Here are some odds and ends that I thought might interest you.

Are Men Good For Anything?

Roy Baumeister is a well known and respected academic psychologist who has done a lot of research and published a large number of journal articles.  I am familiar with him from reading some of his work on willpower.  He has published a brilliant new book called Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men.  I read a lot of the same old rehashed stuff, but every once in a while I come across something truly original; it is so refreshing to encounter something new.  Dr. Baumeister has developed what he calls a radical theory on why men and women are different.  Whether you agree with him or not, and I found his work persuasive, you have to love an original and in this case courageous thinker.  Highly recommended.

Article on thelifething

Jonny over on thelifething blog published a guest article of mine called 10 Easy Steps For Getting Yourself to the Easy Life.  You might want to check it out and while you are there look over Jonny’s blog; he does a great job on it.

Radiolab

I just cannot say enough good about these podcasts.  If you are interested in how the world works, do yourself a huge favor and check them out: http://www.radiolab.org/series/podcasts/

The Unique You

“When you realize that no one else on this earth can be like you – that no other soul can know the beauty, sorrow, light, and darkness you alone are given to see – then you will no longer want to be like anyone else on this earth.  You will, at last, be the fearless individual your heart of hearts has called you to be.” – Guy Finley

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

Get Free Updates to The Rat Race Trap by Email here or via a reader in the top left sidebar.  I would love to have you on board.

If you have followed me for any length of time you will realize that I am NOT a proponent of doing things that make you miserable.  I do not recommend staying in a job you hate or any other life-killing behavior.  However, on the assumption that at the moment you are in a circumstance or situation that is making you miserable, and that at the moment it is the best alternative you have in front of you, there are some things you can do to improve your experience of it.

This article is focused on work, but the general principles can be applied to any circumstance you turn into misery for yourself.  The following are some of the things that work best for me and I think if you put them into practice they will work for you as well.  I’m going to use the example of a job you don’t like for much of this article, but the ideas can be applied to anything.

Accept That You Don’t Control the Universe

If I could snap my fingers right now and be free from having to earn a living, be transported to a beautiful white sand tropical beach in front of a lovely glass-fronted home, and be waited on by beautiful half-naked girls in grass skirts, I would snap my fingers.  But alas, the universe doesn’t work that way.  Instead I will continue to write this article.

You control your actions and sometimes things go your way, but mostly they do not.  Even if it is possible, whatever it would take me to get to the home on the tropical beach with the grass skirts would not be worth it (and after a few months it would lose its impact), so here I am writing this article happily.  When you accept that you control your actions but not the outcomes, you automatically become much happier and thus less miserable.  Stop continually focusing on the gap between where you are and where you want to be and your misery level will drop dramatically.

Accept That You Choose Your Actions

If you say you have to go to a job you don’t like, you are speaking a falsehood.  You do not have to do anything.  You are choosing to do it because you believe it is the best alternative you have at the moment.  I know people who don’t work, who don’t have an income, and are overweight.  Somehow they have shelter and eat more than they need without going to a job they hate.  And they have consciously made that choice.  When you truly accept that you are choosing your actions, there is an immediate and significant change in attitude that improves your outlook.  You chose it so stop wallowing in your self-pity.

If You Are Going to Do It, Get Something Out of It

This is one of the most neglected methods of finding the positive in something you don’t like.  I guarantee you there are a huge number of opportunities in and at your work to develops skills that will improve your life.  You can learn peaceful well-being at a job you don’t like and you will thereby gain a huge benefit that will last the rest of your life.

Ignore what you don’t like about your job and instead focus on your skills training.  Screw the job and enroll yourself in The University of Self-Growth – your employer is paying your tuition and providing the classroom.

• When you walk into the office instead of telling yourself how much you don’t want to be there, enthusiastically and with a smile greet the people you see.  Start your day off with a bang and practice an optimistic outlook.
• Practice not gossiping and talking about other people negatively.
• You can literally spend all day practicing being in the moment, not being affected by what happened five minutes ago and not worrying about what is going to happen tomorrow.  An incredible skill-building opportunity!
• Work on building personal and professional networks.
• When you write emails or other documents, practice your written communication skills.  Work on a crisp, clear, style of writing that is perfect for emails.  You can also practice presentation skills and computer skills.
• Take any training offered that gets you away from the job and lets you build useful skills.  Ask for training for anything you can relate to your job.  You will be surprised how often it is allowed.
• By definition if it is a job you don’t really like, you will have tremendous opportunity to practice the skills of remaining calm in stressful situations, detaching from outcomes, looking for the bright-side of things, and being happy no matter what your circumstances.
• Work on improving your negotiation skills.
• Practice the art of listening.
• Practice the art of understatement.
• Practice being engaging and witty.
• Stay alert at all times for opportunities to grow in some way.  You will never run out of them.

