The “no more Mondays” version of retirement easy. Or you can “rewire,” starting a whole new ”build a success” effort with all the funthat comes from charging off in a new direction. But there’s a third option out that might suit you better.  It’s way different than just dropping out, but on the surface looks distressingly like it.  That third option:  Surrender.

The primary religions of the world all teach the idea of surrender-to stop trying to make what you want happen and accept whatever does happen with serenity instead. Of course, you don’t have to be retirement age to embrace this approach to life.  Neither Jesus or Buddha or Mohamed was wizened when the tenet of surrender became part of what they preached.  But when you retire, there’s almost a natural bridge to stepping into surrender if you have not already.  At least if you know what you are looking for.

We all can step into surrender.  For most of us, it’s not obvious or simple.  I’ve been struggling to figure out how that should work for over ten years.

Most of us got involved in climbing the career ladder instead, propelled forward by the goals and objectives we hammered out for ourselves.  That’s the ”
build your own future” version of life:  know what you want and have a plan for getting it.  You call the shots.  Work harder.  Work smarter.  Work longer.  Success is earned and it takes a lot of work and sacrifice. It’s the highly touted, socially acceptable way to succeed in our culture–to live life well.

When we retire, the career ladder disappears though.  At first, the delight of not having to worry about time is a huge plus.  But if you are still buying in on the “make your own future” version of life, eventually you start to feel like you got pushed off the merry-go-round.   The nagging thought persists:  “I need to be doing something more.”

All this is perfectly normal and the answer I’ve been giving for years is “Find a new purpose.”  That’s still what I would recommend, but in not exactly the same way.

The “career path” way to find a new purpose is akin to your previous career path efforts. List the things you believe in strongly, assess what you’re good at, and then find a way to apply the latter to the former.  That still works.  If you aren’t ready to move on from what has already worked for you, this is the approach you really do need to take.

But if you want to move beyond what you already know you can do with this question of “what’s next?”, there’s another way to go about it.  And that is to surrender to the now.  With that strategy, you don’t have a plan.  You don’t have goals.  You don’t have responsibility for making things happen.  You just live everyday awake and engaged.

Instead of your self-prescribed marching orders, you have a process: Open to what’s happening around you, watch, and wait.  As this life unfolds, you will begin to act on what comes into your life instead of trying to force certain things to be in it.  You are in the flow instead of trying to swim upstream to get to that goal.

Paying attention to what comes into your life and doing what you can with that is the sum total of what you have to “worry” about when you function at this level.  You don’t have to prove yet again that you can apply the discipline and drive to “get the job done.”  You surrender to being part of life as it is now and just live it.

This isn’t the same as the ”Golden Years” do-whatever-I-want-all-the-time version of life.  That’s a form of cheking out and it is, essentially, backwards.  When you do the Golden Years thing, you only allow in what you are already comfortable with.  That strategy means your world will get progressively smaller.

Surrendering to whatever life brings each day and living with complete awareness of it keeps your world expanding.  You don’t know what is going to come next.  You just accept your place as part of it.

This concept both intrigues and terrifies me.  I’m reassured by who I’ve become with all the effort I’ve put into making things happen.  But if I want to continue to grow, it’s time to let that go.  To just accept whatever comes into my life rather than trying to call the shots.

That is a brave–scary–new world.

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Mary Lloyd is (at least for now) a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website.

When I was a kid, there was a phrase “Let George do it.” The comment was usually offered when something needed to be done but the speaker didn’t want to be the one to do it. The message was “I shouldn’t have to take care of this.”

I haven’t heard that phrase in a long time, but it’s not gone. The idea that somebody else should handle whatever distasteful task needs to be done is a frustratingly robust part of our cultural mindset.  But now it’s assumed at such a basic level that nobody bothers to even mutter the words.

So let’s get this straight. George is not going to do it.  George will not balance the budget–at any level. George is not going to reduce the federal deficit by taking responsible action to both curb spending and increase revenues. George is not going to keep our grandkids from having to pay down debt we incurred by waiting for him to do it. And, most tragically, George is not going to keep our loved ones safe from unbalanced people with guns and a total disregard for human life.  George isn’t even going to shovel that 2 feet of snow off your sidewalk before someone falls on the resulting ice after the melt-and-freeze-again routine begins.

