Let Me Out by Peter Himmelman

Author:Peter Himmelman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-15T11:01:42+00:00

Brain Bottle Opener 8: The Two-Minute Drill

I want you to take exactly two minutes and make a list of things you’d like to do with your life right now. Why only two minutes? Because if you give yourself an hour, an afternoon, a day, or a week to create the list, you’ll never do it. It won’t be happening in the present. Even five minutes can be too long in some cases.

There’s a big difference between doing something now and doing something a little later. The present is easy. The present is painless. The immediate present won’t let your mind wander off to the refrigerator or the television.

The appearance of your dreams written in actual ink and on actual paper is the first small step toward making them real. One other great thing is that the list of dreams—the list that gets written down somewhere and hangs on the wall behind your computer or on your bathroom mirror—is tantalizing to you and your creative spirit. We’re all hungry for our Milky Way Moments, hungry just to know exactly what they are and where we can find them. Here are some of the results of my own Two-Minute Drill:

Scuba diving in Bali

Playing at Carnegie Hall

Watching my daughter get married

Performing in China

Going on a book tour

Lining up dates in Europe for my Big Muse seminar

Learning to fly a plane

Traveling to Eastern Europe with my wife

Learning Spanish

Recording a jazz album

Playing music at a children’s hospital

Doing an interview for The New Yorker

Buying some land and raising goats and tortoises

It’s funny how many surprising things can come out in two minutes. Seeing my daughter’s wedding, for example. She doesn’t even have a boyfriend that I’m aware of. And this is weird: buying some land and raising goats and tortoises. Now, if I’d had more than two minutes to do this list I’d have probably come up with a host of reasons why that tortoise/goat farm is a stupid, childish, impossible idea. And those are the very reasons that would have prevented most of these ideas from ever coming into the world.

It’s not a lack of ideas or the inability to select one perfect idea from among a hundred that holds us back; it’s fear of failure and shame and their frightening shadow, fear of abandonment. Whether or not I choose to implement this particular dream of a goat and tortoise farm isn’t the point. The point is that by working in the immediacy of the present, I am able to employ some Kid-Thinking to free up my mind to imagine things I might never have considered before. Using the two-minute time limit forces us into the power of the present.

Now it’s time for you to write your list. Just write. Don’t overthink. Don’t even think at all. I want you to list things you’ve always dreamed of doing but never had the time or the energy or the resources or the courage to actually do. They can be ridiculous things, far-fetched things, ideas that make no sense at all.

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