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

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!