Category: Defining Success

While eating out tonight, my waiter asked me towards the end of my meal if I had ever eaten at that restaurant before.

I told him I hadn’t.

He replied simply, “Well… you’re always welcome here.”

And what surprised me about this, I guess, is that not only did I feel like he really meant it… but he couldn’t have been any older than 17 years old.

…Obviously I’m welcome to come in and spend money at the for-profit business he works at.

But, you know… what most business owners don’t realize… is that us customers… we can sniff out whether you mean what you say or not pretty damn quickly.

And it’s the business “hack” that too many people ignore… genuinely caring.

I’m 35 years old and I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited about a year ahead.

I’m more in tune with who I am than I’ve ever been.

I’m more confident in my path than I’ve ever been.

I’m connected to more amazing people than I’ve ever been.

And you know what’s interesting about those statements that I didn’t even realize until I just typed them out?

…I’m connected to more amazing people than I’ve ever been BECAUSE I’m more confident in my path than I’ve ever been BECAUSE I’m more in tune with who I am than I’ve ever been BECAUSE (and this is the real key) of all the inner work I’ve been doing every day for the past 5 years.

Life on the outside is always a reflection of life on the inside.

Commit to improving your life on the inside and slowly, slowly… life on the outside will undoubtedly follow suit.

We catch opportunities in life much like how a spider catches dinner.

We don’t wait for opportunities to fly into our mouth… we create a web to catch them.

Try to make your web too big and you’ll have but a single strand of webbing circumferenced over an excessive space with a big hole in the middle… and your opportunities will fly right through. This is what happens when we try to make a difference or create a connection that involves too big of a jump from where we are.

This seems to be the default in a world that has the world at their fingertips. We see it, the full scale of it, and are constantly getting fed the image of the .01% who are impacting it, at that scale, and we want to do the same… so we try and skip the whole growing, building, developing process and try to just web a strand from where we are to the other side of the world in hopes of catching the opportunity easily.

But, of course, this doesn’t pan out.

Focus more on what’s in closer proximity… on building connections with people, places, and things in your local community and utilize resources in your own backyard… and what you might find is an appropriately sized web that catches an appropriate amount of opportunity.

…And slowly, you’ll grow into a bigger spider, capable of creating larger webs with thicker strands that’ll catch more opportunities (dinners) which will only perpetuate the process further and further from there.

This is the formula to impact. Not one long piece of webbing… but an appropriately sized, complex web that no bug can get past.

When you think about goals as finish lines… you line up on a start line and prepare to race.

…Because that’s what we’re wired to do when there are finish lines involved.

But when you think about your goals as the construction of masterpieces… suddenly racing gets removed from the equation altogether.

…Because taking our time, pouring from our soul, and demanding from its construction our best is what we’re wired to do when “masterpiece” is involved.

P.s. Just lay the next brick.

If the holidays wasn’t everything you hoped it would be… rather than place blame on those who didn’t deliver on your expectations… ask yourself: how can I take more of a role in making it into what I’d love it to be?

Maybe that involves doing the hosting yourself? Or introducing fun games to encourage more spontaneous connection? Or coming up with fresh and creative traditions that’ll get everybody talking… like wearing matching pajamas, or playing a game of spoons, or gifting an incredibly random gag gift…

The point is to take control over what you can control. And if you’re not willing to do that… then maybe don’t place blame on those who are willing and are trying… maybe it’s worth meditating on how you can drop expectations all together and uncover new ways within yourself to have a good time regardless of the setting…

Some counter culture gift ideas for the holiday season.

• A friend and his girlfriend decided they were going to skip town during the holidays altogether and have themselves an experiential weekend in a city they’ve never visited before capped off with an NBA game as the cherry on top.

• Another friend was telling me about a new tradition he and his wife started with Gold Belly. Apparently, you can live in Alaska and have Chicago style deep dish pizza for dinner—without ever leaving your home. Or Philly Cheesesteaks from Philadelphia or lobster from Maine for that matter… Each year, it’s a new dinner dish from somewhere different across the USA and Canada. And it’s a gift that’s totally unique, authentic, and shared.

• And yet another friend was telling me how he and his wife have given up gift giving altogether and decided to write each other a love letter each year instead.

Sometimes we get so caught up in the commercial brainwashing of the holiday season that we forget we have control over how we want our holiday to actually unfold.

Ask yourself what your ideal holiday schedule would look like… what experiences you truly want to put on a pedestal (getting an expensive gift?)… and then start reverse engineering your way towards that vision.

As is the case with most things in life… this holiday season is what you make it.

…Not what it’s been made out to be.