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Jay over at InnerNoodle has a great perspective and discussion on the search for Life Purpose and how it’s not as difficult as it’s often made.  He elaborates on his journey in this and I figured I’d prefer to write a bit more then a short comment on the subject and here’s the result.

Searching for Purpose

I definitely agree with many of Jay’s points.  I feel too many people spend (should I dare say waste) time searching for what they wish to find as a life purpose and they ignore for years some obvious known life purpose at that time. Some people spend years of their lives searching for a life purpose.

I think they find many things that could be purposeful along this path, but they either refuse to accept it or simply want to find something that attracts them more.  Often people are so connected with their material world, the same notions bleed into their soul searching so the status and glamor of their purpose is highly important to them.  This ultimately leaves them searching, taking little action and ultimately feeling lost and inadequate from not being connected to something with meaning in their lives.

Living Your Purpose

The point that people are always searching for something that has some, “cool factor” is a massive roadblock to people taking action and simply living what they know best at that time. If you were asked, “What is your purpose?” and you have no response, I can assure you that is because you are thinking you have no response because you’ve trained yourself to wait for a purpose that you want.  Well, what if you purpose is something that you don’t know yet, or really don’t want?  Is that still a purpose?  Do you decide your own purpose or is it something you find by searching?  Is it something that is revealed through experience, through others, through God?  How do you live your purpose if you don’t fully know what it is.

My suggestion is this.  Instead of thinking that you don’t know your purpose, break the habit and develop a new belief that you will only find your true purpose by taking action on what you feel could be your purpose at this point in your life. Act on what you feel, don’t analyze it too much or criticize it, just explore.  Stop and let yourself examine those feelings and desires.

1. What are your strongest desires or feelings in your life right now?
2. What action can you take right now to explore that further?
3. With what you know right now, is it possible that this feeling ties to a purpose in your life?
4. Would it hurt anyone to follow your gut with this and see where it leads?
5. If this is your purpose, could you live it more fully right now?

This type of questioning can help you to explore new areas in safety by using just the imagination at first.  Visualizing yourself take on new actions and living in a way driven more by purpose can enable you to avoid the seeking and start living for what you know at this point in time.  It helps you open your mind to new possibilities of purpose and to discover new and more defined purpose than what you currently know. Getting out of that trap of trying to find a perfect, well defined purpose by living with what you know right now, will give you far more opportunities to know your life purpose, but to actually live it!

Purpose Does Change

I also believe you don’t have ONE set life purpose, your life purpose changes as does your life.  No life is static, nor is any purpose.  If you actually do something for what you feel in your gut at any point in your life instead of just thinking, dreaming, and hoping to discover something greater, then your life purpose will change as you do.  It is something that grows with you and it is something you discover along your journey of life.

Purpose is connected deeply with your spiritual centers and most people seek out purpose to a point where they can find a morally accepted purpose.  To me, this is driven entirely by your connection to God and your faith in that allows you to experience the joy of purpose, with hope for returns outside the worldly temporary things so many cherish in life.  This is exactly why I think so many people struggle to find a purpose, they don’t have the faith or spiritual beliefs that let them connect to a moral purpose, separately from the material temptations.

So, I encourage you to let your heart and mind wander.  If you follow your heart, believe in your ability to find happiness in purpose and accept the journey of discovery, it will lead directly to the purpose you have been seeking.  Just make sure you get your mind out of your own way!

Posted by Mike King under Life | 12 Comments »

This is a continuation from this short 3 part series on inspiration.  My original guest post called, “8 Steps to Inspire Others ” and my last article, “8 Methods to Find Inspiration ”. I hope this helps you find ways to spin your inspirations into action.

Research and Learn the Subject

Obviously I’m a big proponent to learning and so learning more about any subject or person that inspires you is a great starting point for activating your mind on the subject.  Once you activate your mind by learning more about the subject and by thinking more about it, it will more easily lead into action in your life.  If you can excite your mind and generate more and more interest in doing something, then the actions come much easier later on.

