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A Year of No Expectations

Posted on January 25, 2012 by jessicahlawrence

A year ago today, I had this ticket in my hand as I boarded the plane:

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.

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Love and Family History on a Plate

Posted on September 29, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

A few Sundays ago, I found myself craving a tuna fish sandwich. Not just any tuna fish sandwich. Tuna fish the way we ate it around the kitchen table on Sunday afternoons growing up.  My dad had a special, simple recipe: white meat tuna in water, drained and mixed with salt and pepper, lemon juice, chopped celery and just enough mayonaise to taste, piled between two slices of toasted white bread and accompanied by a glass of cold milk, potato chips, and the Sunday Times spread amongst the four of us.

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
And in learning all of that, I should finally be able to pass those plates of love and family history on to my future kids too.
(I’ll be documenting everything I make here on occasion, but mostly on my Love on a Plate Tumblr)

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A Morning with Meaning

Posted on September 27, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

We often get up in the morning and immediately jump into where we left off the night before: we flip open our laptops (or even just roll over and grab our phones) and dive back into email or whatever windows we left open on our computer. The problem with this (as I’ve written about before) is that often times hours can go by and then we realize that we haven’t actually gotten anything of any importance done.

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.

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Courage to Start

Posted on September 15, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

I’ve been thinking a lot more about something Seth Godin wrote about on his blog the other day, and that I’ve written about before too.

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.  

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The Best One Word Question

Posted on September 14, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

I realized recently how much I do out of routine.

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.

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I’ll Take My 15 Minutes Back

Posted on September 13, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

Your meeting ended earlier than you expected.

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.

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Regret Me Not Project Day 135: Actionable Empathy

Posted on August 14, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

I didn’t really understand how important dedicated bike lanes were until I tried riding a bike in a part of the city that doesn’t have them.

I didn’t understand how crappy the software was that some of my staff had to use every day until I sat down and spent a few hours trying to use it myself.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t been empathetic about these situations in the past. I always thought bike lanes were a good idea. And I certainly listened to my team when they complained about their software.

But I didn’t really, truly understand deep down in my gut until I actually became the biker and the software user.

Before, I simply had empathy.

After, I had actionable empathy – empathy that would move me to do something, to fix something, or to at least be prepared to shout my support instead of keeping it quietly to myself.

 

 

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Regret Me Not for Good

Posted on August 10, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

My birthday was back in May. That day was supposed to mark the end of my Regret Me Not Project, the point at which I would have had all the experiences, learned all the skills, read all the books, and watched all the movies that I had on my lists.

I’ve done a lot in the past nine months, including having lots of experiences that have scared the crap out of me. I took a kiteboarding lesson…I did roller derby…I took improv classes and then performed in front of a live audience…I took voice lessons.

After growing up with asthma and never even being able to finish a 9-minute run in high school gym class, I started running the 3.5 mile loop near my house.  I finally went back to dancing again and for a couple months before I moved to NYC, spent three hours in the dance studio every Monday night, taking jazz, ballet and hip-hop back to back. I took a series of salsa and lindy lop lessons.

I took Pure Barre classes, a meditation class and a Cheese 101 class. I had my first mushrooms, oysters, and real sushi.

There are still a lot books I haven’t read and movies I haven’t watched. And I still haven’t had a drumming lesson, or become an expert on wine or craft cocktails, but I happen to know just the perfect person now to help me with those things. ;  )

And I think my desire to the learn how to play the guitar has morphed into a desire to learn how to play the fiddle, and now that I’m moving into a new apartment, one things I’m most excited about is that it has a kitchen big enough to allow me to expand my cookware beyond one frying pan.

Other than still needing to go to a spa and a beach bonfire, now that I’m really looking at it, I actually did almost everything on my experience and skill lists.

And in the end, the point of this whole experiment wasn’t just to do all of these things, it was to change my mindset and the way that I approached life in the process. I wanted to stop living in the “when” (putting off truly living until some nebulous point the future) and I wanted to start living in the “now.”

That shift of perspective occurred in much more dramatic way then I imagined.

My Regret Me Not Project woke me up and opened my heart. It made me much more keenly aware of who I am and what it is that inspires me. I’m able to be so much more present in everything I experience and am much quicker to say “yes” to experiencing something new, which changed everything about how I move through life.

