Mike Sturm

Two Simple Practices to Forge a Healthier Path

There are times when I wake up and from the jump, I feel like I’m way behind. I feel like I’m in slow motion. I feel like I’m already stumbling through the day. I spill coffee everywhere. I skip working out. I fail to catch up on emails before the new ones come rushing in. I don’t write a damn thing. I feel like I’m just buried.

I have the drive, I have the dreams, I have the goals. But I struggle. I stumble. I fall behind.

And what’s worse, I see all these people around me who seem to be crushing it. They’re organized, they’re ahead, they’re making an impact. I’m just watching from the sidelines, and I’m cursing myself for not being further along.

I’m assuming that many of you feel the same way from time to time.

So why does this happen? Why do we get so disheartened by all of this success around us? Why is it so hard to just keep going — to carry on? Allow me to offer up two possible reasons:

1. We’re doing too much — we just don’t know it. 
   Often times we are trying to do too many things at once. We think we’re just doing one project, so that should be easy, right? But actually, each project involves a lot of things: analyzing, organizing, planning, brainstorming — and we often try to do these all at the same time. 
    
   These are all different job descriptions, with different workflows, and they get in the way of one another. So when we do these myriad other things — at many times unknowingly — we exhaust ourselves. We scorch the earth behind us, and make it that much harder get things done later on.
2. We let unrealistic expectations and desires govern our relationship with ourselves.
   We expect a lot from ourselves. We expect both a lot of volume and a lot of quality work. We also tend to also expect it quickly. As anyone in quality control or project management can tell you, you can’t have all three of those things. For one thing, when you have desires and expectations of creative work right off the bat, in what way are you allowing yourself a free and stress-free environment in which to really create? Sure, you may well have a goal — something you want to convey with your work — but at least until you gain momentum, don’t let that goal be a set of shackles on your process.

A Simple Suggestion: Be Radically Compassionate With Yourself

The problem with making mistakes, falling behind, and procrastinating is that it’s like a nuclear bomb. It’s bad enough that the blast is loud, bright, and destructive, but it’s the after-effects that actually do the worst harm. We fail, we fall behind, we mess up, and that is bad enough. But what is worse, we then proceed to beat ourselves up about it. In some instances, the beating is long and drawn out. There is a lot of negative self-talk.

So in terms of solving the problem, two things need to happen: Radical Acceptance and Radical Compassion.

Radical Acceptance

You are going to fail, fall behind, etc. There is no getting around that. You must accept that. Period. That is step one.

But this is tougher than it sounds. You have to accept that these things will happen, accept that you are not exempt from them, and accept that when they happen, they don’t make you any less valuable or deserving a person. This does not happen overnight.

In fact, those who have lofty goals, seek high performance, and devour the most self-improvement literature tend to be the toughest on themselves. They may screw up a lot, but for some reason, they hold themselves to absurdly high standards. As a result, they judge themselves too harshly when they fall short.

Radical Compassion

Step two, then, is to then refuse to beat yourself up about the inevitable mistakes, missteps, or bouts of procrastination. Instead of engaging in the negative self-talk, stop and allow the wave of negative emotions to subside — almost literally like a wave.

Most of our mental chatter is negative; it’s a real problem. The voice we speak to ourselves in tends to be critical, unsupportive, and thus obstructive. We think we need to be hard on ourselves, to push, to work hard. But you can push and work hard without being hard on yourself. In fact, it’s much easier to push and work hard if you don’t constantly beat yourself up for falling short or being burned out.

An Exercise in Radical Compassion

One of the newer waves of behavioral therapy is called ACT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. One of its creators, Stephen C. Hayes has an interesting exercise wherein he asks us to imagine ourselves as a child:

Acceptance is taking in your history as it is … much like giving that child a hug. The compassionate part of us would not slap a child for feeling fear or sadness, yet we do the functional equivalent so readily to ourselves as adults.

…the only way the child part of us can be listened to, respected, loved, cared for, and allowed to play is if the grown up part of us chooses a vital and self-compassionate path, that acknowledges pain and yet carries it forward into a life worth living. It is sometimes hard to find a place to do that for ourselves. If that is the case, there is an alternative. Imagine yourself as a child, and a time when a hurt you are feeling now was first being felt. Do it for that child.

This exercise can work wonders. Imagine yourself as a child, at a time when you felt sad, vulnerable, when you were looking for support, approval, and compassion (as we all were as children).

Imagine yourself as that vulnerable child every time you stumble and get mad at yourself, because deep down, you still are that child. Your emotions are still there, you just ignore or denigrate them. The less you do that, the more compassionate you will be with yourself. The more compassionate you are with yourself, the less likely you will participate in a cycle of anxiety and burn-out. That’s the foundation of sustainable personal growth.

