My 10 Commandments

Monday, June 23rd 2008 by Shanel Yang         Email this article to a friend

My Personal Ten Commandments are the rules I try to live by in daily life.

They’re different from my life goals. They’re the tools I use to get there from here. It takes different strokes for different folks, but I’ve found these happen to work best for me.

Over the years, I gathered these from various treasured sources, and each of them inspires me in different ways in different times of need. But, no matter how simple or common- sensical they may sound, I still manage to forget pretty much all of them unless I have this list around.

Why not try making your own list after you discover what works best for you?

MY PERSONAL TEN COMMANDMENTS

1. You are the most important bird in your nest.

In my free ebook Cuckoo In Your Nest!, I stress the importance of taking care of all your own needs first before you can be of any real use to anyone else. Especially in the long run. Especially if you don’t want to secretly (or loudly) resent the people you do help when you can’t afford the time, effort, or money to do that. Especially if you secretly expect some sort of reward or payback from them or others and find out the hard way that it never comes. Or, it comes too late. Or, it’s never enough.

Take care of your needs first. When all of your own needs are sufficiently met—so that you don’t feel deprived or lacking—you can give freely of your time, effort, and money without any strings attached and experience the unparalleled pleasure that is the joy of giving. Otherwise, you are just setting everybody up for expectations, disappointments, and hard feelings down the road, including and especially yourself.

2. First things first, second things never.

This one is from Brian Tracey’s excellent book about procrastination, Eat that Frog! The idea is if you focus on the most important things—the ones we dread the most—and do our best to get those right, the rest tend to work themselves out or simply don’t give you enough return for your time, effort, and money investment.

3. Your thoughts create your destiny.

Suze Orman teaches this as one of her laws of money in her DVD The Courage To Be Rich: Creating a Life of Material and Spiritual Abundance. I love her message that our thoughts become our destiny. She teaches us to be careful of what we think because whatever we think, we will eventually say. Be careful of what we say because what we say, we will eventually do. Be careful of what we do because our actions become our habits. Be careful of what we let become our habits because our habits will become our destiny! If we think poor thoughts, such as “I’ll never get out of debt!,” guess what? We’ll never get out of debt! If, instead, we think, “I’ll be out of debt someday soon!” Then, that will be our future. Thoughts are incredible, mysterious, yet, extremely powerful, forces of nature. They can make or break us. So much so, they should come with warning labels: USE WITH CAUTION!

4. You can handle it.

This one I got from Susan Jeffers’ classic Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. No matter how dreadful or scary you think something is going to be, you can handle it. The human mind, heart, and body comprise an incredible system that can withstand crazy amounts of pressure, heartbreak, and physical abuse, yet still survive to thrive again. Whenever I feel I can’t do something, I just tell myself I can.

I can handle it! I can handle the rejection if that’s what happens. I can handle not making the team, winning the prize, falling on my face—10,000 times if I have to—because I can. And, because that’s exactly what everyone who has ever achieved their wildest dreams and more has had to do to make it! So, I will, too!

5. Make it work.

Tim Gunn of “Project Runway” always impressed me with his calm demeanor and soothing voice. As he circles the frantic work room in the final 15 - 30 minutes of the competition each week with a discerning eye and thoughtful finger to his lips, he stops at each station to have a closer look at each design and a little heart to heart with each designer. He cuts right to the chase of every problem and offers helpful tips on how to fix them. Yet, even as the minutes continue to furiously tick away, his voice and demeanor stay the course of utter, unshakable calm. Finally, he always ends his wise counsel with his trademark phrase that is at once a serious wake-up call and a cheerful vote of confidence: “Make it work! Make it work!”

Whenever I feel I’m working under a very tight deadline, I remember the seemingly impossible tasks the contestants of Project Runway are asked to complete … or Iron Chef, or The Apprentice, or any show I used to watch in wide-eyed amazement while thinking to myself, “How in the world do they do that? How do they keep going when it looks like they can’t possibly win or even finish their work on time?” But, I’m always surprised anew, when, despite seemingly impossible hurdles, like big chunks of sugar sculptures falling off and breaking in episodes of The Food Network Challenge or vicious fights breaking out amongst their own teammates in episodes of The Celebrity Apprentice, they still manage to get the tasks done! So, no matter how outrageous my deadline might be, I just roll up my sleeves and get started, do the best I can, then turn in whatever I’ve got when the time is up. That’s what “make it work” means to me: I know I can get it done.

