Yes, I need a bit of an energy boost. But mostly I need a Reason. I am sitting at a small table outside Starbucks, with a Purpose: drink coffee.
Maybe someday I will find a way to just sit and watch the parade. For no reason, with no purpose. Just sit.
Postscript: that was terrible coffee, Starbucks.
A couple of things happened today to make me go “Yay!” And a thing happened that could trigger a doomloop about the future if I let it. all of this at work.
Take the Yay. Focus on what you want more of.
The things I do that make me cringe . . . are revelations of coping mechanisms, self-protection behavior.
Protection from what?
Why did I burn my entire day yesterday, fucking around on the internet ‘n such, just to work frantically until midnight to ship an OK product that was behind schedule?
Uncover, discover, discard.
From @visakanv:
Often have to remind people:
no one is coming to give you the life you want
no one is secretly watching you closely and then throw you a surprise party with that outcome you dream about
you have to actively act every day to make your dream a reality
https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1525760456769478656?s=21&t=e6JfRAd-Qh0yUQmF-fENeQ
It’s Graham’s Killhouse Rules, for regular people.
Making a great product takes about 10x as much effort and energy as creating a mediocre product.
Making a fantastic product takes about 100x as much effort and energy.
You can tell instantly when you’re using a fantastic product. Everything about it hits your subconscious.
https://twitter.com/austen/status/1525708755869917184?s=21&t=e6JfRAd-Qh0yUQmF-fENeQ
100x. LFG.
Found on the internet: How To Avoid Playing God (An Early AA Pamphlet)
Working on self is a lifetime activity.
Too often we think this means going to talk to a therapist. I’ve done that, and it helped. So I’m not denying the importance of asking others for help. In fact, I think it is essential. The same brain that thought you into this pickle will not think you out of it. You must have external help.
The help must come from people. People can write books and by reading the books you lean new things and make changes to your life. Books have been essential for me. “The first thing to go is the reading,” Bob Anderson would say. Meaning that the maintenance of your spiritual condition must include, among other things, daily reading to keep you on The Path.
Or the help will come from actual real live talking and sharing with another person. This, too, is essential. I think rigorous self-honesty can only be built when you are willing, one tiny admission at a time, to be rigorously honest with another. Human being. And without rigorous self-honesty, you’re dead.
One easy path to growth—a trigger to get you into therapeutic action—is to start on a humble but necessary and useful task.
There is a @visakanv tweet out there somewhere saying decluttering projects or working on personal finance are (not his words, but this is the idea) a gateway or path to therapy, to uncovering what’s really going on. This is the old “uncover, discover, discard” game, isn’t it?
The Pathless Path contains a similar anecdote, where attention to finance helped Paul Millerd confront his underlying psychology about money. See pp. 134-137.
Moral of the story: any activity I choose to do, intended to make things “better”, will reveal reasons within me for why the situation became unacceptable to me in the first place.
I can’t declutter the house without revealing the truth about why it became cluttered in the first place. And once I confront that root cause, I can do something about it. I can confront the hidden dis-ease that caused the clutter in the first place.
Again, this comes from reading The Pathless Path.
If we don’t define “enough,” we default to more, which makes it impossible to understand when to say no.
The Pathless Path, page 133.
Given my current planning (for how to proceed with my business) this is life-level critical to remember.
Business planning defaults to growth, to more. More customers. More profit. More employees. These are the markers of accomplishment. They are the markers of externally-bestowed approval. Prestige.
Be extremely wary here. Fortunately I am going through a strategic planning process with a consultant. I am going to add this to the mix. What does the business do? What is my role in the business. The universe will give me whatever I want. I am not going to demand more. Or worse yet, blindly default into the more bucket.
This fragment of a thought is triggered by reading chapter 8 of The Pathless Path.
All of this discussion assumes that prestige is a Good Thing to pursue and value. That is a reasonable starting assumption: the feeling of having prestige gives (you hope) a feeling of well-being, satisfaction. Happiness. (Just writing those words flags how squishy they are, capable of almost infinite meaning from one person to the next. Take care that the words are not squishy and variable in your own head, dear Author. Otherwise you will be on an aimless path, not a pathless path.)
Paul Millerd’s starting definition seems to be:
Kevin Simler defines prestige as “the kind of status we get from doing impressive things or having impressive traits or skills.”
The Pathless Path, p. 119.
Prestige is status, the judgment of others. In this definition, Others decide that what we do or are is impressive, and think approvingly of us — because of what we do or are.
One way we get the approval of others is through credentials. You went to the right school, you work at the right company. Prestige is a signaling game, and the signal is indirectly transferred prestige. Harvard has prestige. You attended Harvard. Therefore you have prestige.
If you are alive, this is dust in your mouth. You, in your soul, know that you are the same person with and without the Harvard degree. To seek and get the approval of others for something that is not the essential you is a hollow, soul-corrupting achievement.
Meaning . . . Self, come into my office take a memo to self. Self, do not chase external markers of success. Credentials. Signals.
