Mike Sturm

Photo Credit: Mr Cup / Fabien Barral on Unsplash

A Practice for Quieting the Noise of Life and Gaining Focus on What Really Matters

For the past few weeks, I’ve found myself in a bit of a personal and professional crisis. You see, over the past 6 to 7 years, I’ve become quite good at recording and tracking my projects and actions. I’ve done it in various programs and notebooks. I practice ubiquitous capture — making sure I don’t lose what could be the next great idea, or the next thing I need to get done.

But much like a garden variety hoarder — who saves every little thing they believe they might use one day — I’ve become surrounded by projects and actions that quite simply don’t matter. And like that hoarder with a house full of collected trinkets and trash, I simply can’t bear to part with them, so they stay on my list. And the list of projects and actions keeps growing and growing.

And it’s killing me.

Productivity Hoarding and the Mind-Suck

When you have collected numerous projects and tasks in whatever system or list you use, what tends to happen is a kind of mind-suck. Every time you glance at that long list in an effort to figure out what to do next, you freeze, like a deer in headlights. You freeze, get overwhelmed by all that stuff, and you run far away from it. And then the list becomes useless — and even the important stuff in that pile of otherwise useless projects and tasks get ignored. As a result, you become unproductive and feel terrible because of it.

But there is a way out.

Greg McKeown, in an interview on The Art of Charm podcast offers a very helpful practice — one that I’ll call The Hundred Year View. Here’s how he describes it:

Every quarter, someone should hold a personal quarterly off-site. You schedule somewhere between a half a day and a day…and you’re asking all the big questions…what are my 3–5 most important life goals? Actually, I’ve gone even further than that. Sometimes I’m asking what’s my three to five hundred year vision?….What do I want my grandchildren’s life to be like? What do I want their learning to have been? And when I can think in that very, very long term perspective, it helps to distinguish between the vital few and the trivial many…A hundred-year vision really pushes one to think clearly.

There is something both simple and powerful in this practice: transcendence.

In the noise of the day-to-day, or even week-to-week action of life, we tend to narrow our focus to only the immediate or urgent things — what’s in front of us now or what needs to be taken care of very soon. It makes you become reactive (instead of proactive), and you exist as a kind of stimulus/response machine — merely taking the inputs of the world and spitting out your outputs. You lose the intentional, purposeful spirit of a person doing big things over the long term.

Thinking from the viewpoint of a longer timeline — about your grandchildren’s lives, and about your legacy — you come to adopt a different view. The things you thought were big look small — because they are small. It reminds me of a very useful metaphor to help you think from that transcendent hundred-year mindset.

Using the Hundred-Year View: A Quick Exercise

Have you ever gotten on a plane, in a mad rush to get wherever you are going — the stresses and nagging things of your life just nipping at your heels? Then the plane takes off, you can’t have your laptop open, and your devices lose connectivity. It’s just you and your thoughts.

Then, with no devices to buzz at you, you look out the window. As the plane ascends, you can see people walking on sidewalks below, cars zooming quickly on the roads, and all of the activity of daily life. But after about 20 seconds, you are several thousand feet up, and all of the activity of the world below has faded into a peaceful landscape — speckled with clouds and rays of sunlight. Suddenly, things look and feel different. For me at least, my mind goes to different place: I can take that longer view. I can ask the bigger questions — and keep from getting distracted for long enough to really try to answer them.

Since hearing McKeown’s thought about adopting the hundred-year view, I have mixed it in with my takeoff metaphor to fashion a mental exercise to get me back in the right mindset day-to-day. When I have been putting out fires, answering emails, and none of my bigger projects have been getting the attention I know they need, I take a few seconds and do the following exercise:

1. Close my eyes.
2. Take 3 deep breaths.
3. Imagine myself in the airplane, taking off, and looking out the window.
4. I ask myself: which of the things I’m stressing about now will have an impact that people still feel 100 years from now?

The answer to that last question is usually “none”. And while I never simply neglect everything that’s not a huge project, it helps me not to worry so much about the little things. It also encourages me to put just a little bit of time into the bigger things — the things that will matter 100 years from now.

Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash

How the First Principle of Improvisational Comedy Might Just be a Superb Principle for Living

Being an effective person requires being able to get along with many different people. But navigating the various personal and professional relationships in your life can be difficult. Luckily, there is a simple tool that can help you build better relationships, help you more effectively navigate difficult conversations, and produce more creative ideas while with a diverse group of people. It does, however, come from a pretty unconventional source: Improv Comedy.

There’s a principle at the foundation of improv called yes, and. The idea is that in order for an improv sketch to work, the actors involved need to be able to count on one another to keep the spirit of the skit going — no matter what crazy improvised line one of them has blurted out. So if the sketch starts out as being about a boy asking a stranger if he’s seen his lost dog, and the stranger suddenly informs the boythat his dog is actually a dinosaur, and being hunted by the dinosaur police — everyone has to roll with it, or the skit falls flat.

When actors are yes-anding, an improv sketch could be a hilarious and surprising mini-play that takes the audience on a journey. When the yes-ands are half-hearted — neither yeses nor ands — it can be a train wreck on the stage. The same thing is true of many conversations in life.

So many of the train-wreck conversations that break deals and damage relationships have one thing in common: we’re failing to yes, and!

Why Yes, And Works

I have been yes, anding for most of my life. For me, it was forced upon me by my environment. I grew up in a household of stubborn, argumentative, and knowledgable people. My parents, grandparents, brother, cousins, aunts and uncles would argue constantly — with seemingly a whole lot on the line if anyone was proven wrong. In order to defuse many a heated arguments, I had to use humor — specifically improvised jokes that played off what someone had said. I still do it — because it works. It wasn’t until I started looking into the principle that realized why it works so well.

When done right, a yes, and does two things:

• defuses, prevents, and de-escalates rising aggression by acknowledging what someone has said, and accepting it by adding something onto it
• forces the other party or parties to collaborate

The “Yes” portion forces you to accept — at least for a little while — the validity of what others are saying. In personal relationships this is key, because when we (even implicitly) label others’ feelings as invalid, it turns them off to any possible cooperation or compromise. Both of those things are important to functional and productive relationships.

It forces you to contribute, but in a way that helps others first.

It gets others to accept what you say — due to the Reciprocity Principle

In general, it produces better creativity — because the agreeable nature of the conversation boosts the mood of the people involved. And it has been shown that good moods are great for creativity and idea generation:

“…the most powerful way to boost your mood and feel more creative and alive is to act compassionately and kindly. Mow your neighbor’s yard. Cook a casserole for a friend in need. Do something for your spouse to make their life a little easier. Donate money to your favorite cause or simply look someone who served you in the eye and say “thank you.”
“When we connect through compassion we experience what researchers call a “helper’s high.” We feel a rush of emotion that leaves us feeling happy, more connected, and calm. Often we can experience those feelings again, even when the good deed is long done, just by reflecting on the memory.”

How to Yes, And

Implementing Yes, And in real life is a skill you have to develop, but you can get pretty far simply with the right attitude. Quite simply, you have to want to get along with the other parties; you have to want to get them to cooperate and collaborate.And you have to want to cooperate and collaborate with them. Unfortunately, that kind of attitude is not always easy to adopt — especially when the other parties are being aggressive or abrasive.

Often times — especially in the context of business — the default attitude becomes adversarial; the other party is the enemy to be defeated. However, it is often when we act aggressively to defeat our foe — rather than collaborate with them — that we end up losing anyway. We ruin what could be a win-win situation that is not as good as what we could have gotten by collaborating. It is the classic example of the prisoner’s dilemma.

As you develop the attitude of wanting cooperation, you can employ some specific yes, and tools in your interactions. An easy place to start is with casual conversation with neutral parties. You can start with the blandest of topics, and just attempt to add on some substance to a comment.

For example: you’re in the break room and someone says “boy this heat is something else!” You could just say “yeah” half-heartedly and leave it at that. But if you yes, and the conversation, you could say something like “yeah, and it seems like no matter how much I prepare myself for it as I’m walking outside, it’s like getting punched in the face”. I do this all the time (not the same line, but something in the same spirit). It ends up either getting a laugh most of the time, and nearly always continues the conversation.

Obviously, that’s harder to do in conversations that are getting heated, but if you calm your own rising emotions, there is usually some way to use the power of affirmation and addition to keep tensions from rising to a boiling point. A great tactic to use is verbal mirroring and asking for confirmation. If someone is clearly getting angry (and you weren’t the direct cause of it) you can simply affirm their anger, and recap what you believe they’re angry about in a way that is generous to them (not “I can see your angry because you think I slighted you, but I really didn’t).

In most cases, that levels out the rise of tension, and even helps it begin to subside. Then you add something that continues to affirm their point of view and anger, but then suggests something. The suggestion can’t be I suggest you calm down!, it has to be something neutral, something to lighten things a bit, or something that takes divergent path that might have been hinted at earlier in the conversation. It can be tricky, and it relies heavily on the specific context of the conversation, but again, if you have cultivated a genuine desire to get along with the other party, it will be much more natural.

The Takeaway

Using Yes, And helps you develop rapport and foster cooperation by affirming and adding on to what others say. Doing so leverages the principal of reciprocity — which inclines people to help others who have helped them. It also helps avoid or defuse difficult conversations. To effectively Yes, And requires cultivating the right attitude — a genuine desire to get along with others, and to collaborate.

Photo by Francesco Gallarotti on Unsplash

Thinking Big, Acting Small, and Understanding the Limiting Tendencies of the Mind

Our minds are wonderful machines. At any given moment, they can be zooming through numerous different operations: thoughts, feelings, plans, inklings, and processing thousands of pieces of data from our senses. We can drive ourselves to work while listening intently to talk radio, and tapping an unrelated rhythm on the steering wheel — all while eating a breakfast sandwich. So much of the marvelous stuff our minds do happens automatically. It’s like magic — magic that happens every day.

But that can be kind of a problem, too. Here’s a quick riddle to illustrate that:

Q: How do you topple a tree with only two fingers?

A: When it’s still a sapling, pinch it and rip it out of the ground.

This little riddle teaches us two important lessons. One lesson is about how our mind’s greatest strength can also be a great weakness. Our ability to create stories and meaning from sparse details can end up manufacturing unnecessary constraints on our thinking that limit the breadth of our thinking. The other lesson is that we can often confuse thinking big with thinking small — and vice versa. We think that big problems require grand action on a large scale. But often, it is the small things, done deliberately and at the right time, that have the biggest impact.

Lesson 1: Manufacturing Constraints

Our minds are so good at smuggling in context and building a story that we often don’t even notice when it’s happening. In the question above, most of us hear “tree” and we immediately think of the towering things in forests with thick trunks and rough, sturdy bark. But nothing in the question mentioned how old or big the tree is — we manufactured that context and built it up in the form of a wall in our thinking. That wall kept us from thinking of the simplest, most effective answer to the question.

On many occasions, this ability to construct context and a narrative serves a purpose. It begins with our perception — where we only get bits and pieces of data from our eyes and ears, and our brains fill in any gaps, so that we seamlessly perceive the symbols and signs in the world around us. It continues when we hear incomplete or sparsely detailed stories — or when we’re trying to remember something from long ago. Our mind fills in the gaps, so that we have a story to work with. It’s not something we can (or would want to) abandon — but it’s something we need to be aware of, and ensure we keep in check in certain circumstances.

There are times that call for thinking differently, creatively, and solving big problems. When those times come, we need to understand the constraints that we automatically place on our thinking, and do what we can to remove them — so we can address big problems with the most free and creative thinking we can. That can be as simple as asking yourself what assumptions am I making about this problem? or do I even understand what the problem is, or just think I do?

Lesson 2: Thinking Big and Small

Toppling a tree sounds like a big task. If I were to ask anyone on the street about the simplest and most effective way to do it, most people would answer that it takes special tools and is moderately difficult . In other words: it’s a big project. I’m sure that before I sat down to write this article, I would have conceived of it in much the same way. And that makes sense, because we as humans suffer from two afflictions that make it difficult for us to solve big problems with small actions: we think big effects have big causes, and we are blind to how small changes build into big situations.

If we want to affect big change in our environment, we usually do need a detailed plan, actions, follow-up, and coordination in order to make that happen. But we tend to underestimate how effective simple, well-timed actions can be. In the case of the tree, our two fingers can be just as effective as a chainsaw, ropes, and a team of people — if we act at the right time.

But timing takes a different element: awareness. You have to be aware of what is going on — especially with things that might be an issue for you. But in order to be aware, you have to care about what’s going on. You can’t view the people, things, and events going on around you as obstacles, distractions, and problems. Doing that will prevent you from noticing the sapling as it sprouts, and allow it to become a big tree that now costs you money, energy, and time to remove.

