Month: July 2021

Edit everything out of your life that takes you away from achieving your goals.

There is so much buried in that idea.

First, you have a goal.

Second, the goal matters so much that you’re willing to be clear-eyed and remove any obstacle between you and that goal.

I did this in a small way today in the way I set up my work day. Anything inconsistent with my immediate goal today has been eliminated. It’s not hard to do, once you know what you want to do. Metaphorically chisel away all of the marble that isn’t shaped like David, and there you are. Simple, really. (Heh.)

I’m feeling great. Exercise continues. Physical. Focus continues to improve. Ruthless pruning continues. Mental. Reading and writing. Spiritual. Interaction with others. Social.

One millimeter at a time, I move forward.

They have authors who profess to be experts—because they did research and wrote up a book and published it.

Give me the practitioners, not the preachers. Or as Dan and Ian say for the Tropical MBA podcast (a glorious exception to my complaint), someone who is a practitioner-preacher. 50/50. Someone who has the experience and knows how to express it.

Someone who can communicate, like a preacher, and communicates actual, personal experience and lessons learned. That’s who I want to hear from.

I love Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom podcast. But he has too many preachers and too few practitioner-preachers. I’m listening to an episode now and as soon as I finish typing this rant I’m deleting the episode.

. . . unless you change.

Yes I’ve probably posted this before.

It’s doubly true right now, this moment. For me, for family members. For you.

Start now. Do something. Do something different.

Fucking right fucking now. Now now.

Move. Move tiny, but move.

Here is what I know, from personal experience, if you want to change your life. These are the boring, accurate, and productive lessons that I have learned.

If you want to make a change in your life:

• Don’t think. Use someone else’s ideas for a while. Your most brilliant ideas and insights, coupled with all of the energy and willpower you could muster, applied over and over again, put you to the jackpot you’re in right now. And trust me—you poured a lot of energy and willpower into this adventure you call your life, and look at the payoff. Kinda pathetic, no? It’s because of your ideas.
• Aim low. Extremely modest goals. Embarrassingly small. It took me forever to hear it. Now I hear and see it everywhere. Jordan Peterson says “aim low.” The 75 Hard program is working for me because I aimed low. “Follow a diet” is one of the 75 Hard tasks. My “diet” is no frozen yogurt, no ice cream. Silly, small, but this has an immense impact.
• Start doing. I use the word “doing” because action is the key. Your brain will get smarter as it watches you achieve tiny increments based on someone else’s thoughts and ideas. Your brain is not going to get smarter based on implementing your own ideas. Action. Action. Action. Action. Extremely modest action is better than ambitious action. Personally I think that —at this stage—ambitious action is worse than no action. Ambition coupled with failure (because you set your goal too high) is a mindkiller.
• Don’t stop doing. That’s the key to the 75 Hard challenge for me. There is no finish line in life. Every day I show up and report for duty and do my modest 75 Hard things. It’s the same as the “90 in 90” advice I got early on. Even after the 90 I kept going.

This sounds like Grindset instead of Mindset, but it isn’t. This isn’t a grind, it’s freedom.

“Discipline equals freedom” according to Jocko Willink. He is right. The part everyone misunderstands is the discipline part. Everyone wants to start a new life the way I started my Economics major in college: by enrolling in Intermediate Macroeconomics. No. You start at the beginning. And sometimes you start even lower than that. It might be necessary to relearn high school algebra, for instance. Find bedrock and start there.

I think everyone gets discouraged looking at a Jocko Willink or a David Goggins. How can I possibly measure up to those examples?

I can’t. But I can measure up to myself, my yesterday self.

Those two started small, according to their definitions of small. (Their definitions of small look like mountains to me, but my perspective is not their problem.)

But they started. And they didn’t stop. Take that inspiration away from their examples with your own life. Start doing and don’t stop doing. Don’t focus on what they did. Just that they did something and kept doing it.

Start small, and be willing to stay small for a long, long, long time.

