14 Changes for Fall 2018

Regardless of age, we all go through periods of time where we detour from our journeys and lose sight of what's really important to us. We hit the gym hard for a couple months and feel confident about our re-discovered fountain of youth, only until we can’t go one day because of some other commitment, which again happens the next day, and the day after that…

That's OK. It's human nature -- I too periodically lose my sense of self and purpose.

Rather than drudge down the path of self-defeat, I choose to turn inward whenever I feel discontent. I firmly believe in constantly evaluating and re-evaluating one’s life direction, so that’s why I’m beginning my Seasonal Changes series. As the calendar changes seasons every three months, I think a perfect opportunity presents itself for me to reflect and ask myself what alterations I need to make to rejuvenate my life.

In no particular order, I present the 14 changes I’m making for the fall of 2018. I will do my very best to adhere to these guidelines for the next three months, and then I’ll reevaluate once winter welcomes us.

For the first eight habits, you’ll notice the Rule of Three, a spin-off of Joshua Fields-Millburn's Rule of Two.*

I care deeply about my health, so I’ve determined these eight behaviors as the most important to me for my physical and mental well-being. I must practice each behavior three times per week for the amount of time I’ve designated for it. Rather than beat myself up for not writing on a given day, I’m saying that as long as I follow the Rule of Three, I can permit myself to feel satisfaction. This is the bare minimum; if I do a certain activity more than three times per week, that’s certainly not a bad thing.

1. Writing (45 minutes per session)
2. Reading (30 minutes)
3. Walking (at least 30 minutes)
4. Push-ups (150 reps)
5. Squats (100 reps)
6. Core (10 minutes)
7. Meditation (10 minutes)
8. Call friends and family (No required duration)

The following behaviors do not follow the Rule of Three, but I still find them to be very important for my well-being.

1. Jar of Awesome**
1. I took what was once a container of almonds and transformed it into my “Jar of Awesome,” a small jar I keep in my bedroom. Every time I do something I’m proud of, no matter how big or small, I write on a small piece of paper what I did it and place it in the jar. I can then refer to the jar whenever I need something to smile about.
2. When doing creative work, put the phone in airplane mode
1. Whenever reading or writing or coming up with ideas, I will put my phone in airplane mode. If my mind is in other places, I’ll never produce the quality art I’m capable of.
3. Mindful eating
1. I’m a very healthy eater in terms of what I eat, but I never really take the time to enjoy it. I have to slow down when I eat and savor every bite, because eating healthy food is such a wonderful experience that I don’t appreciate enough.
4. Loving-kindness**
1. This theory posits that when you start to wish happiness upon others, you’ll become happier yourself. For example, if a random guy is texting someone as you walk by him, quietly tell yourself that you hope he’s telling his loving girlfriend that he’ll be home in 20 minutes to see her.
5. Peanut butter discipline
1. As we all know, one spoonful is never enough. It's the only food I struggle with eating too much of, therefore I’m limiting my peanut butter consumption to one spoonful per day.
6. Carry an idea notebook everywhere
1. Because I spend so much time alone with my thoughts, I constantly come up with ideas. The problem is, I often forget them if I don’t immediately write them down. From now on, everywhere I go, I will carry my backpack with me because it will always have my idea notebook ready to go with a pen.

Those are my changes this fall, what are yours?

*https://www.theminimalists.com/two/

**Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss

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Stay or Go?

I often speak to my fellow dreamers about all of the things we want to accomplish in life -- the paths we wish to explore, the lives we hope to live, and the places we dream of going to. Although the idyllic rags-to-riches American Dream is still deeply embedded within us, the Googles and Instagrams of the world constantly expose us to different lifestyles with their filtered photographs of ornate architecture and cloudless skylines and teeming nightlife in cities spanning the globe. They’re beckoning us to come explore them in ways once unimaginable to the generations that have preceded us. Us millennials increasingly dream of the ability to do whatever we want, whenever we want, which leads me to my fundamental problem.

I need your help.

I’m currently at ESPN Radio in Central Connecticut. My contract expires in February, meaning I’ll have no reason to remain in this area. I’ve never had a “dream job,” but I have long coveted the chance to play a role -- any role -- in the production of a sports documentary or a long-form feature. Many of the films are rooted in historical subject matter, which often requires hours upon hours of research in libraries and archives. Once the information is gathered, a narrative can then be crafted through one’s writing and storytelling skills.

