Have you ever heard this folk story about Pedro the Fisherman?

Standing on the dock unloading his day’s catch, Pedro is interrupted by a foreign tourist admiring his haul.

The tourist asks him politely, “Is this your catch for the day, quite impressive!?”

Pedro responds, “Why yes, we had a very good day.”

The tourist, interested in knowing more, asks, “Do you do this well every day?”

Pedro answers, “Some days better, some days worse, but most of the time, we have more than we need for the village.”

The tourist then asks, “What will you do now that your day is done?”

Pedro proclaims, “I will take a nice walk on the pier with my beautiful wife and enjoy the sunset.”

The tourist then exclaims, “Imagine how much fish you could catch if you had two boats!”

Pedro, “Two boats? And then what would I do?”

Tourist, “Well, with all the fish you would catch, you could buy more boats, you’d have a fleet!”

Pedro, “And then what would I do?”

Tourist, “You could catch more and more fish, and eventually, you could build a cleaning and canning plant and produce your own product for export.”

Pedro, “Sounds like a lot of work, what would I do then?”

Tourist, “You could build a distribution program and sell your products all over the world!”

Pedro, “And then what would I do?”

Tourist, “Eventually, you could sell the whole thing and retire!”

Pedro, “And then?”

Tourist, “You could take wonderful walks on the pier with your wife and watch the sunset each night.”

Pedro, “Hum?” as he scratches his head and walks away into the sunset.

Is Pedro successful by the standards of our culture today?

Our culture is represented by the tourist.  The ambitious desire to have more, and more, but in the meantime, to be less and less present and connected to what matters now.

“Success is a progressive realization of a worthy ideal.” – Earl Nightingale.

For Pedro, the worthy ideal is the expression of his passion of being on the ocean each day, harvesting the fish, providing for his community and family, and enjoying the fruits of his labor with his wife each day.

Is the pursuit of a strong and successful business as the tourist would espouse not the pursuit of a worthy ideal?

The pursuit as an expression of a passion for the work, the creation of something that contributes to many, and supports the wellbeing of your fellow human could indeed be the pursuit of a worthy ideal.

But most often, as this tourist describes, the pursuit has less to do with contribution, and more to do with acquisition, accumulation, and an insatiable appetite for more.

Our responsibility on this earth is to be the best version of ourselves while we contribute to the greater good.  What legacy will we create that matters most.

How will we create something of value, make a difference to those around us, and allow us to be present in the process?

That is the question of purpose.

My friend Tony Blauer, one of the world’s foremost experts in self-defense and tactical defense systems coined a great acronym for FEAR.

F-alse E-expectations A-ppearing – R-eal

I found myself awake at 4 am, unable to go back to sleep.  Worrying about the possible implications of business decisions, the future of our lives, the impending economic doom and gloom.

These days, it’s getting harder to get away from it.

The noise, the chatter.

Everywhere you look; your in-box, your social channels, your streaming media, and good old fashioned TV, you can’t get away from the doomsayers.

It feels at times like the world is going to blow up, burn up,  flood, or just simply get too expensive to live in.

Personally, I think it’s all just the same as it always has been, it’s just amplified by all the noise, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to digest.

You can’t ignore it.  You can’t forget it exists.

But what you can do is realize that it is all just a story we are creating, and those who are writing, reporting, and posting about it are creating.

Stories can either serve you, or serve to constrain you or destroy you.

In previous posts, I’ve talked a lot about Story, and how it manifests. How everything we believe is just a form of story, and most of it has been served to us by our circle of influence over many, many year.

Worry, well that’s just a poor use of our imagination.

Our imagination is so powerful if we let it focus on what we can do rather than on what we can’t do, or what we feel could or might happen to us.

Do we need to have insurance for a rainy day?

It’s a good idea to have insurance to cover your important stuff, but once you’ve covered your important stuff (and one could question how much of it really is important!), the rest is just compensation for our FEAR.

So how do we stop this incessant worrying disorder that wakes us up at night, or keeps us up at night, or possesses our daily internal dialogue.

Replace it with stories that serve.  Imagine the possibilities. Imagine your outcome or the story you wish to live.

Imagining what’s possible, even if at the moment it seems impossible, can create a fracture in the glass ceiling.

We all have one, a ceiling we’ve created in our minds that holds us back, prevents us from reaching higher.  Simply allowing yourself to imagine more begins to push it higher.

Keep doing it in your formal or informal journaling and eventually you will crack it, break it, and reach higher.

There is no service in worrying.  There is no benefit in creating false expectations that appear real.  There are benefits to creating images of the beautiful possibilities.

So the next time you wake up thinking about the doom, shift your narrative to what’s possible, not the expectation of what’s probable because that’s just not real.  The negative is no more real than the positive.

The positive just serves to inspire and activate you, the negative just serves to anger and constrain you.

Don’t worry, be happy 😉 

Anthony Robbins, challenged by the constrained format of the TedTalk spoke for just over 20 minutes and described what we humans need quite succinctly.

In his words, there are six human needs.  

Four of these needs are the needs of the personality, and two are the needs of the spirit.  Put another way, one can likely infer that the needs of the personality are the needs of the ego.

The four needs of the personality are; certainty, uncertainty, significance, and connection.

Certainty is a quest for construct, a desire to know everything that will or could happen, control is the center of this person’s universe.

