Reality Laughs

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.

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.

Again, this morning.

Boom. 💥

Momentum. Celebration.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I started the 75 Hard program on May 1. Today is July 30. That’s damn near three months of twice-a-day workouts. Here is what has happened.

I aimed low. Two walks in the neighborhood would be my workouts. I allowed myself to go to the gym (I like it except for the fucking masks and fucking lockdown fucking bullshit, but that’s not the gym’s fault) but didn’t expect it or force myself. I allowed myself to run if I felt like it, but didn’t expect it or force myself.

Sometime in late June or early July I found myself waking up early to walk. I didn’t force it, I didn’t want it, I didn’t expect it. But now I’m waking up automatically and I’m out the door around 5:00 am. I always wanted to be an early riser . . . and now I am. Without trying.

I rarely set out to run. Yet I break into a trot more and more. It just happens, without stress or effort.

I can bang out 4 miles of running anytime I feel like it now.

The lesson learned:

• Change happens automatically and you don’t have to engineer it.
• Create the conditions for good change and good change will happen. (I bet the reverse is true, too.)
• It takes a long time. Longer than you think. No, even longer than that. I feel as though the early riser, automatic runner behavior is a new sprout that must be nurtured to grow into a sturdily-rooted tree.

Aim low. Win. Repeat. The results will take care of themselves.

The Feynman Algorithm:

1. Write down the problem.
2. Think real hard.
3. Write down the solution.

Too often the advice we get is approximately that useful (that is, the advice is utterly fatuous, masquerading as profundity).

“Start with the end in mind.” “Plan your work and work your plan.” These are intellectual potato chips.

This is a vapid little blog post, I admit. There is an idea in my head that is struggling to get out. It revolves around pundits looking profound but leaving you no better off (after hearing them speak or reading their books) than the day before you knew they existed.

How do I not be like that?

I’m leaving this here, half-baked, so that perhaps one day I will come back and find why I am so deeply dissatisfied with self-help and business books.

Maybe it’s like pop songs. They are churned out by the bushel. Most are crap. Maybe most of everything is crap.

How do I be not crap?