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What is the fuel that drives me forward? Here is an important but incomplete clue:

Anything that creates a private challenge and tests you to control it before it controls you.

Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable, by Tim Grover, p. 85.

Elsewhere in the chapter he notes that big time achievers crash across the line for their specific thing, without fear. That’s why big time achievers so often experience scandals. (And, at least outwardly, they don’t seem to care about scandals. Cf Bill Clinton.)

Not that I want scandals. I care deeply about living the good life, as better described by Marcus Aurelius and others.

But Marcus Aurelius clearly was a big time achiever. He had something driving him, with positive output and results for the man himself. Clearly one can achieve massively without scandal, for whatever definition of “achieve” you choose.

The brain is noisy today. It is quite a change from yesterday. One obvious reason: less sleep last night. When I sleep well I’m in better shape mentally. Make a note to self about that, will ‘ya? Something to work on!

I’m reading Marcus Aurelius and everything seems so trite. “Yeah, yeah, I know that.” Except I don’t know that because I’m not doing that.

I’m rehearsing speeches and conversations in my head—and they will never happen. But in my head, in these imaginary conversations, I sure sound wise. People look up to me because I’m so wise.

Constructing this facade is all for puffing up my ego.

Stop with the rehearsals.

Use the method you have used a million times before and will use a million times again: stop talking to yourself and start talking to God (in your head so people don’t think you’re psycho!). “Hey God, here I go, yapping in my head to myself about how wonderful I am and how much I know and how people should love me more. Help me out, here, please.”

Remember the Jackson Browne song and the line in it. “Get up and do it again.” The title of the song is The Pretender. Get up and do it again, but do the right thing again and again and again.

And it works. All of a sudden I’m thinking about what I should be thinking about, doing what I should be doing, thinking about the person in front of me instead of what the person in front of me thinks about me.

Maybe this is what the Carpenter is talking about with that admonition. “Pray without ceasing.”

Here is the first verse of The Pretender. See how it sets a scene in just a few words. I know those houses. I know that packed lunch, in real life and spiritually. I can’t listen to the song anymore; it cuts too deeply.

I’m going to rent myself a house

In the shade of the freeway

Gonna pack my lunch in the morning

And go to work each day

And when the evening rolls around

I’ll go on home and lay my body down

And when the morning light comes streaming in

I’ll get up and do it again

Amen.

Say it again

Amen.

The Pretender, by Jackson Browne

Say a prayer for the Pretender. I am a pretender.

I keep coming back to this comment by Harry Callahan. Important important important.

Memory of long ago when I started down my professional path and was tempted by the high risk, high reward (if you’re lucky) shiny path. An older, wiser man in the same profession told me I had to know what I was: a “bet it all” personality or “slow and steady”.

Even me as a dim bulb young lost person knew who I was. I wanted the high payoff but couldn’t tolerate the risk. I also knew the slow and steady path would pay off handsomely, because I had the older, wiser man in front of me as an example.

I doubled down on the slow and steady, and here I am, reaping the rewards.

It works the other way, too. Know who you are and see if who you are is slowing you down. I have been blinded by one of my skills, and now realize it is slowing me down.

Be careful that your biggest assets don’t become your biggest liabilities.

But you can only have those realizations when you know who you are.

Reality laughs. Now I have a clue about why, in a certain activity, I have been stymied. I assumed I should be using my biggest asset. Nope. It’s holding me back.

What follows coheres with what went before. Not like a random catalogue whose order is imposed upon it arbitrarily, but logically connected.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.45. (Gregory Hays translation).

And I am not the connector, the producer. I do not have this power.

At best I can be the sower who goes out to sow. I laid the seed. Perhaps applied water. Everything else happened without me.

Think of this in business and maybe you won’t think that you’re so damned important.

Again with Freedom.to. The old saying is “God did for me what I could not do for myself.” The same is true for a simple piece of software. Freedom keeps me away from the hellseeds of the internet, because I am not yet strong enough to do so myself.

Daily, I set the blocklist. I could set up a repeating schedule but it’s better for me to do it daily. The simple action helps me remember myself.

At some point I will not need Freedom. I know this is true because I see websites on my list that used to consume my attention, and now they are meh. In time, I will be able to take other websites or leave them, indifferent. Training wheels, for now.

Admit weakness, take action. Not necessarily to become strong so you can resist evil, not so you can banish evil entirely, but strong so you can make the evil irrelevant to you.

