Chapter 1.1: Find Success without the Recipe

By developing two uncommon skills, mindfulness and agility, you can achieve true success in most fields of life and work. You must define success on your own terms, rather than rely on others' metrics or recipes. Imitating others who have been successful works fine to get your feet wet, but it won't make you successful, because the world has new competitors, and you are a different person.

Mindfulness practices develop skills in seeing the world more clearly, along with its opportunities and dangers. With mindfulness, we can discover hidden causes more readily, and we can fix problems and exploit opportunities more easily. In a word, mindfulness gives us insight.

Agile practices develop skills in low-cost, low-risk experimentation. Insight is great, but to blaze new paths you have to take risks. There are lots of dangers in that unexplored jungle, so we need to learn how to explore safely. In a word, agile gives us innovation.

We discuss the challenges of developing mindfulness and agile skills, including the distractions of modern life and the need for ongoing study and practice. We show how mindfulness and agile practices can be applied in different fields and situations, from healthcare to career development to family life.

Mindful agility is a practical philosophy—i.e., it is composed of practices and principles. These principles of success encourage you to first think critically about your own goals, then imitate others to get the basics of a field, then use mindfulness to build competence and insight, then use agility to innovate.

This episode is chapter 1.1 of the Mindful Agility book under development. 

Credits

• Amelia Hambrecht, Rob Coles, Eve Rubell, Jeff Stuit, and Divya Maez were our beta reviewers, for whom we are super grateful. Early beta review is an agile staple: we make changes to our episode based on feedback. If you ever want to give it a try, reach out to us. If you are reading this, you are in our target audience. 
• Nichols, M. (1967). The Graduate. Embassy Pictures. Amazing movie. Seven Academy Awards.
• Stinger sound Swing beat 120 xylophone side-chained by Casonika licensed under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) to Mindful Agility
• Image of magician backed by Imitation by DALL-E

Staff

• Daniel Greening, host, agile consultant, software executive
• Mirela Petalli, co-host, meditation guide, and neurocritical nursing instructor
• Dan Dickson, business coach, executive and management consultant

Links

• Mindful Agility Substack ("The Mindful Sprint" weekly brief)
• Mindful Agility web site
• Mindful Agility Community Facebook group
• Mindful Agility Youtube channel