Mike Sturm

Photo by Vadim Sherbakov on Unsplash

Some candid thoughts about how the very things that make us feel more in control can end up derailing us, and how to make peace with the messy business of doing.

I write primarily about productivity and self-improvement. I also struggle immensely with both of those things. I have days where my goals are clearly laid out, I refer back to my priorities to make decisions, and I truly get things done. But other days, I wake up, my morning coffee barely wakes me up, and I just can’t get a single thing of value done. I stumble until I surrender to dinner and sleep. I am still chasing that mythical wonder week where I accomplish all of my goals, and get revved up for another 7 days of productive work.

So yes, I write about ways to be more productive, and ways to grow, but those things are so difficult to actually do. But it is precisely because these things are so difficult for me that I write about them, and publish that writing. If they are difficult for me, but also matter that much to me, I suspect the same is true for many others.

I know that many of us struggle with this. Many of us try, and fail, to become more productive, and to be better people. We often see these two ventures as one and the same thing — which can be a dangerous way of thinking. We don’t have to be super-productive to be good people. I think many of us forget that.

Sad-sack reassurance aside, I have been on a quest for the past 10+ years for the perfect productivity system. While I still haven’t found that system, what I have begun to realize is that such a system — if it even exists — is not really the answer I’m looking for.

I Thought I Was Looking for a System…

A productivity system — like any other system — is just a tool. Like any other tool, it only allows you to do a job more efficiently, but it cannot tell you what job to do or how to do it. Those are two things that most of us have to re-examine regularly; two decisions that many of us need to make almost every day. Our failure to take those decisions seriously is at the root of the things that plague so many of us: procrastination, unaccomplished goals, abandoned projects, and so on.

But tragically, we continue scouring the internet, books, podcasts, and courses — trying to find that mythical system that will add that missing piece to our productivity game. We continue to have faith that a system will save us. And in fairness to us, that faith is not our fault. We have been brought up to believe in systems. Systems will save us all. But so often, we forget that systems are only tools.

How I Got Hooked

Ever since I got a job in the real world (that is, outside of academia), I became almost obsessively interested in how to keep track of all the things that needed doing. I discovered David Allen’s Getting Things Done, the website 43 Folders, and various podcasts about productivity.

Notice what I didn’t say I became interested in: the actual doing of what needs to get done.

It wasn’t until just recently that I realized that. In fact it was a few weeks ago. It was an unexpected, but very welcome, epiphany. And like all epiphanies, it happened in my kitchen.

The “Dishes Epiphany”

Sometimes, you can find wisdom in the most unusual places. Recently I found myself face to face with a particularly large sink-full of dirty dishes. This is not unusual at our house. My wife and I both work — a lot. And we also try to spend a lot of time with our kids (before they’re old enough to mostly replace us with friends as preferred companions).

As I looked at this sink, i realized that it technically wasn’t a full sink; it merely looked that way because the bowls and plates had not been stacked so as to make the most efficient use of the space (bowls inside bowls, cups inside cups, plates on the bottom, etc.). So I began rearranging the dishes, so that there would be more space in the sink. This is something that is second nature to me. When I see the sink like this, I tend to just do it.

But then came the epiphany: 
In the time I spent arranging the dishes in the most efficient way, I could have just washed the dishes!
I wasn’t necessarily crunched for time, and I had all the necessary tools to just wash the dishes. Instead, I chose to focus on efficiently organizing the mess in the sink so that it didn’t look as badly in need of attention.

How often do we do the same thing, but at a larger scale? How much of our time is devoted to simply re-organizing a mess that should just be cleaned up? How often do we adopt a new tool, a new method, a new mindset in order to avoid actually taking care of what needs to be taken care of? I think the answer is: more often than we’d like to admit.

The Reason Behind the Organizational Rabbit Hole

Most of us indulge in some kind of rabbit holes. They’re those things that are tangentially related to something important we’re trying to do, but only tangentially. They are at once both easy to get sucked into, and difficult to pull away from.

We dip our foot — or just a toe — into a rabbit hole, innocently enough. Before we know it, we’ve sapped all of our time and cognitive energy — and we’ve accomplished none of what we’ve set out to. We’ve wasted hours figuring out the best way to organize our projects, tasks, and files.

For me — and I suspect this is true for others — there’s something really attractive about getting your stuff organized. Whether it’s stuff for your gig at someone else’s company, or the stuff for your own company, there is something so oddly attractive about the activity of organizing — and that’s to say nothing of the feeling once you’re finished. You can stand back and smile at a neat digital or real-life workspace.

And yet, there are still plenty of things on your to-do list.

What I think is at the root of our attraction to organizing is this: we want so desperately to be in control. The activity of organizing delivers that much-sought-after feeling of being in control, and it does it very quickly. It’s why Tetris caught on like wildfire, and why mobile games so much like it still hold a place in our hearts. It gives us an unmatchable hit of pleasure to put things in neat and organized order.

Reading about a system that promises to get you organized and productive does a similar thing. You get the thrill that comes with the prospect of being in control, without having to engage in the dirty work of dealing with all of your stuff. And eventually, you feel that creeping sense of not having done what you know you should have.

A Way Out?

So often, we feel like our workload is out of control. Things fly at us — expectations and responsibilities — and we barely understand them, let alone know how to handle them. Given how out of control we can feel about our to-do lists, it’s no wonder we sometimes want to just focus on organizing things.

But the most important thing you could be doing is almost never organizing your stuff. It’s usually something else. It’s usually the messy, uncertain, and unattractive work of some big project. It’s usually thinking, and not the regimented, process-based thought that makes us get that hit of dopamine like we do when playing Tetris.

So what do we do? We still want to stay organized. We still want that feeling that comes from setting life’s Tetris blocks in the neat space where they can fit. But that is an in-the-moment craving. That’s not the long-term joy that comes from doing the important things. And that’s the battle: sidestep the allure of short-term, but unimportant pleasures for the long-term, important ones.

I wish I had an easy answer. But that would fly in the face of the very logic that creates the problem. And realizing that is actually the important lesson here. No system will save you. No list will make you get the things done that need to be done. So many unbelievably successful people spent exactly zero minutes agonizing about which way to organize their projects, or how their tools should be arranged. They weren’t afraid to leave things messy — because that’s how life is; it’s messy.

And because life is messy, we need to allow messiness. We have to meed life on life’s terms, if we want to get anywhere. So we can’t cling to the dopamine hit of organizing, so long as there is important doing to be done. And here’s the quick advice — if there is any: if you are truly plugged into the important things in your life, a few moments of thought will reveal to you what the important things are that need doing. In a sentence, no system will save you, only being plugged into (that is, really caring about) the people and projects of your life will. Unfortunately, that’s something that no system will do for you. I wish I had better news.

So…Burn My Lists?

Am I saying that there’s no sense in keeping productivity tools and systems in play? Am I advising everyone to burn their to-do lists? No. There is value in tracking what’s on your plate. After all, it allows your mind to do what brings the most value: thinking — as opposed to merely remembering (which it sucks at). Again, I’m not advising anyone to stop being organized.

What I am advising is that it’s very often difficult to see when we’ve become too focused on organizing, and the feeling that comes with checking things off of a long, well-organized list. Such feelings are not the stuff that real productivity is made of. Real productivity doesn’t look like a clean notebook or a logical list on your favorite app — synced across various devices. It looks like someone doing, engaging, thinking, balancing, mapping, writing, etc. It looks like checking in with yourself in the moment, tapping that very seat of your soul, to make sure you’re working on what’s most important to you.

Lists will always be a great way to keep less valuable stuff off your mind, and help you to make sense of the flood of things coming at you. But lists will never be a substitute for the messy activity of engagement with what matters. Know when your lists are keeping you from being engaged. I suspect that deep down, we can all sense when that is happening.

How a 2,000 year-old theory of human motivation can still help both individuals and organizations become the best versions of themselves.

Photo by Hello I’m Nik on Unsplash

What makes a great leader? What qualities does a great leader have that compel people to follow her? What gives a great leader that gravitas — that ability to inspire, manage, and challenge others?

And what about a team of people? What qualities do great teams possess that other teams don’t? What makes a team of people able to go above and beyond, meet tight deadlines, and build a strong foundation of success? What makes a team able to stand the tests of both time and growth?

In short, what factors make a person or an organization truly excellent?

This question is far from new. In fact, a great many talented thinkers have been trying to answer it for millennia. That makes what I’m suggesting perhaps all the more bold. Plato — yes the Greek philosopher who lived over 2,000 years ago — actually built a great model. With some very minor tweaks, it provides a great way to view your journey toward excellence — for both you as a single person and for an entire company.

Of Motivation and Mental Models

For Plato, excellence is about harmony. The human psyche is made up of three distinct motivating forces — each of them performing a different function. Likewise, a group or team of people features those 3 same motivations, in the form of people whose dominant motivators are one of the three forces. The great person gets each of those forces doing what it does best and working in harmony toward a common goal. The great leader does the same for her team.

A word of warning: this is a mental model that attempts to sort people into neat categories. As with any such model of human nature, the categories will rarely seem as clear cut in practice as they sound in theory. But we can chalk that up to the tricky business of studying people: it’s usually a bit messy and unclear. But that shouldn’t keep us from trying out such a model on our journey to be more effective, and to become better leaders — especially if we find that such a model yields results.

The 3-Part Model of the Person and Team

Plato identified 3 different forces at work in our psyche; 3 different things that motivate us:

• The Appetite seeks comfort, pleasure, and simple material things.
• The Spirit seeks honor, victory, and recognition.
• Reason seeks truth and wisdom.

According to Plato, one of the three drives become dominant. This led him to believe that there were 3 kinds of people, classified by which of the drives was predominant.

• Those driven primarily by appetite are called workers.
• Those driven primarily by spirit are called warriors.
• Those driven primarily by reason are called guardians.

It’s worth noting here that guardians — as Plato envisioned them — are rare beings. They were those truly excellent people who are able to avoid the pitfalls of the various passions associated with the spirit and the appetite. In a sense, becoming a guardian is what we should all aim for. To be a guardian is to reach the level of human excellence.

In a word, the goal in both leading yourself and leading a team is simple: harmony. When we fail to get the 3 parts of our nature harmonized we feel anxiety, stress, frustration, or all of the above. But those emotions are commonplace. In ourselves, we see each of the drives working against each other, and in our teams we see the different types of people working against each other. The result is conflict, chaos, and a lack of growth.

When things go well for us as individuals, our drives do the work they do best, and we thrive. When things go well for a team, each type of person does what they do best, and the company moves briskly forward — like a ship being rowed by a well-guided crew.

Let us now take a look at the 3 drives and 3 types of people in depth.

Appetite /Workers

The appetite motivates us through an attraction to more basic and short-term, concrete things. The paradigmatic attractors are the material things like food and drink, money, sex, and so on. But for our purposes, another kind of attractor is the simple pleasure of being able to check things off of a to-do list, or to just complete some tactical work.

In a team, the worker is primarily moved by the desire to just get things done. They are the folks who put their heads down and get the job done. They hunger for the basic satisfactions of the job well done. They want projects with a clear direction and end-game, and they work diligently — for the most part. They respond to the practical rewards of money, promotion, or just the small-scale recognition for having completed a project or task.

But workers can tend to be short-term thinkers, and can prove to be limiting forces in brainstorming sessions — where the objective is to think more big-picture. That can elicit complaints from teammates, so it’s up to a successful leader to remember that the workers are focused on things other than the blue sky and lofty ideas — and harness their energy accordingly.

Spirit/Warriors

The spirit is that part of us that responds to big achievements, notoriety, respect, honor, valor, and the like. It thrives on conflict and ambitious undertakings with far-out horizons. It’s the part that you tap into when you’re contemplating your legacy, as well as when you’re scrolling through LinkedIn or Facebook — comparing your resume or timeline to those of others. It’s a more romantic and less linear part of the psyche.

You can often count on the spirited folks to go make a blind pitch to investors or prospective clients, and sell a great story about what your company is trying to do. Again, such a pitch will likely be light on details, but the spirited folks aren’t motivated by details, and thus don’t motivate others with details. They motivate by stirring in others the romantic ideals of valor, recognition, and notoriety. And it’s arguable that such things are every bit as important as making a detailed plan.

The warriors may be able to rouse a team to work toward a crazy, romantic goal, but don’t get this confused with vision. Just because the warrior is willing to run headlong in a certain direction — and has convinced others to faithfully run with them — that doesn’t mean the warrior knows what awaits them there.

The Warriors are often the ones who step up during a brainstorming session with the crazy and industry-disrupting idea — though they may not have any idea how to do the dirty work required to implement it. At that point, the workers will likely step up and demand a clear plan toward achieving such a lofty goal. That’s the benefit of having both types of people there.

Warriors are often risk-takers — a trait that has definite drawbacks. They can get caught up in the pursuit of lofty goals or making a name for themselves, and fail to incorporate more practical and prudent thinking in their decision-making. Whenever you see a company tank after the quick “pivot” of a new CEO, it’s likely that a warrior executive was at the helm.

Reason/Guardians

Every human has the faculty of reason, and use it to some degree or another. The practical application of reason is weighing the risks and rewards of possible courses of action, and how they match or conflict with values or goals. Personal excellence — as Plato defined it — is when your faculty of reason controls your spirit and appetite, leveraging their respective strength and momentum.

Those people whose faculty of reason outstrips their appetites and spirit Plato called guardians. They are the ones who have honed this faculty in such a way that they have significant wisdom. That means they not only have a great deal of knowledge, but also know how and when to best deploy it. Sure, they may still feel passion and hunger for honor and notoriety, but they have the uncanny ability to use reason as a check against giving way to the lure of appetite and spirit.

It should come as no surprise, then, that guardians tend to make the best leaders. A team ruled by a guardian would by definition take the best actions. Since guardians have unparalleled wisdom and reasoning abilities, the companies they lead would be the best.

The Problem with Guardians

So the way to ensure that your company has great leadership is to get guardians in there to lead! Simple, right? Unfortunately, there are a few issues with effectively installing guardians at the helm of a company.

1. Guardians are usually not the type to promote themselves as leaders.
   In Plato’s Republic, he noted that since guardians’ main interest is in seeking wisdom, they will not tend to seek out positions of power and influence. They would rather spend their time trying to figure out the secret truths of a given domain. A guardian in a given company may be hidden away combing through discarded reports or media that seems to have nothing to do with the business at hand. They will rarely — if ever — grab the bull by the horns and take over a company.
2. It’s hard to tell who is a true guardian, and who is simply a delusional warrior.
   Guardians are able to comprehend and create some amazing ideas — many that end up having a significant impact. But at the time, those ideas may sound completely bonkers to everyone else. What’s worse: everyone else has no reliable way to tell the difference between what’s bonkers and what’s brilliant. The best option you have is to listen, and keep an open mind.
3. Guardians aren’t forever.
   Well, no one lives forever, but this is a problem for guardians because when we find a guardian for a given company or team, we get tempted to build everything around them. But this is a mistake. A great leader — like every human — is temporary. They are subject to the 3 Ds: deterioration, departure, and death. They may become too old, or too preoccupied with their personal life (god forbid) to engage in the way a company demands. Or quite simply, they may just leave or die.

