|
Stephen Shapiro graduated from
Cornell University with a degree in Industrial Engineering. During his
successful career with the international consulting firm, Accenture,
Shapiro helped develop and ultimately led their Process Excellence
Practice. Following his departure from Accenture, Shapiro wrote his
first book 24/7 Innovation, which shows how businesses can prevent
innovative stagnation at every level of the organization. He is
currently an expert and highly sought-after consultant and professional
speaker on topics of creativity and innovation.
phenomeNEWS: Stephen Shapiro has a new book out and the title got to us
right away – Goal-Free Living: How to Have the Life You Want Now –
because we have been goal free forever and receiving a lot of flack
about it. The author has quite a tale to tell. Hello Stephen.
STEPHEN SHAPIRO: Pleasure to be here.
This is fascinating. From the minute
we read this in O: The Oprah Magazine, which we’re sure you got a lot of
feedback from, we decided we must interview you because you’ve got
something really interesting to say about goal-free living.
It is something that has peaked
interest in a lot of people and it is interesting how some people love
it, have a positive reaction to it and a lot of people think I’m
absolutely crazy. We’re in
with the craziness then, if you’re crazy. We liked the beginning, where
you talked about how you were striving and were goal-oriented like a lot
of the rest of us were at first and had a turning point when a psychic
friend told you that you were like a frog. Can you relate that story?
Sure. Most people are encouraged to set goals and set plans and figure
out where they’re going. My five-year plan – what am I doing next week,
next month, next year, until five years down the line, if all works out
well, I’ve achieved what I wanted to achieve. And it was in a
conversation with a friend of mine who was observing all of this and she
said, “You know what, Steve, this just doesn’t seem quite like who you
are.” She described me in a way that really resonated, which is as a
frog on a lily pad, basically hopping from experience to experience.
Every hop to lily pad is very active, but it’s not like a linear path
for five years. It’s really moving, meandering with purpose through life
and you end up in a different place than you expected to end up, but
you’ve enjoyed every moment of the trip.
We love that “meandering with a
purpose.” That sounds so good for those of us who are dreamers. I’m
meandering with a purpose. That should be a bumper sticker, don’t you
think?
I’ll be sure to come out with a line of
them soon. We love it! You
also talk about two types of people. There are goal people and river
people.
Right. And that was from a conversation
that I had with someone I interviewed during my trip which was sort of
the genesis of the book. There are people who like their goals. And they
like to plan the work and work the plan and they like the predictability
and the stability and the safety of the goals. And there’s also
something about achievement, being able to check things off of their
to-do list that gives them satisfaction. That’s the part of the
population that most of the books out there have catered to.
What I’ve known, from my own experience
and from other people I’ve interviewed is that there are river people,
goal-free people. People who are much more into the experience rather
than the achievement, much more into being in the moment rather than
worrying about how things turn out. And so you have the goal-oriented
people and the river people being the goal-free people.
When I wrote the book I originally
thought that it was going to be the goalaholics of the world, the people
who are really into their goals and would be most interested in
goal-free living. My original hypothesis was that these were the people
who are most stressed out and therefore would benefit from this. What
I’ve found is that the people who live goal free, at least that’s their
innate way of living, are the ones who have responded overwhelmingly to
this, because it finally gives voice to these goal-free, river people
and validates the way they’ve been living. So I’ve received emails
almost every day saying thank you, it’s about time somebody recognized
that there’s a different way to live than just focusing on achievements
and where you’re going.
It’s like smelling the roses along
the way.
Absolutely. Taking an experiential
approach to life, where what gets you jazzed up is what you’re doing,
not where you’re going. In
your book you also mention that when you’re on a train or bus, instead
of putting your head in a book, just look at the landscape, listen to
what people are saying and just be there with that moment and enjoy it.
I think one of the challenges that we
have, especially in today’s society, are that there are so many things
to distract us between cell phones and BlackBerrys and the iPods. What
ends up happening is we’re only experiencing what comes through these
technological gadgets rather than connecting with our environment and
the people around us.
We miss so many great opportunities
when we do that. What is the
difference between goals and aspirations?
The difference between goals and
aspirations is obvious when you look back at the origins of the words.
