Reality Laughs

I woke up early and walked around the neighborhood for 45 minutes as the darkness gave way to a deep blue dawn.

Feels good.

Most of the walk was spent in rehearsal. Me, rehearsing in my head, a mythical conversation with people I will never meet.

Feels bad.

The conversation is about me telling the people I am talking why they are so wrong. And I’m telling them so in the most self-aggrandizing way possible. But with humility!

There is always an audience for this mythical conversation, and they are listening eagerly to every word I say. Maybe I’m on stage. Maybe it’s TV. I don’t know. But there is always an adoring audience.

I got home and cracked Meditations open, for my daily reading.

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.

Meditations 2.1.

Time for me to tell my brain to STFU. “We are always living in rehearsal,” Bob would say. That’s me.

Live in the present. Don’t rehearse for a future that will never come. Don’t dwell on thoughts of events that will never return.

A cool, damp, quiet dawn. No one is out. Peacocks and crows are causing a ruckus, as they should: it’s their appointed task.

Time for me to do what God intends for me.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Food-wise, it’s an uncontroversial statement.

But the mind? The idea sometimes easy to accept but hard to swallow.

I am better off without social media, without television, and all that they deliver. Calmer, for sure. Pretty much the only social media for me is YouTube at this point, and selected channels and topics only. Mindset stuff.

People might come around to the idea but it’s my experience that giving up Netflix or cable TV or Instagram or Twitter . . . people don’t understand that this is far more important than giving up Cheetos.

They are horrified by the prospect of losing the ability to see that episode of Law and Order for the third time. So they continue to eat mental poison.

Let’s extend the idea a bit further. The things around me. Physical objects. Are they moving me forward? Holding me back? Or merely barnacles attached to my hull?

Time for careful curation. Or . . . a purge. Curation is a word that gives room for half-assed effort in this context. Wholesale disposal is what I need. Some day I will be dead and will have none of this stuff. What’s the difference if I throw it away now?

What about people? Or to be more specific, what about the consciousness of the people around you? Consciousness or mindset cannot be distilled away from the body that encapsulates it, so we are talking about choosing the people around you.

I don’t see athletes surrounding themselves with slugs. I don’t see physics professors choosing to talk sports with a beer-filled Dodger fan in the right field bleachers.

Like attracts like.

Birds of a feather flock together.

Note how often you’ve seen two people walking down the sidewalk together. If one is slightly lumpy, so is the other. Clothing so often identical or at least close enough to rhyme.

That means if you want to change (and most people don’t) you are fighting gravity when you hang out with the wrong people.

I’m not particularly fit and I have a little roll of fat around my middle. I need to be around people who are fit. If I surround myself with fat people, I have to exert enough effort to fight myself forward to my goals and resist the gravitational pull of those around me. That’s why I go to the gym. I see role models there and perhaps will meet people of like mind there.

The idea extends as far as you want to go. But ultimately the Jim Rohn saying has to be respected: you are the average of the five people you are around most.

Just be sure to remember the idea that you a whole person contains many things great and many things awful.

Would I want to experience what Tiger Woods experienced as a child to reap the rewards he reaped? And look at those rewards—a mixed bag, at best.

That’s why envy is so poisonous. You want the mountain’s pinnacle without the rest of the mountain, or the effort of the climb. (And envy is looking outside of yourself, instead of looking within, to the Kingdom of God).

Nevertheless. Curate the collection of people around you. Allow for flaws, even as you are deeply flawed. Role models show you what to do . . . and what not to do.

The right people encourage, direct you towards your goals. They do this as much by silent example as by explicit instruction.

I saw this with my kids’ high school. It was default normal, expected, and approved to be smart and study hard. This means that the kids with less natural drive is would be pulled along by the current to achieve more than they otherwise would have achieved.

There were plenty of chuckle-heads and dumb adolescent stunts, as you would expect. But I think almost all of the kids (not just mine) did a bit better than their default ability because of their surroundings. And surroundings means people, not the buildings.