So what is a company to do when it needs a good leader? There are 2 things to do: (a) grow a supply of guardians from within, and (b) as much as possible, substitute core values, a mission, and operating principles to do the job of guardians.

Grow Good Guardians

Plato’s Republic is in part a discussion of how to make people and societies the best they can be. Quite a bit of that happens from the ground up — meaning that good leaders are grown in environments that are conducive to raising even-tempered, thoughtful, and reasonable individuals. Just as it takes a village to raise good children, it also takes a company to raise great leaders.

So an effective approach to getting great leaders for your company is to create an environment that fosters the development of guardians. In other words, if you want good leadership for your company, be a company worthy of good leaders. And if you want to cultivate great leadership within yourself, be worthy of the tutelage and mentorship of others who can teach you.

Here are a few simple things that can be done in order to be a person or a company that can effectively grow guardianship.

• an attitude of humility
• open, candid, and respectful communication
• continuously demonstrated genuine care for others
• a willingness to sacrifice rapid exponential growth in order to create and cultivate healthy working relationships

Note that all of the above advice works just as well for individuals as it does for companies. These things are simple attitude adjustments, with knock-on effects that create an excellent culture within a company, and create excellent character within a person.

Part of Plato’s philosophy examined the reciprocal relationship between a person and their society. It works just as well when we look at a person and the company they work for. A good company will create good potential leaders, and good leaders will return whatever investment the company made by staying aboard to keep that company great. But it is not a quick process, and it requires a willingness that seems to be lacking these days in both companies and people: the willingness to invest in each other.

Invest in a Mission, Values, and Operating Principles

Great leaders are guardians, which means they have developed their faculty of reason to be so strong that it keeps the passions and desires of themselves and others in check. But that’s pretty abstract. What does that look like in practical everyday use? The answer is simple: subordinate your desires and appetites to your faculty of reason by creating and using core values, mission, and specific operating principles.

Core values are the things that matter to you. They’re the things you want to serve and promote, but also the things you won’t compromise on.

A Mission is your why. It’s what you’re trying to achieve, and it’s your literal reason for your work — whether you’re an individual or company. It’s the particular long-term way that you’re seeking to serve your values.

Operating Principles are your best practices for what you regularly have to do. They’re the few decisions that make initially that make thousands of future decisions almost automatic — so they don’t waste your time and energy. A good set of operating principles guide your behavior effectively toward your mission and values by telling you how to handle things that come up that might normally throw those less thoughtful into fits of paralyzing indecision.

For you as a single person, the way to do this is to take time — really take time — and craft a mission, vision, and value statement for yourself. Then (and this often gets skipped) take time to ensure that there is real buy-in and commitment to the mission and the values.

Again, this is true for both individuals and companies. The reason why we don’t follow through on our goals is almost always because we didn’t fully buy in to them. The same holds true with a company. Buy-in takes time; there’s no way around it. So take the time to get buy-in.

The mission needs to be something that isn’t dictated by reactions to trends or the demands of other people. It needs to come from a place of reflection and reasoning. Once that is done, it acts as the protocol for steering the ship. When a decision must be made, refer to the mission, vision, and values already crafted. If there is a real concern that they don’t provide adequate guidance — take some time to revise them.

The Takeaway

So let’s summarize. There are 3 types of primary motivators in people: appetite, spirit, and reason. These 3 motivators manifest in 3 types of people: workers, warriors, and guardians — depending on what motivates each person.

The pathway to individual excellence is gaining self-mastery by strengthening your faculty of reason so that you can harness and control your appetite and spirit. The pathway to organizational excellence is to install guardians as leaders in your company. There is a twofold process to achieving these goals.

1. Grow guardianship from within by changing your attitude (either individual or company) so that you can more effectively be led by good leaders.
2. Develop a set of core values, mission statement, and operating principles to ensure that your culture and character continue to be lead by reason.

This model is simple, perhaps quaint by some accounts, but it provides a slightly different way of better understanding people and groups of them. It should serve to give us another resource for the ongoing quest toward personal and organizational excellence.

Photo by Marcel Heil on Unsplash

Against the imaginary hierarchy of jobs, and our arbitrary acceptance of it, and in favor of a richer concept of work.

When I was 16, I attended the graduation party of a guy that I worked with at the local supermarket chain. He was a year older than me, and was being pushed into that next phase called adulthood. I recall a conversation taking place, much like so many others I had engaged in around that time. It revolved around the question of what was next for us young adults. Where were we all going, and what were we going to do with the rest of our lives? In this particular conversation, someone made the joke that no matter where they end up, they just don’t want to be asking if people would “like fries with that.”

It’s an easy joke to make — the implication that someone behind the counter at a fast food place has surrendered to the drudgery of meaningless work. Many of us make that joke all the time. The other implication of it is that there is a clear line — existing somewhere — between meaningful work and meaningless work. But what is that line? What separates meaningful work from a soul-crushing job? Is that line objective or subjective?

I suspect that like many things we use as the basis of easy jokes and comforting adages, we have no ever-loving idea.

Hypocrisy and Meritocracy

The joke about fast-food work is easy to make. Many of us worked in that world as kids, and to varying degrees, we hated it. So we denigrate such a job to a lower skill level and assume that such a job can never be the source of meaningful work. And yet, every time we pull up to the drive-thru, we bring with us the expectation that we’ll receive our order quickly, it will be correct, and we can be on our way in minutes. We expect this, and so do millions of others around the world each day — and by and large, that expectation is met. Our experience there can color a large part of our day, and the same is true for millions of others. So why do we imply that the job at the front line of that experience is meaningless?

While we allow our own prefabricated dreams to color our evaluation of which jobs are meaningful work and which are the opposite, what good does this do anyone? Why do we carry around such beliefs? They only serve to hurt those who find themselves in the jobs we relegate to the bottom of the ladder, and also make us feel badly — if we don’t end up in one of the jobs we place on such a high pedestal.

This supposedly meritocratic pyramid of meaningful work is far from a coherent system with any objective basis in reality. Rather, it is a hodgepodge of folksy anecdotal value judgments — put on like so many hand-me-downs by those of us looking to feel better about what we spend over 1/2 of our waking hours doing during adulthood — working.

The Illusion of “Jobs”

By and large, almost any job can be meaningful. Whether it is or not depends overwhelmingly on the person doing it. There are a few reasons for this.

First, “jobs” are not static things that exist apart from the people doing them. When I apply for a job, I’m not standing outside of some sculpted and finished container that I must contort myself into. Sure, some of us may feel like that is the case, but show me an employer who sincerely wishes for someone to only do what the job description says, and I’ll show you an employer who won’t be hiring that way for long. Jobs are ephemeral; they are placeholders in an organization until the real bringers of value — people — find their way into it. Once that happens, jobs cease to exist, and in their place, we find people and work.

Secondly, once you find yourself in a “job”, what you make of it has so much to do with how you choose to work each day. There are as many approaches to work as their are people doing it, but there is a way to categorize work into two broad categories: proactive and reactive work.

Those doing reactive work are more likely to describe their work as both a “job” and to find it lacking meaning. They tend to be exhausted, to view their career as limited by their job description, and to compare their situation with others — despite having very little understanding of others’ situations.

Those doing proactive work are more likely to be both optimistic about their work, as well as mostly dismissive of their job descriptions in terms of how they define the work they do. Being proactive in your work is about looking for and trying to leverage opportunities — not just opportunities to “move up” in a company, but opportunities to just become better at what you do and to help others. A proactive approach to work is about taking pride in what you do as a reflection of your standards, your character, and your self-respect. It has very little to do with where you work or what your official job description is — and any such relation is usually coincidental.

Where the Meaning Comes From

All that is to say that the line between meaningful work and a “meaningless job” is almost entirely subjective. Our attitude and our approach do most of the work in defining the fulfillment we find within the professional realm. Sure, you may consider certain jobs to be more tailored toward your skills, interests, and ambitions — and for that reason you may ascribe more value to some jobs than others.

There’s nothing wrong with aiming for something you really want. But just understand that — should you fall short in your aims (and many of us will at some time) — your failure to get the exact job you want will have little to do with your long-term professional satisfaction. No job will ever provide anyone with the kind of fulfillment we’re looking for. That comes only from our individual approach to our work — something that no mere job should ever be able to control.

At the end of the day, there are no such things as “jobs”. There are only people doing work — whatever work they take on or are asked to do. Within that work each day — all across the world — are millions of battles and millions of victories. There are goals met, milestones achieved, and opportunities to feel a rich appreciation for quality work — no matter what that work might be.

I am by no means saying people should settle for where they are. But I am saying that we should never allow a bankrupt hierarchy of occupations to rob ourselves and others of the opportunity to extract real meaning from whatever work we happen to do. It’s the lest we can do for each other, and ourselves.

image courtesy of the Candy family

On the 25th anniversary of the comedian’s death, some thoughts on life, laughter, love, and the gaping hole left in our collective sense of humor.

On March 4th, 1994 — 25 years ago today— news began making the rounds that actor and comedian John Candy had died while filming the comedy Wagons East! in Durango, Mexico. He was 43 years old.

For most people my age (I’m 35) or younger, John Candy — if he is anything at all to them — is basically the older generation’s Chris Farley. He was one of a long line of Hollywood fat funnymen stretching back to Lou Costello and Oliver Hardy.

But he was more than that — much more.

Yes, John Candy was known as the big funny man. He did his share slapstick and one-liners. But his real appeal was in his down-to-earth, everyman quality — his innocent sincerity. In films like Uncle Buck, that quality poked right through the fourth wall and into the hearts of a generation of people — especially kids — watching a grown-up get down to their level and be somehow both hilariously buffoonish, and wisely cool at the same time.

John Candy made us laugh in a way that I don’t think any other comedian had done, or has since. He got us to laugh at him first, but then to laugh at ourselves, and then laugh with each other. The laughs were only at the expense of our inflated egos, and once they were effectively deflated, he went on with the show.

But beyond his ability to engage with us onscreen, it was off-screen where the real magic happened. You can search for stories online from people who worked with him on films, and find examples on each one of him being a generous, humble, and caring guy. One of my favorites is one that I can’t find an official account of, but I’ve seen in a few forums online.

As the story goes, Candy was at a bachelor party, which involved a stripper doing a show. The father of the groom was there, and wasn’t into that kind of thing, so he retreated to another room. At some point during the show, someone noticed that Candy wasn’t there watching with everyone else. Instead, he was found in the kitchen, sitting with the father of the groom, talking quietly and laughing with him. He sat in there the whole time, to keep the father of the groom company. Now that’s classy.

And there’s also the fact that, for a long time, he didn’t give interviews, and his reasoning was pretty telling. He told the LA Times once:

I think the real reason I hate to do interviews is because I think I’m boring. I just always thought there were more important things to talk about than myself.

He took his wife and kids with him on movie sets whenever possible. He offered his co-stars rides and invited them to dinner. He made up characters for his kids and put on shows to make them laugh — even when that was what he had been doing all day for months on set.

All those things are great, and I’m sure that plenty of folks in Hollywood have stories about them like that. But the John Candy story that really got me involves lasagna. One of the last things he did on the day he died in Durango City, Mexico — on the set of what would be his last film — was cook a lasagna dinner for his assistants. It’s something he did on a regular basis for them on set. Those young folks who are usually fetching food, coffee, and whatever else for the Hollywood elite were having a lasagna dinner cooked for them by one of Hollywood’s most famous funnymen. It was just what he did.

Here’s a barometer of a society — and perhaps in this increasingly global time, it’s a barometer of the world. How many John Candys are there? How many giant stars are there who can captivate us on camera with razor-sharp wit, deep humility, and sincerity, and regularly cook lasagna dinners for their assistants?

Right now, I don’t think there are many. 
Right now, we’re uneasy. We’re on edge. We could use someone to make the rounds knocking everyone off their high horses, but also making sure that everyone has someone to talk to.
Right now, too many people are trying to be like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, but not enough of them are trying to be like John Candy.

Even if we don’t get paid millions to make people laugh on the big screen, we can at least sit with a shy, reserved old man at a bachelor party, or cook lasagna for the people that everyone else would consider a few levels below us on the ladder. We can be just a little like Big John. Even if we’re nowhere near as big as he was.

I don’t have all the answers. I probably don’t have any of them. I think very few of us do. So perhaps the most helpful thing we can do when we can’t give people the answers is to humbly help them embrace just how funny we can be as we all grope around blindly for them. I think John Candy did that pretty well. And I hope that at this time 25 more years on, we’ll still remember why that was important, so we can try to do a little more of it ourselves.

credit: gerait (via pixabay)

How the Boundaries of Thoughts and Minds are Being Re-shaped, and What that Means for Us

I’ve been obsessed with thinking for some time now. I want to understand how we can do it better. But in order to improve any process, you need to have some understanding of how the current one works. Nor do we know as much as we’d like to about the supposed place where thinking happens: in the mind. For all the work that various disciplines have done, there is still so much about thinking and minds that we just don’t understand — but not for lack of trying.

The What and How of Thinking

Part of the problem is the subjectivity of thought. Scientists — whether psychologists or neuroscientists — know plenty about what happens in the brain when people report certain thought processes or experiences. But we don’t yet have a way to know the subjective “what it’s like” of those experiences — as people have them. This might be something we could ignore, if only such experiences were incidental to the meat of thinking and basically bland in nature. But that is not the case. Our subjective experience while we’re engaged in thought is complex and difficult to describe. What’s more, in many cases that subjective experience can be what motivates us to follow a given train of thought — past the point where there are any logical tracks left for said train to follow.

Another problem for any scientific analysis of thinking is that thoughts are not as simple and divisible as we sometimes characterize them to be. Anyone who has attempted insight meditation (or a few other kinds) can attest to the complex nature of thoughts. They may appear to be discrete entities — restricted to one point in time, and one “space” in our attention. But upon examination, we see that various ideas and sensations bombard us simultaneously — like a pack of excited children talking over one another. We hear whichever one we most fix our attention on, and perhaps catch some parts of the others. But it’s hard to separate what is what in the din.

A final problem — which is perhaps the most exciting one — is that it’s not as clear as we might assume where any given thinker ends and another begins. By way of example, let’s say I am typing a sentence on my computer, when I come up with an idea. The idea is so rich and complex — at least as I experience it — that what I write on my computer (and thus what is stored in the cloud) only relays one part of the rich tapestry of that thought.

The WHERE of Thinking

The lion’s share of the well-known and well-funded work being done on thinking is done with a focus on one location: the brain. But the truth is, even a small amount of investigation has given evidence to back the idea that thinking takes place in areas all over the body. As a recent article in Nature elaborates:

The ongoing exploration of the human microbiome promises to bring the link between the gut and the brain into clearer focus. Scientists are increasingly convinced that the vast assemblage of microfauna in our intestines may have a major impact on our state of mind. The gut-brain axis seems to be bidirectional — the brain acts on gastrointestinal and immune functions that help to shape the gut’s microbial makeup, and gut microbes make neuroactive compounds, including neurotransmitters and metabolites that also act on the brain.

