We worry about how we’ll be perceived when we have to tell someone what we do at a cocktail party or when we run into an old colleague or schoolmate who hasn’t seen us in years.

We learn intuitively as we grow up, without anyone ever having to tell us, what our community deems as successful. We may be applauded for becoming a doctor, but not so much if we become an auto mechanic or a barista, no matter how great we are at the job.

As we scroll through status updates on Facebook and Twitter, we’re constantly confronted by other people’s ambitions and often can’t help but to use their success as a measuring stick of our own.

In this great TED talk, Alain de Botton implores that we ask ourselves a question that I think is essential to getting ourselves out of the habit of subjective success measuring: are we “truly the authors of our own ambitions”?

For most of my childhood and young adult life, I had a nagging sense that there was something wrong with me. I could never place exactly what it was, but it seemed to come up everywhere, from my choices of what I did with my time (I loved to read by myself or hang out with my mom) to the classroom (where my more vocal classmates always spoke ahead of me). I spent a tremendous amount of time trying to fix what was “wrong” with me by forcing myself in any way that I could to fit in with everyone else, from joining a multitude of clubs in high school to a year-long stint as a member of a sorority in college. None of it ever worked.

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I discovered that there was in fact, nothing wrong with me. I was sitting in a meeting at United Way, and the new head of the organization was introducing himself. He spent time telling us about his professional background and then shifted to telling us more about his personal life. At the time, it seemed a little bit out of place – I was not used to someone in a business meeting delving so deeply into his life and personality.

It was one of those moments though, that ended up being a pivotal turning point for me. As he described himself, he unabashedly called himself an introvert. I had heard that term before and knew that I technically fell into that category on personality scales like Myers-Briggs, but I had never really understood what the term meant and usually felt that it was given a negative connotation (like being incredibly shy or anti-social). The way that he explained the term introvert, though, was different: Introverts and extroverts get their energy from different places. Extroverts tend to get energized by spending time in large groups and being with other people. Introverts, on the other hand, tend to gain energy by being alone or with a close friend.

That was me. I did like people (in fact, I loved a core group of people incredibly deeply. I was empathetic, caring, and put a lot of effort into helping people that I cared about). But if I hung out in a large group or with a group of strangers, I lost energy quickly. Part of it was that I found small talk challenging – I had an innate preference for talking about deeper, more serious subjects and often felt awkward trying to dive into a conversation that didn’t feel substantive right away. I also tended to be a private person, keeping a lot about my personal life to myself except with people I knew well, but sometimes made me come across as snobby or inaccessible.

Over the years, I did what many introverts do when they’re working on something they’re passionate about: they adopt somewhat of a public extrovert personality. I figured out how to get good at (and even enjoy) things like public speaking and mingling at cocktail parties because they were in service to something much bigger that I cared about, but I have never lost those key qualities that make me an introvert.

Since I first heard the explanation of introversion and extraversion at that United Way meeting, I’ve read a lot  on the subject, but Quiet is the first book I’ve read that didn’t end up making me feel like introversion is something to be fixed. And it also didn’t come across as one giant cheer that ends in “Goooooooooooo Innies!!!”

Quiet provides a scientific, historical, and cultural context for introversion and extroversion, which not only illuminates the topic, but provides a clear argument for why we need both introverts and extroverts in order to make the world work.

I hadn’t realized until I was reading Quiet how much I still carry around a tremendous amount of guilt for not always being like the rest of the world and for needing things that the rest of the “normal” world doesn’t seem to want or need, whether it’s needing to hide out in the bathroom for a couple minutes so I can have a moment of solitude in a busy day or wanting steer away from small talk and always delve more deeply into conversations.

Quiet explains pretty much everything I never understood about myself. I cried as an 8th grader because I couldn’t figure out how to be like everyone else. I finally realize, deep in my gut and without guilt, that that’s not the point.

One-way from LA to New York.

I could say that I arrived in the city with a couple of suitcases and a dream, but that wouldn’t be quite accurate.

It was more like five suitcases (plus carry-ons) and not much of a dream at all.

I didn’t arrive with a dream of changing the world. I didn’t arrive with a dream of building a business that would take off. I knew I wanted to live in New York, and that was about it.

It seems a little bit strange in way, when I look back over my year, and realize that I didn’t plan any of it. I didn’t set any goals or benchmarks. I didn’t write down what I wanted to achieve and then work methodically towards accomplishing it.

That may seem counter to the standard advice for getting things done, that writing things down and mapping out a plan creates better results then flying by the seat of your pants. And while I believe that to do lists and work plans may be great for project management and to add shape to goals once you decide that you want to do something, if you apply them to life in general, it often backfires. Those lists can create artificial fences and be so limiting that you miss all of the good stuff because you’re concentrating too hard on item number three on your life to do list.

