Killin' it! with Paul Crik

By now, Americans are fully aware of the current vampire craze.  Popular TV shows like True Blood and movies like Twilight prove that we have an almost unending appetite for the sexy, scary creatures.  But how do you stand out in a line-up full of garlic avoiding, night-dwelling blood suckers?  The CW network discovered just the right attention grabber for the  launch of a new show, “The Vampire Diaries.”  The network has teamed up with the Red Cross to promote the show with blood drives to take place at hundreds of highschools and colleges across the country.  The tagline for the events is “Starve a Vampire. Donate Blood.”  In addition to the blood drive, the campaign is producing and selling vampire based products: Fang Floss and 1000 VPF (Vampire Protection Factor) “sunscream,” because “sun is the #1 killer of the undead.”

The floss and sunscreen are kinda normal marketing gimmicks, but it’s the blood drive that gets me.  That’s a killin’ it idea….take the vampire craze and use it to bolster the real-life-put-it-to-good-use blood supplies at hospitals and other medical facilities around the country.  I’m inspired by that kind of cleverness, and also by the unexpected coupling of the Red Cross with the entertainment media, to the benefit of both groups.

Instead of just draining life from others like vampires, the end result here is win win. Symbiosis.  Good entertainment and good for the blood flow, and that’s killin’ it. 

Ted Kennedy was a man who had two brothers assasinated, was in a plane crash that killed a pilot, and was also of course at the center of the Chappaquiddick story.  He had every reason in the world to become jaded and cynical about the world of power and men.  And yet he held onto his beliefs (whether one agrees with them or not) and fought for them throughout his life.   He wore the scarlet letter of Chappaquiddick that kept him out of the presidency, but rather than begrudge the limitations that episode put on his aspirations, he instead let it guide him to use hs senate seat as few others have ever done.

The legacy of Teddy is not a democrat or a Kennedy, it is of a man who repeatedly had his heart crushed by personal tragedy and still believed in fighting for the good of the American people right up to and even after his death!

That’s right.  Even in the last couple weeks before his passing Ted Kennedy was working to have rules changed so that his vacant senate seat could be filled as quickly as possible after his death.   Under current rules, the governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, must wait at least 145 days to appoint Ted Kennedy’s successor in the senate. This final effort speaks to Kennedy’s unique combination of idealism and pragmatism.  His last endeavor also stands in contrast to the most common types of last wishes – usually in the form of a will – where chips are cashed in and scores are settled.  Despite all the adversity he suffered being a central member of the tragic Kennedy clan, and through all the evidence of human power and frailty he’s seen in 46 senate years, in his final days Ted Kennedy was thinking about the work that needed to get done the morning after he’s gone.

Killin’ it in your life is not so much about monumental achievements, eloquent statements and grand finales as it is about understanding that the most important tasks we undertake will be the ones that outlive us.

Let face it, life online and in video games often delivers bigger payoffs for less effort than the real world. Assassins’ Creed, Halo, World of Warcraft, SIMS – there’s no end to the lives we can lead online. Changing your life in the real world, however, starts with a shot in the dark that may or may not lead anywhere. Also, maybe one or two facebook friends might be interested in the fact that you just polished off a carton of ice cream while watching American Idol, but breaking the ice with strangers face to face requires you work a bit harder. Because the goals and strategies for winning are not always as clear-cut in real life as they are online, we remain in online realms for longer than we should. In fact, this is such a growing problem that online detox facilities are opening up all around the country.

So, is getting help to pull the plug on your virtual life killin’ it? The answer is a yes. Killin’ it is all about being able to balance online and offline life. Virtual life is not satisfying unless it’s accompanied by a full offline life. Likewise, a rich offline life should be used to nourish and facilitate decision-making in virtual realms – a portent of the future. This may be why guests at the reSTART Internet Addiction Recovery Center in rural Washington are just five miles down the road from the headquarters of Microsoft. Additionally, once patients have completed the 45-day program, they can become a fan of the reSTART Internet Addiction Program on facebook. The real test to know if the reSTART program is killin’ it will be if they can grow their number of facebook fans well past the current 13 lonely souls that they have now!

Nadya Suleman, better known as “octomom,” was recently quoted saying that her decision to give birth to and raise 14 children has “screwed up” her life.  Though the unemployed, single mother of six was really not killin’it it when she defiantly celebrated the simultaneous birth of 8 more children, she might actually be killin’ it now.  If we’re honest, what Nadja was seeking isn’t much different then what most of us want: a lot of people to love, a lot of people to love us, and a little social notoriety along the way.  Octomom chased these desires; now she’s feeling the pain and admitting that she thinks she messed up her entire life.  I’ve met so many people who feel the same way about getting married or going far down a career path that doesn’t pan out?  In these situations, most are too embarrassed to admit such colossal mistakes. Nobody will to force us to own up to it, and I suspect deep down that people would rather not hear about it anyway.