We have to stop waiting for George to do it. We’re making things so much harder so many ways by shirking our collective responsibility to do the hard things now.

Congress can’t just sit there waiting for “the other side” to blink.  Parents with difficult children can’t assume that they’re the only ones who will ever be affected by the child’s troubles.  Municipalities can’t keep assuming “the economic recovery” will rescue them from incredibly inefficient spending patterns.  Gun lovers can’t assume that no one else will ever get hold of their weapons.  All of us need to stop assuming that because we want–or even truly need–it, the government should provide it.

We all need to stop assuming that it’s other people who should feel the pain to get it all back on track.

This is not popular stuff.  We are mired in the absurdity of recognizing at the rational level that we, personally and culturally, need to choose a very different course while remaining emotionally intractable about accepting the bitter but unavoidable medicine we all need to take.

Pointing to millionaires and assuming that just having them pay more taxes will solve our gargantuan federal budget problems is like expecting the garden plot in your back yard to produce enough potatoes to save Somalia from famine.   Assuming that stricter gun laws will keep our children–and everyone–safe from lunatics is as naive as believing that the only threat from a hurricane is the volume of rain.

Nothing is going to happen until we all accept that personally, this is going to hurt.  AARP and other senior lobbies yell about not changing Medicare and Social Security.  Don’t be ridiculous.  Not seeing the need to change–by cleaning up the massive amount of fraud, reducing the options for those who can afford to take care of themselves, changing the enrollment age, etc. are reasonable things to do to get both programs on stable ground.

Same deal with gun control.  The National Rifle Association and its “pry it from my cold dead hands” mentality needs to start thinking in terms of “how can own guns responsibly and safely” instead of “everyone should have as many as they want.”

We have become a nation of sound bites and spin.  We need to go back to looking for real solutions instead of worrying about how things are going to play with the talking heads.

And the talking heads?  To be sure, the media need to make a course correction as well.  Striving to provide responsible news coverage instead of opinions dressed up like facts would be a good start.  Advocating for collaboration and mutual problem solving instead of braying from one or the other political extreme when editorials are warranted would also help a lot.

But let’s get back to you and me.  We need to ignore the pundits’ opinions–liberal or conservative.  We need to look for information, not validation in what we absorb of the news.  We need to balance our own budgets. We need to take action when someone we love appears to be in emotional jeapardy.  We need to stop assuming someone else is responsible for all the violence youth absorb in so many forms these days and take whatever action we can to stop the flow of that toxic mind food.  We need to insist that our bureaucrats and legistlators spend our tax money–and other revenue–well.

We cannot wait for George to do it anymore.  We have to do it–by accepting that we can’t have everything we’d like to have from the government, by helping our neighbors in need instead of assuming the government will handle it, by taking action to deal with the dangers emotionally troubled people pose to themselves and others, by insisting that video game designers and movie moguls come up with something more enticing than violence as their special of the day.

We are all George.  We need to do it.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website.

All that angst about “not having enough time” is supposed to go away when we retire, right? Well…

For the last couple months I’ve been struggling to “find the time” for things I really want to get done.  I’ve also been feeling guilty about not getting to the “shoulds” (like dusting).  A lot of stuff is just not happening.  It’s not because I have a major project at work that’s burning holes in my own choices.  I have been captain of my clock for almost 20 years now.  You’d think I’d have it figured out.

I don’t.  But when I started to look at it more closely this morning, I made a startling discovery.  Maybe “having enough time” is the wrong way to look at it.

We all have “enough time”–we are blessed 24 hours every day.  You don’t get 27 hours because you need it as a young parent, or 18 hours because you’re tired of it all and waiting to die.  24 hours is it.  It’s how we manage it that makes the difference.  Depending on your personality, this may be a conscious thing or it may not.

I am a planner.  I make specific decisions about how I am going to spend that 24 hours.  I make a list of what I want to get done every day.  I cross stuff off when I get it accomplished.  My sweetheart rarely does lists.  He’s a lot more casual about whether something gets done or not.   At the bottom of it though, we are both making choices all day long about how we spend our time.

One of the things that bugs me most about the current version of “retirement” is the boast by retirees that “I’m so busy I don’t know how I ever had time to work.”  It’s not about being busy.  It’s about filling your 24 hours each day with what you really value.