In my time here, I’ve made a great deal of connections and earned some respect, so much so that I’m confident I might be able to land myself in a program that could serve as a launchpad to the long-form platform at ESPN, which I believe offers the best in the business. I'm emotionally shaken to the core every single time I view one of their pieces, and the thought of one day playing a role in something like that sends chills down my spine.

However, it could take 1-3 more years of 50 hour weeks and overnight shifts and sleepless nights and holiday shifts. It will deplete my precious resources of time and energy and not allow for the early-to-bed, early-to-rise life I find myself craving every day. It will require me to constantly tie myself to technology while sitting in a chair for nine hours a day, two behaviors that I cringe upon thinking of.

Is that really worth it?

Because another part of me wants to completely drop everything and start anew somewhere else. Seriously, just pick a point on the map and go there. I’ll find my footing and pay the bills in more creative ways. I’ll live a more intentional life with less clutter and fewer possession and fewer commitments and fewer toxic people around me. I’ll have more time and energy to pursue the activities I love doing, like reading and writing and having meaningful conversation over a beverage of my choice. My heart tells me this is the time in my life to take the money I’ve saved and go out and see the country/world, meet new people, and certainly put myself in a number of uncomfortable situation, which is where the most growth happens.

Sure, staying at ESPN provides security and finances and benefits while the alternative may not. But if I stay here and continue my inevitable work-a-holic ways, I’m afraid I’ll never leave. I’m insanely competitive, and knowing my insatiable desire to outdo others, I’ll climb the ladder and eventually arrive at a place where I could never justify turning down undeniable prestige and a sexy paycheck.

My greatest fear in life is looking back with regrets. If I stay, will I regret never having taken advantage of the period of my life where I have absolutely nothing tying me to a certain place? If I go, will I regret turning my back on a job that I fantasized about for years in college and over the past 18 months? My head has one answer, while my heart gives me another.

I don’t know what to do. What do you think?

Social Media Warfare

We find ourselves existing in the apex of an era defined by around-the-clock judgment and ridicule, social media warfare and anonymous attacks on one’s character. Our nation’s citizens, which the Founding Fathers believed were a virtuous group, take every opportunity now to demean other people for their values and beliefs. It seems that a hateful message from a lunatic with a pitchfork always awaits us the next time we connect to WiFi.

MLK said it best: “Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.”

Come on y’all, we’re better than this.

I recently took a trip to Harvard’s highly-esteemed art museum. For hours I admired the creations of some of history’s brightest and most complex minds, and it hit me.

Monet and Degas’ perception of art may be completely different from mine, just like my interpretation of the meaning behind a sculpture may sound totally different than yours.

But you know what? That’s OK. If Edgar Degas lived in today’s hateful online cesspool, I certainly wouldn’t @ him  and tell him why his oils on canvases of young ballet dancers are stupid. That wouldn’t make him happy, nor would it make me proud of myself either. America’s most enticing freedom is that we are all entitled to form our own thoughts and opinions on any matter, but it doesn’t mean we have to hurl insults at those who disagree with or upset us. We all have different definitions of beauty, and that’s what’s beautiful about life. What’s not beautiful, however, is demeaning others.

One’s life trajectory mirrors that of the house-building process. To construct a house, you first lay the foundation. Then, you install floors and place the walls and build the roof. You now have all of your absolutely essential components to prevent the home from caving in.

But let me ask you this.

After doing all of this work, what would happen if a random person just started smashing holes through the walls and floorboards?

So the next time the urge to spread vitriol on social media overtakes you, remember that people can’t build their dream homes if someone like you constantly seeks to tear it down.

Be better.

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Message for the Highly Motivated

Once a candle’s wick is ignited, its flame can burn endlessly for hours, illuminating the surrounding space and filling its air with intoxicating aromas of vanilla or cinnamon or mint.

But as the ember calmly rages on, the wax inside the candle slowly withers away, the flame dimming with each passing hour. If no outside forces artificially extinguish it, the flame eventually burns itself out, leaving behind a decayed wick and hints of the smell that once was, and can no longer be.

Our older peers will often credit us for our abilities to inject new fires into seemingly lifeless people and/or situations. We can do this, of course, because we enter the next phase of our lives extremely confident and motivated to make an immediate impact. After all, we’ve dreamt about this moment for years now -- the days of independence and self-sufficiency.

So naturally, once we hear the gunfire signal the start of the race, we hit the ground running -- literally. We zoom past the competition, mocking them as we go by, wondering why they aren’t pushing themselves harder. We know in the moment we’re suffering, but we visualize the finish line and know that if we just stay the course, we’ll find ourselves dashing through the white tape in no time.