As much as we’d like to hold onto that quaint notion that our brain is all there is to the mind, so much of the data tells us otherwise. There a hundred ways one can try to explain away the interaction between brain and gut in an effort to keep that quaint old “brain-only” paradigm, but at a certain point, we’re just being silly to do so.

If we can admit that mental activity extends beyond the brain, it is a little bit easier to then take a slightly more risqué (but more richly rewarding) step, and say that perhaps mental activity extends beyond one single body.

A Collaborative Consciousness

Since the time when humans have become able to program machines to store and process data, we’ve colloquially referred to the work they do as thinking. And while may of us liberal arts & humanities softies (like me) try to talk about how impoverished machine thinking is compared to what we humans do — that way of conceiving it might be due for a change.

Earlier, I gave an example of someone interacting with a computer while thinking, as a way to introduce the idea that perhaps it’s not so clear that we can constrain the boundary of a thought to one place. The more we humans use machines as part of our cognitive processes, the more difficult it becomes to separate the two when it comes to thinking and thoughts. If it makes any sense to say that my gut, my appendages, and my central nervous system are part of my mental experience, I think it also makes sense to say that my computer, my smartphone, and the pieces of software I use are also part of it as well.

Much like we have been conditioned during our lives to interact with a cooperate with our bodies, so have we done the same thing with machines. Though they are not physically attached to us, they are intellectually and cognitively attached. They are part of the extended thinking thing that is our nervous system and the flow of ideas and information between us and the machines.

This is a heady thought, but it’s worth playing with. The more collaborative our work with machines becomes, and the more immersive it becomes, the less it makes sense to enforce boundaries of thinkers and thinking to one physical body.

Beyond the Dynamic Duo

Just as we should not be content to restrict the idea of a thinker to a person but not a machine, we should also not be content to restrict thinking and thoughts to one person in a group environment. This is not so radical a suggestion. We already kind of buy into this idea. We talk about the “mood in a room”. We refer to “groupthink” and “consensus” all the time. These things point toward a perhaps already blurry boundary between the individual thinking and thoughts of each person in the group, and some larger entity that is the group’s mental life.

If we try to make sense of sentences like that last one using the old way of thinking about mentality — namely the one brain/one thought paradigm — we’ll stumble and squirm. That’s where we have let ourselves be more open to viewing thinker and thought as not restricted in space or time. The thinker — as well as the thought — can be extended in both dimensions.

Four-Dimensional Thinking

If there is reason to believe that thinking is not restricted by space — that is, where in our outside of a body it is done — then why suppose that it is restricted by the other remaining dimension? I’m referring, of course, to time.

If it becomes difficult to say that thinking takes place only in one discrete physical space, it makes even less sense to try to say there are temporal boundaries. If you have ever tried to perceive where a thought begins and ends in time, you’ll see what I mean.

Some thoughts can (and do) flicker in and out of existence without us having time to be aware of them. Others seem to span eternities. And though we assume that my thinking about a pink elephant yesterday was a different thought than my thinking about it today, is that necessarily true? Our memories have been found to be quite unreliable (pick your favorite experiment), and so who is to say that either my elephant thought is not the same today as yesterday, or that the two are not just one large thought, spanning a few days with my attention only picking up on it a few times?

G.W.F. Hegel based an entire philosophical opus on the premise that ideas can and do live long an fruitful lives, where they do battle with each other, combine with and modify each other, and so on. Again, heady stuff, but in a time when I can essentially chat face to face with someone on the International Space Station while I’m in my pajamas in Illinois — why can’t we get a little heady?

So What Does this Mean?

By and large, what I have written so far has been descriptive in nature — that is, I’m attempting to suggest a way of describing how things are. But what I’m really interested in is how changing our description of thinking and minds can offer us new and better prescriptions — that is, what we should do to improve our thinking.

There is always the simple intellectual benefit associated with changing the way you look at something. Simply taking on a different point of view, and a different mental model of something can have radical beneficial effects for one’s thinking. The various “revolutions” in science bear this out.

A really great book on the topic (that should probably be required reading in high schools) is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In the book, Kuhn talks about the process by which big steps are taken in science that seemingly came out of nowhere and changed everything. It’s worth exploring in detail, but I’ll simplify it here by saying that simply changing how we view whatever system our theories are trying to describe can allow us to take huge steps in manipulating those systems to our advantage.

So, if we can begin to view minds and thinking as unbound by both space and time, what kind of advantages might we realize? I apologize for not bringing answers, but I should have warned you that my background is philosophy, and that’s kind our thing.

Suffice it to say that minds are not what they used to be; they’re more. And I think that’s a good thing. But we’re still getting our bearings when it comes to thinking — be it human or machines doing it. We can take baby-steps in the realm of implementation, but let’s take leaps and bounds in the realm of thinking about it. It might just be what saves us from ourselves.

Photo by Beatriz Pérez Moya on Unsplash

Sometimes, doing a big, hard thing really is as easy as doing a bunch of small ones.

The phrase “I’m writing a book” evokes all sorts of feelings, doesn’t it? After all, books are, well…they’re books! The only people who write books are authors — not regular people! Writers place these and other roadblocks in front of themselves as a way to not write something so large as a book. I know this because I too was doing it for quite some time.

Since I began writing online, about 4 years ago, I have had every intention to eventually write a book — eventually. That has been the operative word. I had ideas, and the hunger to be the kind of writer who has a book under his belt . But every time I would begin to think of writing a book, the pressure would fold me like flimsy pair of boxer shorts.

Writing is Writing…is Writing

Writing a book seems like such a big thing to do — to have done. Only authors have written books, right? But I’m just a salesman — a husband, a father — with a mortgage and a driveway that needs shoveling. I’m not Tony Robbins or Elizabeth Gilbert; and that’s what has kept me from writing a book. So I resigned myself to write short pieces here on Medium for the past 4 years. Week after week, I’d start with a blank white space and a blinking cursor. I’d spend a few hours mulling over some topic, eventually settle on something, click “publish” and move on.

For some reason, that didn’t feel like writing to me — at least not the same kind of writing that makes a book. But recently I realized something: writing is writing. Composing an email to your friend, asking how she’s holding up after she got dumped — that’s writing. Jotting down how you feel about you partner in a Valentine’s Day card — that’s writing. Writing is writing. If you can do that, you can write a book.

A Book Is Just a Bunch of Words

We make so much out of books. We lean on them, we scour them for inspiration, we identify ourselves through them. Books have been, for the past several centuries, vehicles for inspiration and action. And while it is true that books can be so very valuable once published and read, they are just a bunch of words.

I don’t say that as a way to denigrate the power that books can have, and how worthwhile they are as an investment of time and emotion. I say “books are just words” because it is what the reluctant writer — the one depriving the world of her work due to her fear and insecurity — needs to hear.

Sometimes books are amazing works of of art from the time of their first draft; many times they are not. Sometimes books are well-received and heralded as life-changing upon their release. Most are not. But so much of that is not up to you, the author. You may think it is, but it is not. What is up to you — dear writer — is whether and to what extent you put your heart and mind into what you write. After you put forth full heart and mind, then arrange, edit, and worry about how it will all be received (maybe).

And So, I Gathered My Bunch of Words…

I should have known all the foregoing advice. But it took a candid conversation with my wife to realize it. After all my hand-wringing and pacing around the room about what big thing I should do in 2019, my wife simply asked:

“why not write a book?”

When I asked what about, she said:

“you’ve written what, like 200 articles already? You’re telling me there’s not a book in there?”

And so it was. I reminded myself of how much I love to think and write about big problems, and help others do the same. Then I looked for the articles that I thought would help the most when put together. Then I wrote about the writing I’d already done, put a new essay in there, and published it.

Okay, there was a lot of editing there, but you get the idea. I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel in order to write a book. I had already done the hardest part: starting and producing chapters. All I had to do was put them together — which was actually pretty fun.

The Moral of the Story: Run a Marathon — 1 Mile at a Time

The best way to write your first book is to just write a book without meaning for it to be a book, and then making it a book afterward. If writing a book is the literary equivalent of running a marathon, then consider my advice to be this: run a marathon by running a moderately-paced mile — 26.2 times.

I wrote and self-published an e-book, which depending on who you ask, may not really be a real book. But part of my mind — that part that kept telling me how impossibly big a project writing a book is — accepts it as a book. So I’ve effectively shut up that part of me that was keeping me from just going after the bigger things I’ve been thinking of.

The book is out now, and I couldn’t be happier. Whether it’s great or not-so-great, it’s my first step, and I’m glad I took it. Now I’m much less hesitant to take the next step — which doesn’t seem as big as it used to.

So, speaking of first (and next) steps…what’s yours?!

Thanks for reading, you can pick up your own copy of my book: Be, Think, Do on Amazon. A paperback version is in the works, so if that’s your preference, stay tuned in the coming weeks.

Helping each other write better. Join Us.

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

How a destructive hustle-focused culture is hurting both our professional and personal lives, and what we can do about it.

A few years ago, a term emerged from the annals of the internet, and exploded into mainstream discussion: toxic masculinity. It’s a general shorthand for the harmful set of beliefs and behaviors about what kinds of things men are allowed to do, and what they are supposed to be like. The problem is that these beliefs and behaviors have been harmful to both men and women. Which is why there is now a call to identify and remedy these beliefs and behaviors.

Toxic beliefs and behaviors are not restricted to the realm of gender. Toxicity bleeds out into various other social arenas as well.

Much like there has been a portion of society allowing and/or encouraging a harmful brand of masculinity, there has also been a swath of working people allowing or encouraging a harmful brand of working. It goes by several hashtags (think #hustle, #riseandgrind, #success) and has several patron saints (think Vaynerchuck, Musk, Dorsey). Suffice it to say, it promotes an approach to work that ultimately ends in either exhilarating success, or severe disappointment. Either way, the side-effect is usually burnout.

While the above hashtags have various groups promoting them, there isn’t an official critical name for the mindset. So allow me take a crack at it. I call it toxic taskulinity.

Toxic Taskulinity describes a harmful set of attitudes and behaviors that have become increasingly accepted in our work lives, but that fly in the face of a balance and sustainability — in both business and in life. Unlike toxic masculinity, it knows no gender boundaries. Men and women alike are increasingly embracing this approach to working — much to our eventual detriment.

There are 4 basic features of Toxic Taskulinity:

• The 10x+ mentality
  Fetishizing hyper-growth, and exponential returns on investments (whether those investments are time, money, or labor) — often in a very quick time period.
• “Being Always On”
  Both an expectation that others will respond to communications immediately, as well as an emphasis on performance and being on display.
• Hustle Fetishism
  Idolizing the “hustle” mentality — constant movement and simply doing a lot of stuff; being busy.
• Ostentatious Self-Hacking
  A tendency not simply to work on improving oneself, but to do so to the extreme, and in a way that involves quite a bit of showing off and competition.

The 10x+ Mentality

In an essay in the seminal book The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick Brooks presents the idea of a kind of high-performing programmer whose output compared to the balance of the team is about 10:1. Brooks identified these highly efficient programmers as the ones to hire and aspire to promote as leaders of teams — in an effort to squeeze more output out of them.

The idea of 10x has since been co-opted from the world of programming to the world of business in general. At some point the concept of 10:1 efficiency in programming became mapped onto the concept of growth — both in magnitude and in speed. 10x growth seems to have gone from impressive but very uncommon to the expectation — leaving those who aren’t achieving such extreme growth to feel inadequate.

What’s worse, this expectation of 10x-ing has resulted in a flurry of people and companies doing all sorts of unnatural or unethical things in an attempt to claim 10x growth and beyond. A great recent example is the Theranos debacle. Elizabeth Holmes and a small team of Toxic 10x-ers swindled investors and a tech-fetishizing public out of billions of dollars as they tried to build a company that so perfectly exemplified this toxic mentality of rapid and huge growth.

Such is the name of the game when statistical outliers get branded as the new norm. People are inclined to slither their way to being part of that small statistical set, and the more motivated ones will do the kinds of things that leave many of us slack-jawed. But we often forget that we who don’t question this new set of beliefs play a part. We don’t ask questions, we don’t challenge the assumptions and expectations, and so we allow the big offenders to keep acting unchecked — and even supported and cheered on. This is true both within companies, and outside of them.

The “Always On” Allure

Cell phones, email, and text messages have been around for less than half a century, and yet they have become as much a fixture of our lives as have forks, knives, and spoons. Tools tend to shape the people that use them, and in turn, the cultures are shaped as well. Cell phones, email and text messages are no exceptions. We are becoming — in part — what those tools have helped mold us into.

Whatever that shape is, it involves being “always on”. There is an expectation that if we are serious about our work, we should almost always be accessible — whether we choose to be accessed or to access others. We are there, along with our tools, and we can be gotten to, and get down to work, if need be.

I am not above this. I answer emails on Sunday at 11pm. I text colleagues at odd hours. I take phone calls on holidays from customers. It is as much a part of my vocation as the roar of the smith’s blast furnace was to my ancestors a few centuries ago. The expectation is that we are around and can pick up; and if we can’t (or more accurately, won’t) then we’re just not putting forth the expected effort. It’s not that we’ll get fired for it (though some might), it’s that our work ethic — something personal and having to do with our character — is called into question when we’re not “always on”.

This “always on” is more than just being available, it’s also about always being “on” in terms of being performative. Social media — be it pictures, videos, or texts at its base — has encouraged us to be performative creatures. We act and we act out. We act in ways that will show people that we are who we would like to be, or who they would like us to be. This is not to say that it is fake or insincere — it is simply to say that it is a way of acting that is different than when we are alone or in close company. More of our lives are lived in performance than any other generation.

Such an existence has its accompanying anxieties. We sense others performing, and we wonder how our performance compares. Or we — turned off by their performance — attempt to perform in a way that shows others that we are not into such performances. It’s the anti-performance, but it is still a performance.

Hostages to the Hustle

The word “hustle” used to carry a negative connotation — associated with someone cheating others out of money through dishonest and cunning persistence. Somewhere in the past half-century, the tables have turned, and the word has become highly regarded. Hustling is now the word used for hard work, busting one’s ass, going faster, harder, and leaving it all on the field — so to speak. But recently it’s gone even further.

These days, it’s not enough to simply become skilled, knowledgeable, and wise — you must also work harder and longer than everyone else. The basic attitude is this: If the day were to spontaneously grow an additional hour, the hustle mentality would advise that we use it to work that much more.

I would never disparage the concept of hard work. With a worthy goal, and a well thought-out plan, hard work is the mark of someone of solid character — except when every other thing goes by the wayside for the sake of said work. Hard work doesn’t mean a damn thing if you do business like a snake. It also doesn’t mean anything if you cut yourself off from an examined and meaningful existence with other humans. It becomes toxic when you start your own company, get others on board, and coerce them into the same way of thinking.

If you work at a breakneck pace, but do cutthroat business and show a disregard for others, where is the virtue in the hustle? The world has had just about enough of the hustlers who burn bridges and speak out of both sides of their mouths. They may get what they’re after, and in short order — but they often get it at the cost of others, and the cost of the good name of companies and industries.

