Mike Sturm

Lessons learned as a gigolo reflects on what went wrong

Photo by Johnny Cohen on Unsplash

I was listening to some music yesterday while working, when all of the sudden a recording of “Just A Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody” by Louis Prima came on. If you’ve never heard the song before, take a listen — at least to the first verse. You may recognize the melody. It’s an American standard.

The first verse of the song features lyrics that made me think a little. Take a look at them:

I’m just a gigolo 
And everywhere I go
People know the part I’m playin’
Pay for every dance
Sellin’ each romance
Oh, what they sayin’?
There’ll come a day
And youth will pass away
What, what will they say about me?
When the end comes, I know
They’ll say “just a gigolo”, as
Life goes on without me

The song is a kind of cautionary tale about a man who has made a choice. He’s chosen one kind of life over another. He’s chosen a transactional life over a life of generosity — a life built around getting his share, rather than on just being generous.

He did things that others do for their own sake, and to connect with each other — dancing, romancing. But he did them as transactions. The value of those things, rather than in the acts themselves, existed only in what he got in exchange for them.

Sure, there was a time when this lifestyle he’s living had its perks. The money was rolling in, and the pleasures were — well — pleasurable, I’m sure. But as the years roll on, and the transactions continue, he begins to wonder about things. When he’s gone, what will his legacy be?

As it turns out, because each dance and each romance was simply a transaction, he failed to make any meaningful connections. When he’s gone, life will go on without him.

He got paid every dime he asked for, but all that got him was an empty feeling. The world paid him what he asked, and when he’s gone, they won’t owe him anything more. They’ll be just fine without him — because the transactions are done.

The same is true for us. When things become transactions for us — that is, when we stop doing them for their anything but money, social currency, notoriety, or whatever — we begin hollowing out our lives.

When we give with the expectation of repayment, and dwell on that, we cheapen things.

There are times when all of us become a bit transactional. We want the money, we want it upfront, and we’re not interested in much else. Or we want the notoriety, praise, or promotion. So our behavior and our thinking centers around that. And that’s okay from time to time.

But when we get more transactional, we stop being generous. We stop giving the benefit of the doubt; we withdraw inwardly — into our own obsession. That kind of withdrawal perpetuates more of the same. It’s a negative place to be. It sets us up to treat others — and ourselves — in less than generous ways. When we do that, we actually end up getting less in the long run. So we perceive that we need to fight tooth and nail for more, and it becomes our daily preoccupation.

The transactional existence makes us “just a gigolo.” Life goes on without us just fine.

Rather than putting our hand out to dance the night away with someone, we demand payment beforehand. Rather than relaxing into romance freely, we sell each romantic act, to ensure that we don’t get less than we give away. And trust me, people take notice. They will stop coming around. Fewer dances, fewer romances.

If you’re lucky enough to live to an old age and retire, as you look back on how you conducted yourself, it’s worth asking how generous you were. How much did you give without expectation of repayment? How much did you do that was for the good of the thing itself, or for others? The more there was, the more you’ll be remembered — because whatever you were paid wasn’t due to you demanding — it was given out of gratitude for your generosity.

Being generous doesn’t mean you don’t get compensated. It just means that you don’t make it the central motivation for what you do.

A tiny manifesto for those of us who fail every day

Photo by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash

Every day, I find myself doing things that I wish I hadn’t. I say things which, upon consideration, weren’t wise to say. I give in too quickly to anger. I fail to reach outside of my own head, and ruminate on worries, doubts, and preoccupations. The list goes on.

We all go through this. We all make mistakes, and we make them daily.

It’s tempting to view these mistakes as blemishes that build up on our lives, and keep them from being the perfect lives we desire. It’s tempting to view each mistake as a barrier to being who we want to become. But we can’t be so hard on ourselves. It’s the wrong way to look at things.

It’s entirely up to us what becomes of our mistakes. We can choose whether those mistakes remain negative, or become positive. Any mistake can serve as the basis for betterment. And when it does, that mistake becomes positive — because of what it produced.

When I was 19, I entered into a toxic relationship. It was only my second romantic relationship. I didn’t know any better. Staying in that relationship was a mistake — a big one. For over 5 years, I found myself slowly feeling worse about it — and making more and more mistakes that served to make my life more difficult.

The mistakes I made while in that relationship served to make my circumstances outside of the relationship worse and worse. Eventually, I made a particularly bad mistake that resulted in the end of that relationship — as well as forcing me to relocate, and basically start my life over again.

At the time, I felt hopeless. I felt like my mistakes would forever haunt me as barriers to the perfect life I had been trying to build.

By the grace of so many wise and helpful people I met along the way, I managed to meet while rebuilding, I learned about the magic mistakes. You see, all mistakes have this weird, magical property. Every mistake can turn into a positive thing as time goes on — so long as you sit down, fully address the weight of it, and — with determined effort and sincerity — learn from it.

In that way, mistakes are a complete source of fuel for improvement. Each mistake holds within it the diagnosis of what went wrong, instructions on how to get better, and the emotional fuel needed to work for improvement.

But that fuel is only available to us if we choose to use it. If we choose to regard mistakes as blemishes to hide and disregard, they will continue to get in the way of whatever life we’re trying to build. If we choose to use the magic of mistakes, they will — in virtue of the improvement they fuel — turn positive over time.

There is beauty and grace in the recovery from even the gravest of mistakes. The worse the mistake, the more there is to learn, to display true humility, to build character through making amends to others, to practice determined effort for good.

It may take a while — a lifetime in some cases — to turn really bad mistakes into positive parts of your life, but given enough time and sincere effort, it happens.

In closing, I’ll convey this simple adage: 
Each of us are only as good as how we recovered from, made amends for, and learned from our mistakes. So when you make a mistake today, take heart. Here’s your chance to become that much better.

Photo by Micah Tindell on Unsplash

If I would have heard Stephen King’s sage advice earlier, it would have changed how I felt about my own journey

For years, I beat myself up about not finding my “one thing” — my life’s path. So many books and articles I’ve read talk about how important it is to focus on that one magical thing, and really perfect it. But I’ve always struggled to find it — and I’ve continued to beat myself up for it.

I’ve worked different jobs in different sectors, I’ve made false starts into different career paths, and I always ended up feeling like I gave up too soon.

But then I heard some advice from Stephen King — the man who’s reliably put out bestselling books for decades.

King was giving a talk on creative writing to students at UMass Lowell. During the Q&A session a nervous student stepped up to the microphone in the audience and asked the award-winning author about how to develop as a writer.

The answer King gave was simple:

“You have to read a lot, and you have to write a lot…

That’s not surprising to hear. Of course you have to write and read a lot to be a writer. Those are the two things that a working writer does as part of the job description. But then King goes on to drop a much more interesting piece of advice — one that applies not just to writing, but to anything someone might want to do with their life.

…and you have to continue to get buzzed by what you’re doing….You have to really like what you’re doing.”

That’s it, the buzz. It’s a simple, but infinitely useful piece of advice. Find and follow the thing that gets you buzzed.

Let’s unpack what that means, shall we?

What is the “Buzz”?

