Month: December 2020

A Scott Adams Periscope a while back contained the advice to let good thoughts out of your head. If you had a good thought about someone, say it. Don’t admire secretly.

I don’t do this nearly enough, but I have done it more than before, so thank you Scott Adams and the internet for making my life better.

When I tell people what I think, a funny thing happens: I think this will make the other person feel good, and that’s why you do it. Maybe they do feel happy. Probably will, in fact.

But I feel better when I do it. That’s the real payoff. I’m not doing this to get someone else to do something or feel something. I’m doing this for myself.

It’s a way to create gratitude. You don’t think “I am grateful.” Much better is to do grateful.

Praising or thanking another person creates gratitude in me.

Am I going to come across as shallow and manipulative? Will they think that I’m just saying these kind words for my own reasons?

Nope. Not a risk, in my experience.

An honest thought (“She looks pretty this morning and wow look at how she put together her outfit today!”) sincerely expressed will be received exactly as intended.

Even (maybe especially) an honest “I love you” or “You’re doing great” comment matters.

Let good thoughts out of your head and share them.

Along those lines, here is something from Marcus Aurelius:

When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have: this one’s energy, that one’s modesty, another’s generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we’re practically showered with them. It’s good to keep this in mind.

Meditations, 6:48.

All I would add is — tell them.

Because it isn’t suck. It just is.

The thought and the phrase came to me after seeing a Gary Vaynerchuk excerpt on YouTube.

Life is life and stuff is stuff and sometimes you are doing what you want to do and sometimes you are doing what you don’t want to do.

It passes. The good stuff and the bad stuff and the indifferent stuff. The stuff you want to remember you’ll forget and the stuff you wish you could forget you’ll always remember.

Right now it’s always ok. Even when it’s suck.

Think of your own life, and the objectively suck things you have experienced. Where are they? Just memories. And the great thing is I can tell people and say “I went through this, so can you.”

Embrace the suck. Grin and bear it. Whatever metaphor you choose.

Even kidney stones. That was the most pain I have ever had in my life. What did I do? Waited out the week or so until I pissed them out. The pills barely affected the pain. I didn’t even have the awareness to say embrace the suck to myself. I just, y’know, lay there one breath at a time.

I don’t want that experience again, but maybe next time I will be able to lie there and be aware enough to say “embrace the suck” to myself. Or not. Whatever.

We had houseguests for the last few days. Happy times, and the cycle is interrupted. No reading in the morning, no quiet times at odd hours when thoughts come up, meaning no notes are written here.

Also, I’ve been busier at work than normal. Again, distractions rather than time for reflection.

All of which means it is time to remember. No regrets for yesterdays. That was the old pattern: “I missed the reading! Bad!”

Now I just don’t think about it. Something went wrong before? Just do what’s right now.

And anyway. What is “wrong” and does that word have any meaning? Be done with the self-judgment.

Flogging myself as a way to get “better” seems pointless in so many ways.

So when you see it, stop it. Just like stop talking to yourself and start talking to God. Same disease, same cure.

Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. the twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that happen to you.

Meditations, 10:5.

Not waiting like you’re waiting for the bus and it arrives. More like an array of infinities and what you do right now, like picking one can of soup off the shelf instead of another.

When I first read the quote today, I felt the sadness of predestination. A second reading caught a different interpretation. I feel the lightness of endless possibilities.

And possibilities only become real by action. Lots and lots of action.

Aside. This was the first thing I saw when I opened up Meditations today. It’s funny how I can read along and then one thing resonates. Usually it’s four or five pages in where something hits me. And as often as not it is something I didn’t highlight last time I opened the book.

Barely noticeable now.

Cataclysmic then.

Once I felt guilty about this. We must keep the memory alive.

No, keep principles alive. Memories fade until “Pearl Harbor” is just a sound when the words are uttered, not a call to passion and action.

So too has 11/22/63 faded.

The Vietnam War. Faded. Veterans who were despised in the 1970s now proudly advertise their tour of duty on hats, license plate Frances, etc. Soon they will be gone and with them go memories.

And 9/11/01 is fading visibly. Those who remember the day (like me) will remember it less and invest less passion and remember fewer lessons and draw fewer principles from those memories.

Those who did not experience that day have only the hearsay of people like me to build experiences and memories of their own. Their memories will fade faster. These are my children.

Their children? My grandchildren will read about these events in school and it will mean nothing. It’s like my experience of my great-Aunt whose fiancé was killed in the trenches in WW I. She never married. Impact on my mother? Significant. Impact on me? It’s a story.

We live. We die. In the middle we need to live right. I don’t know what the point of this musing is except that profound experiences mean little or nothing over time to individuals. Genghis Khan. The ripples have subsided and the waters are calm again.

I feel the energy, pent-up and waiting for release. Patience!

Reading a new job posting site today (because I want to hire). So many people looking for work. Most of them must be great. So many possibilities. I found myself imagining what I could do so I could work with one or another of them.

Up to now I have been feeling blocked, frustrated by a limit. A self-imposed limit from an idea that I must do it all myself. Self-imposed ideas of what will work and what will not.

None of those ideas are remotely true, unless I believe them. There are other ideas and I can believe those, too.

The ideas that I have heard in the last few days that have opened my eyes:

• If you want investors it’s not enough to be good. You have to give the investor a vessel to invest in.