Toxic taskulinity continues to encourage us to sacrifice everything for the hustle — nights, weekends, family, friends, etc. It’s taught us to adopt a mission that excludes taking the time and mental space to think things through, and getting the buy-in of others (unless they have funding for you). It seems to be leading to a world of solitary entrepreneurial martyrs, who — though they may work themselves to death — hope to one day hope reach the hustler’s heaven, and get their equivalent of 72 virgins (an IPO? Getting bought by Google or Amazon?).

Ostentatious Self-Hacking

The origin of the word hack, as we used it today can be traced back to the early days of computing. MIT sponsored a club called the Tech Model Railroad Club, which is where many a young enthusiast cultivated their love for clever but seemingly inelegant solutions or workarounds to persistent problems. Those solutions — dubbed “hacks” — became the basis for the way many of us use the term today.

But the idea of “hacking” has made a jump from a linguistic perfect fit to an ill-fitting — and I’d argue — detrimental usage. Consider the primary definition of a hacker, courtesy of the (in)famous The Jargon File:

A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users’ Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.

The co-opting of this term outside of the world of engineering is perhaps the most telling. The practice of hacking is built upon the premise of something being both systematized and programmable — but life as we know it has thus far proven to be neither. And yet, part of this new attitude toward life and work includes the belief that we can and should hack our way to better living.

Furthermore, there is an element to it that rears its head any time people with a lot of disposable income get their hands on something: ostentation. That is to say, if something is of interest at all, once the wealthy or notable get wind of it, it becomes something to show off and a forum for competition.

Social media is now flooded with entrepreneurs, and those wishing to be like them, showcasing their increasingly extreme efforts to systematize and program their way to a supposedly better life. Hashtags and spruced-up selfies abound — along with clever product-placements.

The idea is that like the early builders of miniature railroads and computers, there is a body of knowledge that the privileged few can access, and such knowledge allows you to bypass the problems that everyone else faces — to guarantee a shortcut to the #bestlife. The rest of us — struggling as humans always have day to day — see the glamorous portrayals of those supposedly reprogramming amazing and envious lives, and our hearts dip with each new instance of it in our respective news feeds.

What Can We Do?

Far be it from me to offer up a panacea for any modern existential ailment. To do so would be to make the same mistake that we make when we take a hacker’s approach to living. But in some way, we can think a little systemically to begin remedying the situation we find ourselves in with toxic taskulinity. Trying to make everything a system is what got us here, so reverse engineering that is as good a place as any to start. Here are a few modest suggestions to overcome the tendencies toward toxicity, as we try to eke out a professional life.

Think of profitability and sustainability, rather than growth.

No matter what kinds of disruptions and innovations young and hungry entrepreneurs come up with, the basic principles of business still apply. A business needs to be profitable and sustainable. If a business isn’t both of those things, then it’s merely a matter of time before it collapses under its own weight or momentum.

The same principle holds true for an individual lifestyle. Going fast and hard in an attempt to grow exponentially can yield unbelievable short-term results. But those results are “unbelievable” for a reason: they can’t be sustained.

In a fantastic essay on the topic entitled “Why We Choose Profit”, Basecamp founder and CEO Jason Fried outlines the many reasons why profitability and sustainability beats growth and valuation every time. The whole essay is worth reading, but a particularly great line is this:

Typically when people talk about FU money, they think about millions. Once you have millions you have FU money. Well, actually, all you need is $1 in annual profit. Because once your company is self-sustaining and profitable, and you don’t owe anyone anything (in my book, if you owe money you aren’t truly profitable), then you can say FU to just about anything. You don’t need to do anything you don’t want to do when you don’t have to rely on anyone else to be sustainable. You don’t have to dance on anyone else’s stage, or play by anyone else’s rules. FU money isn’t about buying an island, it’s about being an island — your own sustainable entity.

Again, this applies whether you’re a person on your own or at the helm of a business. Be profitable and sustainable, and you own your own destiny. That’s something that constantly hustling for growth just can’t get you.

Slow down periodically

Just like I don’t blame my 4 year-old for running around, screaming, and throwing toys when the rest of her friends at a birthday party are doing it — I don’t blame the cavalcade of hustlers and growth-hackers out there for working at a burnout, breakneck pace. But I do urge them — like I urge my daughter — to slow down, take a few breaths, and think.

My most crippling deficiency is a tendency to get drawn so deep into thought that I fail to take action until the last minute. This can be as bad as going all-out toward a brick wall of burnout, so I will not put my behavior on a pedestal here. But what I can say is that the mindset of toxic taskulinity favors action — quick action. But the tendency to think long and hard before action seems to have taken a back seat.

Even if you’re a busy entrepreneur — especially if you are one — it cannot be bad for you to set aside time each week to reflect. Review what you’ve done, what you’re thinking about doing, and what the long-term impact might be. Think not just of the immediate consequences, but a few rounds into the future. One hour per week can be enough — hopefully a little more each quarter. It’s simply time to slow down, and reflect without pressure or the hustle and bustle to influence your thinking.

Even if you don’t think this will produce better results (which I highly doubt), it will at least be better for your mental health. Even the most high-performance engines cannot run at their maximum RPMs indefinitely; they need to slow down to stay at a healthy operating state. The same is true of people and businesses.

Embrace the mentality of “Less, But Better”

The thing about the hustle mentality is that though many hustlers are invoking the language of lean and productivity culture, they’re rarely being lean at all. Rather, they simply create bloat in their lives by taking on too much, and priding themselves on how many boxes they can check off each day before collapsing in a heap on their desks.

A better approach would be to steal a page from the book of famed designer Dieter Rams, who coined the design philosophy “less, but better”. It worked well for him designing iconic products at Braun, and it can work just as well for designing a daily or yearly routine for you. Aim to do really important things, but question whether every single email, phone call, and supposedly “urgent” communication really needs to be answered. Often times, being “always on” for those kinds of demands on your time and attention is basically like giving a binging addict more cash. Sure, they stop bothering you, and are grateful for what you did, but you’re simply feeding their destructive problem.

Work on yourself earnestly, but quietly

There are enough influencers posing for selfies at gyms and bragging about how long they fast for each day. Nobody will notice, or think less of you, for simply working on bettering yourself in solitude. Likewise, no one will lose respect for you if you do it in a non-glamorous, tried-and-true way — rather than some flashy hacker-iffic fashion.

If you happen across good techniques, ways of thinking, or best practices — sharing them is a great service to others. After all, that’s basically what my whole game is. But there’s a difference between offering up help (i.e., serving others) and flaunting how well you’re (supposedly) doing, and how much of an opportunity you have to spend time and money on life-hacks. In the end, such inevitably empty ostentation hurts more than it helps.

If Nothing Else, Be More Thoughtful

This message will likely fall on some percentage of deaf ears. Devoted hustlers — like devoted zealots of any ideology — will hold on to the four elements of toxic taskulinity with full faith. They will swear that in order to make it, you need to embrace 10x growth and beyond, be always on, always be hustling, and continue to push yourself like a machine. There will be little we can say to dissuade them — and why shouldn’t that be true? After all, they’re the ones driving the expensive cars and taking selfies on picturesque islands that they are leasing for the month.

But to some extent, there is a part of each human that must question any kind of doctrine of faith like toxic taskulinity. There has to be an element that resists the consistent (and sometimes belligerent) push in this direction — in any direction. I guess all I’m asking is that at a time when society seems more receptive to pushing back against toxic sets of beliefs and behaviors, we be willing to do it in all sorts of arenas. Almost all of us work, so why not start there?

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For the past 2 years, I have chosen 3 values to focus on at the beginning of the year. This year, I’ve chosen 1, and I think that will make all the difference.

Every January for the past couple of years, I have chosen 3 values on which to focus during that year, and published a piece about them. It has been my way of tweaking the popular practice of goals and resolutions to something deeper and — hopefully — more effective.

This year, I’m doing things a bit differently. I’m further tweaking my already simplified practice by reducing the list to one single value.

Preface: Why Values?

Many people adopt goals or resolutions at the beginning of each year, and I by no means discourage that practice. Goals are great for giving you something to try to achieve, and thus something to work toward — so they provide motivation and a push toward something. Values serve a slightly different purpose.

While goals can effectively provide motivation and a push, they are by design narrow. They are only effective to the extent that there is a target in mind. Values provide something different than goals: direction and guidance. I have written previously about values, as they compare to goals, but suffice it to say: values are what remains when your goals, passions, and interests change. Values tell you which sacrifices to make, and which goals to pursue in the first place. Values exist at a higher level than goals. So even if it so happens that you end up being unable to achieve your goals, you can at least take solace in the fact that you stuck to your values.

My (Singular) Value for 2019

For the previous years, my chosen values have worked out okay, and I was all set to set up 3 of them for this year. But 2018 was different than the previous 2 years. In 2018, I found the last few months to be marked by a realization that gave me pause. The realization was of a problem that has followed me for quite some time. It became clear that if I was going to do anything to work on myself in 2019, it should revolved around this problem.

My Big Problem in 2018

Late in 2018, I had the privilege of working with two gentlemen that I would now count as friends on a project that they are working to make into a business. I won’t share the details here, except to say the following: it was an intensive correspondence that made me accountable for getting fairly intensive thinking/writing tasks done at a set time each day. I was able to successfully complete all of the tasks by the deadlines, but doing so seemed to take much more effort than I thought was reasonable. It made me think about why that is.

I have never been one for deadlines. I tend to work more slowly — especially when significant thought is required (or seems to be required). But where that gets me into trouble is when I justify procrastination by calling it “taking time to think” — when in reality, I’m stalling; I’m scared.

So as this year ended, I began thinking about why I stall, why I get scared. What I believe it comes down to is that I forget my commitments. I either forget my commitments to others or to my future self. When that happens, I allow my thinking to get taken over by concerns for the present me — the one who doesn’t feel like working now, or is bored by working on what he’s committed to, and craves the momentary pleasures of whatever strikes his fancy at the moment.

As I dug deeper, I came to realize that somewhere along my journey thinking about projects, tasks, goals, and efficiency, there is a simple, foundational truth that I lost track of: you are what you care about. Care is measured by commitment. Commitment is measured by your actions. And though it is rarely acknowledged, thinking is a form of action. So in the end, you are what you spend time thinking about and doing. If there are commitments that you let go unmet while thinking about and doing other things, you end up in a state of disharmony. At the end of 2018, that is where I found myself. So I took 2 weeks off of my day job, and dug into fixing the problem.

My Solution: A Singular Value

As 2019 accelerates into full swing, my focus is not on a set of values or principles, but rather on a single one: commitment.

My focus in 2019 will be on meeting and managing my commitments, which include:

• commitments I make to others
• commitments others make to me
• commitments I make to myself

Those 3 types of commitments will drive my actions in 2 important ways.

The commitments I have already made — rather than my whims and desires — will guide my actions. I will direct my time, effort, and attention toward meeting my commitments first and foremost. That is clear-cut.

Where I feel that I cannot meet said commitments, where even following the 40% rule leaves me expecting to fall short of meeting the commitment, I will manage the commitments I have made. By this I mean, I will reach out to those to whom I have committed, explain that I am unable to meet the commitment as it stands — and ask that they be gracious enough to alter it so that I can meet it. If I feel it necessary, I will ask that they release me from the bond of said commitment entirely, apologizing for having not met it.

The commitments I have yet to make will also guide my actions. I will be very conscious of when I may be making commitments, and pause to ensure that in doing so, I have every intention and expectation of meeting them. This also sounds simple and easy, but you would be surprised how many of us do not do this, and how much damage and difficulty it causes.

The Details: 2 Tools to Work With Commitments

Whatever you aim to change — whether by way of goals, habits, or values — it works best when you have some specific tools in mind that you will use to make it happen. These tools can be physical tools, pieces of software, or simply habits of thought — so long as they do the job of helping you to focus your time and effort effectively toward the goal at hand.

My 2 tools are the following: the 40% rule and the commitment ledger.

The 40% Rule is a way of thinking attributed to ex-Navy SEAL and holder of multiple endurance records David Goggins. For my purposes, the rule is basically that whatever level of effort or stretch you think is your maximum, it’s really only 40% of your maximum.

For me, this is the perfect tool to address my tendency, which is to favor the path of least resistance, to procrastinate on things that don’t seem immediately doable to me, and to call it a day when the resistance reaches a moderately high level. But there have been moments in my life where I have — by chance — taken this 40% view, and managed to do some pretty cool things on some tight deadlines. Because of this, I know that there is something to the 40% rule.

Now, do I think I’m going to start breaking all sorts of records and become a totally different person because of this completely unscientific “rule”? No. But, it will simply serve as a reminder to me — at times when I would normally throw in the towel on meeting a commitment — that I can keep pushing, and stay true to my word. And at the end of day, I’ll feel much better for having expended that extra effort to keep my commitments.

The Commitment Ledger is an idea that I came up with after reading one of my favorite books: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In it, Stephen Covey talks about the concept of an “emotional bank account” — where we make deposits when we keep our commitments, and make (fairly steep) withdrawals when we break them. He says that making regular deposits and few to no withdrawals is key to building strong relationships — be it with yourself or with others.

To this day, that metaphor resonates with me. Commitments are the currency of relationships, and relationships are the currency of life. So if you’re concerned with living the best life you can, it makes sense to keep track of your commitments. So that’s what I do. I track the commitments I’ve made, and whether or not I keep them or don’t. At this point, it’s a fairly simple list, but it keeps me focused on the things that I am attached to in some way, so I remember which relationships I might be sacrificing when I get distracted from doing the work that I really ought to be doing.

A Brief Epilogue: Thinking Differently About Doing

I have been an enthusiastic adherent to the GTD system for about 10 years now, and I still believe that it is an elegant and helpful system for organizing one’s life and getting more productive. But I have begun to veer slightly away from it — or at least from the way it approaches projects and actions.

For many, it continues to be useful to separate work into goals, projects, and tasks. It allows for a clear hierarchy and common language for those doing knowledge work. But as I have begun to focus on commitments, I have found the terms “goals”, “projects”, and “tasks” to be lacking in the kind of gravity that I think must be expressed by whatever language we use to think and talk about work — be it professional or personal work.

What I mean is that a project is just a set of actions with a desired outcome. Many times, you can be waist-deep in a project and its tasks without being able to clearly identify why the project matters anymore. In many cases, the sunk cost fallacy tricks us into keeping up work on a project when nothing really recommends it. But if the project is a commitment — if someone, or a few people, are counting on it, and that is clear to you as you track the project — that has some gravity behind it.

My commitment in 2019 is to commitment. My focus will be on managing and meeting my commitments.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

And other magical myths we hold on to at our own peril

From time to time, I will hear someone talk about their “dream job”. It used to be that when I heard mention of that magical thing, I would almost involuntarily start wishing for that mythical job that I could one day wake up ecstatic to do every single day — with each email and phone call resulting in a cascade of joy and happiness.