The buzz that King is talking about is one of those things that can’t be adequately conveyed by words alone. If you’ve felt it, you know it.

Some people might use the word “passion” to attempt to describe it, but it’s different than that. It’s simpler. It doesn’t need to be some grand overarching mission or purpose. It’s just feeling both excited by and engaged with what you’re doing.

A buzz is also very private. Only you feel it, and it motivates you in a very specific way. You feel it when you encounter a problem that compels you to dig in and solve it. You feel it when you get pulled into a project with some messy details to sort through — and you get excited to roll up your sleeves and begin sorting through it.

And, more importantly, a buzz is also not something that comes from only one thing. A buzz is not a mission or passion, but rather an indicator you’re connecting to something — that you’re tapping into a deeper part of yourself.

In fact, a buzz is a gateway to finding that overarching mission or passion — the thing that you can call your life’s work. And after that, it can serve as a great gauge for how you’re doing in your professional journey.

If you’re feeling that buzz regularly, then you’re on the right track. If not, it’s time to to re-calibrate.

So, How do You Find Your Buzz?

Some people find their mission or life’s work early on, and their buzz comes from plugging away it. But for most of us, it doesn’t happen that way. For most of us, the buzz we feel is a helpful guide to finding our “main thing”. That’s why finding the buzz in whatever we’re doing is important.

Here’s an important point to remember: you can find something to get buzzed about no matter what your current job is.

You don’t need to be dramatic and quit your job in order to go on a journey and find your passion. Your journey can take place where you are now — no matter where that is. You can work on finding your passion by continuing to do whatever you’re doing — just doing it a little differently.

You don’t need to start a side-hustle to get buzzed (though you can if you’d like). At nearly any job, you can find something to get a little buzzed about. Like so many things, it’s mostly about slight changes to your mindset and approach.

Don’t be Work-Monogamous

Part of the journey of finding your life’s work is being open and experimentation.

Of course, you can’t let yourself get distracted by every little thing that comes your way. The name of the game is allowing for changes in your focus and enthusiasm. My focus and enthusiasm can get diverted by another opportunity that I get buzzed about. As long as it’s not a worthless opportunity — it’s okay to follow it.

Why think that you need to just find one thing to get buzzed about? Why can’t you get buzzed about a few things — even in the same day? You can. You should.

The trick to finding that buzz is to cast your net wide. Get involved in a lot of things, with a lot of people. Read about different subjects, take a shot at different projects or duties at your job — if they’re available. Roll up your sleeves and take on different kinds of work, to see what gives you a buzz. What you find might surprise you.

Keep your eyes and ears open — both on the job and off. Take on things outside your normal duties, if they seem to energize you.

Get a Mentor

Stay in touch with your manager. If your manager doesn’t seem to care about your personal development, work on finding a mentor. A mentor is someone who’s not your boss, but who you respect, and who can help guide you in your professional development.

A good mentor can be someone above you, or just someone within your company who seems to have a valuable point of view. They don’t need to be extremely successful or an expert on something. They merely need to be able to help you see things along your path that you don’t recognize, and be willing to spend time talking you through your journey.

The mentors I’ve had in my time have been huge contributors to whatever success I have achieved. And even the mentors that have guided me through jobs that I’ve left behind continue to leave their mark on how I approach other work — and life in general.

Drop Your Preconceived Notions

The most valuable lesson I’ve learned in my working life has been that you shouldn’t approach your career or any particular job with preconceived notions. Specifically, you shouldn’t come into a job thinking that only certain work will fulfill you, and that your career must follow a certain path and trajectory.

For a select few, that might work out. For the rest of us, all it will end up doing is disappointing and frustrating us. It will also keep your focus too narrow to spot other opportunities.

My own preconceived notions have let me down more often than not, and it was only when I was pushed to shake free of them that I was able to find “the buzz”.

I was 100% sure of my career path on no fewer than 4 occasions—and each time I admitted that I was mistaken has ended up making my experience that much better in the long run.

• I went off to college totally sure I was going to get my degree in illustration and work in that field. But I failed, and had to pivot.
• I worked in the retail nutrition industry, and learned a TON about supplements — so much that I was recruited by a competing company. But things changed.
• I got my B.A. and M.A. in philosophy, and taught at a college for nearly 5 years, 100% sure that it was my lifelong career path. Circumstances forced me to re-examine that plan.
• I signed on to a full-time gig doing customer service and purchasing work at an industrial company. I thought it would be just a paycheck. But I taught myself Excel, learned how to be a manager, and got recruited onto the national sales team. 10 years in, and the job continues to provide me with new opportunities and constructive challenges.

The point is, buzzes come from all over, and it’s best not to pretend you know where they’ll come from. Just stay open and stay agile.

Most Buzzes are Temporary

The thing about buzzes is that for the most part, they are temporary by nature. It’s partly because of you, and partly because of the nature of the work. You may get buzzed about something now, but after doing it for 3 months, it’s run its course.

You may find another thing that gets you buzzed, and feel like moving on. And that’s okay, too. The important thing is to stay open, and be willing to pivot. If you don’t, you can miss opportunities to try other things that can both add value to others’ work, and bring you valuable experience.

A great habit to get into is to regularly ask people in other areas of your company what they’re working on. Even if you have to listen to them complain about their projects and their boss, you can find out what else there is to work on. If you hear anything worth digging into, dig into it. You might just find yourself at the beginning of a new path—as a result of one conversation!

The Takeaway: Stay Open, Stay Curious

The Buzz is an indicator that you’re on the right track. But in order to be receptive to buzzes from all sorts of different things, you need only do two things: stay open and stay curious.

Don’t give way to pressure that tells you to find something now and stick to it. Find things to get buzzed about — follow that buzz — and see where it takes you. You may be surprised, and delighted, by where you end up.

Dealing with a lockdown in uncertain times is challenging, but if you approach it in the right way, you can use it as an opportunity for lasting self-improvement

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Depending on where you live, you may be in week 2 or week 10 of some kind of “shelter in place” order — which essentially means you need to stay at home unless going somewhere public is absolutely necessary. It may be this way for another month, or months. Nobody knows for sure. And it’s beginning to affect us all quite a bit.

It’s a potent mixture of cabin fever, hypochondria, and anxiety about the future.

Those of us with kids, they’re now more of a fixture at our homes than ever. More than that, we’re being told we must educate them, as well! Those of us with office jobs, we’re now managing the fun of every single meeting being a frustrating Skype or Zoom call. Some of us have been furloughed, laid off, or own a business that can’t re-open until….?

Any way you stack it, this is a uniquely crazy time.

So the question is — during these unprecedented times — how do we eke out an existence that we can be okay with? How can we essentially bring our entire lives indoors for…well, indefinitely? Can we do more than just stay sane? Can we, perhaps, use this weird circumstance to forge some personal growth?

I think, actually, we can. But we have to be nimble.

However You Feel, It’s Okay

The following paragraphs are simply some pieces of advice that I’ve found helpful during this time — from one reluctant homebody to another. They are what I suggest you do in order to remain in good spirits during challenging times. I can suggest things to do, but I can’t, and won’t suggest how you should feel. That’s not my place, nor is it anyone else’s.

