In School, Did You Peek the Other’s Answers?
The Main Reason The Teacher Said Stop Looking At Your Neighbor's Paper
The fastest way to ruin your life is to follow someone else’s plan.
The fastest way to get your first trip to the principal’s office is to peek at your neighbor’s paper, on the desk next to you, hoping to get the answers you could have learned if only you had done the assignment. If only you had done the work.
The older you get, the more you will recognize that someone else’s plan shows up in disguises—each more clever and deceiving. All of them end up taking time you will never get back in your life, sending you down a path that never reaches your destination, and creating a false sense of security or comfort, only temporarily.
Some disguises I’ve uncovered are these:
Disguise 1 Best practices.
This is someone else’s story and in the past—rear view mirror. Living is now and in the future. Yesterday’s success story is someone else’s memory. Instead, concentrate on creating Future Practices and wrap them around your capabilities and vision.
Disguise 2 My success story as a best-selling author or Substack writer.
How much time and energy can you waste consuming content instead of clearing your writing desk and doing the work? The one gem of value I get from scanning those “my success” articles is the sentence that says, essentially, “Stop reading this. Stop procrastinating. Stop getting ready to do the work.” Find one step you can start and finish now, do it, and then see if there is one more thing you can start and finish today that moves the needle on a customer relationship, finances, health, or friendship.
Disguise 3 Templates, frameworks, systems, and software that claim productivity.
These are glorified versions of the best practices disguise. They are variations of peeking at the answers on the other kid’s paper and thinking this is going to work for you. Copying and stealing is a strategy with a short fuse that always blows up in your hand. After working 40 years with thousands of brilliant professionals, here’s what I noticed. The most productive people aren't following complex systems. They're doing something much simpler, but harder. They're showing up every day to tackle the obvious work that moves their businesses forward.
The problem comes when people substitute templates and busy-feeling productivity exercises for what they ought to do: Sit down, clear distractions, and do the work. As long as you know the difference between a tool and your masterpiece, that works. Someone else’s template, list, or secret sauce —those are tools. So long as you look at someone else’s answers only to come up with better answers that honor your creativity, your work, your sweat, and your system, you’ll not fail.
Do You Have a Plan for an Intentional Life?
Someone else’s plan—the answers on the other kid’s paper at the next desk, works only for them. Your one, unique, exclusive, gifted life needs a plan just for your intentions and strategies. That happens when you obsess over creativity, originality, authenticity, and the rigor of living healthy, sleeping well, and blasting into the new day with your purpose, your project, and the answers on your paper. Not the answers on the other kid’s desk.
Do you create plans for the year, for the month, for the week, and daily lists? Do other people’s lists work for you? Do you rework your lists after peeking at the other person’s lists?
One reason you may not have a plan is you have not yet realized that a plan is not a list of things that won’t happen. It is an evolving blueprint that structures your mind to notice ideas that lead to progress.
The first time you get this right, it’s painful, because you go deep—seriously deep into your mind and all of your lived experiences since childhood to deal with your identity. Who are you? What are your gifts? Are you the person who can achieve the goals or milestones of your dreams? Are all of your decisions a step toward the future you envision?
The painful part is letting go, confronting lies or convenient stories you told yourself to justify decisions that did not end well, and unlearning what you invested so much time and emotional energy in—far longer than you saw desired results. Avoidance and procrastination may provide a temporary sense of security, but it’s a house of cards.
The Only Plan for You is the One You Will Do
There isn’t any other way.
Somewhere around midlife or as professionals get to decisions about exiting one practice to consider another passion project, we notice the lack of an intentional plan that covers the seven bases of human experience and remaining life.
You’ve been here before. You’ve tried planning and something is off. You’ve tried everyone else’s template, method, and hacks and it falls apart when you have no guidance and then you overcomplicate into a cloud of distraction you wanted to escape.
I’ve wasted time and money on coaches who said they worked with professionals and could guide me. That’s how I realized they were using templates and systems that worked for them, and not me. What matters is persistence and belief in yourself.
What turned the corner for me was realizing I needed to work with someone who would never advise me or tell me someone else’s success story. The guide who helped me the most understood the most important things that mattered to me, including brain science, professionals, communicators, communities, freedom, and living healthy. What worked for me was not giving up until I found someone who had already been through everything I learned, experienced, and forgot, and was only about a year or two ahead of me on what I needed to learn, practice, and own.
If there is someone very much like me and past 40, I will turn out to be the wise guide and storyteller who can help them. I’m not yet creating a course or putting up a sales page on the internet around this. Instead, I’m delighted to organically grow the online community of Gifted Professionals and Communicators and create a space to conduct lots of tiny experiments and surface areas for discovery.
This Brings Us To You and Your Brain
It’s the new year and many headed to the gym to get that energy and core strength that went off the rails last year. Overheard on the weight bench next to me was the lady in the Lululemon outfit who asked the instructor, “What exercise routine is best for me?” The answer applies to everything we are covering in this article: “It’s the exercise that you will actually do.”
So, which plan is best for you? This is where it gets scary. You step closer to the unknown. Your mind is starting to lose constraints and boundaries. This is when some brain science helps and assures you that you cannot fail if you realize you are human.
The blueprint that structures your mind has seven connected categories of what humans do. Everything else is a subcategory or variation. Don’t overthink this because all details fit into one or connecting categories.