And I knew all of this was important, but I then I came across this blog post being passed around on Twitter, and it became even more clear just how important the work I had been doing was.  On her blog, Bronnie Ware, who had worked for many years with people in palliative care, posted the top five regrets that the patients she supported had on their deathbeds:

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
  2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Without knowing it when I started out, my Regret Me Not Project was really about avoiding those five regrets.

And that’s exactly why I’m going to keep going. I don’t believe in bucket lists because they let people off the hook too much – they still allow you to overwork and lose touch with friends and ignore living until the point when you’re almost dead.

So I’m going to keep posting about whatever I’m learning and experiencing that fits into the Regret Me Not philosophy alongside my other thoughts because I never want to lose this mindset.

I’m thinking a lot now about how I want this project to evolve as I evolve and I can’t wait to share some of those thoughts and plans with you as I get a little more of the thinking done about it.

Regret. Me. Not.

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Regret Me Not Project Day 133: Email Mercy

Posted on June 16, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

I’ve been thinking a lot about email lately (and it turns out, so have a number of other people like TED’s Chris Anderson and Seth Godin).

I’ve been thinking about email not only because I have overflowing inboxes, but because I’ve realized that email is a tremendous source of daily guilt for me.

The guilt comes from wanting to be able to respond to everyone in a timely manner, but having these horrifying moments when I realize that somehow an entire week has gone by (or even two weeks or…oyyyyy…even a month) since someone emailed me. And there the email is, sitting in my inbox, waiting for me to hit reply.

I picture the person sitting on the other end of their computer, wondering why I haven’t responded yet.

I have been that person, waiting for a response from someone, making up reasons in my head for why they haven’t responded yet, like:

  • They don’t like me
  • I said something offensive
  • I did something offensive
  • Whatever I emailed them about isn’t important to them
  • They aren’t really my friend after all
  • They’re slacking off
  • They’re busy
  • Their inbox is overflowing

After ruminating about all of those potential reasons, the only ones that ever seem to turn out to actually be true are the last two.

Thinking about it a little further, the main reason I don’t reply back to people in a timely manner is a combo of being busy and having an overflowing inbox, plus something else: because I care about how I respond and get very few emails that can be responded to in just a couple of words, writing a thoughtful response takes time and a fairly significant amount of energy, both of which seem to be in diminishing supply.

In addition, to be totally honest, sometimes I end up rebelling against my inbox in favor of connecting with people in person. I know that email can help facilitate and initiate those in-person meetings, but at the same time, as the amount of time that I spend responding to email increases, the amount of time that I have for grabbing coffee with someone decreases dramatically.

Never mind that giving over huge chunks of my day to email means that I have almost no time to think and create things that will last much longer than the short-term firedrills that email creates.

I end up hating email because it takes me away from the things that matter.

I think everyone is getting to their breaking point. I’ve noticed that response times have been slowing down across all platforms – from email to Twitter to texting.

I used to get incredibly annoyed and think that people were really rude if they didn’t respond immediately when I texted them. Since everyone carried their cell phones around all the time, it seemed implausible that anyone would ever have a reason for waiting for hours before texting me back

And then one day I realized that I had let a whole day go by after I had received a text from a close friend, and I still hadn’t responded yet.

That was when I knew something was really going wrong.

Then I realized I hadn’t talked to my parents in almost two weeks.

And then I realized I hadn’t talked to a good friend in California for months, and the only time I ended up being able to catch up with her was while I was trapped on a five hour ferry boat ride in which my service kept cutting out because I was in the middle of the ocean.

I had to be in the middle of the ocean in order to finally find the time to talk to someone I care about a lot? There is something very, very wrong about that.

I really don’t like living a life where the most meaningful interactions are the ones that happen the least frequently.

And now that I think about, I can’t remember a single time when email alone has been the platform for a meaningful social interaction. It has helped facilitate interactions in other settings, but I don’t know that I’ve ever walked away from an email exchange thinking “man, that was powerful” and feeling incredibly fulfilled.

