 Would you like to be fully creative? Would you like to fulfill your human potential? So if you would like to do this, is it a good idea to go with a flow, or is it a good idea to have a super regimented schedule that might constrict you? So let's talk about this. And what I'm going to do is actually read to you a chapter from my book, Joyful Productivity. I am recording this on October 2nd and just starting to announce that the audio book of Joyful Productivity has just been released. And it's been read, you know, I wrote the book and the audio voice is from Jill Minye, Jill Edwards Minye. She has a beautiful voice and I'm just so proud of the book being read by her. So check it out on Audible.com or on iTunes. You can buy it either place. So but let's talk about this. I'm going to read the chapter to you and I'm going to offer some commentary around this. All right. So to start with, let me, well, I'll just start with the chapter and then I'll offer some of my thoughts. All right. So what is your relationship to deadlines? Do you work well by giving yourself due dates or do you avoid deadlines and prefer to go with a flow? Either way can work. Understand your choice and be accepting of whatever consequences occur as a result. If you go with a flow, then be accepting that you may never meet your goals, that your goals may constantly change based on your internal whims and other people's external requests. On the other hand, if you want to set a vision, have goals and to achieve your goals, then you need to have a good relationship with deadlines, especially the ones that you set for yourself. Call it due dates, milestones, deadlines. I've even had clients call it lifelines or divine lines or any other word that energizes you. Okay. So let me pause here from the chapter and kind of share with you some of my current thoughts on this. So this is a philosophical question that you need to answer for yourself. How do you like deadlines? It seems so obvious of a question because everybody has deadlines and it's also obvious to everybody or it seems to me like everybody assumes that deadlines are bad. Deadlines are bad. You're supposed to feel bad when it comes to deadlines. And by the way, I'll do another quick tangent. Is it bad to feel bad? Let's think about this together for a moment because this has been a life-changing transformation and thought for me recently. What if it's good to feel bad? Okay, let's hang with me here. Feelings of anxiety, frustration, confusion, depression. I'll take depression out of the picture for a moment because depression can be horrible and can be spiraled down into just suicide. It can be really, really bad. But let's just talk about kind of mild negative feelings of some anxiety when you're creating something, when you're writing, when you're creating, when something's not certain and you're trying to create something that's not been created yet. There is naturally anxiety. Naturally, there's anxiety. I feel it. I feel it right now. I'm speaking to you. I'm not sure. I see people on the live video coming and going. I'm like, oh my god, people are leaving my live video. I must not be interesting enough. Why are you leaving? You know what I mean? There's anxiety. It doesn't matter if I'm writing alone. If I'm doing a live video, I see the numbers go up and down. People come in. People go out. Or if I'm creating an online course and I'm going to market, I'm like, I don't know if anybody's going to buy. Maybe what if I do all this work? It's common fear. What if I do all this work and nobody, and it doesn't make a difference? Nobody buys. Nobody cares. That's a common experience for me. It's not just you that's getting, everybody feels this. And so the question is, how do you deal with negative emotion? Do you try to avoid it? It's a bad somehow. It's bad for my physical system if I start feeling anxious or maybe a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of confusion, a little bit of uncertainty and doubt and reluctance and resistance is a good thing. What if it is making you stronger? What if it is giving you the opportunity to work through it and then end up on the other side being stronger and having created something working through the negative emotion? So I want to invite you to reframe negative feelings as good because it can be good if you reframe it as good. Don't worry about how it affects your physical system. Say, oh, negative emotion, that's an opportunity for me to work through something and come out stronger and wiser on the other side. It is a gift. Your anxiety is a gift. Your uncertainty is a gift. Your doubt is a gift. So deadlines also are a gift and you can give yourself that gift by setting deadlines for yourself because if you look at life, for those of you who think that you're a free spirit, okay, and you're supposed to go with the flow, let me tell you the truth about life. Everybody has a deadline and it's called death. So go with the flow came from, I think, ultimately came from your soul's eternal expression. I'll share with you my personal beliefs here and I hope you don't mind and you