I bought a new pair of shoes a couple weeks ago. They’ve been a tremendous help to my sanity. They’re just a pair of plain Converse sneakers to most people, but to me and a few of you, there is a special significance to this brand of shoes. Because Converse sneakers, like a bow tie, or even a fez, are cool. I’m referring of course to Doctor Who. It is one of the few television shows to which I’ll admit I’m a fan. Because, like a few great works of drama, it is entertaining (funny at times, scary at others, and often simultaneously) and is a constant reminder of what is important. The most important things, I’ve often said, are also the things we tend to forget the most easily.

So for my friends in the U.K. and Canada where the show is easily available, here are ten reminders of important life lessons from Doctor Who:

1. Curiosity counts. I was recently asked what is the most important quality in life and, to my surprise, the word that came out of my mouth was “curiosity.” Helen Keller once said “Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” If this is true – and I suspect it is – fostering a deep commitment towards curiosity is the distinction between these choices. I don’t think you could survive a lifespan over 900 years without it. Even while being faced with genuine danger, The Doctor is always the embodiment of curiosity. More often than not, it is his curiosity that helps him solve the mystery behind the danger.

“There’s something out of place – let’s go and poke it with a stick.” – The Doctor (Amy’s Choice episode)

2. Being weird is cool. Running shoes and a suit, bow ties, or even a fez – none of these things in themselves cool. But being yourself, in all your quirkiness, is. Human societies are good at teaching individuals to mind their place, to keep in line and to conform. We teach our children too often to fit in with society’s expectations. Yet I cannot think of a single person who I admire, or who has accomplished anything extraordinary, who was not weird in some major way.

CRAIG: Has anyone ever told you that you’re a bit weird?
DOCTOR: They never really stop. (The Lodger episode)

3. Life is complicated. Have you ever noticed how quickly most people “understand” something without really understanding it? Whether its your feelings about something, or quantum physics, most humans will listen to only a sentence or two before they begin nodding their heads like they get the whole picture when they have only

RORY: How we can we be outside the universe? The universe is everything.
DOCTOR: Imagine a great big soap bubble with one of those tiny little bubbles on the outside… Well, it’s nothing like that… Yeah. No. But if it helps, yes. (The Doctor’s Wife episode)

4. People are scary. I don’t know about you, but people scare me. That is plural, as in groups of people. I can relate to anyone one on one, but en masse… that’s when things get scary. In Doctor Who, on one side you have masses of aliens, like the Daleks or Cybermen, trying to change the universe as they have decided it should be. On the other side, you have masses of panicked humans either trampling over each other to get way, looking on with apathy, or just submitting without a struggle.

5. People are amazing. Individually, that is. One at a time. Or in small groups. Really small groups that is. It’s not only the Doctor and the Doctor’s companions who amaze us. Consider Mickey’s transformation from a scared little boy to a man of action, dedication and determination. In fact, any individual the Doctor is able to coax from the crowd usually amazes us.

6. Life is amazing. This goes hand in hand with the curiosity. Miracles surround us if we choose to see them, and the more we try to understand the world around us, the more miraculous it becomes.

Time isn’t a straight line. It’s all… bumpy-wumpy. There’s loads of boring stuff. Like Sundays and Tuesdays and Thursday afternoons. But now and then there are Saturdays. Big temporal tipping points when anything’s impossible. ~ The Doctor (The Impossible Astronaut episode)

Have TARDIS will travel.

7. Home is where your feet are. For someone who is rather a gypsy and does not understand homesickness, this is a reassuring reminder. While Thomas Wolfe maintained “You Can’t Go Home Again,” the Doctor has no home to go back to. And this is mostly okay. We should feel at home wherever we are, I think.

8. Don’t take anything for granted. Stone angel statues that come alive when you close your eyes, an impossible astronaut, walking mannequins… well this list could just go on and on. In Doctor Who it is often the smallest detail that proves to be the most important at the end of an episode. A wink, a whisper, a random comment… again this list cold just go on and on.

9. Embrace new experiences. I made fish sticks and custard for my children a few weeks ago. It was actually pretty good!

Don’t look away. And don’t Blink. ~ The Doctor (this quote being completely out of context, certainly)

10. You can always recreate yourself. I don’t think you need two hearts and a TARDIS to regenerate yourself. With every new experience the human brain rewires itself, creates and uncreates itself on a biological level. This is usually a slow, subtle process, but sometimes, with the snap of one’s fingers, the change can be dramatic and even miraculous. Although in my case,  new teeth would be kind of nice.