To get the benefit, you have to stay aware of consciously building specific skills.  Otherwise, you’ll just fall back into the “I hate my job” habits.

Reflect on the Positive

Take some time to deeply reflect on the positive benefits of whatever it is you are choosing to do that you don’t like.  And I mean some time to reflect deeply.  If you go to a job you don’t like five days a week, then spend 30 minutes any time you feel down reflecting on what you get out of it.  I know people who say they don’t like their job who use that job to obtain:

• An active single social life at trendy places
• A beautiful climate-controlled home
• Travel and Vacations
• Nice cars and clothing
• A wonderful family who is well clothed, fed, and schooled

The list is endless.  Reflect on the fact that probably most of the people in the world would snap their fingers to have the life you you have.  Think about the other joys you have in your life that the job you dislike makes possible.  Think of that beautiful smiling child you are taking care of by doing what you are doing.

Whatever it is you are doing, reflect on why you chose to do it and focus on those positives and do not dwell on what is making you miserable.  I’ve done this and it works wonders for me.

Don’t Take The Train Ride of Misery

An architect was building a magnificent cathedral.  During an inspection he passed three workers toiling away in the hot sun doing the exact same task – smashing rocks with a sledgehammer.  He asked each what he was doing and why.  The first man answered “I’m breaking rocks because I get paid to break rocks.”  The second man answered “I’m making small stones that will go into the wall of that building and I do it to feed my family.”  The third man answered “I’m helping construct a wonderful cathedral.  People will come from far away to gaze upon its marvels.  I’m doing it so I can learn how to build a cathedral.”

When you are starting to do whatever it is that is making you miserable, you have a choice and it is truly your choice.  It is not being forced upon you.  You can chose to hope on the train full of miserable complaining people and join in all the wallowing, or you can skip it and take a nice pleasant walk instead.  This was a very hard lesson for me to learn, but I finally learned it.  I spent years talking myself into frequent misery and joining others on the misery train.  I still fall into that trap sometimes because I am human.  As often as I can remember to make that choice, I talk a pleasant walk instead.

If There Was Ever a Job For the 80/20 Rule

If you can get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort then this is the time to apply it.  If you don’t like cleaning the house then don’t try to make it spotless.  Get in the moment and spend a small amount of time happily making it look decent instead of a lot of time making it look perfect.

Apply the 80/20 rule at work every day.  On the least desirable tasks, spend 20% of your time getting most of the results and then move on to something better.  Most people have far more leeway in their job than they believe.  If you will simply get the courage to take control and empower yourself you will be surprised by the results.

You can’t work intensely and enthusiastically for hours on end without burning out.  Besides if you don’t like your job you’ll never be motivated to work like that.  So what most people do is a half-assed, hit and miss, watching the clock, wallowing in their misery job.  So consider an alternative win-win that you can feel good about.

Work intensely and hard, really getting into it for a period of time; say 30 to 45 minutes.  Then alternate that with a break; even a longish break.  Take a walk, take a nap, meditate, listen to some music, read a book, surf then internet, go into the coffee bar, or whatever you can get away with.  If you do this throughout the day, your employer and you will both benefit.  You will contribute more to him and you will get more out of it than doing it the miserable half-assed way.  You will probably be many times more productive than you were before.  I can also guarantee you that the time you spend working will be more enjoyable as a result.  Forcing yourself to go with gusto for a period of time is much easier and more enjoyable than sloshing through a whole day.  Don’t feel guilty or feel like you are cheating because you are not.  It is a win-win.

Focus is the Key Point

You are miserable when you focus on the things that are wrong.  You are happy when you focus on what is right.  Focus on what you can learn from whatever you are doing to help you in the future.  Focus on the moment and not the miserable past or your worried future.

In A Word It’s “Attitude”

I could go on and on, and perhaps I’ve gone on too long already.  I wish I could explain it in 200 words, but I can’t.  Ultimately it’s something you have to experiment with and work out yourself.