could tell me what your personal beliefs are. But I personally believe that you and I live forever. Our soul and our consciousness goes on after physical death and so we still have that memory of eternity and we still have that memory of full capacity to do whatever we want. So literally in your eternal life, in the life of your soul, of which you are partly taking part now, your part of your consciousness is here in the physical constricted body, part of your consciousness is in the eternal soul, you literally can go with the flow and do anything you want and it's fine. But I'm talking about here in the third dimension constricted body of, you know, October 2nd, you know, and you have a deadline of 80 years in this physical life. You can't just go with the flow. Otherwise, you will find yourself homeless, poor, homeless, you know, and probably in jail. Okay. If you fully go with the flow. Now, there is one positive example of going with the flow. If you go with the flow in full service to humanity, in full service to humanity and not just to fulfill your appetites, this is the problem I think with the go with the flow people is they go, I just want to go with the flow, I'm so creative, I'm so full free spirited, but go with the flow like peace pilgrim with the flow. Do you know peace? Peace pilgrim is one of my greatest heroes. Yeah, if I were to say that if I'd only pick one hero in life, it would be peace pilgrim. That's it. Peace pilgrim. Very similar to Gandhi over here. I really should get a nice picture of peace pilgrim and put her up here because I really like her very much. Peace pilgrim went with the flow, but she went with the flow completely out of service to humanity. She slept on concrete floors a lot. She slept in the woods a lot. Do you want to go with the flow and do that? She was completely homeless. She had no money, no possessions, just accept what she wore and everywhere she went, she just walked until someone gave her food. She walked until someone gave her shelter. Otherwise, she slept on the concrete floor on the roads or on the forest. That go with the flow I think makes sense. The only go with the flow that makes sense. Full service to humanity, she was so happy. She was fully fulfilled in her human potential out of service. Now, if you don't want to do that, if you still want to have comfort, if you still want to have food whenever you want food, if you want to live in comfort like I do and like most of us do, you can't go with the flow. You will be in jail. You will be homeless. So does that make sense? So basically if you have goals, it doesn't make sense that you go with it. If you have a goal and you have requirements for a particular lifestyle, how can you go with the flow? Please help me understand those of you who are totally free-spirited. I honestly am confused. I am truly confused by this. How can you have life requirements of I want to have this kind of house, I want to have this kind of car, I want to be able to go on these vacations, I want to have these experiences and I want to go with the flow and how I live. If I don't feel like doing this online, if I don't feel like writing this blog post today, I'm not going to write it. It's too much work. I feel anxious today. I think I should just take care of myself today. I'm tired. I don't want to do a video. George says we should do consistent content but George has a lot of energy. I don't have energy and I'll just go and relax today. Oh, I don't want to reach out for clients because it's scary. What if they reject me? I don't want to go with the flow. I just want to go with the flow and hopefully people will contact me. I'll do whatever I feel like doing. If I just do whatever I feel like doing, eventually my goal will be met. Please help me understand what you're thinking. Please, because I don't understand how it's aligned between I want a lifestyle like this and I want to just go with the flow. I'm honestly confused. Please help me understand. Okay, so let me continue reading the chapter to you and I'll share with you how I understand these things. Okay, so consider three ways of being. One is go with the flow. This way can work well if you are already financially secure or you don't need to achieve specific results except whatever comes with just going with the flow and a sidebar here. If you have a trust fund, wonderful. Congratulations. Your parents, your ancestors have already succeeded financially. You are now going to be taken care of for life. You can go with the flow. You really can because yeah, you always have housing. You always have food, just enough at least, and you can do whatever you want. Congratulations. You can go with the flow and knowing that you can't give yourself specific goals to reach in life because you're going with the flow, continuing on with the chapter. Many artists prefer this way but they usually end up with a lack of material comforts. Oh, I just want to, I just feel like doing some art today or today I don't feel like doing art and that's, you know, okay, back to the chapter. Just know this. If you aren't going to be reliable, you