To quote a reindeer from a recent film that you may find yourself watching during this mass quarantine: you feel what you feel, and those feelings are real. Don’t let yourself feel bad about feeling bad. Sadness, loneliness, grief, desperation, uncertainty — all of these feelings are okay to feel. Just be careful that you don’t let them dictate your actions. You can absolutely feel these heavy feelings, while still doing the next right thing for yourself.

Acknowledge your feelings — no matter how unwanted they are — and affirm to yourself that they are not who you are, and they need not dictate what you do. Remember that you can take action toward a goal, and not as a reaction to what you feel.

Feel — acknowledge — pause — breathe — then resolve to do something helpful for yourself or others.

And remember, if you’re locked down during this time with others, let them feel their feelings as well. We’re all going to process this weirdness in different ways. We need to allow each other to do that. But we also need to be there to listen to each other, and help each other process this. Listen, ask empathetic questions, and affirm that everyone’s feelings are valid — as we all work through a colorful array of them.

Adopt the Benigni Mindset

In the movie Life is Beautiful, the incomparable Roberto Benigni plays Guido Orefice, a Jewish bookshop owner in Italy who get sent to a concentration camp with his young son, Giosuè. Seeing that his very young son is initially scared, Guido explains to Giosuè that the camp is actually a complicated game in which he must perform the tasks Guido gives him. Each task is worth one point, and the first child with one thousand points wins a tank.

But if he cries, complains that he wants his mother, or says that he is hungry, he will lose points, while quiet boys who hide from the camp guards earn extra points. Giosuè is reluctant at times, but with his father’s insistence that they carry on, he does. I won’t spoil the ending, but the approach proved to be effective.

Adopting a similar approach might not be so crazy in our current situation.

To be clear, I’m not comparing sheltering in place to being in a concentration camp. That would be stupid. However, what I am saying is that like the young Giosuè, some of us are afraid or just unsettled — unsure what to do from day to day. And it is when we feel that way that the approach of Roberto Benigni’s character doesn’t seem too far out.

So, adopt a Benigni mindset. As much as possible, go on as you were before this dumpster fire happened. Don’t give into anxiety. Don’t treat this as different, grave, or serious within the confines of your own home. Accept the situation, but make what you can out of your new constraints. Like Guido, make it a game, get as many points as you can. Then get working on winning this thing.

Fake it Till You Make it…Out of This

Sponsors of recovering alcoholics and addicts have a saying: “fake it till you make it”. It means that even though you may feel like this new sober life is weird, and you feel like you’re heart’s not in it, and you don’t believe you’ll make it through — act like you know you can. Eventually, you will know you can. And you will.

Translate that to the current problem. Let’s say you got laid off. Don’t resort to spending the day in your pajamas, reading, and watching TV. Get up at the same time you did when you were working. Follow your normal morning routine. Then, where you normally had a block of work, insert a different productive activity.

Take one of the now free online courses (or 10!). Set out to learn a totally new skill that can get you a new job. While you’re at it, look for new jobs. Scour LinkedIn for folks you can connect with and chat about opportunities. Set up a list of people to email or call — just to check in. And treat it as work — meaning you sit down somewhere and focus on it and it alone. Take it seriously, and get it done.

Take breaks when you normally would. Do a lap around your place. Step outside for a few minutes to change your environment.

As much as possible, run your day like you would under normal circumstances. This alone will trick your mind into thinking that things are not so abnormal — and should reduce your stress a little.

The point is, in times like these, you may have to trick yourself into not spiraling into disarray, discouragement, and disengagement. Now, more than ever, we need to carry on as much as we can. We need to stay healthy — both physically, but perhaps more importantly, mentally and spiritually. We need to stay productive.

And there’s nothing more productive than working on yourself.

Get A Little Spiritual

Though you and yours might be safe from the raging pandemic, it’s unlikely that you won’t be touched in some way by its effects. The global economy, and all who play a part in it, will feel the effects of this thing for years to come. Many businesses will not recover, people will be forced to change careers, relocate, or build new lives altogether. For many, this is a time of existential upheaval.

Whatever your situation — be it a minor series of delays and setbacks or a full-fledged uprooting of your life as you know it — devote a little time to the deeper things. Get spiritual during this time of forced solitude.

Whatever your feelings about the terms spirituality, all I mean by it is an examination of and connection with your deeper values and purpose in life. They may rest upon an established path and practice. They may not. That is (and should remain) completely up to you.

But here is what is helpful about getting spiritual during these times. Spirituality is about getting out of your own head. It’s about moving beyond the moment-to-moment pleasure-seeking and self-pity that we all feel, and submitting to something greater. It is about pushing to be more than just today’s list of things to do or worry about. It’s about confirming and living for a purpose — whatever you deem that to be.

No matter your country, your ancestors used times of solitude in the centuries before you to cultivate spiritual depth in their lives. And each of their journeys looked a little different. Now is the time for you, too, to use that solitude to deepen and strengthen your sense of who you are — beyond the superficial things.

Don’t blast it out on social media, don’t make a big deal about it. Just explore what life beyond the superficial stuff means to you. Give it, at long last, the time it deserves. I could think of no better time to do that than right now.

Plan the First Thing You’ll Do When…

Many of us are saddened by the things we can’t do right now, and long for the days when we were free to do whatever. While your best bet is to focus on what you can do right now, it won’t hurt to build a little something to look forward to. Remember that like everything, this too shall pass — and think to yourself: what’s the first thing I want to do when it does?

Perhaps this whole thing has made you miss seeing your family in person. Perhaps you have a group of friends that used to get together for drinks, and you miss that. Perhaps you just miss going to a coffee shop and sitting at a table, people watching. Whatever it is, write it down on a sticky note and put it somewhere (perhaps a calendar — on a date in the future).

Whatever it is that you miss during this time of loneliness, write it down, and allow yourself to look forward to it. Don’t make it the center of your life right now. Don’t attach your well-being to it. Just allow it to be there as an added bonus to enjoy, once things start to build back to something like normality.

The bottom line is that there’s no operating manual for what we’re working through right now. We’re facing this generation’s version of widespread existential uncertainty. It is up to all of us to figure out how to process and work through it. That’s the work of being human.

As much as we are in this together, we’re also each on our own to make individual sense of our own journeys through this. As with anything else that confronts you in life, this will be what you make of it. Make this situation another set of ingredients for building a better rest of your life. Start now.

Building excellence is as simple as looking for helpers, and working to be a helper yourself.

Photo by Rachel on Unsplash

If you had to start from scratch today, and build a company with an excellent culture, how would you do it? If you are committed to starting to grow your personal brand or company, what is the most effective first step you can take?

What if you had to look no further than Fred Rogers — host of long-running children’s program, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood? Rogers once gave the following advice in an interview:

“My mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.”

He’s spot on. There are helpers everywhere. They are the folks whose first instinct is to put aside their stuff for a few minutes, and get you what you need. They’re the folks that ask you good questions, and try to understand things.

No matter your endeavor, look for helpers. They’re out there, just find them. Find them, bring them in, and keep them close. Also, keep them fulfilled. Keep doing that, and the rest will take care of itself.