There is a definite balance here to maintain between too little time before action and too much.  That point will not be equal for everyone and I think it needs experimentation to realize.  If you spend all your time learning about a subject and don’t take any action, then the learning can be more of the inspiration than the action and when it does come time to take actions, then the learning component is greatly reduced.  On the other hand, if you take action without knowing anything about the subject, it’s possible to cause more harm than good by either frustrating yourself or in some cases causing emotional, physical or relational pain because of the actions you took without understanding them well.  Balance this by knowing at least enough about what new things you are getting into and find the right people to help or guide you and you can make the learning experience align with the actions you take keeping the inspiration that drives it satisfied and in balance.

Connect with Others

A great way to act on inspiration is to look to share and connect with others that have similar interests and activities.  As I outlined in the finding inspiration article, this strengthens the inspiration and gives you people to talk with and share more experiences about the events that drive this.

These connections can easily develop into closer relationships and friendships and these will give you friends and colleagues to act out your inspiration with.  You can use each other and work together to achieve the results you want in this related area.

Ask For and Accept Help

Connecting with others is great when perfectly aligned as your energy and synergy can be very motivating, but that is not enough with inspiration.  Inspiration is about change and new things, so there are always areas you will face that will be a challenge to act on.  This is where these connections come in as you now have people to ask for help when you need it.  They can guide you in areas they are stronger at and they can encourage you to drive through challenge far more than you could tackle on your own.  Don’t be afraid to ask for help already , and then be willing to accept it.  Accepting it is the part that means action and there is no exception with that here.

Do the same for others by helping where you can you will continue to promote your inspiration not only in yourself, but also in those learning from you.

Take Action Soon

Don’t wait too long to take action towards something that inspires you.  I already mentioned the item of learning and researching a subject, but there’s more than that.  Often people are afraid to do something because it is so grand or noble or simply outside their comfort zone.  It can be the simple things that as an action, shift from from a wisher on inspiration to an actor on inspiration.

Look at the things that inspire you from the first section on finding your inspiration and pick some action to do more of that or to begin implementing one of these items in this article to make it real.  A small step today that gets you closer just lets you take a bigger one tomorrow and it will send you down the path towards the results you hope to achieve from whatever inspired you in the first place.  If it is a person that inspires you, then contact them.  You’d be surprised how easy this can be, even if they are busy people, famous or in some other way, hard to reach.  People who inspire others, do so because of connections and they know this, so will generally be happy to talk to you, to help or to at least give you some direction to get you started.

The sooner you start doing something real with your inspirations the sooner you will gain the results hoped for.  This enables you to then move on to new inspirations or to grow the original one with more intensity, more importance and dedication in your life.

Visualize Results

Action is definitely more important to take than this step, but this one can give you nearly all the same benefits when the action is simply not possible yet or because of where you are.  The imagination of the mind is a wondrous thing, it simply doesn’t know the difference between what is imagined and what is real.  This gives you a fantastic ability to experience achieving what you want from these inspirations even when you are not doing an real actions on them.  There have been countless studies and brain research conducted about how the mind’s imagination can be used to become stronger, more creative, confident and even better at actions when they are finally performed for real either the first time or after many repetitions.

If you add visualizing your results into your steps for acting on inspiration, you will see the benefits without the practice.  Beyond this, it also helps you to realize what your true desired outcomes are as you can imagine it before it happens.  This visualized results can be a strong motivator to take even more action!

Be Persistent

I’ve touched on persistence before in my productivity series, and it is just as valuable here.  Persistence is about being headed in the right direction , making progress in that direction and consistently steering your actions toward your goals.  Since taking action on inspiration will always be in some way challenging, it’s important to accept setbacks and failures along the way.  If you learn from those, get back up and be persistent by trying again, you will make great progress and eventually be where you want to be.  You can’t let a setback stop you!

Set Goals

All of this is based on getting somewhere new with inspiration and so you can’t do that without some goals in mind.  It may be some new ability to learn, material possessions, or a special talent or ability, no matter what it is, you won’t easily get their without setting some goals for guidance.  Goals are a brilliant tool if used well and typically abysmal failures if not understood well or planned properly.

Your goals must connect to something with meaning in your life.  Luckily this topic of inspiration largely addresses this as inspirational expectations are usually seated in something already important to a person.

