My College Wake-Up Call: When "Experiencing Everything" Wasn't Enough

I had such a great time in college. I did all the things and ran with all the crowds and currents that swept me up. It was good. It was fun. It was the classic college experience. 

• Design
• Intention
• Vision
• Desire
• Inward sensing paired with outward expression

I’d always had a vision for my future upon which I’d thrived. Every year was mapped with certain milestones. It was not a rigid plan but a directional intention with a short-list of key milestones that, essentially, made my path look more like me and less like others. 

Anecdotally, the ancient dot matrix-printed copy of this timeline still exists and is fun to read as many of the plans I’d documented then have come true. Children with international educations and lives overseas, along with many other key milestones in my life, have actually matched the draft version of a life plan. A million forms of chaos have jumped in my path throughout my 54 years, so it’s incredible to see that when my 13 or 14-year old self typed up this aspirational list, it did somehow light a fire on a certain force that impacted reality.

Returning to my college days, after the first total immersion into college, I realized I was becoming a bit one-sided, doing all the work of “experiencing” without doing the work of harnessing, choosing, and aligning those experiences with a higher-level bespoke vision. 

If you follow KindEdge you know that we carefully design every part of our lives to support the short-list of things we can do really well. The vast un-choosing of “all the things” is what unlocks the door to experiencing something more amazing by going deep and hard on the one quirky “only you could do” goal, dream, or vision you want to make real. 

And at the same time, part of the rigours and practice of KindEdge is to do continual experiments. You cannot know your one path is right unless you are continually taste testing the world around you. 

It’s a tough balance but the goal is to achieve the long-game, the “what” you want to achieve, while continually testing the “how” - asking if the way you’re using your daily minutes is the best way to achieve your goal.

So again, back to college, I had that “out-of-balance” feeling. I realized that without my conscious intentions and plan I was experiencing only the strongest trends and currents. I was not digging in hard to expose the things that are un-advertised, or that occur in un-trendy time slots or locations. 

To have a truly enriching college experience, I realized I needed to “consciously curate” or select what I did where and when. I remembered how much the old me loved to wake up early, before the rest of the world. I shifted my sleep schedule a bit, though I did not have much control over the screaming post-party Alpha Sigs below my balcony in Kitchin Hall. But eventually I was able to begin waking up just before sunrise, capturing the rare moments of quietude in a college environment. I recall one morning there was a magical North Carolina morning mist hanging within the courtyard. It created a pillow that softened every sound, from the chirping of birds to the humming of distant car engines.

This created a moment, sort of hallowed and pristine. As I was soaking this in, feeling so much more in my own skin, I noticed that there was a huge man at the far left end of the balcony on which I stood. I recognized him as a member of the neighboring fraternity who was also in ROTC, the campus's military program. 

I think neither of us wanted to let out the secret about how beautiful this morning silence was. We looked at each other with minimal affect or reaction. The tiniest hint of a smile was the equal exchange to mark the moment. 

I haven’t kept notes about many of the mediocre experiences at late night parties. They were good, important things to experience. And I’ve had plenty of stupid-fun nights out post-college as well.  

But this moment clearly had a preciousness that left a mark. And with every year of my life, I’ve done a better job of taste-testing the world around me, and letting my gut guide which pieces deserve my commitment, and which elements are good for others, but not for me.

You Need Help & Conscious Curation is the Help You Need

“You need help” sounds like an insult, I know. 

But that’s not where I’m going here. What I’m trying to say is you have every right to pursue your life’s dream of

• Starting a business
• Changing your career
• Publishing a book
• Writing a movie
• Becoming an IRONMAN champion
• Starting a charity
• Or just deleting bad people from your life. 

But this kind of radical life change requires a network of people who will propel you forward and help you at every step along the way. 

Does your dream tend to stay stuck in your head, and frozen, because when you look around at the environments and communities in which you live, you do not see anyone who is actually pursuing an amazing dream like yours? 

And when you look to the internet and YouTube do you feel even more stuck because everyone there is already a fabulous success, giving you zero useful tips or insights on how you can actually just get the first few awkward steps in motion in your daily life? 

Well as I said, you need help. But it’s not from either of these two groups. Before you set forth on your dream or goal, you need to set the foundation to ensure that every step you take along this path of the unknown is supported by a network that has been consciously curated for you. 

What is Conscious Curation? 

Conscious curation is the process of evaluating every single thing in your life to assess whether it truly aligns with the future you desire. Too many times the people, places, environments, habits, and things in our lives are there by default. 

It’s hard to accept the truth that if you are serious about changing your life to become an IRONMAN or a screenwriter or a charity leader, you are going to have to do some painful and ruthless discarding of people, environments, habits and things that are weighing you down.

What Do You Need to Discard to Make Room for Your New Life?

