In his book On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft Stephen King describes, in one of his many forewords, his initial reluctance to write that particular book. As a fiction writer he felt the desire to write about writing, but he left the work unfinished for a long time questioning his motivations. He didn’t want to write a book, even a short one, that would leave him feeling like either a literary gasbag or a trancendental asshole.

After a comment from another writer (a band member even) he decided to finish and publish the book. I’m glad he did, because even in the first chapter “CV” he writes a passage that I found to be very well thought through:

“This is not an autobiography. It is, rather, a kind of curriculum vitae — my attempt to show how one writer was formed. Not how one writer was made; I don’t believe writers can be made, either by circumstances or self-will (although I did believe those things once).

The equipment comes with the original package. Yet it is by no means unusual equipment; I believe large numbers of people have at least some talent as writers and storytellers, and that those talents can be strengthened and sharpened. If I didn’t believe that, writing a book like this would be a waste of time.

This is how it was for me, that’s all. A disjointed growth process in which ambition, desire, luck and a little talent all played a part. Don’t bother to read between the lines, and don’t look for a through-line. There are no lines — only snapshots, most out of focus.”

This small amount of text holds a lot of experience and tells the tale of a paradigm shift. It also holds promise for everyone seeking to find a suitable profession that they actually enjoy (and there are lots of you seekers out there). It also holds a warning for those that already are on the right path. Read it carefully and you’ll find them.

What appealed to me in this piece was this part in particular:

The equipment comes with the original package. Yet it is by no means unusual equipment; I believe large numbers of people have at least some talent as writers and storytellers, and that those talents can be strengthened and sharpened. If I didn’t believe that, writing a book like this would be a waste of time.

Ever since I heard it (I have the audiobook) I’ve been going back to this bit and listen to it again and again. You have to believe that talents and skills can be strengthened and sharpened, it has to be the core belief for everybody with a desire to teach (like I have). That’s important.

But the statement about the equipment and the package is also vital. Everybody has talents, and not everybody has the same talents. Strengthening and sharpening equipment that’s there is useful, but for equipment that’s not included in the package, it’s utterly pointless and a waste of time for both student and teacher (or master and apprentice if you will).

It’s important then to find your equipment (sounds cheeky, but you know what I mean), to discover your talents and strengthen and sharpen them. Don’t bother to fill in the gaps, you were not made to fill those gaps anyway. And when you know what your equipment is, nurture it and exploit it simultaneously and make it work on your life’s work.

Knowing your life’s work is equally important by the way, lots of people are still in the dark on that one too. Your life’s work should be something you find important. The only way to find out is to find your path and starting walking on it. The path will show you which way to go and your talents will help you to decide when the path forks. That’s something I believe.

Stephen King’s passage can easily be rewritten for this blog, my blog about my path. It’s an account of my journey, my thoughts, my lessons learned, my uncertainties. Snapshots at best, most out of focus. But I trust that this path is my path and that it will show me which way to go. In the past I have taken detours (even recently), but my path keeps finding many inspiring ways, mostly through people, to get me back on track. Right now, it lead me to the desire to discover my talents. Haven’t given that much thought before.

This blog is not a self improvement blog. It is, rather, a kind of living memoir — my attempt to show how someone finds his path through life. Not how the path was created; I don’t believe paths can be created, either by circumstance or self-will (allthough I did believe those things once).

The path comes with the original package. Yet it is by no means a clear path; I believe large numbers of people have at least some vision of their path or future, and those visions can be strengthened and sharpened. If I didn’t believe that, writing this blog like this would be a waste of time.

This is how it is for me, that’s all. A disjointed growth process in which ambition, desire, luck and a little talent all play a part. Don’t bother to read between the lines, and don’t look for a through-line. There are no lines — only snapshots, most out of focus.

There it is.
What’s your path?

It’s Sunday, 6:17 AM. I’m running my first run in a long time, loving the freshness and quietness of early morning. After 5 minutes of relentless protest, my legs accepted that I’m not going to stop and have started cooperating.

Holding Myself Back

I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging the past few days, and it’s been on my mind for several weeks now. I’m not really satisfied with how thing are going, and that’s not due to circumstances. It’s because of me.

I came to realize that I’m holding myself back. I’ve been trying to define my blog, to define “How to be an Original”. But I kept bumping into a barrier, something that stopped me from being satisfied with whatever definition I came up with. Until it hit me last Sunday (bear with me on this one).

I realize now that I started with the definition process months back already. The topics I blogged about were as the things on my mind, very diverse. And at the same time I was reading blogs about blogging, like ProBlogger, to learn more about blogging. One of the things I learned was that it’s best to choose a (niche) topic or a (niche) demographic and write specifically for them. Especially if you want to earn a buck from them.

I also received some feedback that it wasn’t all that clear what the blog was about. With this and the advice on blogging, I took a good look at my blog. And I limited the subjects somewhat, so it would fit more closely to productivity or self improvement.

Fast forward a little and I’m coming up with all kinds of topics that I’m interested in. I want to write about them and often even draft a post already. Only to decide later on that they don’t fit my blog. And I put them in storage, with a saddened heart.

Personal Blogs…Yuck (No More)

You know, I looked down upon personal blogs before last Sunday. There are a gazillion of them out there, with people writing about their <insert pet here> puking over the carpet, the recent visit a restaurant (and the <insert bad habit here> waitress) and their annoyance over <insert name of retail chain here>’s lack of customer service. B-O-R-I-N-G.

For years I thought about blogs as just that, boring accounts of empty lives. I couldn’t see the point of having one, let alone reading them. Until I discovered some niche blogs, wow! Okay, so blogging is great if you just ignore the personal blogs. Or so I thought.