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Setbacks are an important part of life. They are especially a part of trying anything new, a part of our growth as human beings, a part of the human condition. If there is any skill most worthwhile, it is learning from setbacks.

Setbacks are not Failures

The difference between a setback and failure is just a matter of perspective. When describing something as a setback, we put ourselves in a position to start again. It is the middle of one chapter of a continuing story. Failure, on the other hand, has an air of permanence to it – the last chapter of a book that was never finished, and never read.  Thomas Edison had over 10,000 setbacks before he succeeded in making an electric light that worked. If he had described any one of those setbacks as a failure, it would be another’s name, another’s story we would remember, not his.

Here are 5 ways to deal with setbacks that I have learned through trial and error over years.

1.Embrace the Setbacks

Imagine if you could live an entire month or year without a single setback. What would that be like? At first, it may seem like a good thing. The reality, however, means that you have not tried anything new. You’ve found a formula to do things and have been working the formula. Not once were your limits tested. Not once were you surprised. You’ve been in a rut.

2. Budget for Setbacks

Even if you are starting on a completely new project, you should already have some idea of how often to expect setbacks. If I am starting a new woodworking project, I know enough to calculate how long it should reasonably take. Then, if I’ve never done this project before, I double or triple that time. I also know, in any new project, no matter how well I have planned, I can expect to go back to the hardware store at least once, so I budget my time and money accordingly. If I am working on a novel, even when it is flowing well, I know ahead of time there is going to come a day when much of what I’ve written already, is going to be rewritten, deleted, crumpled into a ball and thrown in the trash.

3. Keep Your Goals in Mind

Another way to budget for setbacks is in the time and energy you spend recovering from them. Learning from our mistakes is important, but don’t let a few setbacks take you off course. For example, when writing articles for other websites, I know that a small percentage of them are going to require revisions. I don’t like being asked to revise articles. I take care with my work, so even a request for a small revision seems like a setback to me. I often get angry, with myself, or with the editor. But I also know they are going to happen, so I schedule a few hours throughout the week to deal with them. If I’m working on my book, or another article, my goal that day is to finish the work at hand. If, at that time, I get an email asking for revisions, I don’t look at it. I set it aside, so I can open it during my scheduled time.

4. Learning from Setbacks

Because I schedule time to deal with setbacks, and don’t dwell on them when working on other projects, not only am I able to complete my daily goals, I can give my setbacks the time and energy required to deal with them. Enough time has usually passed that I do not react emotionally. I can freely take the time I need to learn from my mistakes, analyze what happened, and work out ways to make them less likely to happen in the future. In my example with revisions, for example, I can often anticipate the most likely questions an editor may have, and can address those in the article, or with a small note attached to the article. At this point, less than 20 percent of my articles require revisions and my rejection rate with websites that have worked with me before is below 1 percent.

5. Follow the Curve

Setbacks are directly proportional to the learning curve on new activities. In the beginning, setbacks may outnumber successes. It may even seem like there are only setbacks and nothing else. (This is rarely true. Even dumb luck will ensure some success at the beginning of a new endeavour.) You will also notice, however, that the steeper the curve, the more rewarding later successes will be. In addition to this, we should all keep in mind that learning curves never become a straight line. Learning how to drive a car, and driving it accident-free for 20 years does not guarantee you won’t make a mistake tomorrow, or that there is nothing new to learn when dealing with traffic.

Photo by Kriss Szkurlatowski

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We all meander through points in our lives when the world seems to be taking from us more than it gives. If a steady income is not coming in, for example, that seems to be when the car breaks down, a child suddenly needs expensive medicine, the furnace dies, the fridge starts making strange noises, and shoelaces begin snapping for no other reason except sheer spite.

I went through a dark financial stretch myself a few years ago. It was tough enough that I was able to earn my third degree green belt in “starving artist”, but also tough enough that I can tell you without batting an eye that there are worse places to be than financially down and out. This is the story of one of those things.

I don’t generally concern myself too much with money. That is part of the benefit of a modest lifestyle, seldom having to worry about the ups and downs that pass us by. There are some people, however, who do concern themselves with it.