Look for the Helpers

Helpers don’t need to be experts. They don’t need an impressive list of achievements or skills. In fact, some of the most helpful people don’t have either of those things. But they have something much more valuable: enthusiasm to contribute.

We often think that the right amount of skills or expertise make someone an effective contributor .Companies will often hire for skills; it’s why job listings still have long lists of things that candidates supposedly need to be proficient at or certified in. When we look for help in our own endeavors, we look for a long list of accolades, awards, and experience.

But in my experience, having those skills and accolades (in most cases) is not what makes for the best contribution. The person may be competent, but competence doesn’t equal contribution; there is so much more to it.

There are perfectly competent sociopaths all over the world. They’re good at what they do (i.e., they’ve got skills), but that often comes with being difficult to work with, or being set in their ways. When you’re looking to someone for help — be it growing your company or helping with your personal project — the last thing you need is someone to fit your thing to their most favored pattern.

How to Spot Helpers

Helpers are easy to spot, if you know what to look for. They are the folks who — though they may not have many of the skills listed on paper — have something that will motivate them to master any one of those skills: the desire to help.

A helper is not merely an enthusiastic person, though enthusiasm is a part of it. Helpers are not only excited to help, but also know how to go about helping. They know how to ask questions, get an understanding of what they do and don’t know, as well as what’s important to know. Then, they get to work. They build solid relationships, listen well, and connect.

The thing about a skilled person who isn’t a helper is that they will never outgrow their skills, unless it directly helps them primarily. Helpers, though, see that growth works both ways. They will give of themselves to learn more, so they can help grow others and an organization. They know that they’ll get growth in return — and that it takes time.

Be a Helper Yourself

Perhaps the best thing you can do in a company or a community is be a helper. Not only is it more beneficial for the organization long-term, but it’s also easier to start doing right away.

The best approach is to start by asking questions. If you ask enough questions, and really try to understand the answers as they’re given, you will begin to make progress. You don’t even have to be knowledgeable about something in order to help.

On many occasions, the act of someone answering your question will help them come to a better understanding of a problem, and they’ll have a solution they didn’t have before. And all you had to do was ask a question.

Once you become knowledgeable and skillful to some extent, you can begin coming up with solutions. You can jump from one problem to another — asking questions and gaining even more skills and knowledge. At that point, you have helped your organization tremendously, and you’ve also helped yourself.

See that’s the thing about helpers: they’ll always begin by helping others, but they end up helping themselves considerably.

Look for the helpers, and be one yourself. 
As far as an organizational or personal growth strategy, you can do much, much worse.

Photo by Almos Bechtold on Unsplash

How the gurus of self-help unwittingly derail our progress by creating unreal expectations.

When we’re kids, we’re bombarded by talk of magic. From children’s books, shows, movies, and games — to Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy — there’s no shortage of magical explanations for things. Our entire worldview is filled with magical explanations of things.

Part of growing up, it seems, is leaving magic behind, and focusing instead on understanding how things work. That’s not to say that there is no place for wonder and admitting that we don’t know something. In fact those attitudes are a great way to start learning and improving.

But over the past decade or so, something has been going on in the self-help and personal development world. The idea of magic has somehow crept in. The idea that we can somehow improve ourselves and make big changes in the world by circumventing normal action and cause/effect mechanisms seems to be gaining momentum.

But what is that doing to us? How is that affecting our quests for personal growth?

The Magic Hour

In 2006, Rhonda Byrne released the book The Secret, which describes and encourages people to engage in a kind of magical thinking. It must have been in the zeitgeist, because within 5 years, as Steve Jobs attempted to beat what would end up being terminal cancer, his biographer chronicled Jobs’ approach as heavily anchored in magical thinking.

The term “magic” then took off. By 2015, Elizabeth Gilbert used the concept in her book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Around that same time, Marie Kondō released her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying up. And alas, a new paradigm for personal growth was born.

As more and more online content about self-improvement cropped up, use of the word “magic” skyrocketed — and it continues today. More than that, the use of the term “Life-Changing Magic” continues in content all around the internet and traditional media.

But is that a good thing? Is viewing and describing our interaction with the world through the lens of “magic” helpful? Or does it oversimplify and obfuscate things — causing us to fail at the task of understanding ourselves and understanding reality?

Magic vs. Method

So what is magic anyway? When we see an article or book with the phrase “magic” or, better yet, “life-changing magic,” what is at play? Regardless of what the author might intend or explain, connotations draw us in. Nearly everyone has a dense set of ideas and (more importantly) feelings about magic.

When we were children, magic was a big part of our worldview, and depending on how life progressed for each person after that, it may have remained there in some way. So when we see the word magic, offered up as a serious descriptor of something in life, it’s very easy to leave behind critical inquiry and everyday reasoning.

When we describe things as “magic” or “magical”, and especially when we describe something as “life-changing magic,” a few detrimental things happen to our thinking. First of all, when things are described as “magic” the connotation is that they happen without direct or strenuous effort. That might be the very definition of magic as it’s used in work about self-improvement; magic means spooky action at a distance — both at a physical distance and at an intellectual distance. Just do this one thing, just change your mindset, and things fall into place — as if by magic.

Furthermore, when magic frames a discussion of something, mystery is accepted — rather than questioned. Things are left unexplained that we might normally feel compelled to deeply and shrewdly investigate and understand, so we can leverage that understanding to more effectively make things happen. This is especially harmful when we take a view of our mental lives as magical in some way. While we can certainly drum up thoughts and desires from seemingly whole cloth, it does little good to do that while abandoning the practice of taking a hard look at your emotional and cognitive patters, as well as behaviors, and getting to understand how your mind works.

The Damage of the Word “Magic”

Even if the actual process that an author or speaker lays out isn’t really magic, but more like a tried and true method, it can still be harmful to describe it as magic. Why? Because connotations are often much stronger than actual descriptions. This means that you can describe an empirically sound, difficult, and methodical thing all you want, but if you use the word “magic,” the perception will often be that somehow less effort and frustration is involved — which is false.

Does that sound dumb? Of course it does! But that’s simply Marketing 101: words — even single words — matter greatly because they can have such a deep effect on people’s perceptions and behavior. The words we use to present things to people — even ourselves influence how we view things and behave.

So if we’re going to describe something as “magic” or “life-changing” or both, we’re structuring expectations and framing things in a way that is quite vulnerable to misunderstanding and disappointment. That mis-framing can be the difference between someone sticking with something, or abandoning it in frustration — because their unrealistic expectations weren’t met.

Everything’s “Life-Changing Magic”, So Nothing Is

At the end of the day, personal growth isn’t really secret or magical. So why not approach it that way — rather than by pretending that there’s some piece of it that somehow defies normal understanding? That would reduce the likelihood of people forming unrealistic expectations of the world and themselves, and (I imagine) would increase the likelihood of people sticking to something that’s difficult — because they were never presented it as if it were immediately and magically life-altering.