I’m not building a business where I want investors. But the insight of just being there, awesome, not being enough? Priceless. You have to put that awesome into a thing, a product, a service, a something so the outside world can interact with it. Because that’s what I’m looking for: interaction. Otherwise I’m just standing there and people say “Cool, bro, but what do I do with that?” Its me looking at the mountains and saying “Nice mountains” but that thought goes nowhere. The mountains don’t benefit and I don’t benefit.

Man oh man there were a couple of other blinding insights and now they’re gone. Oh well. They will come back if they are important.

Oh. The big one was I am seeing how limiting my own opinions are. Deliberately saying no to certain tools, for instance because I decided I would punish the tools because they were bad. (I’m talking about social media for advertising and business development purposes.) What does my feeling of being buttmad at something limit me from seeing and experiencing?

I mean, I know that. But I persisted. I know the value of an open mind and yet I had a closed mind here.

Maybe I need to operate on the hypothesis that 99% of my thinking involves a closed mind view point. I somehow received an opinion, adopted it, and stopped thinking.

Challenge every viewpoint you have as probably wrong. Maybe it was right once, but it stayed still while other things moved.

As Taleb says about economists, they aren’t good with things that move. Everything around me moves. Get good with that. Keep the deep spiritual truths and personal principles that have served you well. They keep bumping up against events and producing good results. But everything else? It’s transitory. Whether I get pissed at Facebook and therefore stay off it or not? Who is hurt in that opinion? Me.

There is energy and flow coiled and ready behind letting arbitrary opinions go.

A deadline staring at me. Time to sit down and get the work done.

But the headspace? Only a little grumpy about it. Only a little stressed. Pretty good overall, willing to just sit down and work from top to bottom on the work I did yesterday. I have a good draft. Now take it to final.

The “pretty good headspace” comes from the usual habits. Remember. That’s all I need to do, to say to myself. It snaps me into awareness. Me, simultaneously the creator of the universe around which all revolves, and the smallest speck of random matter in the universe, so small it cannot be found. I am everything and I am nothing, both at the same time.

The “little grumpy” and “little stressed” is the part that I need to let go of, right now. That’s why I’m writing this: to remind myself that sitting down and doing the work is the appointed task, and my opinion of the task does not matter. In fact, opinion is one of those things that can only detract from having a good life, a peaceful life. Opinions can’t make a good life.

So let the opinion go. Just do the work.

And for future opinions, realize the reason for the grumpy and the stress. The reason is too many things to do in too little time. Something must fall to the ground, undone. You don’t want anything to fall to the ground, but it must. Even if you were blessed (haha it would really be a curse) with 52-hour days while everyone else had 24-hour days, you wouldn’t get it all done.

So deal with the root cause: too many things need to be done in too little time, because you made those promises. The root cause is me, not the jobs to be done.

For the now: have a cup of coffee. Sit down to do the work in the way you know it needs to be done. There are two things on your now plate: the work project and the home project. Say no to everything else. You know how to pace yourself, so do it.

That action plan takes care of the opinion module for the day. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” As usual, the KJV says it best. And the tasks of the day are not really evil, are they?

It’s a good quote to remember. Take action now, ignore thinking about the past (promises I made and can’t keep today), and ignore thinking about the future (what people might think or so because I can’t keep my promises).

Or even easier: Just do. Don’t think.

1. Daily spiritual maintenance actions.

2. Long term life change actions.

3. Today’s work tasks.

Don’t forget to eat.

Memory of this exact thought, over 30 years ago.

I didn’t even know what “it” was. All I knew is they had something good in their lives that I didn’t. And I certainly didn’t want more of the life I was living.

I was right. It worked for them, and it worked for me. It still works today.

Belief coupled with action.

And try to not be intelligent and inject your own opinions, while you’re at it. Your best ideas got you to this precise jackpot that you’re staring at right now, so you know what more of your own intelligence will produce: more jackpots.

When I start something I have a vision in my head of what an expert result looks like. My beginner’s efforts are embarrassing.

In little ways what is happening now is that I’m willing to start. Period. I’m willing to look at my first efforts and realize that they’re bad but they will evolve to better, quickly. And I look forward to seeing that evolution unfold.

It happens when I write something. It starts off bad and I know it’s bad, but as it goes along it gets better. Magically. It’s almost as if I didn’t know how to think or express myself, but the effort of trying to think and express myself actually brings about that result.

In a roundabout way I’m saying that I like experiencing the journey from noob to competent. I like feeling the progression of building skills and knowledge. Something was not there. Then it was.

From competent to mastery? That’s a chasm that I have only bridged a couple of times. Put down your head for 25 years and work. That’s the only thing I can say about mastery. Shut up with your 10,000 hours. And even mastery is only a bare beginning.

I have more mastery to discover within me. Let’s trudge fearlessly to the next one — the most interesting journey of all so far, because it involves hand-to-hand combat with self. Not a body of knowledge, not a technical skill, not a profession. Self.

With luck, a specific course of action I have embarked on this week will lead me to a peaceful co-existence with self.

But in the meantime, reaching journeyman status is fine. We are all Privates in this Army.

I walk past my dog on the way to the kitchen. She rolls on her back, legs in the air. I scratch her belly. She is happy. Me too.