When they go for dinner, drinks, or coffee, they keep a mental checklist of who picks up the tab, who picked it up last time, and the amounts that were spent. If they live with someone, they keep tabs on the monthly bills, the groceries, and keep running totals in who is ahead or behind.

We all know people like this. I happened to live with such a person for a short time period. It’s been suggested to me that this is actually the norm – that the majority of people live this way. And that scares me a bit, to be honest. For most of our relationship I was oblivious to this – until my finances started getting short. That’s when I noticed the fridge was no longer being stocked, unless I was the one to go grocery shopping. Bills, which I had thought we were both paying, began piling up on my desk, with notes explaining what I owed down to the penny.

I sat down one evening and discovered that up until then, I had been paying for about 80 percent of our bills. She had been fine with that, but once I needed to start budgeting, she was making sure that she did not pay a cent more than half. In fact, the way it worked out, she never had to pay close to half even when I was broke.

Two troubling observations came out of this. First, I discovered it was not just money that she kept track of, noting what was in the win or the loss columns of her life. She also tallied time and attention. How much I did for her, compared to what she did for me, who vacuumed, who cooked, who did the dishes, who tolerated the other person’s television shows the longest, etc, etc. And I discovered that not only was she never in the loss column of her life, she was almost always in the 20 percent threshold.

Love, friendship, time and money, in her philosophy of life, were all related. She tracked each of the things, constantly, and measured them daily to make sure she was never behind.

This, however, is not what disturbed me most. What disturbed me was to discover that this attitude towards life is contagious. In fact, it’s as contagious as a smile. Because I began noticing who bought the groceries and how much was spent. I began noticing who replaced the toilet paper. I began noticing who cooked and who also did the dishes most nights. Not only did I notice the answer was usually me…. I began noticing just how often I was noticing.

Each day a sizable portion of my attention was caught up with the same mental spreadsheet she had been using for most of her life. Love and friendship no longer seemed to be unlimited in their abundance, but limited, measurable, finite. And as a result of being measurable, what was once in abundance began to seem painfully sparse. Time seemed to get tighter and tighter. Money seemed always out of reach. Affection within myself became difficult to share.

There is no form of poverty quite as painful as feeling love is a limited resource.

The solution, I discovered, was to become more generous with my time, my money and my affection. It took a few weeks of practice, but I soon forgot to measure what I was getting compared to what I received. I slept better, smiled more easily and the world once again filled me with wonder.

A hand is not measured by what it holds. Whether it is stretched out to give something it holds, or stretched out to receive with an empty palm, it is the hand itself that matters most. It is the touch between the hands that is important.

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A lot of research has been done on the psychology of happiness in the past fifty years. Understanding what makes most people happier in their lives is an important step to making your own life happier.

Here are 20 facts about happiness you may find surprising.

1. Your  genes and family upbringing account for only half of your happiness levels.

2. Only 10 percent of your happiness comes from external circumstances.

3. Your outlook on life, and what you choose to do with your life accounts for 40 percent of your happiness levels. This includes your friendships, work, and participation in your community.

4. It gets easier as you age. A 2005 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey showed ages 20-24 are sad for 3.4 days per month.  Those aged between 65-74 are sad only 2.3 days per month

5. A mere 20 minutes of exercise, three days each week will increase your happiness by 10 to 20 percent after six months.

6. The happier you are, the more antibodies your body generates – up to 50 percent more, in fact.

7. In the United States, the number of people with clinical depression is 3 to 10 times more common than it was for their grandparents at the same age.

8. Happy people generally earn more than unhappy people.

9. Women are unhappiest in their life around the age of 37; men around the age of 42.

10. Dancing increases  happiness.

11. Sports facilities and community centres  increase a community’s overall happiness.

12. Money buys happiness. Those who can afford to have their basic material needs taken care of are happier than those who cannot.

13. Money does not buy happiness. After having your basic material needs met, additional money does not have any impact on your levels of happiness.

14. People in relationships are usually happier than people who are single, however….

15. Happier people are more likely to retain relationships.

16. Education and intelligence do not make you more happy than anyone else.

17. Happiness has a fragrance. Clinical experiments on body odour have proved your scent changes between when you are stressed or happy

18. The more you hug your children, the happier they will be as adults.

19. The most powerful way to increase your short-term feelings of happiness is to perform random acts of kindness to others, or to send a letter of gratitude to someone you care about. Five such acts in a week will increase your happiness for up to three months.