But beware. Don’t think you’re going to be the Savior and help everyone. You have seen where that leads. Horse/water/drink. You can only share, not shove. Don’t be a self-appointed bwana, recently arrived to civilize the savages. 🙂

And thoughts. Don’t allow poisonous thoughts to become rooted in your mind. Thoughts fly through and land all the time. No problem with that. Just don’t entertain them and let them rest. Move them out if they are unproductive. But that’s for another day. This is long enough already.

Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. Now.

Repeat.

Let’s say that right now you won the lottery.

Does that mean you can stop? Are you done? Did you win?

No, no, and no.

Imagine again you just won the lottery. What happens one minute after that?

There is no done. There is only different.

Big Brains say “let’s create a system that gives people an incentive to do X”. That happens in tax law all the time. Elsewhere, too.

Big Brains don’t remember high school calculus and they haven’t read Taleb. They forget f(X), the results or side-effects of X.

Fortunately, at the individual level I can avoid the blindness driving political, top-down choices. I create X and (if I’m staying awake) I am aware of f(X) when I decide to do X.

And if I’m asleep or stupid, and if I don’t see f(X), I will be acquainted with it soon enough: because I personally pay the cost or reap the reward of doing X and experiencing f(X).

Individual autonomy. Get some.

Consistency and aiming low. Let’s talk aiming low.

Aiming low is an insight from Jordan Peterson. (And others, like BJ Fogg).

Big tasks are sexy and appeal to my ego (look at what I’m doing!) but daunting and seemingly impossible. Set absurdly high standards for yourself as a noob and you will fail.

Example: the gym. I’m a noob and I cannot lift heavy stuff.

“Become a millionaire.” How do you start when you’re broke? Setting a goal of earning $50,000 per month is souls-crushing when you’re barely breaking even. Visualization and affirmations and all that? Fine stuff but when atoms start moving—or don’t—how are you going to keep at it over the long haul?

“Put $5 in a savings account.” That’s something that almost every broke person can do. Even me.

Aim low isn’t really the advice. Aim high but act low.

I want consistency in getting things done. Two “aim low” ideas came to mind while writing this:

• Writing. 500 words a day seems daunting. More to the point, I’m not doing it. How about 100 words a day? How about 50?
• Tasks. Too many things in my life languish, incomplete. Just open up Things and look at what’s there. Don’t commit to doing, just look. To that end, I now have my iPad sitting on my desk to my left, dedicated to Things. So I’m already moving!

Consistency and aiming low. Let’s talk consistency.

Consistency is the lesson I take from 75 Hard. This is the 10th day into the program for me. I am learning how to do the same thing every day. Day after day after day.

Oddly, the app helps a lot. My simple mind likes looking at the checklist and clicking things off.

I am now terrified of not completing the 75 days.

I do not want the negative reinforcement of being a quitter. I crave the positive reinforcement of being a finisher.

To that end, it’s time to invoke my Inner Goggins. Remember all of the tough things I’ve done in the past? Long, hard trails. Long runs. I pride myself on finishing. I might not be fast but I finish.

Those are just mountain memories. There are other things I’ve finished by sheer determination. Kids and paying for education, for instance.

Grind. There is glory in grinding it out. (Glory for self). Funny that I remember these things and it shines a light on how negative and false the self-accusation “you’re a quitter” is. I forget the wins. I forget the self-discipline, the doggedness.

I am grinding out 75 Hard.

There is only hard work, late nights, early mornings, practice, rehearsal, repetition, study, sweat, blood, toil, frustration, and discipline.

Uncredited quote on the Goggins Video YouTube channel, May 8, 2021.

Unpopular. Inspiring.

Why does Ode to Joy make me weep?

I feel as if life could not possibly be better for having listened to it this morning.

T told me, long ago, that life is hand-to-hand combat with self.

True.