Imagine:

“Good morning, how’re you today?”

“I feel like I screwed up my whole life.”

Likely it would go more like this:

“Good morning, how was your weekend?”

“Weird, I got married to someone I met on facebook last week.”

“Whatever floats your boat!”

The more we allow ourselves to judge someone else as a joke because of their ambitions and failures, the easier it becomes to ignore our own shortcomings in life.  Octomom is showing us something about killin’ it by having the courage to admit she failed because of her own choices.  

Brett Favre, the one time great American Green Bay Packers hero, is at it again. Into retirement. Out of retirement. Back into it, and out again.  Reports have now been confirmed that Favre has reversed his reversal about joining the Minnesota Vikings, and instead will undergo another surgery to reconstruct both of his weathered shoulders with a new medical composite made of walrus muscles…after which he plans to compete on the mens’ professional tennis circuit instead of in the NFL.  Alright alright, you got me, I’m kidding!  But it’s hard not to poke a little fun at Favre’s inability to stick with a decision, right?  His waffling on retirement has become a kind of yearly ritual, just another boy who cried wolf story.  Why should we ever believe Favre is retiring at this point, after he’s faked on us so many times?  We shouldn’t.  He’ll still be in the NFL when he’s 65, I’m pretty sure.

But even though we may think him foolish at this point, he still deserves a small killin’ it nod too.  Favre’s yearly rise and fall offers us the same high-impact narrative each time.  The hero, bruised and battered, resigns, but then rises again, restless, denies his defeat, and returns to battle once more, addicted to the thought of squeezing just a little bit more victory out of life.  People, myself included, can’t ever get enough of that story.  And we also can’t help but be at least mildly inspired by Favre’s relentlessness.  It’s almost like good ole Brett knows we need his broken-fix it tale each year; perhaps he retires and re-emerges just to show us that quitting is always reversible.  You can quit and then decide not to quit.  And in fact, you can do it again and again.

Killing it, believe it or not, is not simply knowing when to quit, but also realizing that you have to quit quitting.  Favre may have overextended the number of times we fans can take his quitting seriously, but America never gets tired of his rebounder’s killin’ it spirit.

Paul,

I don’t know whether its new york or just daily living or age. and with it a real sense of not feeling I’ve put “it” together as well as I thought I would have and what do I do about it, but I find that without really even realizing I’m not seeing much fun or joy or pizzazz in things. So I forget to look for it. I put on ‘ho-hum’ eyes. I’ll be honest, that in itself is the scariest thing I’ve ever felt in life. The thought that I might either entirely lose, or see greatly diminished,  my joi de vivre. That I’ll become cynical and bored and bitter and safe and secure in my criticalness. My rightness. 

But I gotta say there’s something about Killin’ It that wakes it up for me. I’ve started to play this game with my friends where we come up with a topic or a name (drive-thru restaurants, or Derek Jeter, or bottled water) and then we each have to say whether it’s Killin’ It or not.  The more I play the more my own sense of what I think is awesome comes into focus. And same for my friends, even though we might have totally different takes on the topic.

Just wanted to let you know about that and say thank you.

KI
Darren

Darren,

You’re welcome!  Playing the Killin’ It game always puts me on a high too.

I’ve even found I can play it by myself. If I get all caught up in the drudgery of life, when everything feels like one long list of to-do’s, I make myself go through the exercise of Killin’ It (how is this Killin It, what would be the Killin It way to get this done, etc) and I’ll be  damned if my energy and momentum don’t change. No matter how many times I experience that, there’s always part of me that’s surprised at how simple and strong it can be.

And fun.  One of the biggest challenges in promoting Killin It has been maintaining a commitment  to the silly and absurd. I’ve found that if I get consumed with perfection and rightness it suffocates my joi de vivre, and then my work and life suffer together. So another game I play with myself that you might get a kick out of is ‘the purposeful mistake’.

When you’re feeling stressed and losing you’re mojo, don’t try to calm down or let it go (that becomes one more layer of stress), instead force yourself to do something wrong. If you’re late and stuck in traffic, pull off for a coffee and be even more late.  If you’re golf round is sucking, aim 90 degrees right and smash it into the woods and count it.  As you play ‘the purposeful mistake’ you’ll find yourself searching for the exact wrong thing with creativity and pleasure. You’ll find your fun again. Also, the more specific you try to get in what to do ‘wrong’, the more clear it becomes what it is that you wish were more right.  So you stop wasting anxiety on a general feeling and become aware of exactly what you’re trying for.

KI
Paul

Over the last couple weeks, town hall meetings have been held across the country to give information about the health care reform congress is trying to pass.  The meetings have been big news because they generate high levels of emotion.  While I know that people get more sensitive in a chaotic economy, I wonder how all this drama sprouts up so suddenly, like a dormant beast just waiting to rear its head.  It seems to me that the drawn out process of getting the health care bill approved has maybe given people too much time to mull the issues.  We read endless–and often paranoid–speculation on what will happen if we socialize healthcare.  The government will start euthanizing the elderly, abortions rates will skyrocket, health care will be rationed, people will become doctors after a one month training course, and so on and so on.