The bottom line is you can choose a positive or a negative attitude about whatever you are doing and in that choice lies the difference between joy and misery.

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

Get Free Updates to The Rat Race Trap by Email here or via a reader in the top left sidebar.  I would love to have you on board.

Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age – This is a really good book about what it means to make use of the advantages of the connected digital world without suffering all the disadvantages.  I highly recommend it as probably the most balanced treatment of the good and the bad of being permanently connected and a fascinating history going back to Socrates.

The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance – This is just a really, really good book on how to perform better. Definitely recommended.

The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us – Another book about how our intuitions are often wrong and what to do about it.  This was an extremely well written book.

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History – This is now on the bestseller list and deservedly so.  It is really an eye opening account of the little-known culture of the Great Plains Indian tribe the Commanches. I can honestly say I learned a good bit of little-known western history from reading this book.

Wrong: Why experts* keep failing us–and how to know when not to trust them *Scientists, finance wizards, doctors, relationship gurus, celebrity CEOs, … consultants, health officials and more – A fascinating account of how experts are always getting it wrong. There were some surprises in here for me.  For instance, 2/3 of scientific papers announcing a new finding and published in the most elite peer-reviewed journals are later proven mistaken for a variety of reasons.

The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind – As a 49 year-old I LOVED this book.  Yes, you are not as quick as you used to be and yes, recall of names becomes more difficult, but in other ways the middle-aged brain is better than a young brain.  For anyone past 40 and who wonders about what is going to happen to your mind, I highly recommend this wonderful book.

The Alternate-Day Diet – This is a diet for health as well as weight loss.  Consider it.

The New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less – This is a good read and a very interesting look at how the Baskin Robbin’s heir gave up his inheritance for the ultimate Spartan life. His points are legitimate but he goes way further than I would ever consider.

Here is a list of other books to consider. I liked all of these:

The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn

Mengele: The Complete Story

The Youth Pill: Scientists at the Brink of an Anti-Aging Revolution

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (Vintage Departures)

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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I’m thinking old age regret is going to suck.  In order to avoid it, I find it useful to put myself on my death bed and imagine how I will feel.  It’s easy to piss your precious life minutes away when you are young, or even when your not so young, but it is sometimes helpful to realize at some point you are done and will get none of them back.

Some of these thoughts represent my personal experience but many do not; they are just observations of the habits of others.  Some of these may offend you, but don’t take it that way.  What’s good for you may not be good for others.  In the end, I hope they stimulate you to think a little about what you are doing with your precious life minutes.  These are not meant to make you feel good; they are meant to make you think.

1. Lying on my death bed, I will be so happy I spent my life compromising with my partner.  When they left me and took half my money after years of letting them tell me what to do, I thought “Wow, that was really worth it.”
2. Lying on my death bed, I probably won’t remember anything from the tens of thousands of hours I spent watching TV and surfing the internet during my life.
3. Lying on my death bed, I probably won’t get to see my friends and family. My death room will be likely be filled to overflowing with the grateful executives from the corporation where I slaved away my entire career.
4. Lying on my death bed, I’ll be thinking “It sure was good I saved so much money for a rainy day.”  Then I’ll turn my head and notice it is raining outside.
5. Lying on my death bed, I will be so happy that I spent endless hours searching for coupons so I could win the “be frugal” contest.  I felt so good in the checkout line saving my pennies.  That was better than talking a walk in the sun or spending quality time with friends and family.
6. When I get really old I will probably fall down and break my hip. I won’t have one of those “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” devices. I’ll be really mad that I didn’t go see the mountain gorillas in Rwanda while I could still walk; before I fell down and died.
7. Lying on my death bed, I’ll be so glad I spent half my life being angry at the government, big corporations, my stupid neighbors, idiot drivers, my ungrateful family, the communists, the liberals, the illegal aliens, and everyone else who is ruining my life.  I couldn’t do anything about any of it, but at least I died a bitter old unhappy man.  That will show them.
8. Lying on my death bed, I’ll be thinking it was so worth it to eat myself into obesity and sit myself into physical atrophy.  Who wants to play with the their grandchildren on the beach when they are 80?  It was much better having a nurse push me over to the window in my wheelchair.
9. Lying on my death bed, I’ll be so happy I spent my life working my ass off so I could buy houses, cars, big screen TV’s, clothes, furniture, and all the other fine things in life.  Oh the memories of those experiences.  Parking my fancy car in the garage of my fancy house was like the highlight of my life.  Sometimes I would just sit in the car and hug the steering wheel.  I felt so good to have someone to hold onto.
10. Lying on my death bed, I’ll be grateful I lived life on my own terms and not according to the dictates of others.  I’ll be thinking that in some way parts of me will live on in the lives of others I have touched.  I’ll be happy that I took each day as it arrived, neither reliving the past or fretting about the future.  Life was one hell of a ride and I enjoyed just about all of it.  No regrets.

