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Inspired to Flourish: Voice & Exit Takeaways | happyliving.com

“One day, you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now.”
(Paulo Coelho)

I had an inspiring weekend attending and speaking at the Voice & Exit conference in Austin, TX. As I mentioned in my previous post, Voice & Exit is a two-day festival focused on human flourishing.

My task as a speaker on Sunday was to lead a discussion about how to turn interesting and meaningful ideas into action. After all, the purpose of every conference is to teach, expose, and inspire attendees.

As an attendee, I listened to a line-up of visionary speakers. They shared expansive, challenging, and uplifting ideas for self, community, and world.

My Voice & Exit Takeaways

Ryan Holiday, Author of The Obstacle is the Way

  • Challenges create opportunity
  • Every situation is a chance to practice excellence

Jack Kruse, CEO of Optimized Life

  • Small things can have a big impact
  • Be curious, keep learning, and exploring ideas

Jamie Wheal, Executive Director at Flow Genome Project

  • Live “north of happy”
  • Optimal human performance lies 80% in biology and 20% in psychology
  • The FLOW Genome Matrix is a framework for improving components of biology

Dylan Evans, Author of The Utopia Experiment

  • Appreciate the little things of modern life
  • When “bad” happens, you just have to start again
  • Follow your dreams, even if they turn into nightmares

Brian Robertson, Founder & Author of Holacracy

  • Challenge the status quo
  • Search for ways to make the entire system work better

John Mackey, Co-CEO of Whole Foods

  • Capitalism and economic freedom can lift the entire world
  • A business’s purpose is more than to make money: a business needs money like a human being needs red blood cells, but neither money nor red blood cells are a purpose
  • We have reason to be very optimistic about the future of the world

Magatte Wade, CEO of Tiossan

  • Appreciate what we have in developed countries
  • People in underdeveloped countries are literally dying to have what we have
  • Give back… what you can, when you can

Jim Epstein, Producer

  • The progress of technology will personalize everything
  • As technology makes creation more accessible, artistic and editorial vision will be the biggest challenges

Alex Tabarrok, Professor of Economics, George Mason University

  • The world does not have a poverty problem, we have an organizational problem
  • Get people to where the jobs are – there are certain areas suited to mass economic activity

Jeffrey Tucker, Author of Bit by Bit

  • Material things are scarce, while information and ideas are abundant
  • Digitize everything you can

It is my responsibility to get a return on my investment of time and money I spent attending the conference by turning the ideas that are most important to me into a personalized effectiveness plan. I followed these three steps:

1. I paid close attention throughout all the session for WHAT ideas moved me and I kept a written list. Just being away from my “normal” work and routine got me thinking about new and inspiring ideas, so I paid attention and wrote down those as well.

2. I sat down with my morning coffee to prioritize my list by asking WHY each item was important to me. This eliminates ideas that are just “conference cool” and prioritizes the things that are anchored to something meaningful in my life.

3. The final step is HOW I plan to transform each prioritized idea into action. Every idea for change requires something different: time, resources, willpower, collaboration, etc.

My BIG 3 Ideas

These are my big three ideas that I am incorporating into my life:

WHAT: Get to the right side of the Flow Genome Matrix as often as possible
WHY: I want to live happily and healthfully into my 100s
HOW: Begin a research project on “flow” by getting my FLOW PROFILE and considering how the results can optimize my life

WHAT: Digitize everything I can
WHY: Digitizing ideas, information, products, and services that help me live “north of happy” will allow me to easily share them with the world and pursue my mission to improve the health and wellbeing of the world, one person at a time
HOW: Continuous learning about digital technologies, and asking the question, “How can this be digitized and shared more easily throughout the globe?”

WHAT: Write my first book about turning inspiration into action
WHY: I have used a repeatable process for turning ideas that touched me deeply into big changes in my life. I believe turning inspiration into action is a key to happiness and I’d like to share it with others
HOW: Starting today, change my calendar to schedule time every week for writing my book

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