And then I realized that there is no such thing. A dream job — defined in that way — does not exist. The thing about a “dream job” is it tends to always have one distinguishing property: it’s a job other than the one you have. And you know what? For most of us, it remains that way.

If that is the case — if the grass is always greener on the other side — why don’t we just decide to focus on appreciating what it is that makes our lawn pretty good, even though we don’t think it’s the greenest?

The answer is that we do this for things other than jobs. We do it for relationships, sex-lives, kitchens, friends, bodies, and so many more things.

The dream house tends to be one other than the one you live in.
The dream car tends to be one other than the one you drive.
The dream partner tends to be one other than the one you’re with.
And so on…

Unless you decide to stop thinking that way. Perhaps it’s not easy, but it certainly is simple. Just ask yourself if you are expecting too much of your satisfaction every day to come from X — whatever X is: a job, a person, a situation, etc. Most of the time, the answer is a resounding “yes”.

It is one simple question, but it can make all the difference. And once you ask and answer it earnestly, you can make the decision as to how you will feel about your life and the things in it. You can set goals, establish a purpose, and work toward something realistic and tangible.

The thing about goals is that if you’re going to set them, they can’t be something like “get my dream job” — because that term is at best uninformative and at worst delusional and misleading. It’s like telling someone to to type in “the Promised Land” in their GPS and you both expecting to meet there. Best of luck to you both. In the meantime, you should probably ask for an address or coordinates.

To that end, if you do bear down and get realistic about what “dream job” means to you, you’ll very likely find that you are expecting way too much from a place that pays you to be there. I get it, it can’t be all for a paycheck. But let’s be practical here; when it comes to being happy, you have to do some of the lifting yourself. You can’t expect your job, your partner, or your bank account to do all of it for you.

One day, you will wake up, and if you’re lucky enough, you’ll be 65. The world will have changed, the circumstances will have to, but you will still be there. You will have (likely) been trading your time and attention for a paycheck for decades, and you can have done that in one of two ways:

• constantly hoping to get some other job that you assume (without evidence) will be way better than this one
• finding things about each job you have that enrich you as a person, get you skills and recognition, and enjoying the things worth enjoying — while maybe pursuing better opportunities as you find them.

I don’t know about you, but the latter option sounds way more attractive to me. That’s the way I have chosen to go. Join me, won’t you?

Photo by Dean Rose on Unsplash

The counter-intuitive relationship between aspiration, attitude, and achievement.

I used to teach philosophy classes at a community college — after working a full day at my 9–5 job. I would leave the office at 4:30, drive about an hour to the campus, and try not to bore a group of tired students to death while I droned on for almost 3 hours about (of all things) philosophy. I did this 2 days a week for 10 semesters. The pay was almost nonexistent, there were no benefits, and I loved it. It’s been a few years since I’ve done it, but I still kind of miss it.

In my Philosophy 101 course, I opened the very first class almost the same way every semester: I warned students that things are often not what they seem, and that in many cases the truth runs counter to what you might expect. That’s why it pays to not accept the received wisdom as gospel, to question the accepted best practices from time to time, and to ask a lot of questions. We end up finding that some of the most helpful pieces of advice we can receive are counter-intuitive — they fly in the face of what we assume as we make our way in the world.

There are 3 pieces of counter-intuitive truths that I have stumbled upon in my time. They are as follows:

• slow is fast, fast is slow
• small is big, big is small
• soft is hard, and hard is soft

Slow is Fast, Fast is Slow

There is a saying in the community of salespeople that goes: “slow is fast, fast is slow”. The idea is simply that especially when you’re trying to fold someone into the process of doing what you’re asking, to rush it is to systematically slow down the process of getting effective buy-in. So fast becomes slow, and slow becomes fast. In general, the idea is this:

If you approach something in a rushed manner, and continue to push it through with a goal of meeting a timeline, several things can happen to make things go more slowly:

• there will be push back from stakeholders that will slow down the progress. Being slow allows time for buy-in by way of dissent being totally (not partially) vetted, and totally (not just partially) acknowledged and addressed.
• the quality of the outcome will suffer, which means more rework later on, and add time to the process.
• completion (the finish line) becomes an illusion, and there will continue to be loose ends discovered that need to be tied up, because the speed didn’t allow them to be addressed

We often approach projects or work with the mindset of needing results now, and needing to do a million things at once. But what we don’t realize is that the more important the results are, the more beneficial it is to take it slow.

Small is Big, Big is Small

By now, nearly everyone who can read has heard the phrase “the journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step” or perhaps “think globally, act locally”. Both of those phrases tap into something that is discoverable by anyone working on a large project: small actions can have huge knock-on effects. The converse of this is also true; some of the biggest, most grandiose actions can fall absolutely flat, and do nothing.

We humans tend to see huge advances, exponential growth, or quickly escalating trends and think that because they are so huge, they must have started off with some big idea or big, well-planned action. But in so many cases, it is a small idea — when let loose at the right time, in the right conditions — that ends up having a huge impact. And that idea often first gets implemented with some small actions — a crappy first draft, the back of a napkin blueprint. And those are just the examples that happen on a short time scale.

On a longer time-scale, this principle is true even more often. Time is an unmatched multiplier of strategically done work. That means combining a series of small actions together over time multiplies their collective impact.

Soft is Hard, Hard is Soft

I grew up in Chicago — which for a time, was home to the world’s tallest building (now known as the Willis Tower). When I was a child and visited the tower’s top floor, the day happened to be quite windy. I was amazed that the tower — such a solid and durable structure — swayed in the wind as much as several feet each way. This was no accident, skyscrapers are designed to sway in the wind.

The reason for this has to do with the concept of horizontal force on an exceedingly vertical structure. When a gust of wind is coming at a skyscraper, there is a lot of surface area (length) to hit and push against, compared to surface area holding the tower down to the ground (width). If the skyscraper weren’t built with the ability to sway and flex with the force of the wind, the building would experience quite a bit of structural damage at higher elevations.

In essence, in order to be hard, solid things that house large numbers of people and things, skyscrapers have to in some sense, be soft. Skyscrapers have to be able to flex and sway when an opposing force comes at them, so they don’t snap when met by significant force. In the same way, we as humans have to be able to flex and sway as well, if we want to be able to thrive in uncertain conditions.

We may be tempted to try to show strength and rigidity — to resist compromise and flexibility — but all that does is make it easier for us to make no progress. A little is better than nothing, and often when we refuse to be a bit soft and flexible, we end up with all or nothing (and most of the time, nothing). Some will perceive this to be a call to “back down” or be “soft”, and perhaps it is, but the only thing we have to gain by standing firm and inflexibly in the face of resistance is a boost to our ego — and not much else.

In this sense, softness is hard, and hardness is soft. The things and people that are not rigid and inflexible end up lasting through the changing and forceful winds of the years. It is only in our naive assessment of what strength means that we thing we must refuse to flex, sway, and change our minds. But as we experience the various shifts in the environments — be them personal, political, or professional — we can come to realize that being able to be flexible and a bit soft will help us last through quite a bit of turmoil, and come out stronger in the end.

We can aspire to be strong, achieve big things, and move quickly all we want. But our attitude can not always be the same as our aspirations. Big achievements often come as the result of attention to small actions. Seemingly fast progress comes at the result of a slower approach to work. Strength is a function of flexibility, rather than the result of complete rigidity. When we embrace these seemingly counterintuitive ideas, the notion of progress becomes a whole lot more realistic.

Photo by Avi Richards on Unsplash

Hidden deep in every job is the opportunity for much more. But how many of us take it?

Of all of the phrases I hear regularly that bug me, chief among them is “it’s not personal, it’s just business”. I consider that phrase a very special brand of bullshit. I say this because I think many of us have heard it so often throughout our lives that we have come to believe it, and regurgitate it as a way of proliferating a pretty harmful division in our lives: the idea that our work is separate from and mostly irrelevant to the rest of our lives. It’s harmful to our own personal growth, and harmful to others.

The truth is it’s never “just business”. At some level — no matter how much we want to believe otherwise — it’s personal. I hope, dear reader, that you who spend (probably more than) 1/3 of your adult life at work can see how insulting that is. It’s even more insulting if you own a company, and you pour your blood, sweat, and tears into it. It’s never just business, and anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is just trying to end the conversation without admitting the full gravity of the situation.

While this phrase has irked me for some time, it wasn’t until recently that I began to realize why. When you get right down to it, work can be many different things to many different people, but it is always — at least in part — an expression of your values, principles, and habits. Those of us who dismiss work as just a place to go and toss away 8+ hours for around 5 days a week (or more!) are losing a golden opportunity to enrich our character, and our understanding ourselves and other human beings.

To put it another way, work serves as an undeniably spiritual endeavor. But wait, please don’t stop reading because you saw the word spiritual. I know, it’s the kind of word that carries a lot of unsavory connotations. But here’s the thing: spirituality is not the weird, new-age, hippy-dippy kind of thing most people associate it with. In fact, spirituality is an entirely practical thing. If you have even the vaguest idea of what some of your core values are, and you care about what they mean — you’re already doing something spiritual!

A Simple and Clear Definition of “Spiritual”

Here is the simplest and most informative definition of the term “spiritual” that I can think of:

Spirituality is that area of inquiry and action that is concerned with the possibilities of a uniquely human phenomenon: the vast space between stimulus and response.

Whatever we mean by the term “soul”, it is at least that faculty that makes the choices — the thing that takes in the experiences that reality feeds us, mulls them over (or doesn’t), and forms a will to act. It is that place that spans miles at our best times, and shrinks to the size of a pinhole at our worst.

Those of us that operate mostly on autopilot — where we act and react without thinking, and feel out of control — are the ones that have the most work to do. And that work is surely spiritual work, whether we want to use that word or not. It’s simply the work of settling into and expanding that space between action and reaction — stimulus and response. It’s reflection, contemplation, and character-building. It involves values, volition, and vehemence. It involves work.

Work as a Spiritual Outlet

For the past few years, articles on mindfulness have been popping up on sites like Inc, Fast Company, and Fortune — sites that used to merely publish about capital, global supply chains, and business plans. And though it is easy to chalk this up to just general trendiness, the better explanation is that people’s work is a spiritual outlet. Whether you initially wanted your job or not, you’re there, you put in time and effort, and you feel something as a result. Whether that is positive or negative is a function of many things, but one of them is your approach to it.

Tucked into every job — big or small — is a chance to hone one’s character and values, a chance to practice what one preaches (or fail to), and a chance to refine the traits that make a person who they are. Many don’t choose to look at it that way, and I am sure they have their reasons. But given that for many of us, our job literally pays for our life choices, it seems a waste to treat it as just some place to go for 8 hours or so each day, and nothing more.

Think of all the things that happen at work. The human drama, the ambitious projects, the coordination and organization, the human connections. Even if you work mostly on your own, think of the times when you successfully pushed yourself to do more, create more, and get more done. That is more than just work for pay, it’s personal development. You’re digging into that space between stimulus and response, and you’re pushing out great things. As a result, you’re stronger, smarter, wiser, kinder (hopefully), and slower to overreaction. If you approach your work in the right way, all of this is true no matter your job.

Mindset over Materialism

I am arguing here that work is (or at least can be) a spiritual thing. In the past, many have contrasted spirituality with materialism. And I think that the tendency to treat a job as merely a means to an end (a paycheck) is indeed to turn a blind eye to the opportunities that a job presents to enrich yourself. As cliche as it may sound, it really is a mindset.

If you approach your work as something involving more than just the money you get or the objective metrics you achieve, you can derive much more benefit from it. That benefit carries over into the rest of your life, as well. A person who feels better about the way they’re developing on the job can then go home feeling better able to be a parent, a partner, as caretaker, etc.

But here’s the kicker: when it comes to the spiritual nature of work, you can’t rely on you boss, your title, your company, or your tenure to provide that spiritual fulfillment in work. They can certainly provide reassurance at times, and provide support, granted they care about you. But ultimately, the best kind of on-the-job experience is the self-managed one — where you set goals for yourself each day, week, month, and year, and achieve them. In many cases, these goals are small and simple — like answering all of the urgent emails in the day, or helping out someone in another department. The most fulfilling and character-building experiences in my career have been things that were not measured in my metrics or put as objectives on my performance appraisals. They were “soft achievements”, but they had a hard impact on me.

With 1/3 of your life spent sleeping, the balance is likely to be an even split between work and everything else you do. Refusing to treat work as a deeper, spiritual outlet to help build your values and character is perhaps the biggest folly one can commit. But it is also easily remedied. You can start today, simply ask what value you can strive to exemplify today in your work, live it, and keep going.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

How to single-task and achieve full concentration on a task, so you can enjoy the benefits of single-tasking.

More frequently than I would like to admit, I have a lot of tasks to get done, and a smaller amount of time than I’d like which to do them. I sit down boot up the laptop (or whatever the tool du jour is), and get ready to go. Then it happens: freedom — sweet paralyzing freedom. I get to decide what to do next. But in the back of my mind, I’m not sure that my choice will match the real world urgency and importance. I’m worried I’ll make the wrong choice.

So what happens? I tense up and get equally nervous about each of the tasks, which means I end up 5 times as stressed and 20% (yes, that’s 1/5) as productive as I could be had I just devoted myself to one of them.

I think that’s probably familiar territory for many people. And it makes perfect sense, given our silly, silly brains. It’s a natural reaction to the combination of stress and scarcity. Our lizard brain turns on and pumps adrenaline through our veins, making is want to do the cognitive equivalent of running away from a predator — so we fail to commit to any single task and just throw small pieces of time and attention at each, in a scattershot (and ineffective) fashion.

To change how we act in situations like this, we need to look at another scarce resource that is easier to understand that time: money.

Time vs. Money

Time and money are both resources, and they’re both valuable. In fact, some people say that time is money. But the two resources are different in a very important way.

You can’t buy a $20 shirt and $20 pair of pants with the same $20 bill. Each of them costs $20, and there’s no way to magically condense that. We seem to accept that basic truth for money, but somehow think that we can skirt around it as it relates to time. But that’s just silly. If 2 projects each require about 2 hours of focused concentration, we can’t use the same 2 hours to do them both.

When you think about it, time is actually even more valuable than money, because it’s more scarce. Theoretically, you can increase how much money you have coming in each month, each year — and most of us do over time, as we progress in our careers. But you can’t do that with time. You’ve got what you’ve got each day, week, month, and year. The best you can do is hope to use it more wisely.

As with any resource, since you can’t somehow increase how much of it you have, the only choice you’re left with is to manage the hell out of what you do have.

The Concentration Equation

If time is the great equalizer, then concentration is the great multiplier. Take any time you allocate to a given task, and predict what the results will be given normal working circumstances. Now add in concentration. The more you are able to concentrate on the task at hand, and filter out noise (whether informational noise or sensory noise), the more you can multiply the output of the time spent on that task.

Keep in mind, the results multiplied aren’t necessarily quantity. In many cases, quality gets multiplied. That means a better quality of work, fewer mistakes, and a deeper analysis or higher tier of creative output.

