Unintended consequences

I’ve been the victim of bad advice on a few occasions.  There are limits to the amount of legitimate life advice one can glean from my magic 8-ball (the pool ball) and a Ouija board.  For some reason it appears that both the 8-ball (pool ball) and the spirit world are holding something against me.

It is an accepted fact in some circles that creative ideas are often formed in the shower.  This is a clever marketing trick by the shower commission to get people to use more water.  I think it happens to everyone at some point before they realize it is all a scam.  I’ve tried to learn techniques to harness that creative energy when not in the shower.  I visualized the water flowing over my head and attempted to let my mind be creative.  This just made me think about meetings.  I don’t even like meetings.  They are a waste of time.  Scheduling and attending meetings consumes my daily routine.  It is ridiculous.  I knew there was a problem when I scheduled a meeting to discuss having a moratorium on meetings.

Thinking about everything and nothing at the same time forced my mind away from meetings, which I also discovered was an excellent technique to assist me in making it through all of my meetings.  It did not help me to harness my creative potential.

Hypnotherapy is supposed to be good for something.  I stood in front of a mirror and bored myself to tears trying to trick my mind into being creative.  I don’t think I even managed to hypnotize myself once.  The mirror fell for it though.  I managed to suggest that it was in the 3^rd dimension.  I had to replace that mirror after I couldn’t return it to this state of being.

I felt I had one last attempt in me before I would have to capitulate.  I waited for an off day and decided to stay in the shower until I had created a new technique that unlocked my full creative potential.  That ended up being one of the multiple times I have almost drowned when I fell asleep from extreme exhaustion.  The marketing team tried to create a release that explained my hospital visit as a simple case of dehydration, but I was certain no one would fall for that.

Much to my surprise, the hospital staff did fall for the story, so I never had to tell anyone that my own dumb behavior almost resulted in a nomination for a Darwin Award.  I want to win just as much as the next person, but I could do without winning one of those.  That would detract from my ability to win my DEs at the track.  My creative potential appears to only be free when I’m in the shower despite my best efforts to unlock it for other times.  The decision was made against my well to pursue other items on the personal to-do list, such as conquering mornings with happiness.

The only early mornings I have ever remembered as being enjoyable were all during a track weekend.  Even then, if you had approached me sideways before I had become acclimated to being conscious again, bad things could have happened.  I wanted to try to figure out how I could force myself to enjoy mornings when I wasn’t at the track.  This started with visualizations of the track surface, the air, the sounds and smells of being back at the track.  I found a different happy place by doing these visualizations.  This resulted in being even less happy when I would be ripped from my visualization by an AcMo emergency.  Why can’t emergencies ever occur after noon, but before 5pm?

When I was younger I used to turn the shower on and then fall asleep on the bathroom floor.  I had hoped my clever trick would provide a few more minutes of sleep every morning.  It never worked since I was caught napping every single time.

I made a choice to try to become more of a morning person after reading several articles that indicated all successful CEOs get up early and get more done during the day than other people.  I liked the idea of that, except for the getting up earlier part.  I needed to increase my leadership performance, so I gave it a try.

The earlier morning wake up time didn’t make me more productive at all.  Instead I found myself falling asleep even more than normal during the day, and usually while road testing a client’s vehicle.  The chances of an accident increased to uncomfortable levels.  I had to find a better alternative.

I decided to set all of my clocks to a new time zone so that I could trick my mind and body into waking earlier.  This worked for the first few days, but then I discovered I was late for all of my appointments.  Because I didn’t know what time zone I had used to set my clocks, I couldn’t be sure what time it was anywhere.  I was going on feel, and my mind and body were lying to me.

All of the experimentation caused me to wake at odd hours in the morning, often with no recollection of having fallen asleep.  Now I am fortunate if I’m able to sleep past 5 AM.  This has not increased my productivity at all.  In fact, I’ve become less productive because now I spend all of my mental energy manipulating my schedule to find time and space to nap.

I’m sharing my failures in an effort to help some of you out there from making the same mistakes I’ve made.  I now have a myriad of new problems someone has to resolve including a defective mirror that no longer reflects, a leaking shower floor, clocks that refuse to keep local time, and an inability to do anything other than schedule meetings.  Some people just aren’t meant to be morning people.  Accept it and focus on the stuff that matters most such as how to avoid being stuck awake in the morning.