Month: May 2021

We’ll start our analysis with a truism, stark, self-evident and understated: sometimes things do not go well. That seems to have much to do with the tyrannical nature of the world, with its plagues and famines and tyrannies and betrayals. But here’s the rub: sometimes, when things are not going well, it’s not the world that’s the cause. The cause is instead that which is currently most valued, subjectively and personally. Why? Because the world is revealed, to an indeterminate degree, through the template of your values (much more of this in Rule 10). If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it’s time to examine your values. It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It’s time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.

Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, page 170. Emphasis in original.

Oh.

Where you are judged on your actions today.

Future you is the judge. That’s why Hell is so awful. Future You is the judge. There is no escape from the realization that you did this to you by your own decisions.

Have a goal

If you do not have a definite aim, you will go nowhere and everywhere.

It need not be a well-defined goal. Need not be a SMART goal. But make it directionally accurate. You know your goal is somehow northwest of where you are. Aim northwest. You will get clarity from movement.

One of my goals is to be a crazy-fit 90 year old man. I have an image of the future and me in it. White hair, buzzed short. But . . . fucking hell, he’s 90??? Astonishingly fit.

I’m in no rush to reach that vision. I will become 90 years old one day at a time, no matter what. I don’t yearn for this or recoil from being 90 years old.

I am only interested in what I’m doing today.

And it is an intriguing aim. Imagine quality of life in every facet at 90 as a “fucking hell, he’s fit” 90-year old man. Imagine the interesting task of building toward that goal: what to do, how to eat, everything. N=1 experiment.

Start now

You have a goal. When do you begin?

Start now.

Start here

You lack the tools, the resources to achieve your goal.

Start with what you have on hand right now. You have the resources to start. You don’t have the resources you need to finish. But you’re at the starting point, and you have enough on hand to start now.

Get tomorrow’s resources tomorrow.

Starting now gives you something you didn’t have yesterday: direction and momentum.

Start with what you know now

You can’t get much done at all. You need information, you lack skill.

Life lessons are learned in life.

I started lifting with a few YouTube videos and a great deal of sheepish confusion at the gym. I learned some stuff quickly, from putting my hands on a barbell. Those were lessons I learned only from doing.

Better technique comes with practice and instruction. But I can only practice and receive hands-on instruction if I’m in the arena, at the gym, as an ignorant amateur weightlifter.

Do what you are capable of now

Do what you can do just as you are right now. You are smart enough to take action today. You are strong enough. You will get smarter and stronger tomorrow, building off the momentum and learning of today.

I can only lift the bar, without weights? So be it. Go upstairs one step at a time.

Aim forward, measure back

Always aim toward your goal. You will find it moves in front of you, like the horizon, so you will never get there. You will never be done. You will never be there.

But you will feel immense satisfaction by staying in the present moment, immersed in your self-appointed journey. And you will feel pleasure — and find guidance — by looking back to yesterday you, and noting your progress.

Today You, Yesterday You, Tomorrow You

You lifted weights at the gym today that yesterday you could not lift. You understood something you read that yesterday you could not understand.

Don’t fret that the barbell could have contained more weight than you lifted. Look at what you did today, compared to yesterday.

Don’t fret that you are still ignorant and lack understanding. Look at what you know today that you didn’t know yesterday.

What you were yesterday was the foundation on which you built today’s accomplishment. Today you is built on the foundation of yesterday you.

Incremental progress. One millimeter a day, if that’s all you can do today, is world-changing.

Build a strong today you. Tomorrow you will be thankful for the foundation you built today, just as you are thankful for the foundation yesterday you built for today you.

“Canary in a coal mine.”

It’s a phrase everyone knows. And everyone knows the meaning of the phrase, even those of us who were not coal miners a century ago.

Memo to self: Look around you. Look around your life, your coal mine. Really look at it. Look at it like Tony Eafrati looks at a target.

(Listen to one of the Jocko podcasts where he talks about this. There is an unexpected revelation of power in how he describes looking at the target, just looking with patience, when planning a military mission. “Those who have eyes to see, let them see.” Develop Sight, Seeing. his skill matters above all else.)

What’s my canary?

By the way, do you even know that you’re in a coal mine?

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

Don’t look outward at them, whoever they are.

Look within.

Apple trees produce apples.

But as near as I can tell, a conscious man can, with deliberate effort, change himself. No longer bearing apples, he become an orange tree, bearing oranges.

This is the hope that drives me forward: the belief that I am capable of achieving something different—and higher.

Quantic’s Life in the Rain.

And in my optimistic moments, I must acknowledge that this has happened to me. I have, to use the misused cliché, been born again.

Having had that awakening, I then confront the truth of my infinite ignorance. Do not despair. Even the wisest of us is equal in his infinite ignorance.

Stay on The Path. I will, for the rest of my life, be in a position of infinite ignorance, regardless of effort or intelligence. There is no possibility of arrival, or achievement.

Action is the aim. The journey is the destination. Keep trudging is the mantra.

Whenever you see something happen and announce your judgment, remind yourself that time has not stopped. Whatever you see is not the final result.

Let’s see what happens. It’s not the end of the story.

This is why it’s so important to never give up. You’re not sprinting for the finish line. There is no finish line. A new chapter will be written tomorrow.

Write it.

The stars that take their course across the sky every night. My daily life.

The story is one of an endless cycle. Awaken, go about my day, sleep, only to arise again.

The folly of done. Of accomplishment. Ticking tasks on the list as done, and somehow expecting the cycle to stop and give me respite.