So the real objective, then, of our efforts in becoming more productive and effective should be on two things:

• increasing the amount of time we can spend per session on given tasks
• increasing the intensity of concentration on the tasks

The way to do the former is proper time management. The way to do the latter is to do two things:

1. Make single-tasking a habit
2. Improve your power of concentration, and yield it during each session of work

(Briefly) The Drawbacks of Multi-Tasking

By now, I think there is enough work out there discouraging us from multi-tasking. But not only do I see many people still doing it. I also feel the pull to do it myself. And that’s a real problem for a few reasons.

First of all, there is a well-established pile of evidence that multitasking is actually counterproductive.

…the power of multitasking is a myth. Human beings are, essentially, single-core processors. We can’t effectively check our email, listen to someone asking us for feedback on a project, and take notes simultaneously. We can do it, sure, but everything suffers. Juggling tasks divides your attention, increases the time spent refocusing on important tasks (making you less productive), often gives people the impression that you aren’t completely focused on them (because you’re not), and robs you of a powerful focus you could be directing towards a single important task.

Secondly, multitasking is also harmful to your physical and mental health, largely because it fatigues your faculties, and reduces your ability to make effective decisions.

Multitasking is a brain drain that exhausts the mind, zaps cognitive resources and, if left unchecked, condemns us to early mental decline and decreased sharpness. Chronic multitaskers also have increased levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, which can damage the memory region of the brain.

So let’s just agree on this: as the old adage says, if something is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing right. And let’s add that if it’s worth doing right, it’s worth doing with undivided effort and attention.

Single-Tasking and a Better ROI on Time

It is all well and good to understand that we ought to be doing one thing at a time as much as possible. But it is quite another thing to actually only do one thing at a time. If you don’t believe me, try it — especially when you have a bunch of seemingly urgent and important stuff tugging at your mind. Even at times when we think we’re only doing one thing at a time — if we really pay attention — we find that our mind has proceeded to do something else as well. When we drive to work, wash the dishes, or even exercise — things that seem to demand a decent amount of attention — we are usually also thinking through the various things that are pulling at us.

The trick to single-tasking, then, is to learn how to concentrate fully on what you are doing. When you can do that, you can begin to multiply the value of your time. Going back to the time/money analogy, concentration is like a discount coupon at a store. 5 minutes of super-concentrated work buys you more and better results than 5 minutes of semi-distracted time — in the same way, that $20 buys you more with a deep discount coupon.

A Concentration Ritual

The verb “concentrate” refers to an act of gathering together something in a way where much more of it now resides in a single place than previously. This is true for populations of people concentrated in urban areas, or juice — concentrated in one small can. The same is true of your attention, and looking at it in this way can help. Just use your imagination a little. Form a small, but effective ritual to get yourself to concentrate better.

Rituals are powerful things, they can be quite effective at poking the mind into a different mode than it normally operates in. So it makes sense to set up a ritual to help you get into a mode of deeper concentration. Ultimately, you can fool around with different variations on this ritual, so long as you find that it works. Use it when you need to devote some time to a task, and you want to get the most return on your investment of that time. It should go without saying that this should be done in an environment when you’ve prevented any external distractions as much as you can (i.e., you’ve turned the TV and radio off). I have found that I can do this while listening to music — though the music ideally should not have lyrics, as they can distract you.

1. Close your eyes and take a deep breath in, hold it, then breathe out.
2. Open your eyes, and then say something like this:
   “I commit to spending {however many minutes or hours} on this task, and fully offering up the power of my mind to the task during that time.
3. Begin working.

That’s the ritual to get going, and that’s not very difficult, but you’d be surprised how often that can really help you to do one of two things: (a) just get you into a mode where you’re willing to wholeheartedly work on a task — rather than half-heartedly (and distractedly) do so and (b)act as a check on whether you believe you should be wholeheartedly working on the task now. If as you begin the ritual, you feel doubt or are “not into it” — perhaps that’s because you feel something else is more pressing. Don’t ignore that urge — explore it, and either acquiesce to it, or reason with yourself that it’s no longer worth paying attention to, and drop it.

Tips for Maintaining Concentration

For the most part, the challenge of concentration is not really getting to concentrate in the first place, but rather, maintaining it for any desired amount of time. I have found a few things to be helpful in this respect. They may seem a bit weird and heady, but concentration is a weird and heady thing, so stay with me.

Anchor your mind to your task by imagining a literal connection to the objects you’re working with.
I write and read a lot, so the actual objects I’m working with are either a computer, phone, or piece of paper text. My mind is very prone to wander when I am engaged with these things, so I have taken to imagining a rope or string that ties my head to the computer or text to help keep me anchored. Yes, it sounds weird, but it totally works. As I type these words, I am imagining a rope jutting out of the area between my eyes and to the computer screen where I’m watching the words appear as I type. The longer you can keep this connection, the more effective your concentration remains.

When you feel tired or uneasy (and you will) take a breath and/or close your eyes and stretch briefly — but keep imagining the anchor.
Concentration for any worthwhile period of time requires exertion — mental exertion — and it is taxing. You will feel some fatigue, and depending on how your body is situated, you may feel stiffness or soreness in your body. If it’s beginning to overtake your concentration, give in and move a little. Accompany the stretching with a deep breath (or a few). But keep imagining the rope tying you to your work. That rope should remain taught and keep you attentive to your work. It’s a reminder of the commitment you made to your task — until it’s done, or until your committed time is up.

Be patient when developing this practice
As with any mental practice, be patient with yourself as you develop it. It is not easy — which is why there aren’t a lot of people doing outstanding focused work all of the time. Your mind — if it is at all like mine — will resist efforts to tie it down (especially when you’re invoking imagery of something tying it down like I’m suggesting). But after you are able to spend a few sessions where you’re tied to your task in full concentration, and you feel the joy of having poured yourself into something for a time, the force of habit will creep in. At that point, momentum is on your side, and the habit will become easier to maintain.

Ultimately, when it comes to work done, the equation remains the same. The quality of your output will always be a function of the time you spent, multiplied by the quality of concentrated effort during that time. You can throw more time at something, but you’ll never improve the result as quickly and dramatically as when you improve the quality of concentration. So go forth and offer up as a much-concentrated effort on your important work as you can.

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credit: Tov Mauzer (via DeviantArt.com)

Or, why everything you *think* you know about a (supposedly) violent and misogynistic work of art is probably wrong.

1999 was a simpler time. You could get on an airplane without having to remove half of your clothes. Most people were eating gluten and didn’t seem to care. There was Nu metal. I could go on…

Also in 1999, you could make a movie where a rag-tag group of (mostly white male) ne’er do wells in trench coats and ski masks plan to blow up buildings while beating each other to a bloody pulp, and barely an eyebrow was raised. There was also no Facebook and Twitter to host outrage-fueled rants about the film’s nearly pornographic violence. Everybody won!

All kidding aside, 1999 was also the time when David Fincher’s cinematic interpretation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club was released. The reviews — as they sink into the annals of cinematic history — are decidedly mixed.

It is not difficult to find scathing, but well thought-out, reviews of the book and film. It’s also not difficult to find reviews praising it as a masterwork of cultural criticism. Like so many works of art, it has been as divisive as it was impactful.

I am not here to analyze what different critics think of the film. I am not here to praise one review or take apart another. I am here to talk about what the film means to me — both personally and philosophically. Because when I first saw the film — at age 16 — I was hooked in a way that no other movie at the time had hooked me. And though my mindset was decidedly different at that age than it is now, my appreciation for the film (and to an extent, the book) remains with me.

Because I want to be fair, I will give a very brief account of what has been said against Fight Club as a good and insightful piece of writing and cinema. It has been accused of condoning overt sexism, misogyny, violence, and barbarism. A simple Google search will yield for you a bevy of well-written articles making those claims. Many are worth reading. I will let you decide which ones with which to engage.

But at the end of the day, the greatest thing that Fight Club does is what any great piece of (a certain kind of) art does: it leaves you dizzy, disoriented, and in a position to think freely about everything that was just thrown at you — so you can make your own decision.

Busting Myths

To kick things off, I’m going to bust some myths and misconceptions about Fight Club as quickly as I can here. I’ve given some version of this spiel to nearly every woman I’ve dated or been friends with (always trying my best to never mansplain, of course), so by now, it’s nearly memorized.

1: Fight Club is not about fighting — at least not physical fighting.

Yes, you probably knew some douche who either started his own “fight club” or talked enthusiastically (drunkenly?) about doing it. Fight Club is not about fighting, or starting a club where people fight. It is about a group of people — young men specifically — who feel out of place, uncertain, confused, and needed an outlet.

It’s also about how many wrong ways there are to explore those feelings and vent them. 
**SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON**
The main character is so dissatisfied with his life that he creates a second personality that takes over when he’s sleeping. This second personality — named Tyler Durden — creates a subversive club of other dissatisfied dudes who beat each other up, and then engage in political vandalism and disruption.

The film’s climax revolves around the main character chasing Tyler Durden to undo his now nationwide conspiracy to overthrow the financial system in the US (named “Project Mayhem”). He confronts Durden, who insists that he’s only doing these things because it’s what the main character really wants. The film ends with the main character fighting and killing Tyler Durden (i.e., the destructive, subversive, nihilistic part of himself).

So yes, figuratively it is kind of about fighting —but it’s about a man fighting a spiritual fight against his more basic and immature self. He’s fighting against society’s dictate that he grow up and fall in line, but then fighting against a harsh nihilism that he adopts as a reaction to that. Even the scenes that seem to be a fight between to characters are really something else entirely.

There is one brutal fight scene — in which the narrator (played by Edward Norton) is fighting the admittedly good-looking member of the fight club (played by the handsome Jared Leto). He hates this guy purely based on the fact that he’s “pretty”. During a run-of-the-mill fight, Noton’s character ends up straddling Leto’s character and begins punching him in the face — furiously. He ignores his opponent’s attempt to tap out (which is strictly against the rules of the club), and proceeds to smash his face in with a series of blows, until the other club members pull him off.

When the film came out, this scene was often cited in complaints about the movie’s pornographic use of violence. And this was indeed a vulgar display of violence. But the vulgarity had a purpose. We weren’t really watching a man fight and severely injure another man; we were watching a man fight and severely injure the better angels of his nature. That scene was the scene where this main protagonist lost control. It was a fight that the good guy lost — until the very end of the film, when we see him rear his head again to win a victory for reason.

The fights in Fight Club is definitely violent, but more intellectually violent than physical. And any punches thrown are symbols for the deeper fight happening within the story.

2. Fight Club features only one woman, and only in the role of a love interest — but not for the reason you think.

Yes, the film scores poorly on the Bechdel Test. But I submit to you skeptics this fact: it does so on purpose, and its act of doing so aids in furthering the feminist cause. Hear me out (and go ahead and comment if you find that I end up mansplaining).

When I was a teenager (which was when the film came out), young men were being encouraged to pursue women as trophies — accessories to a better-looking life — and as part and parcel of building a more thoroughly masculine identity. This might sound familiar to many women, who were (and are) encouraged to pursue men as necessary parts of their lives and identities. In fact, this is pat of the reason for the Bechdel Test in the first place (as I understand it).

When Fight Club came out, I was on the border of swallowing that sweet, sweet concoction of misogyny, chauvinism, and low self-esteem that was being passed around at the time. Because I was patient enough to look beneath the surface of the film, I got the real message. That message, to me, was this: you have a lot of work to do on yourself before you can go bringing a lady into your mess. Define who you are — fight that fight with yourself — before you go trying to forge a relationship. A woman should be an equal partner in your life’s journey, not a way for you to define your success or identity.

It took me a long time to internalize that lesson — at least the part about doing work on myself. It wasn’t until very recently (and interestingly, after I got married) that I really rolled my sleeves up and did that hard work on myself. To an extent, I’m still doing it.

3. Fight Club is not advocating the violent overthrow of society.

During the film, the dudes who were enthusiastically beating the hell out of each other the day before begin what they dub “project mayhem”. It involves malevolent and destructive pranks aimed at businesses and certain types of art. There are threats of personal violence against public officials, and ultimately the planning and carrying out of the explosive destruction of several large commercial buildings. It’s all done in the name of one man’s vision to rid the world of commerce and capitalism as we know it. To those who have been watching Mr. Robot, the message is familiar — hauntingly so.

But if you really watch the film, there is explicit skepticism about this movement from the very man who helped it begin. He perceives the plan as having gone way too far past the initial light rebellion and fellowship. He sees the blind following of a charismatic figurehead, and hears the dogmatic chants of the disillusioned young men (though their chant is not about making America great again, it seems hauntingly familiar). He comes to understand that it’s not the right path, and essentially wakes up from his nihilistic slumber in order to try to shut it all down.

To me, this was important. I learned that no dogma, no “simple” solution, no slogan will save you from having to deal with uncertainty and fear about what you will do with your life. No externally provided and neatly packaged answer — especially not from a charismatic pitchman in disguise — will make the pill of existential angst any easier to swallow. The answers are never simple, and if someone tells you they are, they’re not giving you the real answers. Tyler Durden was just a different kind of Hitler, a different kind of Donald Trump.

Love and Mayhem

If you’re a skeptic about the film, hopefully I’ve made you think a bit more about it. But I had (and still have) an abiding love for the film. It came at the right time in my life, at the right time on the American timeline, and it cemented the bond of a friendship in the most formative period of my life.

But I can’t write off my love of the film as the result of nostalgia or subjectivity. I came to love it, and still do, because it presents an original view of both issues that exist in society, and a unique response to them. It also presents a still-relevant critique of dogma and demagogues.

I still love Fight Club — the mayhem, the bloody fists, the Edward Norton — all of it. And I hope that perhaps this small offering can help others do the same. But make no mistake: if some bro insists that you sit down and watch the movie with him — be very skeptical.

Photo by Francisco Moreno on Unsplash

How our unique place in the history of consumerism and technology has blurred an important distinction, and how we can see it more clearly.

We are simultaneously in a great time to be alive, and an extremely dangerous one. On one hand, we have at our fingertips all kinds of stimuli — from information and entertainment, to conversation and consumption. Theoretically, we can have a desire for something, find it, pay for it, and have it arrive to us all in the same day — without leaving our homes, and using a phone that fits in our pocket. It’s a veritable buffet of goods and services that exist in order to cater to our every whim.

So not only has the sheer quantity of available pleasures increased dramatically, but also (and more importantly) the time between when we form a desire to when we can fulfill it has dramatically decreased. In this way, we live in a time truly unlike any other in history. And we seem to be taking it all in stride.

Or are we?

The Pleasure Trap

While there is an aspect of this that sounds great, you can probably see the potential drawbacks. There is a phenomenon known in psychology as hedonic adaptation, which basically says that humans have an uncanny ability to adapt to the stimulus they receive, and quickly return to a stable level of baseline happiness.

What this means is that for each of your desires that gets fulfilled, you very quickly become used to it, and your level of happiness goes back to what it was before. It’s a lot like tolerance to a drug: the more you get, the more you get used to having more, and the more you desire.

So if you combine our mind’s uncanny ability to adapt to pleasure, with an ever-increasing supply of more easily-obtained pleasures — we’re setting ourselves up for a kind of pleasure-addicted life that may end pretty hollow.

