Freedom.to is on full lockdown again today, doing for me what I cannot do for myself.
A man’s got to know his limitations.
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Avoid rehearsal
By that I mean talking to yourself about future or past conversations with other people. Maybe an encounter went poorly, in your mind. “If only I had said x instead of y, then I would have succeeded.” So you rehearse the conversation over and over in your head to make it come out the way you want.
Rehearsal bathes you in self-made toxicity. The event is past. Why are you re-running the script? You can’t make a better outcome.
Or the event might or might not happen in the future. And if it does, you’ll be ready and know what to say. Wrong.
Don’t talk to yourself. If you find the loop running, stop it.
The only way I know to stop rehearsal is to talk to God using an internal conversation.
And remember: You’re not in rehearsal. This is the main event, always.
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Check in with self
Up early, feed the dog, make some coffee and sit quietly before the family wakes up. Peace.
The aftermath of Election Day is on the Twitter. Time to block all of it again, using Freedom. At some point I will be able to look at the noise and see it for what it is (beyond my control) but for now, I need training wheels. Know your limitations.
A day of via negativa ahead of me. Maybe do some roadwork in the form of walking to the office.
That’s a time constraint question, and the answer to that question is within my control.
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Work harder
Lots of people talk about how bad it is to just work harder. “Work smarter!” they say. Working harder becomes counterproductive at some point. Doing more of the wrong thing makes things worse.
Noise, mostly. Justifications. Excuses for why it’s ok to browse the internet or eat frozen yogurt.
How many people reach the boundary of effort, sweat, pain? How often have I reached the point where the curve turns concave? Damn few times.
Give it all you have until you hit an obvious wall, matter what you’re working on. Working harder has a beneficial quality all of its own, quite apart from the results it creates.
Mantra: grit.
Say it.
Edit. Listen to TheWarrior Poet’s podcast 43 again. Get a bit of nuance to the hard-core mode. Hardcore is useful, but . . . not always. “Too much is never enough” does not always get you what you want.
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Choose “not wrong” tools
Now, today, is a day that I do not start anything new. Everything I do today is aimed at completing a task, a project, a thought.
Get momentum and don’t lose it, capture territory and don’t let it go, establish position and maintain it, etc.
That’s my aim, and to do it, here is my plan.
Practically speaking, this means a rolling list of open loops where I can establish progress. It means a method of writing down where I am so I don’t have to do the same thing again. “Oh yeah, where was I?” It means giving work to others. It means saying no.
Of all of those nice platitudes, the one I will implement today is “get it to a good resting point where you can’t go any further and write down what you know and where you think you need to go next.”
Use a Google Doc. Not Word. (That is an arbitrary choice that I made simply because it is “not wrong”. Rather than look for “best choice” look for a “not wrong” choice when making a decision. This is an extension of the Munger concept “don’t be stupid” to getting things done.)
Paper is an example of wrong. Paper is good (really good) for creativity and thinking but not so good for tracking and production.
End of day objective: Google document with only the things I worked on today. Brief status and what to do next recorded. Excellent documentation in the file for everyone to see.
Let’s go. The family awakens.
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“I don’t need to be right anymore”
Try that on for size.
It is courtesy of the Ballistic Radio guy.
It’s an asset to be right, right? Stop wanting to be right.
Via negativa. Cut out the seemingly good.
To everyone else, you are a stranger at best.
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The map is not the territory
Your perception is not reality.
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Via negativa and valuable stuff
It’s easy to want to cut damaging, harmful things out of your life. Difficult to do, usually. But easy to pick these things to prune away.
Harder, though, is to prune away the good in favor of the greater good.
Perhaps this is where the payoff is. You have many wonderful ideas. Just pick one.
Actually there is some truth in both approaches.
- Stop doing stupid shit.
- See your assets as carrying hidden liabilities.
Apply via negativa liberally to both.
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The world is a pitching machine
“The world is providing input like a pitching machine. It doesn’t love you, it doesn’t hate you, it’s just pitching. But you have to be ready to stand there and take the pitches, and that to me is a measure of how much reality do you accept. The longer the latency, the longer the pause before you can start responding, the less acceptance of reality there is.” -William Aprill
Ballistic Radio podcast for August 5, 2020
A good analogy about reality.
Stand there and swing. Hit or miss, depending.
Or stand there right in front of the pitching machine and take a beating.