Goals must also be measureable.  This inherently makes them something you need to consider and be realistic with as you will have to have a way to measure it.  Something to count, to see or specifically identify and recognize.  Go ahead and set audacious goals but if you do, ensure you can easily recognize progress and keep driving forward.  If you struggle with goals, be a little less aggressive and set easier goals to train yourself and gain some ground with accomplishment while acting on your inspirations.

Also, ensure your goals are time based with specific dates so that you can focus on them and know when they need to be checked, changed and rewritten.  Don’t leave your goals to be static.  Taking on a challenge with something that inspires you will be new, and so will the goals so you can’t expect to set them early and never need to adjust them along the way.  Go ahead and drive towards them, work hard to reach them but don’t worry if they need to be adjusted along the way.

Be Enthusiastic

I just love this one!  It is so powerful and yet so under used by people who want to act on something that inspires them.  Even more of a crime is when people are inspired by another person, and that person is extremely enthusiastic yet that doesn’t seem obvious to the person looking to then act on that enthusiasm.  Well, I can tell you, if you put more enthusiasm into your actions, you will make much faster progress.  Enthusiasm will build confidence as well and it automatically attracts others and inspires them to find out more. Wouldn’t that be impressive to act on an inspiration and take it full circle, by inspiring someone else with the same thing!  I think so!

Not only will enthusiasm drive even more inspiration but it will help to engrain deeper beliefs in your mind.  Energy and excitement in the mind build stronger neural connections with new activities and things you learn so that enthusiasm can slowly turn into a deeper passion or conviction.  This will ensure you lock in place the beliefs needed to act on that inspiration at any time.  The passion will become stronger and in turn, that will continue to then be something you express, where once again you’ve come full circle as you begin to inspire others with it.

Posted by Mike King under Success | 14 Comments »

Tim @ Mini Life Hacks suggested I write a following up article from my guest post about 8 Steps to Inspire Others . Thanks for that suggestion Tim, I’ll first cover the methods to find inspiration in this article and my next one will cover how to take action on that inspiration.

Search Out New Experiences

Inspiration comes about because of change or seeing the possibility of change.  If you always do the same things, this will be either minimal or non-existent.  You must search out and have new experiences in order to find inspiration.  This works by seeing new places or people that can inspire you.  There are many ways to find and the inspiring moments and things will different for everyone.  They might include some of these which I often find inspirational:

• Nature and God’s creations
• Creative art and writing
• Stylish music and sound
• Innovation and brain science
• Life impact stories (Arswino always has great examples of that at his blog )
• Underdog stories.  Check out Lance’s example here at Jungle of Life: So Much More Than A Football Game
• Overcoming crisis and trauma

These are just a few and everyone will have their own personal favorites that interest and inspire them.  If you don’t go searching for this material to inspire you however, don’t expect it to simply come knocking on your door.  You must search for it!

Keep An Open Mind

Once you do find new experiences, the unknown often drives fear or a defensive attitude towards it.  The change that inspiration is generated from will only be held back by those initial worries or reactions so you must keep an open mind in these situations to see them from new perspectives.  You want to let it shape you thoughts, change your initial response and give yourself some time to ponder the new things before denying any possible acceptance or further exploration of the subject.  You never know what you could be missing if you close your mind to new ideas.

Watch Your Emotions

Emotions are often tied to that initial response but they also relate so closely to your past experiences they are often limiting or blinding what we dare to see or believe. A story that might be inspiring to one person can easily make another upset or angry based on how they relate their own experiences to that.  Pay attention to your emotions, watch them carefully and try to control them.  They can hide many subtle things that lead to inspiration at the wrong time or place.  Keeping them under control and always trying to change the perspective you experience things in can help with getting past a negative emotional response.

Your emotions could just as easily be signals to find inspiration as often you feel deeply connected to something or you care a great deal about specific topics so you naturally gravitate and have interest their.  Use this when it ties in well with the types of inspiration you want in your life.