Living with no goals or expectations over the past year has led to an embarrassment of riches: a man that I love, a circle of friends and a community that inspires me, a job that I adore, a place to live that makes me happy every time I walk through the front door.

And yet I’ve come across people who find it hard to believe that I’m not harboring a secret desire to do something huge, to launch a startup or build schools in Africa or have a high-level position at a famous company. It’s like there’s this expectation that most people are just biding their time doing something for now until they can finally do what they have always wanted to do.

But that’s not me.

It’s also not that because I have no expectations, I’m living a life without vision. I have a vision for what the organization I lead can become over the next year – but it’s visceral first and to-do listy second. And I have a vision for what I think the most essential components of my life are: my relationships, work that is challenging and peaks my curiosity, and exploring things that make me feel alive (like cooking or bringing interesting groups of people together). That vision helps me be incredibly open and intuitively make choices without putting up unnecessary barriers.

Living this year of no expectations has left me with a tremendous sense of gratitude. For the things that have happened. For how much I have learned. And for the amazing group of people who proved my point about having no expectations because any bar I could have set for them would have been a bar set too low.

In the past, the length of time that we expected to be in a job or a specific career was likely to match the timespan of the other commitments we wanted to make: we could plan to spend 30 years in a job, and also plan to spend 20 to 30 years paying for a house; 20 to 30 years raising kids; and 40 or more years in a marriage.

Planning in multi-decade increments felt comfortable because we could count on a job (and then some kind of retirement) to support us during that entire span of span of time.

Now, many of us still have those life goals (get married, own a home, have kids), but a lot fewer of us have a job or career that will be consistent over the same timespan. On average, people now stay in jobs for only 3 to 5 years, and that can be even shorter for Gen Y and for people involved in certain industries (like people in tech startups who seem to change jobs every six months to a year).

That leaves me with a question I haven’t quite found the answer to: how, exactly, are we supposed to go about making 20 to 30 year commitments to a house and raising kids when we can only see our future income six months, a year, or, at most, a couple years out?

It’s easier to categorize things that way. It’s easier to say that something is either simply good or bad then to come up with a complicated descriptive term that allows for it to be a little bit of both.

Our natural reaction when something doesn’t work also has a tendency towards extremes. We react to failure by swinging the pendulum in the complete opposite direction.

There are a lot of people (including me) who find themselves in this trap when it comes to how much impact they can have on the world. I find myself swinging back and forth at times between feeling like I can change the world and feeling like I can’t change anything.

But as a wise friend pointed out to me this morning, there is something in the middle.

In between doing nothing and changing the entire world, there is a lot that can be done.

Maybe I can’t change the entire world, but I can make one person’s life better.

It’s a simple thought and certainly not a new one, but it’s something that seems incredibly easy to forget as we all strive to add value to the world.

As I grew up, there were also my grandmother’s famous chocolate chip cookies…

My mom’s flank steak, applesauce, corn chowder, meatloaf…

My dad’s techniques for broiling buttered bagels or making pancakes from a Shaker recipe…

The neighbors up and down street helped me fall in love with brownies with cream cheese frosting and puffy, crispy pavlovas.

There is so much of my childhood that is tied to the food the generations before me created. A giant serving of love and family history on a plate.

But I had this jarring realization the other day: while my parents cooked memorable meals for my brother and me, if I had kids right now, I would not be able to give them the same thing.

Why?

Because I can’t cook.

It’s not because my parents didn’t try to teach me. And it has nothing to do with my genes - I’m related to enough great cooks (including my brother) to know that being a good cook is entirely possible for me.

My main problem is that I haven’t really been practicing. I’ve constantly been in situations when other people have done the cooking or when choosing to eat out was too easy or when I didn’t even have a kitchen.

But when I eventually have kids, I want them to have meals that mean something. I want the food that I cook for them to make them feel warm and loved. And when they grow up, I want them to ask me for recipes the way that I’ve called my mom asking for the recipes for her corn chowder and meatloaf.

Learning how to cook was one of the skills on my Regret Me Not project list that I didn’t get to before my birthday this year. But I’m going to get to it now.

Here’s the plan:

1. I’ll make an inventory of what I already know how to cook (I can, in fact, fry an egg…at least sometimes)
2. I’ll learn some basics (I’ve been looking at the awesome book Notes on Cooking already)
3. I’ll cook something (anything) every day
4. I’ll learn how to cook something from someone else at least once a month
5. I’ll host a dinner party or brunch at least every other month

I started an experiment a couple of weeks ago to see what would happen if I didn’t look at my inbox until I had done at least 3 hours of real work. This practice worked great – I got way more work done and still took care of what I needed to in terms of responding to email. I deviated sometimes, especially when the work I needed to do was related to the emails I had waiting for me, and it was a struggle to constantly remind myself to adopt this new practice, but it proved to me how much we get sucked into to doing things that make us feel busy.