I finally realized this morning that the dilemma for me is that I have a hard time making peace between what I want to “get done” and the things that come along on a spontaneous basis that have more value.

In the last two weeks, my list has been ursurped by helping decorate the nursery for a soon-to-arrive new grandson, a trip to the zoo with my granddaughters, hours of televised sporting events as part of Father’s Day, and a hike in Mount Rainier National Park on a glorious sunny Summer Soltstice.

Every one of the things that I did instead of spending time on the important projects really was more important.  But I’m giving myself a stress pill by fretting over what didn’t get done because I did those things.

Not so very smart, I agree.

But what’s a better approach?

This morning I finally saw the light: see it as the budgeting process it is.  Cutting out the little time wasters can help.  E-mail, especially forwarded stuff, needs to be demoted.  Forgetting how to get the Spider Solitaire game to load would be good.

I need to stop pretending I can do it all.  When the unexpected requires resources, the original plan has to change–be it with money or time.  Maybe it’s a timeline I set for myself on a writing project that needs to be stretched,  Maybe it’s putting a “creative fun” project on hold for a little while.

But  I’m concerned with just leaving it at these kinds of solutions.  I’ve done this before, and eventually I start to resent that I’m getting to what everyone else needs of me but not to my own interests.

That’s where the “Ah ha!” occurred this morning.  When I was managing operations in the gas industry, one of my most unexpected challenges was teaching the guys I supervised that it’s no better to be way underbudget than to be way over.  When you’re underbudget, the company holds back resources you say you’ll need that could have been used elsewhere.  Something that could happen didn’t because you said you needed those dollars.

It’s the same deal with time management.  It’s wiser to live near the tipping point between “enough time” and “not enough time.” on an on-going basis. Living well does not come from “getting everything done.”  It comes from using your time on the things you value.  Sometimes that’s going to be on the “to do” list and sometimes it’s not.

That means a granddaughter’s excitement over a hippopatomus trumps getting a blog post up. And that is just fine.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirment: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love and 39 Bites of Wisdom: Little Lessons in Getting Life Right (a Kindle e-book), For more, please see her website.

Fifty percent of good problem solving is knowing what the problem is. Too often, that step gets lost in the rush to make things “right.”  When that happens, instead of solving a problem, you just create more.

How do we miss on figuring out what’s wrong in the first place?  Lots of ways!

On the top of that list is the tendency to assume that a symptom is the problem itself.  It’s wet under your sink.  If you assume that’s the problem, then you will just mop up the water.  Problem solved?  Not really.  If it’s wet under your sink, somethng is leaking.  If you don’t find and fix the leak, the water will collect under the sink again and again, eventually rotting the wood.

It’s also easy to assume you know what is causing that symptom.  I had a nice little reminder of that last week.  I recently recoupled in terms of living arrangements and we are living in his house.  So all the peculiarities are new and different.  When the whole house circulating fan went on after I’d started my morning routine in the bathroom a few days ago, it included a rather irritating rattle, which kept going and going  and going.

I assumed it was the ceiling fan and went on with the teeth brushing, face washing, etc.  It was only when I had finished and opened a drawer to put away my hair brush that I found the real cause of the problem.  Once the drawer was opened, the rattle became much louder.  And when I investigated, I discovered I’d accidentally turned on the little battery powered gadget that takes fuzz off your clothing.

That example isn’t a big deal.  We hadn’t spent hundreds–or even thousands–of dollars to get the “not real” problem assessed and “repaired.”  But there have also been several situations where that kind of expense was involved.  Both were related to health care.

My significant other has a genetically transmitted kidney condition.   He does a great job of managing his diet and his lifestyle so that it’s not an issue for him.  But when he gets sick, the medical community automatically assumes it’s because of this condition.

The first time I was witness to this, the eventual diagnosis was pneumonia.   The second time, they ordered a series of high risk and expensive ($5000 a shot) injections to help his kidneys work with his blood.  Even when there was no improvement, they kept going.  The side effects of this treatment are serious–an increased risk of heart attack or stroke, for starters.

Eventually, the situation got so bad that he ended up in the emergency room and then admitted to the hospital.  And that’s when they took the time to find the real problem, which was a no-longer-indolent lymphoma that they’d noticed several years before.

