Month: May 2022

I am liberally using Freedom to lock myself out of Twitter. Some day I will ignore the corrosive stuff without assistance. Now, I need assistance.

I am in the midst of the 75 Hard program again. My life works better when I do the simple, daily tasks that it requires.

Specifically, I am in Phase 2 of the year-long arc of the program, which means accomplishing 30 days in a row of the standard requirements:

• Two 45 minute workouts every day
• A progress picture every day
• Drink one gallon of water every day
• Maintain a diet every day
• No cheat meals, no alcohol, every day
• Read 10 pages of a nonfiction book every day

Failure to hit the mark on any one of these means you reset the clock to Day 1.

It’s the little things that trip me up. I find that fascinating.

At Day 16 I didn’t take a picture, because I kept telling myself I would do it when I got home from the second workout. I didn’t. I walked through the door an completely forgot. (Now, the picture is the first thing I do in the morning when I wake up).

Start at Day 1.

Today at Day 21, I picked up the book I am reading, and from the way I organize my bookmarks I could tell that I had read 8 pages the day before—not 10. Clearly I had spaced out. I probably got up in the middle of my reading to get a cup of coffee, or maybe had a conversation with my wife. Whatever happened, I did not remember to go back after the interruption to complete the reading.

Start at Day 1.

What’s really interesting is that I don’t feel a sense of failure or shame at resetting the clock. I didn’t fail. I learned something interesting about myself.

Life is not a contest. Life is not a race. Life is not a series of accomplishments where you ring the bell to announce success—in the sense that success means “finished.”

One side of the coin says “finished” and the same side of the same coin says “starting.”

There is no other side of the coin.

Anyway. What did I learn about myself here?

1. Look at how I don’t even care about the arbitrary Day 1 stuff. I know what needs to be done, I do it. Yay me.
2. I am easily distracted. So have less shit going on, because that means fewer distractions. Say “no” a lot.
3. The big, hard stuff is easy. It’s the small stuff. Sweat the small stuff. Love the small stuff.

The still, small voice has spoken. Listen to what it says.

I did not know of this man until after his untimely death. Why are people talking about him?

Thank you — to a man I never met and will never meet — for telling the truth.

This just goes to show that giants walk amongst us today. Marcus Aurelius delivered wisdom almost 2,000 years ago, and Kevin Samuels delivered this gem 3 years ago.

Of the roughly 8 billion people alive now, how many others there must be, just like Mr. Samuels. This is a wonderful world.

Speaking about myself here . . . .

I am a problem solver. If something is “wrong” I want to leap in and fix it. That’s my brain.

That’s my job, too: people walk in and say “I have a thorny problem, please fix it.” I fix it. They give me money. Pavlov would be proud: it makes me want to solve more problems.

But! Thar be dragons.

It’s not a universal good to “solve” a visible “problem.”

What might look like a problem might in fact be a surface manifestation of a deeper condition. The deeper condition might be good or bad. Altering the surface manifestation might have a feedback impact on the deeper condition.

And the “problem” you see might even be a “problem” here but, transported elsewhere, would be a “solution.” Maybe a solution to something you haven’t even thought about yet.

My problem-solving method always starts with brainstorming all the ways I can imagine to solve the problem. But what an act of arrogance that is! Do I really believe that the four ideas I have are the only options available? The universe is far more varied than that. There may be 104 or 4 million things I can do. That’s why Occam’s Razor is a useful heuristic but not an absolute truth.

So I see things that I think are isolated problems that are not isolated. They have hidden causal effects in multiple directions. Unidirectional, multi-directional causality. I see problems that are in fact themselves solutions. I see a necessarily tiny subset of actions as the only possible response to problems.

I should just give up. It’s hopeless, right?

No.

We work. We make things “better,” within our best understanding of “better.” This is what it means to be human. And then we die. In other words, the urge to fix stuff, make things better (even if temporarily) is what we do. So . . . LFG.

Just temper your arrogance. you cannot know everything.

This is where the Lindy Principle comes into play. Be especially careful when confronting ancient problems. A quick and obvious (to you) action that will magically resolve a centuries-old condition is unlikely to solve the problem you see. If you have an easy, obvious solution, odds are that it has been tried over time and failed. That’s the Lindy Principle: things that are flawed will break over a long time period because time and random probability will deliver stressors that will break it. And something that has survived a long time has had untold stressors thrown at it, without breaking.

In short, if your brilliant idea is so brilliant, it would have been discovered already. As a rule, use that to tamp down your ego. Yes, astonishing breakthroughs happen. And yes in retrospect they seem obvious and simple. But . . . why is it your idea that falls within the category of epoch-changing intellectual achievement?

