In your own lives, remember that committing to a “good enough” plan, and executing it with zeal and ardor, is better than swerving all over life’s roads searching endlessly for the perfect solution and abandoning yesterday’s plan. Choosing a simple path and grinding away while tuning out distractions is the way to achieve most anything.
amplifiedbeing.com
Woke up a bit earlier than usual today. Ran a bit longer than usual today.
Bangin’.
Let’s pretend. Today’s visualization is me, a family man 200 years ago. It’s 1821 and we’ve trekked west to Ohio or Indiana. Found some land. Decided to stop and build a life. Right here.
Work hard. Every day. Monotonous. Taxing. Sweaty, dirty. No end of work in sight. I clear a small patch of forest for a rough cabin and a garden to grow some food. Hah! There are 200 acres of trees and stumps and rocks yet to clear.
Be that man. Pounding away at whatever needs to be done. Day after day, winter and summer, with just determination, sweat, and simple tools. Relentless. Resilient. Resourceful.
Be that man today.
I need it.
America needs it.
I am feeling weak when I start to fantasize about things that are beyond my control and require assistance from the supernatural to achieve.
I do that a lot. I did it this morning on the dawn patrol. When I feel powerless and aggrieved I lapse into spinning fantastic yarns in my head about things that could only happen in fiction. Harry Potter-level fiction.
It’s because I’m feeling weak and inadequate. That’s when I imagine that I am endowed with magical powers. That’s when I feel righteous and I am the only person who can Right This Wrong.
Funny. As soon as I had that realization this morning and realized this was all made-up fantasy (as compared to real fantasy I guess!) my brain cleared and the rest of the walk was peaceful.
Let’s go back to square one, and remember Bob’s advice: stop talking to yourself and start talking to God.
I am the same inadequate, powerless person I am mid-fantasy. I always will be. And the fantasy I create in my mind always makes me feel worse. Why is that? Why do I feel unhappy in my imagined triumphs accomplished effortlessly by wielding unimaginable personal power?
At least have some inner peace, eh? Drop the fantasy. Maybe that inner peace will be a resource that I will be grateful to have cultivated at some future date.
Ask not to whom the ambulance speeds. It speeds to thee.
Here’s another tell. If you’re negotiating with yourself, if you’re explaining something to yourself . . . you’re avoiding something you should do.
Day 71 of 75 Hard and I will start at Day 1 with my wife as soon as this cycle is complete.
The power of repetition. I’m doing the same damn thing over and over, and it has a visible impact.
What’s 75 more days to me? Nothing, in the big scheme of things. Everything, in reality.
Repetition + monotony = accomplishment.
From Tiny Habits:
He is talking of change in the context of families or communities. Why not apply that philosophy to customers of your business?
Day 101 of the 75 Hard program. I’m walking before dawn as I type this.
Onward. Let’s keep this streak alive.
Incidentally, ignore the debating society. From the moment I woke up (and even now, as I’m out, walking, in the dark) my brain started negotiations against the proposition of Going Outside.
Hah. Silly brain is silly. We walk before dawn.
If I am afraid, I am afraid.
Don’t tell me my fear is unfounded, improbable, imaginary. That’s a losing proposition and it’s not going to help me. I’m afraid and now you’re telling me I’m stupid? Fuck you.
No. The way to deal with fear is with bravery. Even the tiniest act of bravery is enough.
The fear of financial insecurity is damn near universal. The amount of money someone actually has will not assuage the fear of possible future lack. I have seen it with people who couldn’t possibly spend all their money during their lifetime, even if you handed them gasoline and a match to help burn money.
Here is the tiny act of bravery I used, again and again and again. It banished the fear and got me started to having a decent emergency cash reserve.
Here is how I did it: every time I was afraid that I would experience financial catastrophe, I would open the bank app on my phone and move $5 from my checking account to my savings account. I would immediately feel better.
Why? I’m guessing that this was a visible signal to my brain that—contrary to my imagination and all the possible calamities that might befall me—I was in fact so financially strong that I could take money out of the day-to-day bank account and put it into permanent savings. My brain ignored the amount and focused on the action.
Incidentally, the savings account balance at which my fear dissipated was embarrassingly small: $1,000. It just goes to show that the fear was unreal, imagined. But you couldn’t have told me that while I was in the middle of the fear.
But if you had told me about the tiny act of bravery ($5 to a savings account in a completely different bank, hard to access), I would have listened.
I don’t know where the idea came from. As near as I can tell, I just spontaneously started doing it.
Today, I did a transfer to savings, just like the old days. A bravery transfer. More money this time (a lot more), same principle. I am brave.
Working hard might get you an A in school, but no amount of hard work will compensate for a service that doesn’t help solve real customer problems.
The Fail-Safe Solopreneur, by Darren C. Joe. Page whatever (I’m reading it on the Kindle app).
I need to hear this. I relish the grind and kinda subtly like to flex on the Work Harder Mentality. This is true for my approach in business and personal/spiritual affairs.
Hard work is necessary but not sufficient for success.
Success does not have a single cause, whether it is hard work or something else. “I worked hard for 20 years and look at what happened.” Success has a swarm of causal elements, some visible and some not.
Yet hard work is a factor that is within my control. Other causal elements are not. Therefore, channeling my inner Stoic I know that I must put in the effort. Max it out. I don’t mean maximum effort in terms of peak performance. I mean maximum effort in terms of optimal performance. What can be sustained over time? Do that.
There is another causal element within my control, and that is the mindset element. Again, channeling my Inner Stoic, ask what is in my control and what is not? That’s all I have to do. Well, I have to notice it and behave accordingly.
Working hard now (or not) pays dividends (or drills holes in the hull of your boat) later.
Yesterday at the gas station the guy in front of me was buying a Gatorade and $40 of lottery tickets. He simply could not do the mental math to compute how many tickets he would get at $2 per ticket, even though the gas station cashier kept telling him.
He skipped basic arithmetic in elementary school. I think it is also reasonable to assume that he did not take the effort to understand statistics and the improbable likelihood of a winning lottery ticket. His life would have been improved more with $40 of gas in his tank.
The compounding effects of being soft, of choosing the easier path, of lack of hard work as a young man put him where he is today. Lessons are everywhere. I learned one yesterday at the gas station.
That scares me into working harder today so I can reap the compounding rewards tomorrow. Podcasts and audio books while I’m running, not music. No TV, no social media, no movies. Stuff like that.
What is the compounding effect of reading Meditations 50 times? 100 times? Every time I read it there is something subtly different on the page. How did that happen?
Work harder. But don’t treat hard work as a single cause for any result. Do the footwork and let go of the results.
But work harder.
Let’s go. Stay on The Path.
Walked a block to loosen up, then ran.
The only thing holding me back from running every morning is my head. “I don’t feel like it.”
I’m going to allow the “I feel like running” feeling to grow naturally, a la Tiny Habits.