For example, to make room for your redesigned future life you may need to discard: 

• People who have been in your life a long time but are just not a match for the amazing future ahead of you.
• Things that are holding you back from making real progress toward achieving your goals, from the earbuds that keep losing their charge when you’re at the gym, to the house that is taking too much time and money to maintain, to the pair of trousers that are too tight and make you feel awful about yourself when, in fact, you are putting in good efforts toward exercising every day. 
• Habits that will stand in the way of your goals, from the habit of staying out late, to the habit of spending money on non-critical things, to the habit of giving up your true needs to avoid confrontation. 

Conscious curation is about wiping the slate clean and very carefully, consciously selecting only those people, environments and objects that are 100% aligned with your new future. This is a very tough task but when you see evidence of the benefits in real life, you will never want to stop.

Real Examples of Conscious Curation in Action

You’ll begin to have aha and o.m.g. moments like: 

• OMG! It’s so weird, now that I sold my old house in Arkansas and moved into a condo in L.A. to pursue my screenplay writing career, so many good things are suddenly happening. In the past, when I lived in Arkansas, I would message so many people and get no response. Now that I’m in L.A., I keep coming across people in coffee shops and book stores, and in my writing classes who are so happy to help me out and give me referrals. 
• OMG! Now that I’ve committed to the new habit of placing out my cups of water every night, I now easily get fully hydrated every morning which has given me so much energy every day that writing my book every day after work has been a breeze!
• OMG! Now that I’m living in my dream downtown condo, I’m no longer wasting time weeding an oversized yard, and no longer paying thousands of dollars a year to maintain two air conditioning units for my enormous house, and therefore I have won back all the time and money I need to travel every single weekend to race in triathlons around the world!
• OMG! Now that I told my buddies that I’m giving up going out late to bars, I’m actually having more fun because, with the three people who were willing to shift to an earlier time to socialize, we discovered a new crew of people who combine stand-up paddle board outings with happy hour, doing a social “paddle-up” to waterfront bars. Turns out to be so much fun!
• OMG! For the first time in 20 years this year’s taxes were so much easier and cheaper because, now that I’ve discarded my chaotic ex-spouse, there were no more last-minute emergencies over lost documents, no more procrastination-based false emergencies, no more re-filing due to missing documents and errors, and no more mess-handling based on his bizarre spells of hyper-trading in various systems that would create paper trail nightmares. 

Imagine in each of these examples, what the trajectory of that person’s life would look like if they did not make that change. All our old defaults have a way of quietly hijacking our progress. 

Why Rebuilding Your Space Makes Change Easier

For example, when our closets and bookshelves remain filled with the old default object, we end up never having easy access to the things we need to have at-the ready. If your goal is writing a book, clear everything away from one entire bookshelf and make it the go-to for creating. Fill it with the most amazing pens, all your favorite notebooks, editing tools like sticky-notes and washi tape and more. 

And if you seek to transform your health and fitness, why would you want to let 80% of your kitchen storage continue to be filled with cake mixes? And why would you continue to allocate 80% of your closet for stilettos and dresses? Empty it all out and leave 20% for the old. Fill the new space you’d made with the objects that align with your new goals. Buy new organizers for your kitchen to house your health supplements and healthy foods. Geek out on filling your closet with your favorite outdoor running shoes, your favorite indoor running shoes and a rockin’ collection of running outfits. 

The goal in doing all this “un-choosing” and “re-choosing” is to make your path forward easy. When you are pursuing a dream or a radical life change, it’s a hard path. Change is simply very hard. There’s no way around that. 

But if you rebuild the foundation to fit the future, you will no longer be swimming against the current. As I said, you need help, and conscious curation gives you the help you need. 

How Do You Build a Network That Actually Supports Your Goals?

One of the biggest boosts you will get is from the “people” element of conscious curation. The discard aspect is oddly pretty easy. The hard part is creating a new network of people who will serve as fertile ground for your success. 

If you are a publishing editor, but you dream of starting up a SaaS software business that helps musicians collaboratively write music, you will need to begin to create a brand new network around you. Your entire LinkedIn network, and all the contacts in your iPhone, are based on your old life. Those networks are not fertile grounds for your future success. So you will need to go very deep for several months to rebuild a network that can support you and propel you forward in your SaaS software startup venture. Establishing this new network is the primary and critical step to ensure that when you hit walls and barriers, you’ll have people who can hold your hand and help you move forward.

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How Should You Choose Who You Follow Online?

Here are two videos I recorded a while back that are right in line with the concept of Conscious Curation: 

In this video, I discuss the importance of carefully curating who you follow online. It’s not just about choosing or un-choosing specific influencers and celebrities. It’s also valuable to be aware of when the channels you follow are narrowing vs broadening your point of view. 

