Month: February 2021

Makes me feel like he is a regular guy. There is hope for me.

No one could ever accuse you of being quick-witted.

All right, but there are plenty of other things you can’t claim you “haven’t got in you.” Practice the virtues you can show: honesty, gravity, endurance, austerity, resignation, abstinence, patience, sincerity, moderation, seriousness, high-mindedness. Don’t you see how much you have to offer—beyond excuses like “can’t”? And yet you still settle for less.

Or is it some inborn condition that makes you whiny and grasping and obsequious, makes you complain about your body and curry favor and show off and leaves you so turbulent inside?

No. You could have broken free a long way back. And then you would have been only a little slow. “Not so quick on the uptake.”

And you need to work on that as well—that slowness. Not something to be ignored, let alone to prize.

Meditations 5:5.

One of us! One of us!

Seriously, though. It is reassuring to see that even a man like Marcus Aurelius had a noisy, self-critical brain.

Practice the virtues you can show.

Let’s do that today.

You can accept comfort and slouch toward mediocrity, or you can embrace challenge and stretch forward to excellence.

I need to find people who will challenge me. It’s the “you are the average of the five people you hang around most” idea. I fill my head with Jocko and Goggins at the moment, so they are virtual friends who challenge me. But I need IRL people who have that kind of attitude, because I’m striving for it myself.

Mediocre is repulsive.

It’s like Sebastian’s idea. Someone says “wow you’re good”. His reply is “good on a normal scale or good on an elite scale?”

I don’t want to be good on a normal scale. Within the limits of physics, I want to be good on an elite scale.

Right now I’m training myself to be default “on” (I can’t express the thought clearly) through running. I decide to run and I execute. Stomach full or empty. Tired or rested. Sore legs or not. The temperature is cold or hot.

That reminds me. Contingencies. someday it will be raining and it will be time to run. I need gear to be ready so there is no excuse. Though if necessary I will just go, and be wet.

Prepare for known contingencies and sources of failure. Eliminate SPOFs. That’s one way to transcend mediocrity.

Assumptions lead to actions. If I believe something, I will act based on that belief.

Assumptions are frequently wrong, and almost always incomplete.

The reason that my assumptions are incomplete is because they are based on old information, not on what is in front of me. Conditions and circumstances change.

My assumptions are wrong for obvious reasons. I ain’t that smart that I know everything, and I have the human capacity for knowledge: selective memory, bias, laziness, etc.

The marker to look for is certainty. It’s even beyond that: watch for smugness, arrogance. I’m not capturing the emotional components well, but I hope you get the idea. It’s one thing to be right and know it. It’s another thing to be right (you think) and feel a superiority that dismisses alternative views.

The other marker to look for is inattention. If I’m so right, I don’t have to think about this and I can pay attention to something else.

Examples in the last 12 hours. Comical/sad/instructive.

• In the current competition we are scored based on completing tasks daily. One is planning your day the night before. 12 hours after raving in the midpoint review that I’m killing it and getting perfect scores every day, I forget to plan my next day the night before. I was blinded by the perception that I am Mr. Perfect and didn’t check at end of day to see if the plan was in place.
• Last night, running, I’m almost home: I’m about to turn the corner onto my street. In the dark I tripped on the uneven sidewalk and bang down I go. My head was elsewhere, and I wasn’t paying attention. I know the sidewalks in my city are shit (the fucking City Council wants to save the fucking whales, metaphorically speaking, instead of doing it’s fucking job), I’m paying attention usually, except now. So my assumption about reality is correct, I’m in familiar territory, and I make another assumption failure: to forget known truths. Actually I usually run in the street for precisely this reason: the streets are better-maintained than the sidewalks. Assumption that took me down: I’m already done with my run in my head.

How do I keep assumptions aligned with current reality?

This rumination kicked off with this excerpt from Meditations:

Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquillity. Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary?”

But we need to eliminate unnecessary assumptions as well. To eliminate the unnecessary actions that follow.