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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I’ve had a lifelong passion for freedom; political freedom, financial freedom, and personal freedom.  Over the last couple of years though, I have slowly become aware of another form of freedom that can be more powerful and liberating than all the others.

The Real Freedom

During all these decades in which I have pursued freedom, in reality, I have been a slave to the tyranny of my own mind.  I’ve done it to myself.  I have been missing something that very few people achieve or even know exists – Psychological Freedom.  Psychological freedom is the freedom to choose our own state of minds.  It’s freedom that comes from not reacting to what is external to us with fear, want, worry, stress, frustration, anger, jealousy, depression, or hurt.

How Things Should Be

We all have needs, desires, and expectations of how things should be.  We shouldn’t be burning and logging the rain forests or shooting tigers for their penises.  we shouldn’t have to work at a job we don’t like just to pay the bills.  We should have been promoted by now.  Corporate bureaucracy shouldn’t exist.  The government should do this or that or not do this or that.  Other drivers shouldn’t be such idiots.  My partner should want to spend more time with me.  We shouldn’t have to take care of our helpless family members.  He should love me for my brains instead of her for her body.  People should act the way we think they should act.  I shouldn’t have cancer; it’s not fair.

We want to be more beautiful.  We want to have more money.  We want to live on the beach.  We wish we were famous.  We want to be like him or her.  We want this thing or that thing.  The list is endless and forever changing.

The gap between the way we think things should be or wish them to be and the way they really are is the source of our slavery.  Within this gap lies the tyranny of our own minds; the loss of our psychological freedom.  As soon as you say to yourself that you want or need something more, you have declared that there is something wrong with your current circumstances.  You have brought into focus the gap and in some real way diminished your current self.

The Key To Freedom

“It is our mistaken belief that we must push life in the direction we choose that keeps us in a strained and unhappy relationship with it.  Reality has its own effortless course, and we can either embrace its way or struggle endlessly with our own.”  — Guy Finley

Realizing that within yourself you have the power to be free and happy regardless of your current circumstances is the key to psychological freedom.  It is not the external events or circumstances of your life that have enslaved you; you have enslaved yourself to your thinking about those external events and circumstances.

You have some control over your actions, but you have very little control over the outcomes.  Sometimes things will go your way, but often they will not.  What you do have control over however is how you react to those outcomes.  Detaching yourself emotionally from outcomes which you cannot control is a critical step to freedom from all those negative states.  You do not have to get upset, angry, depressed, irritated, or frustrated by external events.  You do not have to react in any negative way when things don’t turn out the way you think they should turn out or others don’t act the way you think they should act.

I have to admit when I first encountered these ideas, I was skeptical.  They didn’t seem to make sense or to even be possible.  If your passion is to save the rainforest, how can you possible detach yourself from your failure as it burns all around you?  It’s possible.  You can learn to be fulfilled and experience joy in the process, in the actions you take, and to accept with peace whatever may happen.

Detaching yourself from outcomes is a skill and like any other skill the more you practice it the better you get.  However, the rewards are immediate from the first time you put it to use. The more skilled you become, the greater will be the psychological freedom you will achieve.  This is something that is 100% internal to you and cannot be influenced by external events.  Your freedom is entirely yours for the taking.

Another Thought

“Every morning, when we wake up, we have twenty-four brand-new hours to live.  What a precious gift!  We have the capacity to live in a way that these twenty-four hours will bring peace, joy, and happiness to ourselves and others.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

You will be a different person tomorrow than what you are today.  You’ll be a different person the day after that and the week after and the year after.  Things change and despite what we like to believe we have no idea how they will change.  I can have a dream for next year and tomorrow things might change in a way that makes it meaningless.

