Treasure Hunt In Action

You Don’t Have Time to Read This Blog

I just read a blog post about time management for lazy people. By the time I was done, my head was s

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Hunt Treasures Right Now

How you can lose 10 pounds, travel all summer and turn into a leaf

Or, how I gave up trying to fix things, and found myself slim and in Maine.

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Treasure Hunt for Couples

Hunting Treasure in Amsterdam
Sometimes Life Is Like a Sappy Romance Novel

Boy meets girl. Boy meets girl thirty-eight years later. Boy marries girl. Life really goes like

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Barak's Treasure Hunts

The Curious Case of Cackling Crows

I love taking long walks, noticing the world around me. By noticing and getting curious about the wo

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Share Your Treasures

What do you want?

What if you could want it all, like a kid wanting a pony? Tell us what you want!

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Our Latest Treasure

You Don’t Have Time to Read This Blog

I just read a blog post about time management for lazy people.

By the time I was done, my head was spinning. It listed seventy-two things to do, and wisdom from three very smart and talented masters of time management.

It had photos of desks, rules on how to have phone calls, when to stand and when to sit.

And all so you, too, can be productive–or at least 30% more productive than people who don’t manage their time.

What does this say about our society and our world? What does this say about our values?

I think it says a few scary things:

  1. It’s all about being productive. If you get things done it’s good. If you get less done, that’s not so good. (Last week I asked a fifteen year old student in my leadership program how his morning went. “Productive” he said. His morning involved skiing with a three year old. How can you be productive skiing with a three year old?)
  2. If you can’t manage your time you aren’t trying hard enough, or haven’t practiced enough, or, even worse, you just don’t care. There’s some moral, ethical or personal failure here. Shame, shame on you, you unproductive, poorly managed people!
  3. There’s a right way to live, to relate to time and to get things done. And that’s to manage, control, and structure everything. Forget about mystery. Forget about happiness. Forget about wonder and joy and adventure and the brilliant spark of creativity. It’s all about doing things the right way. It’s all about living a managed, controlled and structured life.

Ugh.

Over the past several months I’ve been getting deeply curious about time, and about how we move through time.

There are 600,000 google searches every month on the phrase “time management” and virtually every result comes up with a version of the same message: “If you just use my time-o-matic system, you’ll manage your time well, and manage to be productive, and manage to get the right/virtuous/meaningful things done!”

Never have I seen anything questioning the underlying metaphor of managing time.

And that’s where we run into trouble.

(more…)

Treasure in the New England Woods

Keeping on the Autumn theme, here’s another way to learn from leaves.

Treasure Hunters notice things other people miss. And when they notice them, they continue on and get curious.

It’s a huge part of Treasure Hunt, that simple ability to notice and get curious. They’re skills that we can practice so that when life doesn’t seem like a treasure, it’s easier for us to switch things around.

And when we engage all of our senses--including sound--we can help our brain to relax and become more open to the world around us.

Spend a couple of minutes watching (and listening to) this Treasure Hunt I found myself on in Massachusetts not long ago. And take a couple of minutes to notice the sounds around you. Become aware of them for the rest of the day.

Intentionally stopping to notice and get curious about your surroundings can help you train your brain to see treasures you’ve been missing and, over time, can help you become more present, relaxed and focused.

And that’s always a treasure!

How you can lose 10 pounds, travel all summer and turn into a leaf

yellow leaf 1

Take a minute or so to look at this wonderful child of the New England Autumn

  • What do you notice? What patterns are you seeing?
  • Do the swirls and whorls make you think of anything else?
  • How did this little leaf become this way?
  • How did it know to look like a birch leaf, and not a maple or oak leaf?

It’s all a matter of following some Simple Rules
Mathematicians and biologists talk about fractal formations, attractors and dynamical systems. From the leaf’s perspective it all boils down to:

Follow a few simple mathematical rules over and over again, and you’ll end up looking like a birch leaf.

As cells divide and shift and combine and mutate, they follow these simple rules, and over time you get a leaf. It is unlike any birch leaf that came before, but by following the same rules as all other birch leaves; it clearly is still a birch leaf.

And the brown swirls are all close cousins, if not brothers and sisters.

We call these oft-repeated mathematical principles, The Simple Rules.

Simple Rules govern our lives as well.
The tiny little rules we follow over and over again are both intimately familiar and mostly invisible to us.

Over time as we follow these rules we get something that looks pretty like our predictable life. I have a couple of powerful examples in my life from the past year or so:

My 43-year-old body was stuck at almost-fit-but-never-quite-there. Then, I noticed and got curious about my simple rule of walking to the store five days a week for a can of soda and a candy bar. I replaced it with popping a handful of nuts and raisins in my mouth and drinking a glass of water before heading to the store. And before too long, I changed the Simple Rule of I need my daily Coke to I don’t like sugared soda, it makes me ill. Lost 10 pounds like nothing at all.

A year ago I noticed a recurring thought: “Don’t Trust.” It would sneak in throughout the day, and without realizing it I was making lots of little decisions and taking lots of small actions grounded in not trusting. As soon as I noticed it, I got curious. What triggered it, what it led to, and what did it feel like? And, by playing around, I replaced it with the question, “what would I do if I were being BOLD?” Changed everything. Thousands of little actions later, I’m at the end of an amazing four-month summer on the East Coast, working on the road and visiting family and friends.

I used to look for the big fixes, or settled for the inevitable. Neither worked, neither was satisfying. Noticing my Simple Rules, getting curious about them, and playing have worked magic in my life, and in the lives of many Treasure Hunters out there.

What are your Simple Rules?

  • What’s a small thing you do over and over?
  • What’s a small thought that comes into your head on a regular basis?
  • What’s a familiar sensation or feeling you have?
  • What small patterns repeat again and again.

Just notice them, and get curious. There’s nothing to fix, nothing to change.

You can play with them, interrupt them, use them as triggers to start another simple rule. We’ll explore some ways to do that in other posts.

And for now just start with noticing and getting curious. Sometimes this is all you need to break free of a simple rule, and allow something larger and unexpected to emerge.

Have fun!