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Bravery as the antidote to fear

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.

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Avoid “just so” stories

I’m a simple man. I seek simple explanations. I strive for a simple life.

But simple does not mean singular. It is important to understand causation (avoid Nassim Taleb’s “Wet roads cause rain” fallacy). It is also important to avoid single-cause explanations for phenomena.

I see a lot of “we have millions of years of evolution baked into our DNA and thinking” used to explain behavior or suggest action. You should only eat meat because caveman. Your instinctive reactions come from your forefathers’ experiences on the African veldt. Etc. “Just so” and onto the exhortation du jour.

Weak.

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Dawn patrol, running

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.

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Working hard correlates with . . . what?

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.

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Dawn patrol

Again, this morning.

Boom. 💥

Momentum. Celebration.

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Failure is feedback

And more important, it is not feedback about YOU. It is feedback about your actions, your theories applied to business, interpersonal relationships, etc.

Don’t take it as personal criticism, because the person doesn’t know your insides. The critic only knows the outside actions you created.

So just say “Huh! That’s not creating a result I want. Let me try something else.”

And sometimes you listen to the critic and understand that there is something deeply wrong with them. Allow them to be flawed. Their perspectives are flawed and are unreliable feedback.

Now let’s talk about the real feedback: self talking to self and finding fault with self’s own performance.

Now the enemy is inside the walls. It’s harder to dismiss the commentary and self feels every barb of criticism.

But it’s still possible to stand back and just say “Huh! I will change things next time. I was wrong this time.”

While it is initially harder for self to admit fault to self, once that hurdle is passed things get easier. If self refuses to engage in recriminations and just gets to work doing things better, the ego is taken out of the game. Humility. Now the inner critic is trying to play tug-of-war with someone who has dropped the rope. The inner critic is powerless.

Not that you should take self-criticism seriously all the time, however. You are just as flawed as your external critics. You’re likely to flame yourself for something trivial just because you got a parking ticket or you didn’t get enough sleep or something like that.

Just look at what happened. Take note and get into action. Move on.

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Momentum (I have it)

Andy Frisella’s podcast 127. The two things champions know:

  • The importance of creating momentum.
  • The importance of sustaining momentum.

Strike while the iron is hot. And keep the iron hot.

This answered a question for me.

I have momentum. This morning I awoke naturally at 4:48 am. I was out the door at 5 am for the first walk of the day. I have been doing the dawn patrol for a couple of weeks now.

The momentum comes from the 75 Hard routine. Should I keep going after completing the challenge? Keep going with modifications? Stop? These were the questions I kept asking myself.

The obvious answer is obvious. Keep going for another cycle, without a break, without modification. It’s working, whatever “it” is. The emergent growth is spontaneous in ways I did not anticipate.

Don’t fuck with it. Don’t pull the “I deserve a reward” bullshit. Don’t “I will keep doing this but change this or that.” NO.

Remember what Al said. Your best ideas, your hardest work, every ounce of willpower you could muster, and your conception of God . . . landed you right here. an utter failure in every department.

Or Clancy. Same scenario: bullheaded willpower lands at us zero. We throw in the towel and start taking direction. Things get better. They get so much better that we take back the towel . . . and spend the rest of our lives in pain because we went back to our own brilliant ideas and willpower, tearing off tiny pieces of the towel to throw in every time the pain becomes too great.

Surrender. Acceptance.

Don’t start that cycle again. Don’t start injecting your own brilliant ideas to “make it better.” Your idea of better . . . isn’t always successful, is it?

You’re on The Path. Stay on The Path.

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Clarity is lacking

The bridge scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail comes to mind . . . “What is your quest?”

I have no answer to that question. Or too many answers. Or both.

Is that troubling or liberating?

Yes.

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“What does better even mean?”

Source: CPJ text message today.

It’s a thought-provoking thought.

One response is to become a wimpy “everything is relative” lazy baby. Nothing is better than anything else in the long run. In the long run we are all dead. That’s cynical and nihilistic. It’s not for me.

Some things are objectively better than others—otherwise, why bother?

I have within me a gear that drives me to “better” and I know “better” when I achieve it. (And it’s never enough). I think some (but not many) people have a similar gear.

Most people want to be told “this is better than that” and they believe it and take action accordingly. They believe the last thing they heard from whoever pops up in front of their face. They don’t think.

I’m like that in a lot of areas of my life, so I’m not being hypercritical. I don’t know or care about “better” in many, maybe most facets of existence. The important thing is to know this and FFS don’t just gulp down the last thing I hear and treat it as Gospel.

That’s probably a better view than lumping all humans into two categories, isn’t it? We likely all have a bit of us that yearns for “better” and a bit of us that is a gullible fish that bites on every lure dangled in front of us.

In the areas where you know what “better” looks like, double down. Drive relentlessly toward “better”.

But also have humility. Even here, where you have talent and discernment, other people know more than you. They have different ideas of what “better” means. They see things not visible to you.

I don’t know, but I would bet that even someone as monumentally advanced as Miles Davis would listen to other musicians and pick up pieces of “better” from them. People with a relentless itch for “better” seem to be relentless learners, seekers.

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The secret to life is just don’t quit

Joe Maguire in Jocko Podcast 292 starting around 2:05:00.