Share the Experience

Finding inspiration comes a whole lot easier when you are actually talking about it doing that and talking with other people.  This is where inspiration feeds inspiration in many cases as simply sharing one inspiring story with a friend or colleague can spark them to think of their own inspiring messages and it often waterfalls into a deeper relationship as you discuss important things between you.  Each of those items shared also reveals something that has meaning to a person and knowing that thing is meaningful to them will automatically add importance to it in your life, especially if you already valued it.

Sharing stories of meaning and value are also a great way to discover new things and inspiration as well.  The first step about searching for inspiration is made a whole lot simpler when other people bring those stories to you directly in conversation.  Of course you will never feel the same hear about a story then experiencing it directly but often it inspires you enough to go make a similar experience yourself and get over your fears of leaving your comfort zone.  Offering that same to others by sharing your experiences builds a stronger relationship where you can continue to share the inspiration and drive each other to find more of it.

Seek Out Solitude

While sharing your experience with others has it’s set of advantages and methods to find more inspiration, so does solitude at the opposite end of the spectrum.  Solitude offers a way to focus your mind and body, which can allow you to tune in to your surroundings, your thoughts and your life.  It lets you notice some of the things that inspire subtly and that you would have missed if stuck in a hectic noisy environment.

Solitude is also a place where we can find time for reflection and deep thinking.  It helps a person link their actions and experiences to their thoughts, their hopes and their faith.  Spending time in solitude can relax the mind and sharpen your senses which makes the impact of inspiration often more intense and lasting.  Solitude will be different for different people, some may enjoy that time to think and study, others may meditate to relax the mind and body, and some may spend the time connecting spiritually through prayer and their internal connection to God.  All these things help calm the emotions, alert the senses and help to make points of inspiration more obvious in your life, an important way to find more of the inspiration you are looking for.

Keep in Mind Your Role Models

Role models come about because they either inspire a person or make them jealous.  Ask yourself what does your role model do that you like about them.  Don’t look for what they have or can offer you, but only in what they do.  Is it how they handle a situation, the steps they take to overcome hardship, their ability to lead and accomplish great things or perhaps it’s the methods they use to build and encourage strong relationship. Whatever it is, you can draw on that not only for seeing the inspiration but also to seek out more.

Do your role models align with the areas in your life you are passionate about? In other words, are they the source of inspiration that is most important to you?   It’s worth looking at how your role models steer you as often people have role models that steer them away from the important areas of their life and do so more because of social influence than heartfelt inspiration.  I’m not suggesting you carve out your role models only from what is important to you right now, as that would limit finding new inspiration, however, it is important to ensure your role models are truly impacting you with inspiration that matters to you and not just because of social influence.

Align Your Actions

While most of this step will be broken out in my next article about taking action on inspiration, I think some alignment of your actions with what inspires you will also help you find more inspiration.  Taking action towards something reinforces in our minds that action and it can quickly build the neural connections in your brain to learn that new action and associated inspiration that led to it.  This makes inspiration last and grow in value in your mind so putting attention to something that inspires you along with specific actions will only strengthen that.  This stronger connection will drive you to seek out even more, as the value you have towards that grows stronger and stronger.  If you continue to take action on new inspirations, they will develop easier, strengthen themselves and associations with other inspirations and lead to developing new beliefs and passions .

Follow Your Faith

Finding inspiration is not easy, especially in our hectic world with so many false social influences and media bombardment.  Connecting what is really important to you with what you encounter is something that you must learn to do to separate the noise from the inspiration in your life.  This comes as no small tasks and while the steps above might all help in that, it’s going to come down to you trusting yourself and your beliefs to actually recognize what is inspirational to you.  You must learn to trust your own judgment here, no matter the source.  That source of judgment is founded in the faith you have towards knowing what matters, knowing what is right and knowing you will recognize the differences as you encounter them.  This faith, whether you consider it spiritual or not, is one to be followed when seeking out inspiration.

Please add your comments about this article, your inspirations and your own methods of finding them.  I’d love to know what drives you and how you find it!