20. The most powerful way to increase your long-term feelings of happiness is to understand your strengths and talents, or life purpose, and to work on sharing those parts of yourself with others.

*Photo by Arsel Özgürdal

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Nowhere is the constancy of change as visible or as memorable than a Canadian autumn.

We are surrounded by changes in our environment, in our relationships and in the workplace. Our thoughts, our hearts, and our bodies change with each passing second, transforming us from what we are to what we are going to become. Change can be sudden or gradual, comforting, or dizzying and chaotic.

There is something inside each of us that can ensure that we have some control over the changes in our lives, that we do not get washed away and broken by the waves around us or inside us: our personal values.

Each of us have a system of values to live by. They are formed in childhood and modified over the years by personal experience, and influenced by friends, peers and family. Yet, compared to our emotions, they change very gradually. Once fully formed in our adult years they are sometimes modified, but generally do not change at all.

Without a clear understanding of our values, we each run the risk of letting the changes around us, or changes in our own emotions, to sweep us away like a leaf in the wind, taking us to places we may not have wished to be. Changes that cause us to do things that defy our values lead us away from ourselves, too often leaving us with disappointment, anger, shame, embarrassment or regret.

Values are the compass that keeps us on course.

Something as important as your own value system deserves a few minutes of your time.

1. Write down a list of your most important values.

2. What are your top ten values? List them.

3. Number those values by their importance.

Having a clear understanding of your values will allow you to effectively react to circumstances in a manner that does not betray your sense of self. It also gives you the benefit of:

• Becoming the living embodiment of your values and principles at home and in the workplace
• Making faster, more effective decisions
• Better prioritization of demands upon your time and energy
• Contribute more successfully in accordance with your value system
• Deeper and more fulfilling personal relationships
• Working towards goals that are built upon the foundation of your value system

I will shortly be offering a workshop addressing the importance of values at home and in the workplace. I have also compiled a list of about 120 of the most common values to live by which I would be happy to share with you, to help get you started in identifying your own values. If you’d like more information, or would like a copy of that list, please drop me an email: david at davidweedmark dot com.

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I grew up with Star Trek, beginning at the age of three, watching reruns every weekend on Channel 50 Detroit with my father. In 2009, I took my own son to see the film in the theatre. In between those years, it has always been there, in one form or another and, in many ways, it has saturated the way I look at life. In the Nineties, I wrote a review of the book, Make It So (Star Trek: The Next Generation), examining the leadership lessons of Captain Picard, for a national magazine. But it always left me wondering about the Leadership Lessons of Captain Kirk.

The character’s effect on me probably first really hit me about ten years ago when I was facing a difficult situation at work. Our company was either going to lose a ridiculous amount of money and risk going out of business, or lose our most important client. “It’s a no-win scenario,” I was told by the President of the firm.

“No,” I said, shaking my head and not even thinking about the words. “I don’t believe in a no-win scenario.” (The phrase wasn’t so well known then.) I called the client, met with them twenty minutes later, explained the situation, and within the hour, they happily re-negotiated a contract that had already been signed.

Here are what I consider to be the Top 7 Leadership Lessons from Captain James T. Kirk.

1. Don’t Believe in No-Win Scenarios: From the Kobayashi Maru test at Starfleet Academy, to every single time the auto destruct is set on the Enterprise, and turned off within moments of detonation, the most important lesson Captain Kirk teaches us is that there is never a benefit from accepting a no-win scenario. Sometimes rules are meant to be broken. If you need to break them, do so audaciously.

2. Live with Awe & Wonder. The best way to overcome any fear, is to look at it from a perspective of fascination. I think William Shatner explains this best: “We meet aliens every day who have something to give us. They come in the form of people with different opinions…. For me, Kirk had always lived a life of awe and wonder; those were his feelings about the universe and everything he encountered… The meeting of every new alien was never marked by fear or apprehension. Rather, the emotion was always one of awe, the magnificence of creation.” ~ William Shatner on Captain Kirk (from an interview with Esquire)

3. Be an Outlaw. Play by your own rules. Play fairly, and keep the best interests of others in mind, but do not be afraid of confrontation. To be an adventurer – that is to explore your life as an adventure – means that you will inevitably run into conflict. While he did described himself as a soldier, Kirk was actually a revolutionary. This is why he spent so much time in alien prisons. Kirk respected the opinions of other people, but never let their opinions steer him away from his own principles.