Click to continue »

Image by minkymonkeymoo

This is not your regular ho-hum weekly review. It couldn’t be, because we’re well over three weeks into this month and I have yet to publish a new post. So much for weekly…

Why have I been silent for so long? To be short, for three reasons:

• Ski Trip in Switzerland
• Self awarded extended break from blogging
• Family outbreak of Norovirus

The Norovirus wasn’t a lot of fun… Patient zero was my son, followed after two days by my wife and another six hours later I fell victim too. Along the way we infected some other people as well, so we quarantined ourselves for the recovery period. Being sick with all of us at the same time was challenging, some things you don’t want to take turns in I can tell ya!

“By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.” - Lao Tzu

Taking the extended break

Anyway, I liked being away from the blog when I was in Switzerland to such a  degree that while driving back to Holland I decided upon extending it for another week. Not that I’m contemplating to stop or anything, I just liked the mental distance from writing. Sometimes the best way to go forward is to stand still first. So that’s what I decided to do, stand still and just let the blog be the blog for a while. It was liberating and very refreshing.

I’m thinking about how to express what that period did to me, but I’m finding it hard to find the right words. It did not designate it as time to think about the blog, or as time in which I did not have to write, or in which I tweaked design or coding or something like that. It was purposeless, and that’s what was great about it. The blog just existed, it just was there, without my attention. Maybe it’s about letting go, maybe that’s the next step. I don’t know, but I think it might be. That week was about letting go, I did not have to blog, have to write, have to achieve goals, have to be accountable. I just was, and the blog just was.

The Norovirus was a blessing in disguise, because it forced me to extend that period even longer. And it deepened the experience as well. That virus hit me hard, to the point where I just felt like I couldn’t do anything. Not even read or watch television, just sleep or be awake (and care for my wife and son every now and then). My mind did something wonderful though, I started to process. Not think, just process. Without effort from my side, no conscious effort anyway, things fell into place, patterns emerged and creativity started to flow. My mind was doing spring cleaning it seemed (and my body was too). And the virus kind of forced me to undergo this.

Because doing wasn’t getting in the way of thinking, and thinking wasn’t getting in the way of feeling, there was room for just feeling. Don’t know if feeling is the right word, but because I wasn’t doing or thinking, a space opened up in me to see and connect to my path, my legend. There was room to realign. Not consciously realigning, it was an unconscious process. I realize this sounds vague, but that’s the best way I can describe it. It was refreshing.

Emerging patterns

One of the patterns that emerged was that I focused too much on the ‘getting’ part. So much that I lost connection with what I originally wanted. My goal of getting to 2500 subscribers is a great example. I was focusing so much on getting the subscribers, that I lost connection to what’s really important. Making a connection, being valuable, provide meaning, learning and sharing genuinely, growth! Those were are my motivations for this blog. On a tangent there are other motivations, like earning a buck, personal branding and so on, but they are secondary.

The thing with those motivations is that they are not directly quantifiable, and as such hard to measure. So you look for tangential metrics to measure progress, or give you a hint of your progress at the least. I found it’s important to keep connected to the original motivations, because if you fail to do that, the metrics and the goals are going to lead their own lives and take over.

This insight came to me last week. I have to focus on my original motivations that revolve around giving and growing, and be open to the getting part without focusing on it. I need to let go of the getting.

Trust

When the virus hit me last week, I was forced to let go too. I had to hand over my recovery process to my body and trust that it would do okay and that it would tell me when I needed to do things. My body was in control, and I had to trust it. That’s letting go, and it only feels good when there’s trust.

Letting go and keeping peace of mind at the same time, requires trust.

• I trust that when I let go of focusing on getting well, I will recover anyway.
• I trust that when I let go of focusing on the getting part, I will get it anyway.
• I trust that when I let go of being in control, I won’t be out of control.
• I trust that when I let go, it won’t be gone.

I feel I just made a big step.

Dear Jesse,

Congratulations on your first birthday!

I remember that night a year ago very vividly, when you came knocking at the door in the middle of the night and over 5 weeks early. I guess you were ready to step into this world and move ahead, as you do so powerfully since that day.

The kind of love you awakened in me took me by surprise. It’s not more or better than other love, only different. Different from the way I love your mom, different from the way I love my parents, brothers and sister and different from the way I love life. It has enriched my life.

And with that love comes a full range of other emotions. I have experienced feelings of helplessness when you were in the incubator in the early weeks, feelings of despair when you were crying relentlessly in the early months. Feelings of pity when you were in pain from what we now know were food allergies and feelings of insecurity about all the new aspects of life that being a parent brings with it. They too have enriched my life. Click to continue »

On Tuesdays I write about Living my Legend. This section is inspired by The Alchemist and is an account of my journey of living my potential.

In this article I will be detailing my mission statement into guidelines and goals. But first a quick recap of the previous two articles.

My five personal core values are:

Love – Fun – Freedom – Authenticity – Growth

They are the basis for my mission statement:

I, Lodewijk van den Broek, love life and have a lot of love to give. I enjoy authentic growth and I help others to grow. I’m here to have lots of fun and enjoy my freedom in comfort and vitality.

Why make guidelines and goals?
My values define what I want to experience in this life, and my mission works as a compass to point me in the right direction. These are fairly static, they will not change very often and changes will most likely be minor. To be of practical use on a day to day basis, they need to be translated into workable guidelines and goals, that can be more dynamic and adapt to changing circumstances.

Guidelines are ‘rules’ I want to live by, that find their roots in my mission statement and in my personality. They can be formulated ambitiously, meaning that I may not live by those rules yet. Goals are simply what they are: goals. Things I want to achieve, formulated in a SMART way.

And with the guidelines and goals, I can define habits changes, projects and actions to start working on getting them done, to attain my goals and live by my guidelines. Click to continue »