In Summary

When we’re presented with a problem, we tend to immediately make assumptions that constrain our thinking. When we constrain our thinking, we constrain our actions. We also tend to think that only big actions will solve big problems, but that is not the case. Being aware of the impact of timing, and of small actions can be a huge advantage in more effective problem solving.

“A small white house surrounded by trees in the autumn” by Scott Webb on Unsplash

A few thoughts on love, life, and living

Sometimes I find myself alone in the near-dark of morning, and the thoughts that run through my head are special ones. They’re not the kind that find their way in during the hectic light and activity of the day. They seem reserved for a time exponentially more quiet and subdued.

These thoughts are about life, about experience, and about love.

I’ve been alive for almost 35 years now, and I have been fortunate enough to have learned about love during that time. But the way I learned about it was not always pleasant. I had to see many things disguised as love that were not. I had to feel things that I was told were love — but were not. I had to ache and yearn, and reject the very idea of love. I had to be on my own for a while after being a constant boyfriend since age 18. I had to be alone, and come to embrace that feeling.

We’re never alone, you know. That’s a mistake I think we all make from time to time. We’re never alone; we’re with ourselves. And there is a difference.

You have a relationship with yourself, whether you believe it or not. And if you can’t or won’t sit alone with yourself and be at peace — it can feel like there is no rest. That’s where love comes in.

Love is often pursued as a substitute for a relationship with oneself. It is pursued as a distraction, a diversion, and a saving grace. But that kind of love — like most diversions or distractions — never outlasts the thing being diverted or distracted from. Eventually, you have to be with yourself — and the din is either overwhelmingly loud, or the silence is enough to break you. And that’s okay, because it’s just the two of you; and no matter what, you can make it work…if you try.

These days, I understand that love is a positive feedback loop. It begins with me and myself, extends outward to another, and comes back to me richer and warmer — and begins all over again. I used to see love as something that never changes — something that is strong from the beginning and sustained through time. I now realize that love is the opposite. It’s something that begins small and fragile, and that grows with experience, cooperation, vulnerability, service, failure, breakdowns, trial and error, and reconciliation. Love without any of those things is merely a sapling — susceptible to any weak wind or rain that might wash over in a moment.

I look today at the woman I met almost 10 years ago, and the feeling is completely different. Back then, she was a mystery. The attraction was intrigue, curiosity, and suspense. It was intense, alluring, and motivating. But it is not what I feel today. What I feel today is so much deeper, richer, warmer, stronger, and sustaining. I look at her and see 10 years, 2 children, 2 houses, and numerous adventures — arguments, make-ups, and moments of intimate connection.

I could never — none of us could ever — feel that for a relative stranger. That is love; it isn’t something discovered fully mature and kept whole. It’s something carefully grown and cultivated — something nurtured and encouraged — something that began so rough and vulnerable, but made strong and flexible through the years.

Love is not about fanning flames — that’s a an amateur’s way of seeing it — because love is not fire. Love is a house — nay, a mansion — but it starts off as a few boards and nails. And it is only made into something more when you build it up enough to keep out the winds, rain, and cold, that it becomes a place to go for shelter — to stay warm, and to build a life.

Perhaps I am wrong, and perhaps the hot, hot fire still burns as brightly for someone, somewhere. But I was never one for fire anyway — I’ve found that there is a fine line between staying warm and being set ablaze. I’d rather build my mansion, one room at a time.

Image Credit: Kristopher Roller on Unsplash

Faith’s bad rap, reason’s inflated reputation, and the nuance of human actions.

Faith gets a bad rap. It’s a shame, really. But like anything that gets its image tarnished over the years, it tends to be because of what its adherents do and say, as opposed to anything intrinsic to it. A great example of this is the Rick and Morty Szechuan sauce incident. A perfectly good television show makes a quirky reference a few times, and its fan base takes it to an unimaginable extreme. In essence, the fans ruined it.

In the case of faith, I see its use by theistic religions (the ones that believe in a single all-powerful god) as an age-old case of “the fans ruining it”. Faith is misused by fundamentalist Muslims to justify their take on jihad, which can be a beautiful concept about the spiritual struggle to which we’re all subjected. Faith is misused by fundamentalist Christians who claim that the earth was created only thousands of years ago, and that homosexuals will rot in hell. Those in the “reason” camp take the bait, and engage in a war of words where the incredible power of faith is discarded like so much wrapping paper on Christmas morning.

Once again, the fans ruined it.

But really, faith is something worth talking about — whether you believe in a god or not. And there are two things about faith that are particularly powerful:

1. Faith is an incredibly powerful, yet overlooked tool for everyday living.
2. Faith is something that we as humans naturally practice constantly.

But first, let me just talk about what faith is.

The Meaning of Faith

A simple definition of faith is a strong belief in something for which there is no prevailing proof. And by that definition, faith is neither a uniquely religious phenomenon, nor is it one confined to those familiar with the word and its meaning. Faith by this definition is also not quite a belief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It is simply strong belief beyond what an objective analysis of the evidence would suggest.

In that sense of the word, we use faith in many of our everyday activities. I hear stories of contaminated water and boil orders all the time, and I know almost nothing about the municipal water supply in my area, yet still I drink from it daily. I have faith that the system is working.

I regularly fly on airplanes across the country in giant commercial airliners that would certainly harm or kill me if one of the thousands of moving parts malfunctioned. Again, I know very little about how aeronautics works, or how planes are inspected, fixed, or built. And yet, I buy tickets, wait in lines, board, surrender my bags, and click my seat belt closed. I have faith that we’ll take off an land without incident.

I used to comfort myself by characterizing this as reason. There have been numerous successful flights over the years, and most people aren’t dying from drinking tap water, and I’m relying on that as evidence for my trust in the processes. And while perhaps others are thinking through the number of successful flights, clean water supplies, and other such things — that doesn’t factor into my thought process. I put my faith in these things — particularly in the people that uphold them — and it is as simple as that.

The entire structure of most people’s days is supported by a network of faith — faith in each other, faith in themselves, and faith that things will largely go on that way that they have for an extended period of time. None of us knows enough about the things we do every day to have made a purely rationalistic decision to support our actions.

I Believe I Can Fly

Let’s tease out the airplane example a bit more — take it back to the birth of aviation. Wilbur and Orville Wright — as well as the various other pioneers working on aviation — threw thousands of hours and billions of dollars chasing manned flight when the evidence available to the experts dictated that it wasn’t probable.

The Wright Brothers weren’t exactly working with a large body of evidence to motivate them to try this expedition — and in fact, the numerous failures they experienced made the evidence accumulate clearly against them in their endeavor. What they did use — at least until they started logging successful hours of flight — was faith, a faith in themselves and their mission.

I’m not saying that faith wins out over reason, of course. Reason is vital in our lives as well, but I think we tend to give reason its proper credence — even if we fail to deploy it properly all the time. All I am suggesting is that we give faith a chance. Actually, we’re already giving it a chance by using it regularly, I’m just asking that we stop acting like the faith we operate with every day is actually reason.

And here’s the funny thing. The ardent skeptics who I’ve argued this point to excercise a large amount of faith themselves when they insist that all of my examples of faith can be shown to be actually be reason. They have faith in their ability to deconstruct complex emotional and cognitive motivators in people to show them as based solely on evidence and logical thought processes.

That’s the other thing — and it’s kind of like what the Wright Brothers showed us — what ends up being pretty solid reason in later generations almost always started off as faith.

I Hear Your Objections, but…

I wholeheartedly believe in science. I believe that in building a map of reality and all of its intricate laws, we will do our best work if we proceed from hypotheses, define what data would disprove our hypotheses, and gather the data. It’s what we’ve done for centuries now, and it has done well for us intellectually speaking.

But we’re simply fooling ourselves if we believe that faith played no part in our initial efforts to make sense of and manipulate the world. The fact that we have for so long set out to try to make sense of and manipulate the world — and continue to do so — is a great example of faith in action. We act in faith that we will someday figure out what no one else has.

Faith and reason are not enemies, but friends. They work in tandem, even if one soars to great heights and leaves the other behind and often forgotten.

As with so many other things, I just can’t say it as eloquently as someone else, so I’ll simply cite them. Here’s Lisa Miller from The Washington Post:

Reason is one way of measuring the world — an excellent and crucial way, to be sure. But intuition is also part of intelligence, as are hunches and feelings. The value of these more instinctive approaches to human experience has been lost in the relentless, rationalistic efforts to prove who’s stupid and who’s smart. Thus, the ephemeral mysteries of existence are reduced to equations on a board in an AP math class….
Faith and reason can live happily together: It’s narrow-mindedness, by the faithful as well as by atheists, that leads to stupid thinking.

Miller uses the term intuition here, but her target includes my characterization of faith here. The point is that there is a great deal of debate that rests upon a supposed chasm between faith and reason. But that chasm doesn’t really exist — either between people, or within them. And even if it does exist, it’s not really chasm, but more like a small crack — one that anyone can easily and gingerly skip over.

Photo by Esteban Lopez on Unsplash

My journey from being obsessed with my image to being able to stop bullets with my chest — sort of.

Not long ago, I read Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly, and it changed the way I thought about how I present myself to others. Specifically, the book contains a great quote in it that made me look at vulnerability — something I had never entertained as a possibility — much differently.

“Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.”

For a long time, I operated under the assumption that in order to be respected, I couldn’t be vulnerable — I had to be unassailable. I had to do work that was perfect. I had to know about everything. I had to have all the answers. My decisions had to be perfectly rational. I could not make mistakes.

And of course, this was an absurd assumption. My work was not (and still isn’t) perfect. There are plenty of things that I don’t know about. I make irrational decisions on a daily basis (as a matter of fact, we all do — and that’s actually a good thing). In short, I am not unassailable; I am not invulnerable. But why was it that I thought I had to be?

I’m No Superman

Growing up, I was infatuated with superheroes. I read the comic book adventures of Batman, Superman, Spider-man, and various others. And my infatuation with them consisted of more than just the action, the over-the-top art, and the complex supernatural stories. My infatuation was with just how these heroes were able to always come through and prove to be the best — no matter what.

Superman, among his various other super abilities, is invulnerable — meaning he can’t be hurt. There are exceptions to this, of course, with a convoluted special case involving Kryptonite — an element from his home world that negates the empowering effects of Earth’s yellow sun, thus making him basically human when exposed to it. I’ll stop the explanation there, to avoid revealing myself as even nerdier than I already have.

Batman, on the other hand, is just a human being, like me. But what made him special was a vast fortune left to him by his deceased parents (whose death when he was a child he lives the life of a vigilante in order to avenge), and a seemingly limitless mental strength. Batman, to me, was infinitely more interesting than any other superheroes because unlike them, he had no super powers, and he had to use this mental fortitude he had to overcome his lack of superpowers.

Through his mental fortitude, he was able to gain a towering intellect, push himself into peak physical condition, and outwit and outthink every villain he faced. No one got the drop on the Caped Crusader¹. And though it took me a while to realize it, that was precisely the problem.

The Subtle Art of Evasion

Little did I know, my idolization of Batman set me up for an even harder realization down the road. I had come to believe that by working hard enough and having an iron will, I could make up for any deficits I had, and thus end up becoming invulnerable.

You see, because Batman wasn’t naturally invulnerable like Superman, he had to work 10 times as hard to ensure that he still couldn’t be hurt. Instead of being invulnerable, he became evasive — no one could touch him. As I grew out of adolescence (at least in years), I found myself coming to mimic the hero of my youth; while I was also not naturally invulnerable, I too became untouchable — which is something completely different — and infinitely worse.

I had friendships, sure — and a few relationships, but they were always colored with fear that at some point, I would be called into question. And I wasn’t ever able to articulate what it was that would be called into question — it was just something, anything having to do with who I was as a person. All I knew was that when it did happen, and I was unable to prove invulnerable, I would have to feel something other than pleasure and confidence. To me, that was a fear greater than most others.

This caused me to — much like my childhood idol, Batman— act defensive and withdrawn. I practiced all kinds of social jiu jitsu in order to avoid the possibility of being open and vulnerable. I used humor, brought up random facts to switch the topic of conversation, and steered clear of one-on-one time with others. Whenever my choices or actions were questioned, I would become exaggeratedly defensive. I would use whatever weaponry I could to avoid having to come clean and admit that I might be imperfect.

My work life — at least in the beginning — followed much the same pattern. I had to be more civil about it (to avoid making things weird), but I found ways to divert any criticism, and blame mistakes on various things or people other than myself. It was always the fault of a lack of clarity, an abundance of constraints, or the classic “I actually meant to do that, and here’s a long, convoluted explanation of why though you think it’s wrong, it’s actually not”.

Quite simply, I avoided being wrong or vulnerable at all costs.