Like so many “big” stories, most of what we gather about the health care proposal from the internet.  The repetition of information is rampant: a headline is reported, tweeted, commented on, recycled through status updates, blogged about, re-tweeted, parodied, dugg, and pundited.  Though all of it centers around a single event, our brain (at least in part) registers all the repetition as separate events.  So even though just one stressful thing has happened, it feels like several. The overload which occurs creates emotional responses that are out of sync with the size of the actual event or story.

Human brains, as of now, are still not equipped to process thousands of images and words a day that have little immediate bearing on our physical situation.  Maybe we can facilitate our own evolution by training our minds to digest the web vibrations at a lower frequency.

Killin’ It is remembering that anything repeated hundreds of times on the web can stir these amplified emotional levels; it’s  a little like the equivalent of your neighbor suddenly becoming a Brad Pitt level celebrity because he/she is the subject of a single viral story.  Good for your neighbor, but bad for public understanding.  You have to remember to peel back a few layers of public frenzy anytime it erupts.

Balance the presence of the web in your life with a balanced life of web presence.  That makes no sense, right?  But read it 100 times and it will start to seem like poetry. Killlin’ It!

For the last couple of weeks, earth dwellers have been privy to a  stream of dusty debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle.   The shower happens annually, but this year it’s especially stunning.  Tonight the densest part of the dust and ice from the comet will come into contact with the earth’s atmosphere, creating a natural show of astral delights. Wherever you are, be sure to step outside tonight, breath some fresh air air, and take your own front row seat for this astral event.  Killin It!

Running.  It’s the simplest exercise there is, requiring nothing but a pair of shoes and your will.  Yet, when you go to the shoe store the choices are endless.  Air channels in the heels, elastic laces, sole pumps, honeycomb vents.  All that before you even consider a brand.  But recently a new shoe breakthrough has been grabbing the attention–and adorning the feet–of serious runners world wide.  Vibram’s new barefoot shoes, a glove-like footwear with separated chambers for each toe, offers the novel experience of running with nearly naked feet.  The trend comes on the heels of shoes getting unnecessarily complicated, lifting runners up with thick soles and creating a sloppy distance between the foot and the ground.  Like the hybrid’s blossoming after an era of overbuilt inefficient SUV’s that have now been all but discontinued, barefoot shoes embrace the idea of a progressive scale-back.  Streamlined and efficient, though unusual looking, these breakthrough shoes actually allow for faster run times as they eliminate the bouncy interference of 3 inch soles.  In short,  they hold the promise of keeping us connected to paths we tread. And you guessed it….that’s killin’ it.  I’ve already ordered my first pair.

in the recent past you may have noticed I referred to myself as a “motivational expert.”  While I consider this to be true, I’ve become disenchanted by the term.  It’s so 20th century.  After all the infomercials and make-your-life-better-guru-scams (we’ve all seen ‘em), who’s gonna trust another “motivational expert”?  I wouldn’t.  So I’ve put it in the garbage.  I want to set a new standard for “Killin’ It” by creating a new title.  EMOTIVATOR.  The word practically says it all, but in case you’d like an explanation directly from me, here goes.  

As an EMOTIVATOR, my goal is to do the following for everyone who wants to kill it:

1. Harness your emotions so that you can use them to apply new gestures and actions in your life, enabling you to achieve your true desires, or fail trying.  Watch any of my original videos and see for yourself if they don’t strike you in a place that draws a laugh or a tear, or steels you with the confidence you need to – for example – ask for that promotion.

2. Motivate you to take action, whether it be to improve your career, your love life, your spiritual health, your relationships.  Thinking is not enough.  If thought doesn’t lead to an active attempt at improvement, you will remain stuck.

3. Finally – and here is where the E in EMOTIVATOR rings loudly – I want to help you balance your online and offline life.  The most common problems people suffer from today have to do with an imbalance and resulting dissatisfaction that comes from not being able to do this.  Internet addiction is rampant.  Many people have even ceased eating in favor of staying online all the time.  Others eschew online life as an unreal or artificial place.  Neither of these extremes is killin’ it.  I’m here to help you make better sense-and use- of facebook and twitter; to help you use and moderate these valuable online social outlets to make for yourself the best possible life at the dawn of the 21st century.  Count on me to offer advice and valuable insight on the daily breakthroughs from these massive Internet forces.

On another note, I was so WOWED by this example of killin’ it that I just had to share it with you.  Watch as this wild New Zealander dives from a helicopter to catch a marlin with his own hands.  Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you haven’t.  That, my friends, is killin’ it!