So, what do we do? There are days when I feel like I’m going to literally die under a pile of email. And I know that there are a lot others who feel the same way. But it seems like everyone feels stuck with it – like because we were given the tool, we have to use it and this is just our fate and the way that the world is.

I’m contemplating a few things that I might do to deal with this problem, but I’m not sure what exactly I’m going to do yet.

In the meantime, I’ll raise the white flag and say that if you don’t reply to an email of mine for a really long time, I’ll understand. I won’t assume that you are slacking. I will assume that what’s going on with you is the same thing that’s going on with me.

Let’s all have a little email mercy on each other.

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Regret Me Not Project Day 132: Interview with Catharina Bruns of workisnotajob.

Posted on May 31, 2011 by jessicahlawrence

Yay! Today I’m soooooo excited to feature an interview I did recently with Catharina Bruns who runs workisnotajob., a concept and design studio that not only does outstanding design work but also serves up amazing doses of inspiration and loving kick-in-the-pants reminders of what’s truly important.

I had been following Catharina on Twitter for a while, and finally got the opportunity to meet her while we were both working out of the Loosecubes headquarters the other week.  We got into a discussion about a blog post I had just written about the strange habit of people to compete with each other over prizes that don’t actually matter that much (like having more Facebook friends than anyone you know). Cath had some really interesting things to say about what motivates her, so I asked her if I could interview her, and these are her thoughtful responses. 

Me: We were talking the other day about people being motivated by somewhat arbitrary prizes (like having more Twitter followers than someone else or earning more money) – you said that those things never really cross your mind as motivators. Since those aren’t factors, what does drive you? 

Cath: I just strongly believe that we all should contribute to the world by living our individual talents and make things that we feel passionate about happen. We should use this life to satisfy ourselves with our work and help others along the way. I don’t understand how it is motivating to look at other people’s achievements. I personally don’t see competitors, I only learn from other and see the  work I want to do. And to do the work and the challenge to create my own path and fulfill a purpose – constantly motivates me. 

Me: Do you think you’ve been motivated by the same things as a kid or has that changed over time? 

Cath: Well, I certainly didn’t call it “work” back then but I always thought that I need to “do something” to express myself and loved it when others were interesting in the way they were doing stuff. I was so busy with trying to understand the world and how I make sense in all this – I am obviously still learning and think if you do the work you love (aka do something that leads to something you can work with) it really helps you to understand your purpose. And motivation I think has a lot to do with knowing your purpose.

Me: You mentioned when we were talking that you are able to be authentically excited for someone else’s success. A lot of people have trouble with that. What is your philosophy or approach to life that allows you to celebrate the success of others so easily? 

Cath: This might not be an exciting answer but: Firstly, there is room for everyone. The more people do interesting things, the better. But also: It just doesn’t even occur to me that other people’s success etc is in relation to my own journey.  Clearly, everyone has their own background, reasons, gifts and challenges and to compare your dreams, achievements or your struggles with someone else in the world is to do a disservice to the uniqueness of both of you. I love when people work on what they love and get rewarded for their work – I want to encourage everyone to be on that journey and even if you don’t aspire to do great things, I think you should! I think to do what you individually can is crucial for the greater good,  so go and live your dream already. And you better not compare yourself to others on the way because even if it seems someone else’s life path is similar to yours, it is not. I wish you great success!

Me: There is more emphasis now on finding work that is directly connected to your passion. Do you feel like you have a definitive passion? If so, when did you discover what it was and what was the process like to get there? 

Cath: I am convinced that the things that come naturally to you, that make hours pass like minutes, that make you feel alive – that is where your passion lies. As anyone else, I am very passionate about some stuff and pretty ignorant to a lot of other things. I actually believe, indifference is as important as passion. To actively explore the areas that you feel passionate about sometime seem to be in conflict with what society suggests you should pursue and what’s “realistic”- that’s why a lot of people end up in jobs they hate, spend money they don’t have and do things that kill their spirit.  So we need to ask ourselves in who’s reality do we want to live in? We need to realize that we don’t have to be what other people expect us to be and that we don’t have to comply with other people’s structure. I do what I love because I believe, anything else is not right for me and not helpful for anyone else either. When I freed myself from the thought I had to “work they way the world works” and learned to embrace my own way of doing things, I was able to pursue my passion. 

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