It’s one of the questions I’m asked most often…

What if I choose wrong?

People are so freaked out about making the wrong choice.

Traveling down the wrong road.

“Wasting” time, money, energy on the wrong thing.

Newsflash. With rare exception. The only bad decision is indecision, followed by inaction.

It doesn’t matter whether you choose right. There is no wrong. No such thing as wasted time, money or energy…IF:

(1) you commit to being present and engaged in whatever you’re doing, and

(2) you approach everything with curiosity and openness, always a student.

So maybe you took the “wrong” job?! What can you LEARN from the experience of living in a place of misaligned action? What skills, resources, relationships can you cultivate doing the “wrong” thing that’ll advise and accelerate your quest to get closer to the “right” thing?

What is your “serendipitous detour” teaching you about what you do want, don’t want, excel at, suck at, love, hate, yearn for or abhor?

The only way the time, money and energy you put into something that’s not quite right is wasted is if you choose not to see and build upon what you’ve gained along the way.

In the end, the only bad decision is indecision, because it leads to inaction. And without action, there’s no data. No experience of life. No information to serve as fuel for evolution, connection, joy, progress. No growth. Just gray.

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Today’s guest contributor is writer, coach, violinist, filmmaker, law school graduate, and web designer, Emilie Wapnick. Emilie works with multipotentialites to help them build lives and businesses around ALL of their interests and she’s the troublemaker behind Puttylike.com.

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“I moved to Portland to find community, a home… To settle down,” I spoke softly.

She looked at me with big eyes.

“Now I have to choose between Portland, and the thing that Portland represented, which is what I actually wanted.”

Like many 20-somethings of my generation, I have consciously designed most facets of my life. I chose self-employment to provide me with freedom and a sense of contribution, I chose a broad theme for my business over a niche in order to express my multipotentiality, I gave real thought to the friends in my life, to how I wanted my day to look, to how I wanted to feel, and to where I wanted to live.

How lucky we are to live in a time and place where this is possible, and to be privileged enough to enjoy this freedom.

I’ve been very deliberate about designing my life ever since realizing that I could. But what happens when the universe that you trust, that has been so good to you, decides to impose some of its own conditions? Do you stick with your original plan or do you shift, maybe giving up some of that autonomy you hold so dear? (In this case, moving to a new city with the person you love.)

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Last summer, I launched Good Life Project TV, – a broadcast-quality web-series that explores the journeys of world-class artists, entrepreneurs, makers and world-shakers.

I had no idea if anyone would watch. Or care.

But it was the thing I couldn’t not do…

Got my answer nearly immediately. Good Life Project TV™ took off. It’s now been watched in more than 135 countries.

I’ve written 800+ blog posts, articles in national magazines and two books. But, none of them has generated the response created by Good Life Project. Humbled. Grateful. Awed.

But, there was a bit of an ish…

The show is about 45-minutes long. That format let’s me go really deep with guests and avoid all the sound-bitey B.S.

But not everyone has 45 minutes to watch the show on a screen. So, shortly after launching, we began posting mp3 audio versions to a subscriber-only vault area. Better, now people could take the show on the road and listen.

Still, downloading it, then transferring it onto your phone or other listening device was a bit, well, cumbersome.

Which is why I’m sooooo excited to share with you today that…

Good Life Project™ Is Now Available
as a Podcast on iTunes!!!

We’ve just launched today with the first 20 episodes already posted. I’ll be accelerating delivery of the rest until we’re all caught up over the next few weeks. Then we’ll stick to a weekly schedule that mirrors the live web-series.

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Lissa Rankin’s new book, Mind Over Medicine, is creating quite a stir.

Rankin is an M.D. who walked away from her practice of mainstream medicine after a highly-successful career. She was frustrated, angry and looking for answers that traditional guidelines didn’t seem to support.