We need to do better at diagnosing problems.  Right now, the Democrats have diagnosed the budget shortfall as not bringing enough money in.  The Republicans see it as a matter of spending too much.  It is both, but nothing is being done to solve the problem because neither side is willing to expand their diagnosis.

So what do we do about this a plain ordinary people?  Try not to fall into those same traps with your own problem solving, certainly.  But we can also serve as the “double check” with others making decisions on our behalf.

Ask questions to force those service providers to go beyond what they are assuming:

• If a doctor says “Well, that’s just because of your XYZ disease ask”If I had not already been diagnosed with XYZ disease, what would you do to figure out my current health problem?”
• If your mechanic tells you your car is just getting old, ask “If this car weren’t ten years old, what would you recommend?”
• If your financial advisor says “The market is too unpredictable.  We can’t invest now.” ask “How do other advisors keep people invested in this kind of climate?”

It’s easy to see others’ shortcomings–and frustrating to have to deal with them when they are affecting our own quality of life.  But this is not a solo difficulty.  As a culture, we are used to instant fixes, be it while playing a video game or ordering a new bike off the internet in the middle of the night.

We all need to take more time to be sure we understand the problem we are trying to fix.  When you do, it increases the odds of it staying fixed once you address it considerably.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.   She also recently released 39 Bites of Wisdom:  Little Lessons in Getting Life Right as an e-book for the Kindle.  For more, see her website.

Having a sense of purpose is a key element to living well. That’s easy to say—or write.  But actually connecting with that purpose and staying true to it is a whole different ballgame. 

Purpose can be elusive, especially if you are the kind of person who changes a lot over time.  Usually all that changing includes new directions in what you believe to be the point of being here at all. As you mature spiritually and emotionally, your sense of what your life is about gets deeper and more complex.  Unless, of course you get distracted by…well….living. 

It’s not full speed ahead toward that point on the horizon even if you do have a clear sense of why you’re on the planet. I just read of a couple who’d survived two nights on Mount Rainier—in January–after getting lost on what was supposed to be an easy snowshoe trek.  Whatever their purpose was before they faced that peril, it was suspended while they dug snow caves, climbed steep slopes in the snow, and otherwise focused all their energy on surviving the immediate moment.  Now that they did survive, their sense of purpose will most likely be permanently different.

My point?  As you move through life, your assessment of “what’s the point?” is going to change.  Acknowledging that is a good start toward keeping yourself both focused and satisfied.

Here’s an example:  when you first have kids, your purpose is to parent them.  But as they grow, your purpose on their behalf changes.  Sure, you still love them, encourage them, and make sure they have the resources you can help them find to move toward being happy, successful adults.  But you go from being the center of that child’s universe to being the font of all solutions to being a coach, then a cheerleader, and ultimately, a proud spectator.  Parents who don’t understand that their parenting purpose changes end up hurt, angry, and worse.

When your purpose changes and you’re not in sync with that change, you won’t feel settled.  It can make you restless or irritable or even angry.  If those unpleasant emotions pop up without you being able to put a finger on “why,” you may want to take a look at what’s going on with your sense of purpose.

There are also a few things you can do to strengthen your sense of purpose at its core. In A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose Eckhart Tolle distinguishes between your internal purpose, which drives you toward ever higher evolution emotionally/spiritually, and an external purpose that addresses your contribution to the greater good as a worker, leader, teacher, whatever.   It’s that external purpose that morphs again and again.  Knowing your internal purpose at those times can keep your life satisfying.

When you think about “purpose,” think dynamically.  Your sense of what you are here to do today will probably not be anywhere close to what you are focusing on in ten years.  But also, think authentically.  In Finding Your Way in a Wild New World Martha Beck recommends starting with your first answer to “What’s the point?” and digging deeper by asking successive questions that come from your previous answer until you get to the one that doesn’t produce another question.   Then you’re at your core—at least according to Martha.

Here’s how it looked when I tried it:
When I started focusing on retirement issues, the answer to “Why am I doing this?” was “Because I’m furious with our cultural norm for how we treat people who are old enough to retire.”  That answer produced the question “Why am I angry about that?” To that I answered “I’m angry because we all lose by doing it this way.  More health problems, more social problems, and all that talent and experience wasted.”

Okay, so “Why am I upset about what society chooses to waste?”  The answer to that was “There’s a better way that would benefit us all and I want to help bring that about.”