Uncertainty is the classic adrenaline junky, or the one addicted to drama.  These are the rules breakers, non-conformists, and the classic chaotic artist.

Significance is the person drawn to the title, the ultimate position, the power, material wealth, possessions, and status.  They are never satisfied with enough, because there is never enough.

Connection is the person who is in and out of romantic relationships, never being completely pinned down.  Or the person who knows everyone, but no one knows them.  They are obsessed with the connection, and not with the content of the connection.

Robbins describes all of these needs metaphorically as water buckets with a hole in the bottom.  You can pour as much “significance” or “certainty” into the bucket, but it will never be full.  The hole in the bottom makes it so.

Robbins goes on to infer that most of us are biased toward one or more of these needs as our focus of attention.

However, no matter how hard we try, no amount of these needs will bring fulfillment, no amount will seem satisfactory.

He describes the two other needs are the needs of the spirit.  

This is where the rubber meets the road of fulfillment.

These needs are growth and contribution.

Your intention and attention to growth are the great secrets of success.  Are you aware of how you are changing, are you creating and manifesting that change, or are you simply a passenger of change? Forced to accept the consequences of your actions or inactions versus the recognition of your creation.

The intentionality of growth and the self-reflection in its experience drives your sense of fulfillment.  

We are all here to experience and grow, are we writing our own story, or is the story written for us?

Ultimately, growth and growth alone can not bring a complete sense of fulfillment.  It’s growth within a community, organization, circle of influence, or family and your contribution to those who surround you that makes you whole.

We are nothing if we are alone.

The truth is, none of us can explore ourselves without the aid and assistance of others. The question is, are you cultivating those who surround you, or are they imposed upon you?  

Do you define your tribe, or is it that which you have been prescribed?

How are you creating your circle of influence and how are you in turn contributing within it?  Food for your thought.

How often have you come home from a vacation and said, “Wow, I need a vacation from my vacation!”

Truth is that this is far too often the case and there are two fundamental problems with this reality.

First up, why do people live lives where they feel like it is necessary to have a vacation where they completely go off the rails?

Shouldn’t life in general just be full of moments where we throw caution to the wind, and moments where we re-gather ourselves and prepare for the next adventure?

Why do people feel like they have to pack it all in to one or two weeks a year?

Secondly, why DO people loose it completely on vacation?

Why eat, drink, party, go over the top every single day and then fall down and go boom at the end? Only having to figure out how to recover once back at home?

Resonate with this experience at all?

The truth is that we get into this rat race called life where we have a limited bandwidth for establishing best practices that support success and fulfillment.

Wake up, hit the snooze button a few times, get up, go slam a big cup of coffee, eat a couple of pieces of toast, check social media, hammer out a couple of comments, get everything done that’s gotta get done before walking out the front door, move through the mass commute to the office, bang out a full day of work (could be another paragraph of points here!), maybe eat a lunch or a couple of crappy snacks during the day, drive back through the evening commute, scramble to create a tangible dinner, do more work not done during the day, invest more valuable time on social media, and then crash!

Or perhaps don’t crash but stay up thinking of things that need to get done or other useless or painful stuff, only to wake up to that pesky alarm again!

This story of life could be reproduced in many forms for parents, working mom’s or dad’s, stay at home mom’s or dad’s, the point is many are living lives of judgment, self judgment, judgment of friends, colleagues, or judgment of people unknown.

How busy are those guys? What trinkets they have, who do they hang out with, how many friends or followers do they have, judge or be judged? This approach to life, with little time allotted to personal well-being and best practices leads people to go overboard when they’re off the reserve so to speak!

So when someone goes on vacation, and effectively reproduces the same life only replacing work with over the top play, all-you-can-eat buffets, open bars, and nights that end when the sun is rising, or if kids are involved, when the kids are going to bed!

In one instance they’re up all night, in the other, they’re sleeping way too long, but probably being woken up multiple times by the kids, or by their bladder!

Vacation should fundamentally be about changing venue. The chance to live life in a new place, see new things, feel new feelings, and experience other cultures or opportunities.

If you have established tried and true structures and traditions in your life that act as the foundation on which you can thrive, then these foundations should be linked in to your vacation.

Eating well (especially now that you’ve eliminated that age old excuse of “I have no time to cook” and experimenting with new recipes and new combinations of food in order to refine a healthy regime would be one of the most effective and valuable elements of a vacation.

Getting various exercise experiences into every day would help you stay in a good place energy wise and help you recover from the day to day stresses of life, and on vacation you can try all kinds of new things, whether its hiking, walking, biking, you can use it to see new things and transport you throughout your journey.

It doesn’t have to be a gym where you train, the great outdoors will serve you well, and now you have even more time than normal to plan and integrate other experiences into the mix.

The chance to journal and reflect on life each day, something that is a great personal practice for anyone who wants to thrive in life, is an excellent component of a vacation when you once again have maybe just a little more time to engage in such thought.

But the true life lesson here is that if these cornerstone elements of life are a part of your day-to-day, they should be a part of your day-to-day on vacation. And if they are not part of your day-to-day, then a vacation may be an excellent place to start.

When you bring these practices on vacation or introduce them into your life while on vacation, you can use that unloaded time to invest in raising the quality of your dialogue and your efforts so that your program for success is established or becomes even sharper when you return. Instead of feeling like you need to recover from your holiday, make the vacation take you to the next level!

BTW, I am on vacation right now!