The Turning Point: I am More than All This

Coincidentally, it was when I began writing about self-improvement that I really came to grips with this albatross of invulnerability hanging around my neck. Initially, I started writing online about productivity — obsessed with trying to squeeze more out work and life, and trying to show others how to do the same. My approach was that of an expert — speaking to an audience from on high, and pretending to have much more information and insight than anyone else. But I certainly was not an expert; I was merely one practitioner and enthusiast among many.

It didn’t take long for me to begin reading the work of others in the field — writers who took a similar tone of expertise and unassailability. So many of them turned me off within the first few paragraphs of their pieces. Initially, I couldn’t figure out why, and then it hit me — like the ton of bricks that I had been trying to outmaneuver for so long: the very invulnerability that made me disconnect from the writing of others was the same kind of invulnerability that I was displaying in my writing.

From there, I came to realize that my posture of invulnerability sure kept others from criticizing me, but it wasn’t because there was nothing to criticize — it was because no one wants to confront someone obsessed with being invulnerable, so they give up. When people don’t see it as worth it to engage you with criticism, your relationship with them is (at best) half of what it could be.

Being “invulnerable” fosters a series of relationships that is barely more than superficial. And that is no way to live. When you take a posture of invulnerability, you remove the possibility that others can help you (because, after all, you’re fine on your own!). When you do that, people get turned off quickly. While they may still maintain a relationship of sorts with you, chances are, it won’t be very fulfilling for either of you.

Being Invulnerable by Being Vulnerable

So here’s where I get into a bit of semantics. I ended up finding a way to achieve my goal of being invulnerable.

It is possible to be invulnerable, but paradoxically, it can only be done when you choose to be vulnerable — to open yourself up. The definition of vulnerability is simply the inability to be hurt or harmed. Yes, choosing to be vulnerable with others leaves you open to smaller, short-term harms. But the disposition of being open and accepting — which comes with vulnerability — actually makes it much less likely that you’ll suffer severe long-term harm. Let me explain.

My journey to become more vulnerable has been guided by my willingness to simply admit that I mad a mistake — which is something I have always had a hard time doing. In order to do that, I needed to dissociate my actions and decisions from my concept of self and self-worth. Simply put, I am not my actions or decisions. They are things I do, but they do not define me or my value as a person. When I began to truly and deeply believe that, it became easier for me to be vulnerable and admit when I was wrong or didn’t quite know what I was doing (which it turns out, is a lot of the time).

The habit of disconnecting from my actions, thoughts, emotions, and decisions fostered a calmness and self-compassion that I had not experienced before. It has also allowed me to grow personally more than I ever had before I made that disconnecting a habit.

Just a note on this disconnecting. Not identifying with my thoughts and actions is not me shirking responsibility for them. If I do something that has bad consequences, I do all I can to try to correct it. And the funny thing is, it’s actually easier to do that if I don’t identify with the action. Think about it. If I identify with my actions, and someone tells me that I did something wrong, my first interpretation of that will be that I — as a person — am wrong. That’s much worse than just realizing that, though I’m a good person, I just took an action that was misguided. It becomes easier to be responsible for the action, because you’re less likely to see it as a personal indictment.

Stay Open

The surest way to stay vulnerable is to stay open. Openness means being willing to listen to others and really think about the possibility of them being right. Not only that, but consider that perhaps you are right much less of the time than you think.

At worst, you’ll find out you’re still right quite a bit, but be more humble about it. At best, people will sense that you’re a good person to talk to — and that’s never a bad thing.

¹ Yes, I know, there are various times when, technically, Batman has been defeated. In fact, my favorite story arc of all time, Knightfall, revolves around his back getting broken by super-yoked villain Bane.

credit: Úrsula Madariaga

And How It Keeps Us From Being Great at Sales, Leadership, Parenting, and Pretty Much Everything Else

One of the things that we as humans are not so good at dealing with is when things don’t go the way we’d like them to. Buddhists have a word for the feeling we get when that happens: dukkha. It’s a shorthand for the nagging dissatisfaction and unease that follows the various disappointments of everyday life— and learning to cope with it is essentially the basis for the entire religion.

But this isn’t an essay about religion or spirituality. It’s an essay about something very different: the concept of laziness. It’s a concept that I’ve struggled with for a long time — partly because I’ve been accused of being lazy on more than one occasion, and partly because I have found myself believing that I was, in fact, lazy. But the more years I live, and the more I attempt and fail to finish various projects, the more I am becoming convinced of a simple hypothesis: there is no such thing as laziness.

A more conservative thesis would be this: calling someone lazy has no good practical application, and is itself a lazy thing to do. And moreover, the concept of laziness is actually an intellectual and interpersonal crutch. We use it when we can’t do the hard work of really communicating and attempting to understand others. Once we realize this, we can vastly improve how well we sell, lead, parent, and generally get along in the world.

“Laziness” is a Lazy Concept

Consider the dictionary definition of laziness: a disinclination to expend effort or energy. I simply don’t think that a person who has this as a personality trait truly exists. No one is really disinclined to expend effort or energy on everything. And in fact, some of those who others call “lazy” can be seen expending a lot of effort in order to avoid doing things.

At best, laziness is a relative term. All it means is that you’re unwilling to expend energy on certain things — namely, whatever the person calling you lazy is concerned with. In that case, what the concept of laziness comes down to is simply a mismatch in priorities. Someone sees X as a priority, and you don’t. So you don’t do X, or you do a sub-par job. Thus, you get called “lazy”.

Had you attached the same level of urgency to X, you likely would have moved heaven and earth to make X happen — in the same way that when you have to urgently go to the bathroom, you make the effort to find one.

What’s worse is that we who call others lazy are also — in effect — being lazy. We’re using a convenient label to explain a problem — one which puts a stop to any inquisition into why someone was lazy about something. Again, it’s not that the person is lazy and that’s why they didn’t complete the task. They didn’t perceive the urgency or importance. It seems like it would be valuable to find out why they didn’t. And who knows what other valuable nuggets of information you can turn up while looking for the answer to that question.

Transference: Getting Great at Sales, Leadership, Parenting, and Pretty Much Everything Else

More often than not, if we attempt to explore why someone was “lazy” and didn’t do what we asked, we’ll find the same thing to blame: our inability as humans to deal with the fact that people simply feel differently than we do about many things. We all experience this. Our urgent need to get on the next flight to Dallas is rarely ever matched by an equally urgent need in the ticket agent at the gate to find us such a flight.

And that’s where the real opportunity is missed when we just label people as “lazy”. We miss the opportunity to figure out how we failed to transfer the urgency and/or importance of the expectation we had. Often times, the reason for this failure is a lack of focus during conversations, or conversations that are too one-sided. Other times, the failure is simply a lack of connection, and thus a lack of importance placed by another on your relationship. It could be that the other person is simply overwhelmed, and cannot even bear to reprioritize once they settle on some arbitrary list of priorities.

There can be numerous reasons why someone didn’t do what you expected, but “they’re just lazy” is the laziest reason you could possibly use. And why use it when you could explore the real reasons, and possibly learn something about how to effectively help others to feel the urgency and importance that you do?

Those of us who can take the urgency and importance we feel and transfer it effectively to others truly excel at interpersonal activities: sales, leadership, parenting, public speaking, and so on. To some, it may seem like simply “motivating people” or “getting their asses in gear,” but it’s something much different — much more magical. It is a delicate art of carefully and completely transferring a perception and a felt value from one person to another, or many. That is no small feat.

So how do you do it? That’s a tough question. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say that it begins with simply being more tolerant of people, and more patient with them. It certainly also begins with refusing to explain people’s behaviors by using simplistic and general character traits. After all, when you paint people and their intricate minds with a broad brush, all you get is a blurry and uninteresting depiction of reality.

Rather than assuming laziness as a motive, assume some responsibility for failing to transfer the felt urgency and importance to them. Assume it was your fault (just to start with). Then ask questions to understand what their priorities are — which will give you insight into why your priority wasn’t one of them. Like I said earlier, even those who we label as ‘lazy’ expend energy on things — like their priorities. And when you can link their priorities to yours, well that’s half the battle of transferring your feelings of importance and energy to them. That’s alignment, and alignment gets things done! Again, calling someone lazy doesn’t get things done — at least not for long.

Motivation is a tricky thing. Those who don’t seem to feel it can be hard nuts to crack, but you’ll never crack them if you simply don’t try. So do yourself the favor of ditching the word “lazy”. Do the work of finding out why someone else didn’t do the work. You may just become better at the work that you do.

credit: Vance Osterhout on Unsplash

Chasing after the best of everything actually keeps us from enjoying nearly anything. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

I was out to dinner with a co-worker recently. The restaurant was quite nice, and boasted a whole menu of dishes that sounded amazing. This was both of our first times there, and I was poring over the menu — going back and forth in my mind about what dish I should get. I wanted to get the quintessential dish to capture this place and its flavor. I wanted to nail it.

During that process, I couldn’t pay attention to the conversation going on between my colleague and our dinner guest. I heard what they were saying, and I wanted to join in, but I was hell-bent on making the most out of this dinner. My coworker, on the other hand, perused the menu for what seemed like less than a minute, and was ready to order.

When our meals came, I was happy to be able to eat, but as I tasted it, the worry crept up in the back of my head: could I have ordered a better meal? My colleague seemed pleased with his choice, and went on eating confidently. It was that quiet confidence in his choice that made me feel a bit silly about racking my brain to order “the best” dish. It seemed so important to me at the time, but in retrospect, it was absurd.

What I came to realize then and there is something that a few thinkers in the psychology community had come to realize already:

The drive to maximize the results of our choices often ends up limiting how much value we actually derive from them.

The more we demand of ourselves and others, the easier it becomes for the results to cause us stress and anxiety. What’s more, insisting on squeezing the most out of each choice makes it increasingly more difficult to be decisive — to be confident in your decisions. When you’re less decisive, you spend more mental energy on decisions, and thus have less of it to devote to the numerous other things that demand it.

The Dangers of the Maximization Mindset

The maximizing mindset can be summed up as the desire and inclination to try to get the most and the best out of decisions, interactions, and people. It’s a mindset that many high achievers in the business world champion. And here’s the funny thing: even the self-proclaimed minimalist is guilty of the maximizing mindset. The obsession with getting rid of things, having the least amount of stuff in one’s “daily carry”, and having the smallest house that can be packed up and taken the most places — it’s a maximizing mindset.

But there are 3 main problems with this mindset, and they negatively affect your quality of life. The problems are:

FOMO: fear of missing out
FOMO (the fear of missing out) makes anything you do less enjoyable, because you’re worrying that another choice could have gotten you more pleasure. That wouldn’t be a problem if you weren’t looking to maximize.

Paralysis: the inability to make decisions efficiently and effectively
When you’re looking to maximize, you can end up spending so much time deliberating which choice is going to yield the best results, that you create a lot of unnecessary stress & tension in the process of choosing, which sucks the joy right out of the whole process.

Stifling of Exploration: insisting on maximizing makes it difficult to simply explore — which is a hugely beneficial practice.
Focusing on the maximum return stifles a very beneficial process of human life: exploration. When we demand a certain level of return on our time and energy, we abandon the mindset of an explorer. And that mindset is more beneficial than many people realize — especially the most driven and ambitious among us.

The explorer — like the maximizer — wants to find something valuable at the end of the journey. But unlike the rest of us, the true explorer opens up to whatever she might find along the way, and chalks it all up as simply part of the journey. Truly opening up requires being somewhat detached from trying to get the best results; it’s a type of letting go. When you let go of trying to maximize, and simply let things unfold, wonderful things can happen.

Satisficing: A Smarter Approach

Rather than being maximizers, it often makes more sense to be a satisficer — or one who has a satisficing mindset. The word “satisfice” is a portmanteau of the words “satisfy” and “suffice”. The satisficer is not looking for the best or the most, rather, she’s looking for what will work, and allow her to go on living.

While it may seem like satisficing will just get you an average and lackluster life, that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, a study on worker satisfaction showed that though maximizers tended to get higher salaries, they ended up being less satisfied with their jobs.

Seem crazy? Sure, but the reason is straightforward: maximizers second-guess by nature. They devote so much time to pursuing the best that they can’t really be sure that they’ve gotten it. Perhaps they could have done better if only they had more time, or data. Satisficers see something acceptable, and move on. And they end up more satisfied than the maximizers — who eternally chase the elusive dragon of “the best”.

Satisficing in Action

As an example of satisficing in practice, imagine that you want to purchase a coffee maker. You go to different websites, pull up reviews, compare them, go to the store, look them over, and agonize about which of the few that you’ve narrowed it down to is going to deliver the best coffee brewing experience. When you do that — and you turn it over in your mind enough times — you train your mind to second-guess your decisions. And it robs you of some of the joy you can get when you do get something new, like a cool coffee maker.