“And what’s the point of me being involved in that?”  Well…”I need to help.  I need to solve problems.”

Okay, now I’m to something intrinsic to me. I can use that awareness a lot of different ways.  The point of my whole life is “How can I help?”  I’m not here to be an “expert.”  I’m not here to sell gazillions of books.  I’m here to help.  Very soothing to know when my life gets crazy—or confusing.

Knowing there’s more than one version of purpose and understanding your core (or internal) purpose can make life more serene and satisfying—whether you are just stepping into adulthood or planning what you want to do in your 90th year.

This article originally appeared in the February 2012 edition of Barbara Morris’s online newsletter Put Old on Hold.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  Her recently released e-book 39 Bites of Wisdom:  Little Lessons on Getting Life Right is available exclusively on Kindle until March.  For more, please see her website.

A brand new year. What a great time to renew our vows to do all the things we were going to do to make our lives better last year…and the year before…and …

The turning of the year is the perfect time to take stock of where you are trying to go. That part of the old “new year’s resolutions” idea is definitely worth keeping. But the resolutions themselves? Well, maybe we need to take a closer look at that.

It’s easy to make a list of how you want to be better. But is it going to motivate you to do anything more than writing it? A list concentrates all that stuff you think you need to “fix” into one massive dose of self-improvement. That’s a good way to feel pretty inadequate in a hurry.

There’s room to question the whole negative motivation thing, too. Negative motivation is only as strong as the negative consequence. So if you aren’t feeling any real pain because you haven’t gotten to it, committing anew to getting it done is pretty likely to give you more of the same.

Still, it would be nice to get on with some of this stuff—all of this stuff, actually. What’s a good way to use the new year to motivate yourself?

Figure out what usually makes you get things done. If making a list and checking off completed tasks works for you, then that list is a fine idea. But if you get things done by someone else’s deadline, committing to a buddy, or dealing with one change at a time, something other than a list as your New Year’s plan might be wiser.

Be clear about what you can change. It’s so tempting to “want it all” but that can ruin the whole effort. Choose things you value that you truly want to make happen. And be realistic. You are not going to overhaul your personality, your financial situation, and your love life in one twelve month period. In fact some things are never going to change.

Accept that change often comes from messy beginnings. There are times when the change you need to make arrives as an ill-defined, disconcerting restlessness. We’ve all been encouraged to write those measurable, achievable goals. But we don’t always evolve as humans in that orderly, concise manner. If what you need to do is muck around, get on with it instead of trying to jump over the messy part by setting a bunch of easy-to-assess but irrelevant goals.

When you don’t know where you are going, writing a bunch of instructions for getting there (i.e. “New Year’s resolutions”) is a waste of time. In that situation, trying to do one thing every day that addresses what you believe in or want more of in your life might work better. Make it small, doable, and something that you can get done in the time you have each day. It might be as small as spending two minutes (literally) thinking about where you want to take your life. But do something.

New Year’s resolutions too easily become “big deals” that are impossible to accomplish in the crush of everyday life. Then they are de-motivators instead of positive tools for helping yourself change. Using this time of year to assess what you’re doing with your life is a great idea. Limiting yourself to a list of “resolutions” as the outcome? Not so much.

Go beyond the tradition and incorporate an awareness of what it takes to help yourself succeed in how you go about it and what you choose at all. Maybe this year, see what happens if you make the commitment more flexible. When you get off track–and we all do, just pick up the process again once you notice you’re not doing it. (If it’s important enough to want to change in the first place, you will notice.)

That which isn’t growing is dying. Working toward creating something more than what you currently have in your life is wise and good. But don’t set yourself up to fail—and feel like a failure–by making an impressive list of things you don’t really need to do, want to do, or know how to do.

Yeah, baby! We’re looking at a brand new year again. What do you want to do with it?

This article originally appeared in the Januray 2012 edition of Barbara Morris’s online newlsetter Put Old on Hold.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love. She’s just released an e-book collection of her articles for Put Old on Hold titled 39 Bites of Wisdom: Little Lessons on Getting Life Right (exclusively on Kindle until March). For more, please see her website.

The farther you move through life, the more tempting it is to want to have everything under control.  Bad plan.  That strategy is a nice straight road to boredom.  Being a beginner until the day you die is an important piece of creating a good life.  And beginnings are not controlled situations.  Beginnings are messy.