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Morning routines are the on trend these days. It seems like each wealthy and/or famous person has a morning routine that has been a contributing factor in their success.

Nearly every morning routine you can read about includes meditation. What it also includes is a bunch of stuff geared at making you happier. But what’s odd is that while they include both meditation, and a stated aim of making you happier, those dots are rarely connected.

For the vast majority of us, happiness is not something that needs to be pursued. In fact, pursuing happiness is as odd a concept as pursuing one’s nose. It’s right there in front of you, a part of you, if you just realize it’s there. Often, just meditating alone can help you to realize that.

What gets in the way, for most of us, is desire. We desire certain things. We desire material objects, we desire other people, we desire physical sensations.

We also desire situations. We desire having a certain job, having the admiration of various other people. We desire notoriety, expertise, and other peoples’ acknowledgment of those things in us.

But here’s the crazy thing, we desire both those things, and those situations, but in both cases, they are things that we don’t have. When we do get some of them, our focus then changes to those things that we don’t have. And when we achieve more, we tend to then want more. We replace previous hurdles to happiness with new ones.

All that does is create space between happiness and us.

This is not abnormal, it is something that so many of us do. But the process of stopping it is fairly simple. Just think of your nose. Like your nose, happiness is there waiting for you. Just realize it. You are here, you are alive, conscious, and able to feel. So choose to feel that the present moment is enough for now.

Choose to acknowledge that you are inclined to make your happiness contingent upon some future outcome, but then break that connection. Sure, it would be great if you got that book deal, or made a six figure income next year, but why hold out on being happy until those things happen? Why not just take the time to appreciate where you are, be happy now, and then also be happy when you achieve your goals? It is possible, I promise.

Over 200 years ago, when the notion of “the pursuit of happiness” was first coined as a cultural motto, we as humans lived a more closed-off existence. Today, we have access to more ideas, more opportunities to be enlightened and learn how to live better. Let’s not let that opportunity escape us. Just remember your nose.

All of this is to say the following. These days, I’m no longer pursuing happiness, I’m pursuing other things, with happiness as my beneficent companion. Never too far away to call upon.

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The more I read online, the more I find myself bombarded by writing that focuses on empowerment. But it tends to do so in the same way: by insisting that we have so much more power over our situations than we think — that our destiny is ours to shape; the world is effectively our oyster.

But I am not sure how empowering this really is. I think that anyone who has lived more than a few years on their own can attest to the fact that there is an awful lot that it is clear we don’t have power over. The world turns daily, and quickly, in a direction we did not determine. It will not stop and start to accord with our wishes. When we don’t see that, it can be very disheartening. When we do, see this, we realize our powerlessness.

But here’s the paradox: the only way to feel truly powerful is to fully grasp how powerless we are. When we understand how small our sphere of influence is, we are empowered to do those things that will truly have an impact.

That sphere of influence basically begins and ends with us. On a few occasions, it can extend to those we’re close with — to family, friends, and coworkers. But it only extends that far if we exercise power over ourselves. It may sound selfish, but the most important and effective work you can do to be empowered is on yourself. When you have ultimate power over yourself, you have a power that very few others have. When they see that power in you, you gain respect and admiration. With that comes the power to affect real change.

The problem, though, is that it’s really hard to gain that kind of power over yourself. Our minds are so active and instinctive — racing around and working based on conditioned habits — that we can rarely sit alone with our thoughts and effectively shape our focus and attention. It’s why listening effectively is difficult. It’s why doing difficult focused work is difficult. It’s why there is such an interest in spiritual practices of all sorts — because they heavily emphasize this kind of work on oneself.

But it all begins with realizing how powerless we are. With that realization comes liberation. We are free to start from zero and make incremental progress toward working with the ebbs and flows of life — rather than against it. We are free to work with our minds to make them more skillful — rather than against them. We are then free to become powerful — and all because we admitted we were powerless.

Funny how that works, right?

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“To achieve anything, you need a burning desire.”

-Napoleon Hill

I read the book Think and Grow Rich about 2 years ago. It was about the time that I began writing the kind of stuff you’re reading right now. In it, one of the founders of the modern self-help and positive psychology movement, Napoleon Hill, talks about the passion and desire that are necessary in order to succeed.

Since then, I have read countless pieces and seen countless talks by people wax poetic about hustle, tenacity, and hunger. They pine for people with passion, gusto, balls, and passion. They talk about how much of that is the very seedbed of success.

I hear all that, and I wonder. I question. I am skeptical.

The word Taṇhā is the Pali word that means “hunger”, “desire”, or “longing”. For buddhists, Taṇhā is at the root of the most pervasive and paralyzing problem of humanity: suffering. We suffer because we have desires, hungers — we lust after things, feelings, and people. And we don’t get them. And as a result, we suffer.