Posted by Mike King under Success | 28 Comments »

I’ve got a guest post up at Marc and Angel Hack Life .  It’s called, "8 Ways to Inspire Others "

I wrote this since so many people talk about inspiration and things that in fact inspire them, but I’ve not seen much in the way of guides that actually help you put actions in place to inspire others more.  This can happen at any level of business or in life and I hope this articles helps you inspire others with your own ideas.

Please add your comments with the article for others to see, I’ve closed them here.

Posted by Mike King under Success | 1 Comment »

Author : Zig Ziglar

A few years ago now when I was absorbed in a number of motivational books and audio cassettes, I listened to one by Zig Ziglar called, "You are a Natural Champion".  Remembering that I enjoyed listening to it triggered me to buy this book when I saw it in a local book store.  I’m happy to say it is a great book and I didn’t even realize that both Ziglar and the book deliver a Christian message that I thoroughly enjoyed and agree with.  Ziglar covers a huge list of topics in life, all focused on how to live those areas successfully and have a lasting impact on others with a purpose behind it all.  He challenges you to see the areas you can live a successful life and he does it with personal stories, humor and great inspirational messages and quotes.

He covers well one of my favorite topics, passion. He helps explore how to use that passion along with inspiration to live successfully and get to peak performance.

Ziglar offers a path to success that involves God and spirituality along the way and he covers how it has come over the years in his life to now be the central theme and purpose he has to offer in his teaching.  He allows his life and he references the life of many other great leaders and teachers who have God and Christianity as their foundation to be an example of living "Better Than Good".  He makes the point about how the education system has shifted entirely away from any spiritual teaching or even exploration and that has limited so many people from getting at least an introduction to a God based purpose driven life.  I definitely agree with him and think its a sad shift that unfortunately supports itself to occur more and more.  Luckily there are still leaders like Ziglar to counter this shift and still provide the teaching and life example needed for our young people today.

So, the book itself is definitely interesting and as intended, inspirational and motivating.  Ziglar challenges you to face every day events from a new perspective and look to find and use your passions to match your work, actions and beliefs together to get to peak performance.  I did find some of his examples of using the phrase, "Better Than Good" to be a bit repititive and they dragged on a little at the time of reading.  The funny thing is that now after reading the whole book, I’m glad that was all there because it set it into my mind and I’ve seen some of the same affects by using that simple phrase myself.  That phrase works great when you are responding to how you feel, how something went or even to give someone else feedback on their own work or help they’ve offered.  Let them know that you are "Better than Good" or that the work they did was "Better Than Good" and you’ll find that there is always an overwhelming response when compared to the more traditional "fine" or "good" that we find ourselves using so many times.

If you are at all interested in exploring peak performance I think you can learn a lot from Ziglar in his books. Those areas he teaches that none of use should ignore which are necessary for success are:

1. Passion
2. Peak performance
3. Purpose

Posted by Mike King under Book Reviews & God | 3 Comments »

I get a LOT of questions at my graphics company from people who are either interested in getting into the 3D industry for a career or at least personally as a hobby. There are a lot of important things to know and I wanted to shed my own opinions on this.

First the career angle.

Now, I’m not trying to discourage everyone here from getting into 3D. I personally love it, and get a lot of enjoyment in the artwork and graphics I deliver to many happy clients and of course my own personal work. However, there seems to be a lot of people simply thinking 3D would be such a great career and so enjoyable and all they have to do is create some cool 3D stuff. Wrong!

3D is a tough career. Its a cut throat business, has many many different skill and styles available and is extremely competitive and for the most part, does not pay all that impressively. Wow, seems a little more dreary now doesn’t it? Don’t worry, lots of upsides. Work is always a downer in some ways, and the 3D world is still work you realize? Right, moving on. I constantly get asked as well what schools and courses I recommend for people to take and specifically which schools I see the best candidates from. Well, quite frankly, I don’t see any schools or programs consistently delivering better artists than the others. I believe it is nearly entirely based on the talents and determination of each individual, not the school or courses they took. So, I honestly don’t recommend any particular school or courses. It depends more on what you want to do and what you already know. If you want to do character modeling, study anatomy. If you want to master lighting, study real world sets, photography and filming. If animation is your thing, then learn from cartoons and master the art of story telling with minimal details in your models. A great animator can bring a pencil to life. So, you need to find what you are most interested in. If you don’t know, then often some general courses for 3D animation and modeling might help spark the interest, but I’d recommend you find this out on your own as a hobbiest instead of wasting your money on something you don’t even know you like yet. Explore it on your own and if you like it then do some research on various programs available to determine if they are what you need to expand your knowledge. Everyone learns differently as well, some need to be taught, some learn on there own and some just can’t learn certain skills well at all. Depending on how you learn, you need to decide if school is right for that or self study and hard work. You definitely don’t NEED to have formal education to get into 3D, but it can certainly help. No matter what, the skills need to be there though, the education itself will NOT get you a job.

