Your Big Picture Is In Your Every Day
Do you ever write something and think, “huh, that’s good, I should probably take that on board myself”? I like to think of these moments as your soul, while it wrestles with all your conditioning, throwing a line of rope out to you in the hopes you’ll see it and start pulling. When you’re daydreaming and think, “Wow, that was profound” or explaining something to someone and realise “I never actually looked at it like that before.” These are all little nuggets trying to bring your attention to the knowing and truth inside of you.
Here’s one of mine from recently. I was writing the essay for my Immersion group about planning. You likely know that in the last year or so, I’ve changed up my planning on a daily basis and from a theoretical point of view. I started planning from a future vision of how I wanted to feel, rather than what I wanted to achieve, and that has helped me to set goals and take actions that are rooted in fulfilment. So basically, I love to talk about planning. But as I was writing, this line flowed down my arms and out through my fingers: “In the end, our ‘big picture’ is just a series of individual days; so what we want in our individual days is what we want for our big picture.”
I hadn’t thought of it like that before.
Previously, the big picture had been a thing. It was always the big picture of what you want. It was a noun; it was a thing that existed, that one day I’d be able to see and touch and walk around in it. It was static like a still photograph, all the details frozen and unchanging. There would be a certain amount of money in the bank; there would be a perfect picnicking family; there would be the status of success. There would be this big audience waiting to buy; there would be press cuttings, there would be a remote team carrying out instructions. All of it laid out like a Renaissance painting, waiting for me to animate it when enough time had passed, and enough work was done.
There are limits to how motivating this still photograph is, though. It’s so far away, and everything that exists before you get there is a bleak wasteland. When we think of the big picture of what we want, we tend to go big, go dreamy. We’re encouraged to do this, to dream bigger than we ever thought was possible. But the more significant the dream, the further away we put it in our realistic timeline. Because the big picture is a thing to get to, it’s also not a thing you can have now. It was the life you wanted to possess, and therefore a certain number of levels had to be accomplished and coins collected before you were able to open the box.
It also gives you nothing. When you pull out that photo desperate for hope that you’ll make it and seek motivation and answers to carry on, all you get is the same scene. It doesn’t release anything to make your life right now better; it doesn’t give you any clues or shreds of hope. It just stares blankly back at you, with the unspoken answer being, “you just have to get on with it if you want to get out of the wasteland.” There are no compromises; do, or do not do.
What we really need from our big picture is a video, not a still—a verb, not a noun. We need a big picture that is not a thing to get to, but an existence we can dip into. Something so close that some days we actually experience it, and that lights a fire under us to make the changes we need to have more days living our big picture. Something that gives us hope every day that how we want to live is possible for us. Something that means the time before that is not a wasteland, but more like the Spring – full of new shoots and young growth and flashes of the Summer to come. Something that we can alter and edit in our mind, that we can place ourselves in that we can deep down actually believe is possible because we’re already kind of doing it.
Our life isn’t a still photograph. Go into your head now and get your brain to show you your life. It’s video clips, little tiny moments, and everyday things. You could be running down a hill in a blue gingham school dress, pouring a bottle of rose in a baking hot pub garden. Maybe laughing together at a joke you don’t remember, sitting at your potter’s wheel/your desk/your drawing board, and feeling inflow. It isn’t a frozen still, but a moving entity made up of every single day. So if you can inject a little big picture into your every day, then those every days will come together into a video montage where you were living your big picture the whole time.
All we need is a little translation.
Your big picture may be built, like mine was, on things. The markers of success. But what did you want those things for? How did you want to feel in your big picture that made those things necessary? For me, I wanted the money in the bank and the team because I wanted to feel I had a secure base to do what I wanted from, for those things to enable my freedom. I wanted the press cuttings so that I could wave the proof, validated by external forces, that I was capital-S Successful.
What did I want in my every day? I craved freedom from obligation, to not have diary appointments and people’s expectations. I wanted a lot of space and not a lot of structure to float organically between work and not-work, where my inspiration took me. I wanted to be answerable only to myself.
Comparing everything, there were some critical conflicts. To have a team is to have management responsibilities and diary appointments and the expectations that I’m going to do a certain thing at a certain time. It requires me to work in tune with the team, not myself. The press cuttings would mean that I’d need to be answerable to an editor or a third party and create what they wanted. While I thought those things would bring me the security, freedom, and validation I wanted, they would do the opposite. So instead, if I used how I wanted to feel in my every day, the big picture would look different.
It would look like deepening the business not exponentially growing it, earning enough to make sure I felt secure, but not so much that I would have my freedom compromised. It meant staying a company of one, so I could structure my days however the hell I wanted. It meant doubling down on producing the work I felt most inspired by and publishing it myself without the gate-keepers.
This big picture felt aligned, much more faithful to the core of how I wanted to live and feel. And it felt much more do-able because I was already doing it in a lot of ways. It meant each day I could wake up and not think, “what can I do today that will take me closer to my big picture?” but “what can I do today that is living my big picture?”. And then, I get to go live in the Summer, instead of in the wasteland.