A better option is to simply ask yourself: why am I getting a coffee maker? Likely, the answer is going to be: so that I can enjoy a good, hot cup of coffee every day to kick my morning off right. But do you need the best coffee maker in order to do that? Probably not. And even if there is a difference between the elusive best coffee maker out there, and the one you bought, how much will that difference really alter how well your life goes? If the answer is more than not much, then you’ve pinned way too much of your well-being on a piece of machinery.

The same goes for anything you can buy. Some amount of hand-wringing is acceptable, and maybe necessary, but anything more than a small amount is an indicator that you’re missing the forest for the trees. Simply choose what you’re leaning toward, and be okay with learning later on that it wasn’t the best. After the fact, the only difference it can really make is up to how much you choose to worry about it — and you simply choose not to worry about it.

Is it easy? For a person like me — who regularly spends what seems like an hour in the toothpaste aisle every few months — no, it’s not easy. But is it worth it to pick your battles when it comes to whipping out an intense and complex decision-making process? Absolutely. If you don’t, it’s a fast track to driving yourself (and your loved ones) insane.

The Takeaway: Choose Your Battles

Life is short, but it’s also composed of a lot of decisions. If you pursue any more than a few of them as battles where you have to get the best outcome, you may win some, but you’ll lose most. And the ones you win will likely have exhausted you — so you won’t even have the mental energy to enjoy what you’ve got.

The better way forward is to choose a few things that truly matter to you, focus on pursuing the best in those few areas, and let everything else ride. Whatever is good enough is fine with you. You’ve got bigger fish to fry. And maybe you don’t even have to fry the fish — sashimi is good enough.

“A perspective shot from a kayak on a rippling lake with the sun setting on the horizon in the distance” by Joshua Ness on Unsplash

What the sages of the East can teach us about effort, strategy, and observation.

The thing about Eastern philosophies is that they are full of contradictions, but unlike in Western philosophies, contradictions are not seen as problems to solve. Rather, contradictions are embraced as illuminating — because well, reality is full of contradictions. Take this passage from the Tao Te Ching, probably the most contradictory of all Eastern works:

Look, and it can’t be seen.
Listen, and it can’t be heard.
Reach, and it can’t be grasped.

Above, it isn’t bright.
Below, it isn’t dark.
Seamless, unnamable.
it returns to the realm of nothing.
Form that includes all forms,
image without an image,
subtle, beyond all conception.

Heavy, right? And seemingly going back and forth contradicting itself. But with passages like this, the Eastern sages showed that they were onto something: life is full of contradictions, and the Eastern masters realized this. So rather than writing long paragraphs trying to reconcile these contradictions, the great minds of the East practiced a form of analysis more like poetry: put the contradictions together, and let them be — in words on the page — to allow us to reconcile them ourselves in that act of thinking that can’t be put into language, but can surely be felt.

The Way of the Sage: Non-Action

One of the most prominent contradictions in Eastern philosophy is the concept of Wu Wei found in Taoism. Loosely translated (as is usually the case with concepts from the East), it means “non-action” — doing less, and putting forth less effort. But don’t be put off by that, it’s not a philosophy of laziness or a lack of care.

A bit less loosely translated, Wu Wei describes not forcing things as a way of life. It’s about spending less time trying to manipulate situations, people, and environments to satisfy your desires, and spending more time aligning yourself to the natural flow of things. It’s about avoiding the paralyzing effects of overanalyzing, stressing out, and all of the things that come with a general need to control events and people. Quite simply, Wu Wei is an approach to existence that advocates an acceptance of the myriad things that are out of our control, a willingness to go along for the ride, and a readiness to act in the few instances where action will truly add value.

But that last part — acting in the few instances where action will truly add value. That is the difficult part. Knowing the difference between the few situations where some small action will add real value and the many situations where we feel anxious to act, but those actions will get us nowhere — that is all about receptivity.

What I mean by receptivity is an openness to the long view. It’s a forest-for-the-trees mentality. It manifests in the person who — during a heated argument with their partner — keeps in mind that this is but one valley, which will have accompanying peaks, and then realizes that it might not be worth trying to keep arguing so they can prove themselves right. It’s the investor who resolves not to emotionally withdraw their money from the market during a downturn. It’s the leader who listens intently to the emotional criticisms and anxieties of their team, and keeps calm enough to sift through that criticism for the problems that can be addressed and yield real improvement. It is the person who lets that silence in a conversation linger — and resists the urge to fill every single gap with more talking.

If that sounds a bit too esoteric, perhaps the manifestations of it are more apparent, and easier to think of. Consider some of the most memorable people you know — the type of people who when you met them, they drew you in for some reason. Not the people who were loud and opinionated and made a mark because they were simply obnoxious, rather the people who displayed that certain something — the strong, silent type, if you will. It’s the person who, when they spoke, you found yourself listening intently — drawn in by the person’s seeming collectedness and non-smug quiet confidence.

It’s Not Being Lazy, It’s Being Strategic

Again, Wu Wei is not about laziness and complacency. Rather, it is about conservation of energy — specifically, of mental and physical effort. Significant effort will always be necessary in order to get things done. However, we all fall prey to wasting effort (and time) on thoughts and actions that at the time we think add value, but in the fulness of time, we realize we were just spinning our wheels, ultimately to end up right back where we started. We do this because we often feel uncomfortable, and we want to act because we feel that doing something is better than just waiting, or sitting with that discomfort.

The Taosist masters warned against this. Sometimes, sitting with that uncomfortable feeling is exactly the thing to do. And in doing so, you’ll save a lot of energy for things that matter. As a bonus, you’ll also feel more comfortable and relaxed where others tend to feel tense, anxious, and make poor decisions because of it. When that happens, you gain an incredible advantage over many other people — people compelled to act when action is just not necessary.

Wu Wei is about relaxing into the states that we consistently encounter in reality: uncertainty, conflict, discomfort, desire, and so on. It’s about relaxing enough to see that there is not so big a difference between those states and their opposites that we so badly desire: certainty, peace, pleasure, and possession. They come on and pass as quickly, like waves on an ocean.

Still unsure? Allow me reconcile the concept of Wu Wei with modern productivity advice. Wu Wei is about outsourcing your work to the world. There are rhythms and cycles in reality. If there are things that happen in those rhythms and cycles that you are trying to do yourself, sync up with those cycles. There’s a quote by Paul Rudd’s character in a relatively unknown film called P.S. which sums this up pretty nicely:

Find the pattern...

Find the pattern, and put yourself in a position of profit

when the pattern repeats itself.

People spend a lot of time and energy both ignoring and fighting against natural patterns — patterns of nature, patterns of markets, patterns of energy, patterns of behavior, and so on. But rather than fighting against those patterns, find a way to use them. Like Aikido teaches, it takes much more energy and yields much less success to try to stop your opponent’s momentum and reverse it by force. It is much less taxing, and much more probable that you’ll succeed if you use your opponent’s momentum against him. The only energy you use is the energy of observation, planning, and waiting.

Take This Home With You

Mastering Wu Wei is as easy as standing back and observing — even for a little bit. Note the patterns you see. Start with your own moods, thoughts, and behaviors. You will be surprised just how many patterns there are. When you do that, you can figure out how to use your own momentum to create value for yourself with less work.

Having mastered leveraging your own patterns and momentum, you can move on to other things. And the other patterns in life — they are likely to be much easier to understand once you understand your own psychological patterns. You observe, you plan, you act, and you profit. And in the end, it’s almost as if you didn’t even do anything; things just kind of unfolded naturally. Again, from the Tao Te Ching:

…the sage acts by doing nothing,
Teaches without speaking,
Attends all things without making claim on them,
Works for them without making them dependent,
Demands no honor for her deed.
Because she demands no honor,
She will never be dishonored.

How we perpetuate a myth that keeps so many of us poor, overwhelmed, depressed, and alone.

A few years ago, I was a member of a leadership development group in the not-so-prosperous post-industrial Midwestern town where I live. Every other Friday, the group — made up of mid-level management people at local firms — would get together at a different location to learn about the local economy. We learned about business development in the area, about leadership qualities, education, non-profits, and civic involvement.

On one occasion, we visited a food bank that serves about 15 counties in the area — meaning somewhere over 1 million people. The person representing the food bank revealed to us something that I found stunning and counter-intuitive. He said that where the food bank falls short is not where most people think it does.

The food bank — like most other food banks around the country — has plenty of food — plenty. In fact, each year, they throw away tons (literally, tons) of food that goes unclaimed. They also have plenty of volunteers to help process the food — during most times of the year. In short, supply — be it food or labor power — is not the most pressing issue. The most pressing issue is demand.

The real problem the food bank faces, he said, is that tens of thousands of people in poverty are not using the food bank. That’s right. The most salient problem for the food bank in this poor metropolitan area is that a good portion of the poor population is not taking the free food. For whatever reason, people are just not showing up to the pantries to get food. They don’t come out to get food from the food trucks that the pantries support regularly. They simply choose not to ask for help.

Why is that? Why would so many people who could obtain free food, and who would unquestionably benefit from doing so, just not do it — and either go hungry or pay for food instead?

Sure, some of it can be attributed to laziness. That explanation can be deployed to explain some portion of pretty much any problem. But using laziness to explain the root cause of a problem is itself lazy and also irresponsible. So what else is there that makes people who need food and have little or no money, choose not to take it?

We Suffer From an Affliction

I don’t blame most of those people for not reaching out for free food. I understand. Though I’ve never had to go hungry myself, I understand their affliction because I too suffer from it. Millions of people of all socioeconomic backgrounds suffer from the affliction. It’s an affliction that can ruin relationships, destroy careers, and cripple communities.

This affliction is the refusal to ask for help.

The affliction is a widespread cultural phenomenon that preys upon millions of people — both rich and poor, young and old, working and unemployed. It has deep roots, and it keeps people who could otherwise be successful from realizing their potential. But why does this affliction persist? Why is it so damned hard to ask for help — especially when help is available?

Part of the problem comes form our national discourse here in the U.S. No matter how liberal we become socially, there remains an undercurrent of rugged individualism. It began as the 20th century began — with the “rags to riches” stories of Horatio Alger. Even as the depression hit in the 1930s, people were urged to “pick themselves up by the bootstraps” and get out of abject poverty by their own willpower and gumption.

These days, the message we receive is the same, but the mode of delivery is different. We continue to be sold Algeresque stories, but instead of scrappy young boys from the slums, we get college dropouts who built computers and apps in their parents’ garages. We are presented with wondrous stories of entrepreneurs starting and selling companies within a year or two for billions of dollars. To compound that, we are also bombarded by articles that urge us to adopt certain habits, read certain books, or take certain courses — the implication being that we too can learn to rise like those revered few have risen— alone.

It’s all very beautiful and inspiring. But it’s a beautiful, inspiring lie.

I hope we’re not all too naive to realize that this is just ideology repeating itself. None of these new paragons of success did it on their own — nobody ever has. Not Jobs, not Bezos, not Zuckerberg, not Musk. They all had help — tons of it.

No one who has succeeded at anything ever did it without asking for and receiving, help. This is how it is, and how it always has been. But somehow we continue to pass through the centuries and conveniently forget it. That has to change. It only benefits the select few who already have success, fame, wealth, and influence. It buries the rest of us in self-sustained social obstacles and baseless self-doubt. The more the public at large upholds a stigma against those who ask for help, the more we’ll repeat the cycle of terribly large numbers living and dying in poverty, living without realizing their potential — wasting away.

How Do We Change This?

So I ask you, if you’re still reading: how can I help you? How can you help me? How can we help each other? How can we convince everyone that giving and receiving help is a good thing?

Charity is not a bad word, it is help for those who don’t have enough to repay. That’s it. Forget the Protestant Work Ethic. This is the 21st century, and we should be okay providing for those who are in trouble — whether we get anything back or not. And it’s not an issue of political ideology.

We have shown — whether we’re left or right-leaning, that we are mostly okay throwing billions of dollars at companies that never make any money, and fall away into obscurity. Why then should we act so stingy when it comes to providing housing, food, health care, and education to people. I doubt that the mythical “welfare queens” spent anywhere near as much money as the various startups that have failed spectacularly in the VC funding era.

We’re making progress on a range of issues relating to society and professional development. But I don’t see that same progress in making it okay to ask for and acknowledge help. The attitude of stingy judgmentalism remains as strong as ever — even as those who themselves judge receive help regularly. In turn, those who need help are shamed into not asking for it. We can’t be afraid to ask for help, but more importantly, we can’t continue to feed into the stigma associated with asking for it.

