Hugh’s Blog

Order is Freedom

“For the first twenty-five years of my life, I wanted freedom. For the next twenty-five years, I wanted order. For the next twenty-five years, I realized that order is freedom.” Winston Churchill

It’s counter-intuitive and yet absolutely true: you have more ability to enjoy the freedoms of life when you organize the details first.

Of course we can be seduced into the Hollywood or Madison Avenue image of free-living, laissez-faire life styles of the rich and famous. It seems ideal to be worry-free and happily consumed by frivolous decisions like what restaurant has the best haute cuisine. But my experience has been that behind every person that avoids the necessary diligence of creating goals and getting organized there are either lackeys running behind picking up the pieces or their life is actually a deck of cards waiting to fall.

Refining the balance between care free and organized is one of the great secrets of both success and enlightenment.

What I mean by ‘organized’ is that the details of life are planned, recorded, prioritized and managed in such a way that you know that you are moving towards your goals and (here’s the kicker) you don’t have to worry about them.

For example, do you have exciting goals for this year for your health, wealth, family, professional development, and spiritual growth that you are committed to and are revisiting at least once a week? When you are at work are you organized enough so that you can focus on one thing at a time? When you are driving your car are you actually ‘there’, or are you far away in worry-land fretting about something that may not happen?

Being organized is not synonymous with being fastidious about details or anally-crazy about cleanliness. In fact I know people that are pretty loose about details and how their surroundings look, yet they are incredibly focused, clear-minded and intensely present in conversations.

List-guru David Allen and author of the Get Things Done books makes the connection between control and energy with ‘organized’ in his new book “Making it all work”. “Inefficient systems drain energy – that’s a principle of pure electrical mechanics. A short in the wire, or circuitry that is not hooked up right, will prevent the maximum flow of power.” says Allen.

I like to think of organization as how I clear my mental ‘RAM’ so that more important thoughts can be entertained. In the 1960’s George Miller at Harvard coined the expression the ‘Magic 7, plus or minus 2’ referring to our mental capacity for thoughts. When I am worrying about preparing for an upcoming speech, getting more sales, finding a solution to a web site issue, lowering my mortgage costs and finding time to work on my book there isn’t much capacity left for a simple thing like a conversation. Not only is this mental chatter distracting, it’s exhausting.

Do yourself a favour: every week take one aspect of your work or life and get it in order. Create a goal, define and prioritize the steps and milestones, commit it to a planning system and get started. Order is freedom and it just takes you to make it happen.

Enjoy!

Hugh’s adventure exploits have taken him from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from mountain peaks to the rapids of some of the wildest rivers. While his business adventures have included a private airline, real estate, tourism and consulting to leading organizations like: Imperial Oil, Shoppers Drug Mart, Royal Bank of Canada, Sun Rype Products, Telus, and the Red Cross, as well as four universities and four colleges. Hugh is a passionate advocate of the enduring power of vision, personal choice and constant improvement. Find Hugh at www.HughCulver.com contact him at hugh@HughCulver.com