Archives: Learning

When we find people we can respect while respectfully disagreeing with them, we grow. We grow because rather than taking offence at their views or thinking negatively about them as people, they help us challenge our own beliefs simply because they’re different.

Difference is important. Difference creates challenge. Challenge is what powers the world.

“To fly we have to have resistance.”

Maya Lin

Without difference, without resistance, without challenge, nothing changes. Not individuals, not organisations, not countries. Only through opposition does anything shift.

Once we open up and take in opposing views one of two things happens: we change our mind, or we understand our own views better.

I subscribe to Seth Godin’s blog because I respect him and love his writing. But I also disagree with him often. When one of his posts lands in my inbox and I disagree with it, it makes me stop and ask myself not just why I disagree with it but what I actually believe (and why). 

When we find people who challenge us our thoughts, views and beliefs clarify in a way that helps us grow and move forward.

I hope you disagree.

Dmitri Shostakovich composed extraordinarily quickly. Once he heard the piece in his head, he would pour the notes onto the page. He could manage 20-30 pages of score a day and rarely made corrections.

I can’t write that fast. I can’t write music at all, but let’s leave that to one side. Words vs. music may be an indirect comparison, but even with the benefit of technology I can’t come close to that speed (or endurance).

Shostakovich, however, constantly worried that he worked too fast. He wrote a letter to a friend saying, “Undoubtedly this is bad… composing is a serious business.”, an idea that is so clearly ridiculous that it left me hoping his friend wrote back to tell him as much.

We must never get caught up in the idea there there is one right way to do something – a proper way or, even worse, the “done” way.

My wife and I make tea totally differently, but they usually taste the same. 

Lee Child’s writing process is totally different to Haruki Murakami, but they have both written bestsellers.

Clint Eastwood, when he directs a movie, shoots as few takes as possible, while David Fincher is renowned for shooting 20, 50, even 100 takes of a single shot before moving on. They’ve both made masterpieces. 

The way we succeed is not by doing things the way someone else does them, but by finding the way that suits us and owning it.

After all, for all his worrying, Shostakovich was a pretty solid composer all things considered.

Starting is hard. Things get in the way, we doubt ourselves, we worry that if we start we may not finish, we may not succeed, we may not make it to wherever we’re going.

People will often share the old Lao-Tzu quote, the “a thousand-mile journey begins with a single step”, but they often miss an equally great truism from the same chapter:1

“Rest is easy to hold.”

Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching

And so we hold our rest because if we start we may fail.

“But wait,” people say, “Failure is a good thing.” They tell us that Edison said “I know 10,000 things that will not work” 2 and while it’s lovely to know other people have done it before us, it doesn’t make failure easier to take.

Eventually, when we finally take that fabled first step, we remember: the reason people start is because starting feels good. It’s scary, fun, intimidating, energising, exhilarating, uncertain and, most of all, it’s a beginning. We can say, “I have started.” Our journey has begun, however long it may take and wherever the road may lead.

We can never feel the same regret for the things we start as we do for the things we never begin, so if you’re thinking about starting something, start.

Because you can. I believe in you.

1. Chapter 64, Tao Te Ching, quote taken from the Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo translation [non-affiliate]. [↩]
2. He didn’t, by the way – the quote attributed to him by biographer Walter S. Mallory in a 1910 biography was “Results? Why man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.” Source: Quote Investigator [↩]

Sometimes things just pop into my head. Unprompted, unwanted and not always helpful. But sometimes things pop into my head unprompted, unwanted and very, very helpful. Like yesterday when I started thinking about learning vs. teaching.

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I wanted to move this site and these posts further towards the original intention of this blog. While mulling it over after I posted it I realised what wasn’t working.

Every time I’ve tried to restart this blog I’ve focused on what I can teach. What lessons from my life I can shape to apply universally. How I can benefit other people (like you, Dear Reader) with my knowledge.

And that’s bullshit.

If I sit here every morning1 and try to think about what I can teach today, I’m going to tie myself up in knots. But – more importantly – I’m going to create inauthentic, disingenuous posts.

The reason my blog resonated with people when I first started writing was because I was focused on learning. I was trying to make sense of my world as it was. Horrible, scary, intimidating but also funny, bright and full of excitement.

That’s precisely what I need now. Not a place where I can come to preach my wonderful wisdom, but a place I can put down what I’m learning every day.

If that’s something you can also learn from, fantastic. Have at it. Take away what you want to take away. But this place is for me. For my lessons. For my knowledge. For my experience. This place is where everything starts to make sense. I hope.

1. or afternoon, or evening, whenever I managed to plonk myself down [↩]

It’s the end of January and the end of my first month of habit change.

What with everything that’s been going on for the last few weeks, I’m actually surprised at how well my meditation practice has been going. I’ve missed a couple of days here and there, and some of the days I did it my mind wouldn’t let me focus, but that’s not a bad record.