The word goal comes from the Old English word that means barriers,
obstacles and hindrances. And if you think about football and you try to
get to the goal line, the destination, what do you have to do? You have
to plow through a 350-pound linebacker in order to get there. So it’s
hard work pushing forward toward a destination. Aspiration comes from
the similar Latin word for inspire and spirit, which means to breathe
life into. One of the connotations I like is “panting with desire.” So
it’s about how can you create something that’s passionate, desirable in
your life but it’s not a destination and it’s not hard work. It’s
actually sort of light and airy. The great thing about an aspiration is
it’s not somewhere to get to. An aspiration’s purpose is actually to get
you excited today. It’s sort of a context. If you think about a
vacation, for example and if you know you’re going on a vacation in a
month’s time, that vacation hasn’t happened, yet it will get you excited
today. And that’s really what you want to do with an aspiration. It’s
not a place to get to, because as most people know, they think about
their vacations, they get ready to go on their vacations and they build
it up in their mind and then they get on their vacations. I don’t know
if you’re like most people, but the vacation rarely lives up to the
expectation. And then the vacation’s over and you go back to your
regular life and in some respects you wish you never went on the
vacation because it just makes you more aware of how your life isn’t
exactly the way you want it. So an aspiration isn’t somewhere to get to,
it’s just something to play with.
Oh, yes. Now you weren’t always
living goal free, were you?
No, I wasn’t. In my core, I probably always was at some level, but then,
as most people, I got caught up in things. After I graduated from
college I started realizing that I wanted to be successful, make money
and make partner in my consulting firm. I worked my butt off. It
destroyed a relationship and it took a number of different experiences
that I had for me to recognize that by chasing my goals I was actually
destroying, not enjoying my life. That was part of the change that I
went through in order to become much more experiential and goal free.
That was when I realized the detrimental effect that these goals were
having on my life.
That was your “ah-ha” moment.
It was one of my “ah-ha” moments. I’ve
had several over the years that sort of came together to form the way I
view the world now. Another “ah-ha” moment really came, interestingly,
two years ago when I drove across the country to interview people for
the book. When I met these goal-free people, it helped to reinforce and
help me see additional ways of living life. It’s just been a series of
epiphanies, I guess you’d call them, over an extended period of time.
What we think is interesting is that
you set out to interview for another book altogether and in your
wanderings you, at some point, dropped your thought process on that
thought. It opened up your limited scope and ended up being something
completely different and more wonderful than you even imagined.
It was unexpected. The trip I took in
the summer of 2003 was definitely a goal-free trip. It was unplanned. In
fact, originally what I was going to do was drive across the country and
write a sequel to my first book, which is called 24/7 Innovation and
that was about corporate innovation. I was going to write a book about
creativity. Just sit on the beach, go to the mountains and write a book
on creative thinking. It was about two weeks before I started the trip
that somebody suggested that I interview people for the book to add some
richness and texture. So I did. I sent out some emails and basically had
hundreds of requests from people who wanted to be interviewed. I
traveled intending to write a book on creativity. As I interviewed these
people, the creative stuff was interesting, but the way these people
live their life was the thing that became most interesting. Then the
book moved away from corporate creativity to a book on goal-free living.
And the trip itself is a great metaphor because it was completely
unplanned. I didn’t know where I was going to sleep each night. I would
basically make my hotel reservations two hours before I got to a city.
Typically I didn’t know who I was going to interview until I got to a
city and I started talking to people and asked who were the most
interesting, as I did in New Orleans, when I met a voodoo priest. It was
just a very interesting experience where, without any plans, the result
was so much better than what I would have ended up had I followed the
original blueprint. Several
years ago we went on a trip to Germany, because a friend of ours said
she missed us so much she had to have us there. So we went. Then her
business picked up and she didn’t have a lot of time for us, so we went
off on our own, around Germany and France and had probably one of the
most fabulous times that we’ve ever had.
That’s great. It’s like when you take a
vacation. You could follow the tour guides and do all the things that
the tourists do and you know what you’re going to get. But my experience
and it sounds like your experience, is when you get “lost,” when you end
up exploring the back roads, when you take detours, you tend to find the
coolest, most exciting things that you never in a million years would
have found had you planned out your itinerary.
Exactly. Another good point you
brought up in your book was that when you were a goal-oriented person
working many, many hours, you were meeting a goal but you weren’t very
happy at doing it. And the moment you decided to drop all the structure
around that, your amount of dollars greatly increased. Then I would
suspect you are making more than you ever made before and you’re totally
happy doing what you’re doing.
It is interesting how, when you really do the things you love to do, you
eventually get the money because if you’re enjoying what you’re doing,
you tend to be better at it and you’re always going to find a way of
making it work. And the thing is, it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t
matter how much you make because if you really, truly have a deep
appreciation for where you are and you’re enjoying what you’re doing,
the money becomes much less important regardless.