Shall I then be overwhelmed with grief and disappointment at my loss?  My loss of something I never had in the first place?  By focusing on something you want in the future, on the gap between what you have and what you want, you are missing what life has to offer in the meantime.  Why not experience life as happens to you in the here and now with maximal freedom, joy, and peace?

If you live an urban setting and your dream is a cabin in the woods, by all means pursue your dream.  If you someday live in a cabin in the woods then great.  If you don’t then that’s great too.  In your “failure” you might find that you have met the love of your life and she introduced you to a vibrant urban life which you didn’t know existed; a life of community, cafes, art, and culture.  Your life in the woods may not have been all you dreamed it would be anyway.  Even Thoreau returned from the woods after a couple of years.  To throw away what you have in pursuit of what you don’t is a fool’s game.

I know I have not offered a lot of practical techniques in this article, but I plan on writing more how-to in future articles.  With this article my goal was to make you consider the possibility that there is a better way.

“Letting go is not giving up; it is going up.” — Guy Finley

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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Guest Article Tuesday

Note From Stephen:  I get a lot of requests for guest articles.  I’ve decided to create a new feature called Guest Article Tuesday where readers or other bloggers can express their ideas to my readers.  This week Art Decker with Self Storage Co. shares his interesting email solution.

Until recently, I had an organization problem. A bad one. I was late to every appointment, I forgot tasks, I would get distracted, etc.  Even when I added tasks to my do list, somehow the to do list would get lost, left at home, or shuffled into a pile of papers that I wasn’t going to have time to sort through.

One weekend, I had an “aha” moment when I suddenly realized that I had found my Achilles heel — and that it was email. I was looking at every email that came into my account, whenever it came in, no matter what it was. An email notification felt like a ringing telephone — something I needed to attend to right away. (In fact, the telephone was a secondary part of the problem — but more about that in a moment.)

If you recognize one or more the five habits below in yourself, you may have the same problem:

1. Your email is set to notify you immediately upon the arrival.
2. You receive personal and work email at the same address.
3. You receive automatic emails (lists, alerts, statements, etc.) at that same address.
4. You process and/or act on each email frequently throughout the day.
5. Your email inbox contains too many emails to fit on one page.

I knew that I had to stop spending so much time on email. Email was eating my life, eating my work tasks, and eating my sanity! I decided that I could not go home until I had come up with a system that would prevent me from spending all day on email. I started with the following steps:

I set up two new email accounts

1. A free email account for all my automated emails that I would check occasionally but not every day. This shrunk my inbox down to about one third of its former size.
2. A new task-focused email account to be the heart of my new productivity system. This email would be the one that I would check regularly, and that it would be free of personal email, free of spam, and free of automated bank statements and the like, because I would not give this email address out to anyone. I set it up so that my old email address, the one I was now using just for personal email, was featured in the from line. No one needed to know the new address — not my wife, not my boss, not my best friend. If they knew the new, super secret task-focused email address, they would only hijack it by sending non-work emails.

I went through all my emails and unsubscribed to all the junk

I turned my old email account into my personal account

I would check it once a day. I set up my vacation responder to let people know that they would not be getting immediate replies from me unless they were emailing me about a current work assignment. I could just forward emails going to this account to my new accounts (see below) by setting up filters.

In the settings for my old email account, I set up a series of filters

My filters take the email that I really need to see right away — the emails from clients, for example — and forward those emails to my new, super secret task-focused email address.

I also added a small program called Jotter to my cell phone

Jotter allows me to send myself emails telling myself to do things — very handy when I am out visiting a site and have my cell phone, but not my computer, with me.

I stopped checking my old email address during the day and turned off notification

I will check my personal emails at home and respond to them in comfort, while I am relaxed and not worrying about all the things I haven’t accomplished yet today. That makes for nicer email replies sent out to my family and friends!

I did not give out my new email address to anyone

I wasn’t joking when I called this a super secret account. It is my gatekeeper — the gatekeeper to my sanity. I won’t tell anyone the address. I’d rather give out the PIN number for my ATM card (which is not a good idea, in case you’re wondering) then give out my super secret email address. It’s the only reason I am starting to get things done.

Once I made these changes to my email habits, my life began to change for the better. But I have other plans for my super secret email. I can use my email program’s filters to apply custom labels. That way, I can make the items in my email inbox into a series of context lists — much like the context lists used by people who rely on the GTD productivity system. When I am ready to work on a particular context, I can just open the emails with that label. I am considering some other tweaks as well, like color coding. Perhaps I will just add the color red to the really urgent emails.