This is one of the insights from Day 11 of the 75 Hard program. Each day is relentless. Each day asks me to perform the tasks assigned to me, without pity or consideration. Each day will be followed by another, with its required tasks, until I die.

Speed is unnecessary and desiring speed is silly. It cannot be given to me, even as I cannot make the earth circle the sun a bit faster because I want it to be summer again.

This is another way to think of the mills of God, grinding slowly.

What do I take from this?

Life is relentless. The treadmill moves at its own pace. Sprinting or sitting on the treadmill? Both pointless.

It’s time to find my pace. And peace.

Remember that. what other people think of me is unimportant.

My opinion of you is my business.

Remember that, too. Don’t feel the need to tell people what you think of them. They are hard enough on themselves, in the quiet of their own minds. My opinion of others hurts only me.

My opinion of me is my business.

And there, it is especially important to be kind. When I pull a stunt, be kind and guide myself towards my Primary Purpose.

I, like them (whoever they are), am human and prone to error and rash behavior.

Honesty, to see what is real, and acknowledge it. Kindness, because we need it (given and received) to stay on The Path.

I woke up early and walked around the neighborhood for 45 minutes as the darkness gave way to a deep blue dawn.

Feels good.

Most of the walk was spent in rehearsal. Me, rehearsing in my head, a mythical conversation with people I will never meet.

Feels bad.

The conversation is about me telling the people I am talking why they are so wrong. And I’m telling them so in the most self-aggrandizing way possible. But with humility!

There is always an audience for this mythical conversation, and they are listening eagerly to every word I say. Maybe I’m on stage. Maybe it’s TV. I don’t know. But there is always an adoring audience.

I got home and cracked Meditations open, for my daily reading.

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.

Meditations 2.1.

Time for me to tell my brain to STFU. “We are always living in rehearsal,” Bob would say. That’s me.

Live in the present. Don’t rehearse for a future that will never come. Don’t dwell on thoughts of events that will never return.

A cool, damp, quiet dawn. No one is out. Peacocks and crows are causing a ruckus, as they should: it’s their appointed task.

Time for me to do what God intends for me.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Food-wise, it’s an uncontroversial statement.

But the mind? The idea sometimes easy to accept but hard to swallow.

I am better off without social media, without television, and all that they deliver. Calmer, for sure. Pretty much the only social media for me is YouTube at this point, and selected channels and topics only. Mindset stuff.

People might come around to the idea but it’s my experience that giving up Netflix or cable TV or Instagram or Twitter . . . people don’t understand that this is far more important than giving up Cheetos.

They are horrified by the prospect of losing the ability to see that episode of Law and Order for the third time. So they continue to eat mental poison.

Let’s extend the idea a bit further. The things around me. Physical objects. Are they moving me forward? Holding me back? Or merely barnacles attached to my hull?

Time for careful curation. Or . . . a purge. Curation is a word that gives room for half-assed effort in this context. Wholesale disposal is what I need. Some day I will be dead and will have none of this stuff. What’s the difference if I throw it away now?

What about people? Or to be more specific, what about the consciousness of the people around you? Consciousness or mindset cannot be distilled away from the body that encapsulates it, so we are talking about choosing the people around you.

I don’t see athletes surrounding themselves with slugs. I don’t see physics professors choosing to talk sports with a beer-filled Dodger fan in the right field bleachers.

Like attracts like.

Birds of a feather flock together.

Note how often you’ve seen two people walking down the sidewalk together. If one is slightly lumpy, so is the other. Clothing so often identical or at least close enough to rhyme.

That means if you want to change (and most people don’t) you are fighting gravity when you hang out with the wrong people.

I’m not particularly fit and I have a little roll of fat around my middle. I need to be around people who are fit. If I surround myself with fat people, I have to exert enough effort to fight myself forward to my goals and resist the gravitational pull of those around me. That’s why I go to the gym. I see role models there and perhaps will meet people of like mind there.

The idea extends as far as you want to go. But ultimately the Jim Rohn saying has to be respected: you are the average of the five people you are around most.

Just be sure to remember the idea that you a whole person contains many things great and many things awful.

Would I want to experience what Tiger Woods experienced as a child to reap the rewards he reaped? And look at those rewards—a mixed bag, at best.

That’s why envy is so poisonous. You want the mountain’s pinnacle without the rest of the mountain, or the effort of the climb. (And envy is looking outside of yourself, instead of looking within, to the Kingdom of God).

Nevertheless. Curate the collection of people around you. Allow for flaws, even as you are deeply flawed. Role models show you what to do . . . and what not to do.

The right people encourage, direct you towards your goals. They do this as much by silent example as by explicit instruction.

I saw this with my kids’ high school. It was default normal, expected, and approved to be smart and study hard. This means that the kids with less natural drive is would be pulled along by the current to achieve more than they otherwise would have achieved.

There were plenty of chuckle-heads and dumb adolescent stunts, as you would expect. But I think almost all of the kids (not just mine) did a bit better than their default ability because of their surroundings. And surroundings means people, not the buildings.

But beware. Don’t think you’re going to be the Savior and help everyone. You have seen where that leads. Horse/water/drink. You can only share, not shove. Don’t be a self-appointed bwana, recently arrived to civilize the savages. 🙂

And thoughts. Don’t allow poisonous thoughts to become rooted in your mind. Thoughts fly through and land all the time. No problem with that. Just don’t entertain them and let them rest. Move them out if they are unproductive. But that’s for another day. This is long enough already.