Doing the email experiment connects with something else I started thinking about earlier in the summer. I had been thinking about the few things I can do in a short amount of time each morning that have the highest ROI. My thought was that if I can make my day meaningful in the first hour that I’m awake, then on the days when things seem to spiral out of control, I don’t end the day feeling like it was a waste.

So I’ve been experimenting now with a high meaning, high ROI morning. It’s a combination of the things we know have the highest impact on our overall well-being, our creativity, and our ability to contribute something meaningful to the world. And it takes less than an hour.

1. Do 10 push-ups and 50 situps (less than 5 minutes). It may not seem like much, but at least it is something. At least I get up and get my body moving. Doing this small amount of exercise motivates me towards doing more and on the days I do this, I feel better.
2. Write Morning Pages (10 – 15 minutes, sometimes a little longer). This is the morning mind dump. Whatever you woke up worrying about, whatever you’ve got on your mind, falls out onto the page. Morning pages is a concept I learned through Julia Cameron‘s book The Artist’s Way. In the traditional way, you write 3 pages by hand of literally anything that comes to mind. If you need a more modern way (because writing by hand can be painfully slow), I use 750words.com.  No one is going to see what you write. It’s your way of clearing your mind at the start of your day.
3. Meditate (10 minutes). I used to shy away from meditation because I associated it with freewheeling hippies who didn’t shower, always smelled like patchouli, and had an unrealistic view of the world. But the research is there that meditation is absolutely one of the best things you can do for yourself mentally and physically. It reduces stress. It helps you handle the ups and downs of a day. It teaches you a skillset that you don’t really learn anywhere else. My favorite way of meditating in the morning is with Susan Piver as my guide – she is the one who helped me realize that meditation is not just hooka-hooka stuff for hippies. You can follow ten-minute guided meditations as part of her Open Heart Project. 
4. Create something (1o to 30 minutes or longer). This is something that stuck with me from a post on Leo Babauta’s blog about creating a profound workday. We are really good a filling our days with doing, but not so good at filling our days with creating. If you start each day by creating something – writing a helpful blog post, taking a photograph, even drawing a little sketch – the day feels different because you’ve already added something meaningful.

We often worry so much about whether our ideas are good enough, whether what we’re about to do is going to have an impact, that we never even bother to start.  We worry that whatever we do won’t be enough. 

But what if you forget about trying to get over all of your fears? What if you simply conjure up the courage to start? To take one step forward at building something, at creating art, at making the world better? 

That one step, it turns out, means something. In fact, it means a lot.

With that one step, it’s likely that you will inspire someone else to take a step forward themselves. You will give them the courage to start.

Your courage to take a small step creates a chain reaction of small steps. And those small steps add up to something big.  

The routine of my own habits.

The routine of other people’s expectations.

So I started asking myself a question every day.

Many, many times throughout the day.

It’s the best question ever.

And it’s only one word.

Why?

Why am I about to RSVP to this event?

Why am I setting up this meeting?

Why am I feeling bummed out right now?

But I don’t let myself end there.

I’ll follow it up by asking again: “no, really, why?“

If it’s a complicated why, sometimes I’ll draw it out – create a little diagram that looks like the expanding roots of a tree. I’ll keep asking myself “why?” until I get to the real answer.

My questioning of myself isn’t about passing judgment. It’s about understanding motivation.

Because understanding motivation is the key to helping me separate out what’s truly important from what’s not.

Your conference call didn’t take as long as you thought.

You find yourself on the train for a commute that is taking a little longer than usual.

The dentist is late finishing up with the patient before you.

You’ve got 15 minutes.

What are you going to do with that time?

For me, those are the times when the guilt sets in, when I think I should be doing something “productive.”

And productivity experts would be quick to jump in and give me tips on how to make the most out of that time – how those little pockets of 15 minutes throughout the day can lead to getting a lot more done.

But I find it kind of ridiculous that we’ve come to believe that we have to fill every nook and cranny of our day with doing something.

If we can’t give ourselves the fifteen minutes in the waiting room at the dentist or the five minutes in line at the grocery store to just chill out instead of sending emails or making a phone call, then we’re doing something wrong.

We’re doing too much. And we’re focusing too much on productivity techniques being the trash compactors of lives – squishing as much as possible into the small space we’ve got in a day.

If productivity is supposed to about getting more of my life back, then I’ll take my 15 minutes back.

And gladly do nothing but stare out the window.