Change is hard for all of us, myself included. In this new series, I’ll be sharing daily mediations on transition, change, reinvention. Look out all you rock and rollers, turn and face the strange.  

# # # 

It’s empowering to know that we are the architects of any changes in our life. 

The fact that transition is a workshop to create a more rewarding existence is a wonderful thing. Each of us can exploit the changes that have already occurred and use them as opportunities. 

Okay, that’s the upside. 

Now let’s talk about a key downside of transition. 

Adjusting to change gives rise to stress. Easing the dread of our new and unfamiliar circumstances takes significant psychic energy. 

And so, during our periods of change, we need to pace ourselves. One thing at a time. Creating conditions for our own sustainable happiness needs to include patience and proportion. Because if we try to make these life changes at once, we’ll get overwhelmed and want to quit. 

I remember one weekend in college trying to catch up on years of neglected goals in one week. Didn’t work out so well. I should have been doing a little bit each day during the semester, rather than compressing all my delinquent tasks into one spring break staycation. 

Have you ever made that miscalculation? When your eyes were bigger than your stomach? 

We’re all guilty of this mistake. We eat like elephants and shit like birds, and then wonder why we’re so constipated. 

But here’s the thing nobody tells us about transition. 

We need enough time to process the all changes take place inside of us. We need to rest a while to consolidate and get used to these new routines. 

If we don’t take the chance to get a little more familiar with our new reality, we’ll feel disconnected from it. 

It truly is a grieving process. And we don’t get to decide when it’s over. 

Ask anyone who’s ever been laid off in a down economy. People not only lose their livelihood, but also one of the most important continuities in their life. 

My friend’s dad lost his job as an accountant during the last recession, and he was so devastated by the loss, that he still got up every morning at the same time, showered, shaved, put on his suit, grabbed his briefcase, and just sat at the kitchen table all day long. 

It broke my heart to hear that story, but it kind of made sense. 

When change makes us feel like a piece of reality is gone, we do whatever we have to do to survive. We convince ourselves that what we thought was reality wasn’t simply an enchantment. 

Oof, transitions are tricky, aren’t they? 

It’s like, we want to motivate ourselves, but we forget to pace ourselves. And there’s no handbook about the journey of what it means to live sustainably. 

If recent changes have sent you into a spiral of disorientation right now, honor your energy level. Pace yourself accordingly. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

If you feel exhausted, might that be because you’re fighting against yourself?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

Tune in and subscribe for a little execution in public.

Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs

Change is hard for all of us, myself included. In this new series, I’ll be sharing daily mediations on transition, change, reinvention. Look out all you rock and rollers, turn and face the strange. 

# # # 

From an evolutionary perspective, an adaptive trait is a behavior or physical characteristic that enables or enhances the probability that they will survive. 

For example, humans sweat to regulate their body temperature and endure long periods of physical movement. This adaptation allowed prehistoric humans to excel at hunting. They could jog after large prey under the midday sun until the animals eventually died from exhaustion. 

But the paradox of evolution is, even adaptive competencies can become maladaptive if we take them to the extreme. 

The trait of resilience comes to mind. 

Because we now live in a world where experts are telling us that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent, but the passionate combination of grit and perseverance and tenacity. 

Which isn’t untrue. There is no doubt that resilience is a highly useful in the face of trauma. 

But any overused strength can quickly invert into a weakness. 

Voltaire famously asked this question in his book on optimism:

Is there anything stupider than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away? 

It reminds me of my own misguided resilience, a trait that has backfired in both my personal and professional lives. From former lovers to a potential job prospects, being someone who didn’t take no for an answer might have felt noble and romantic to me, but it wasn’t producing results. 

Quite the opposite, in fact. My resilience in the face of rejection, aka, bouncing back like a child’s inflatable clown, only worsened my chances of being picked. There came a point of diminishing returns where bowing out, letting go and moving on would have actually left me in higher standing than continuing to showing up at people’s front door with my tongue hanging out. 

Grit is useful until all those small, loose particles of stone and sand get caught in other people’s eyes. 

And so, any of us could find ourselves in a situation where we are too resilient for our own sake. One way to assess the potential downsides of this adaptation is to ask a few questions:

Are you so resilient that you’re overly persistent with unattainable goals? 

