I feel like I’ve lost a lot of momentum lately, like I’m half the person I was a few weeks ago.  My spiritual mojo is shot lately.  My will to do things is there, but the energy and time is not.

It troubled me and I meditated on it a bit while feeding my son, Noah this morning.  I’ve been irritable, prone to angry outbursts and saying things that I don’t mean.  In all honesty, I’ve thought several times recently whether this was all worth it.  I realize my honesty will open me up to criticism, but this is my public sounding board so I accept it.

I felt like the children were taking up too much time and energy (all of it), and my day job of managing large-scale projects was draining my reserves.  My ego-driven psycho-babble self was feeling resentful that I’ve had to give up a great many enjoyable tasks (music, writing, exercise etc.) already.

As a general rule, I don't want to become another example of a generation living only to support the next generation and so I felt threatened when my dreams were put on hold yet again.

I’m not proud of any of this.  I’m far from being a perfect person, and while I feel a little better admitting this, I still need to address it and fix it (i.e. get the Ego to take a back seat).

So as I sat with Noah, feeding him, staring at his big, beautiful eyes, admitting my imperfections and vowing for the one hundredth time that I would do better, I figured out what's been happening.

My brain doesn't know what to do with all of this yet.

It's all new, all the sensations, the stress, the belief that every triplet's cry is a screeching firedrill, that the success of a work project rests solely on my shoulders.  It's blowing out my comfort zone and until my brain can burn the new neural pathways to handle this, I have to admit that I will keep making mistakes, that I will continue to be an irritable, pathetic mess, and that my wife and children are saints for putting up with me.

This is why I haven't the energy to write more than a few scattered words, to embrace the challenges at work with continuity, to handle the stresses of screaming babies with grace and patience.

It's times like these when you have to stop forcing it.

Let the brain build the neural pathways so that new actions and new  habits can be ingrained.

Absorbing and regurgitating self-help books at lightening speed is like taking a sip from a fire hose.  Your brain adapts at its own speed and despite what the Law of Attraction proponents say otherwise, it may take you longer to adapt than it would the next person.  It make take a lot longer to adapt than you can process information.

That's okay.

I'm realizing that it's not a race between me and "X blogger" to see who can put out a book or who can get to 5,000 subscribers first.

You should be focusing on creating the best "you," not a poor facsimile of someone else.

It's in these moments I am reminded of the wisdom of detachment, in passively viewing as you let your life unfold naturally rather than forcing every particular technique and life hack (no disrespect to lifehack.org, I am a fan) into your routine.  You may seek success, but take the time to understand, apply, and integrate the new thoughts and processes.  Don't just jump onto the next great thing.

So, for me, that means slowing down a bit, letting the new habits of parenthood burn their pathways into my brain first, since they are the most important.  Then from there, evaluate to see if I am ready for the next area of growth, whatever that may be.

I've spoken about slowing down several times lately, but the Ego keeps creeping in to try to push me to the next level.  While I would love to be a full time blogger/writer so that I can stay home and be a better parent/husband to my kids and wife, I need to focus first on the be the better parent/husband part, then worry about the other goals later…and most importantly, I need to be okay with that decision…and that's the hardest part.

I was mindlessly floating along the World Wide Web today, as I am prone to do when I am trying to get my mind off certain things and on to better things.  I’m not too sure exactly how I got on the topic but I was researching some information on Don Miquel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements, for a future post and came to a link on Bamboo. This happenstance occurrence has turned into a really cool lesson on the secrets of success.

It turns out that these marvelous plants are the fastest growing of their kind in the known world.  They have been documented to grow forty-eight inches in a single twenty-four hour period.   That’s two inches an hour.  That means you can grab a frosty beer (preferably a Guinness), a bag of pork rinds (or tofu rinds if you are so inclined) and your favorite camping chair and literally watch these suckers grow.  That’s what you call an overnight sensation in my book. 

I was, as we say in the business, slightly intrigued. 

What possibly could account for their awesome success? 

Bamboo Success Principle #1 – Know What You Want
 
The Bamboo, for its part, is pretty single-minded.  It knows exactly what its destiny is…to grow into a bamboo tree.  As humans, we aren’t so lucky.  We’re quite domesticated despite being born for the wild.  We are bombarded early on with messages of how we should be and act.  We are told that we are good boys and girls if we act a certain way, and we are otherwise punished if we don’t.  The problem is, what one person considers “good behavior” often differs from another.  Based on the thousands of mixed messages we receive every day, it can be tough to figure out what you truly want.   It’s critical; otherwise you will wander aimlessly and wonder why you are still unhappy thirty years from now.

You are wired to be a creative creature.  You’ve been given the intellect and creative cognizance to do amazing things.  It is your duty to put that to use.  You do no one any good by being unhappy.  It may take time figuring out what you want. 