Here’s the kicker, though: simply helping others is not going to fix this. In fact, depending on the context, it may make things worse. What needs to happen is a combination of two things:

• people in influential positions, who are recognized as successful, need to emphasize the help they had to get there
• people who help others, need to drive home the point to those they’re helping that the transaction taking place does not indicate the receiver’s lack of strength or ability — it’s simply help, which we all have gotten from time to time

If you’re a manager, you can do these things today, with the people you manage. If you’re a community leader, you can do this today by publicly addressing the points above. If you’re a parent, you can talk to your children about all the help you needed and received, and ensure your kids know that it is part of your job to provide that to them.

If you think you didn’t really receive help, and you did it on your own — you’re part of the problem. What you can do is sit down, spend 10 minutes listing your accomplishments (the ones you think you did on your own), and ensure that there was no one who took a chance on you, listened to your pitch, gave you the benefit of the doubt, or cleared the way at all for you. Because if there was — guess what? You got help!

If we can prioritize those things, perhaps we can change our attitude about giving and receiving help. Perhaps the help we do give can become more effective. It’s a crazy idea, sure. But it might just be crazy enough to work.

credit: Cassandra Hamer

A simple, ancient practice that you can do anywhere, anytime, and get back the control you need to make better decisions.

We humans are living in a hopeless time-warp. Our minds have a serious aversion to existing in the present moment. We may be sitting at dinner with our family, but our mind keeps jumping forward to that meeting we have at the office tomorrow, or to last week, when we had that big fight with our significant other. We live a split existence; our body is in the present moment, but our mind is either in the past or future.

And this split existence is at the root of some of the most difficult and nagging problems we have. One of those problems is the problem of self-control. When our bodies are in the present moment and our minds are fixed on some other time, we become out of touch with our bodies. When we become out of touch with our bodies, we give up the reins of control over them.

As we spend more time away from our bodies — so to speak — that distance between mind and body multiplies. We lose the opportunity for a deep knowledge of what our bodies are telling us, and how our mind and body relate to one another. When we lose that, we can feel anxiety, stress, hopelessness, and various other emotions that all share the common theme of weakened control over how we behave.

It tends to manifest in the same ways: you’re distracted and stressed; you have a lot to do, and a lot on your mind, so you venture over to the pantry and open the pack of cookies. Before you know it, you’ve eaten 3 of them. But you barely even feel satisfied. You walk into a meeting at work, thinking of all of the things that you need to do today, tomorrow, for the rest of the week. You drift in and out of paying attention during the meeting. You shift and squirm uncomfortably in your seat. Before you know it, the meeting is over, and you don’t even remember what happened in it. You feel more stressed, and it’s not even time for lunch yet.

A Way Forward

But there is something that can help. In the Buddhist tradition, they call it anapanasati, which roughly translates to “awareness of breath”. It may sound simple — almost too simple to do much of anything, but that’s kind of the point. Some of the most effective modes of change are so simple and obvious that they continue to be overlooked, until they’re not.

In a wonderful essay on the topic of anapanasati, Ajahn Sumedo says of the practice:

The rhythm of our normal breathing is not interesting or compelling, it is tranquilizing, and most beings aren’t used to tranquility. Most people like the idea of peace, but find the actual experience of it disappointing or frustrating.
…
The gentle rhythm of the breath, being slower than the rhythm of thought, takes us to tranquility; we begin to stop thinking.

It’s true, most of us are not used to tranquility, to peace. We may think we are, but most of us think that peace and tranquility are the same as a state of pleasure — being happy or feeling really good. But when most of us think of those feelings, they involve stimulation, activity (especially mental activity), and excitement. But peace and tranquility are not happiness or pleasure. They are feelings of quiet and stillness. They are the mental equivalent of a calm and glassy lake on a mild morning without wind.

And that is the point, the stillness of a mind concentrating on that fundamental bodily activity of breathing is the stillness that builds connection between mind and body. That connection between mind and body is the bridge to a connection between a person and the present moment.

When you can be fully in the present moment, connected — by mind and body — you can more effectively assert yourself. You can say “no” to tempting sugary treats. You can say “no” to zoning out and being preoccupied. And when that happens — when you’re not split between preoccupation with the past or future, and being conscious of the present — you will leave behind that feeling that accompanies missing moments of your day. You will have fully experienced the minutes and hours as they unfolded. No more “where has the day gone?” moments of anxiety.

More Than Just Breathing

The practice of anapanasati is not simply about attention to breath. It may begin that way, and any time you find yourself losing control, that is the touchstone: just collapse your attention into your breath.

But anapanasati evolves into the practice of cultivating a mindset — a way of approaching your own mind — a better and more compassionate way. Sumedo, again, elaborates:

We are training the mind like a good mother trains her child. A little child doesn’t know what it is doing, it just wanders off; and if the mother gets angry with it and spanks and beats it, the child becomes terrified and neurotic. A good mother will just leave the child, keeping an eye on it, and if it wanders she will bring it back. Having that kind of patience, we’re not trying to bash away at ourselves, hating ourselves, hating our breath, hating everybody, getting upset because we can’t get tranquil with anapanasati
…
In this way we’re not trying to become perfect all at once. We don’t have to do everything just right according to some idea of how it should be, but we work with the problems that are there. If we have a scattered mind, then it’s wisdom to recognize the mind that goes all over the place — that is insight. To think that we shouldn’t be that way, to hate ourselves or feel discouraged because that is the way we happen to be — that is ignorance.

Simple Steps

Now you have a basic understanding of what this practice is and what it can do for you. Now for the how. Here’s a list of simple steps to help deploy the practice of anapanasati, in order to get the most out of it.

1. Close your eyes and inhale deliberately by using your diaphragm and belly. Then exhale at first sharply, but gradually easing.
2. Open your eyes and allow your breath to happen without you directing it.
3. Feel each inhalation and exhalation. A helpful way to start doing this is to imagine your stomach as a balloon, expanding and contracting as you breathe in and out.
4. As you experience other thoughts pop into your head, simply note them with a smile (either an actual smile or a mental smile) — the same kind of smile that you’d used to acknowledge an innocent child in public. Be careful not to get angry or anxious about thoughts “intruding”. Just let them be.
5. Gently bring your focus back to your breathing, leaving alone any thoughts that have popped into your head. It’s helpful to imagine yourself allowing your intrusive thoughts to stay with you, but as an audience, watching you focus on your breathing, peacefully — as if to say “here’s how to do it.” It sounds weird, but it works.

Do this regularly throughout the day, as you remember to do it. It’s especially helpful right before you begin eating a meal, or as you wash your hands after having gone to the bathroom. Even practicing for 30 seconds in between meetings or at a stoplight in your car can be extremely effective. It serves to punctuate your day with the kind of presence and receptiveness that can help you feel more like you have experienced the day, instead of another hectic day having gotten away from you.

As you practice anapanasati more and more during your normal days, you should notice a feeling of a bit more control over your actions. You’ll be less likely to find yourself with a mouthful of cake that you don’t quite remember putting there, and more likely to find yourself a bit less stressed out.

Image Credit: Samuel Wong

The original 12 step program was tailor-made for those suffering from addiction. But the general lessons behind them are relevant for nearly everyone.

Years ago, I was close with a handful of people in the recovery community — people attempting to put their lives back together after they were impacted by drug and alcohol abuse. It caused me to take a look at the methods that organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous, and its related organizations, use to help people repair damage to their lives and attempt to stop using substances that for so long were part of their everyday lives.

At the basis of recovering from addiction is the phenomenon known as the 12 steps of recovery. The steps are meant to address the spiritual basis of a problem that has always proven to be so very difficult to address through science and medicine. The inventors of the 12 steps — Dr. Bob Smith and Bill Wilson — intended to fight the crippling problem of addiction from its ground zero: the individual’s spirit.

But the spirits of those afflicted with alcohol and drug addition are not the only ones in need of help through this life. We all need help. And this help can come in the form of more general and widely applicable 12 steps. That’s what I offer below: 12 steps for the rest of us. 12 principles to follow in order to simply become better than you were yesterday — and eventually become the best you that you can be.

1. Admit that you are powerless.

You’re powerless over so much, and the failure to recognize that you are powerless is at the root of so many of life’s most robust and devastating anxieties. In fact there is hardly a worse feeling than when something goes terribly badly, and you feel that you could have controlled the outcome.

But the truth is, there are many things that you are — for the most part — powerless over. The weather, the actions of others, gravity, traffic. You name it, and you can’t control it; at most, you can merely contribute — and not all that much. Simply accept that.

But don’t confuse quantity with quality. While there may be few things that you can control, those few things can make all the difference in your life, and the lives of those around you. Focus on your behavior, your attitude, and the choices you make daily, and excercise your control over them to the best effect you can. However, accept that once you’ve done that, you’re effectively tossing your actions and choices up into the spinning vortex of everyone else’s choices and actions — over which you have no control.

That should help you approach things in a more balanced way, and be a lot less stressed as a result.

2. Believe that only something greater than yourself can help you become better than you are.

Steve Wozniak — co-founder of Apple, and legendary figure in computing — once summed up the motivating factor in his journey by saying:

“I didn’t do any of this for the money, I did it because I wanted to bring good computers to the world.”

If you are self-centered, self-serving, and self-involved, the odds of actually becoming a better person are pretty low. Rather, devoting yourself to service — serving someone or something bigger than just your own desires — not only will the rewards be greater, but the motivation will be more persistent.

3. Make a decision to turn your will over to something greater than yourself.

Make the decision that you are no longer operating in each moment to just fulfill your momentary desires — to simply follow your will. Make the decision that your will is now taking a backseat to a greater purpose. Make that decision today. Make it tomorrow when you wake up and don’t feel like following through. Make it each moment when you feel like doing something else.

4. Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself.

What do you regret? What do you wish was different? How have you fallen short, or how do you continue to fall short? Get that stuff down on paper, so it’s there for you to make your peace with. This is how you see yourself, so either work to accept it, or work to change it.

5. Admit to your shortcomings

Write in a journal — a daily one if you can. Work through the things you feel badly about, and label the emotions you feel. Then open up about them to others. Join a forum online, talk with a mentor, see a counselor, or confide in your partner or good friend. Once you have voiced these things to someone else, you can begin to benefit from having a perspective other than your own. You will also feel much better having those things out in the open.

6 & 7. Prepare for Progress

The days come and go at the same rate they always have, and that will continue, no matter what you do or don’t do. If you’re going to leverage those days for effective change, you have to have a system in place to ensure that whatever greater thing or purpose you’re submitting yourself to — you can work toward it.

Here, things like an organizational system, a morning routine, a coach or mentoring meeting, and other things that put you in a better position to do better things by default. Left to our own devices, we human animals tend toward momentary pleasures, comfort, and convenience. The only way to overcome that inclination is by submitting to a principled way of living. That can only be done if you make the appropriate preparations.

8 & 9. Get right with the people of your life

Until the robots and algorithms start running the world, anything worth doing ultimately relies upon people. That goes for both your personal life and your professional one. The more there are unresolved or unspoken issues between you and others, the more friction there is keeping you from achieving what you and others set out to do. So get right with the people you live, love, and work with.

The process isn’t too difficult. Start with an admission of some way that you’ve messed up, and apologize for it. Then ask how you can make things right, or talk about how you’re working on whatever trait caused you to mess up. Have a conversation where you ask someone else about how they’re doing — specifically how they’re feeling. Establish a rapport, build a reputation as someone straightforward, sincere, and understanding. Guard that reputation with your life.

10. Keep track of what you’re doing well, and what you’re not, and promptly focus on the latter

If you don’t write down your goals, dreams, commitments, and other important objectives, your odds of meeting them decreases drastically. Even the act of recording those things gives you the feeling of greater control over your own destiny. Don’t believe me? Try it.

At some regular interval, it never hurts to just write about what you’re doing well, and what you’re not. Then think about how to fix the things you don’t like, deprioritize things that don’t concern you any more, and plan to improve. So many of us are brought up to believe that somehow becoming a good person should be automatic, but that’s absurd. Being a good person, and improving, is real work. And any work worth doing is worth planning out. Planning involves thinking, and the best way to think about something is to write about it.

I want to clarify here: “focus” doesn’t mean ruminate. When you slip, see if you can get back up, or ask for help. The sooner you do it, the more people will be willing to help you, and the better you’ll feel.

11. Set aside time to collect, reflect, and project.

Life comes at you pretty quickly, and if you’re not careful, it can leave you just as quickly. Taking a set period of time — an hour is best — each week to step away from everything, quiet the mind, and reflect, will repay you in exponential dividends.

This is why an hour on Sunday for Christians has been such a boon. It’s a fringe benefit that the hour of worship in a totally different environment also helps to re-calibrate the mind from a week of bombardment, and center it on values and relationships (even if it’s only the relationship between a person and themselves).