I call it the pleasure trap: we’re encouraged by businesses and technology to act more quickly on more of our desires — which they exist in order to fulfill. As a result, we get accustomed to having more and more desires, and having them fulfilled more quickly. This means that we form more desires, and form them more frequently. The more pleasure we chase, and the more pleasure we get, the more we need.

But what we forget, is that the more desires and expectations we have, the more opportunities there are for frustration, anger, and feelings of hopelessness. It can end up ruling our lives, if we let it.

So what can we do about it?

Know and Live the Difference: Pleasure vs. Joy

The best way to step away from the pleasure trap is to cultivate joy, rather than chasing pleasures. Joy is not the same as pleasure. They are markedly different things.

Pleasure is just what it sounds like. It feels great when it’s happening, and usually involves the senses. It comes from and depends on something external — some stimulus or some object.

But pleasure is short-lived. It comes and goes quickly. And in some cases, it fades quickly into guilt, shame, regret, doubt, and other negative emotions — depending on the circumstances. And even when it doesn’t, it leaves in its wake the expectation of more. It’s that expectation — that desire, for more of what you have — that can be your undoing.

The pursuit of pleasure — like every other pursuit — is a sacrifice, a trade-off. You may pursue one thing, but whatever you don’t pursue, you leave behind. And so often, we don’t realize until it’s too late, what we are leaving behind as we chase after pleasure. In many cases, it’s something more valuable, and more lasting: joy.

Joy — as opposed to pleasure — is a combination of understanding, appreciation, gratitude, and connection. Joy is deeper than pleasure — it’s intellectual (some say spiritual). It is something that — unlike pleasure — you cultivate through an understanding of both yourself, others, and the nature of the world around you. And what is more, you can actually generate and sustain joy without any kind of stimulus — which is not the case for pleasure.

What’s more, joy is more complex and nuanced than pleasure. Joy can be made up of both pain and pleasure. It can spring forth from a terrible experience — the kind that you learn from, and that give you appreciation for what you have.

We may think that joyful life is made up of a thousand enjoyable moments — that having joy in your life is simply a matter of collecting a bunch of fun or memorable experiences. But nothing could be further from the truth. Joy is built of both joyful and painful moments. Joy often comes at times when pleasure is not even a factor. Joy and pain can coexist. Joy and loss can coexist. The same cannot be said of pleasure.

image credit: Jonas Verstuyft on Unsplash

A simple, 2-step method to help you learn and unlearn more effectively, and gain a stronger body of knowledge in the process.

For all the lip service that we tend to give the concept of “an open mind”, I have found that it both (a) isn’t clearly and consistently defined (b) there is no good set of instructions for how to develop and keep an open mind.

For the most part, I think that we tend to conceive of an open mind as simply being willing to try new things or tolerate people or opinions who are different. But what I mean when I say open mind is more robust than that. I call it being actively open-minded. By actively open minded I mean possessing the following 2 traits:

1. The ability to quickly and nimbly integrate new information into your current set of beliefs.
2. The willingness to change your existing beliefs according to the strength of evidence that supports them.

Those of us who consider ourselves as “lifelong learners” have likely honed the first trait quite well. But the second trait— effectively the ability to change your mind — is challenging for many. And often, the more educated you take yourself to be, the more research you have done and the more intellectual milestones you have reached, the harder it is to be willing to change your mind.

So my advice here is less about developing the first trait, because I think most of us have an idea of how to learn a bunch of stuff, and begin weaving it into the fabric of our existing knowledge. What I will focus on is how to be ready, willing, and able to change your mind about things, and how to stay that way.

The Method

I’ve met a great many people who have claimed (often proudly) that their beliefs are supported by rationality. But what that often means is simply that they have a structured argument for their beliefs, which includes some sort of evidence to support them. That is a great start, and that kind of structure should always be in place to support one’s beliefs, but with the buffet of available evidence for any given belief, it’s not enough.

What I am suggesting is an additional 2 steps, in order to take you further down the line of being open-minded. These steps are simple, and steeped in discussions that were going on during the mid-20th century about how to do good science. They are as follows:

1. For any position you take on an important subject, have a clear idea of what evidence — if you were presented with it — would make you change your mind.
2. Look for that evidence on a regular basis by interacting with people who disagree with your position, and consuming media that presents evidence against your position.

The first step is one that people rarely do when they take up a position on an issue. Many of us go our whole lives simultaneously telling people both: “prove me wrong”, but also never clearly laying out what would actually prove us wrong. As a result, we tend to dismiss evidence that contradicts our positions, and we lose valuable opportunities to engage in enriching discussions that can only help us grow intellectually.

Like any habit worth picking up, this requires two things: an attitude change and practice. But if you do it at the beginning of a tough debate, or as you begin to write about your take on something, it can be an absolute game-changer.

The second step is one that some people just flat out don’t do, and much to their detriment. In the realm of social and political issues, people tend to stay within the echo chambers of media that supports their given ideology. That allows them to hide themselves from any possible challenge to their beliefs because they simply don’t encounter it in their chosen media buffet. In the realm of academia, researchers can get trapped in literature reviews of journals that tend to publish very similar articles from scholars that agree, and that can also cause a lack of exposure to the broader marketplace of ideas.

For those of us who are neither political junkies nor scholars, we can tend to simply get trapped in our own belief systems by not venturing out of our intellectual spheres. In the same way we tend to get into routines where we grab lunch from the same place, watch the same kinds of movies, we can end up only read books by the same group of authors, about the same subjects, or getting involved in the same kinds of projects. We build, hop into, and tape shut our own intellectual boxes.

The alternative approach is to make time to venture outside of your normal reading, viewing, or listening. Look up podcasts that might contradict your views on things. Research notable detractors from your position. And thanks to the first step, you can do this in a targeted fashion — armed with specific evidence and topics to look for: the stuff that would prove you wrong.

Active Open-mindedness, Simply Stated

To put the principle simply, here is the way to practice active open-mindedness: Be ready, willing, and able to change your mind about things by clearly defining what evidence would prove you wrong and actively looking for it. Side effects may include: higher degree of intelligence, increased humility, better critical reading and listening skills, and more original point-of-view.

credit: Jordan Madrid on Unsplash

On mission, values, attitude, and connectedness.

For the past few months, I have been working on crafting a personal mission statement and set of core values. Ever since reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People for the umpteenth time, I have been utterly convinced of the importance of a mission statement and core values. Which prompted me to start the process of writing my own.

I’m not quite there yet, but I can share one motto that has stuck with me:

Open Mind, Open Heart

To me, it sums up many of my of my attitudes and aspirations.

What do I mean by that?

An Open Mind

An open mind is important. It’s crucial in both learning, and emotional and personal growth. Without an open mind, there is no way to receive the messages that others are constantly sending you.

I’ve heard it said that it’s nearly impossible to learn effectively without feedback. Getting feedback is crucial to figuring out whether you’re on the right track, and thus deciding what you’ll do next. But without an open mind, you have no access to feedback. At best, you have a sliver of the feedback you could be receiving and using.

An open mind is not as simple a thing as it sounds. To truly have an open mind, you need to actively suspend belief. You need to not only admit that you may be wrong, but you need to seek out evidence that could disprove your beliefs.

You can perform a test right now to understand just how open-minded you are. Take some belief you hold about the world, about society, about yourself, etc. For that belief, do you have in mind what kind of evidence would change your mind? What I mean is, do you know what kind of facts or data would cause you to believe something different than what you do?

For many of us, we don’t approach thinking this way. We form an initial belief, hold it for a while, decide that it’s the truth, and move on. We may know what evidence supports our belief, but we don’t know what would — if we found it out — change our mind. What that does is cause us to confront every challenge to our beliefs with a reaction of trying to confirm our belief. It also makes us unfocused and unreceptive when talking with others who may not agree with us. It makes for bad brainstorming, bad strategy sessions, and weak collaboration.

Keeping an open mind is about holding out against intellectual laziness. It’s about always being willing to be wrong about what you believe, and making time to entertain opinions contrary to your own. It’s ultimately about leaving behind fear. So many of us keep our minds closed because we’re afraid that a challenge to our way of thinking will endanger our very identity. But that is a mistake. You are not your beliefs, you are the one who chooses whether to believe or not. But when you make the mistake of identifying with your beliefs, you cut yourself off from so many other amazing ways of thinking and living.

An open mind leaves fear behind, and embraces the wide world of wisdom.

An Open Heart

For as open as your mind might be, it’s nothing without an open heart. Yes, it sounds sappy and like there’s neither practical benefits to it, nor is there any research to recommend it.

An open heart doesn’t mean being an over-sharer, or a sad-sack who cries at the drop of a hat. It doesn’t mean being overly sensitive or talking about feelings all the time. It doesn’t really mean anything objectively. It’s quite subjective, actually, and what it looks like depends on who you are.

An open heart is about being sincere. It’s about acknowledging the value of emotions, and using that to make better decisions — both personal and professional.

More than that, an open heart is about being welcoming to everyone, and giving everyone the benefit of the doubt — until they give you reason to do otherwise. It’s about believing that you can learn something from and get value from everyone you meet.

An open heart is about allowing a real connection others, and encouraging connectedness in general. Those connections are the foundation of a good life. And whatever definition of success you happen to use, connections form the basis of it.

Your open mind can help you to think different thoughts, receive criticisms more willingly, and change your long-held positions on things. But an open heart allows you to let others into your world, and allows you to get into theirs. An open heart allows you to increase the types and depths of experiences you can have by orders of magnitude. That allows you to get exposure to different stories, different information, different wisdom. And all that adds up (so long as your mind is as open as your heart) to more wisdom of your own.

In the same way that an open mind is about leaving fear behind, so is an open heart. Being open with your feelings, and being open to the feelings of others is about realizing that you are not merely your emotions or convictions. Yes, those things move you, and are important to respect, but they are not who you are. And when you can admit that about yourself and others, you can walk openly into conversations without need for a guard. You can be vulnerable without fear of mortal emotional injury. You can ask others to do the same, knowing that they should not be afraid. You can connect, because the connectors are clear of interference.

The open mind allows you think differently.
The open heart allows you to feel differently.
Both are infinitely important in the journey to wiser living.

Credit: Daniel Chekalov on Unsplash

The way we look at a our personal and professional lives takes a toll on both. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Since the time I began working a grown-up job, I have been hearing things about “work-life balance”. From what I can gather, this is supposed to mean something like a tolerable, or even desirable, division of time and energy among one’s professional and personal endeavors. If you have a good work-life balance, the conventional knowledge says, you are not sacrificing the health of one part of your life for the sake of the other. The two parts are effectively balanced.

While I respect the spirit of the phrase “work-life balance” and the sentiment associated with it, I disagree with its major premise. I don’t think balance is the right way to think about work and life because it assumes that we can (and should) strive to separate our work and our life. It assumes that we can each neatly separate ourselves into two people, and create two lives (or more!). And this type of thinking robs us of the opportunity to live a unified life — one where what we do for money and what we do with that money are in lock-step.

The “balance” model of managing the personal and professional is outdated, and needs to be replaced. Rather than balancing our career and our personal lives, we should aim to harmonize them. When done right, the benefits can be truly great.

Separate, but…equal?

Tipping the Scales

Perhaps the coining of the phrase “work-life balance” was a happy accident, and there is no need to read anything into it. But at the very least, we have come to use the phrase to describe a relationship between two aspects of a life. And it’s curious that the mechanism we chose to illustrate that relationship is a balance. If you think of a balance scale, the relationship between the two sides is clear: it’s one of opposition, separation, and direct comparison — a zero-sum game. One side’s loss is the other side’s gain, and vice versa.

More concretely, balance often manifests in a home life that doesn’t involve talking or thinking about work. But this “balance” comes by way of compartmentalization, and serves to make us more unhappy in two significant ways.

First, by separating our work life from our home life, we are making ourselves effectively two different people. This seemingly well-intentioned split is not only more difficult to manage, but also less fulfilling. For many, it means being a different person at work than at home, a personality split that can exacerbate over time. Eventually, it grows into a wedge that drives a permanent gap between two parts of what should be one life.

But even if you don’t develop two different personalities, you’re still left with the problem of that zero-sum game: tension and trade-offs. When you’re merely “balancing” work and life, you create tension between the two parts of yourself, and there’s no reason for it. Each of these parts of your life need you to make decisions — important ones. And if the decisions are arranged in that zero-sum, balance paradigm, you’re bound to both disappoint and feel disappointed at some point.

The second way that “balance” sets us up for unhappiness is that it chokes off what should be a synergistic and collaborative relationship. Unless your job is inherently unethical, or against your core values, there’s always an opportunity to use it as an outlet for your best personal work. And it doesn’t take that much imagination.

The simple virtues of pride in good quality work, keeping your commitments, serving others, active listening, creative thinking, and so many others are present as opportunities every day on the job. Whether you choose to see your job’s seemingly mundane tasks as opportunities to hone and express your character is the choice. And if you choose to balance your work against your life, rather than integrate the two, it’s an inferior choice.

And in that same vein, when we don’t integrate our professional victories and struggles into our personal ones, we miss a huge opportunity to allow friends and family to connect on a deeper level with us. Being able to celebrate with your family when you close a huge deal and being able to vent and seek comfort when a day or two goes badly — that can only help your personal relationships.

But may times, when we merely balance the professional against the personal, those in our personal lives don’t have a context for any of our professional experiences. Because we tend to try not to “bring work home”, we don’t include our closest people to us in the conversation about work, and so they effectively never learn the language — so to speak. They only learn to see work as the other part of your life, rather than as a vital and integrated part of it.

Luckily, there’s a alternative way to view the relationship between the personal and professional that is much healthier — for both your professional and personal lives.

The Concept of Harmony

Rather than viewing your work life as something that competes with your personal life, it is far more helpful to view it as something that collaborates with and enriches it. Obviously, this is more difficult if you hate your job, but don’t use that as an automatic excuse. After all, part of why many people hate their jobs is because they live day to day with that job competing with the rest of their life for time and attention.

Rather than viewing your job as competing for your time and attention, it’s possible to view it as an opportunity to exemplify, strengthen, and reaffirm your character. It’s also possible to include those in your personal life in your thoughts and feelings about work. Think about it: you spend 1/3 of your day — and ultimately your life — at work. What good argument is there (unless your job is top secret) for you to reduce talk of your job “work was good”. That’s unfair to your close confidants, and it’s unfair to you.

Harmony, unlike balance, can exist just as well when your work is going well as when your job seems to suck. In fact it’s more important at those times than when things are going well. Your personal relationships should be rich enough to provide you support and guidance in your professional life, and it’s on you to do that enrichment. Sure, your spouse, partner, or friends should ask about work and genuinely want to know, but they’re looking to you for clues as to how much you want to talk about it. No one wants to hear a constant parade of complaining, but people close to you do want to hear about your true thoughts and feelings. Work is no exception.