She discovered that in her practice, patients in one of the healthiest towns in the country still weren’t healing. For certain conditions mainstream medicine worked well. And, in fact, Rankin doesn’t cry for the end of it. But, for others, there was something deeper that was going on. And no matter how often mainstream medicine soothed the symptoms, the real challenge, the deeper pains, kept resurfacing new and old symptoms over and over.

What Rankin argues is that mainstream medicine does not represent the universe of potentially valuable treatment protocols or modalities. That state of mind, emotion, human circumstance, human interaction and belief not only play a role, but have the ability to effectively turn on or off the body’s innate ability to heal itself. To keep disease and pain ever-present, or serve as a foundation for sustained recovery.

Rankin knew this argument would potentially position her as a major target, a quack preaching pseudo-science. Even though her pedigree in medicine is reasonably bullet-proof. And, interestingly, while she’s looking to convince patients, the real demographic she seeks to make her case to is…doctors.

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Today’s guest contributor is Jennifer Boykin, the Creative Visionary and Chief Rabble Rouser behind the midlife reinvention movement Life After Tampons. She also speaks, teaches, and writes about adversity, triumph, and Women Who Rise and is the author of Breakthrough:  How to Get on With It When You Can’t Get Over It (download it free, btw).

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I make trouble for a living, and while I love my job very much, I don’t think I was supposed to be so impossibly good at it.  In fact, I was raised to be the “good one.”  My brother had the opposite role nailed down.

But then, life had its way with me.  A bunch of “unfair” stuff happened, including the death of my first child, and all my goody, goody-ness evaporated in a flash.  All of a sudden, I was introduced to my beautiful ROAR.

I have a very scary ROAR, as it turns out, and, at first, I didn’t know how to use my roar rightly.  I had been the “good one” for too long.  I had no ability at all to finesse my new skill.

Here are two horrible examples:

Once, shortly after my daughter died, I was pushing my grocery cart up to the checkout line, and this other lady cut in front of me.  I just glared at her and told her she’d better “watch out” because “I was the mother of a dead baby and I wasn’t in very good humor.”

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Confession. I’m an empath.

I feel other peoples’ emotions as if they’re my own.

Often, their pain. On an unusually strong level.

Whether I know them or not.

I shake when I see other people experience awe. I cry during Hallmark specials. Nearly every episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition left me a blathering mess. Stuff just seems to get to me more easily than others.

I’ve known this since I was a kid, just didn’t know there was a name for it until recently.

There’s good about it. And bad.

It’s been a huge asset as an entrepreneur, marketer, leader and artist. I can get into peoples’ heads, understand what they need, want, desire, aspire to. What makes them vibrate with emotion, good and bad. It lets me work on more of an emotional level, see past facades and words, then speak to, create and solve for what really matters.

It’s also been hugely beneficial in allowing me to connect when I teach, present and, as I’ve more recently discovered, interview people. In a past life, taking depositions in a dimly-lit cinderblock government room, I felt my way through the conversations on a more intuitive level, processing beyond words.

And, as a human being on a quest to be more human and better understand what this lap on the planet is all about, it lets me know, on a visceral level, what people are experiencing as if I am them. It allows me to see people more easily from a place of grace. To drop the judgment. Not always. And not everyone. I’m still very much a work in progress. But more often than not.

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You’re angry. Beaten down.

Unappreciated and underpaid.

Hamstrung by the powers that be.

Taken advantage of. And you’ve reached a breaking point.

The status quo is causing pain and it must go.

Change has become a moral imperative. Time to rally the forces.

To tear it down. Move away from the current paradigm.

Away from tyranny, oppression, inequality.

Away from ignorance, negligence, malevolence.

Away from disrespect, injustice, intolerance

Away from lies, deceit, defeat.

Away, away, away.

Problem is…

“Away from” is a rally cry, but it’s not an organizing principle.

It’s about tearing down, not building up.

Away from is an incendiary device. But what will you build once the the bastards have fallen and and the wall has tumbled? Once you’re free of your cage? And how? With whom? Toward what end?

