creative maverick

There’s a problem with this incessant goal-setting that so many coaches are into.

It places a focus on the future and suggests relentless action and compromise in the present to get there. When you achieve that goal, you allow yourself a brief period of rejoicing and then set a new one. Urg, I feel a sense of existential desolation just writing that!

It’s all very mesomorphic, by which I mean action-focussed. What about how you want to be from moment to moment? There’s no goal you can tick off for that one.

My creativity coach Jerry Hyde said it’s not anything in the future that will make you happy but how you do today.

The book The Power of Now is well known for advocating this philosophy and Steve Pavlina wrote a great post on his blog about how the book transformed his life:

The idea of creating freedom and wealth in the future by constraining myself in the present was nothing but a fool’s errand… I adopted the mindset [instead] “If it doesn’t exist in some form right now, it will never exist”.

I began focusing more of my energy on improving the quality of my present reality instead of projecting all those improvements into the realm of someday… I started asking questions like “How can I experience more joy in this very moment?”

In the past I would set goals because I believed that achieving those goals would increase my happiness. But now the flow goes in reverse. Today I set goals to increase my expression of the happiness I’m already enjoying.

I’ve actually created the very situation I was hoping money would someday grant me.  I imagined what I would do if I was already rich beyond my wildest dreams… But instead of waiting to become rich first, I decided to find a way to make it happen right now, even if I’d only be doing it for free in my spare time.

This line of thinking produced some amazing results for me. Today I’m so happy it’s almost ridiculous. Even though I don’t have millions of dollars in the bank, I feel like I’m already living the way I would live if I were financially set for life.  If I won $100 million in the lottery, I’d keep doing what I’m doing right now.  The money would simply expand my capacity but not the essence of what I’m doing.

What would you do if you were already set for life?  Figure out what that is, and find a way to begin doing it on some level right now.

This is not how I have lived my life in the past but I believe it is essential to adopt in order to be truly successful,  healthy and happy. So one of the tenets of the one year Creative Maverick experiment is to create the life I want in the present. I’ll be reporting how this turns out.

If you want to try this for yourself, read the first Creative Maverick daily habit to start this process right away.