How to Harmonize Work and Life

Harmonizing your work and life is about holism. You have one whole life, and work is a part of it. Most likely, you’re working as a way to support you and your family (or your lifestyle, which includes the people in you life). To that extent, your partner and the people close to you are stakeholders in your professional journey. Work-life harmony is about treating them that way.

Let’s assume you have a romantic partner, and you share a household of some sort. The professional decisions you make affect them in various ways. More time at the office or traveling means less time with them. Simply making that trade-off and explaining it to them later is a pretty poor way to do it. Rather, let them know that that’s the type of decision you’re looking at making. Get their thoughts, get buy-in on a collaborative plan of action, and make the decision confidently. Repeat that approach regularly.

Harmonizing is about an attitude and approach more than anything, so there’s not necessarily a formula for harmonizing work and life. But here are a few best practices. For the sake of brevity, I’m assuming that you have a significant other or partner, but this works just as well for any people that are a big part of your personal life.

1. Talk to your partner regularly about your work, honestly and openly (not just griping and complaining). Make those conversations regular ones. Include triumphs, stumbles, tough meetings, etc. Talk about what you’re proud of, and what you’re trying to improve. Ask your partner the same about their work.
2. Let your partner know when you’ve got to make a tough decision between demands of work and demands of your personal life — especially when it could directly impact them. Educate them on the real pressure you feel, and let them have input.
3. Be mindful of how much the people in your life contribute to your success at your job, and thank them for it periodically. This often gets overlooked.
4. Treat your partner like a trusted adviser when it comes to work decisions. Let them know what you’re facing, and get their feedback and advice. You don’t have to take their advice, but let them know that their input is important.

These are just a few things you can do to harmonize work and life, and there are certainly more. But again, the essence of harmonizing work and life is treating the people in your personal life as stakeholders in your life — your whole life — and treating them that way. Simply remembering that and acting on it will help immensely in successfully harmonizing your work and life. With that harmony comes a more sustainable kind of happiness.

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“closeup photo of green bamboo sticks” by Bennett Dungan on Unsplash

On Limitations, Self-Discovery, and Creative Work

There are two types of limits we have when it comes to creative work: those that we just encounter, and those that we place on ourselves. The limits we place on ourselves are the most prevalent, and the most insidious. We place all sorts of limits on what we will and won’t do, and that in turn limits just how creative we can be. And many times, we forget that these limits are self-imposed and self-maintained.

But if we can reveal these limits, and examine them, we’ll see just how many of them are silly. Then we can abandon them, and begin to do really good — really original creative work. To begin, ask yourself a simple question:

What wouldn’t you do?

In my mind, there are three different variations of this question. Each variation reveals a different kind of self-imposed limitations that are hindering your creative work.

1. What wouldn’t you do because you think it’s “not your style”?
2. What wouldn’t you do because you think it’s been done already?
3. What wouldn’t you do because you’re scared that doing it is too daunting?

Write down these three questions, and take 10 minutes or so to answer them. Seriously. Just write down the first thing or two you think of for each question. Then, ask some fairly simple follow up questions.

1. What about that thing you won’t do makes you think it’s “not your style”?

Is your style so well defined that you can clearly rule out a project when you’re stuck or lacking inspiration? And even if your style is so well defined, is it something that cannot evolve? Why shouldn’t it evolve? Is your style a platonic ideal — a transcendental, unchanging form that is above all the change of the rest of the world, and of everyone else’s struggles and evolutions? Of course not, why would it be?

Creative people evolve. The best ones reinvent themselves and their work constantly. This extends far beyond just those who make art, but also those working with ideas. Thinkers of all kinds evolve — entertain new ideas and examine old phenomena from new angles.

There will always be paths that don’t work out as well — or at all. These are merely phases in the evolution. The more crazy and out of place a phase seems, the smaller it may be in the grand scale of an evolution. To believe that you, as a creative, know definitively what is “not your style” is a sneaky form of arrogance. Don’t close off paths to yourself, it could be the difference between evolution and eternal frustration.

2. Are you sure it’s been done already?

I mean, how do you know — you haven’t actually done it! The devil — after all — is in the details. If you haven’t actually begun to make this thing, how do you even know what it is, let alone that it has been done already?

Think of how many movies about battles in space have been made — lots of them. And no one seems to be maligning any of the Star Wars films because Star Trek had already been made.

My point is that your fears that some thing you’ve conceived of has been done already are probably largely unfounded and definitely useless. You can’t know if something has truly been done already until you actually begin to make that something. So do that, then be the judge.

The great thing is, if you start it and you see that it shows striking similarities to something else out there, change it. Tweak, adjust, change some things up, and make it different — just don’t make the mistake that so many of us closet perfectionists do, which is to beat yourself up for not making something, but then tell yourself not to make anything unless it’s totally perfect and completely original. Think of how insane that really is.

The Mona Lisa — arguably one of the most famous and revered works of art in history — didn’t start off as an original idea. It started off just like so many other paintings at the time. It was going to be a portrait of someone, done on canvas, with paint. What ended up setting it apart is how well done it was. But that took time, because Da Vinci was clearly not limited by worries about whether what he was doing had already been done.

3. What is so daunting about an idea?

We almost all have a project or idea that we’ve thought of that is our equivalent to War and Peace. It’s an idea that seems so big and pie-in-the-sky that the thought of even getting started on it is enough to tire us out. Some flavor of this sentiment is attached to many ideas that we try to make real. It is a sneaky enemy to productivity in creative work; it is a mixture of good and bad. It is good because it rightly gives credence to ideas as valuable and worth doing, but it’s bad because it regards many ideas as just too much for you to do. But this is misguided.

No idea is too big to try. All it takes is one word, one brush-stroke, a few lines on paper, and the like. And, here’s the important part: it doesn’t have to be good. A bad first step — or first 100 steps — does not spoil the journey. In fact, the bad first steps will very likely be totally retraced or forgotten as the journey goes on. No one consuming the end result cares about that part of the journey — and if they do, they already understand that a crappy start is often par for the course when it comes to great creative work.

If you are truly scared of having another unfinished project hanging around, have fun with that concept. Tell yourself that you’re starting this project just to make a crappy run at it — to do a really crappy job for just a little bit. Frame the crap; keep it for your records. Give a title like Crap Composition #1.

There are so many things we are not doing, but I think there are too many things we think we think we just wouldn’t do — more than we’re aware of. Being aware of these things, and the reasons we have, may just enlighten us to how much we allow our subconscious to limit our creativity. Those are limits we truly cannot afford. Shaking them off is part of the process of doing good creative work. It’s not glamorous, but it’s necessary.

Helping each other write better.

Credit: Olivier Fahrni on Unsplash

A Simple Acronym: B.E.L.L.A.

Staying mindful is no easy task. Whether you’re sitting and meditating, or attempting to do an activity mindfully, certain things tend to get in the way of being present and basking in the moment. The Buddhists have a name for these things: hindrances. There are 5 of them, but I won’t break them all down here. Suffice it to say, they are negative thoughts and feelings. We’ve all experienced them, and they can take many forms. We get physically uncomfortable, we get bored, an attractive or compulsive thought or urge pulls at our mind to run away from the moment. And so on.

Our minds will never completely stop doing these things; it’s just how they are. So the idea is not to try to force our minds to act as we’d like them to, but rather to be welcoming of adversity in our thoughts and feelings. One of my favorite meditation teachers, Gil Fronsdal, once gave a talk about an acronym that he came up with called BELLA. It describes what he suggests we do when we face difficulties with staying mindful. I lay out my own explanation of the process below.

Be

You may be peaceful and happy one second, and all of the sudden feel anxiety, sadness, or an urge to jump up and do something else. When that happens, simply take a proverbial step back from that thought process — as if you were stepping out of a rushing stream. Sit on the bank of the stream and let it rush by.

Just be what you are, how you are. Be with how you’re feeling — whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent. Don’t oppose it or get involved with it; simply allow it to be there beside you.

Examine

Examine your feelings and state of mind. Investigate in order to understand, as if you were trying to write a detailed description of an interesting room of a unique house. You’re feeling self-doubt? Great. Note some adjectives that describe it. Are there thoughts that seem to be attached to it? Describe those briefly to yourself.

Acknowledge that there is this feeling or thought here, but also acknowledge that it’s not who you are, and that it’s perfectly okay for that thought to be here. It’s just one thought or feeling coexisting with others — many which contradict it. They’re simply sharing the same space, and you are observing.

If you are feeling frustrated, just feel frustrated — but attempt to get a good look at your frustration. Take a hearty sniff of that fresh from the oven smell of hot frustration. Note how it seems to be pulling or pushing you, while resolving to stay still and examine it — rather than being moved to do something else.

Lessen

Lucky for those of us practicing mindfulness, entropy is a law of nature. Things naturally deteriorate and lessen over time. That’s also true of emotions and desires — so long we don’t feed them. The tactic here when we encounter something unsavory is to let it be, and allow it to weaken on its own — which it will.

The trick to getting unsavory thoughts and feelings to lessen and subside is to disengage with them. Refusing to identify with them is a huge step toward that, and allowing them to simply burn out their fuel is what follows. When I do mindfulness meditation — especially on a day filled with stress, desires to just get up and nervously do something unproductive do pop up. Those feelings are strong. Many times — more than I would like — I give in to them. But when I do not, I find that they lose their power more quickly than I would have thought.

The key is to sit, observe, and not allow anything to move you until your meditation session is over. As you get used to this, your mind becomes less reactive, and more proactive. That carries over into the time your’e not meditating, as well. You feel the pull of potential distractions, but you now have this ability (perhaps weak at first) to just let it be while you do what you’re supposed to be doing. That muscle gets strengthened after a while. It will never be strong enough to overcome every distraction and desire, but even the small victories count.

Let go

Part of the lessening step above is also letting go. Two things tend to provide fuel to unwanted desires and feelings: identification and thinking. When we identify with feelings and thoughts, we provide a bed of soil for these unhealthy weeds to grow — a place for them to embed themselves, and nutrients to fuel growth. Simply viewing these thoughts and feelings as things that just happen, but are not yours — that goes a long way to keep them from effectively running you.

Often times, we tend to allow unwanted desires and thoughts kick us into high-gear trying to think our way around or out of them. This simply never works well. When we think about unwanted thoughts or desires, we’re engaging with them, and all that does is keep them at the forefront of our mind. It also ends up contributing to our identifying with those things — which makes them even stickier, so to speak. Letting go — refusing to identify with or entertain these thoughts and feelings — allows them to wilt and die, just like a weed no longer in the soil or sunlight.

Appreciate

For however many times we are bombarded by unwanted and unproductive thoughts, feelings, and desires, there are other times when we are free from them — even for short periods of time. If we can take time to appreciate when our mind is at peace, and we are not pulled at by a million thoughts and distractions, we can build the strength to let go later on. Again, so much of the mind is like a muscle, and appreciation is like wholesome, protein-packed food for it.

Appreciating the times when you have clear and focused attention — without distracting thoughts and feelings — makes you that much stronger and more resilient. Appreciation also helps to leverage the natural tendency we have to pursue pleasurable experiences. It’s a truly pleasurable experience to be present and to not be pulled at by other thoughts and feelings. Once it happens a few times, your mind begins to chase after it, and that means building a habit of mindfulness becomes just a bit easier.

Appreciation can also help you to add one more tool in your toolkit for dealing with negative thoughts: appreciation of them. It’s an odd thing to think of, for sure, but it’s real. You can appreciate negative thoughts and feelings even if you don’t enjoy them. It is a subtle distinction, but if you can do it, you can lessen the pull they tend to have on you. You can appreciate these negative things that pop up as simply examples of the wonderful, powerful mind at work. Think of them like you think of a young child that you love. They act out, cry, or do something wrong all the time. But they are learning, and making mistakes is the primary mode of doing that. So you have to appreciate those mistakes, even if they’re unpleasant at the time. They are simply small parts of a wonderful whole.

“landscape photography of woods” by Imat Bagja Gumilar on Unsplash

Forest fires and the human mind have more in common than most people realize. Well actually, it’s not so much the forest fires that are like the mind, but rather the forests themselves.

Let me explain.

You see there’s this notion within those practicing mindfulness that somehow the goal is to purify the mind, rid it of the bad or destructive thoughts and inclinations — the end result being an idyllic crystal clean spirit that can do no wrong. But nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t believe such a thing actually happens. I don’t believe it’s possible. I don’t even think it’s really desirable.

Fires Are Part of the Forest

As anyone who has been practicing mindfulness for any period of time will tell you, the mind is a crazy and unpredictable place. Thoughts, feelings, memories, and desires pop up, escalate, and fall away many times each day. Wonderful feelings of pleasure, contentment, and relaxation wash over you, and then give way to something else. And so on, and so forth during our waking hours. And that brings me back to the forest.

As any forest geologist will tell you, forests aren’t lush and green from end to end, they’re populated with both dense, green areas, and sparse, dying, dead, or even burning areas. That’s right, forest fires — which make us tend to feel on edge and as if we need to act swiftly — are a natural part of the life cycle of a forest.

Lightning strikes or spontaneous combustion in dry conditions happen in forests, and burn the dry and dying parts of it — dying out as wetter, healthier parts are encountered. Portions of a forest also die, decay, and create conditions for future growth. The animals wandering around also play a part. And this has been happening for millions of years.

The mind, in many ways, is like a forest. And if you don’t believe me, sit for just a few minutes and be mindful of what kinds of things pop up in your mind. You’ll see that like a forest, there are lush, wonderfully peaceful parts of it, but there are also ugly, dry, and sparse parts of it — parts that may be on fire with various feelings you’d rather not have. The temptation may be to try to put out the fires — to replace the dry and dying parts with lush green sprouts and spend more time and energy taking care of those. But I don’t think that’s the right approach to take.

Burning and Acceptance

Rather than trying to put out natural fires or stop natural decay, why not embrace them as part of the forest? Let them die out in the same way they popped up — without getting wrapped up in them, and possibly making them grow stronger and last longer. Being mindful and trying to cultivate a healthier mind are noble goals. But we cannot allow idealism about what we should feel, think, desire to make us expend too much effort on something futile.

Rather, what we should do is allow the fire or decay in our minds to happen — not take over, but just run its course. The trick is to allow it to play out, but not contribute to it. As I once read in a mindfulness meditation training, simply observe, but do not get involved in those unproductive, unhelpful thoughts and feelings. Much like forestry personnel observe and monitor a natural forest fire, but do not get boots on the ground and start meddling.

Most important in this analogy between our mind and a forest is the following: you must accept the mind as a whole, rather than focusing on small parts of it. Your mind is more than the undesirable thoughts and feelings that pop up, much like a forest is more than the sparse, dry, and dying sections of land within it.

What’s more — and this is key — those dry and sparse parts of a forest that seem imperfect and ugly, those are perfectly normal parts of a beautiful whole. In the same way, the imperfect thoughts and feelings that keep popping up in your mind — the ones that seem ugly and anxiety-inducing to you — are part of the greater whole of your mind. If you can accept them as they are, and simply restrain yourself from contributing to them, you will feel so much better about yourself. That alone will help immensely in being more at peace with yourself, which goes a long way in helping to be at peace with others, and do what needs doing.