If you stay on The Path, you will someday realize that small is your lot in life, forever.

Every morning is Day 1. The horizon is always far away, whether you are crawling, walking, or running towards it.

A different take on The Golden Key, from A New Pair of Glasses, page 54.

The Golden Key to this thing called life is rigorous self-honesty. Rigorous self-honesty. Why? Because we have a monitor within us. We didn’t put it there, and we can’t dislodge it. The religious call it conscience. (This is another thing I don’t understand—don’t know anything about it.) I call it God. God in me, as me, is me. I’m not God, but God is me.

The way I understand it is the way he describes the three words—God, good, life—as synonymous. That’s earlier in the book. These words all describe the same thing.

When I consider my livingness (I sit back and perceive myself as a living, conscious organism) I look at that attribute of “alive” as being the God in me. All I have to do is say to myself “I am alive” and I know I am infused with God in me.

Infinitely greater than I am, because He’s all of you, as well as me.

Look at what happens to my view of people around me when I notice that they are alive, too. God is in them, too.

Not different from, or other than, or apart from, but a part of. I am consciously aware of the living presence of the Almighty.

Don’t sweat the Christian phraseology. Focus on the absolute destruction of that feeling of apartness, aloneness, difference.

So the Golden Key to this thing called life is rigorous self-honesty. The pattern is right here. When I perform according to the best I know, the pattern’s right here; it’s not in the mountain, it’s not in the temple, it’s not in Jerusalem, it’s in your own mouth, that you might know it and do it. When I perform according to the best I know there seems to be a nod of approval from the universe, and they call that “peace of mind.”

That’s is. Right there. You don’t have to be perfect, you don’t have to know it all. You just have to give it what you have right now, to the best of your ability. Bob would say “if you only have 4% today but you give it 100% of that 4%, that’s good.”

When I perform less than my best the ol’ sausage grinder’s right here, too, and it starts chewing me up: “Uh Oh Chuck, why’d you do it, why’d you do it?”

I know that sausage grinder recrimination feeling only too well.

The only way I can get rid of it is to see it for what it is and decide to do better, with the Grace of God. And it disappears, and I’m back in the King’s Row.

There is the self-honesty. Bob used to say that when you’re in the ditch your only job is to get out of the ditch. This is how you get out of the ditch. Rigorous self-honesty. See that you didn’t do your best, admit it, and get back on track.

To keep our priorities where they belong, this is the great secret to this thing called life: rigorous self-honesty. And the pattern is right here within me and within you.

Not on topic, but interesting to me.

This site started on October 9, 2020. It’s now 9 months later.

I enabled Jetpack stats on May 1, 2021.

Current stats show only one occasional visitor, and I know who that is. He know about this site because I told him.

I have only told one other person (outside my family) that this site exists, and he has never looked at the site — he told me so.

Up to today, I have made 457 posts. That’s more than 50/month.

What does this tell me? Organic SEO is ignoring me.

And it’s glorious. It’s almost as if I am invisible in the world and I can do or say anything I want.

I didn’t want this to be an Wildly Successful Internet Project with heavy traffic, and I still don’t have that intention.

This is a site for me to work out my thinking, for my own benefit. It’s hard to know what I really think and believe. Reading good books and typing out my thoughts slowly, with my thumbs, on an iPhone — well, that helps me See. That’s a deliberate initial cap on that word.

If you (whoever you are) get some benefit, so much the better. If the universe ignores this site, I am not harmed in the slightest.

The only harm to befall me would be to my ego, and anonymity is a tool to intentionally keep my ego in check. The other tool to keep my ego and selfishness in check is to resolutely refuse to make this a commercial endeavor.

In posting here, I seek no money, no glory. I intend to happily live my life, doing what God wants me to do. For fun and for free.