Each email can have more than one label. That means that different emails can have labels for projects, for their context (phone, email, etc.) and for the due date. I can do a series of numerical labels ranging from 1 to 31, or a series of labels for each day of the week, or each month of the year. That way they can be organized by the due date in addition to organizing them by context and I can pull up my to do list in several different ways.

I am so organized! I have a life again. I have my sanity back. I am ready to go ride my bike….

Art Decker is a division manager with Self Storage Co. Art leads a stressful life, with much of his time eaten up by meetings and conference calls. He also spends a lot of time traveling from one self storage site to another. As a result, Art has developed a strong interest in topics such as productivity, organization, working while traveling, balancing work and home life, and reducing stress.

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

Get Free Updates to The Rat Race Trap by Email here or via a reader in the top left sidebar.  I would love to have you on board.

Your happiness is very precious; it may be the most important gift you have been given.  And yet I would wager that you are giving much of it away.  I do.  We all do.

Do you have a boss that makes you mad?  Is there a toxic person in your life who makes you depressed or causes you to seethe with anger and frustration?  Do you stress out over the idiot drivers on the roads?  You are handing your happiness over to them; just giving it away as if it were nothing.

Are you drug down by the burdens of daily life; of making ends meet?  Are you depressed by illness or disease?  Are you tired of obligations and commitments?  Do you whine that you don’t have time to do what you want?  You are giving away your happiness to circumstances; throwing it in the trash can of an imagined difficult life.

You Have a Choice

I do not believe that the universe has a plan for me and I’m not into Pollyanna positive thinking.  However things are and for whatever reason they are the way they are, you can simply accept them as a given at that moment.  Who cares how they got that way?  Just because they aren’t the way you think they should be, doesn’t mean you should flush your happiness birthright down the toilet.

Often, way too often, I find myself giving away my happiness to others or to the situation I find myself in.  When I realize that and resolve to take it back, I find my life immeasurably improved.  With absolutely no change in external circumstances, I have changed my reality and made my life a whole lot better.  It’s really that easy.

The hard part seems to be that giving away your happiness tends to be the default mode most people operate under.  It’s a very difficult habit to break.  I find that automatically reminding myself with calendar appointments that send an alarm or by hanging up signs work very well.  I’m going to hang a sign that says

Hold On to Your Happiness and Never Ever Give it Away

in as many places as I can think of, as a constant reminder to take back that which is mine by right.  What about you?  Are you going to resolve to hold onto your happiness or are you going to foolishly give it away?

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

Get Free Updates to The Rat Race Trap by Email here or via a reader in the top left sidebar.  I would love to have you on board.

This is all my personal opinion of course, but if you are interested in what I think, here it is.

Manage Stress

Read Andrew Bernstein’s fabulous book The Myth of Stress: Where Stress Really Comes From and How to Live a Happier and Healthier Life.

Child Raising

Stop hovering and helicoptering around your children.  Give them a break.  Give them a chance to relax and participate in unstructured activities – to be kids in other words.  Giving them more unstructured free time and fewer adult-run activities and lessons will result in a more capable child and future adult.  Leave them alone if you want them to grow up to be self-reliant, resilient, and well adjusted adults.

Freedom

If you cannot spend at least several hours every day doing something for no other reason than you want to do it, then I consider that slavery.  Drop commitments like they are poison.  Avoid spending yourself into slavery (see below).  Absolutely do your own thing and not what anyone else thinks you should do, whether that anyone is society, your family, or your partner.

Spending

Avoid the Golden Handcuffs.  One of the biggest threats to your future freedom is to lock yourself into a lifestyle that forces you to stick with a job you would rather not have.  If you want an eye opening view into how little somebody can live on read John Robbins’ (of Baskin Robbins fame) book: The New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less.  I wouldn’t recommend following his approach totally, but a happy medium seems very appealing to me.  Would you rather experience a free life or live in a big house and drive an expensive car so you be enslaved to the corporate world to pay for them?

Free Yourself From Manipulative Relationships

Time does not run backwards.  You do not get a do-over.  When you are lying on your deathbed, it is highly unlikely you will say “Boy I’m so glad I wasted my precious life putting up with all the drama and crap in my relationships.”  Read more…

Spend Time With Other People

Even if you tend to be introverted like me, maintaining and active social life is critical to long-term well-being.  This factor is showing up repeatedly in study after study.

Exercise

Strength training once a week for maintaining function as you age.  High intensity interval training for maximum heart and lung capacity about 20 minutes three times a week.  I highly recommend the Pace Program.  Cardio and Pulmonary maximum capacity is correlated to mortality rates and it is not gained by sustained aerobics.

Nutrition

Avoid what comes in a box.  Eat as natural food as possible with plenty of fruits and vegetables.  Critical enzymes are destroyed by heating, so eat plenty of raw food.  Limit your calories and give yourself permission to eat something sinful on occasion.

Limit Time With Doctors

A great many treatments simply don’t work and it is easy to get caught up in a prescription domino effect; take it from someone who has experienced it.  Get medical treatment for serious issues but consider non-drug, non-traditional approaches if they are available.  This is an area where balance and judgment is critical.  Just don’t overdo the doctor thing.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

The books of Richard Carlson are great.

“Rule number one is, don’t sweat the small stuff. Rule number two is, it’s all small stuff.” — Robert Elliot

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

Get Free Updates to The Rat Race Trap by Email here or via a reader in the top left sidebar.  I would love to have you on board.

Imagine the same diet; the same calories, fat grams, etc.  In one group of mice, a high fat meal is consumed early in the day and a high carbohydrate meal later in the day.  In the other group of mice, the a high carbohydrate meal is consumed early in the day and a high fat meal later in the day.  Most of us tend to eat more fat later in the day at the big meals, so we are like the early-carb / late-fat mice.

But the mice with high-fat breakfasts had “significantly lower body weights and body fat composition” than their counterparts who ate high-fat dinners, according to their study published this week in the International Journal of Obesity.

Those weren’t the only differences. The mice that began the day with more carbs developed insulin resistance, a condition that increases the risk for Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. They also wound up with more insulin, leptin and triglycerides circulating in their blood, which are also associated with diabetes and heart disease. –- LA Times

So at least in mice and most likely in humans too, the timing of daily fat intake may be very important in setting your daily metabolic cycle.

I have the perfect solution for you.  In order to make sure you get fat early in the day, try Udo’s Choice Oil Blend (see below) with breakfast.  You get a boost to a good metabolic cycle and an ideal fatty acid balance. My bottle says one serving is 14 grams of fat, but it is good fat.  It says you can put it in drinks or food, but it tastes fine and I just take it straight.

Udo’s Choice Perfected (Ultimate) 3, 6, 9 Oil Blend is a certified organic blend of guaranteed GMO-free, unrefined edible oils. This unique blend delivers a reliable source of the n-3 and n-6 essential fatty acids that are essential to life. Based on 15 years of practical experience with fats and oils, this formula is a 2:1:1 ratio of n-3: n-6: n-9, a combination most therapeutic for the n-3-deficient, n-6-rich diets, as well as ‘low’ and ‘no’ fat diets, common today. The Perfected Oil Blend includes oils from fresh flax, sesame and sunflower seeds, as well as oils from evening primrose, rice germ and oat germ.

Note: I have no financial interest nor get any commission or anything else from you buying Udo’s Choice.  I just recommend it because I think it is excellent.  I find it at most vitamin stores, health-food stores, and some supermarkets.  It is widely available.

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

Get Free Updates to The Rat Race Trap by Email here or via a reader in the top left sidebar.  I would love to have you on board.

Guest Article Tuesday

Note From Stephen:  I get a lot of requests for guest articles.  I’ve decided to create a new feature called Guest Article Tuesday where readers or other bloggers can express their ideas to my readers.

Hugh DeBurgh, The Passionate Warrior, has dedicated his life to the achievement of the ultimate family lifestyle. You can find him writing about Creative Family Lifestyle Design over at his blog, The Way of Passionate Warrior. Currently he is on the second leg of a worldwide travel adventure with his wife and four young children.  Follow Hugh on Twitter or sign up for his RSS feed and don’t miss an update!

Where do you call home?

With my family, things can be a bit different than for most.  You see, we are road warriors.  Digital nomads.  Call us what you will.  For us, home is wherever we are.
We live most of the year in a 35 foot diesel motor home.  All six of us.  Me, my wife, and four young kids.

And during the time that we are on the road, that motor home is our home.

Friends have asked us how we do this.  Are we independently wealthy?  No.  Do we live on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?  No.  Don’t we miss having roots in a community?  Not really, because we still have those.  Are we insane for living so close together for such long periods.  Perhaps.

I’ve also heard comments to the effect that a motor home can never have the feeling of home.  When folks say, “There’s no place like home,” they aren’t seeing a rolling box on wheels in their mind’s eye.

I guess what all these folks are asking is, “What do we sacrifice by living a mobile, nomadic lifestyle?”

Fair question.

First, we aren’t always on the road.

We do drive a lot.  We have circumnavigated North America (Canada and the US) one-and-a-half times.  And we have zig-zaged all over the interior as well.  We still do.

Yes, our motor home is our house.  But our community is wherever we choose to stop and experience for a while.

And we stop from time to time.  Often it is to visit an interesting place.  A museum, or a historical site, or a science center.  Or perhaps just somewhere that’s fun.

At other times we casually stop somewhere and just get that homey feeling.  When I feel that, I want to stay.  Not long enough to build a house, but for a week or two.

To me that homey feeling is when you feel it’s OK to let down your guard.  Where life’s affordable, the natives are friendly and sparse, the weather is nice and the scenery is pleasant.  And where all of your principle needs can be easily met.

We just found such a place.  In Champaign, Illinois.  It’s a little campground outside of town, in the middle of cornfields (what isn’t in the Midwest!).  The scenery here is very pleasant, its quiet, shaded with a lovely grove of trees, and yet five minutes from all the amenities you could need.  And the Internet here is awesome!  Finally I can get work done and backup my files online.  That’s a big deal for me.

Which brings up another issue.

Mobile Lifestyle Needs

When you live on the road, your needs are quite different than when you are just “camping.”  As a result, we have little in common with the casual campers who surround us at most campsites, especially in the summer months.

When you camp, you may be prepared to accept a certain amount of “roughing it.” But when you are “home,” you  have fairly consistent needs that now need to be provided for on a mobile platform.

There are the basics, like, food and such, there are comfort needs, and you may also have business needs – typically technologies that allow you to work on the road.

For me to be able to call a place “home” I will have to satisfy all of these needs wherever I happen to be.

A lot is written about lowering your needs “threshold” before heading on the road. That is, reducing the number of things that you think you need so you can pack a bit lighter. We did that when we started traveling.  And it feels fantastic to get rid of  all of that stuff that you thought you couldn’t live without.

But there are some things that we are not prepared to part with, and yet are difficult to carry with us.  We have to scavenge to satisfy these needs as we go along.
One of those scavenged needs is high speed Internet.  Without it, we cannot carry on our business.  And without that economic engine, the road trip is over.

The Internet Makes Our Lifestyle Possible

Without the Internet and cell phones, we could not live as free a life as we do today. To ensure that we keep connected, we carry our own Internet technology with us.

One of my big gripes when we’re on the road is the Internet quality, or lack of it, that we find.  So we do the best that we can.  Outside of major metropolitan areas, Internet signals are poor or inconsistent all over North America.

In fact, this is a serious problem for anyone who wants to live life on the road but needs world-class communications at the same time.

There are very few entrepreneurs who seem to be addressing this problem.  And those who are trying are using technology that’s getting a bit long in the tooth (cell technology and satellite Internet).

As more and more folks discover the freedom and beauty of the mobile lifestyle, this lack of Internet infrastructure means that North America is loosing its traditional advantages over parts of the former third world and Europe, where the Internet is often much more ubiquitous.

Anyway, even with these minor issues we sacrifice very little to live a mobile lifestyle.

You can buy most anything you need on the road.

Nice campsites in quiet and safe communities are available for $25 to $50 a night (water, power and sewer included), and we tow our car along with us.

And the scenery is always changing. When the weather is hot, we head north.  When it gets cold, we let the snow line chase us south.  All the while we run a business and write posts like this one.  The kids play and life goes on.

If you’ve ever wanted to chuck your current lifestyle and hit the road, just do it!

Give it a try.  Consider renting an RV  or other more affordable means of travel. Vacations are usually way too expensive to maintain as a lifestyle.  Yet you can live quite comfortably – even luxuriously – while living mobile.  It just requires that you reconfigure your life so that your dollars buy you the maximum possible return, and no more.

I hope that you will take this post as your wake up call to live the life you’ve dreamed of!

And let me know what you decide to do.  I’d love to hear about your adventures!
All the best,

Hugh