m busy. I’m important. I don’t have time for you.” When somebody asks how we’re doing, we say “Busy!” without even thinking. It is a habit.
When did this become a badge of honor? Are we supposed to honor your sacrifice?
Let’s call a spade a spade, shall we? If what I just said describes you, then you’ve got a problem. It means you’re grossly disorganized. It means you don’t have any systems set up to deal with inflow and outflow. It means you’ve mistaken rapid movement with accomplishing something. It means your life isn’t your’s anymore.
It means you have to stop working on stuff and instead work on yourself. It means you better get organized…..”
And The Universe sends stuff too – via Feedreader!
On the Zen Habits blog this morning….“The Minimalist’s Guide To Cultivating Passion”
“I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years,” Steve Martin recalls in his 2007 memoir, Born Standing Up. “Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.” If you do the math, this sums to fourteen years of hard work before Martin saw returns on his investment.
Fourteen years.
That’s a long time to remain focused on a goal without reward, especially when the path is ambiguous (“The course was more plodding than heroic,” Martin recalls). But as he makes clear in his book, Martin found a Zen peace in the simplicity of his pursuit. He describes with relish, for example, the importance of “diligence” in becoming a star — a term he redefines to mean the ability to not work on unrelated projects — and he labels “loss of focus” as an “indulgence” that success cannot afford.
Martin’s story should resonate with those of us interested in the minimalist lifestyle preached here at Zen Habits. He injected minimalism into his life by orienting his world around a single passionate pursuit: innovating stand-up comedy. For Martin, there was never any doubt what his Most Important Task would involve each morning, and jettisoning unrelated commitments and distractions came naturally. As he discovered, when you know what your life is about it’s easy to sidestep all that threatens to clutter it.
In other words: passion breeds simplicity.
Even if we agree on their value, however, how do we find these simplicity-generating passionate pursuits in our own lives? This is the thorny question I address in this post.
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