6. You don’t need to be the best, just better than the rest.

When I used to teach interview skills as part of my image consulting business, I always started the lesson with a little joke:

There was a guy who had never been in the mountains. His friend was a big nature lover and convinced him to go hiking. There they were, enjoying the great outdoors, the fresh air, the beautiful trees, when the first guy spotted something moving in the distance by some bushes. He realized it was a baby bear. He got all excited and said to his friend, “Hey, look! There’s a baby bear! Wow! I’ve never seen one outside of a zoo before!”

His friend finished lacing up his shoes, never taking his eyes off the momma bear, and calmly said, “I don’t have to outrun the bear. I only have to outrun you.”

My point with this joke was that all you need to succeed at anything is to be just a little bit better than your competition. Sometimes that competition is only with yourself, and in striving to be just a little bit better today at something than you were yesterday is definitely good enough. At that rate, you’ll be good to as great as you want to be in no time! Often, our own perfectionism gets in the way of even trying to do anything because we falsely believe and demand of ourself that we have to be the best or at least very good at it before we dare to let anyone see our imperfections or less than completely polished works of art. Wrong!

That kind of thinking is a trap for procrastination and jams your creativity. Just go for it! Do you best, but dare to fail! Make a lot of mistakes, and learn as much as you can from them. Who knows? Maybe the competition is doing worse. I was surprised to see this very same scenario played out many times on The Apprentice.

7. Trust your instincts.

My belief in my instincts come from various sources, including Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Warming The Stone Child: Myths & Stories About Abandonment And The Unmothered Child. For a summary of the latter and tips on how to grow your instincts, see “Fan Your Inner Flame Till It Burns Bright.”

In the past, when I’ve ignored my instincts to follow conventional wisdom or the imploring advice of family or friends, I’ve seriously regretted it each time. I don’t know why it takes us so long to finally trust our instincts. They are our guiding light like guardian angels. That little voice that saves us at the last minute from taking that final step before certain disaster. The more I listen to it, the safer I feel. Now, I pretty much give in to my instincts in all my most important decisions. Instead of falling into a a state of emotionally-driven pandemonium like I’d feared, my instincts have proved rather conservative in nature, tending toward a “wait and see” policy on most issues. Go figure! It turns out that my purely “rational” decisions have been so erratic because they were devoid of an important emotional component.

8. Make a lot of mistakes, but never the same ones twice.

Thomas Edison is the gold standard when it comes to the number of tries to get something right. The story goes, after 10,000 failed attempts to invent the long-burning incandescent light bulb, Edison was asked what it felt like to have failed so many times. He replied something to the effect, “I haven’t failed! I’ve successfully eliminated 10,000 ways that it won’t work, so I’m getting closer all the time.” Imagine if he didn’t keep track of all the different ways it didn’t work and had to stay in the dark about which methods had been tested and which had not! He would have been going in circles forever, with his only hope of finding the exact right combination of metals, gases, and filaments being that of pure chance.

9. If you want to succeed faster, fail faster.

Founder of IBM Tom Watson failed very rapidly (sometimes in just one day) through a series of careers early in his life and attributed his eventual success to it. Robert Kikosaki also extols the virtues of quick, sound failures in his Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

As long as you are doing sort of okay at whatever it is that you’re doing just to pay the bills but don’t really love, you’ll never take the leap of faith to go after what you’d really love to do with your life. It’s sad but true that the only people who seem to find their bliss early in life are the ones who had little or nothing to lose by going after it. Take me, for instance. I came out of law school with mountains of student loan debt, began racking up another mountain of credit card debt, and got busy learning all the ropes of being a lawyer in a big firm, even though I quickly realized that I’d probably made the wrong career choice. But, I couldn’t just quit. What would I do about all that debt? I had a good-paying job. My family and friends might think I’m a failure. I couldn’t bear the thought of that. So, even though I was unhappy, I convinced myself that, since I’d made this bed, I had better lie in it. I stayed in that bed for over 10 years! Whereas if I had simply failed as a lawyer, or even a law student, early on, I would have fallen back on my original love of writing during all those years and been as happy as I have been since I started blogging!

10. Progress, no perfection.

Perfection is the bane of existence for procrastinators, critics, and control freaks. Let go of perfectionism and embrace any small inch of improvement, then you will easily stay motivated in any goal. It also helps to know that any skill can be learned and improved upon with practice more than God-given talent. See, e.g., “Change Your Mindset to Change Your Life” and “So You Think You’re Smart?”

CONCLUSION

That’s my list. Now, how about you? If you don’t have a list of personal commandments to guide you through your personal development goals yet, you might want to give these a try for starters. Then, develop your own list as you find quotes or affirmations that speak to you. Be awesome! Be your own hero!

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