I’ve interviewed people who were making
lots of money. They made a change. They made less money, but they’re
still much happier. I’ve interviewed people who were making lots of
money, left their jobs and ended up making more money. But the money
isn’t really the important part of it. It really is your attitude and
relationship toward your goals and toward your life that I think, at the
end of the day, is the most important thing. And for me, personally,
it’s just liberating. When you realize you don’t need to chase this
carrot that everybody else is chasing, it creates this freedom, this
lightness in your life, that all of a sudden you have so many more
options and so many more things you can do. And, yes, there’s so many
more ways to make money and there’s so many more ways to be happy.
In your wonderful adventure across the
United States, in the car, all by yourself with your tape recorder, you
discovered, among other things, wonderful people along the way. And you
discovered a pattern, eight secrets that these people seemed to have.
Could you share those with us now?
Sure. The first of the secrets is a foundational platform secret; use a
compass, not a map. And essentially what that means is have a sense of
direction, not a destination, but a compass setting, a direction that
you’re going to move and then don’t plan it out. Don’t map it out. I
think the important point in this one is that maps are great; they’re
useful. I use maps. What maps are most useful for is getting from Point
A to Point B as quickly as possible, but life isn’t about efficiency, it
isn’t about effectiveness, it’s about exuberance and passion. It’s just
as important to get out of the mindset that we have to get to somewhere
very quickly as to enjoy where we’re going, which leads into the other
seven.
Trust that you are never lost. If you
don’t plan out where you are going, you’re going to end up in places you
didn’t expect to get to. Anywhere you are is just where you are. And
they’re all experiences. We get caught up in worrying about making the
right decisions and the wrong decisions and in reality, there’s only
decisions. And as long as you relate to your decisions in a powerful and
positive way, you really can’t get lost, no matter what path you go
down.
The third one has to do with what we
were talking about before getting your head out of your electronic
gadgets and experiencing things and remembering that opportunity knocks
often but sometimes softly. It’s finding opportunities in unlikely
places.
The fourth one is about appreciation.
It’s want what you have. You can’t be goal free until you recognize
you’re already where you need to be and everything else is icing on the
cake. The fifth one is to seek
out adventure. It’s about trying new experiences, trying new things,
seeking out different ways of doing things. We tend to do the same
things over and over, therefore we have a limited set of experiences to
pull from. And this is about applying creativity to your life and trying
new ideas.
Number six is becoming a people magnet,
attracting people into your life. It makes life much more enjoyable and
it helps you move along toward your aspirations.
Secret number seven is embrace your
limits, which is about embracing your humanness. We’re not perfect. We
all have perceived limitations and once we accept them and acknowledge
them, then use their power, we can actually become much more powerful.
Sometimes when we do something that doesn’t feel very powerful, when we
“fail,” we can actually turn that failure into a success and that’s one
of the most powerful ways to live.
And then, finally, number eight, is
remain detached, which is, if you are trying too hard to get what you
want out of life, not only will you most likely be unsuccessful, but you
also create a lot of stress. So by being detached and remaining
detached, you let things flow, you enjoy the moment and you don’t worry
about how things turn out. It’s a commitment to the process rather than
a commitment to the outcome.
Very good. One of the secrets
reminded us of the old Zen saying, “Wherever you go, there you are.”
Exactly.
Here you are, staying in the now and appreciating the now like so many
of the spiritual folks and top gurus have told us for years and years.
What you’re putting clearly and succinctly into this goal-free living
concept is to appreciate what you have in order to expand. So many
people rush onto the next thing and they don’t have time to appreciate
what they’ve accumulated so far. Anybody who’s ever moved will recognize
that one.
Oh, yes!
These secrets are actually very rich life lessons.
We struggled a bit with the word
secrets because it makes it sound so mystical when in fact, these are
things that are obvious. There’s nothing that I’m saying here that’s
like, “Wow!” but nobody really takes the time to live this way. So it’s
a reminder that there’s an alternative way to live. We can enjoy the
moment, enjoy where we are and use the future not as somewhere to get to
but as our playground that gets us excited.
When I moved to England in 1999, I used
that as an opportunity to get rid of practically everything I owned. If
it didn’t fit into eight boxes, I was getting rid of it. I gave stuff to
family, to charity, I sold stuff. Everything fit into the eight boxes. I
even downsized from there to two boxes. When I was in London, at one
point, I moved from one place to another place in the back of a taxi.
One trip. And that was everything I owned.
We’re impressed! And it was
freeing. So it’s not just wanting what you have, it’s recognizing that
you can be extremely happy with even less than you have already.