Not even as a marketing tool. Credentials are justified as a way to pad the resume with signals to future employers. Don’t chase external markers or signals even for such utilitarian reasons. You’re lying to yourself.
Chase a different type of prestige—a different approval of others. Chase the approval of having one other person say to you, unbidden, “Thank you. That helped.” In other words, seek the approval of unbidden gratitude.
To be precise: you will not be happy inside if you are counting on people gushing with gratitude. But if you help others in ways that are useful and valuable to them, the act of being useful to another human being will have in it the seeds of happiness and deep self-acceptance for you.
On page 123 of The Pathless Path, Paul Millerd starts to discuss discovering a different type of path: “recognition from other people who are passionate about ideas.”
That’s where I am in the book right now so I will stop this little essay right here.
Except.
I immediately connect his statement (“. . . passionate about ideas”) with the Dan Sullivan update to Marcus Aurelius’s ideas.
Dan talks about four types of people and their mentality or thought processes. They stair-step up from least enlightened to most capable of enlightenment. Or at least the possibility of enlightenment.
Just to make it easy, here is the passage from Meditations that is the precursor to Dan Sullivan’s repackaging of the concept:
Things ordinary people are impressed by fall into the categories of things that are held together by simple physics (like stones or wood), or by natural growth (figs, vines, olives …). Those admired by more advanced minds are held together by a living soul (flocks of sheep, herds of cows). Still more sophisticated people admire what is guided by a rational mind—not the universal mind, but one admired for its technical knowledge, or for some other skill—or just because it happens to own a lot of slaves.
But those who revere that other mind—the one we all share, as humans and as citizens—aren’t interested in other things. Their focus is on the state of their own minds—to avoid all selfishness and illogic, and to work with others to achieve that goal.
Meditations, 6.14.
Marcus Aurelius thus divides the minds of men into:
Dan’s remix is more accessible and understandable to me. That makes sense given the year that I live in.
Back to The Pathless Path. Let’s wrap this up.
I don’t know where Paul Millerd is going with his discussion of prestige, of external approval.
But for me, happiness is in the St. Francis Prayer. It’s in the feeling I get when I do something useful for someone else. I know it’s good. I know it’s useful. It’s nice — but not essential — to get positive feedback from others.
A simple example. A well-done slide deck makes me happy. I know that I have really explained something as well as I can within the constraints of time and the physical aspects of the medium.
Today is a good day.
Go with the flow. The path of least resistance. Let gravity do your work for you. Etc.
This is one of the hidden secrets of getting something done or making a change.
The best way to reliably get what you want is to put yourself in the reference class where getting what you want is the median outcome.
https://twitter.com/spakhm/status/1525533954698354692?s=21&t=vh9QgRZU9XN6Ui–Wccwbw
This demonstrably works. It has worked in my life. The single biggest change that I made can be attributed to the simple fact that I stayed close to people who had made the transformation that I sought. You know what I’m talking about — the change that started over 3 decades ago and continues to manifest even now.
Here’s something to do (speaking to you random internet people who might accidentally come across this post someday). When you’re out on the street, watch pairs of people.
More often than not, they dress alike.
More often than not, you will see two fat people together. Or two fit people together. You will rarely see a fit person with a fat person.
Just watch. It’s not universal but it happens far more frequently than you would initially guess. I have joked about this with my wife as we have been out on the street.
If you are fat and want to be fit, go stick yourself in a group of fit people. Do what they do, get what they get. You will feel weird, but they won’t. When they see you are serious, they will help you, encourage you. Soon you will start to be fit, like them. you are joining their church, after all. Why wouldn’t they welcome you?
“Do what I did and you will get what I got.”
On Twitter I have deliberately put myself into a tiny, tiny circle of people who have mindsets I admire. Already I can see how I have change my approach to life.
Specific example: practicing good reply game, as promoted by @visakanv. I have found myself in conversations (real world, e.g., in business) where I am irritated at the other person’s perverse, obstinate idiocy. I wake up and start practicing good reply game and . . . magically the conversation flows, we get results, and the other person isn’t the utter fool I previously thought him/her to be. There are some genuinely good ideas there, as often as not. I would have missed all that.
You can surround yourself with people you know in real life (that’s the best) or lurk on the internet. Or books by long-dead authors are good. Too.
But people, in the flesh, are best as a peer group.
This reminds me. Now that my surgery is fully healed it’s time to go be a gym rat again and woke up some of that gym energy and pick up on that bro science.
Also, for the first time in my life I am actively seeking business partners. Up to now I didn’t feel worthy. I felt judged. I felt less than. Now I am deliberately assembling the people around me for optimal mindset. It’s easier to be cheerful when you’re with cheerful people rather than mopey people.
Tools I’m using:
Mostly I am probing, looking for people with an irresistible, existential yearning in their souls. Something that’s driving them forward to greatness—however they define greatness. Couple that to an ancient morality, a deep keel that makes them unsinkable in any storm. They know what’s right. They can’t help but love the voyage.