As for the big picture for the career, if you don’t absolutely LOVE the idea of working in the 3D industry, then don’t bother pursuing any further, just skip down to the 3D as a Hobby section below. You have to have a really strong desire and determination to get good and be successful, since there is so much competition. So, a career in 3D has many paths. There are animators, lighters, character animators, riggers, real time model experts, texture artists, special f/x 3D artist, motion capture animators, and all the related aspects like 3D compositors, technical directors, cinematographers, 3D matte painters, and the list goes on.

If you know specifically what kind of job you are after, you probably already know which of those is most interested to you. If not, then you need to find out or be in a world of knowing a little about a lot of things. Not many companies are looking for those type of 3D artists. There are some production companies and a number of great broadcast based jobs that need a well rounded 3D artist to handle everything from the modeling to the editing but this is certainly more rare.

As hinted, most companies look for artists with specific talents and skills for what they need. It is wise to specialize in just a select few of these and preferably the most closely related ones. This will allow you to focus your skills and master a specific area. You will then be able to show an exceptional portfolio, instead of a mediocre (or bad) one, like the vast majority of new grads and entry level artists.

Finding those First Few Jobs

Resumes get you interviews and interviews get you jobs in the normal business world. Well in 3D, your portfolio gets you interviews AND jobs. Of course, a bad interview can still take that job opportunity away but generally, the portfolio is your best friend and is all a hiring company really cares about when screening applicants. So, it cannot be good, it must be great!

See my upcoming article named, Developing a Great 3D Portfolio for guidelines on how to do this. Once you have your portfolio built, you can start looking for that perfect job. There are so many places to go about doing this, I’m simply going to list some options without any specifics since you need to target the areas looking for your skill set and type of portfolio.

1. Traditional Job search tools like classifieds, job boards specific company web sites, etc. Target your postings for specific jobs.
2. Online job boards and search sites with specifically for finding and filling jobs.
3. Online job sites specific to the industry you are looking for.
4. Online portfolio sites like linked in and other network building sites.
5. Community sites and forums for 3D content, applications and artists. These can help you build a lot of connections around a specific area of 3D.

3D as a Hobby

So maybe a full time job in 3D isn’t your thing or your simply not sure of it yet. Well, then 3D as a hobby is a great thing to get into. Its fun and there are some absolutely amazing artists to learn from online! A numbers of great online communities for artists exist both for styles of 3D and for 3D related to specific applications. You get to create anything that comes to your mind and you can express yourself in your own unique way!

The image at the right is an image from a scene I’ve created simply for fun in 3D. I’ll fully animate it next and I can truly tell you its been a joy to make it. Lots of work as well, but a joy! So, you’ll need to decide what software you want to use for 3D and what you want to do with it. I do all my work in the impressive 3D package called modo 301, and still a few of my more difficult animation tasks in Lightwave 3D, an older package but still a great contender for general 3D graphics. Other commercial packages include Maya, XSI and 3D Studio. There are some entry level free applications available as well to get you started. Blender 3D is an great open source package with an amazing feature set and good community. Also, there is DAZ Studio and of course always google sketchup.

Either way you look at 3D, its fun to create anything in your imagination, just keep in mind its a tough industry and requires a LOT of learning to master. Take a look at the commercial trial versions available or some of the free packages, both will give you a good glimpse into the 3D artists life and will let you also determine where your interests are, whether it really as a career option or as a hobby.

Posted by Mike King under 3D | 1 Comment »