Month: February 2021

I have an actual, written five year plan. Who do I want to be? (Hint: I am already that man. I am systematically removing from my life everything inconsistent with who that man is.) That’s new.

I am tracking certain metrics monthly. Am I making progress? That’s new.

I am working towards my long-term goals daily. This is not so well focused but it’s happening through a simple method: my self-assigned exercise, no matter what; my self-assigned three hours daily on business, no matter what. That’s my daily plan. Other things fall in around it.

All of this is imperfectly done. Yesterday me was not a planner, a tracker, an aimed arrow. Yesterday me was vague, a whirring bundle of action ridden by a jockey with mood swings.

Today me? I am doing. Directionally correct and learning how to plan and how to execute as I go.

Discipline. And what is upstream of discipline? Truth. Or as Emmet Fox called it, “Your Heart’s Desire.” That thing inside that you secretly dream but seems so inconceivable that you can only turn away with sadness, and distract yourself with pointless, destructive actions. Because thinking of your heart’s desire makes you sad.

Seek that truth. Embrace it. Bring it into the light. Write down your heart’s desire, visible, so your eyes can see it on the page. Immediately do something, anything. Anything that moves you even one millimeter toward your dream.

Move your body and your mind will follow.

Don’t compete to win on short-term things that don’t take me where I want to go.

Pay attention to where I’m going.

From the Jocko podcast 260. The idea is if you you’re injured, have a default protocol on what to do next. “If my knee hurts” doesn’t stop you. Do something else. Pull-ups. Whatever.

Default to always doing.

I run 4 miles a day, every day. At the moment I do this at night when I come home. It’s working, so no changes will be made until this schedule breaks.

The list of gear needed to run is modest: shoes, shorts, shirts, socks. Hat is nice but optional. I am under-stocked on shorts and hats seem to disappear in our household.

Today is the day that I permanently solve that problem.

The Path of Least Resistance. Admonishment to self: “Remove all friction you perceive between you and your heart’s desire.”

In this case I can remove friction by spending a modest amount of money to buy some shorts and hats.

Today is the day.

Memo to self: Solve nagging irritation decisively and permanently with violent immediate action.

Don’t worry about overkill. Overkill is rare, usually easily corrected.

Fear of overkill is usually an excuse for inaction. “Oh, I can’t do that. Something bad might happen!” No it won’t. If anything, fear underkill.

New experiment.

Up to now the M.O. has been intermittent fasting with a time box for eating between noon and 8 pm.

I have stated almost entirely inside the lines. The times outside the lines have been travel, or scheduled events with friends and family where I don’t want to be some sanctimonious fucking asshole and refuse to eat just because. In those situations, eat modestly and STFU. There is no reason to parade your virtue in front of others. There is no benefit to you or them.

The number of discipline lapses? Probably two or three over several months.

The intermittent fasting choice built discipline and helped me understand the value of hard boundaries and when to stop being a hardass.

My best hours for work, productivity, ideas? Morning. These are the last few hours of the fasting cycle, and I would power through those hours with coffee and water. By noon I would be noticeably drained, mental acuity dropping.

So I’m starting today with a new experiment. I will keep the hard end for consuming calories at 8 pm. But I will add in a normal breakfast. It’s no longer intermittent fasting. It’s just life.

The breakfast will be oatmeal with a dollop of peanut butter. Oaymeal because fiber, and I need that. Peanut butter because it makes everything taste better and in theory it has some dense, valuable nutrients.

Oatmeal is defined as one cup of dry oatmeal, cooked.

Dollop of peanut butter is not currently defined. Today it was a heaped soup spoon scooped out of the bottle. I need to figure out how to get a consistent quantity so I can watch the results.

Interesting observation: I finished off the bowl and was ravenously hungry. Eating triggered a desire to eat to satiation.

Instead I went and washed all of the dishes to let the food start to digest. The impulse to eat more went away. I have a French Press full of coffee waiting for me as I start the day.

That’s a lesson. In order to reduce calorie intake, eat an appropriate amount of food and then get away from the table for a while.

This whole thing of running 4 miles at night makes me get up a bit slower than before. Seneca: read a couple of Letters. Coffee while reading. Shower, then foam roller for my quads and calves.

Off to work.

I think this is the beginning of a good system. The next part of the system is the food part. The 16/8 intermittent fasting thing may not be what I need to do.

It’s time for some intelligent experimentation.

The early efforts at being a beast in my own mind (free the mind, your ass will follow, as G. Clinton would say) are showing interesting results.

I am capable of so much more than I gave myself credit for. Previously, I did not allow myself to try, and therefore did not achieve.

Case in point. Previously I thought a 5k was just fine. But when I started being a beast my default minimum, even after not running at all for months, was 6.3k (4 miles, more or less, given Apple Watch errors in measuring distance).

Case in point. Last night I started running the neighborhood and decided to run the long blocks in a southward pattern until I hit 4 miles. Then, wherever I was, I would turn north and return home. Total distance 4.75 miles and I felt good.

What is my limit?

Meta. In what other areas of life should I ask the same question?

Unrelated: I am resolutely keeping it simple. The Apple Watch is unreliable in measuring distance or route: even when I stay on the sidewalk the route shows a wildly swerving path. It reports 1,000 feet of altitude gain when the true altitude change for a loop is more like -50 feet for the downhill stretch and +50 on the return.

I nerded out on the internet and found better and more accurate devices, but decided to not buy them. They are unnecessary for my current intentions.

I don’t care about distance, time, cadence, or any of that. I care about choices made. Commitments kept. Discipline.

Electronic devices are not necessary for discipline: all I need is a mind that makes a decision and a body that follows through.

The benefit of exercise is not really the fact that you are physically better off. Yes, that exists. No, the real benefit is in the mindset that causes you to exercise. Seneca, as usual, has something to say:

For when I don suitable attire, or walk as I should, or dine as I ought to dine, it is not my dinner, or my walk, or my dress that are goods, but the deliberate choice which I show in regard to them, as I observe, in each thing I do, a mean that conforms with reason.

Letters, 92.11.

The “deliberate choice”. That is where the value exists.

The pursuit of happiness/peace is in the choices I make, not in the fancy clothes I wear or how buff I am or the elaborate steak dinners I eat.

When I set “I am a savage, a beast, an animal” as my objective, I am setting myself on a disciplined course. I am making choices, simple choices based on simple and eternal principles.

Choices that create known results. Choices that are known to create peace.

The new me just does. Beasts do not think, debate, analyze. They just do. Peace does not require analysis, intellectualizing. Peace requires deliberate action and choices.

Those actions and choices must be aligned with higher principles.

[I]f I have the choice, I shall choose health and strength, but that the good involved will be my judgment regarding these things, and not the things themselves.

Letters, 92.13.

Strive to understand the eternal principles. Make choices consistent with them.

I’m here. It’s time. Let’s do this.