Steven Barnes outlines his next-level goals across three domains: shifting his creative work toward television and film, helping his son Jason start a business, and physical training for a Manila trip. He uses 100-, 250-, and 1000-day timelines and prescribes hourly breathing and daily self-checks to connect daily habits to long-term outcomes.
Hi, Steve Barnes here and in conversation with Tananarive. She thinks that I should be doing more live broadcasts and then take these and download them and put them over on YouTube. It's all part of the general marketing and teaching program. But it's just sharing, sharing what's up in our lives in a way that I make more constant contact with the people who find the path that I'm on to be interesting. And hopefully that's some of you. So I've talked about noting that my life seems to be operating on the next level. That what that really means is it's not next level compared to anybody else. It's next level compared to what I was doing, which means that I take a look at my career and I've kind of completed everything I wanted to do as a novelist. Although there's still novels I would be fun to write. I'm looking a lot at television and film because the largest unfulfilled dreams that I have involve having my own television series and my own film. So that strikes me as, you know, I've got my kind of a toehold on that. And so I need to deepen my understanding of that. In terms of what? In terms of my family life, I need to help get Jason to the next level of his career. In other words, solidify his business and be able to help him see exactly what he needs to do every day in order to build that business. He can start creating the relationship or understanding the relationship, intuiting the relationship between time, energy, service, and money. And then in terms of my physicality, I made some solid breakthroughs in terms of understanding how I need to train to go to Manila next year. So, you know, that's becoming more and more certain. It's out of the maybe I'll do this category into the probably I'll do this category. Sounds good. I can see how this would work. I can see how I can afford the time, the money. I can see how I can prepare my body and my mind to be ready for it, have just a wonderful time, and it'll be an entire completion of one whole area of my life. So looking at those three things, and I ask myself, do they support each other? And they do, you know, that my urge in each of those areas supports the others. So that's a good thing. So I asked myself that question. I asked myself, will I be of service if I do this? As, in other words, does it pass the three gates? So in terms of the family things, I want to be of service to my wife and My son serving myself certainly, and serving my larger community. It seems to make sense there. In terms of Manila, I'm certainly serving a little kid inside me. I will in training and disciplining myself for it, I'll have more energy and I'll be able to give that to my family and I'll also be able to invest that energy in my career. I'll also have an experience that will probably inform my writing. That all works. And in terms of the writing, you know, certainly financially success there enables me to serve my family. Being able to create stories that that of people who are dealing with stresses and evolving enables me to serve my community and I get to provide a role model to my son, to these students who are following me in terms of writing and in terms of life things. So, you know, the money, the energy, the focus, these things all seem to support each other. There's a certain psychotensegrity about it. So given that if that is true, then what I need to do is to chart it out. In other words, some of these goals are like 100 day goals. There's a goal that's about a 250 day goal and there's another goal that is ongoing. So let's call it a thousand day goal. So if the path goes right to that thousand day goal, goes right through the hundred day goal, 250 day goal, then I've got one path that is providing me with everything in that sense. And if that is true, then I need to design myself a program where my daily behaviors will in a hundred days get me there to one position, 250 days get me to another position, and in a thousand days help my son have his business solid. If he's 19 now, if he could have his business anchored solidly by the time he's 22, that's fantastic. Most people are just getting out of college then. So if he's actually out of business, established, you know, he has a huge leg up on life. So I have prepared my son for his life. So if you do that, if you set things up so that you can see how your daily behaviors, if you could do those daily behaviors for a thousand days in a row or a hundred days in a row, you know, if I just do this, I'll get there. Then all you have to do is ask yourself every day, what is it I need to do today? At the end of the day, all you have to do is ask, did I do it? And if you didn't do it, then you need additional resources. You need to clarify things more make sure to breathe. That's the buy in for this, for everything that I'm teaching is that every hour, every three hours at the maximum, at the minimum, you are stopping and breathing deep, slow, diaphragmatic breaths for 60 seconds. You know, call it every, every hour, top of the hour, deep, slow diaphragmatic breathing gives you a chance to disconnect from the hubbub, to center yourself, to give thanks, to just be grateful. I mean, if somebody took that next breath of air from you, you would give everything you owned to get it. So celebrate the fact that you've got it for free. Anyway, I just. This is just a very, very brief thing. I'm gonna see whether I can do this more often and whether or not that fits and whether or not it serves you. If it does, let me know. You know, put likes forward this. If you'd like to be on my mailing list, stevenbarnslist.com if you'd like to come to the fire dance meetings on Saturday, that list is what it's about. So you take care of and I'll see you next time. Bye bye.