Oh, absolutely! That should be your
next book! What about the sentimental things that you accumulate, like
pictures and things that certain people gave you? How do you release
those?
Well fortunately with pictures, in the
digital age, I’ve been able to scan a lot of stuff into my computer. I
love electronics because I can store millions and millions of pictures
and videos and things like that. So I take advantage of technology for
those types of things. And for some of the other things, I did give them
to my family for safekeeping. But I don’t have that much stuff that I
really hold near and dear. Probably the most important thing that I have
is my saxophone that I was playing when I was a kid and still play from
time to time. That’s probably, in terms of sentimental value, one of the
most important things because my dad played that horn when he was in
high school. Other than that, I really just try to appreciate what I
have right now rather than always getting stuck in the memories of the
past.
That’s excellent. Now what do you
say to folks that really like structure, who really like having their
Day-Timers velcroed to their hip and like planning out things and really
feel safe within a structure.
Well, I guess there’s two things I would say. One is, if it’s really
working, you have to be honest with yourself. Ask yourself, on a scale
of 1-10, how happy you are with your life, where 10 is absolutely
incredible miraculous and 1 is not so good. If you’re like most people,
you’re somewhere around a 7. But then I’ll ask people, what does a 5
look like? As people recognize they’re not even close to where they
think they are. If you’re already a 9 or 10 and you’re loving your life
and you have your goals, I say fantastic and if you’re really happy,
don’t change a thing. But if you’re like most people, as I’ve found the
average is a 5.4 out of 10, maybe, just maybe the fact that you are so
rigid, that fact that you aren’t letting life come to you rather than
you trying to push through it, maybe the fact that you live your life so
rigidly and haven’t explored new opportunities, that might be the reason
why things aren’t as great as they could be. If your life’s working,
stick with it. If not, I encourage you to try something else.
Absolutely. And there are many
wonderful suggestions in the book on how to do just that. We love the
story about the woman who went from a goalaholic to goal free. Oh, boy,
could we relate to that story.
I do like that story. For obvious reasons, she didn’t want her name in
the book, but it’s just this great story of a person who, when we would
talk she could realize that every area of her life was driven by goals.
And those were the things that were destroying her health and happiness.
For dating, she had a particular goal, the way a guy was supposed to
look and the type of person she was supposed to be with. The person she
ended up marrying was absolutely nothing like her original picture and
she is happier than she could possibly imagine. With her career, she
always had this belief, this drive, this goal, to get to where we all
think we should be in the corporate world. That was the thing that gave
her high blood pressure and it was the thing that landed her in the
hospital. And when she gave that up, things were so much more effortless
and so much more enjoyable. It is a wonderful story of somebody who took
every area of their life and really analyzed deeply how the goals were
affecting them. Coming back to
your previous question, really be honest with yourself and ask what your
goalaholic tendencies are costing you.
Yes, exactly. Take a good look at
your life. You said in the book, “I’m much more into enjoying a single
moment for what it is and allowing things to unfold.” It’s a beautiful
quote. I think most of us should aspire to be more often in that place
were we just allow things to unfold. Fabulous.
Thank you. We are so thrilled
that you brought this book out and we look forward to more goal-free
living coming out in the future. If there was something that you would
like to leave specifically with us, another nugget, what would that be?
I’d leave with the story of someone I met during my travels who’s become
a corporate client of mine. He’s been successful in the corporate world.
He had set up this new opportunity, something that really got him very
excited and everything was in place. He wrote me recently and said,
“Hey, Steve, everything’s in place but I still haven’t made the leap and
I’m hoping maybe you can give me a push.” And I said, “That’s the
problem. You’re looking at the future as something you have to push into
rather than the future pulling you.” A lot of times, the security and
safety of the past pulls us more than the future pulls us. So if you can
create something that is just so big, bold and audacious, something that
you’re never going to get to but it’s something that really gets you
jazzed up and you’re willing to give up your safety net to do it. The
future will pull you forward effortlessly. It will happen. You don’t
have to work at it. But until you have that in place, it’s going to seem
like work. So create something that really gets you jazzed up and life
will unfold. It’s a guarantee.
Beautifully said! As you said in your book, “The best experiences unfold
naturally. Treat life as an exploration. Rather than speeding toward
your destination, enjoy the adventure. The best paths are the ones we
know nothing about and would never have visited unless we allowed
ourselves to meander.”
Do you have a web site if people
want to visit? I do. It is
goal-free.com. And on the
website, I have the Are You a Goalaholic Quiz if you want to take that
and see what your relationship to goals might be.
Thank you again so much!
|