When you move, things are total chaos for a while.  When you start an art project, everything you might need gets hauled out of drawers and closets.  To renovate your yard, you usually create a mud bog at some point in the process.

To make something better, most often, you need to make a total mess of what you already have.

And that’s okay.

In fact, it may be an essential piece of appreciating what you have once you’ve completed the change.  My mom’s yearly version of this process was the family camping trip.  Dad was great about getting everything needed by a family of nine packed in–and on–the car, getting us there, getting the tent set up, etc.  He was really good at making order of the inevitable chaos. 

Mom, however, was better at appreciating the chaos.  “Going camping” was our vacation and that meant new adventures for us kids and the chance to break from the routine for our parents.  But “going camping” also made us all appreciate that routine when we got home and had everything put away.

The disruption and confusion of going in a new direction can be unnerving–and almost always is when you change anything significant.  But that doesn’t mean you don’t do it.  It’s just wise to realize what you’re getting into.

Beginnings involve going in the wrong direction.  When  you start something new, even if you have a full set of instructions (which most things in life don’t have), you make mistakes because the whole idea is new and a challenge to grasp.  Mistakes are every bit as much a part of getting things to go the way you want as the things you get right the first time.  Wrong turns help define the context of what you’re doing and help make it work well.  They’re most valuabe if you use them–figure out what they’ve taught you and then move past them.  But if you can’t get that far about what went wrong, at least relax about the fact that they happen.  When you start something new, there are going to be mistakes.  Sometimes lots of them.

Beginnings usually involve a few restarts.  Thinking that it’s going to be smooth sailing from the get-go just invites frustration.  Redirects are inevitable. Sometimes, you don’t even know where you are trying to go when you start out.   And when you need to change course, you often need to just plain stop before you do so.  So if the project doesn’t keep going at a steady pace, don’t be surprised.  And for heaven’s sake don’t get all torqued about it.  Starting something new takes courage.  Finishing something new takes patience and tolerance–for clutter, confusion, and starting again.

Beginnings often don’t look like beginnings.  Starting in a new direction is often disguised as something old ending.  This probably makes the messiness of a beginning even harder to endure.  When what you had worked for  you and was not something you wanted to change, it’s very hard to get on with the messiness of starting over.  That old reliable version of life was…well…yours, whether it was with a mate who died–or left, a job you lost, or health you took for granted. Pining for what was makes getting on with what’s next a lot more difficult.  Letting go of what you don’t have any more and stepping into the chaos of a new start is the only way to get on with your life.  

Know that the disruption is essential and temporary. It’s easy to begin to feel like the turmoil is never going to go away, but that’s not what’s going on.  Psychologically, being able to predict what’s going to happen is as calming as being able to control it.   Reminding yourself that there’s an end point to the chaos gives you that predictability.

Beginnings are essential.   Beginnings can be intimidating simply because of the disorder and confusion they engender.  Begin anyway.  Having a good life is not a matter of having everything under control.  You need to keep your world expanding and to do that, you have to begin something new.  Again and again and again.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  She’s just released an e-book of essays on living life well titled 39 Bites of Wisdom:  Little Lessons on Getting Life Right.  For more, see her website.

Don’t sell Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party short.They are the tip of the iceberg.  Those who are thriving on the status quo–big corporations, legislators, the healthcare industry–might want to have more respect for what’s going on.  It is very unwise to scoff at others’ pain.

Pundits keep saying that Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are polar opposites. Not really. They are both against greed, just greed in different forms.

Greed is defined as “a selfish and excessive desire for more of something than needed.” As a nation, we are into that in spades. but it’s not just a “desire” for more than needed.  It’s a quest to get it at the expense of everyone else.

The big banks took taxpayer money to stave off total collapse when the financial meltdown first developed. As a show of gratitude for the faith the country put in them, they now look for new ways to charge customers fees every time the government denies them the excessive ones they were charging another way.  The big banks really do not get it.  They trashed the economy with their blunders on mortgage lending, took a handout to stay afloat, and are still so arrogant they can’t grasp how sleazy their current behavior appears   They are literally blinded by their greed. 

