WHY YOU SHOULD KEEP ALL YOUR DREAMS IN PLAY

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been feeling like I have to be more selective with the things I want to do and stopping myself from following my impulses. When I was younger, I had no inhibitions about uploading silly videos of myself onto the internet for the sake of sharing it with my friends and having a good laugh. Now? I have to consider all these things like, OMG, it’s going to be on the internet forever. How will this affect my professional career? Does it align with my current brand image? How will everybody think of me? Everybody’s going to judge me! And so what happens? I don’t let myself make spur-of-the-moment videos. I don’t let myself follow my intuition. I don’t let myself have any fun. But it’s all for a greater cause I say to myself. Because by not wasting time and energy on the inessential, I get to focus all my energy on one goal and be that much more effective.

This is a rather widely accepted notion. Famous quotes like, “Jack of all trades, master of none” seems to run quite rampant in the motivational quotes arena, but I think there is something missing here. There's this idea that it’s bad to have multiple interests. Because someone is a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, we make the false assumption that this is all he will ever be. We neglect the fact that this is precisely the path one takes when discovering mastery. Some people just take a little longer than others. 

“All knowledge leads to self-knowledge.”
- Bruce Lee 

The more you get to explore, try new things and follow your curiosity, the more you know and the more capable you are of being fully equipped and ready to tackle that one thing in life. But if you pigeonhole yourself too early on, you end up learning less about the world and less about yourself.

Energy has the capability of feeding back into itself, but when you don’t allow yourself to flow, that energy is never used. It is not recycled or redirected toward your ultimate goal; it is simply sitting there, holding you back, and growing stale. 

Solution:

Let it all flow. Keep everything in play. Don’t cut anything out. This is how you live a rich life, and this is how you maintain your momentum, progress, and growth. 

“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”
- Albert Einstein 

Your interests, impulses, and intuition manifest themselves in different forms. Energy can feed back into itself, get stronger, and eventually morph into something absolutely beautiful, but not if your energy is blocked.

If you look at how rivers form, they do not start as giant streams. They start as a collection of tiny segments – a master of none, if you may – but if you look closely you will find that these seemingly tiny streams start to build momentum. The flow becomes stronger, bigger, faster, all the way until they naturally find their way together, raging with power and becoming a force to be reckoned with. This is made possible because the individual streams explored other avenues and strengthened on their own. By following through with each individual path, the collective whole of the river is made stronger when they finally join forces. Your interests are not as disconnected as you think.

You need to trust that all your seemingly disconnected interests will lead you to somewhere great. If not, believe that it will at least make you a better person with every step you take. Don’t cut anything out because when you do, you are cutting yourself out.

I make fun little videos, and I do it because I get a lot of joy out of them. I also take design classes, swimming lessons, and even started taking voice lessons recently. They do not align perfectly with who I am as a professional. Some of you might even think it’s a waste of time. I admit that it’s very much a sidetrack to what I’ve become known for – photography. It’s random. It’s unedited. It’s raw. If anything, it’s much closer to the real me.

These seemingly random hobbies feed into each other. It doesn’t take anything away. In fact, it makes me feel more alive. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to learn to trust all the pieces in play and to let my interests take me where it will. I let myself be free. I believe that life has something far greater and brighter planned for me than anything I could ever imagine, but first I have to be open to it, and it starts by allowing myself to take these chances.

Stay curious. Keep looking. Keep changing. And let life flow through you.

by Jason Lam

HOW TO KNOW IF YOU'RE MAKING THE RIGHT DECISION

In under 12 hours, I will be taking a one-way flight back to California. My bags are packed. My bedroom walls are empty. Someone else will take my place in this apartment as soon as I leave, and as I spend my last night here in New York City, I can't help but ask the question, "Am I making the right decision?"

This question always finds a way to present itself whenever we sum up the courage to make big “life decisions,” such as when we decide to quit our jobs and travel the world or when we decide to end a relationship with a loved one. It always presents itself at the worst possible times, like right now, the night before my departure … “Am I making the right decision?” And it doesn’t stop there because months later, you’ll still be asking yourself, “Did I make the right decision?”

I'm actually writing this post today not because I'm leaving New York City, but because I recently broke up with my girlfriend. 

"Am I making the right decision?"

To make life-altering decisions is to also believe that you will be bettering your life in some way, shape or form. Moving away from home is founded on the belief that your destination will bring you more joy, or at least a different type of joy that home was missing. Quitting your job is founded on the belief that you’ll find a better, and hopefully a higher paying job. Ending a relationship with a loved one is founded on the belief that you will find someone else who can bring you more joy ... or at the least, accept you for the shitty person that you really are.

However, hesitation can sometimes be interpreted as a sign that whatever you are pursuing is, in fact, the correct path. Steven Pressfield calls it the "Resistance." Seth Godin calls it the "Lizard Brain." Lynda Barry calls it the "Two Questions." And Greg Miller calls it the "Dragon," which is how I will be explaining this concept.

So what is the Dragon?

The Dragon is basically this gigantic monster that shows up every time you want to do anything new and risky. The Dragon is there to scare you and prevent you from succeeding. The closer you get to following through with your decisions, the stronger and scarier the Dragon becomes. Often times, the Dragon manifests itself in forms of fear, anxiety, stress, confusion, and ultimately, giving up and living a life that's just “good enough.”

I once heard a story of a doctor who, on the brink of death, had to undergo heart transplant surgery. Fortunately for him, his surgery was successful, but there was a caveat. While the arteries and veins can be reconnected after a heart transplant, the nerves cannot. As a result, whenever he felt a certain emotion, he did not feel it coming and was unable to hold back. If he was overcome with an impulse to cry, he would just begin to cry because there was nothing to alert him of the coming tears. He was granted a second chance at life but was no longer capable of suppressing his true emotions.

What is the first thing you do when you're about to cry? You hold back. The Dragon holds it back. When we want to quit our jobs, the Dragon shows up again. When we want to travel the world, the Dragon shows up once again. The Dragon is the ultimate form of fear, and the Dragon is what forces the damn question, "Am I making the right decision?"

In ”The War of Art,” author Steven Pressfield presents a rule of thumb that states: "The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it."

While your fear is not an indication of whether your decisions are right or wrong, it is at least an indication of its importance in your life. So the more fearful you are, the more important you know it is to you. After all, you wouldn't be worrying this much if it wasn't. In this way, the Dragon is not an object of terror that is to be avoided, but an indicator that we are in fact on the right path.

So what's the answer?

I don't know.

That's what makes life decisions so hard to stomach. I don't know if moving away from New York City is the right decision. I don't know if quitting my job and traveling the world is the right decision. I don't know if ending this relationship with my girlfriend is the right decision. I'll never know. We'll never know ... and while we may find comfort in believing that the future will bring more joy from our present decisions, the reality is the future doesn't exist. Planning is just another word for guessing. It is a rather scary thing to think about — that there is no there, there — that in fact, the Dragon may actually be trying to protect us from accidentally wandering off the edge of the Earth with no one to accompany you aside from feelings of being lost, confused, and filled with regret.

At least that's what the Dragon wants us to think. 

Maybe the question we should be asking is not "Am I making the right decision?" but "Am I staying true to myself?" The latter creating no possibility to commit the dreadful task of considering the hopes and pitfalls of the future or the past, and allowing us only to consider whether or not our actions correspond with what is important to ourselves. While this approach may not slay the Dragon, it will at least mediate its effect on us. After all, the many obstacles we face are only make-believe, and Dragons don't actually exist.

... but you already knew that.

by Jason Lam