How can I accelerate the journey?

Today, I randomly overheard an interview about launching your career as a UX designer and this question from the audience hit me:

"How can I accelerate my journey?"

What a fascinating question...

On one hand, you can't. There is no accelerating the journey. The journey is the journey. You are on the path and there's no cheat codes or warp drives.

On the other hand, there are so many things that we can do to ensure that the next step on our journey is the most efficient and effective.

• Seek guidance
• Listen deeply
• Trust and surrender
• Ask obvious and non-obvious questions
• Uplevel your environment
• Strive for mastery from a beginner's mind
• Remove attachment and expectations
• Learn from the past and the future

There's a massive challenge with this acceleration process though.

It often doesn't feel like we are going faster at all.

It's can feel more like taking a step backward to take 4 steps ahead. Listening, for example, is very passive. When we listen without attachment, it might be a lengthy process and probably not feel like acceleration at all. And yet, it could be the key to unlocking everything.

This is some Jedi Master level stuff. If you are trying to force acceleration, it won't happen and will actually probably slow you down. When you trust that the journey is unfolding exactly as designed, you will be more open to the opportunities that are hidden in plain sight.

What if I don't live forever?

There was a time. Not too long ago. That I was jealous of vampires. Not because of the Twilight sex appeal or the badassery in True Blood. But because vampires have a virtually unlimited time to accomplish things that are important to them.

WIth an investment horizon of a few hundred years, accumulating vast wealth through compound interest might as well be a certainty. Taking 30 years to master a new skill is a drop in the bucket.

It's a strange thought, I know, but there was a lot that I was hoping to accomplish and one lifetime didn't seem like enough.

Over the last few years, this all began to shift.

I am very much at peace with my life. At the age of 37, I feel like I have accomplished everything I need to and yet I'm also just getting started. If I leave this planet tomorrow, so be it. Life well lived. If I live to 111, fantastic, compound interest to the moon and back.

There's a beautiful scene from the show Newsroom in which the wise, old boss says to the main character:

"On the off chance that you're not going to live forever, why not take a shot a being happy now?"

When I first watched that scene, that line hit me harder than I can properly express in words at this moment.

And honestly, that's a much closer reflection of where I'm at today than being jealous of vampires.

Yes, I believe there is so much left in the tank for me to create, produce, build, manifest, explore and experience, and yet it's already been one hell of a run. I'm going to follow this path wherever it takes me and do my best to enjoy every moment along the way.

Am I making conscious choices?

Life is a series of trade offs.

We trade our time for money and trade our money for goods and services.

We delay gratification in order to receive larger rewards later.

We exercise and lift weights causing exhaustion and physical pain for both sort and long term health benefits or maybe just to look more attractive.

We eat super yummy foods that don't agree with our bodies and then pay the price later.

We watch just one more episode instead of getting an extra hour of sleep and don't feel fully energized the next day.

It's a similar story for consumers. We choose a more expensive product that is better for the planet. Or we may opt for better ingredients. Or maybe we go for worse ingredients but more aligned with our beliefs. Perhaps, we decide to optimize for price and take the cheapest option disregarding everything else. And still other times, we grab whatever is on the shelf in front of us without much thought at all to save time.

Trade offs are everywhere.

Here are some questions that I've been playing with:

• "Am I consciously making these choices?"
• "How do I ensure that these choices are aligned with with who I am and who I am becoming (and not part of an old story or perspective that no longer resonates with me)?"
• "How can I simplify my decision making so I don't spend 14 hours a day research every little nuance in my life?"

I want to make better choices. I believe that comes naturally from first being aware of the things we are optimizing for and then ensuring our actions to reflect that.

How do I create more options in my life?

Let's start with an assumption: having more options in life is better than have few to none.

If you agree with that assumption as I do, then the immediate follow-up question should be:

"How do I create more options in my life?"

I've indirectly spent the last few years of my life exploring this question, and here's the running list that I've come up with. Most of them don't need any explanation, although I may turn any or all of them into separate posts as some point. Also, I'm using the word options here in the traditional sense of choices and alternatives, but also in the sense of our perception and awareness of solutions and experiences that may not have been possible from a previous state.

In order to maximize my options, I have either consciously or unconsciously started doing the following:

• Reduce or eliminate situations, people and environments that make me feel angry, hopeless, frustrated, aggressive or massively triggered
• Decrease personal burn rate of recurring and fixed monthly expenses
• Allocate time for synchronicity, manifestation and allowing magic to happen
• Take a beginner's mindset and objectively ask both obvious and non-obvious questions
• Increase time spent adventuring and exploring new places
• Dig deeper into mastery of things that are important to me beyond the surface level and amateur status
• Explore new topics and subjects that seem fascinating where I have very little knowledge
• Meditate to increase trust in the unknown and remove attachment from forcing a particular outcome

There is an incredible body of knowledge that studies the relationship between our energetic state and the options we can see. From the absolute lowest energetic, there are literally no options. We are just going to lose with no way to win. As our energy level increases, we can see the solution in black in white then many possible options all the way up to unlimited options with an definitive guidance towards the correct option for us.

One of the most important things I do to improve my ability as a leader and a Creator is to design my life to optimize for my energy. Maximizing my time spent in the highest energetic states provides me with all the options I will ever need.

What happens when I don't leave time to integrate?

As we are gifted with a deeper understanding of what it means to be ourselves in this lifetime, new opportunities and challenges present themselves that were not available at previous levels of the video game.

Sometimes we get stuck on the same level for a long time. Some times we don't even realize we are still on the same level. And other times we try to use the Magic Whistle to get to more advanced levels only to realize we needed the skills from that previous level in order to advance further.

Yes, video games were an important part of my education helping me develop problem solving and critical thinking skills, but I digress.

This plays out in real life all the time.

The universe has a funny way of presenting us with similar lessons over and over again until we fully learn and integrate them. I have a handful of repeating themes that have continued to show up throughout my lifetime, and it is only very recently that I've started to notice these patterns.

One of these lessons that I haven't fully integrated is ironically leaving adequate time to integrate.

The world we live in does not reward us for integration. We must achieve and do and create and learn and advance. So we skip over the stage of integration immediately moving on to the next thing. Sometimes, we don't even wait until one thing finishes to start the next.

This repeating pattern in my life has always led to a similar outcome: when I don't leave time to integrate, life forces me to stop and integrate.

This has shown up in so many different forms, but it's always about getting me to slow down and notice what life is presenting to me. I might get sick after running myself into the grown physically. Some form of family emergency might pop up. A company might dissolve or blow up in spectacular fashion. An intimate relationship ends abruptly. Sometimes it's a new form, and other times it's an eerily similar form. Every time though I suddenly have space to step back and revisit what was being revealed at the previous level.

I used to be unaware and unconscious that this was happening. Just plowing through life from one thing to the next. More achievement. More information. More clients. More employees. More books. More conferences. And then, BAM! Something happens to force a hard reset.

I do my best now to allow for more time to integrate, so life doesn't have to be so forceful. And when it's time to slow down again, it feels more like gratitude than pain as I have the opportunity to revisit the previous season and gain greater perspective and understanding.

Bottom line: you either create adequate time to integrate or life will, often unpleasantly, force you to do so.