In its current form, our government is also horrendously greedy. Instead of getting rid of programs that don’t work and insisting on the careful administration needed to make sure graft and fraud are held at bay, bureaucrats complain they just don’t have enough money to do it right.

Fiddlesticks!  They don’t have the will to do it right.  Their greed is for comfort.  They don’t want to be bothered to do the hard work.  

And that includes the politicians who don’t want to do the hard work of getting elected with out the cushy arrangements with corporate America that provide millions of dollars for reelection campaigns.  

There are things government needs to do for the sake of the common good.  How much of what the government currently uses tax dollars for falls  in that category? Greed for power.  Greed for control.  Greed for easy lives.

The advertising industry is also built on greed.  They sell more and more air time in more and more places without any thought of what they have created for “the market.”  The billions of dollars earned on campaign ads inflict a huge amount of misery on those who have to endure them.  All this fighting and mudslinging is a cash cow for them, but for us, it’s turning the living room–or the interior of the car–into a war zone.

The healthcare industry should be paying very close attention to what’s going on, too.  When Michael Leavitt stepped down as Secretary of Health and Human Services in 2009, he noted that the average American household was then paying 23% of its income on healthcare costs.  (He included what we all pay in taxes for Medicaid and Medicare.)  He also cautioned that absent significant reform, that number would be over 40% by 2030.   Obamacare increased that expense.  There is no significant reform on the horizon.

At the same time,  an exhaustive study done by MD and PhD researchers led by Gary Null found that “American medicine frequently causes more harm that good.”  Using their most conservative statistical analysis, they concluded that at least 7.8 million Americans will die from medical mistakes–botched procedures, prescribed drug errors or interactions, etc–in the next 10 years.  They go on to point out that number is greater than all the Americans who have died in all the wars America has fought in its entire history.  Absent a better plan than “make money,” the medical industry is begging for a revolt.

But it’s not just the big corporations and government that are infected with the greed mentality.  Entitlement is a form of greed.  Going to the ER to get treated for your cold and expecting someone else cover the cost is greed.  Thinking that you should not have to take a hit on your payment from the government simply because it’s not convenient for you–when there is not enough money and everything has to be cut–is a form of greed.  Resisting change to improve our schools so we can compete is one of the lowest forms of greed.  (Maintaining the status quo so I don’t have to do anything difficult is more important than teaching kids what they really need to know?  How pathetic.)

I wish I’d paid more attention when my mom told me to study economics. Maybe then I’d know how often greed takes hold of a nation–any nation but most especially our nation–and what it takes to make it let go.

It’s reached epidemic proportions.  We need to stamp out greed.  

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website.

Once you figure out the right path for what you want to do, it seems it should be simple to stay on it. For some reason, that’s not how it goes.

It’s easy to make a major breakthrough on what needs to change to get things to go better and then lose track of it after a while. Whether it’s how you mow the lawn or how to better use social media to get your message across, the new great thing sometimes gets lost in the shuffle.

This is not a case of memory lapse. You just stop doing things the better way. This bugs me a lot when I do it, so I’ve been thinking about it. This is what I’ve learned so far.

Returning to autopilot too soon. A lot of what we need to get done in life works just fine on autopilot. Some of what we forget we know how to do comes from going back to autopilot before the new way is fully ingrained. (This is how you end up in front of the house you moved out of two months ago when you intended to go home to the one you live in now.) When you just let things proceed “as usual” and “as usual” pre-dates the change you’ve found the insight to make, the new way is going to get lost in shuffle–literally.

Stress made me do it. Stress makes us forget things we know. We do things far less effectively, including forgetting the new better way exists, when we’re wrapped up in “what’s not working.”

To do a better job of keeping process improvements in place, the stress has to go. But then the stress should go anyway. It serves no useful purpose, and you really don’t need it. You are the one choosing to have it. I know you hate it when I tell you that. I hate it when I tell myself that. But it’s the truth.

Believing it will always stay the same. Sometimes it’s not that you “forgot.” It’s that things changed and that great insight doesn’t get you what you need anymore. But that doesn’t mean you should go back to the comfortable, old, ineffective way. If the new way doesn’t fetch it anymore, you have to step up to finding another new way.

You lose track. I think this is the one that gets me off the right path most often. I stop paying attention for whatever reason–I’m tired, doing too much, excited about something else, distracted by some immediate minutia–whatever. It’s not quite the same as choosing to go back to autopilot too soon. When you lose track because the lack of attention, you weren’t focused on what you were trying to do.