can't expect others to be reliable for you. Don't expect life to give what give you what you want. You'll need to learn to completely flow with whatever comes. Like I said, if you have a trust fund, beautiful. Do that. You can go with flow if you want to or if you want to be like Peace Pilgrim, God do that because she was a fully realized being who was homeless and had nothing, you know, just fully spiritually realized and that's amazing, right? Okay, let's go back to the chapter. Total acceptance is a profound spiritual practice and as I mentioned, that's Peace Pilgrim for you, right? Okay, the second way of living is scheduled performance. Scheduled performance. Many successful, successful in quotes, worldly successful people work in this way. Think of Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time. When he was practicing and competing, just about every waking minute was completely scheduled. If you read the story, really, when he was competing and in the Olympics, every minute he has an exact routine, eating exactly the same, you know, exactly knew what he was going to eat, exactly knew how many minutes to do brushing his teeth. I mean, everything was down to like the minute, okay? Whether it was swim practice or rest or meals, everything was regimented so that you could optimize his time and life energy for the best possible athletic performance. And sidebar, not surprisingly, he is he won more Olympic gold medals than anybody else in history. So scheduled performance, scheduled everything is regimented does work for success. If you follow a successful formula and you're able to do it willing, disciplined enough to do it. Back to the chapter, the same goes with people who are financially successful. They often have their workday scheduled down to the five minute mark. It's true. So if you read biographies of successful people, it's often very regimented. The third way of being is scheduled flow, scheduled flow. This is what I aim for. I live by a schedule every day, except for Saturdays and additional days off. Okay, let me, let me go off sidebar here a little bit. Ever since I wrote this chapter, I actually now work on Saturdays as well, except on Fridays, I only work till 1pm on Friday. So Friday afternoons are free. But Saturdays, honestly, I took the entire day off and I did that for months, maybe years. And honestly, it got really, really boring. So I just got bored not doing anything on Saturdays. And so I mean, I went on long dog walks and, you know, different parts of the city and I live in San Francisco. So there's plenty to explore. But I just realized I just, I feel much more fulfilled when I'm in service to others. So I decided to create co-working Saturdays. So I have a group co-working every Saturday to two sessions. If you're interested, let me know and I can invite you as well. And I just work on Saturdays to further my knowledge in service to my clients and my audience. That's what I do on Saturdays. And it's so much more fulfilling now that I do that. So I'm really, and I work on my side project, my side business on Saturdays as well. Okay, back to the chapter. I look at my calendar throughout the day and I do whatever I have in my calendar. Here is the difference versus the Michael Phelps scheduled performance mode. Here's the difference. Whenever I do the tasks that I've scheduled, I just go with the flow within the task. I aim to enjoy the task itself without forcing myself to perform or achieve achieve a perfect result. To say it differently, I make sure that I show up for the task that I've scheduled, which is left-brained. And then I allow my creativity and intuition to guide me within that task, right-brained. Not that I'm perfect at always doing this, but scheduled flow is a practice I keep coming back to again and again. I do the work for its own sake, and I practice mindfulness and joyfulness within the work, no matter how the results turn out. This is how I'm writing this chapter now. I have a deadline that I need to write and post this by 9 a.m. Am I nervous, anxious, and hustling? I've practiced just letting my fingers flow. Whatever words come out, based on a preset theme, and I edit lightly, is what you'll end up reading. I'm inspired by this passage from the Bhagavad Gita. To action alone has thou a right and never at all to its fruits. Let not the fruits of action be thy motive. Neither let there be in thou any attachment to inaction. Therefore, without being attached to the fruits of activities, one should act as a matter of duty, for by working without attachment, one attains the Supreme. Just taking a sidebar here, because there's a lot that I just covered. The difference between me and Michael Phelps, or Jeff Bezos, or any other super-uber successful, totally scheduled person is that I don't blame myself for results that I don't achieve. I don't get anxious that I must earn this much money. I must write a perfect blog post. I must get a yes from this person. I simply show up and I create and end my creation. I smile and I enjoy the process of creation, or enjoy the process of reaching out to the perspective