Take the time regularly to withdraw from the commotion of work, and think about things. Collect your thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Reflect on what they mean. Project an image of what you’d like the future to be like, and work toward that image. Allow it to change each week, as your life in general changes. Make that a habit.

12. Use what you’ve learned to help others

The worst form of greed is the hoarding of knowledge. Those who learn but don’t bother to share or teach are leeches. Don’t be a leech. Don’t simply accumulate knowledge without bothering to share it with others, and help them do the same. It’s not even that difficult to do. It’s actually part of the learning process. The period of time during which I learned the most was the 5 years when I was teaching others. The times at my day job when I learn the most are when I’m trying to train or help others. The best and most self-educating writing I do is when I am attempting to provide information and insight to others.

Question, learn, share, repeat — ad infinitum.

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credit: Giuseppe Milo

Especially when it’s supposedly about consent

Though I have political viewpoints, I tend to restrain myself from writing about them online. And one may think that entering into the discussion about the #metoo movement is political — but it’s not.

There is nothing political about sexual transgressions. It is a moral issue — where morality requires that you respect the sexual boundaries of your fellow humans, and those boundaries involve whether or not they want to have sex with you.

This piece of writing started off as a comment on one of the many stories flooding the internet about Aziz Ansari’s immoral sexual conduct. As I was writing it, it occurred to me that I have a few thoughts about sexual morality that I haven’t seen clearly laid out in what I’ve read thus far within the deluge of editorials about sexual assault, harassment, and other terrible goings on. Being a writer by nature, I decided to write out said ideas. My hope is that they give even a few people (let’s face it, mostly heterosexual men) pause, so that they may reflect on their response to the public discussion about sex and consent.

I have seen, in the wake of stories like the one about Ansari, a reaction from many men of throwing their hands up — being unsure what they are supposed to do in order to get clear consent from a woman to sex. The claim is that it’s just a sexual minefield out there, and that men are not mind readers — that women need to be clearer about saying “no, I don’t consent to this sex you’re trying to have with me.” But that’s kind of an odd thing to say, isn’t it? It’s odd because it presupposes a very transactional view of sex. Almost like having sex is a business deal, a sale that men are closing as they take their pants off in the presence of a lady who is also perhaps disrobing.

Is that where we are as people? Is sex just a transaction? Is it a deal devoid of a feeling of collaboration and emotional safety?

Surely, some people — as articles on millennial sexual habits tell us — prefer to keep the long-term attachments out of sex. They prefer casual sex. But that doesn’t change anything, really. It seems that even if you don’t plan on seeing the other person after having sex with them, the act of having sex still demands a connection while you’re with them — the kind of connection that wouldn’t allow you to be oblivious to the other person’s feelings.

If you are being intimate with someone — and sex is about as intimate as it gets — you should be connected to them in that moment in such a way that you can detect how they’re feeling about the encounter. You should be able to feel — emotionally — whether or not they want to do this.

To me, that’s the kicker right there. It’s not even really about consent. It’s about connection. It’s about caring enough to be observant, and pausing when you observe reluctance or that connection beginning to fade.

If you’re having sex with someone, you should — at least at that moment — be connecting with them. I mean, you’re asking this person to open up their body’s most intimate parts to your touch, but you don’t want to bother to be receptive to their intimate feelings? That’s just disrespectful, and unfair.

And for crying out loud, err on the side of caution! There’s no harm whatsoever in pausing for a second when you’re not sure of the vibe and saying simply “hey, are you okay? Let’s slow our roll a bit here.” The worst case is that you look a bit sappy. The worst case with going the other way is that you literally violate someone.

To me, the price of admission for a sexual encounter is that you muster up enough care for the other person that you pay attention to their emotions and be sensitive to them. 99% of the time, when you do that, it will be laughably easy to detect if the other person would rather not be doing it. If anyone — men or women — are claiming that somehow, such a thing is too much to ask, I feel genuinely sad for the state of humanity.

On the Perfection of Imperfection, Graceful Humility, and the Understated Benefits of Acceptance

When I was growing up, I would regularly go to my friend Paul’s house. His bedroom was down in the basement, but in order to get there, you had to walk through a little hallway with an old trunk sitting there — which doubled as a bench where you could take your shoes off. As I took this trip more and more times, I came to look forward to seeing that trunk.

It was old canvas trunk with a wood frame. It had discolorations, scuff marks, and areas where the canvas was a bit tattered and the wood chipped. Not long ago, I happened upon what looked like a brand new version of that same trunk — with fresh, bright canvas and new, polished and unblemished wood frame. The brass was bright yellow and shiny, each rivet plainly visible. It was striking. But it couldn’t hold a candle to that old trunk in Paul’s house.There was something about that old trunk, something that made it exponentially more pleasing to behold than a shiny new trunk.

This isn’t an anomaly. The “worn-in” aesthetic has been finding its way into various arenas over the past few decades. In the late 90s/early 2000s it was the “distressed” clothing movement. As the 2010s came around, antiques and repurposed building materials became the go-to in many interior designers’ repertoires. Things that are old and look it give us a different kind of feeling — one that shiny new things just can’t replicate.

But what’s behind this? Well, it’s not just marketing, and though it seems trendy, the concept itself is not going away. In fact, the concept has less to do with clothing and design, and more to do with a different approach to living — one that focuses on simplicity, imperfection, and relaxation. This approach is called wabi-sabi.

And the thing about Wabi-Sabi is that it isn’t just an aesthetic. In fact, the aesthetic part of it is just a superficial representation of something deeper and more meaningful — something that, when embraced, can guide us toward a simpler and more fulfilling way of living.

What is Wabi-Sabi?

The term Wabi-Sabi consists of two concepts combined into one. Each word has its own rich meaning, but they come together to form a unique concept that explains the warmth that radiates from certain things (or people) that embody it.

Wabi
Wabi is a term that means something like “peace or quiet fulfillment with intentional simplicity”. At one time, it was used to describe the monks of Japan in the 14th century. They had simple robes, often worn and a bit tattered. They lived in simple housing, did their rituals with little adornment and pageantry, and thus exemplified a mode of existence that was respected for its simplicity and tranquility.

Wabi has come to be associated with a kind of minimalism and humility. People are often described as wabi when they exemplify a deep understanding of and comfort with who they are, and don’t crave or long to be anything else.

Sabi
Sabi (which conveniently rhymes with its partner word) connotes the graceful and quiet dignity of something (or someone) persisting through time. It mostly applies to objects, but it can easily be extended to a person as well. It’s the green oxidation on the Statue of Liberty, the whiskering on a pair of old jeans, the dark seasoning on a cast-iron skillet.

Sabi has as its root an embrace of the buddhist teachings about impermanence, and an acceptance of the decoration of time and existence. And that’s the thing about sabi: it can’t be built-in to something or fabricated; it must be earned over time.

“Wabi-Sabi”
Bringing the terms together, wabi-sabi is about a simple, humble, and gracious existence — fully understanding and embracing both yourself and the undeniable truth of impermanence. It finds representation in anything that accepts the fortunes or misfortunes of time, and bears them all with unfaltering dignity and grace.

In objects, you can see it in the presence of imperfections and evidence of use and wear. The objects have clearly been used, cared for, and kept. They could never be mistaken for new, but that’s precisely the point. They have gone through unique use cases, and are thus now unique — and distinguishable from others like them, produced long ago.

In people, you can see it in simple jeans and an old t-shirt, scuffed old shoes, salt-and-pepper hair groomed neatly, but not obsessively, and an understated, but undeniably genuine smile. There is an understated grace and wealth of experience, a comfort, and lack of aggressive desire and ambition (not a total lack of ambition, just that aggressive kind of ambition — the one that usually manifests in a bone-crunching handshake).

Reading all this, you might be confused and think that wabi-sabi would be permissive of neglect, and a wistful lack of care. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, wabi-sabi is all about care and appreciation. Things that show the patina of time are not the same as things that show a lack of care and upkeep. Neglect of things — whether material or otherwise — shows itself in particular ways. Those ways are different than how the simple wear from time shows itself. Appreciation also shows itself in important ways, and appreciation is a big part of what wabi-sabi is all about.

How Can Wabi-Sabi Change Your Life for the Better?

We each want to be the best version of ourself that we can be. That’s the point of reading anything like this piece of writing. But there seem to be infinite different routes promising to get there.

To me, wabi-sabi is a way of getting back to basics. Consider it like minimalism for those who are tired of hearing about minimalism. It’s not an obsession with getting rid of things, taking pictures of your daily carry or tiny house. It’s not an ostentatious series of Instagram posts showing your nearly empty desk. It’s the antithesis of all that.

Embracing wabi-sabi is as easy (or as difficult) as understanding and accepting yourself — imperfections and all. It’s about being compassionate with yourself as you are, and building on whatever that is — not feverishly trying to rebuild yourself in order to pose as something else entirely.

If this sounds a bit vague, it’s because it is. Perhaps a quote from a fantastic piece at the Utne Reader can say it better than my own words:

Bringing wabi-sabi into your life doesn’t require money, training, or special skills. It takes a mind quiet enough to appreciate muted beauty, courage not to fear bareness, willingness to accept things as they are — without ornamentation. It depends on the ability to slow down, to shift the balance from doing to being, to appreciating rather than perfecting.

And there it is. Quiet your mind, understand, accept, and appreciate. That is as simple as it gets. Unfortunately, it can (and often does) take a lifetime to cultivate.

Appreciation is a lost art. It’s like gratitude, but much richer and more powerful. It requires a deeper understanding — the kind that comes through experience, work, and use. The more we can become appreciative of the things, people, and experiences that weave the tapestry of our lives, the better those lives will be, and the better we will be.

So go forth and be both wabi and sabi.

credit: Maxime Le Conte des Floris

How the “Four Causes” of an ancient philosopher can be used as an exercise to help you live with more purpose and focus.

We all get stuck from time to time. We all fall into a rut, where it seems like we can’t move forward and make progress — at least not in the way we’d like to. While tips and tricks abound for trying to get around the problem and keep moving, any of them are going to be short-lived if they don’t address the root cause of most procrastination and stagnation: a disconnect from who you are.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle dealt extensively with understanding the essences of things — whether people, animals, plants, or stones. He defined 4 different ways to answer the question of what makes something what it is. They are:

• The Material Cause
• The Formal Cause
• The Efficient Cause
• The Final Cause

These 4 causes are extremely valuable as a way to get a better understanding of yourself — who you are, and where you are going. And when you remember who you are, you can get going where you’re going. You can overcome the stagnation, and drive forward.

The Material Cause

Aristotle defined the material cause of a thing as the physical stuff that made it up. For a human, it’s flesh and blood, but if we stretch the concept a bit, its also your thoughts and feelings — the mental building blocks of a person. For our purposes, that’s what is most important to get in touch with. The way to get a grasp on the material you is through introspection and simple self-awareness.

Simply being aware of what is on your mind right now is so valuable, and yet so overlooked. At any moment, you have way more on your mind than you are initially aware of. And all that stuff on your mind has weight to it — it impacts your mood and your energy. It also takes up space. It keeps other thoughts and feelings out of your mind, or relegates them to the background, when perhaps they should be in the foreground — pushing your activity in a positive direction.

Getting to know the material causes of yourself is as easy as journaling. Simply writing down the things that come to your mind, and doing a bit of exploration about them on paper can clear up that space in your mind, and take a weight off of you. With that done, it becomes easier to do more constructive things.

The Formal Causes

For Aristotle, the formal cause of a thing is what makes it the particular kind of thing that it is. Another way to put this, and a way that some medieval philosophers took it, is that the formal cause captures the essence of something.

For us, it’s first and foremost about what makes us human, but if we push it further, we can ask what type of person I am. Am I a writer? Well, what is it that makes me a writer? What makes anyone a writer? To me, it seems that what makes someone a writer is that they think and write above all else. Activities and thoughts flow into words on the page, into paragraphs, and into essays of wisdom worth sharing. But for each of us, there is a thing that we are above all else, and at times, we lose touch with what kinds of thoughts and activities constitute being that thing.

In so many cases, we procrastinate by doing something other than what our thing is. Asking the question of what makes you a writer, an artist, a leader, a founder, etc., can quickly get your thoughts and actions aligned once again with that formal cause of whatever it is that you are — and back on the path you’d like to be walking.

The Efficient Cause

The simplest way to understand the situation you’re in is to ask yourself what led you there. Trace the events back to a tipping point. Trace your thoughts back to what event or experience set them off. This is the efficient cause — the concrete events that put things where they are now. Part of journaling should be reflecting on these events, and understanding how they fit in the chain of events in your day, week, month, year, and life.

