The magic of building your own Life: Energy, Focus, Bricks and Creativity

Where can you find the magic inside you to design a whole life?; Is it possible to build a practice for generating concentration at every moment?; Why is it that sometimes, when you make a difficult decision, a certain halo of doubt appears about what would have happened if...?; Could there be one energy or predisposition that predominates in us?; Is there any secret to knowing what needs doing at each moment of your life?

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[See POST on blog @b_crespo QUANTUM MARKETHINK]

My friend Craig Miller (author of "It's Up To You") more than once urged me to think about the energy we need at each moment in order to carry out decisions. We all have four different types of energy to hand [2] at different moments of our lives. And some of those energies may be present in a more intense way depending on our nature:

• Awakening (energy for designing from a blank page),
• Increasing (energy for growing that design),
• Containing (energy for executing the process)
• Completing (energy for knowing how to finish, for knowing how to carry out a decision)

Each and every one of these energies is necessary at any moment of your life, and achieving focus in each context is the only thing we need. Trying to play at designing when what is called for is executing a process is as dangerous and as absurd as trying to keep your eyes open when you sneeze. Every moment needs its own rhythm and its own energy.

When we want to build our life, the first thing called for is to be creative, and to create you have to dream. It is not possible to execute someone else's dream. The process of reverie is unavoidable; otherwise we will only be plagiarising. (Awakening, or the energy of the Artist)

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." Steve Jobs

Once you have set your Desired Future State (SFD), the next step is to master the art of growing that dream. Getting up always takes an initial push. And that energy is pure determination. It is nothing like the one I have used in dreaming, in designing. Now there is no sense in being scattered; determination is what is needed. (Increasing, or the energy of the Entrepreneur)

"The starting point of all achievement is desire." - Napoleon Hill

Then comes the art of mastering execution, and the initial push may well have left us tired. And without the same energy we used to propel ourselves, execution will have left the dream half done. The art of knowing how to execute a project is a mystique that oscillates between method and perseverance. (Containing, or the energy of the Project Manager)

"Vision without action is a daydream. Action with without vision is a nightmare." Japanese proverb

Everything comes to an end. They say an artist's process of maturing arrives when they know the work has to be taken down, said goodbye to, and a new one started. This is an exercise in determination very similar to the push stage. Only now the push is for putting an end to things. Shall we call it detachment? (Completing, or the energy of the Executioner)

"Lead, follow or get out of the way" - Attributed to Thomas Paine.

The magic of knowing how to master each energy at each stage of our lives is an exercise in virtuosity and in concentration (focus). Daniel Goleman (3) said that the art of "focusing" has three vectors of attention: Inner-Outer-Other. It is not possible to succeed without confidence in oneself. Nor is it possible to succeed if our only attention is on our own navel. And even less so without the help of others. Mastering each energy at each moment requires starting from our own mindful attention, putting focus on the context and culminating with the support of and trust in a team.

Triple focus and moments of energy for each occasion. It is a cyclical exercise. Think of the cycle of any startup (Ideation-Funding-Growthhacking-Exit); Think of the hype of any technology (Emerging-Peak of Expectations-Disillusionment-Slope of Enlightenment); The life cycle of a product (Birth-Growth-Maturity-Decline). The phases can sometimes come out of order and the energy for each phase is always there. And the only constant is the initial creativity.

It all starts with creativity. And an idea is worth nothing without the rest.

And that creativity is a muscle and it is also a game. And speaking of games and of building (your own life), I invite you to pick up the original brick designed by the Christiansen family more than 40 years ago. Put six of those bricks together and try out combinations while thinking of an idea you have to hand: a house, a car, an animal, a project, etc. Projection onto an external reference that simply helps unlock the block.

Source: https://goo.gl/images/tiZzeE

Now write down the possible combinations that can come out of those 6 pieces. Did you think you didn't have that creativity? We all have a kid built in when it's time to play. We all have creative confidence if we give ourselves permission to have fun. And the exercise is exponential when you work as a Team.

Answering with a mathematician's precision the question of the possible combinations of these 6 LEGO bricks, here's a number: 915,103,765 [4]

And it is still nothing more than a number. And computing capacity and technical knowledge will only give us back a quantity. As cold, as empty as knowledge when it has no context, no narrative.

And even to arrive at this number it will always still be necessary to combine the Artist, the Entrepreneur, the Project Manager and the Executioner. Which energy do you pick up today to start building your own life? Personally, I flirted with the Executioner yesterday and today I am "cosying up" to the Artist.