client, or enjoy the process of marketing my courses. I enjoy the process of making this video. I enjoy the process of doing boring administrative work. I breathe joy into whatever I'm doing in the moment. I enjoy the process of clearing up my emails, or processing my tasks of the day. I enjoy the process without attachment to whatever might happen. Oh, the client might say no. The video might turn out terribly. The blog post nobody wants to read it. The course nobody will buy it. It's okay. I am just here for the activity itself to breathe joy into the activity, to breathe grace, to breathe love, to breathe gratitude for the fact that I get to incarnate in this life, and practice joy, practice gratitude, practice love, practice humility, practice non-attachment in whatever I'm doing, knowing that my eternal soul and my destiny is perfect. So none of it matters. None of the results matter. I don't have to make a certain amount of money. I don't have to have a certain amount of readers, or viewers, or whatever. And yes, anxious with live videos, it can be, it's true. There is anxiety naturally created by, oh, how many people are watching? Oh, are people commenting? Oh, are people liking courses? Oh, did anybody buy? Oh, my God. Is the client going to say yes? These are natural anxieties from the ego mind that happens. But like I said, remember before, negative feelings are good. It's good. It's a gift because, oh, the anxiety is the opportunity for my eternal soul to practice meeting that anxiety with gratitude or with joy. Without something to push on, without evil in this life to push on, we cannot grow. Evil is a gift. Bad things happening are a gift to us, eternal souls that are inextinguishable. We cannot die. Nothing can happen to us, our eternal souls. Nothing can stop your destiny of being perfect in your soul. Nothing can stop your destiny of the path of perfection towards perfection. You are going to become infinitely wise one day, infinitely loving, infinitely created, infinitely powerful. You can't screw it up. You can't screw it up. So because you can't screw it up, because I can't screw it up, any evil we perceive in this world of anxiety, bad things happening, evil in the world, social injustice, racism, blah, blah, blah, blah, are a gift for us to push against that with our love, with our wisdom, with our strength, with our courage, with our humility. It gives us something to push on, because we are here to work out in this world. It's my opinion. Our souls came here to work out. So anyway, back to, so therefore that's what I mean by schedule flow. I still keep a schedule. My schedule is quite regimented every day, but I don't come here to my task and I'm so afraid if I do this. I don't resist what's on my calendar, because the reason why most of you resist what's on your calendar is because you're afraid. You're afraid that if you show up for it and it's and if you can't succeed in doing that thing, it'll be a waste of time, right? You're afraid that if you show up and you don't have the right ideas, you can't work on the writing or on the whatever product you're creating or on the reach out, or you're afraid if you show up for the administrative tasks that it'll be boring. What if you show up anyway and you practice love? Don't think about the tasks that you have to do and it's boring. You're here to practice love and to practice creativity, to practice joy in the boring task. The boring is the evil that we're pushing up against, bringing our creativity and our joy and our lightheartedness to it, right? Okay, back to the chapter here. The key is that I stay with the task. I don't allow myself, so meaning I have a strategy that I keep on experimenting with and testing and finding what seems to work better in the real world. So yes, I do care about the results in the grander scheme of things, but not in the moment. I don't care if this client says yes, but I care overall if my client enrollment methods are effective, but I don't care if this client says yes. I'm here for this client out of love and out of joy, right? But she or he can say no and it's not a problem. But if she or she says no later, I might say, huh, how can I have a conversation next time that is even more of service or how can I talk to the right people? So overall, I care about results, but not in any one project, not in any one campaign, not in any one course, not in any one blog post. You see what I mean? So the key is that I stay with the task. I don't allow myself to get distracted and go with the flow in terms of changing tasks, surfing the net, etc. I stay with what I plan to do. Yet I am not afraid of making mistakes because I don't have a set performance result that I must achieve. Granted, I am much more able to do this because I'm a solopreneur. I get to decide what work product is adequate. I'm not having to please anyone, not even myself, because I care more about the process than the perfection of the result. However, even if you have a job and you need to produce results for your boss, there is a great benefit in learning to flow within the task rather than