George Santayana once said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And it’s not just remembering the past, but also being willing to take a hard look at it now, when you may be ashamed of it or made uncomfortable by it. We cannot know who we are unless we fully come to grips with where we have been and what we have done. Without doing that, any progress we make is borrowed, and the debt will be due before we know it.

The Final Cause

The final cause of a thing is its purpose — it is the why to end all whys. For us, it is the one thing that we are most often unclear about, and that is what most contributes to periods of stagnation and frustration. But we cannot beat ourselves up about forgetting our purpose, because purpose is a complex thing, and I believe that it goes through changes.

Though we can use the term “purpose” in the singular form, purpose is rarely felt as a singular force. There are multiple pulls and pushes on us at any given time — we are different people to each person in our lives. But that should not deter us from defining ourselves and our work in a singular fashion. The difference is in the nature of those forces, which are either a pull or a push.

The various things we are to others — a parent, a friend, a sibling, a partner, etc. — are pulls. Though we can genuinely come to define ourselves through the lens of being those things, they are dependent on the demands of others, and so not wholly ours, and they don’t come from within. This is not to say that those pulls are not worth devoting time and attention to — they surely are. But they are incomplete without an examination of the final cause that comes from within you — regardless of the demands and needs of others.

The final cause for you is a push — and it comes from within. It is what you are to become, and what — in your best moments — you care most about. It may express itself in what you do with and for others, but it comes from within, and through inward energy it is sustained. You may be a mother or father as an expression of your final cause, but your true inward push is caring, serving, and teaching. Whoever you happen to care for, serve, or teach is simply happenstance.

When we lose touch with our final cause, we can feel lost. Many of us can go through most of life without understanding what it is — without a clear knowledge of what we’re driving toward.

When we lose touch with what makes us who we are, we lose direction and energy. That’s why things like meditation and journaling are so vital to living well. They help us get in touch with the 4 causes that make us who we are. When we understand why we are, we can know who we are, and we can do the daunting work of being that person.

Existence is a given. You exist, and you are what you are. But only when you really knuckle down can you take that given existence and make it into a life. Only by understanding who you are, and who you need to be, can you do the rewarding work of living a life.

photo: Darko Popovic

What an Old Danish Philosopher Can Teach Us About Cultivating a Richer Existence

There are many ways to conceive of this huge block of time and movement that we call “life”. But one of the big problems with capturing what it’s all about is reconciling the two conceptions of life: the inner one and the outer one.

What I mean is that each of us lives both internally and externally. There is a way that our life seems to those looking at it from outside, and a way that things look and feel to us from the inside. The difference between the two is a difference of lived experience vs. observed experience. It’s the difference between subjective and objective — between science and (for lack of a better word) spirit.

In the 19th century, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard identified 3 possible stages that a person can move through in their lifetime: the aesthetic stage, the ethical stage, and the religious stage. Most people only go through the first step, and mostly through the second step (though many fall short even of that one).

Kierkegaard — or at least a statue of him

Aesthetic Stage

The main motivation in this stage is pleasure. You could think of this stage as basically a from of psychological hedonism (i.e., if it feels good, it is good). In this stage, people are after pleasure, specifically the pleasure of experiencing beauty.

This is the fervor of one’s twenties — wrapped up in music, movies, and experiencing the wonder of life. The objective of each day — and life in general seems to be to collect as much experience of beauty and pleasure as possible.

I spent a long time in this stage — trying to gather all of the excitement and grandiose experience that I could. I stayed up late, shirked responsibilities, and lived fast. My thought process was entirely focused on the present, and entirely focused on myself. But I wasn’t focused on enrichment (i.e., making myself better). I was focused on personal gain. And those are two different things.

Enrichment involves becoming a better person. Gain involves just getting more — more stuff, more experiences — but not necessarily becoming any better for it. I involved precious few others in my life. I was not there for anyone, and as a result, nobody was really there for me. That’s the aesthetic stage, and it’s a lonely and constantly disappointing existence.

Ethical Stage

In the Ethical Stage, a person has risen above her aesthetically focused mode of operation, and has begun to follow the rules and laws of her society. Inclinations give way to obligations. We feel responsibilities toward others — both particular others and others in general. We have kids, pets, jobs and coworkers, neighbors, mature friends.

Our relationships in this stage are no longer understood as transitory — whereas in college or our late adolescence, they were. There are more complex expectations, desires, and commitments in place. We also tend to understand who we are in terms of those commitments.

In many ways, coming into the ethical stage is an act of throwing ourselves down in subservience — but in a positive and constructive way. Whereas we were once merely individuals, out for our own gain and enrichment, we have now recognized principles worth submitting to. Now we operate based on something other than our fleeting desires and appetites; we try to do the right thing and the rational thing.

I entered this stage when I married and had children. It was a process. I slowly shed my concept of who I was in terms of what I had, or what I had done, and began to see myself as someone there for others — as a partner and a father. I also began my career, and I began to see myself as a colleague and friend to those with whom I work. My objectives became much less about what I could gain (whether material thing or experience), and more about what I could do to be a better person for others.

That is the Ethical Stage — you realize yourself as intimately tied to others and society, and enrich those ties. It is where many of us exist as adults. But it is not the end of the stages of existence.

“Religious” Stage

For Kierkegaard, the highest stage of life that humans can hope to be is what he calls the “Religious” Stage. Now, Kierkegaard was a Christian — that’s no secret. But the “religious” stage does not essentially involve any particular deity or belief system. It’s not about that. Rather, it’s about progressing past the previous two stages in life — and onto something profound and pulsating.

The move from the Aesthetic Stage to the Ethical Stage is about moving away from particular things (possessions, experiences, people) and toward general things (principles, obligations, order & progress). But after some time, that can begin to feel routine. It can feel as if there is no higher purpose in it, other than to continue on doing the right thing — fulfilling obligations.

This final stage involves something more: a leap of faith. For Kierkegaard, this meant taking the leap of faith in a deity. But the characteristics of the leap can be (and I think should be) generalized to other things. The leap of faith involves embracing a belief in something that you may not be able to prove to others. It involves the kind of faith or (to use a less loaded term) confidence that comes from an internal passion and excitement. But it is the kind of belief that moves you because it is utterly individual and unique. Kierkegaard describes the feeling as “simultaneously to be out on 70,000 fathoms of water and yet be joyful.” It’s a kind of awesome fear and excitement, all wrapped up into one.

We read about this leap all of the time — in the form of those who have taken it more publicly. Visionaries and thought leaders who press toward the unknown future with a seemingly unmatched clarity. But not those in it for the financial gain or the glory — those who are in their chosen pursuit for its own sake. In other words, no passion and purpose heartfelt on an individual level, the reason it’s not about the individual, but rather the art, science, or mission being pursued. In short, it is about giving ourselves over to something higher than just us or just our role in society.

The Question For You

So which stage do you find yourself in? What motivates you? Is there a purpose in view — one that isn’t about personal gain or just meeting obligations? Where does your leap happen? Are you willing to take it?

Photo by Paul S Barlow

Spiritual traditions are big on fables. One of my favorites comes from the Sallatha Sutta in the Buddhist tradition.

When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two arrows; in the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental.

I find myself easily frustrated these days, and it has everything to do with making myself suffer because I’m suffering. I inadvertently double down on my suffering.

This happens to all of us: we get hit with arrows every day — arrows of disappointment, arrows of loss and sorrow, arrows of dissatisfaction. Then we feel bad about feeling bad, and we shoot ourselves with a second arrow. We feel bad, then we feel worse. We spiral, and exhaust ourselves.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The Problem is Pleasure

If I am really honest with myself, most of my stress, frustration, and lashing out comes from a feeling of discomfort. But it’s not the discomfort itself, it is my bad feeling about discomfort that creates problems.

I am so obsessed with pleasure and comfort, that I cannot even handle the thought of discomfort or pain. I contort myself in myriad ways to avoid them. And that is precisely the problem. Because in my push to chase pleasure and comfort for so long, I have robbed myself of one of the most beneficial traits that anyone can have: being able to accept and work through discomfort and pain.

And I am not alone. I am surrounded by fellow pleasure seekers, who’s inclination toward satisfaction and desire for continuous pleasure are being constantly reinforce by a deluge of media and marketing efforts. We swipe left and right, we refresh, and reframe. We skip past the waiting, we circumvent moments alone and moments of silent unstimulated introspection. We inadvertently block ourselves from becoming something more resembling whole.

A Step Toward a Solution: Favor Discomfort

The more I think about all this, the more I think that rather than pursue comfort and pleasure, I should favor discomfort. What I mean by that is that when I am presented with a choice to expend the effort to pursue pleasure or to allow pain and discomfort, I should choose the latter.

And this is not to punish myself, or to go full bore into the land of ascetic self-denial. It is merely to practice at something that I am currently terrible at doing. It is exercise, but exercise for my spirit. The hope is that by becoming more, well, comfortable with discomfort, I will not feel so on edge all the time. If I don’t feel on edge all of the time, I won’t do things I’ll later regret — which I only did thinking that they’d make me feel better.

In short, by becoming okay with discomfort, I can become a better person.

Because at the end of the day, the cycle ends up being the same. You feel badly for some reason or another. So you attempt to soothe yourself with something that makes you feel pleasure. But that pleasure is short-lived. And usually, that thing that you relied on for the pleasure was actually the kind of thing that harms you long term. It sets you back in achieving a long-term goal, or it breaks a promise to someone (or to yourself), or it is just plain unethical.

So really, it is in becoming okay with discomfort that we can come to be better people, and to achieve more. And we become more comfortable with the kind of things that others wouldn’t be. So we become stronger. And on this, we can build.

Only One Arrow

Going forward, I will try to embrace discomfort. I will make due with less, and toss away the urgency to try to soothe any little feeling of desire or deficit that I have. I will most certainly be hit by arrows, but I will not shoot myself with any.

This is not “being hard on myself” — if anything, it is the opposite. Most of the “second arrows” we are hit with are the direct result of too many desires — which have become expectations. When we expect something — especially something that will give us pleasure — and we don’t get it, we inflict even more pain on ourselves.

So the best way to avoid that second arrow is to pinpoint that moment when your desires become expectations. Desire all you want, but don’t let that desire turn into an expectation. All that expectation is is more weight on you, and it adds up. You continue to put weight on yourself — expecting too much from yourself and others. And if anything, that’s being hard on yourself. Learning to expect less — and even desire a bit less — is actually going easier on yourself. But that’s the weird thing: it’s actually really hard to go easy on yourself.

So do the hard thing, and go easier on yourself. You’ll have a much lighter spirit as a result.

Gathered during 34 years of building a life

I have been on this planet for just over 34 years now. During that time, I’ve built a modest but fulfilling life. I have many close friends and family to thank for helping me build it. I have many more people to thank who did not directly help me, but gave me advice that influenced me greatly along the way.

Here are a few pieces of wisdom that I gained from others — in no particular order.

Strive to make people comfortable

We as humans strive for comfort. It is when we feel comfortable that we will let down the defenses and the fronts, and be genuine and open. No matter what you are doing — whether building friendships or attempting to defeat rivals — making people feel comfortable is always a great strategy.

When people feel comfortable, they will be more open, more honest, more patient, more willing to try to understand others, and more likely to collaborate.

Another thing that happens when you make others feel comfortable is that you make the kind of impression that is hard to forget — an emotional one. Take it from Carl Buehner:

They may forget what you said — but they will never forget how you made them feel.

Answers are overrated

The smartest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with have tended to ask more questions than anything. Many times, I got the feeling they knew the answers, but they asked questions anyway.

One professor I had did this to an extreme. When I asked her why, she told me that 9 times out of 10, even when she knew the answer, there was something about the answer that she didn’t fully understand that asking the question helped solidify for her.

Answers themselves are rarely even answers anyway. They are rarely the whole story. Usually, answers show themselves to be merely the preamble to a deeper question, which we didn’t bother to ask before.

Everyone has reasons

People do terrible things all the time. People do shady or questionable things all the time. It is part of life. But everyone has their reasons, and to forget this is to miss an opportunity to better understand individual people and human nature as well.

I don’t mean that everyone’s reasons justify what they do — that’s just ludicrous. What I mean is that everyone had a reason that compelled them to do what they did — no matter how thoughtless it may seem to us. They may not always be aware of the reasons — but they are there. Sometimes the most valuable work we can do is to dig for them, in order to gain an understanding of them and — often times — of ourselves.

This too shall pass

Buddhists have a word in Pali: anicca — which underlies the entire buddhist philosophy. Essentially, it means “impermanence”. Nothing remains as it is forever. On top of that, most things fade away or change radically within a short period of time. This is especially true of feelings and circumstances.

