Lottery Test – A thought experiment comparing any specific or course of action against whether you would do that if you had won the lottery. Not just a little money, but a lot of money. What would you do? Really do? Once you’ve bought your mom a house and yourself a nice car, jewelry, doodads…. then what would you do? How would you live? For example…. would you hang on to that garage full of stuff? Would you work in that soul sapping job? Would you travel more? Spend more time with the kids? The end goal of the test is to help you match your actions with your values.
Soft Reset – When you push a combination of buttons on your gadget such as a phone or tablet, that closes all your applications, clears all the data in memory, and restarts the device. It does not erase your apps or data that you have stored on the device’s main drive (as opposed to a hard reset). You typically do this when your device freezes or stops responding to some commands, or is operating sluggishly.
I have used the term here to mean quitting my job and taking a year off. The idea is to clear out the bad habits, get out of the daily grind, work on developing better habits and start again with a fresh clean perspective.
Stand on the Desk – Reference to a couple of scenes in the movie The Dead Poet Society. It’s when you purposely do something out of the ordinary with the goal of seeing things differently. “I stand upon my desk to constantly remind myself to look at things in a different way.” Here’s a clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U91Wl2YpkD8
The Trip – Our year off traveling. We referred to it by this simple but descriptive name in all our discussions and planning. Now that we are on it, we simply just call it life.