obsess about the results. Here is a great passage from the book, The Practicing Mind by Thomas Sterner. Quote, we become fixated on our intended goal and completely miss out on the joy present in the process of achieving it. We erroneously think that there is a magical point that we will reach and then we will be happy. We look at the process of getting there as almost a necessary nuisance that we have to go through in order to get to our goal. It's a paradox. When you focus on the process, the desired product takes care of itself with fluid ease. When you focus on the product, you immediately begin to fight yourself and experience boredom, restlessness, frustration, and impatience with the process. The reason for this is not hard to understand. When you focus your mind on the present moment, on the process of what you are doing right now, you are always where you want to be and where you should be. All your energy goes into what you are doing. However, when you focus your mind on where you want to end up, you are never where you are and you exhaust yourself, you exhaust your energy with unrelated thoughts instead of putting it into what you are doing. This awareness of being where you are and in the present gives you the constant positive reinforcement of reaching your goal over and over again. Let me read that again. This awareness of being where you are in the present, in other words, being focused on the process rather than the result that you want to achieve, gives you the constant positive reinforcement of reaching your goal over and over again because your goal is to be here and to practice the process. That's your goal, right? Keep continuing on with a quote from the book, from his book. However, when your mind is only on the finished product, not only do you feel frustrated in every second that you have not met that goal, but you experience anxiety in every mistake you make while practicing. You view each mistake as a barrier, something delaying you, delaying you from realizing your goal and experiencing the joy that reaching that goal is going to give you. Unquote. That was from the book, The Practicing Mind by Thomas Stirner, T-H-O-M-A-S-S-T-E-R-N-E-R. Wonderful book. It was life-changing for me. Okay, so onward with my book here. So we are repairing our relationship with deadlines by reframing what mistakes are. They are a learning opportunity as we aim for a goal, but whether we achieve the goal or not, we value the process and the learning more. Okay? Ironically, by doing this, we tend to achieve better results anyway, but let us not focus on the results. Whether the results are good or not, the question is whether the process was good. Were we mindful? Did we enjoy the work? Was it compassionate? Was it aligned with our values? If you're going to avoid deadlines and due dates and want to go with the flow, then be fully accepting that life will give you whatever it wants to, sometimes demanding things you don't feel like doing but have to, to stay alive or to get out of trouble. Instead, why don't we create a new and healthier relationship to deadlines? Let's set goals and the deadlines as our compass and yet journey joyfully. Work towards the deadlines with a playful experimentation and curiosity, appreciating the learning and the moment-by-moment process. So that's the end of that chapter and I hope you'll consider listening to the joyful productivity audiobook. Just go to amazon.com or go to iTunes, search joyful productivity and now there's an audiobook version. It is beautifully read by Jill. Her voice, I like her voice better than my voice and she just charmingly reads the book, so you may enjoy that. And thanks for those of you who are able to join me live here. Let's see Wendy and Molly, Kristy, Margaret and Bryce, Captain, Jadina and I want to thank Bryce and Captain for their comments. Bryce wrote a very thoughtful comment here. He wrote, even if you're financially secure, going with the flow is utterly depressing. I had all the time and money to do everything I wanted last year so I went with the flow but my flow was I don't feel good so I'm going to watch TV or play some music but I felt empty. I had everything I wanted but I felt useless and alone. Going with the flow is good for certain things sometimes like visiting a city and letting yourself discover the streets. Going with the flow is good when you don't have any goal, want or need in any given situation but more precisely when your goal is not to have a goal but we all need structure at some point or we jump right into depression like I did. I'm not the only one to say that. Jordan Peterson and Mark Manson say it as well. So thank you, Bryce. I really appreciate that comment. It's so true. So let's learn. If we want goals in our business, we can't go with the flow. Not in terms of our schedule. We got to schedule things and then we flow within activity. Captain says, question. If we focus only on the process and not be bothered about the results or outcome, how can we measure the worth value and effectiveness of our activities? What did we show up but are unable to achieve