What rules, ethics and constructs will guide you? What new reality will you create? What principles and structures will guide the reconstruction? What better resolutions, outcomes, experiences will you leave in your wake of righteous destruction?

“Away from” can start a revolution, but only “toward” can finish it. Click to tweet

So, my question is not “what do you want to tear down?”

But rather, “what will you build in it’s place?”

What are you moving toward?

+++Some fun stuff+++

Good Life Project - Check out last week’s episode, featuring acclaimed DJ & rapper, Jasmine Solano, on her journey to the center of the live-music world. Then, learn how to make your message contagious with Jonah Berger’s 6 steps to global word-of-mouth.

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Today’s contributing writer is Richie Norton. Richie is the CEO of Global Consulting Circle, a boutique international business development consultancy, and the author of The Power of Starting Something Stupid: How to Crush Fear, Make Dreams Happen, and Live Without Regret. 

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A decision had to be made. The impossible decision.

A nurse quietly entered the room and injected a dose of epinephrine into his I.V. I wouldn’t have noticed her, except that when she left, she slid the glass door closed behind her and drew the outer curtain for our privacy.

We were alone. After days and days of incessant attention by multiple doctors and hospital staff, the room was completely quiet. Quiet, that is, aside from the gentle rise and fall of the ventilator and the soft beep, beep, beep of the heart monitor.

Adrenaline coursed madly through my veins. The room spun around me as I sat, disoriented to the point of nausea, on a stool beside his bed. I gripped the bed rail to keep from tipping over. But I wasn’t watching him. My eyes were glued to her as she fell into the chair in the corner of the room and wept, chest heaving, face pressed hard into her hands.

“This is a decision we shouldn’t have to make,” she said almost imperceptibly, as she ran her hands frantically through her hair, pulling it tight away from her face.

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Something interesting went down yesterday…

A major revelation by a public figure, Alex Jamieson, followed by a heated, sometimes respectful, other times vicious conversation. And it all went down through a combination of this week’s Good Life Project episode and my guest’s blog.

Alex burst onto the public consciousness in 2004 as the co-creator and co-star in the Oscar-nominated documentary Super Size Me. The movie tracked what happened to her then boyfriend, Morgan Spurlock, after eating only McDonald’s for 30 straight days and super-sizing his order every time he was asked to.

At the time, Alex was a vegan chef and educator, which made watching Morgan’s spiral into health hell all the more difficult for her to watch. Once the experiment wrapped, she nursed him back to health with a vegan diet. She, in fact, had turned to veganism a number of years earlier as a way to heal her own medical problems.

With her new-found notoriety, Alex became a strong voice in the movement to live and eat more consciously and, because it had worked for her, that included being vegan. She’s also always been incredibly open to other points of view and compassionate and accepting of those who choose different approaches to life and nutrition. This willingness to take people as they are allowed Alex to resonate with and help a lot of people. To meet then where they were.

But, for the last few years, she’d also been harboring a secret…

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Eighteen months ago, I didn’t know from online video.

I’d done a few Flip videos and posted them online. But I was, first and foremost a writer. Video was more or less something people did to waste time or share their goofiness.

Then, something happened that shattered my understanding of the power of video.

In the final hours before my last book launched, we created a video book trailer. Just me, sitting in front of a camera. Totally unscripted, telling a story. Professionally filmed and edited, but simple as can be.

The video went live and the response was like nothing generated by anything I’d written. It took me by surprise in a huge way. I never had the need to be in front of the camera. Still don’t. I’d actually much rather hide behind the screen. But I couldn’t ignore the response to the medium. Here’s the video…

Since then, I’ve made a series of big moves into online video. The venture that’s become my driving focus over the last year, Good Life Project, features a broadcast-quality weekly interview show. The educational side of that venture was launched not with a text landing page, but a 22-minute video that sold out our flagship training program in days, two years running.

One of the things I decided, right away, was that if I was going to do video, I wanted to raise the bar. No home vids or iPhones. We film on-location with a crew, three cameras rolling and everything is professionally edited.

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