That’s the thing about “magic” — as well as things like revolutions, disruptions, and inventions. They’re neither as immediate nor radical as they seem. Everything is gradual and incremental, what makes it seem otherwise is where our attention is. We’re not paying attention, so we don’t see the subtle changes happening.

In fact, think about the most practical meaning of the word “magic,” — as in what stage magicians do. The most basic principle of the craft is that things look like they happen seemingly out of nowhere — because your attention is not on the action. It’s an illusion, possible because we don’t see what we’re not paying attention to. Misdirection is key in magic, and it’s why we stare slack-jawed every time we see a trick. It seems like it all happens in a flash, and defies the laws of physics, but it doesn’t. We just have a skewed view of things, because we weren’t watching closely.

When it comes to self-improvement, and the so-called inner game, there’s no possibility of magic because whether we want to or not, we’re captive audiences to all the stuff in our minds. Your mind won’t let you misdirect and trick yourself for long. So the only real way forward is not by magic, but by incremental but steady change. It’s not sexy, fast, whimsical, magical, or anything like that. And rather than trickery and misdirection, it requires complete and total honesty and transparency with yourself.

Can that seemingly slow, steady, and un-sexy inner game produce big things? Absolutely! It just doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and sustained effort. That’s the great news: if you do things in small and doable steps, you’ll find the kid of progress that’s much harder to lose than the kind you make with sweeping and whimsical maneuvers.

I’m a fan of magic, but I refuse to play tricks on myself or others in order to grow. I refuse to oversimplify and paint in broad, sweeping strokes — especially when it comes to making myself and the world better. In my experience, my mind usually figures out the tricks, and revolts agains them. Instead, I’ll embrace method: tangible, workable, and at times slow steps toward sustainable and significant long-term growth.

Join me, won’t you?

Photo by Oladimeji Ajegbile from Pexels

Enlightenment is not just for meditators or yogis, but it’s often misunderstood and misused, which ruins it for everyone

What does the word enlightenment mean to you?

Does it evoke images of a monk in a saffron robe, sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, with a slight smile of contentment? Does it conjure up thoughts of Instagram photos of a perfectly dressed and perfectly made-up “wellness influencer” on top of a mountain at sunrise, heartily breathing in the aroma of a steaming cup of coffee?

What about a mother of 4 young children, in wrinkled clothes, with frizzy hair, making PB&J sandwiches for her kids — 2 of which are hanging on to her legs while she navigates over and around the toys scattered on the floor of the kitchen?

Almost no one thinks of the latter image when they think of enlightenment. But why not? Why can’t someone with a hectic life, urgent demands, and barely enough time to think about their clothes be enlightened?

I think they can. In fact, I know they can. No matter what your situation, you too can become enlightened — because we’ve all got the wrong idea about what enlightenment is.

What many of us think is enlightenment is actually a form of escapism. And it’s important to understand the difference.

So, What Is Enlightenment?

Over the years, enlightenment has been sold to us as a form of quiet mental solitude — a tranquil transcendence, where one floats above the problems of the workaday world. It’s long been packaged as the result of long meditation sessions and days or weeks-long silent retreats.

Surely, the rest of us — with our 9-to-5s, families, relationships, hectic schedules, bills, and drama — we can’t get enlightened, right?

What utter nonsense.

If that’s enlightenment, I’m not sure it’s something that I want. But enlightenment isn’t any of those things. It’s not withdrawal or transcendence. It’s the opposite. Enlightenment is engagement. Enlightenment is embedment. Enlightenment is being engaged with and embedded in the goings on of your life — each and every day.

Enlightenment means being a full and enthusiastic participant in your life. It means understanding your relationships, admitting and working on your shortcomings, striving toward your goals, and being okay with whatever challenges and pain come your way.

The Myth of the Two Lives

Contrary to many popular ways of thinking, you can become enlightened right in the middle of your crazy, problem-filled, nerve-wracking daily life. In fact, there are more opportunities for enlightenment there than you can find anywhere else. Many of us fail to see this, because we have come to believe in this myth that we lead two separate lives.

On one hand, there is this thing that we call our daily life. There’s a job, bills, a family, friends and neighbors, fights, jealousy, sex, anxiety, self-doubt — and the myriad things that bombard us each day.

On the other hand— supposedly — there’s this joyful, peaceful way of life away from all those struggles of daily life, called “enlightenment”. It’s a place of serenity and joy; it’s the promised land, the endgame. There’s this accompanying idea that enlightenment happens separately from all of the challenges and struggles of daily life, and so you need to unplug and retreat in order to really get enlightened.

Maybe that’s how some folks get there, but I wonder how sustainable it is for them once they dip their toes back into the fast-paced workaday world from which they came? Does that enlightenment scale? My guess is no.

One thing that I’ve learned recently is not to view enlightenment as some graceful, peaceful, transcendental, esoteric, out-of-this-world phenomenon. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Enlightenment is actually a down and dirty, roll your sleeves up, stumbling-bumbling, imperfectly perfect thing. It’s something that you both learn in the trenches, and deploy there.

And enlightenment is not just for a select few, it’s for everyone.

Enlightenment is Engagement, Not Escapism

You can’t become enlightened by disconnecting from the things that make up your life — unless you’re leaving it all behind forever. Rather, enlightenment happens when you fully engage with the components of your life as they are right now.

I used to buy into this idea that enlightenment would come to me if I detached myself from the the ins and outs of daily life, and brought my mind up to some other level — whatever that means. But what I realized was that when I attempted to do that, what I was really doing was practicing escapism. I was instead adopting a different ritual to make me less connected to the things in my life.

Am I saying not to mediate? No. Am I warning you that yoga is a waste of time? Not at all. These practices are valuable practices that can help you de-stress, clear your mind, and gain insight. But those things alone will not do the trick. Once you do de-stress and clear your mind, it’s time to get re-engaged with your life — time to take action.

What I am saying is that whatever your mode of pursuing enlightenment (or its many synonyms), make sure you’re not practicing an elegant form of escapism.

Remember, just because your brand of escapism looks like a sacred practice, complete with all the ornate bells and whistles— doesn’t mean it’s not still escapism.

The fact is, you are either engaging with or avoiding the stuff in your life, and at a subconscious level, your mind knows which one you’re doing. And it will either stress out or relax accordingly.

Be Sure You’re Not an Escapist

Relaxation doesn’t come from escape. We tend to think that it does, but that’s only a short term phenomenon. Relaxation comes from engagement and decisiveness. When you have taken on the things in your life head-on, and made the decisions you know you need to — when you’ve changed the things you can, accepted the things you can’t, and learned a bit better how to tell the difference — relaxation is the natural response.

There are many different ways to do those things — many different spiritual or self-improvement practices. But those same practices can either be used to engage, or used to escape. Make sure you’re choosing the right one. Your mind and body will thank you.

So, by all means, meditate, do yoga, pray, leverage the power of crystals. If it gives you the strength to engage with both the pleasure and the pain of your life, then it’s enlightening.

If whatever you’re doing is helping you learn how to navigate challenges, overcome obstacles, process your emotions, and enrich your relationships — keep it up. But if what you’re doing is a hiding place, a crutch, or a way of putting off taking on the tough things in your life — it’s most definitely not a path to enlightenment; it’s escapism.