Are you so resilient that you fail to find the root of your problem and seek help to solve it?

Are you so resilient that your ego is writing a check your body can’t cash? 

Are you so resilient that you’re missing the signals telling you not to continue your pursuit?

Are you so resilient that you’re unnecessarily tolerant of unpleasant or counterproductive circumstances? 

Remember, even adaptive competencies can become maladaptive if we take them to the extreme. 

It sounds counterintuitive, but perhaps if you were less resilient, you would be more likely to improve your circumstances. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Do you need to bear down and push through and grind it out, or do you need to let go and switch directions?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

Tune in and subscribe for a little execution in public.

Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs

Change is hard for all of us, myself included. In this new series, I’ll be sharing daily mediations on transition, change, reinvention. Look out all you rock and rollers, turn and face the strange. 

# # # 

Kidman, in her stellar performance in the award winning racing movie, makes the following speech to her driver and then husband: 

I’m going to let you in on a secret that most other people know. Control is an illusion. Nobody knows what’s going to happen next. Not on a freeway, and certainly not on a racetrack with other infantile egomaniacs. Nobody controls anything. You’ve had a glimpse of that, and you’re scared. 

And who wouldn’t be, right? All human beings are control freaks. Forget about opioids, that’s our country’s most prominent addiction. 

But the good news is, just because control is an illusion doesn’t mean that we are victims. We may live in this dizzying and uncertain world, but we are not impotent in the face of it. If we are willing to confront the dangerous conceit of putting our faith in our own hands, then we have a real shot and becoming empowered and fulfilled human beings. 

Citrin’s research on resilience comes to mind. He found that most people misperceive and underestimate their ability to deal with such perceived lack of control and, consequently, it’s their thinking that needs to change. 

Running with that, here is a collection of absurd questions to assess your own relationship with the drug of control:

Do you believe this world is truly yours for the enjoying, or do you see it as wearying burden that pins you down with obligations? 

When things go awry, do you take control of the process, or sit back and hope it gets better? 

Can you acknowledge that you actually have a role in your future, or are you submitting under the unseeing eye of some blind idiot god that you inherited as a child? 

All nihilism aside, empowerment, which is the ability to make decisions that influence the outcomes of our work, is our best shot at responding to our lack of control in this world. 

Because no matter how chaotic things get, each of us can grow to love the empowerment that accompanies being responsible for all our actions. The simple awareness that we can stop sitting on our hands and start getting them dirty to improve our condition, it really does make a difference. 

Bonhoeffer summarizes it beautifully in his book of sermons:

Having peace means having a home amid the restlessness of the world, having solid ground beneath one’s feet, and though the waves foam and rage ever so wildly, they can no longer rob me of my peace. 

Control may be an illusion, but empowerment isn’t. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What one very small change could profoundly influence how your life unfolds daily? 

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

Tune in and subscribe for a little execution in public.

Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs

Change is hard for all of us, myself included. In this new series, I’ll be sharing daily mediations on transition, change, reinvention. Look out all you rock and rollers, turn and face the strange. 

# # # 

Each of us needs our own fuel source. Our own oxygen supply. 

We can’t be dependent on externals for our equilibrium. Otherwise we will constantly be shaken to and fro by daily events. 

In short, we deploy our emotional capital. The psychological assets and resources that buttress us, like patience, resilience, optimism and faith. That’s what allows us to bounce back from failure and rejection. 

How’s the health of your account balance? Here are some questions to audit your funds. 

Do you let squeaky wheels derail you, or do you keep moving the story forward despite imperfections and annoyances? 

Do slights and rejections puncture the delicate fabric of your wellbeing, or do you take struggles in stride with a healthy dose of perspective? 

Are you thrown off balance by trivial incidents and mundane annoyances, or do you bounce back trusting their relative unimportance in the grand scheme of life? 

Do you get upset when somebody doesn’t live by your script, or do you stubbornly refuse to upset yourself when your strong desires are thwarted? 

If your answers skewed towards the first half of each question, then your psychological resources may be in need replenishing. 

Camille writes in her book about envy that the ego is a fragile little demon that gorges itself on our eternal discontent. Maybe that’s a good place to start. 

If you want to refuel your emotional capital, practice announcing to yourself that who you are is enough to get what you want. Practicing announcing to yourself that you already have everything you need to do your thing. 