What I love about the Headspace app is the way it guides and supports you in achieving what you need to, as well as the way it explains meditation. Here’s what I’ve learned in the last few weeks:

Meditation can be a habit like any other

I meditate first thing in the morning, before I do anything else. It’s 15 minutes of my morning that sets me up for the rest of the day. The days I struggle with it are when my routine is disrupted for some reason, like at the weekends.

If I don’t have an alarm set and wake up naturally, I find it harder to settle myself and do a meditation session. I suspect this is because on weekdays my habit trigger is the alarm going off – I know what my first 2 hours of my day looks like and it’s kicked off with the alarm followed by meditation. Perhaps I need to find a different trigger so I don’t lose momentum when I’m not setting an alarm.

It’s OK to think

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that meditation is not about not having thoughts, but rather about noticing those thoughts and bringing your focus back to the breath.

The problem I always used to have with meditation was getting cross with myself for thinking things and losing focus. Now I just recognise that I am thinking and bring my attention back to my breath. This has been particularly useful when I’ve been trying to meditate at times of high emotion and stress.

Anyone can do it

If you’ve ever thought that meditation just isn’t for you, give Headspace a try for free – their Take 10 programme is perfectly formulated to ease you into the process and learn more about yourself and the practice.

You will feel calmer

I used to be a very short-termpered person. It really didn’t take much for my fuse to be exhausted, and I’m not going to pretend that my new-found calmness is due to the last 30 days, but it is thanks to the collective experience of meditation in fits and starts for the last months.

That’s also not to say I’m now a picture of zen or incredibly boring; I still have the same passion and drive, the same energy and enthusiasm I’ve always had, I’ve just learned how to let things that I can’t do anything about slide past me without letting them annoy me or make me angry. And that makes commuting a lot more pleasant.

Give it a go

You’ll have gathered that I’m a fan, and I’d love you to try it. Check out Headspace or any other guided meditation app, or just read up on getting started from someone like Leo Babauta.

In February, I’m going to make sure I’m writing 500 words a day. Read more in tomorrow’s introductory post.

When I started this blog it was about trying to keep on top of things, those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Shakespeare told us about. It was about charting my journey up to and beyond transplant and all the weird emotions and exciting opportunities it brought.

Now, though, I want it to be more than that. Partially because I’m now blessed to have a life that’s much like anyone’s: I have a full-time job making a real difference in people’s lives, I have a loving wife and a beautiful home to come home to every night, I have everything I ever wanted from my extra time in life, bar a few of the more outrageous and/or longer-term goals I came up with beforehand.

So I want this blog to be about more than just me and my journey, but to stay true to the principals under which it began.

This year, I’m going to set out to make Smile Through It a place where you can come for inspiration and education of all kinds. (Except the bad kind of ‘education’ that just made you suddenly wonder if you want to come back here at all, I won’t be doing any of that stuff.)

I want this blog to become a place where you can discover and share stories of living life in the most honest way possible. That doesn’t mean people going on crazy adventures: an honest life is simply about living authentically to yourself. And if that’s a little too ‘new age hippy’ for you, think of it like this: happiness comes from living the life that fits you, nothing more.

This, then, will be a period of adjustment for me as I work out how best to make all of this happen, but it will involve lots more storytelling (because I’ve not done nearly enough of that on here in recent months), it will involve a lot more of other people’s stories, and it will hopefully involve more than just reading.

I’d love to hear from you to know what you get out of this site and what you’d like to get from it. What posts really inspire you and make you want to do things, what bores you to tears and never makes you want to come back, and what would you love to see more of from me?

Please get in touch however you’d like: you can email me (or use the contact form on my personal website to be sure of passing spam filters), you can Tweet me, you can even find me on that weird and lonely place they call Google plus (however amazed you may be that it’s still going).

Smile Through It is a philosophy on life that I’ve let slip in recent weeks and months, and it’s time we got back to what mattered. So here’s to a 2015 full of growth and development for me, for this blog and, hopefully, for you, too.

After the emotional overwhelm of 2014, I wanted to try to keep myself on a more even keel this year. I also want to dedicate myself to something that goes a bit deeper than “trying to be better”, so I’m going to take up monthly challenges to start changing my habits and giving myself the space and mindfulness to enjoy life and be grateful for my blessings.

I’m kicking off this month with daily meditation. I’ve been attempting to get into this for the last 18 months and have dipped in and out with varying degress of success. What I have picked up, though, is that it really, really works for me.

I’ve always had quite a temper, a short fuse that’s easily lit and explosions that could be quite uncontrolled. Granted, as I’ve got older I’ve managed to get them under control to the extent that they are usually aimed purely at inanimate objects, but I know they are a trait about me that K likes least.

Reflecting on that, and wanting to be the best husband I can, I set about trying to embrace mindfulness to keep things in check and I was amazed at the results. When I mediated regularly (my longest stint being about 3 weeks, I think), I was instantly calmer and more relaxed about everything. And that feeling stayed with me even when I let things slip.