Instead, we run so fast and so early that we cannot possibly maintain this pace. After spending a few miles ahead of the pack, we eventually keel over to catch our breath, completely unaware until then of how lousy we feel. In almost the blink of an eye, our adrenal glands fail and the runners we thought were light years behind us come gliding by, smiling blissfully as they pace themselves upon reaching their final destination.

Candles are not meant to burn until they extinguish themselves. We want to preserve the candle’s scent, so we must blow it out once it has served its purpose for the day. And not even the best distance runners in the world expend 100 percent of their energy from the get-go because they know how crucial it is to reserve some fuel for later.

The next time you feel like you can’t run anymore, please stop running. Blow out the candle. Admitting defeat is a sign of strength, not weakness.

As they say, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Troy Farkas is an aspiring writer. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @tfark04.

Idea Lists

Facebook. Google. Amazon. Apple. Netflix. Uber.

Aside from the obvious answer, what’s the overarching similarity among these massively profitable and revolutionary corporations?

They all started with an idea.

Before anyone coded websites or designed iMacs, today’s crown jewels in innovation could have found their origin stories sloppily scribbled on napkins or pieces of scrap paper.

The Mark Zuckerbergs, Steve Jobses and Jeff Bezoses of the world held no internal or external advantages over you and me when they began their passion projects. Heck, Jobs worked on computers in his garage and Bezos sold books out of his.

So what’s stopping you from exploring your own innovation and creating something new?

Two things:

Distractions

Our attention, one of our five primary resources*, is more divided than it’s ever been. We hear the “ping” of a notification and immediately drop our current activity and shift our attention to the glowing screen of our smartphones. We struggle to focus on one singular activity in the present because we believe there’s always something else worthy of our attention. The onus falls upon us to drown out the noise and focus on the present moment, an increasingly difficult task in today's age.

“I don’t have time”

We have 24 hours in a day -- that’s plenty of time. In reality, it’s an answer you hope the person you’re upsetting will understand as a valid reason for your inability to do whatever they asked of you. It’s also an easy saying we use to excuse ourselves from activities that force us out of our comfort zones. I've always believed that if you really want to do something, you’ll find the time.

If the thought of entrepreneurship excites you, or if you want to explore the limitless capabilities of your brainpower, I present you with this challenge:

Sit in a chair with a notebook and pen. Put the phone in airplane mode. Turn Netflix off. Take out your earbuds. Eliminate the distractions (but a glass of wine or a beer couldn’t hurt, right?)

On a page, write the numbers 1 through 10.

Now, think. Seriously, stare at the wall and think. It's that simple.

Think as micro or macro as you wish. What frustrates you? What changes do you wish to see in the world? How can you create something new and exciting, something unseen by human eyes?

Challenge yourself. If you get on a roll, shoot for more than 10 ideas. Think creatively. It’s for your eyes only, so don’t be embarrassed by anything you write. Too often, pessimists discourage the creativity of the youth and pass our ideas off as naivete. Don’t let anyone criticize you for formulating a “bad idea,” because there’s no such thing.

Your options for these “idea lists” are endless. This very post was created out of my own that I titled “10 Possible Blog Posts.”

So get started today with just some paper and a writing utensil. No distractions; just you alone with the unlimited possibilities percolating in your mind.

And maybe you should start in your garage. That seems to be the way to go.

* (https://bit.ly/2M9RxeC)

Troy Farkas is an aspiring writer. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @tfark04.

Patience

Good things come to those who wait, they say.

But damn, we hate waiting.

With seemingly everything we need just a touch of a button away today, we become prisoners of impatience when we cannot access the answers we crave.

We wish the roads of life were splattered with billboards alerting us to our final destinations laying just around the bend. I’m constantly stressed about my future and often wish to see giant signs advertising everything that’s going to happen in the next phase of my life.

When we venture down untraveled roads, we turn to our GPS to dictate a crystal clear A-to-B route to us. Just follow my path, the automated voice tells us, and we’ll arrive at our destination with ease.

Only if it were that simple in the real world.

The truth is, our life’s journey is so long. It’s never as simple as Point A to Point B because of all the different metaphorical bumps in the road that present themselves. Therefore we arrive at our destinations, the ones we’ve dreamt about since our youth, often via a completely different route than the one we intended.