There are so many ways that we can turn things from possibly enlightening to full-on escapism. The trick is to keep asking yourself: am I fully engaged in my life, or am I ducking out of it? Ask yourself every day — whatever it is you’re doing. Ask yourself as you veg out on the couch, or dip into a pint of ice cream: am I doing this as part of engaging with the stuff of my life, or is this escapism? Asking and answering that question honestly — that’s enlightenment. No robes or retreats necessary.

Photo by Ravi Roshan on Unsplash

How death reminds us of how we should be living

A colleague of mine died a few weeks ago. 
Strike that. A friend of mine died last week.
He was indeed a friend.

Sure, we worked together, and met because of work, but he was more than that — he was a friend. He was also an excellent engineer, a skilled woodworker, a great storyteller, and a walking encyclopedia of interesting tidbits about a wide range of topics. His name was Dick. And I miss him already.

Dick’s death prompted me to think about an age-old question that I usually pretend to not care about the answer to — until someone dies. That question is: where do we go when we die?

I have an answer — but it’s not the answer. It’s not the kind of answer we’re used to hearing when we talk about death. It doesn’t involve heaven, hell, or any other supernatural realm.

In short, I don’t think we really go anywhere when we die. But also, we essentially go everywhere.

Nowhere and Everywhere

In a sense, we go both nowhere and everywhere when we die. Think of all of the things you said and did during your lifetime. Think of all the times you shared a laugh, a smile, tears, or a profound and comfortable silence with others. Think of the things — even the little things — you helped others with, or the interesting viewpoint you shared that got someone thinking. Those things stick around in peoples’ memories. All those things were as much you as anything we might call a soul — and they live on in how those people you impacted live their lives.

Your impact may only be on a chosen few people in your life, but those people impact others, who impact others, and so on. The marks you leave help others make theirs, and so on ad infinitum into the future. Names and faces may be forgotten, but the traces of life live on beyond those otherwise incidental features of a person.

Even if you were to die tomorrow, think of how many lives you would have touched in your time. And by “touched” I don’t mean in some profound, make-a-movie-about-it way, there are so many small ways that we touch peoples’ lives that we don’t even realize.

It can be a single conversation where you made someone feel really heard for once. It can be a piece of advice that seemed so simple to you, but it changed a person’s whole day, week, and month. These things are difficult to calculate, but they are real and important. They’re the real stuff of this crazy, wonderful mess we call life.

After death, you continue to exist as the difference you have made in this world. The people whose lives you touched, whose paths you’ve helped guide, and whose minds you’ve changed, carry a bit of you with them.

Taking Comfort, Taking Action

Knowing that in a very real sense, we live on after death, we should be able to take comfort — but also take action. We can take comfort in the fact that whatever the verdict ends up being about the soul and the afterlife, we live on after death here, on Earth.

From this truth emerges a clear, actionable principle for living one’s daily life: Since you live on after death as the impact you made on others, strive to make the most of that impact.

What’s funny about life is that we so often misjudge the impact of the things we do. In terms of lasting impact, the huge project on which you spend so much time and effort trying to push to completion can often pale in comparison to a simple heartfelt conversation with someone over coffee . It helps to keep that in mind, and stay open to simply connecting with other people.

We all worry about our mortality, because we all know we’re going to die, and basically none of us wants to. We’ll probably always worry about whether or not there really is a heaven or hell — or a soul to go either place. But whatever your feelings on those metaphysical minefields, it sure helps to remember that your afterlife here on Earth is every bit worth working for. And every death that touches our lives should serve as a reminder to get to work.

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A lifetime of misery can come from chasing the wrong kind of happiness

Without thinking too much about it, answer this question: what is the end goal of your life? All of the accomplishments, relationships, and possessions you may be chasing right now — why are you chasing them? What is it that they promise you, that makes you want them?

More likely than not, the answer is happiness. The external things we chase seem like they will make us happy. We struggle and sacrifice, plan and prioritize, all so that we can get those things that will supposedly make us happy.

But is that really how it works? How is it that we find happiness? And what exactly is happiness, anyway?

(wikimedia commons)

Jōsei Toda and Relative vs. Absolute Happiness

Jōsei Toda was a teacher and activist in Japan during one of the most devastating times of that country’s history. He is probably best known as one of the founders of Soka Gakkai, a lay Buddhist organization formed in 1930 — which has becomes one of Japan’s largest religious organizations.

Along with his mentor, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, he believed that the ultimate end of human existence is happiness. Any undertaking — whether education, entrepreneurship, or religion — should have the goal of making people happy.

But there is a catch. Toda was quick to point out that we are often confused about what happiness is, and that this confusion was actually at the root of a great deal of unhappiness. We often chase things that we think will make us happy, but in turn we make everyone — including (eventually) ourselves — miserable. To help explain why this is, Toda made the distinction between two kinds of happiness: relative happiness and absolute happiness. It is by chasing the former — when we should be chasing the latter — that we short-change ourselves, and sometimes others.

According to Toda, relative happiness describes the more common, but also more transient concept of happiness. It’s the one that we look for outside of ourselves — in people, things, accomplishments, and so on. Though it’s easier to attain, it’s also ultimately not sustainable. It doesn’t last, and we find ourselves craving more.

Absolute happiness describes a kind of happiness or sustained joy that you find within yourself. It doesn’t rely on people, places, things, or goals — and so it is stable through the flux of life. Unlike relative happiness, it doesn’t fade due to circumstances, and it makes both your life and the lives of others richer. It’s absolute happiness that we should be chasing, and actually, that’s the great thing about it: we don’t have to chase it at all.

Relative Happiness

So much of how we feel depends on circumstances. If things are going our way we feel good; if not, we usually don’t. We may set goals, begin projects, and browse for new gadgets Amazon, all with the implicit belief that whatever we accomplish or purchase will contribute to our happiness. But this is what Toda calls “relative happiness.”

Relative happiness speaks of a condition in which one’s material desires or immediate personal wishes are satisfied. While there is no limit to what we can hope or wish for, there is always a limit to what we can have materially and how long we can hold on to it.

Whatever we accomplish or acquire, it is subject to loss, degradation, or simply our own loss of interest and enthusiasm. It is well known that we as humans are subject to what’s called hedonic adaptation — the phenomenon whereby we become used to some new wave of happiness, and suddenly demand more. We get a new thing, get giddy about it, get used to that giddiness, and get hungry for another hit. Wash, rinse, repeat.

This adaptation happens in part because the source of that good feeling is outside of us. It is relative to what we have, what we’re doing, or who we’re with. Because it’s relative, it simply doesn’t last. And because it doesn’t last, it’s not the type of happiness we should be chasing.

Absolute Happiness

A happiness based on external circumstances is fleeting and unreliable. But the kind of happiness that comes from within — the kind you can feel even while you sit cramped on a smelly, crowded bus, or while you scrub kitchen floors on your aching knees— is absolute happiness. Toda explains it quite well:

…absolute happiness means that living itself is happiness; being alive is a joy, no matter where we are or what our circumstances. It describes a life condition in which happiness wells forth from within. It is called absolute because it is not influenced by external conditions.