I suggest some alone time, un-wired, with a pen and journal trying to figure it out.  Writing and teaching people to find their passions is what fuels me.  I’ve just come to learn this since I had my babies six weeks ago.  I learned that it does my children no good to see dad unhappy, toiling away at things he doesn’t enjoy.  Define what it is that you want and get on to Principle #2

Bamboo Success Principle #2 – Setting the Foundation

As I read further I learned that the bamboo literally sits underground for several years before even breaking the surface.  They spend all of their energy during this time building an ingenious rhizome root system that is the key to its rapid growth.  The rhizome root system winds up being 80% of its mass…all under the surface, completely unseen from the general public.

As a seeker of the best self-development techniques, this one smacked me like a two ton…heavy thing.  The secret of success is based on the multiple years of toiling through the basics, setting the foundation for incredible growth.  And this is a guaranteed fact, as so much anecdotal evidence would suggest.

Yes I know…Bamboo Success.  It’s decidedly un-sexy and for our microwave culture it sounds like too much work and too much time to get to where you want to be.   But this is real success.

Very few people turn out to be true overnight successes.  We find that, for those who are, most come crashing down just as quickly, and often more spectacularly because they don’t have the skills and support system to maintain it. 

This is the time where you learn everything you can about your subject.  You do your research online, you take classes and seek mentors.  You absorb every book and article you can.  While you are doing this, you can work on Principle #3.
.
Bamboo Success Principle #3 – DO SOMETHING!

If you’ve ever seen a Lucky Bamboo plant at the County Fair, or maybe a local Art Festival, you will see below the surface, amongst the pretty, colored pebbles in the glass, a tangled mess of roots.  This is its rhizome root system.  Not every single root will be powerful but as a whole, they contribute to incredible growth.  So too, many of the things you try may not be powerful or successful.  But each thing you try will at the very least provide guidance as to the next steps.  Together all of those baby steps, even if they seem to take you through a circuitous route, will lead you eventually to your success.

Just do something.  This is the “ready, fire, aim” approach.  Put something out there and if it’s wrong so be it.  Learn from it and then adjust your aim to try something else, immediately.  That leads us to the fourth, critically important principle…

Bamboo Success Principle #4 – Persistence

During the three or more years of toiling underground, the bamboo doesn’t take a day off.  It doesn’t get discouraged or say, “Well geez, no one’s paying attention to me so I can just take it easy today.”  Every day for several years, it works hard to build its root system, its foundation.  It sets the stage for its enormous success. 

Take a rock band like Nirvana, who toiled in seedy clubs for several years, writing songs for fifteen hours a day, till they seemingly came from out of nowhere, from the Underground, to become an overnight success.

Do something every day to help you achieve your dreams.  Plan the tasks out in the morning, or better yet the night before hand.  I use the 43 Folders system (with my own flavor) as detailed in the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity to keep track of my creative tasks.  Every day I grab a folder and make sure that I accomplish the task notes inside each. 

If, as you go to bed, you ask yourself whether you’ve done something today to achieve your dreams and the answer is anything but Yes, get up and do something, however small, to get you one baby step closer. 

Bamboo Success Principle #5 – Don’t Listen to Critics

Bamboo could care less if you sat there in your camping chair, with your tofu rinds and your Guinness and shouted insults to it all day long, every day.  The Bamboo knows at the very core of its being that it is wired for success and that it will be successful.

Most of your critics will end up being people you know, whether they be friends, family or coworkers.  They mean the best, and they think they are trying to help you.

Understand this…criticism is always more of a reflection of the critic than it is of you.  Whether they envy your success, or have perhaps fallen short in their own quests and have quit before the bamboo broke the surface, their comments must fall on your deaf ears.  Keep a single-minded focus, like the Bamboo, of what you want to achieve, and don’t let anyone tell you that it is not possible for you.

So how am I applying the Bamboo Success Principles?

I know that my goal is to teach by writing, and making my life a living example.  At this time, this blog is my means to do so.  If one reader gets something from here, applies it, and tells someone else about it, then in many ways I am a success. 

But I don’t want to stop there. 

My goal is to continue building a community with this site, to increase my skills, and to learn how to apply the best success principals to my life.   I share my successes and failures so that others can learn and understand. Furthermore, I hope to give my children and my wife the same gifts so that they too may achieve their dreams.

It is a slow process.  I could use this site simply to regurgitate material I have read.  Just read a book every couple of days and put the best principles on here, add a link to Amazon and hope the money rolls in.  Instead, my process is slower as I try to apply what I’ve learned.  I may only read a dozen or so books a year.   I spend a bit more time picking up small tips on the web, or making my own correlations like I have with Bamboo Success.  

I’m trying to build real success, and I expect there will be failures along the way.  But as long as I keep going, I have not truly failed.

The fact is this site is growing as are my skills.  Not exponentially, but incrementally with baby steps.  Each baby step might make me a tenth of a percent better or maybe 1/100th of a percent better.  Regardless, this compounds over time.  

A year or two from now I will be looking back, amazed at how far I’ve come and what an enjoyable ride it has been, all because of the wisdom of an ancient, mostly East Asian plant that did the necessary steps to become an “overnight” success.

- Papa Charley