It’s only a small donation to your account. And your ego won’t be happy about the transaction. 

But the goal, not unlike a startup trying to keep the business afloat despite marketplace fluctuations, is to build an emotional foundation for scale. 

Over time, you will gain trust in your ability to right your ship when it drifts off course. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What inner resources will help you regain your equilibrium?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

Tune in and subscribe for a little execution in public.

Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs

Change is hard for all of us, myself included. In this new series, I’ll be sharing daily mediations on transition, change, reinvention. Look out all you rock and rollers, turn and face the strange. 

# # #

Every organism must keep changing just to stay competitive. 

If we are not ready to adapt and remake ourselves as we grow and as the environment changes, then the world will evolve and leave us behind. 

Time waits for no man. Evolution has zero interest in our being happy. 

The good news is, as humans, our greatest tool for survival is our ability to change. Certainly, we fear change, but we are also remarkably quick to adapt to just about anything that doesn’t kill us. 

Whyte calls this the internal and secret marriage to the tricky and movable frontier called the self. It’s where we continuously improve what is, but we also make evolutionary leaps to what’s possible. 

Instead of pretending ourselves beyond our own evolution, we take a good look in the mirror, asking questions like this. 

What weaknesses have we been running from that it’s finally time to embrace? 

What edges have we been resisting for years that we must now make friends with? 

Hoffman, my favorite venture capitalist and tech entrepreneur, writes about this in his bestselling book about the startup of you:

Keeping yourself in permanent beta forces you to acknowledge that you have bugs, that there’s new development to do on yourself, that you will need to adapt and evolve. 

Sound painful? 

It is. Letting go of outdated parts of ourselves can feel like a death. 

Then again, what hurts even more is pretending that we’re more evolved than we really are, and then unexpectedly getting chewed into a bloody pulp by some unexpected flying creature that breathes fire and knows how to write code. 

May as well pick the path with the highest growth potential. 

If we want to avoid rendering ourselves obsolete and helplessly dependent, we must figure out which parts of our self the world is finally asking us to outgrow. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What is the driving force of your career evolution?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

Tune in and subscribe for a little execution in public.

Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs

Change is hard for all of us, myself included. In this new series, I’ll be sharing daily mediations on transition, change, reinvention. Look out all you rock and rollers, turn and face the strange.


# # #

There’s a difference been adaptation and evolution. 

Adaptation is a specific process of adjusting ourselves to become better suited to our environment. It’s undergoing modification to fit our new circumstances. 

Evolution, however, is a broader term that refers to any change in anything over time. It’s the gradual development of something from a simple to a more complex form. 

But the two ideas work hand in hand. Despite their differences, the theme of both concepts is the same. 

Letting go. It’s about not getting stuck on something we first envisioned for ourselves. 

Because if we insist on consistency all the time in all things; if we are over reliant on our winning strategy for every endeavor, we will never adapt or evolve. 

Personally, my mistake was being way too religious about how I earned my money. It’s my stubbornly entrepreneurial and relentlessly independent personality. Profitable as that may have been, it also put limits on where my success could come from. 

And the epiphany was, oh wow, working by myself has finite earning potential. Not to mention a cap on overall job satisfaction. And in order to become better suited to the changing environment, in other words, to adapt, my career needed to diversify. 

Which meant working in a actual office, joining teams and collaborating with other human beings. It was far more complex than sitting in my living room in my pajamas making art all day, but ultimately more satisfying and less lonely. 

Such is the nature of evolution. We stay consistent in the micro, honoring our skills and talents; but we change in the macro, remaking ourselves as we grow and as the world changes. 

What do you need to let go of to keep moving the story forward? 

Once you figure that out, just know this. Each of us needs to find the balanced commitment to whatever our primary goal is, but with a willingness to pivot quickly when necessary. 

Because evolution doesn’t favor the strong, it favors the most adaptable to change. 

If we can learn to do that slowly and constantly, we will triumph. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What has always been heroic about your work that is now preventing you from growing?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

Tune in and subscribe for a little execution in public.

Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs

Change is hard for all of us, myself included. In this new series, I’ll be sharing daily mediations on transition, change, reinvention. Look out all you rock and rollers, turn and face the strange.