I read a lot of the teachings of zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, who helped me see the impermenance and realtive unimportance of the wide variety of ‘things’ that happen to us in our daily lives. Maintaining a half-smile and letting other people worry about their own days is something that has made my daily commuting through the busiest of London stations so much smoother than it would have been even a year ago.

“Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy and serenity.”
Thich Nhat Hanh

If things are going well, then, why do I need meditation to be my first habit change of 2015? Because I can always be better at it.

There is one more important element to it that reflects on my own skills and experience, too: I need a quick win. I’ve tried before to change habits – something that most experts will tell you takes a minimum of 30 days to do – and my best intentions fall by the wayside quickly.

Meditation is something I know I can do, but haven’t maanged to keep it up daily yet. That means through January I will not only see the instant daily benefit (the reward feeling that my brain will definitely need), but also be better able to keep it going.

I’m going to be using Headspace, an app I discovered for guided meditation that draws you into meditation without dumping you in at the deep end and expecting you to sit in the lotus position and float off into trancendental bliss in your first session. It’s simple, practical, and starts with just 10 minutes a day. It also has a huge number of extensions so you don’t end up stuck with the same old 20 minutes of guidance every day.

If you’re interested to join me, get Headspace for free and Tweet me that you’re joining in and how you’re getting on with it.

“Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.”
Thich Nhat Hanh

When I first started blogging, back in the dusty days of 2006, I began with a Statement of Intent. At the time, it was designed to remind me of the reasons I started the blog in the first place as well as letting people know what they could expect from me and it.

Over the years my blogs have changed faces many times, but this new facelift is something more. The simplified design and stripped-down visuals serve to remind me of the meandering thoughts and intentions that I let take over here and to keep me sharply, intensely focussed on what this blog is becoming.

You’ll notice the old name, SmileThroughIt1, is back because rack my brains as I may, I couldn’t think of a better way to sum up the purpose of this site or the ideas I live by.

What is SmileThroughIt? Put simply, it’s a philosophy of life that helped carry me through some of my toughest times. While waiting for my transplant, not knowing if it would come in time, I learned to focus on the good things in life. More than that, I learned that if I could find just one thing every day that made me smile, that day had been worth it.

This site is here to help me make the most of the second chance I’ve been given and if, through that, I can help, inspire or motivate other people, so much the better.

Before the lengthy break in updates, I’d started blogging to please others, to write what I thought people wanted, to ‘optimise’ my posts. But looking back over my archives, both on here and the original site’s archives, I saw that my best writing and the most effective posts came not from targeting an “audience”, but rather writing something for myself.

Although I hate to admit it, it’s not just my blog that has been through many twists and turns and a distinct loss of focus. Everything that’s happened in this blog has been mirrored in my day-to-day life and it bothers me that I feel like I’m letting this second chance slip past me without grasping every second.

This blog will reflect my change in mood, attitude and approach to my second chance at life and, hopefully, will help guide others through similar changes in their own life.

This story has no planned ending, no final goal, no means by which to measure its success or failure. This blog, like all of us, just is. And what it is comes from what’s inside and the people who read, contribute and support its aims, ideals and author (that’s me) along the steps of its journey.

Come along for the ride.

1. and I’ve moved all of the archives onto this single site, instead of stripped across two blogs [↩]

This week I have been engaged in numerous discussions of the organ donation system in the UK, mostly spurred by my appearance on Channel 4’s 4Thought.tv strand which asked, “Should Organ Donation Be Compulsory”.

Over the week, the show has featured a variety of views both for and against presumed consent and organ donation as a whole. One of these was Derek House, a Jehovah’s Witness who believes that all organ donation is fundamentally wrong.

While his views raised ire among the transplant community, it struck me that Mr House isn’t the man we need to be targeting. His religious beliefs preclude him from supporting organ donation: we’re not going to change that.

If we want to see the number of organ donors in this country increase, we need to tackle the vast disparity between the 75% of people who say they would be willing to donate their organs1 and the 26% who have signed the organ donor register. Those people don’t need convincing of the merits, they just need to be drawn out of their apathy.

Focusing our energies on a battle we’re already winning seems like a better use of resources than fighting one we will inevitably lose.

The same goes for any kind of battle you may be facing as an artist or entrepreneur: look at the fights you face and work out which ones are worth your energy.

Picking your battles is not the same as taking the path of least resistance. It’s about using your focus and energies on strategies and tactics that will make a difference, not banging your head against a brick wall.

1. the oft-quoted figure of 90% is, infact, the people who support the idea of organ donation; 15% of people support the idea, but say they wouldn’t donate their organs [↩]

In yesterday’s post I talked about how mistakes are now open for public consumption thanks to the permanence of the internet.

What does that mean for innovation and leadership?

It means you have to fail bigger. Fail better. Fail publicly.

Too many people see the increased visibility of failure as a reason to go all out to avoid cock-ups.

Au contraire. The bigger, the more significant, the more noticed the fail, the quicker, the stronger, the more good-humoured the recovery, the deeper, the longer, the more profound the admiration will be.

Set an example. Tell the world it’s OK to fail before you get things right.