Meditations 4:24.

That’s a start. Prune away unnecessary assumptions: about myself, about everything around me.

Nota bene: I might have a damaging assumption in the above: the incompetence and malevolence of City governance. 😀 Maybe I should email the person who represents my district and ask for sidewalk repairs. Maybe the crews are just unaware of dangerously cracked and uplifted sidewalk locations. I can do that, or I can have rage in my heart. Hmmm. Hard choice. 😜

Postscript. And that notation above is exactly why I need to keep reading and writing. It’s a process that sometimes help self reveal self to self. After all, the persistent utter disdain in my head for politicians is only poisoning me.

I have run 10k every day for six days in a row. This was my goal: “10k, every day”. It intuitively feels right for cardio, and now I can layer on other stuff.

And here comes the quitting conversation in my head. You need an off day. Maybe just run a short run, because your legs are sore. All sorts of noise. What if you’re sick or there is some reason that makes it impossible to run someday (in the future)? Inference: if you have an excuse then, you can have an excuse now.

Shut up and run. I’m going out again today. 10k, every day.

I’m not doing it for exercise. I’m not doing it to lose weight. I’m not doing it for cardio health or my heart or blood pressure or anything else.

I’m doing it to shut down the quitter in my head. The guy with an angle, a reasonable point of view for why running (or any activity) is really too much and let’s ease up shall we?

That guy in my head never says “let’s go harder”. It’s always a variation of quitting.

I do need a plan for unavoidable inability to run. But that’s a simple plan. It is simply Ed’s advice from 30 years ago. “I am sick and feel awful” I told him. “Should I go to work?” His response was clear and simple: “When you’re sick, your job is to get well.”

If I get the flu and can’t run, my job is to get well and run again when I can. And in the meantime. Be truthful: I don’t have a serious problem that actually, physically prevents me from running. I just have my little whiny brain telling me to quit. STFU, brain. You’re going running with me.

Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.

Meditations 4:7

Words to aspire to.

I’m judgmental and angry and political things. That’s not good for me and for those around me.

That sort of person is bound to do that. You might as well resent a fig tree for secreting juice. (Anyway, before very long you’ll both be dead—dead and soon forgotten.)

Meditations 4:6.

Remember that and live life appropriately. What’s in my control? What is not? Avoid propaganda of all types: the kind I agree with and the kind I do not.

And it’s all propaganda all the time.

I don’t know what is required of me, if anything, for overt political action. So I will in the meantime prepare myself and develop my character to a man of honor and principles.

Though I do agree with the Taleb admonition: if you see fraud, yell fraud.

So in each case you need to say: “This is due to God.” Or: “This is due to the interweavings and intertwinings of fate, to coincidence or chance.” Or: “This is due to a human being. Someone of the same race, the same birth, the same society, but who doesn’t know what nature requires of him. But I do. And so I’ll treat them as the law that binds us—the law of nature—requires. With kindness and with justice. And in inconsequential things? I’ll do my best to treat them as they deserve.

Meditations, 3:11.

That’s how Marcus Aurelius responds: know what the law of nature, the logos, demands, and treat people wound me with kindness and justice.

And ignore the bullshit.

Important: personal knowledge, principles, integrity. Not your own, but eternal. Natural. Externally true, not internally constructed. My idea of right is not what matters. The laws of nature are what matter.

You can only operate from that base.

How do I distinguish between my own deep brilliance 🙂 and timeless principles? Take Nassim Taleb’s idea of time as a filter. If an idea has survived a long time, it’s probably a law of nature. Otherwise it would have been disproved a long time ago, and discarded.

This will be a topic that I ruminate on for a while. I need to work it out in my head.

It’s the question of choice. And it is the question of choice in the face of facts. What do I expect of myself?

It is the nature/nurture question. Am I going to accept who I am, what I am, and my circumstances as limiting my options? Or will I make choices and take action, notwithstanding?

I understand the place of realistic limits. Those limits are time and resources available to me.

