On a day when I am overwhelmed by the feeling of overwhelm and trying to relax the tight knot in my stomach, I stumble across Steth Godin’s new ebook: What Matters Now and find this entry:
EASE
We are the strivingest people who have ever lived. We are ambitious, time-starved, competitive, distracted. We move at full velocity, yet constantly fear we are not doing enough. Though we live longer than any humans before us, our lives feel shorter, restless, breathless…
Dear ones, EASE UP. Pump the brakes. Take a step back. Seriously. Take two steps back. Turn off all your electronics and surrender over all your aspirations and do absolutely nothing for a spell. I know, I know – we all need to save the world. But trust me: The world will still need saving tomorrow. In the meantime, you’re going to have a stroke soon (or cause a stroke in somebody else) if you don’t calm the hell down.
So go take a walk. Or don’t. Consider actually exhaling. Find a body of water and float. Hit a tennis ball against a wall. Tell your colleagues that you’re off meditating (people take meditation seriously, so you’ll be absolved from guilt) and then actually, secretly, nap.
My radical suggestion? Cease participation, if only for one day this year – if only to make sure that we don’t lose forever the rare and vanishing human talent of appreciating ease.
____________
Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray, Love. Her new book
Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage will be
published in January, 2010.
Hope this little piece on ease lights up your day, it certainly brightened mine. If you want to download your own copy of What Matters Now, you can do so here.
____________
Photo Source: lepiaf.geo via Flickr under a Creative Commons License
Tweet This Post 
Facebook
I was reminded of Michael Gerber’s new book, the E-Myth Enterprise when I was out shopping this morning and receiving the cold shoulder treatment in almost every store I visited:
Uninspiring environment = unhappy employees = bad customer service = unhappy customers (who spread the unhappiness among family and friends…)
In his book Gerber says:
“Service is an incomplete word because it says, “The customer is king!” But as it works out in real life, the customer isn’t king except in the mind of the customer.
To the employees, the customer isn’t king; he’s often a pain in the ass. To the suppliers, the customer isn’t queen; she’s often a problem waiting to happen. To the lenders, the customer isn’t king; he’s often a drunk hanging on to a wagon careening into a wall.
No, the customer isn’t king to them - they are!
“If the customer is king,” they all ask privately, deep in the hidden recesses of their longing hearts, “what about me?” That’s what everybody else is asking too: “What about me?”
There can be no such thing as effective customer service in a company where the employees are disenchanted, where the owners aren’t making a decent profit, where the suppliers aren’t getting paid on time.
How true. If we are in business for some self serving reason, if we don’t love what we do, if we don’t love our product, our customers, our employees, our team members, etc. our business can’t be successful. Our dissatisfaction will leak out into what we do, what we touch, and it will be reflected in our product, our language, and our service.
However, it is a delicate balance. If we love our product more than our customers, they will feel left out. If we care more about our customers than our business, it will stall. If it’s all about us, well, then, nothing will work.
Yet, most business operate from exactly that premise: ‘what’s in it for me’. Most people are going into business for some ulterior motive: Making a lot of money, building an empire, being famous, successful, etc. It’s a paradox because of course you want to make money, be successful, build an empire. Why not? However, it’s what happens from you loving what you do. Not the other way around.
See, business is not just something you do to make money, or you go into because you are following your calling. You can’t separate business from life, it is your life!
To say it in Michael Gerber’s words:
“To most people, business is what goes on around us while we get on with our lives, something being done “out there” - at most a commercial enterprise, a place to make money, a place to go to work, a place to buy things, or a place that makes things we buy.
Few people seem to understand that business is much more than these individual factors.
In a free market system, business isn’t what goes on around us while we get on with our lives. Business is our lives. Business is what we do, all we do, who we are. Business is a living thing.”
Let me know what your thoughts are on the topic!
Tweet This Post Facebook
“All of the drama humans suffer is the result of believing in lies, mainly about ourselves. The first lie we believe in is I am not: I am not the way I should be, I am not perfect. The truth is that every human is born perfect because only perfection exists.”
~Don Miguel Ruiz, The Voice of Knowledge
Tweet This Post Facebook
Remember Daniel Pink? His book Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working For Yourself made a deep impression on me and has forever changed the way I look at ‘work’! He now came out with a new book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, and it comes with a fun promotional trailer, check it out!
Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Work Week (amazing book!) has done an interview with Dan Pink on great speech writing (Dan was the chief speech writer for Al Gore from 1995-1997). Here is Tim’s post:
What are the necessary ingredients in a good speech?
I’ve said many times that the three essential ingredients in any good speech are brevity, levity, and repetition. (That bears repeating: brevity, levity, and repetition.)
But at a broader level, the most important aspect of any speech, as Garr Reynolds reminds us in Presentation Zen, is being able to answer two questions:
A. What’s your point?
B. Why does it matter?
That’s the whole enchilada. If you have a single point and can explain to a particular audience why it matters to them, you’re ahead of 90 percent of the business and political speechgivers out there today.
Read more on Tim Ferriss’ blog.
Tweet This Post Facebook