“In every revolution, there’s one man with a vision.”

4. Take Action: When faced between doing nothing, and taking action, Kirk always chose the latter. When necessary he would leap in before looking and improvise along the way, adjusting his actions as necessary. Step forward and do what you think is best rather than hiding behind what is merely expected of you.

5. Accept Advice & Make Your Own Decisions. James Kirk’s two closest friends represented the logical (Spock) and the emotional (McCoy) sides of human nature. He accepted their advice, but was seldom ruled by neither the heart nor reason alone. Getting advice from others is important because it gives us a wider perspective of any situation. But in the end, it is your life and you are the captain of your own ship, so the decision needs to be yours alone.

“One of the advantages of being Captain is being able to ask for advice without necessarily having to take it.”

6. Overlook Honest Mistakes. In both yourself and others, it is important to remember that people will always make mistakes. We learn more from our mistakes than we do by doing anything perfectly. It is how we grow. A good captain does not flaunt his own mistakes, nor does he dwell on the mistakes of others. Accept it, assess it, and move on.

“If I can have honesty, it’s easier to overlook mistakes.”

7. Get Your Hands Dirty. Kirk seldom sat on the bridge, watching from a safe distance. With every new planet, he led the landing party to explore what was down there. Look at every day of your life as a new planet to explore. Get in there, get dirty, get your shirt ripped. Get involved with your own life and explore the world.

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I had the great pleasure of escaping to the woods for a few days with my son this week. It’s a beautiful old cabin nestled between the base of a tree-covered mountain and a deep isolated lake. Before heading out, we stopped at Canadian Tire and picked up his first pocket knife. Its a stainless steel blade, with a wooden handle and brass fittings. It only cost a few dollars, but, if he cares for it, it could very well last him a lifetime.

I showed him how to hold it, how to sharpen it, how to care for it. Then I stepped back and watched, in wonder, as he practiced what he learned and over the course of a few hours made the tool his own.  He seems to understand this better than most. It’s intuitive to him, beyond words, and I realized he was deliberately creating a relationship with this new artifact in his life.

I watched as the tool became a part of him, and he became a part of it. In time, he will develop callouses on his fingers where he grasps the handle. In time, the wood and brass of the handle will become worn where his fingers have pressed against it. The blade will gradually become more narrow, as its edge is pressed against the wood he carves, and slowly eroded from sharpening it on stones. The knife will become familiar to his hands, a silent friend laden with memories of august days sitting next to a lake. It will become an artifact of his life, treasured perhaps one day by his own children and grandchildren.

I don’t own a lot of things, but I used to. Yet, regardless of how many possession I’ve had, it is always the most simple tools that hold the most importance to me: a pocket knife, a canoe, an oar, a fishing pole, a hand axe, a well-crafted hammer, a favourite pen, pencil and notebook, favourite coffee mug… and that’s really about it. I think, however, for me, it was a long tangled journey to discover the importance of such simple artifacts in one’s life, compared to the complicated, forgettable toys we seem to so-easily acquire.

My son already seems to understand these things in a way I was unable to until very recently in life. The pleasure and care he takes in something as simple as a pocket knife, or an old hand-axe, or a fishing pole, is inspiring to me.  It’s a parent’s role to teach a child many things, and I was able to teach him many things in the past few days. But through the course of the past few days, I think I learned much more from him. Watching his relationship with the frogs and fish he caught and then released back into the water, his relationship with the rocks, the trees, the water and even the insects was a lesson in naturism I will not soon forget… and of course the care and importance he placed in his knew pocket knife. I hope he always remembers through the years to come, how his father’s heart is folded into this particular pocket knife as well.

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Listen. Can you hear it? It is the sound of your brain growing, stretching, just by reading these words. Your brain is becoming something more than it was just moments ago.

There are approximately 100 billion neurons in the human brain. That is more than ten times the number of stars in the galaxy. It is not just the neurons that make your brain what it is. It is the circuits between them (synapses) that are the building blocks of your thoughts, memories and perceptions. You have about 100 trillion of these, and the combination between them are nearly limitless.

Every time you learn something new, observe something new, do something new, you are creating a new pathway or circuit between brain cells. The more you do something, the more you think about something, the stronger those circuits become. The less you do something, the weaker they become. Your brain is constantly growing and ungrowing all the time.