I guess this rambling rant can be summarized into three bullet points:

• There are no solutions, only trade offs.
• Be humble. You’re not that fucking brilliant.
• Help your fellow man make his life a little bit better. And the way to figure that out is to ask him—don’t imagine you know better than him.

And also this exercise is why the quest to write 1,000 blog posts is useful—regardless of the quality of the output. Publish, don’t polish.

1. No drugs or alcohol.
2. Family.
3. No debt.
4. God.

These propositions make me an outcast or a rebel in my home town. Or at least I’m unusual, therefore slightly suspect.

I’m not quite debt-free. I have the cash to pay off the mortgage now. But it has a low, low interest rate and . . . well, look at what the Washington DC crowd has done to inflation. There is no need to throw a lump of cash at the mortgage. Better to invest the cash elsewhere. With normal installments the mortgage will be paid off soon enough: in 31 months. I’m not sweating this.

The real battle for a good life is hand-to-hand combat with self. Do I live with a contented, peaceful, friendly, accepting mind? It is possible to live in a self-created hell, even clean and sober, free of economic pressures, and surrounded by loving family.

The solution is God. The Kingdom of God is within. Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven. Etc.

The good life is not made with externals. My car does not make a good life. The good life is a good interior life. A spiritual life. (That is why number 1—no drugs or alcohol—is essential. First, remove the impediments to clear thinking. Then and only then can you hear the messages you need to hear).

And that, dear reader, is where I am now: seeking God daily, hourly.

“Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men.”

― Miyamoto Musashi

It’s a good day to be moving fast.

I remember that line . . . or something close to it . . . from a poem in the Cal State Fullerton student paper sometime in the early 1970s, I think. Maybe it was a special publication of one of the academic departments — not the newspaper. But whatever the publication, I remember holding newsprint. My mother was doing a Master’s degree in music, and would bring CSUF publications home from time to time.

I don’t remember the rest of the poem . . . maybe riding a horse on the beach? Anyway. “It’s a good day to be moving fast” has stuck with me ever since.

I wonder how that single line has affected my life? To the same effect, Fatboy Slim’s “Push the Tempo” is a part of my mental playlist. How often I have heard that song in my head, pushing me on.

Am I driven, and therefore hear and remember messages that reinforce that tendency? Or did these messages create a driven man?

Yes.

The name of this website means something different to me now. Originally, I picked it because I could see all of “them” “doing it wrong” and suffering the consequences. Reality laughed at them because they reaped exactly what they sowed, and were shocked. “What do you expect?” laughed Reality.

The website name, in other words, came from a feeling that I had: smug superiority. I am very smart, etc. Clearly, that is false. I know very, very little. Every single person on the planet is smarter in some dimension than I am. Humility is in order.

Now, I am coming around to a different view. When you are properly aligned with reality, life is easy. When you are cross-wise with reality, life is hard.

Reality Laughs. It means something else now. When my mindset is right, Reality says “Hey, you get the joke! Life is pretty good, isn’t it?”

Reality laughs with me. Not at me. Reality is not laughing at “them”—the people I judged (and unfortunately I still judge them, so this is a work in progress for me). They just don’t yet understand cause and effect. They will continue stepping on the metaphorical rake until they do.

And when they realize that stepping on the metaphorical rake is part of the joke, they will laugh . . . and change.

Life is good. Reality laughs with me. We laugh together.

Seth Godin’s Linchpin is wonderful. I have it in print and in the Kindle version.

I discovered that the Kindle version isn’t the same as the print version.

Here’s a screen shot of an excerpt from the Kindle version:

Now look at this picture of the print version. There are three items in the list.

The universe explodes with possibilities when you read the third item on the list in the print version.

3. Start your own gig. Understand that an organization filled with linchpins is itself indispensable. Hire accordingly.

Linchpin, page 202 (in print, and not in the fucking Kindle version that Amazon fucked up).

I no longer trust Kindle.

Things are a distraction. They diffuse focus. Sell, give away, or trash as many things as needed to give yourself focus.

We have a shelf of cookbooks in the kitchen. Maybe one of them is used once a year. By keeping them, unused, we are lying to ourselves. We are telling ourselves that these books are important—when they are not. We are telling ourselves that we are cooks experimenting with new creations—when we are not.

These unused books reveal other lies we are telling ourselves, too. They present a facade to visitors: we are gourmands, skilled in the kitchen. I’m sure I could think of other lies we are telling ourselves by keeping the cookbooks. I will stop here.

Throw the cookbooks in the trash or donate them to Goodwill. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we tell ourselves the truth about ourselves. And the act of tossing books in the garbage will be an self-affirmation of who we are.

I am using “we” here because there are two of us in the house.

Practicing what I preach, I threw away a bag of buckwheat flour that has been sitting, unused, for about a year. Go me. I’m not going to toss out cookbooks until I get my wife’s buy-in.