When a Narrow Point of View Makes Sense

In some cases, it’s a good idea to choose channels with a very narrow point of view. For example, if you seek to follow an online prayer group, it makes absolute sense that you would want to follow people who are within your specific religion. And if you are on a low-carb diet, focus on like-minded people to make it easy to find advice and recipes that fit your goals. The last thing you need is to be on a low-carb diet and get tempted by high-carb dessert recipe videos. 

When You Need Multiple Perspectives to Find the Truth

However, when you are seeking input on the truth, like the truth about other cultures, or the truth about foreign countries, or simply the truth about the news, take time to select multiple sources with varying points of view. You will strengthen your own ability to judge and make decisions if you take time to gather enough information to piece together a picture that has some small chance at representing the likely messy-in-the-middle truth.

This extra effort is the antidote to the blindness we can all catch when unwittingly let one small echo chamber act as a false representation of the complex truth of our wonky universe.  

Why Following "Successful" People Isn't Always the Right Strategy

And in this video, I explain that when you are building a strong network around you, you need to be very careful to choose people who are at the right stage of success. This sounds odd, I know. 

If you want to be a huge success in the future, it seems like you should pursue and study and follow people who are successful. The mega-rich book author, the founder who made his successful exit and made billions of dollars, the famous actress who has been famous since she was three… all great people to follow. Right? 

WRONG.

Why? Because their experiences do not meet you where you are and do not deliver what you need to get your dreams in motion in real life. 

Rather than seeking out the most dominant guru out there, try seeking out someone who’s in the messy middle rather than someone that fame has already found.

The Danger of Learning From People Who "Got Lucky"

Lifehack: Be aware that sometimes people who get famous early or whose first startup gets sold for billions right away often live in a sort of fiction thinking that they have mastered the playbook of success. In fact, many one-hit first-time founders flounder thereafter because they got external validation of success without having to actually learn the skills needed to continually address failure and pivot to new paths toward success. You may want to be like someone who is successful, but the person you will learn the most from is someone who has failed many times and who has really had to dig deep and refine their own playbook vs. the few who “get lucky” or “get found early.” 

Say you want to be a pro Youtuber. You’ll get little practical advice from the 10-year Youtuber who got started long ago before the market was flooded and SEO games had taken over the landscape. You may get more actionable guidance from someone who’s been dealing with the same newbie struggles you are experiencing during the same environment in which you currently must play.

Beyond that, when you’re following a certain figure, you may not have a full view of how out-of-balance the rest of their lives are, or how little their life looks like what you actually aspire to.

I myself adore author and podcaster Tim Ferriss and others of that ilk. But the more Tim pontificates on tiny little minutiae about the unfulfilled needs in his life, the more I want to tell him get off his hiney and go have several kids, get married, get cancer, have aging parents and deal with a few toxic employers. It is only then that he’d see that the masturbatory degree of over-pontification on how to achieve maximal optimization of all forms of life fulfillment is a form of toxic self-obsession. The Rx for Tim is to go jump in the deep of life’s chaos. All other ills will be cured. There is an ancient Chinese tale for this, which I will not retell here. But this is to say, Tim and friends can pontificate all day every day, but the answer’s already been given by wise men who’ve been there done that long before you. (I will dismount my soapbox here.)

Why Your Gut Matters More Than Their Fame

Listening to your own needs and your own intuition can be a matter of life and death. I can name many celebrities who had fame and endless numbers of followers who ended up taking their own lives. Only after their deaths was the false veneer removed, revealing the truth of their constant self-loathing. I will not name names as the loss of a life and the suffering of depression is a horrible hardship I would wish on no one. However, I know that in these examples, I have heard my gut tell me “that person’s in denial of pain, that is not someone I will choose to follow.” Meanwhile, I watched the rest of the world applauding and lauding that suffering person’s fame.

Ok, that went a little dark, but this “follow your gut” stuff is that important. 

Key Takeaways on Conscious Curation

If you watch the videos above, the following might be useable takeaways: 

• Make sure that the outside influences you let into your life are making things easier for you and your mindset, not harder
• You have a right to judge the people you follow; not every successful person is the right model for you
• The magic in setting goals is more about the powerful un-choosing, not just the adding-on of more goals
• Success is a finite set of choices that live in your daily habits, so choose your habits wisely

P.S. Conscious curation is part of the KindEdge360 suite of practices we do to strengthen your life’s foundation. KindEdge360 practices guide you in making sure that your body, mind, soul and systems are optimized to fit your individual wiring which ensures that your path to succeed at your challenging goal will be enjoyable and sustainable every day.

What's Next: Building Your Board of Trusted Advisors

But there is an even more critical step you must take to ensure you’ll succeed at your goal. That step is to build your Board of Trusted Advisors. There is no way to get from where you are now to the future life you dream of without a very specifically-chosen set of trusted advisors that offer a diverse set of skills. Check out the KindEdge Steps here.