If you are the kind of person who keeps a journal or purchased any of hundreds of planning products created by others, do this one thing to make it yours: Look for the blank pages with no prompts, quotes, or distractions and write a description of yourself in the future, using first person nouns and present tense verbs.
At the top of each page, write the name of one of the seven areas. Some need only one page and if you add sketches or photographs, you may need three pages.
Emotional & Family
Intellectual & Career
Physical & Health
Spiritual & Personal Development
Social & Adventure
Environmental & Relationships
Financial & Wealth
When you write in first person and describe what your life is like in each of those areas—as though already accomplished, you are navigating the unknown, creating the life you want, and writing the narrative of the growing pains and joys you experienced to solidify your identity.
Allow one hour to focus, uninterrupted, on each of the seven areas. You can always come back and change it and you will. As you write what you see as the future you in each of those areas, use all senses—touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. This is your life and you get to write the script that becomes the movie you live and turn into memories. That’s why it matters to take an hour or so for each of those seven areas. The results will amaze you because you just reprogrammed your brain to give you the true story you want to live and share.
Professional Transformations and Life Lessons
This year I get to join the ranks of octogenarians with no intention of retiring, such as Paul McCartney, Al Pacino, Jane Fonda, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Abigail Thomas, and John Williams.
The older I get the more I obsess about the lifetime experiences and transformations of professionals. When was someone going to tell me that professions change as fast as knowledge, technology, world economics, and the next generation? Why didn’t anyone say retirement is a noun and nothing different than the day before? Tomorrow, if you see another sunrise, that’s your signal to keep learning, keep growing, and keep creating something that benefits a human or two—right now.
The older I get the more I want to know about who is doing the research and work with gifted adults and exceptionally talented humans through their lifespan. Compared to hundreds of years of knowledge about professionalism and communication, we are barely starting to appreciate work done by people still living, such as Deborah Ruf, Ph.D. (Gifted Through the Lifespan books and articles), Prof. Amanda Kirby (Get Into Neurodiversity), and Mary-Elaine Jacobsen, Psy.D. (The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius).
The older I get the more I obsess about communication, including skills, tools, human connections, questions, strategies, and intentions. For hundreds of years, our cultures depended on storytelling to make advances, remember lessons learned, and historical context. Only the wealthy few had access to teachers and opportunity.
Today we have something better. We have the internet. At the click of a mouse, we have access to the world’s greatest minds, books, videos, and opportunities for direct contact by email and telephone. Today, anyone who has a plan—the plan for their life and their uniqueness, can build projects and share wisdom. Today we have something that all previous generations never knew, which is reach.
Steer clear of the fool’s errand called content. You can use content to achieve reach and share your thoughts, problems solved, vision, and lessons learned on the way to your goals. Content like artificial intelligence is not your value—they are merely tools that leverage your time. Time is the most valuable resource of all.
My collection of life lessons is more than 80. To show my appreciation to the people I’m lucky to have along with me for the ride, here are the first five cards I can deal from that deck. Let me know in the comments if you want to know about any of the other life lessons. We can do this all day if you want to stick around for the popcorn and intermission.
1. Playmates become more valuable with age.
It’s not the work that kills you or ruins your health. It’s the lack of play and loss of playmates that take you down and shorten your interest in living. On purpose, put fun into every day. On purpose, get outside and ask someone to take a walk with you. The work will be exactly where you left it. Nobody rushed into your office and did your work while you were out awhile or even on a long vacation. Doing the work is the hard part and that’s why play matters.
2. Keep your network small, close, and intense.
Who are the people you love? What do you need to do to make sure they know how important they are to you? Who are those people who would say your name if asked who they are grateful for? Are you clear about what you must do so they love you back? If that’s as many as 12 people, you are wealthy. If that’s as many as 75 people, you are among the rare group of beyond-exceptional humans. When you hear about people who have 50,000 subscribers or followers, ask yourself, how many of them would that person welcome into their home at 3 a.m. if they showed up unannounced?
3. Get to know the stories of people like you and not at all like you.
Curiosity is a superpower. Let curiosity guide listening so you can write their stories and improve your own story at the same time. Explore new worlds through the life experiences of others.
4. Storytelling Connects Us to Everything that Matters.
Stories are the connective tissue of humanity. When times are good, we tell stories. When we fail and struggle to find our way back, we find hope and strength in stories. When we want to start a company, get a raise, or win a contract, stories, not PowerPoint decks, help us advance. Everyone has a story. You can shut down communication by asking, “What do you do?” and you can open hearts and conversation by saying, “Tell me a story.”
5. Three is All You Need to Become Wise
Spend 1/3 of your time with mentors. Find people slightly ahead of you on the path you’ve chosen and make it worth their time to answer questions and guide you. Spend 1/3 of your time with peers. Find your tribe and offer support and lots of listening with peers. Spend 1/3 of your time with people who look up to you. Learn more about yourself and all professions by helping others walk the path you’ve already traveled—the territory you’ve discovered and mapped.
Do you feel like you're on the edge of something amazing and you just can't figure out what it is? That's where I come in. My name is Georgia Patrick. I work with curious, intense, understanding professionals—still in practice and retired, to tap into their full potential and get extremely clear on their gift (their value) to individuals actively seeking such wisdom. It starts with an email. Maybe, later, a short call to make sure we understand you. Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you.
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Never looked at other’s answers but caught many people looking at mine.