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Your perception is not reality.

To everyone else, you are a stranger at best.

For most people.

But frustration and failure and attitudes. I am frustrated. I judge this event to be a failure.

Assuming that I am not one of those weird people who say “yeah, pain, bring it on!” how do I reframe my perspective and use the same events as energy sources to redouble my efforts? Ju-jitsu in other words.

Somewhere in here is understanding the crawl walk run process and understanding and liking being on that journey.

Think of physics and ammunition. Higher mass in the bullet vs velocity of the bullet is the trade-off.

What’s the trade-off in life? I think mobility and optimizing for mobility (being agile if you like that word) is a useful starting strategy. Later, you can switch to mass.

Be a ninja. Then buy the tanks later when ninja tactics are unsuitable.

How will you act?

Episode 23 of Ultraworking. Episode 1 of Warrior Poet’s podcast.

Consider first the idea from Ultraworking. Ray Dalio says if you are an owner you have to build systems full of people. You are one of those people. Think of yourself as You1 doing the work and You2 bring the outside observer and judge of You1’s performance.

Using this metric, You2 finds many shortcomings in You1’s performance, where “you” is me.

Then the idea of Decision Zombies for Warrior Poet. Is You2 a zombie favoring intellectual completeness and risk avoidance over action?

Survey says “yep”.

Question your default actions, that is. And this must start with awareness of your default thinking and actions.

How to do this?

So do it.

Edit (later): done. Much relief. Why do I still avoid certain situations? Have I not learned that showing up and telling the truth is liberating? It has happened so many times that you’d think I’d change behavior. Nope, not yet.

In the usual telling, the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one thing.

Maybe the hedgehog acts on one thing and the fox acts on many things.

Idea from Warrior Poet’s Hobbitses episode.

Everything has a price.

If you want something, you must pay for it.

Envy is a weird emotion in that way. Someone has something you want. He paid the price for it, and you didn’t.

What about luck? Sometimes what someone else has (and I don’t) is a matter of luck. He was lucky, I was unlucky.

True. There are a billion reasons why things happen, most of them outside our control. What we call luck is the cumulative effect of all of those forces that are invisible to us or visible but beyond our control.

Luck, in a way, is like Arthur Clark’s magic. Any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic. So too with luck. Luck is just opaque causation.

And even though luck evens out in the long run, sometimes it is a every long run.

“Though the mills of God grind slowly; Yet they grind exceeding small;Though with patience He stands waiting, With exactness grinds He all.” Longfellow, who was only one of an unknown host of people who have used this analogy through all of recorded history.

Someone could have luck for his entire life, while I am unlucky for my entire life.

And so? What is in your control? It is there that the price is paid. By paying with attention. By paying with time. These are the only currencies I know that will be accepted.

Ignore luck. If someone has a big house and you don’t, that’s either luck or him paying in time and attention to achieve that big house. If he paid with attention to get a big house and you paid with attention to have a happy family (luck existing equally between the two of you) who got the better end of the deal?

Even then, maybe he got the big house and the family, and I just got the family. Not so bad a result, is it? And anyway, it’s not in my control whether someone gets the big house.

Ignore luck. Or better yet, manufacture luck in the pmarca or @naval sense. But after that, pay the price in time and attention for the things that matter.

Really, too, the things that matter are the ephemeral, incorporeal. Ideas, love, peace, freedom. These are what to buy with your time. Wealth will be a byproduct.

But that’s a topic for another day.