something within that interval? Great, great question, captain. So I did mention this a little bit early but let me unpack this a little bit here. When I make plans, when I schedule things, right, I am strategic. I say I'm going to schedule tasks that have a likelihood of success. Okay. So that's when I plan. But then when I show up for my plans, I don't worry whether that task is going to be successful. I just do the task with joy. The client might say no. The blog post might not get written. Now, here's the thing. Okay. Let's talk about blog post writing, for example. If I schedule 30 minutes to write a blog post, right, and then I show up and I do my darn this best to write the blog post in 30 minutes, and I can't physically write the blog post in 30 minutes, right? 30 minutes, actually, you should be able to write a blog post. Maybe for some of us, you will write a long post. Some of us will write short posts. 30 minutes, you can. But you have a certain desire for a certain quality. So to be strategic about it, you say, well, I could spend 28 hours writing a really great blog post, all right? But if we judge our own results and we don't put it out into the market, we are fooling ourselves and say, oh my God, every blog post from me takes 100 hours. And my God, it takes me three months to write one blog post. And I don't have enough testing in the market to know whether I'm going in the right direction. So then we have to be strategic in our planning and say, well, 100 hours per blog post is too ridiculous an amount to spend, amount of time to spend writing. 30 minutes may be too short of a time to create something of reasonable quality. So let's come to the middle somewhere and say I am going to limit myself to two hours or three hours or two sittings of writing a blog post, one hour per sitting. I'm going to limit myself because I know strategically that a blog post or a video or an online course or a product or an offering needs to be put out into the market. I need to put as much out into the market as I can to get feedback from the market so I know how to be more strategic with my next thing. You see, so once you come to some reasonable middle in terms of how much time you are willing to give yourself, constrict yourself to, and I say the word constrict, very contract yourself to, I say that very specifically because a lot of us, I consider myself a free spirit too in a way because I believe in the free spirit of the eternal soul. We need to constrict and contract our soul to a particular structure and this is literally what we did with our human body. We constricted our soul to this structure to be able to work in the world. Same thing, we need to constrict our creativity to a particular structure. Two hours, no more than two hours, for example. And if I do that, then I can put enough out. So in other words, we have to balance between putting enough out into the market to get feedback and putting enough of ourselves, giving ourselves enough time to create something of reasonable quality, reasonable pride. Okay, it's not something that I feel terrible about, but I'm not going to be perfectionistic about it. So yes, it is a strategic work of figuring out what that balance is. 10 hours is too long for a block post. Half an hour or 15 minutes is too short. So maybe two hours is good. So, you know, talk with your coach, talk with your friends about what is the right time. You know, for example, another example, please don't spend five years writing a book. One year writing a book is reasonable. Don't spend five years writing a book. Creating an online course, please don't spend six months creating an online course. Three months is reasonable. I'm a little bit, I'm very practiced at doing online courses now, so I can create a new course every month. But for you, that might be too fast. So let's split the difference between one year is too long to create a course, six months is too long to create a course. Let's come to a middle here and say, please constrict yourself to three months of creating a course and just put out whatever happens in those three months. So you give yourself a deadline and you flow and enjoy yourself within that deadline, but you keep the deadline no matter what. But that deadline needs to be thoughtfully produced. I thoughtfully created that balance. Okay. So that's enough for now. Thank you for, I should have kept myself to a deadline of 30 minutes for this video, went over the deadline. So that's kind of hilarious. But you could see what the difference, if I just flow with this, I can talk with you for eight hours. And this video would be ridiculously long. Nobody will want to watch it, right? That's why that's another example of deadlines that matter, right? So anyway, thank you. And I hope this has been inspiring for you and helps you to create more thoughtful deadlines and then enjoy flow, bring your spiritual self into the deadline so you can have both the benefit of a deadline and the benefit of being a free spirit. Okay. Blessings, any questions you have for me, I'm always open to it. Just comment below. Have a great day.