For instance, I drew the plans for every market that I put in. I drew the plans for all my clients with my own hands. Laid them out, put the departments where they should be and allotted the space to them. I put the back rooms where they should be and allotted the space according to the operation, whether the man had his own warehouse or twice-a-week deliveries from somewhere else. I spotted all the plumbing and wiring that it took to operate the thing. Then we gave it to the architect, who in collaboration with the builders built a building around it and I built the fixtures that went in it. Then the operator put some canned goods and some meat in there and had a store. But that store came out of my head before it was ever on paper. We think and ourselves become the thing we think about. That is the way it is with our lives. We duplicate the Creator in our little world. And that’s the reason it behooves us to know what this thinking apparatus is.

A New Pair of Glasses, page 42. Emphasis added.

After that passage he talks about cause and effect: you don’t plant radishes and expect cucumbers. “As a man thinketh . . .” etc. and he notes the coldness of the equation.

You know it intellectually; you know you can’t plant radishes and get cucumbers. But you think you are above the law and you try to do a little controlling job on your thinking. You’re not getting back what you want, but you think you can think your way into getting it.

A New Pair of Glasses, page 43. Emphasis in original.

So what is it that I want? The inexorable law is true to my own satisfaction: “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

To use the thinker machinery in me to think up a desire and think up the method for acquisition of that desire and to internally create the motive force to accomplish that desire and to achieve that desire and to declare mission accomplished for acquisition and full satisfaction of the desire . . . well, all of that is true because I have demonstrated that loop in my life, but it feels strangely incomplete, like one of those Escher infinite loop improbable drawings that initially seem to make sense yet on closer inspection obviously don’t.

Like the illustration troubles us (in a pleasing way—I like being unsettled by illogical logic in ways like M.C. Escher represented the world) I am troubled (but in an unsettling way) by the surface completeness of the infinite loop of an internal perpetual motion mental engine that thinks its way into creating a satisfactory life.

To quote the great philosopher Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is?” Am I a self-setting, self-accomplishing, goal-achieving self-propelled machine made of meat set on autopilot to careen through the universe? Poof! I appear at birth and then poof! I am gone. Is that all there is?

And I’m not joking by reference to Peggy Lee. (Actually, Lieber and Stoller, because they wrote the song.) Read the full lyrics to the song and tell me it’s not about the deepest human yearning of all: the search for meaning, for love. Here is the chorus:

Is that all there is?

Is that all there is?

If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing

Let’s break out the booze and have a ball

If that’s all there is

I’m flatlined in business.

I notice that I am interested in brand new projects and areas of business to look at.

This has happened before.

Stay on course. Focus on what we do now. Back to basics. The 75 Hard mentality – use it for the business and don’t chase the shiny.

I’m in a mastermind. I’m the laggard in the mastermind. Do. Not. Like.

I’m using the Cal Newport time block method of planning my days. Mostly it’s useful to show how chaotic and choppy my days are. That diagnosis is leading to slow and steady cures. That’s beside the point, though.

What’s interesting is that I do this on paper. And I followed the normal way of writing on paper: write between the lines, just as I was taught as a child. This always made it messy for showing a task that ran from 10 am to noon. Where do I write what I’m doing? How do I draw lines or make boxes to block out time?

I looked online and found an image. The elegant solution to this is to write the time right on top of the line.

All I had to do was override decades of ingrained habit. Write ON the line instead of between the lines.

There is a meta-lesson to learn here.

Conditions are the same today, yet my mind is not in the ditch.

The moral of the story: when you feel bleak, keep going with the routine. (Of course, this highlights the importance of having a routine.)

For me the routine consists of showing up at work every day, having a rough to do list that I start (and sometimes follow). Mostly it involves the 75 Hard process (at the moment, anyway, because I’m part-way through it). It’s the “no matter what” elements that are useful.

And the concept of “finish” and how important it is for your brain to see completion that it created.

I found the idea of finishing being important from this video I found on YouTube while I was watching people talk about 75 Hard. She talks about it starting at around 1:50.

https://youtu.be/w8p2NLbizsk