I understand the limits of fate. Fortune will smile on me, or she will not.

But within those limits, what’s my excuse? I’m too old and have seen to much to blame my genes or my childhood, or to whine about boneheaded politicians who fuck things up for everyone including me.

All of that? It’s weather.

And regardless of the weather, what am I going to do today? Am I on the beam? Am I deliberately choosing the right path, regardless of difficulty?

We all love the Horatio Alger stories. Harry Potter is of that ilk: plucky, determined kid chooses and struggles to rise above adversity.

Where is the struggle for me? Why do I not accept this concept wholeheartedly? There is some gear in me that wants to give up and relax — when it is a question of my own choices. There is another gear in me that wants to give someone else a hall pass in life — when circumstances and fate dealt him or her a bad hand.

The first one is simple. Refuse to be a victim.

The second is subtle. I think there is a back door attack here by my brain. If I give them a hall pass, I get one, too. So refuse to do that. Marcus Aurelius and all that stuff: the killer is the opinion I have of things I cannot control. So refuse to have opinions about those things.

Compassion and helping hand, of course. And I’m a retail assistance kind of guy, not wholesale. “Save the whales” (or insert your favorite “I’m going to save those people over there” mentality) is not for me. I like one-on-one.

Marcus Aurelius talks about dealing with people with justice and a genuine desire to help. That’s the way to go.

I read a few older entries here. Ouch.

Why am I so self-critical?

There is no plateau. Either keep the pressure on or allow weakness to enter. These are the choices.

Metaphor: airplane. Keep the enjoined running or glide. Glide sounds fun until you realize that glide means go down. Maybe the plane loses altitude slowly, or maybe it glides like a rock. If you want to get somewhere, though, power on and careful navigation.

The metaphor is misleading, though. It’s not a matter of adding energy on the one hand and a void of energy on the other. In life, it’s a tide. Either you are consistently adding energy to your life or sloth and decay seeps in.

Maybe the better metaphor is a leaky boat: if you aren’t pumping all the time the leaks will sink you.

Whatever. There is no point to going to extremes with metaphors, or to seeking analogies in physics and the idea of entropy. Figures of speech illustrate. They don’t prove.

Either I run every day or weakness (of mind) seeps in and starts to poison my resolve. Weakness seeps into my muscles, too. But it’s 99% the mental weakness that I care about.

Same thing in life. I’m up at 5:30 am now because the household has started to join me at being awake at 6:30 am so if I want time to read and write, I need to get up early.

How do I train my mind to resist weakness and the subtle (but plausible! and persuasive!) self-talk that tells me to not do?

First. Recognize it. The thoughts that tell me to not do something are the dangerous thoughts. The thoughts to do something are my friends. Yes, be careful to not overdo. That’s my primary flaw at the moment. I need to find the balance so I don’t have a giant traffic jam of things in my life. Throughput. Get that.

Example. Running. The brain says don’t overtrain. Be careful! Listen, brain. I’m so far from overtraining that we are in different time zones. Doing 4 miles instead of 6 is not a prudent guard against overtraining. It’s laziness. It’s weakness entering the body.

Second. Reject weakness when recognized and train yourself. Don’t just resist temptation. Counterbalance it with positive counteraction. The brain concedes a 10k and you pace it off? It says “well if your route leaves you a little ways from home you can just walk back because you did your 10k, after all.” Fuck you, brain. Run it out. All the way.

Don’t resist evil with absence of evil. Resist evil with good. Positive barometric pressure in your thoughts will keep weakness at bay.

It’s true in physical conditioning and it’s true with peace of mind. Anderson would say “it’s easy to do but it’s hard to keep doing.” So true, for mindset, for everything.

The Carpenter: “pray without ceasing.” So true. If you look at prayer as a mindset thing (as I do) the path is clear: keep talking to God. By keeping that conversation going, you don’t leave a void in your head for destructive self-talk.

And for me, the easiest way to keep talking to God is to appreciate everything around me. Gratitude.