I think for me, this is most likely to happen if I think I really understand the new insight that brought about the improvement. I think I “have it covered” and then forget all about actually doing it.

So is this a big deal? Or is it just something that happens to everyone from time to time and needs to be tolerated?

That depends on how important whatever you’ve fallen off the wagon on is. If you lose track of your new accounting system after paying someone to help you create and install it for your small business, you ‘re in a world of hurt. If you forget that you fertilize your roses every fourth week, not so much.

So what can you do to stay on track?

1. On big things that you don’t do often, take the time to recall whether you’ve made any major changes recently in how you do this process. Remembering what’s new can save you a bunch of rework.

2. Don’t buy in on stress. Period.

3. Pay attention to what’s important.  Ask yourself if you are doing it the best way.

4. Notice when you are unintentionally on autopilot.

5. Cut yourself some slack. Usually lives are complex projects. We aren’t going to remember to do things the best way every time.

Still I sure wish I could stay on that great track I find once I discover it. It would be so much easier.
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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love. For more, see her website.

If you’re willing to feel really stupid for a bit, the technology at your fingertips can be amazing. The best example of this right now is your cellphone.

I’ve known I needed a smartphone for over two years. They do things I need to be able to do.  But I kept postponing the purchase. First, the technology I wanted wasn’t available with the service provider I prefer to use.  That was resolved almost a year ago. Then I decided I needed to wait to acquire it until I had plenty of time to learn how to use it. Who ever has that kind of time?

The truth of why I’ve delayed this transition is that I knew the effort was going to make me feel really dumb before I got anywhere close to the “smart” part.

I got the new phone six days ago.  I am now a resident of Dumbville.

Some of the mistakes weren’t even mine. The nerd setting up the phone accidentally dialed my buddy from high school. (Sorry, Bill.)  The friend even called back to see what I needed–but I didn’t realize that until four days later.

However,  this time around with new technology, things do have a slightly different tenor. I’m seeing the “stupidity” as a function of what I’m trying to learn rather than as a personal failing.

Yes, I accidentally dialed a business acquaintance–three times in quick succession. But I cut off the call before it even rang (so I’m hoping she doesn’t see it as a missed call). And yes, it’s taken me four days to learn how to “drag” so I can unlock the screen in less than a full minute. Yes, I still lose the screen I’m working with and can’t figure out why.   But sometimes I can figure out how to get it back.

It’s just all part of the process.

The big difference this time around is that I’m not stressing about getting it right instantly. And that means, I’ve become comfortable in the one thing that true nerds have to be good at. I’m learning to try something and see what happens. That’s a different strategy than “learn what you are supposed to do and then get it right the first time you try it.”

Mastering technology is easier for people who do a lot with it. And it’s easier for people who were born with a joystick in the nursery. But even for those of us who experienced rotary phones and adding machines, learning new technology is easier if you get comfortable with the idea that you’re going to feel dumb for a while. It’s part of the process–like getting wet when you take a shower.

That said, I do have to admit I did one very old-fashioned thing to help myself with the effort. In the small print of the small booklet for “getting started” I saw that you could request a printed user’s manual by calling an 800 number. So I did that. It came in the mail yesterday.  It’s a little four inch square of a book that’s an inch and a half thick.   Odd shape, but oddly reassuring.

Stumbling around is the primary way to learn to use a smartphone. All the geeks I’ve asked acknowledge that. But having that user’s manual gives me a second point of attack. No, I’m not planning to look a bunch of stuff up in it. That’s easier to do online. (Did I really say that?!)

What I need the user’s manual for is browsing. I can leaf through a section while I’m watching TV and learn about stuff I would not have known it could do otherwise.  The user’s manual helps me see what it can do that I never would have asked it to do.

It’s still going to take a while for me to really use this new piece of equipment. It has amazing capabilities plus it’s a different way of doing things I’ve been doing another way for four years. It’s not just a matter of learning the new stuff.  I have to unlearn the old stuff as well.  Not the end of the world, but a complication.

This is all doable–as long as I’m okay with feeling dumb for a while. I’m on it. I want to get really good with this smartphone so dumb it is for the time being.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love. For more, see her website.