# # #

Archimedes was a true renaissance man. 

Working as a mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer, he became one of the leading scientists in history. 

You’ve probably heard his most notable quotation. 

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. 

What’s the secret to making his mantra work for your own life? 

In my experience, all leverage begins with belief. If you believe something hard is impossible, then you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Doesn’t mean belief is the only tool you need, but it better be in your toolkit somewhere, otherwise it’s going to be one hell of an uphill climb. 

One question that’s help to ask yourself is this. 

How could you designate this as significant to yourself? 

Telling yourself that story will infect you with an energy that will help you grow in direct proportion with the challenge at hand. It will galvanize your initiative, commitment and resilience, which is far more valuable than authority, competence and influence. 

During many of my lowest times, whether they were marked by depression, unemployment or loneliness, going out of my way to announce myself that something mundane was actually paramount, changed everything for me. 

Gross, whose research on personal reinvention was pivotal during many of my own personal transformations, coined a helpful phrase called the designated impossibility. 

She said it’s when you designate something as significant to yourself, recognizing that you cannot accomplish it with the power you currently have, and knowing that you must reinvent yourself, or it will remain impossible. 

Sounds like a long enough lever to me. Archimedes would have been proud. 

Because the whole idea of moving the world doesn’t have to be overwhelming to the point of paralysis. We simply have to change ourselves in relation to it. 

One case study that comes to mind is a story that went viral about a decade ago. 

Ali was a middle eastern farmer who became rich and famous by selling sheep using a photo sharing app on his smartphone. Instagram, at the time, was still a new technology, and didn’t have in app purchases like it does today. 

But this man designated the growth of his business and wealth of his life as being significant, so he created a new context for himself. Ali never could have dreamed of that level of economic prosperity twenty years ago. 

In fact, he probably comes from a long family lineage of sheep herders, most of whom wouldn’t even believe his story if he told them. He found a source of leverage to reinvent the way he thought about business, farming, communicating and marketing. And that allowed him to move the world. 

If you want to acquire the capacity to make the impossible happen, remember this. 

It has less to do with authority, competence and influence, and more to do with initiative, commitment and resilience. 

The question is, how do people step into that kind of power? How is it that some farmer in the middle of nowhere can make the impossible happen? 

It starts with belief. Because if you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What are you not committed to, only because you don’t believe it can be done?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

Tune in and subscribe for a little execution in public.

Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs

Hyperfocus is the ability to hone in on a specific task, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else. 

It becomes a trance like state in which we concentrate until everything becomes invisible but the thoughts we think. 

This is both a blessing on a curse. 

From a creativity standpoint, we easily lose all sense of time and perspective and disappear into the glorious oblivion of flow as the ideas pour out of us like a waterfall. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon. 

It reminds me of all those nights in high school I whaled on my guitar in the basement until my fingers were bleeding, while the rest of my friends were out getting wasted. Would not trade those moments for anything in the world. Thank you very much, obsessive tendencies. 

On the flip side, what happens we are not even aware that we’re focusing so intensely? And what if our hyperfocus makes us so oblivious to the world around us that we lose the plot, or worse yet, send a message to others that we have scrambled priorities? 

It reminds me of all those mornings as an entrepreneur, spending hours designing beautiful and hilarious slide decks for imaginary presentations, instead of trying to book actual clients who would pay me real money to deliver those presentations. Woops. 

A classic tale of right focus, wrong target. Concentrating to a fault. Becoming over immersed in unproductive activities while ignoring our more pressing responsibilities. 

One tool for reigning in our superhuman focusing powers is introducing an external apparatus of accountability. To agree on some kind of physical cue to help us to snap out of hyperfocus. 

Like setting two alarm clocks, one ten minutes before quitting time to invite us to wrap things up, and another at the designated end point. 

Or asking a manager not to check up us you until a specified date. 

Or using a task management system to time box your work plan into daily or weekly iterations, after which no further changes will be made. 

Each of these cues are boundaries that enable us the freedom to focus to our heart’s desire, but also come back down to earth at a reasonable time. 

Remember, the ability to amuse yourself in the confines of your own mind for long stretches of time is both an asset and a liability. 

Use it wisely. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What is the potential cost of your constitutional undistractability? 

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

Tune in and subscribe for a little execution in public.

Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs