Good Life Project - Unplug to Plug In: Creating the Space for Brilliance

Episode Date: September 10, 2015

You want to be known as someone who changes the game.Someone who brings amazing ideas, solutions, insights and potential to everything you do. You want to make real things happen. Things that matter.So you plug in. You mainline digital information, entertainment, pretty much any and all forms of data. You squeeze every possible moment out of the time you have, consuming, creating, connecting, rinsing and repeating. Occasionally, you breathe, but only if forced.Partly because it gives you more to think about, talk about and integrate and create. But, also, because it's just become your default. Space terrifies you. And maybe, just maybe, you're even driven by a little bit of FOMO.Thing is...It doesn't matter how productive you or how busy you are if the ideas you're building on don't represent the best you have to offer.And your best ideas rarely, if ever, come when you're filling every millisecond of your life with something to do.Genius comes when you disconnect from tasks and reconnect to space.To plug into your best self, you've first got to unplug. To create the space for brilliance to emerge.That's what we're talking about in today's short and sweet GLP Riff. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week's Good Life Project riff is entitled Embrace the Space. So my usual writing spot is about a 10-minute drive, but on Sunday I would walk to it. An hour each way. No cell phone, nothing. Just me. My backpack and a path that would wind across a bridge from one area through the woods, along a river, and through the park. Walking instead of driving, I literally lost nearly two hours of writing and to-do listing, email, social media, conference calling, outlining, building, designing, all that other stuff that, you know, in theory needs to get done. And that's hardcore productive time just, you know, poof, gone.

And you think to yourself in the beginning, well, you know, you got a lot to do. So it's pretty damn stupid to do something like that, right? I mean, I'm a busy guy, no time to waste, a launch deadline this week, people to serve, legacy to build, blah, blah, blah. And I would think that a lot. And I would wonder as I was doing it. And then I realized that actually, that was really the wrong way to look at it. Because in the mindful window that opened during my walking, not only did I get my exercise in, not only did I drink in a stunningly gorgeous day, not only did I absorb myself in the meditation of life as it unfolded and ramped my creative and cognitive abilities and my mood, I stumbled upon two awakenings. One was a realization about movement, stillness, and clarity, and a very cool visual demonstration. So more on that down the road, I think. But two, an innovative solution to a

seemingly intractable business challenge I've been grappling with. Something that kicked off a cascade of secondary realizations that may well lead to not only a substantial shift in the way that I build my business and professional path, but an experience, products, services I create for others. So it's about creating space. Those moments of in-between that we increasingly fill with tasks, often enabled by the near impossible to escape umbrella of digital connectivity, all in the name of supposedly optimizing productivity, getting stuff done. The thing is, life's not about getting stuff done. It's about getting the right stuff done. It doesn't matter how productive you are, if the ideas you're building on don't matter how productive you are if the ideas you're

building on don't represent the best you have to offer. And the best you have to offer rarely ever comes when you're filling every nook and cranny of mind space, every waking moment of every day. Genius comes when you disconnect from tasks and reconnect to source. Kill the space, you kill the dream. So question and challenge. One, how can you build a deliberate digital space into your day? And two, will you commit to doing this? Because if you will, take 30 days and do that starting today. Doesn't have to be an

hour. Doesn't even have to be 10 minutes, but build the space into the day. Put another way, embrace the space. As always, I hope you've enjoyed this week's Good Life Project Riff. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.