When we graduate from college and enter the so-called “real world,” we expect everything to come quickly to us because well, that’s the way it generally is in adolescence. We'll find a job a month or two after crossing the stage. We'll spend a year or two at that bottom-of-the-barrel "foot in the door" place. And then we'll certainly have an overwhelming amount of options to choose from because everyone will want us, right? And we'll find our ideal life partner in that time also, right? And then, by age 25, we'll have everything figured out, right?

Wrong.

As I’ve quickly discovered, no matter how much we excel, upward mobility moves at a glacier-like pace. Our savings accounts don’t accumulate as quickly as they once did now that we’re responsible for paying rent and student loans. Employers don’t promote us every six months or care about our development as much as our parents, teachers, coaches and other mentors once did. And god, dating outside of a school atmosphere presents a whole world of challenges unseen before in our lives.

We must push the dreams of our future to the back of our minds and stress that we’ll get there one day, but it will just take a long time. Ater all, nothing worth having comes quickly or easily. We can’t stew in frustration over our snail-like-paced development; instead, we need to embrace the possibilities of the present moment while also keeping our Personal Legends close to heart.

Do this, and one day, the bumps and bruises you incur along the way will not derail you. Like the calluses on the carpenter’s hands, you will eventually become numb to the hardships and accept them as a necessary evil. Just persevere through it and one day, somewhere in the future, you’ll stare in amazement at the mesmerising structure you’ve just created.

It will happen. Just be patient.

Personal Legends

I recently reread a childhood favorite of mine, The Alchemist by Paula Coelho. It tells of a young Arab boy and the search for his personal treasure located near the pyramids of Egypt. Along the way, he encounters mankind's demons in the form of thievery and war, and also its greatest gifts like education, friendship and love. This blending of trials and tribulations while in pursuit of his treasure culminates into what Coelho calls the boy’s “Personal Legend.”

Once I finished The Alchemist, I immediately asked myself the question I’ve wrestled with over the past year, albeit without this terminology.

What’s my Personal Legend?

In other words, what’s my mission? Why do I exist?

I’ve never had a concrete answer. I can’t say, “Oh yeah, I want to be a cardiac surgeon and save lives.” A singular option has never presented itself to me.

But I’m O.K. with that. I believe my possibilities are endless, so limiting myself to one outcome would be a disservice to all. Additionally, if that singular goal never came to fruition, then thoughts of regrets and undelivered promises would haunt me forever.

Like you, I get the questions all of the time.You know, the ones from nagging aunts, uncles, or first date prospects about where we see ourselves in 10 years. If you’ve asked me this question before, I’ve probably answered with something like this:

I’ve never stayed up late at night dreaming about any specific path. Throughout my entire life, if I’ve ever only known one thing about myself, it’s that I love performing for people. First, I performed in front of raucous parents and students on the baseball fields and basketball courts of my youth. Then, I roamed the front of classrooms giving presentations on historical figures like Voltaire and Friedrich Nietzsche. For years I poured my emotions out in choir halls, practice rooms, living rooms, showers, streets, and later, on stages. In college, I wrote for the newspaper and talked on the radio and appeared on student television. Now, I write for you.

I’ve spent the last 20 years harnessing and improving upon the vast array of communication skills that run in my blood. With those skills, I’ve mobilized people to action and driven others to tears. I’ve evoked love, hate, curiosity and anger. Taken together, all of this is what will drive me for the rest of my life.

That’s why it’s my Personal Legend.

Unlike the cardiac surgeon example, my Personal Legend permits room for interpretation. It allows some space for deviations and miscalculation, missteps that one must confront en route to realizing one’s Personal Legend. Acts taken to pursue my Personal Legend can come in many forms. At the moment, I write this blog and help produce radio shows that entertain people. Unfortunately I’m not the person directly providing the entertainment, but I help facilitate it. If I felt I were not playing a meaningful role in delivering people valuable content, then I'd have to leave Connecticut.

But in the future, the road to fulfilling my Personal Legend will be filled with exciting creative endeavors. Maybe I’ll write books one day or start a podcast or film a documentary. I might speak in schools and concert venues and coffee shops about harnessing one's creative spirit and how to create something meaningful out of it. I'm confident the right opportunities and the right people will surface at the right time. Because as Coelho repeatedly says in The Alchemist, “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

It’s a lifelong pursuit, my Personal Legend. I don’t know if I’ll ever reach a point where I can definitively say I’ve achieved it because one cannot measure my Personal Legend; it's not tangible. That's O.K., because I know I'll have a hell of a time changing lives along the way. And that's good enough for me.

Troy Farkas is an aspiring writer. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @tfark04. Message him if you need help identifying and achieving your own Personal Legend.