This is why driving a car, reading a book, or riding a bicycle becomes easier the more you do it. This is also why what you do, and the tools you use to do it, become a part of who you are, how you think, and how you behave. Your brain tends to use the most strengthened pathways, even when you are doing something new.

This is why a writer’s fingers may twitch when they are thinking, even though there is no keyboard in front of them. This is why your right foot will press down on the floor if a truck suddenly pulls out in front of you, even though you’re in the passenger seat. Watching too much television will shorten your attention span. Browsing too much on the internet will eventually hinder your ability to sit down and actually read (rather than scan) a whole book.

Whatever it is you do for eight hours a day, five days a week, this too will eventually have an effect on how you think, and how you behave. What you do shapes your mind, becoming a part of who you are.

If you put four sales people in a room, or four accountants, and ask them to come up with new, fresh ideas for their business,  you could probably predict the results. You’ll get a handful of ideas, and they will agree on most of them. People who engage in the same work and deal with the same types of problems everyday, will tend to have the similar perspectives on their work. When looking for new ideas, they will tend to agree on which ideas are best. Now, if you put the accountants and the sales reps into the same room, you will have a much, much different kind of meeting.

As a writer, I find words themselves sometimes become problematic. Reading words, writing words, thinking in words, even when writing creatively, can become a mental rut. Every six months or so, I become overwhelmed with the need to immerse myself in something new. I will paint for a week straight, or draw, or fix a car, build or refinish a piece of furniture, pick up a guitar, speak French, take flying lessons.

This summer I’m learning wood carving. I’m really awful at it, but I seem to improve with each hour. Its a very tactile, non-verbal experience. While it takes a great deal of thought and planning, the thought process is different than writing a paragraph, and the planning is much different than plotting a novel.  When I return to the keyboard, it is with a slightly different mind than if I had just gone for a walk, or watched a movie, or any of those hundreds of other things we use to distract ourselves.

Learning to play music does make you more aware of sounds, but it changes the way you think about words as well. Learning to paint doesn’t just make you more sensitive to colours, it alters your approach to everything else you do. Wood carving, I’m beginning to find, does not just change how I look at a piece of wood, or how I look at the trees. It has slightly altered my perception of the words I’m typing now. It has slightly influenced the way I think.

I don’t believe it matters what you do, as long as it is new, and different from your normal routines. Because, for myself, what I have learned, the act of beginning something new, whatever it might be, also helps me reacquaint myself with a beginner’s perspective. I’ve stepped out of my own head for a while, stepped out of my usual neural pathways, and when I return, it is from a completely different perspective.

In my own head, you could say, it is Frost’s path less traveled. You zen folks out there would call it the beginner’s mind.

So I would urge you this week to get out of your head and try something you have never tried before. Engage with it, immerse yourself in it, experience it. When you return, you’ll be returning to your self from a slightly different angle, a slightly different perspective, than the perspective you have on your life today.

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Why is finding time to do the things we want or need to do so difficult for some, and so easy for others?

Once in a while I get a comment from clients asking how it is I always seem to be so well organized: having information seemingly at my fingertips, accessible within moments of needing it; responding to emails and phone calls within a relatively short time; having deliverables actually delivered on the day they were promised. Things like that.

And the answer is laughable. It’s because I’m the most disorganized person I’ve ever met. Seriously. I’m really a slob. I just tried to open a mango and had to take a shower. It wasn’t pretty, and would probably have been enough to send the most militant vegetarian off fruit forever. I also get lost in thought quite easily, which makes me a bit absent-minded. I’m the guy who puts the milk in the cupboard and has to call his own cell phone because he doesn’t remember where he left it. And to add insult to injury, I also happen to be one of these people who was born left-handed, but was trained out of it at an early age for reasons I still don’t understand but might have something to do with fears of witchcraft, but I really don’t know. This makes me ambidextrous at a few things, but just basically clumsy at anything society considers necessary or practical. I can write with both hands, and they are equally illegible.

But I’ve acknowledged these things about myself. So when it comes to anything important, I know that if I don’t make a concerted effort to keep on top of every detail, it will take only 45 minutes before I’m lost in a quagmire of backlogged emails, stacks of paper, and forgotten deadlines.