I simply, for instance, drink black coffee. Through time and repetition I weaned myself from added sugar, then added cream. Now the presence of sugar and cream is as relevant to me as the presence of salt and pepper. Don’t want, choose against.

Admit it, though. Today you need help from software.

Yes I do, and I’m grateful for it and the people who brought it to my attention.

. . . why Marcus Aurelius comes back to the same thought, the same topic, the same idea. Again and again and again.

Because he needs to re-examine the thought in that moment. And so he writes it down.

Daily, hourly reminders. I need them, too. My head can go to hell in an instant. These reminders help me return to heaven.

I remembered the Funkadelic song today. Gave it a listen again. It’s still great.

Who would have expected this message from George Clinton? I know someone who was a huge P-Funk fan in the early 70s. She flatly won’t take the man seriously. That he would have spiritual perception seems preposterous to her.

Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts.

Preposterous or not, there it is. Right in front of you.

Good thoughts bring forth good fruit

Bullshit thoughts rot your meat

Funkadelic, Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts

Worth listening to. And the song reminds me of the age-old question: do you disregard the art because of the artist? I think the answer is no.

Yesterday a decision was made.

Action has been taken. What was decided has become real.

Ever since I started using Freedom.to aggressively, my phone has become a blessing rather than a curse.

The Kindle app (to read) and the WordPress app (to write) mean this thing I carry around feeds me. I am reaching into my pocket less. If I’m standing in line somewhere, I stand in line. I don’t pull out my phone to do things.

I can and do listen to good books on my phone. (Taleb’s Incerto got a complete triple play recently. Going through it three times without a break? That’s a lot of Taleb).

I can and do listen to good podcasts, and I am now avoiding bad podcasts. One in particular had many, many gems, but I had to dial it down because of the (ahem) associated externalities (Scott Adams). How to think, good. The other stuff, eh, a bit much for me. Better to read his books. Right now the good podcast I’m tracking is The Warrior Poet.

I didn’t think I would get to the point where my phone was my servant. But here I am. Accomplished by saying no. Via negativa.

I really should set up an affiliate link to make some money off my constant reference to Freedom.to. But I won’t. Money is not why I’m here, doing this. Adding money to this activity will change it.

It’s hard, in the moment, to know why you’re pissed off. The more important thing is to stop being pissed off, because that state of mind is of no value.

But it’s easier said than done to go from mental uproar to tranquility just because you want to. I haven’t accomplished that skill yet, and I doubt I will ever get there.

The “why” question is usually fruitless, but here it can be useful. If you have convinced yourself of the Stoic perspective (within your control, outside of your control), build on that foundation to allow yourself to let go of the inner uproar.

Ask yourself why you’re angry, annoyed, etc.

If you identify an event outside of your control, then you have persuaded yourself and it’s easier to let go and return to equilibrium. You have already accepted the truth of the control/no control principle.

Epictetus, as usual:

Practise, then, from the very beginning to say to every disagreeable impression, ‘You’re an impression and not at all what you appear to be.’ Then examine it and test it by these rules that you possess, and first and foremost by this one, whether the impression relates to those things that are within our power, or those that aren’t within our power; and if it relates to anything that isn’t within our power, be ready to reply, ‘That’s nothing to me.’

Epictetus, Enchiridion, 1.5

I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s not. I’m not saying it’s instantaneous in effect. It’s not. My mind wants to chew on thoughts like a puppy gnaws on a bone.

Do it anyway. Use the realization that this is an “outside of your control” matter (the answer to “Why?”) as the trigger. Pull away from the disagreeable impressions, even if you have to pull away again, again, again, and again, for days or weeks on end.

Actually, I should revise my judgment of “not easy”.

It is easy to do. Listen to DJ Boring’s Winona. The track samples from an interview.

Winona Ryder is interviewed and says “It is difficult to be judged.” (Sample at 4:15). (Judgment by others is outside our control). She gives a brief vignette to illustrate how she was judged, erroneously as it turned out.

She also says “I can’t answer the real question. All I can tell you is it’s easy.” (Sample at 3:17). And that is truth. I can’t answer the real question, even though it’s my own question. I will be uncovering new questions until I die. All of the questions are as real as the previous one and the next.

All I can say, based on experience, is that it’s easy.

I can do. That’s easy. Let go as if you’re a maple tree releasing a single autumn leaf, and draw deeply from your roots for sustenance.

The hard part is to keep doing.