Absolute happiness doesn’t grasp for anything, it’s not conditional upon anything happening; it just is. In a way, absolute happiness comes when you actually give up striving to obtain happiness. The striving for happiness itself gets in the way of happiness, because it’s there in us already. It’s deep down, covered by the thorny shrubbery of desire, jealousy, anger, and negative self-talk. But it’s there.

The striving for happiness itself gets in the way of happiness, because it’s there in us already. It’s deep down, covered by the thorny shrubbery of desire, jealousy, anger, and negative self-talk. But it’s there.

Tapping Into Absolute Happiness

Realizing absolute happiness comes from slowing down the ever-grasping mind, and cutting away the numerous attachments (e.g., “if I had this, I’d be happy; if this happened, I’d be happy”). It comes when your mind stops reaching and starts settling — as in, coming to rest. It comes when you realize that even if you don’t achieve anything else, you are alive right now, and you have the ability to — by a simple act of your own will — take a deep breath.

You can live in this moment. You can sit here, and observe and divide this moment into an infinite amount of tinier moments — each bursting with all kinds of sensations and thoughts that you weren’t even aware of before. You can observe the truly overwhelming wonder of your own mind just being. That’s where absolute happiness grows.

You don’t need to meditate to do this. You can do thousands of different things, from making a sandwich to driving to work, and you can realize and tap into this. It’s there for you, but you’ve allowed it to be buried. You need not add anything to your life to find it. You simply need to take away all the things that have blocked your way. It’s work, but you already have all you need to do that work.

If this sounds crazy and spiritual, that’s probably because it is. Maybe you have another name for it, rather than spirituality— so use that. The point is, there is this latent ability within each of us to stop and peel back a myriad things that have grown over our sense of happiness.

We need not add anything to our lives in order to be happy. We can be happy now, and strive for whatever it is we want while already happy. To me, that sounds much better than the alternative. Don’t you think?

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

The practical reasons for “loving thy neighbor,” and how to make it a habit.

What do you think when you hear the word compassion? Most likely, what comes to mind is touchy-feely, emotional, and impractical — right? And that reaction makes sense, considering how compassion has been approached throughout history.

Most of the time, compassion comes up in the contexts of religion or philanthropy— the kind of stuff normally segregated from strategy and the for-profit business world. But compassion is useful for more than becoming a saint or savior; it’s actually a very practical and strategic thing to practice. It is a trait that brings as much benefit to the people who show it as the people on the receiving end. It’s actually a great tool for self-improvement.

Of course, realizing the strategic and practical benefits of compassion requires approaching it a bit differently. I call this approach strategic compassion. It’s somewhere between the naïve “love and be nice to everyone” and the overly cynical “fake it so you can get what you want”. I like to think it’s a more nuanced and realistic approach to behavior — for a human emotional spectrum that every bit as nuanced.

The What and the Why of Strategic Compassion

Definitions of compassion abound, and writings about its value are quite numerous as well. Most of these writings approach compassion from the standpoint of how compassionate behavior helps others. When you treat others with compassion, you help them, they feel better, and the good feelings radiate out to others, fostering a generally positive environment. And than’s fine. But there’s a much more prudential (i.e., beneficial to the practitioner) side of compassion.

Strategic Compassion is the skill of judging and interacting with others based on a charitable understanding of their circumstances, and assumes that everyone has value — and thus are potentially equally valuable to each other.

Compassion as a Skill and an Attitude

I am not playing fast and loose with words here; compassion is a skill — just like anything else. Yes, some people seem to be compassionate naturally, which fools many into believing you are either born compassionate, or you’re not. That would be like saying that because some people naturally have better aim than others, there’s no way to develop the skill of aim. And that’s absurd.

Since compassion is a skill, you can develop it like any other skill. You simply need to develop a method of practice that engages the right mechanisms, and repeat that over and over, in different contexts, until it becomes — for the most part — your default.

Developing compassion is about putting yourself in the right frame of mind, which is about developing cues to stop or slow non-compassionate thought processes as they happen, and begin compassionate ones. Doing that comes from embracing the two core concepts of compassion — which are a combination of principles and processes. These two concepts are charitable understanding and assumption of value.

Charitable Understanding

Adopting a charitable understanding of others involves being willing to put forth the effort to understand where they are coming from, why they think what they think and do what they do. It means that you give others the benefit of the doubt — assuming that they are acting in a sincere effort to build a happy life for themselves, and any terrible or dumb things they do or think are missteps along the way.

There is plenty of precedent for this way of thinking. Plato famously attributed to Socrates the view that no person intentionally does evil — meaning that any supposed evil acts are simply ignorance on the part of the evil-doer. As Socrates explained it, we’re all basically aiming at something we perceive to be good — at minimum, our own happiness. It’s just that sometimes, we mistakenly believe that the way to get there is by doing some twisted or misguided things.

If you are inclined to believe that some people are just hell-bent on doing evil, consider the logical conclusion of that way of thinking. Consider a person not touched by sever mental disorders, who has done some bad things. There are really only two explanations for their behavior: either they knew the things they did were unjustifiable, and did them anyway — just because OR they thought their behavior was justifiable, even thought others may disagree, and they did it.

The first explanation doesn’t make a lot of sense when you dig into it.If someone thinks that something is unjustifiable, how can they then also believe that they should do it? It is borderline nonsensical. We do things that we believe are in some way justifiable — even if we’re a bit unsure — we believe in the moment that there is some justification. This was Socrates’s basic thought on the matter. I am inclined to agree. And using this as a jumping-off point helps for a much better connection with a larger swath of people. You can get along better, make more connections, and see much more benefit by using a charitable understanding of others.

Assumption of Value

The second part of strategic compassion is the assumption of value. The basic idea is this: assume that you and others are valuable — as human beings and as sources of insight into whatever topic is at issue. Assume that just as you bring things to the table (knowledge, skills, personality traits), so also do they.

This is likely to be a difficult assumption to make — especially in cases where someone has wronged you or show themselves to be incompetent. In cases like this, the temptation may be to view the person as less valuable due to their lack of past regard for you, or record of poor performance or lack of skills. But remember, the operative term here is “assumption”. You’re not making a decision based on evidence here, you’re assuming something.

But in the name of a logical argument for assuming value, here is a quick few sentences. While past performance is the best predictor of future performance, it is not a certain predictor. A person can fall short hundreds of times, only to come through at the next opportunity.

Also, it is often by failing many, many times, that a person is able to succeed in the future. Furthermore, the very fact that others assumed a person would produce results like before may well be a contributing factor to why they ended up producing the same results. This lack of faith can manifest in various ways — many of which have an effect on a person’s behavior and performance.

Again, this is an assumption. It is helpful if you act upon it, not so much if you attempt to analyze and disprove it. It’s also not a primary principle to follow naively. If you assume that a person brings value, but they simply don’t, and it looks like they may hurt you or others — you can find a way to leave them behind. This assumption is not a permanent reversal of how you manage relationships, it’s simply a way to approach others initially, in order to optimize the possible value from your interactions and relationships.

