If you're snowboarding, towards the end of the day when your legs start to give out, it can become a nightmare. If you're traveling and you hit a bunch of logistical snags that throw off your timetable, it can be intensely stressful if you're trying to coordinate for a group. If you're putting together new sales presentations, it can be nerve-wracking trying to put together all the creative materials and prep you need to do a good job, meanwhile facing the uncertainty.

Take a look what all these have in common.

Give this one some thought cycles, turn it over in your head 2 or 3 times. It's worth it --

"The Way of the warrior does not include other Ways, such as Confucianism, Buddhism, certain traditions, artistic accomplishments and dancing. But even though these are not part of the Way, if you know the Way broadly you will see it in everything. Men must polish their particular Way." --Miyamoto Musashi 

Prioritizing?

Here's a good one. "Will this resolve itself on its own satisfactorily if I don't do anything?"

Some things explicitly won't -- and require preparation, nurturing, followup, and quick action.

Some things do.

And sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference. But with experience, you figure out what can sit for a few days (or weeks) and what can't.

One of the things that took me a long time to figure out is that often, flying through 2-3 different cities on a single ticket often costs very similar to a one-way flight.

So, going "New York to Berlin on May 25th" might not be cheaper than going "New York to London on April 28th,  London to Munich on May 22nd, Munich to Berlin on May 25th" -- strange but true.

It's especially easy to stop in hub cities for up to a month, so swinging through Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other regional hubs is easy. It's fun to stop in New York for 2-3 days when you're on your way elsewhere if you've got the time.

The thing is, it can be tricky to plan these routings. That's where Matrix comes in --

matrix.itasoftware.com

One good way to get into action is to start with something small and simple. If you have an insurmountable task ahead of you, you start by chipping away it.

So I think it's somewhat dangerous to take time to clear the decks of every little thing. You deny yourself an easy kickstart.

The other tricky part is -- and this isn't a contradiction -- is there's a near infinite amount of not-really-important work to do. That might sound like you'd thus never run out of easy work, but you then hit a different problem -- all of the easy work you could do is slightly more pointless if you've done the things that actually really need to be done, and yet you still don't have the decks fully cleared.

I think it was Stephen Covey who said, "Your things-to-do list won't be clear when you die."

So that's two problems right there -- by clearing off the must-do easy work first, you run out of must-do easy work as a momentum kickstarter. But, you never run out of low-hanging work to do, so the decks rarely truly get cleared.

Question from a reader -- 

Off the bat I wanted to say you have a very useful website. Thank you for that. 

I want to change my life for the better, and I have put effort into it, and still am. My problem is I take on to much at once, and with all that clutter and confusion I feel I am back where I started. I could make a list of 1,000 things I want to learn, and 100 habits I want to have. But when it comes down to it, if its not an external change [Habits like flossing I've built] then I lose track. Confidence, better control of fear, productivity, knowing what I want, are all things that don't seem to build. 

I'm a bit off track. There's a lot I want to ask but I'll ask this. 

Being a huge hip-hop fan, what I love is being able to portray your mind, feelings, and topics onto a page with words, and too, words that rhyme. What advice do you have to help me with doing this? I know you're not a rapper, but when I do write, I look back at disgust or thing 'There's no way that came out right'.

Nervousness, fear, panic, low morale, low mood, low energy -- all natural things that happen from time to time.

If you go spend an immense amount of time walking and your feet feel sore, you say, "My feet feel sore right now."

But lots of times, when someone feels nervous or scared, they say, "I'm a nervous person. I'm a fearful person."

But that's not necessarily true. You don't have to identify with a given mood. Just like sore feet, worries come and go. "I feel somewhat worried at the moment" saps most of the power from it. Identifying with the negative emotion makes it stronger; noting that it's just there and fleeting makes it grow much weaker.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor, in his Meditations: “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”

Abe Sorock is changing the world -- he's the resident and runs the Moishe House Beijing, and he's bringing together very talented and amazing people from the worlds of international business, government, and philanthropy. Professionally, he's the founder and director of Atlas China, which providers staffing and consulting in HR throughout China.

To promote his GiveGetWin deal which is a 1-on-1 session about developing leadership and throwing world-class events, he sat down with me to share his exceptional and brilliant thinking and the methods he uses to bring people together -- and perhaps more crucially, how to become the kind of person who takes charge and sees yourself as a leader co-creating the experience of yourself and everyone in your world.

"The Paradigm Shift: Changing The Fabric Of Your World" by Abe Sorock, as told to Sebastian Marshall

The first step in leading people and putting together great groups is to have a paradigm shift in who you are.

The shift happened for me when I was a student at the Hopkins Nanjing Center. I realized -- if I saw myself as a student paying transactional fee and getting a diploma, I'd behave differently than if I saw myself as part of the fabric of an organization who will be looked on by future classes.

You should never fail at something crucial when it would cost you under $10 to ensure you succeed.

If you ever miss appointments that are really crucially important to you, that means you need multiple alarms.

If you have just one alarm, you might accidentally set it to "PM" instead of "AM," you might otherwise set it to the wrong hour, or your alarm could run out of batteries or the power could go off.

But, two alarms?

Much less likely.