However you are feeling right now, it will pass. It rarely seems like it, but it will. Some sadness may remain, but it will not be as sharp. Loneliness may loom, but each passing moment doesn’t have the same intensity as before. You may be elated at having gotten that raise, bought that house, etc. — but that will also pass.

People get tired, systems lose energy, heart rates slow back down. It is the nature of things. Remember that and take some comfort in it.

Everything in moderation — even Moderation

Yes, living in moderation is good. But moderation doesn’t really look like most people think it does. It doesn’t mean always having only 1.5 drinks, always eating less than 2,000 calories, and having only the serving sizes. It doesn’t mean getting 7 hours of sleep every night, and saving exactly 10% of your income every month.

Moderation looks more like eating that whole huge piece of cake a few times, having a bit too much to drink at that one party with friends you haven’t seen in years — where you end up staying up all night and only getting 3 hours of sleep. Sure, to a short-term viewer, that didn’t look like moderation, but moderation isn’t a short-term game. Don’t beat yourself up for going to extremes here and there. The middle is nowhere to live at each moment, but a good life is made by a middle falling into place over the course of years.

You can learn something from everyone you meet

Seriously. Everyone has traveled a different road, has a different set of experiences, different expertise, and thinks differently. Your failure to learn something from them is due only to a lack of time or a lack of trying on your part.

The more you structure your casual interactions with people around trying to learn something from them, the richer they will be. The benefits abound. You’ll learn more, connect more, and make a better impression on people.

I hope this helps. And even if it doesn’t, at least I got it all down in one place for me to look at later.

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Close your eyes for a few seconds. You don’t need to go find a quiet place, in fact the less quiet the place, the better. Now just listen. What do you hear? No, not the droning of the world around you listen deeper. What’s going on in your head? Everyone has a voice or two (or three or ninety) in their head. They’re not voices you can literally hear, rather, they are the ones to which you listen — the ones you follow the directions of — as you go about your day and decide what you are doing.

There’s the one voice that reminds you what you have to get done today. There’s the one that tells you that you’re screwing up. There’s the one that insists that you’re an impostor, and don’t deserve any of the success you’ve achieved. There’s the one that tells you that you really haven’t achieved anything. But there there is another voice — one that often isn’t loud enough to be heard over the others. I call it the quiet voice.

What I propose is that we make time to listen to that quiet voice, because it has a lot to teach us. But the lessons are difficult to learn.

Tuning into yourself

I promise, I will try to make this piece as un-self-helpy and un-fluffy as I possibly can. But there is an element of this strategy that is about getting in touch with your deeper self. You can say you don’t have time for it, and on a superficial level, you’re right; none of us do — we’ve filled our schedules to the brim. We keep filling them, too; our cups overfloweth with things to do.

But at a deeper level, we have plenty of time to get in touch with our deeper selves. We have just chosen to fill that time with other things. The tragic irony is that so many of these other things with which we have filled our time would be much less taxing, or perhaps not even choices we’d have made, if we were really in touch with our deeper selves.

The deeper self simply is that “quiet voice”. But it’s not quiet because it doesn’t have anything to say, or because it is meek. It’s quiet because it it has subsisted, and will continue to, while all the other voices we hear shriek and holler themselves to death. We hear it in those rare moments when the volume on all of the filler in our lives gets turned down. It is so rare that we hear it, and even rarer still that when we do hear it, we understand it.

What are you saying to yourself?

The quiet voice is your bare identity. It is what you are after you strip away all of the social and status-based constraints and contortions. Below your career objectives, your religious rituals, your social obligations, and your biases tell you you should be — what are you in each bare present moment? What is that thing below all of the pretense, down below all of the promises you’ve made, and all of the strings that have been attached? What is that unencumbered nugget of existence you have buried inside of you saying?!

Answering this question is crucial for tapping into real personal growth because it’s the fountain from which all of the rest of your identity flows. It’s that part of you that connects with things right now, in the moment. It’s the part that makes the rest of your identity possible because it is where all of the passion — all of the fervor — originates.

Our modern existence finds us so at odds with what this voice is asking for, and we sense that every time we are stuck, and not sure where to go, or feel so weighed down by our daily navigations of the maze.

It takes a lot to get to that place where all of the normal buzzing and whirring of the social machine is stripped away. People enlist the help of meditation, exercise, journaling, and so many other things. But those tools must always allow for focus on the goal of digging down deep, lest they be only fancy tools with no real use.

The focus needs to be on getting into that space where the quiet voice lives. Down there, you can find just a flicker of real freedom — the freedom that comes from so many possibilities, from the ignorance about the cautions adopted throughout an adult life, ignorance about the judgments of uninformed critics. I see that flicker in my young daughter’s eyes, when she picks up toys, and begins to mix them together, unlocking new possibilities — embracing new enthusiasms.

Listen to Understand

Here’s the kicker though: just because you listen to the quiet voice, doesn’t mean you have to agree with it, or follow it’s urges. No, in fact there are a great many things that the quiet voice may say that seem despicable, that you’d never want to repeat — and that’s okay.

You need to confront those terrible things you hear and feel, to make your peace with them being there, or to begin the path to changing what your quiet voice says. Either process is fertile ground for inspiring creative work. The struggle to change or the struggle to make peace can be the struggles that sow the seeds of great art. But fear — whether fear of failure, fear of judgment, or fear of finding out what’s really down there — must not be allowed to win. When that happens, that light of possibility for true creativity, truly inspired work, dims once again.

I fear that I have failed to make this writing un-self-helpy and un-fluffy, but I am okay with that. I only promised that I would try, and try I did. Had I listened to the quiet voice initially, I probably would not have made such a promise. So it goes, but I hope that at least reading through this mumbo-jumbo helped you — that is my only real aim here. If it did help you, share it with others. Sharing is caring.

source: pexels

A simple practice to boost intelligence, avoid cognitive bias, and prove your own ideas wrong

In the middle of the 20th century, philosopher and professor Karl Popper found himself mystified by the beliefs and methods of the otherwise intelligent and rational people around him.

I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appear to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirmed instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it.

Karl Popper

That last sentence should ring some alarm bells for many readers — it’s a very simple description of confirmation bias. Basically, when you gain a perspective or theory, you tend to interpret everything as confirming that idea. Whatever seems to contradict it is tossed aside or somehow contorted to fit our beliefs.

Popper saw this problem inherent in many theories — both in the physical and social sciences, and in other realms as well. After all, if we find evidence that seems to contradict our beliefs, we should be stopping to see if perhaps we need to abandon or modify our belief.

As a way to cure this ill of self-confirming theories and belief systems, he came up with what is now called falsificationism: the idea that a theory or belief system can only be scientific if it clearly lays out what specific evidence would prove it wrong.

Basically, if you’re going to claim that you know something, you have to be willing to admit that you could be wrong about it. More than that, you have to lay out what kind of evidence would prove you wrong. You have to make yourself falsifiable.

Why is falsification important?

My suggestion is that the spirit of Popper’s principle can help us become smarter and make better decisions — in both professional and personal realms. Adopting an attitude of falsifiability does a few key things:

• it helps you to avoid many cognitive biases that can hinder intellectual growth and good decision making
• it makes you a clearer thinker by forcing you to be specific about what you think you know, and what evidence you have
• it boosts your creative thinking by making you naturally more receptive to new ideas and helping you more quickly process them

Our minds tend to run headlong toward safety and comfort. This is true with regards to physical safety and comfort —but it’s also true of intellectual safety and certainty. If we feel like we know something for sure — like we have a firm grasp of it — we want to hold on to that feeling.

Because we want to hold on to that feeling, we tend to manufacture certainty by either stopping the search for new information (fearful that it might endanger our feeling of certainty) or interpreting new information in a way that keeps supporting our feeling of certainty.

Those practices stifles creative thinking, intellectual growth, and personal growth. Here’s how thinking in terms of falsification can help you avoid this trap.

Putting the falsification mindset into action

The falsifiability mindset is all about thinking through the implications of beliefs, judgments, and decisions. It’s about curbing your craving for certainty. Adopting this mindset is as easy as picking up a simple practice.

For the decision that you’re making, take out a clean sheet of paper, and draw a line down the middle.

On the left side, write at the top “What I Believe to Be True.”

On the right side, write at the top “What Would Prove Me Wrong.”

That left hand side could be anything. It could be something personal and low-stakes, like I should buy the new iPhone model or something more substantial, like global warming is the result of human industrial waste interacting with the atmosphere.

The right side is where you will have to do a bit of thinking. That’s where this practice can yield dividends. Having to understand what would prove you wrong forces you to do 3 important things:

• clarify what your actual belief is
• confronts the possibility that you could be wrong
• encourages you to tacitly commit to changing your mind under some specific conditions

An often-cited example of falsifiability: the statement that ‘all swans are white’ can be proven false by finding evidence of the existence of a single black swan. (Photo by David Cohen on Unsplash)

My personal falsification story

One of my strongest-held beliefs was that in order to be professionally fulfilled, I needed to be a professor of philosophy.

At age 30, I was ready to take the final step on that path and apply for PhD programs. I also found myself with a newborn daughter, a mortgage, debt, and a full-time job.

I spent 6 months writing and preparing applications, and was accepted into 3 different programs with funding. All were far away from home. It was decision time.

My wife and I had always talked about doing this in the abstract. But now, we had a baby, a mortgage, bills, and jobs. No matter which of the 3 programs I went to, we’d have to move at least a thousand miles away.

I had been promoted twice at my 9 to 5 job. Meanwhile, the job market in academia — specifically in humanities and philosophy — was brutal. About 50% of PhD students didn’t finish their program. Of those that did, it took at least 4.5 years. Upon completion, a tenured position was as rare: about a 20% chance within the first 5 years, and almost always hundreds of miles from the school where one obtained their PhD. And the median salary for a professor of philosophy was just about what I was making at my 9-to-5 at the time.

I was aware of most of those facts. But I was so certain about my belief that as each of them came up in discussions with my wife, I did what Popper described: I manipulated my belief to dodge the gravity of the new evidence.

At one point, my wife asked, exasperated, what would make me re-think my zeal about this professional goal I had. It was a good question, and it seemed like I had never thought of it before.

So I broke out a piece of paper, put a line down the middle, and on one side, I wrote my belief:

In order to feel professionally fulfilled, I need to accept one of these offers from a PhD program, quit my job, and move my family across the country.

On the other side, I wrote: what would prove me wrong?

The simplest answer to that question was that I would be proven wrong if I could do work that made me happy — without upending my current life for a PhD program. But I was so sure there was no way that was going to happen. My wife asked me to try to prove myself wrong by looking for ways that this could happen, however crazy they may sound. This took considerable effort to do, but it was the most transformative exercise I have ever done.

I sat down with that piece of paper, and I forced myself to pursue evidence and possibilities that contradicted what I so firmly believed. How could I still be happy doing anything else but taking this opportunity I saw in front of me? Well, I could do all of the activities that attracted me to being a professor:

• thinking and writing about life’s big, interesting questions
• teaching others to do the same
• reading interesting and thought provoking stuff

Was there a way that I could do that stuff without cross-country move, the 4–5 years on grad school stipend, and the chaotic uncertainty of the academic job market?

The answer appeared to be yes.

I had recently started writing on the internet about the exact topics that I had always written about in the past. The online coaching and course-building phenomenon was already gaining traction. I could read and write about the interesting things I always enjoyed, as well as develop courses and teach others. And I could this without quitting my reliable source of income, moving my family across the country, or subjecting myself and my family to a brutal series of job hunts and inevitable cross-country relocations.

I began with a burning certainty in my belief. I challenged that belief by asking what would need to be true for it to be wrong. Once I wrote that down, I essentially committed to changing my initial belief if a certain condition was met.

By investigating what would falsify my belief, and whether those conditions might already exist, I was able to break out of the narrow mindset I had occupied for so long. By my calculations, it very likely saved me $400,000, along with saving immeasurable stress on my marriage.

How you can adopt a falsification mindset

Adopting the falsification mindset is simple. Like any exercise in thinking, it helps if you write it out, but that’s not totally necessary.

• For any belief you have, ask what it would take for you to change your mind
• Be specific about what evidence would make you change your mind
• Seek out that evidence, and be willing to change your belief if you find it

For me, this was a game changer for an important life decision. But it also works for smaller beliefs and judgments.

Just ask yourself how you could be proven wrong — about any old belief you have. Are you researching a big purchase? If so, what discovery would cause you to cancel the purchase? Are you working toward a professional goal? If so, what new facts or experiences would convince you that this is the wrong goal?

We all have lots of hidden biases that can be examined this way.

If you really adopt the mindset, you should be able to see that your attitude will change — you’ll be more open-minded, and less likely to be dismissive of others or other sources of information. And in doing so, you should reap some serious intellectual benefits.