How Strategic Compassion Helps You

Being compassionate manifests in charitable actions, sure. It can show itself by way of helping others, making sacrifices, or just listening, but compassion itself is not really about action, it’s about attitude. Compassion is a way of viewing others. When you view other people as worthy and valuable — worthy of your consideration and attention, and valuable regardless of their value to you— you will tend to act differently toward them. So while actions are certainly involved they’re actually more of the side-effect of the attitude, which is the important thing.

Being compassionate on a regular basis has many benefits. For one, people will generally tend to return the favor; they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, and treat you better. As with anything, there will be outliers, who will just be an ass to you even at your most compassionate. And that’s fine. Nobody bats a thousand.

Compassion also benefits you by creating a much more positive state of mind. The less time you spend painting others in a negative light, or shutting them out, the less stress and anxiety you will feel. Think of that stuff as baggage that you carry around with you. Compassion provides you with a way to simply put those bags down and walk away.

Another benefit of being compassionate is that you can learn much more. I have long believed that you can learn something from everyone you interact with. Even if you haven’t experienced this personally, think about it for a second. Every person has had an entirely different set of experiences in their life. Though you may share common threads with a person, their experiences are still quite different from yours, and so their point of view is also different. If you fail to take advantage of that in your interactions with others, you’re simply failing to use a readily available, free source of learning.

We encounter impermanence every day, but we seem to forget it when remembering it would do us the most good.

Photo by Mikito Tateisi on Unsplash

I have worked at a handful of companies (both non-profit and for-profit) for 20 years. I’ve had kids for nearly 5 years, but already, I am struck by the parallels between the two endeavors: working and parenting. One shared feature of both working and parenting is the abundance of surprises and frustrations.

Kids, colleagues, and clients are all great at taking a day that seems to be going as planned, and flushing it down the toilet (sometimes literally). ’m not complaining — actually, in a way I’m expressing gratitude for these frustrations and surprises. Because those things that seem so frustrating at the time can actually be the most beneficial things to happen to us. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still frustrating — but that frustration is fertile ground for some pretty great personal and professional growth.

Progress in life consists of reducing as much as possible the amount of things that can make you lose your composure.

An Unusual Measure of Progress

I once heard a saying — and if no one can find the source, I’ll assume I made it up: progress in life consists of reducing as much as possible the amount of things that can make you lose your composure. The better you are at taking things in stride — at staying calm under pressure and continuing onward — the better you’re doing. You can make all the money in the world, and have a great job, but if every little hiccup throws you into emotional turmoil — you can’t be doing well.

In fact, the folks who get to the top — who get the money and notoriety and all that — but who are known for losing their minds at the drop of a hat, it’s pretty clear what the cost of all that “success” was, right? The cost was their mental and emotional (and likely personal) stability. In that sense, the success is hollow; it’s “success” in name only. It is empty achievements gained by trading in any semblance of sustainable character.

As a metric, I like measuring the number of things that can throw you off your square, derail you, or whatever you want to call it. I like it because it’s a metric that — unlike how much money you make, or how many people bought your product — is entirely within your control. It may not seem like it, but whether or not you lose your s*#t is up to you. You may feel like you’re going to lose it when something doesn’t go as planned, but you control what that feeling turns into. So if it almost never turns into an outburst of you being a jackass to others, you’re doing well for yourself.

Mindfulness’s Overlooked Sibling

We hear plenty these days about mindfulness — about being aware of what’s going on in your mind, and being present and grateful, and all of that. And all of that is healthy and helpful. But what we hear less than we should is the corresponding message about impermanence: things — both physical and mental — don’t last; they fade away, so act accordingly.

For all of mindfulness’s benefits, it doesn’t quite get us to that point where we can acknowledge and use an awareness of impermanence. It allows us to experience impermanence at work — the arising and falling away of thoughts, sensations, and emotions — but that experience alone doesn’t force one to embrace impermanence as a pervasive feature of life. That realization takes experience and reflection — something that needs to be stacked on top of mindfulness in order for it to be fully benefit us.

In essence, mindfulness is good, but it’s not enough. In order to get the full benefit of what we experience during our various mindfulness practices, we need reflection. We need to reflect on what we experience as part of mindfulness, in order to help us realize just how often things simply pop up and then fizzle out. And that can be the source of a certain amount of joy and calm — especially in tough situations.

If you’ve observed and then reflected on your mind’s activity for long enough, you will learn firsthand just how short the lifespan of a particular feeling is. Even ones that seem to span days, weeks, or years really don’t continuously survive during that whole time. They pop in and out constantly — giving way to other things in the meantime that pop in and out of your mind.

So back to that frustration I was talking about earlier.

This Too DOES Pass

You’ve likely heard the saying “this too shall pass”. It’s supposed to help us deal with unpleasant things — and keep us from losing our minds when we get frustrated, sad, disappointed, or whatever negative feeling takes hold. So we are often tempted to use this mantra in cases like frustrations with our kids or colleagues — repeating it in our head to calm us down. But our minds are no fools. If we don’t have evidence to support this mantra, we can’t trick our minds into believing it. If our mind has not experienced the rising and falling away of things over and over, we’ll never acquiesce to that simple truth. We’ll continue to ride the wave of anger right into destructive outbursts.

That’s where mindfulness and reflection come in.

The thing about having some kind of mindfulness practice coupled with reflection is that it changes this saying ever-so-slightly, to one that works even better to calm us down: this too does pass. Accepting that old saw that this too shall pass may seem simple and easy, but until you’ve seen it in action through your own observation, you’ll be hard-pressed to actually believe it.

Once you’ve experienced this “passing” firsthand, the “shall” turns into a “does” — as in you’ve seen this feeling before, and it does pass. It becomes like watching a movie you’ve seen several times before. You no longer jump at the scene where the actor pops into the frame unexpectedly. You’re not on the edge of your seat, anxious to see how it ends. You say the lines before the actors do. You smile knowingly as the plot twists unfold. The original emotions give way to a knowing appreciation of the film as a whole. You’ve seen this movie before, and now that the initial emotions of mystery and novelty have given way, you can appreciate it in a much deeper way.

Mindful + Reflective = Equanimous

Like I said at the outset, a great metric for progress in life is how few things there are that can knock you off your square. The word for this is equanimity: the state of being consistently calm, cool, and collected — in various situations.

Note, equanimity isn’t the state of being unflinchingly positive and enthusiastic. It’s not the state of being numb and withdrawn due to a lack of caring about anything. Rather, equanimity is the state of having “seen the movie before” so many times that you are not taken by surprise when the inevitable plays out. It’s being intimately aware of how these feelings of frustration — just like they pop into your head — also pop out.

Being mindful, plus reflecting regularly on what you observe in your mind, yields equanimity. Watching the mind’s movie over and over helps you learn the lines, and anticipate all the things that used to be surprises. As a result, there isn’t much left that can really throw you into a tizzy. You’ll never stop feeling the feelings of frustration and everything else; never forget that. It’s just that eventually, you get to know the feelings well enough that they no longer have the power to overtake you. So rather than feelings pushing you quickly into negative actions, you sit for a minute while you remember that this too does pass — as everything does.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.