No mat­ter where you scull, win­ning does not require the stroke of a genius

Sports are an essen­tial part of my life, and I think they can be a fun and reward­ing activ­ity for any­one. Since my early child­hood, sports and other phys­i­cal recre­ation have been an almost daily part of my rou­tine, and this con­tin­ues through today. I played three var­sity sports in high school, one in col­lege, and have won com­pet­i­tive tour­na­ments in all three. I have been coached by pro­fes­sion­als, includ­ing the coach of a pre­vi­ous top 5 ten­nis player. I have per­son­ally coached in three sports, ten­nis, vol­ley­ball and hockey, and con­tinue to coach vol­ley­ball today. I truly believe that any­one can be suc­cess­ful at any sport; that’s not to say you can be a pro­fes­sional, but that you can learn a sport, play it well and reap the ben­e­fits, includ­ing the eustress might want to add a wiki or news arti­cle link here — not every­body knows what this is of a com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment, the cama­raderie of team­mates and other like-minded indi­vid­u­als, and win or lose, the sat­is­fac­tion from know­ing you played to your max­i­mum poten­tial. Read More

Ask­ing “What’s it all about?” is less passé then you might think.

I sup­pose I’ve always been a bit of a dreamer.  Some of the ear­li­est inter­nal mono­logues I can remem­ber revolve around me being con­vinced I was meant for some­thing, like there would be noth­ing typ­i­cal about my life or the way I went about it.  I don’t exactly know where these feel­ings came from, or why I feel them as strongly today as I did then, but I do know that the more I feel con­nected to those grand designs in daily life, the hap­pier and more ful­filled I am.  I’m com­ing to see that this isn’t an abnor­mal­ity — this is human­ity. The very qual­ity of being human enables you to think in the abstract, to strive for ideals that you can not see or touch.  These ideals are what philoso­phers, artists, and writ­ers all try to trans­late into the perceptible.

Dream­ing is the Default Set­ting for Humans

Real­ize it or not, you are wired to dream, and I don’t mean that in the sense of want­ing a big­ger house or fancier clothes.  Those things are fine for what they are, and there’s noth­ing wrong with want­ing to treat your­self to a nice suit or a posh din­ner if you have the money.  How­ever, these are not ends that can moti­vate you in the long term, and the plea­sure you expe­ri­ence from them is fleeting.

So what are some exam­ples of ideals that really moti­vate? Here are a few:

• Loy­alty to friends, fam­ily, sig­nif­i­cant others
• Con­cern for your com­mu­nity, be it local, regional, national, or global
• Tran­scen­dent feel­ings or a sense of won­der from medi­a­tion, exer­cise, art, and travel
• Romance with a sig­nif­i­cant other (not sim­ply a com­fort­able relationship)

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Make sure your abstract goals don’t get lost in the daily grind.

Intan­gi­ble goals that resist mea­sure­ment are a con­stant prob­lem for any­one try­ing to improve their qual­ity of life.  It is easy to mea­sure your progress towards quan­tata­tive goals; for exam­ple, if I want to have some indi­ca­tor of my gen­eral phys­i­cal fit­ness, I can use the num­ber of push-ups I can do or my rest­ing heart rate.  But for things like,

“How well am I main­tain­ing my friend­ships?” or “How much do I con­tribute pos­i­tively to my work envi­ron­ment?” it’s a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing to mea­sure your progress.

But resis­tance to mea­sure­ment doesn’t make these kinds of goals any less impor­tant.  Luck­ily, there a few strate­gies to wrap your mind around your abstract pursuits:

Mea­sur­ing the Human Touch

I have a real prob­lem main­tain­ing per­sonal rela­tion­ships — I always seem to have a hard time keep­ing a reg­u­lar stream of com­mu­ni­ca­tion going with any­one but the peo­ple I see every­day.  And it’s not because per­sonal rela­tion­ships are not impor­tant to me, it’s more a func­tion of hav­ing other things going on and it gen­er­ally slips my mind at the end of the day to write an email to a friend abroad or to call some­one nearby that I don’t see very often.

I’ve addressed this prob­lem by reduc­ing the social clut­ter I have and being explicit about what I need to do to feel connected:

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