Some days you feel like absolutely nothing can go wrong.  You’re on fire, unstoppable.  Ideas are flowing, confidence is high, and you’re walking around with your chin up and your back straight.  There’s no better feeling than knowing you’re at the top of your game.  The world is your oyster.  Everything you touch seems to turn to gold and you wonder how you were ever stagnant before.

Until the past few years, I had really only been able to identify these times when looking back.  Now I’m acutely aware of them when I’m in them and I grab onto them and try not to let go when that train is rolling.

But these feelings never last long. Maybe a day or two, maybe a little more. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a full week of this superhuman ability to create things out of nothing without obstruction.  Sooner or later things will return to normal and there’s no explanation why this happens.  You just can’t self-motivate like you were able to the day before.  Ideas are at a distance, just out of reach.  You aren’t feeling flow and a day’s worth of work is taking two full days instead of just three hours.

It’s crazy frustrating when this happens. You try and recreate the environment, the feeling you had, and you just can’t. Your mind has moved on, your thoughts are elsewhere, and your current experience has been altered in some inexplicable way. And you don’t like it at all.

What happened?  Well, nothing at all.  It’s perfectly normal for creativity to ebb and flow like this.  It happens to every single creative person dozens – even hundreds – of times throughout a year. It’s just not possible to keep anything running at its highest capacity all the time.

But are there ways to keep it running for as long as you can?  Maybe.  There are things you can do that will help but only in the sense that they may be able to prolong that window.  There’s no guarantee that these things will work every time, but if they buy you an extra few days or a shorter period in the downswing, it could be worth it.

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When you search the interwebs for information on goal setting, you find a lot of the same recycled drivel.  “Make your goals inspirational” and “Break your goals down into tasks” are common recommendations, but the single biggest bit of repeat advice is to make your goals SMART. 

This acronym is one of the most overused in all of personal development, and doesn’t capture the essence of goal-setting.  Not because it’s necessarily bad advice, but rather because it isn’t personal and authentic advice.  It’s cookie cutter… and is more about task management than achievement.

To recap the SMART designation, the general thinking is that any goal that doesn’t meet the following attributes is a goal not worth having.

S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Attainable
R = Realistic (or Relevant)
T = Time-bound (or Timely)

Specific is about making sure your goal isn’t too vague, but instead represents exactly what you plan to accomplish, why you want to accomplish it, and how you’re going to do it.  Measurable makes sure you can actually see and celebrate progress against the goal in order to move in the right direction through quantitative means.  Attainable goals are goals you can actually achieve in the timeframe allotted – i.e. having a goal to make $10 million dollars in 1 week would be an unattainable goal for most people.  Realistic refers to having a goal that you’re both willing and able to achieve.  Time-bound (or Timely) is all about making sure you have an end-date in mind to hold yourself accountable to; a goal to become President of your company isn’t really a goal unless you set a date by which you’d like to accomplish it.

Sounds great, right?  Sure, maybe if you’re a Cylon.  For the rest of us, SMART doesn’t give us a solid enough framework to set personal goals.  The SMART methodology is believed to have started in corporate America, and was originally used for commitment setting in the new practice of management in the 1950s.  It’s intended mostly, to this day, for project management and not for real-world use.  Perhaps this is why it seems so “big company” and not very relevant to the uniqueness and quirkiness that is human nature.  Sure, you want your goals to be SMART, but don’t you need them to be more than that?

We need a new way to think about goals.  A new framework for forming them, and a different way to think about evaluating them once they’re set.

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This October I’ll celebrate a personal milestone.  15 years ago on my 18th birthday, I started an intense strength training regimen while a freshman at Cornell University.  At that time I was training for my Black Belt test in both Tae Kwon Do and Hap Ki Do and I figured a little extra strength and flexibility would help me when it came to that dreaded “break bricks and boards” part of the test.  I didn’t know much at the time, just that lifting weights gives you muscle and protein is important for that – but that didn’t stop me from jumping in headfirst and giving it my all.

Over the last 15 years I’ve certainly had ups and downs.  I’ve slacked off and felt completely out of shape for months at a time.  I’ve also hit my stride many times throughout the years and realized that when I’m exercising regularly, just about everything else in my life comes into serious clarity.  I’ve learned that for me, the benefits of strength training (and martial arts) are far more mental than physical.  I’d tradeoff any gains in strength, size, or flexibility for the things I list below.

In 1999 I started a list of the things I’ve felt I’ve learned “in the gym” and I’ve been expanding on this list ever since.  These are things that I learned as a kid (and as an adult) training in martial arts, and how I’ve since expanded my understanding through intense strength training in a gym environment.  Just like other posts in the Exercise category, the things I list below are certainly not limited to the activities I perform.  If you’re a dancer, a yoga practitioner, a cyclist, or a volleyball player, chances are a lot of these same lessons can be learned with your activity.

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Feel overwhelmed yet?  Most people do.  They’re in the daily grind: wake-up, work, come home, sleep, rinse-and-repeat.  The failing economy has already hit people’s wallets and purses hard enough to limit traditional vacations, and without something to look forward to, the day-to-day hurdles can be even harder to stomach.  And of course, mood affects focus in profound ways – someone who isn’t inspired can find the flow state to be pretty elusive.  Focus requires some level of inspiration for a kick-start – without it, you can end up in a negative downward spiral for quite a while.

Tim Ferris talked about “mini-retirements” in his book, The 4-Hour Workweek.  The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal covered “mini-vacations”, which are shorter but more frequent getaways to recharge.  I’m generally a fan of both concepts (although find mini-retirements to be a lot more impractical).  But taking 3-day weekends is still not something most people can do all the time to recharge their batteries.  And I really do think that focus is local.  Meaning: in order to improve your focus consistently, you need to start with a daily  habit and not a monthly, bi-monthly, or annual one.  Do something every single day to increase focus and over time, the actions will compound into a heap of focus-inducing love.

So take your 3-day weekends… but look at what you can do every single day as well.  I’ve started calling these quick recharges “micro-vacations”.

Micro-vacation (def’n): Daily activity lasting at least 15 minutes that can’t be considered “work” by any sane, rational human being; purpose of which is to recharge and increase overall focus for the next few hours

In talking with people who have trouble with focus, one thing I’ve found is that they don’t intrinsically value taking breaks.  They think it’s slacking off or being unproductive.  But nothing could be further from the truth.  In order for your prefrontal cortex to kick into focus mode, it needs to be ready – and too much work simply doesn’t work.  Just like your muscles, your brain needs time to relax before continuing to push on.

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