It’s much the same for finding time to do things that are important to me. Many people ask me where I seem to find the time to do what I do. Not only do I get lost in thoughts and daydreams (I’ve lost whole afternoons gazing at trees and clouds), I’m also an experienced procrastinator (Revenue Canada can attest to this). That can be a lethal combination when it comes to managing a dozen websites, editing manuscripts, writing novels, or anything else that requires daily shots of intensity over long periods of time. But, again, I understand these things about myself. I know that if I don’t do it today… I’ll probably not get back to it for weeks, or months.

Time is a democratic phenomenon. We are each given 24 hours each day – no more, no less. We can search all we want, but there are no more hours to be found than what we already have. The most important tactic I have found to ensure I make room in the time I have for something important, is to first plant a seed.

As an example, I decided to write about this topic several days ago. And I knew if I didn’t take that seed of an idea and plant it somewhere, it would soon get lost in that big virtual duffel bag where so many of my ideas get placed and forgotten. Instead of worrying about finding the time to do it, I took just one minute, and found a nice graphic and uploaded it into WordPress. I didn’t have to think about it again. Instead, it began thinking about me. It called to me, barely audible the first day, but getting louder and more pronounced, the seed of an idea taking shape (through mixed metaphors and all) until it finally, today at lunchtime, shouted out, demanding my attention. And now its just about done.

So instead of worrying about finding the time to do the things you most want to do, try making the time today – one minute, five minutes, or even an hour. The momentum of the smallest action will soon find its way back to you.

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1. Finding Passion in Your Life

Downshifting, or minimal living, is a lifestyle trend based on one question: is more necessarily better?

The reasons for asking this question have a variety of sources: concern for the environment; job losses; retirement plans running askew with drops in the stock market; or even questioning capitalism itself which seems to dictate keep growing, or die.

Most of those who are downshifting their lives don’t even know there is a new word for it. Some call it downshifting. Others call it a frugal lifestyle, minimal living.

Clode Deschamps, for example, a 45-year old kindergarten teacher began downshifting her life over fifteen years ago, and has not looked back with even the slightest pang of regret. She has never called it downshifting. She prefers to think of it as a conscious lifestyle, or just being me compared to a lifestyle she feels pushed upon her by prescribed by society.

For fifteen years, she has been working only half-days, earning half the salary of her peers, but having twice the time and energy for her class of four and five year olds. Every morning she gets up at six in the morning, brimming with excitement for the day ahead. She spends at least two hours preparing for her class, designing pages for the children to colour, or preparing crafts. It has never occurred to her to recycle craft materials, or even a coloring sheet on a given theme from one year to the next.

She walks her dog and then rushes to school – a twenty-minute walk from her home ­ and arrives early to play with the children in the playground. After her workday is over at 11:30, she usually lingers around the schoolyard, helping other teachers, or interacting with students from other classes during lunch. Picture a 45-year-old woman teaching children to do cartwheels in the halls.

She returns home sometime during the lunch hour and the rest of the day is hers to spend as she pleases: taking her dog for a long walk, visiting with her mother, gardening, helping her neighbours, reading, or pouring more energy into her next day’s lessons.

“If I worked full-time,” Clode explained, “I wouldn’t have the energy I need for the children. I wouldn’t have the energy to play with them and give them all the attention they truly deserve.

People sometimes do question her decision to arrive early at work and to stay there afterwards.

“I love my job and I love being with the kids,” she said. “The difference is that when you’re working half-days, the extra time you spend is because you want to be there, not because you have to be there. And that’s a big difference!”

Working half-days and earning a half-income has been so engrained into her lifestyle that she says she couldn’t imagine living with half the time, or what she would do with double the money. Someone who has never been attracted to fashion trends or designer labels, a “minimal life” is not how she would describe her life at all.

She does drive an old car (a 15-year-old station wagon) and lives in a small apartment. She buys only quality second-hand clothes, seldom eats in restaurants, and watches only about an hour of television each day. At the end of every month, she has always had money left over to put into her savings and retirement plans.

Her minimal life was inspired, Clode says, by the likes of Mother Teresa, Gandhi, and the book Walden, by Henry David Thoreau.

“It’s not a question of living without things,” Clode said. “I have everything I need and everything I want.”

“My family thinks I’m crazy for living the way I do,” she laughs, “but I think the only important thing is if you are doing what you love. Sure, I drive an old car, but if it gets a dent, who cares? It’s old!”

“I’m living the life I want and I love my life. Why would I want to change that?”

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1. Kelly – a dog's life
2. Seize the Day