I find myself hungering for an awful lot of things — from big to small. I want another piece of pizza, I want a better title at my job. I want more subscribers to my newsletter, more recommends on Medium, a bigger house, and so on, and so forth.

If there is a such thing as a collective consciousness — a zeitgeist — and if it indeed changes throughout time, I wonder how the collective consciousness of our age compares to previous ones.

I suspect that there is much more desire inherent in our time. Because of that, I suspect that there is more suffering lurking in our collective consciousness as well. If it hasn’t already manifested itself, it will.

I worry about this for myself, and I worry about it for others. I especially worry about it for my children. My daughter is almost 3. My son will be born in 2 months. What expectations will be embedded into them — without their consent — as they come of age? What pressure will be built into their spirits? What will keep them from being happy with what they have? What will they be told is not good enough, to force them to keep on hungering, keep on desiring?

I am not against wanting to do something with one’s life. Everyone has it within them to find their own purpose — to set goals and work toward them. But everyone also exists in an environment flooded with the desires and expectations of others.

When the noise of others’ desires drowns out the noise of your own spirit, the purpose and meaning you assign to your life ceases to become your own. When that happens, it becomes nearly impossible to enjoy your journey. Your focus comes not from within, but from without. You rely on the fire of others for warmth, rather than building your own. It becomes exhausting.

The hunger of our time is not our own, but that of others. No matter how much we feed others’ hunger, we will never feel satiated ourselves.

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I was talking to a colleague of mine yesterday, who is about to turn 50. He was regretful about the fact that he grew up too fast. He said that when he was a kid, all he wanted to do was get older, so he could do all of the things that that adults were doing — the things that seemed so cool to him as a child. So when he became an adult, and experienced the anxiety, uncertainty, and expectations that come with it, he looked back on a youth that he seemed to have let slip by him.

I sympathized with him, having heard this kind of thing before — also from someone older than me. But I could not empathize. I had never shared his feeling, his desire to grow up. I still don’t, even though I am myself a grown-up. And though I felt bad for not having shared such a common experience, I also feel very fortunate to have dodged a bullet.

The bullet that I dodged was the bullet of missing out on my youth. It’s something that I have seen so many people lament about. They pine for a youth that they feel they weren’t able to fully appreciate — because they were so hell-bent on obtaining the supposed treasures of adulthood. Having found those treasures to be largely composed of fool’s gold, they have turned their gaze backward, wondering if they missed the real treasure — and feeling a sneaking suspicion that they did.

I suspect that my reason for having dodged the bullet of misspent youth was that at least as it regards youth and its nuance, I learned a subtle and fine art. It was a kind of phenomenological alchemy that I have tried to deploy in other areas of my life. It’s a kind of alchemy that turns both the mundane and the painful into gold. It’s called appreciation.

Happiness vs. Appreciation

When I was 10 years old, my parents informed me that by the time I turned 11, we would be moving to the suburbs. We would be moving away from the intimate city blocks that I had come to know like the back of my hand — away from my friends, my school, my favorite parks, and family close by. A summer that by all rights I would have just let unfold like all the others became a summer that I had to carefully and masterfully handle, in order to extract all of the joy and future memories that I could.

In previous years I was merely a diner in the kitchen of my youth, enjoying the meal of a youthful summer. This year I had to become the chef as well. I had to both carefully prepare the meal, plate it, and present it in the best possible way. Only after that could I sit down to enjoy it. It was at that time that a very subtle but very valuable truth occurred to me:

Appreciation is not something that just comes to you. It has to be carefully prepared for, nurtured, and cultivated.

Developing appreciation for something or someone — especially things or people in your life — is actually a very involved and demanding endeavor. It takes effort and concentration, contemplation and mental space, to develop an appreciation for something.

But here’s another important thing that I learned from my youth:

Appreciation is not the same as joy, happiness, pleasure, or any of the other positive emotions. Appreciation is a relationship that involves many other emotions and thoughts— both positive and negative.

You can appreciate a warm, light-hearted dinner with friends where everyone enjoyed themselves and had wonderful, warm conversations. You can also appreciate when your first love broke your heart by breaking up with you in order to date your good friend — and the months of agony and self-doubt that followed. Both of those appreciations are the same, but they involve all sorts of different, opposite feelings.

Experiential Alchemy

I have always tended to follow the model of the optimist : look for the sliver lining, find the good in people, smile through the pain, etc. And though much of that model works to create a positive mindset, it still leaves much to be desired.

The optimist may well have it right that we need to always look for the positive, but inasmuch as she instructs us to only look for the positive, she is missing something valuable.

There is power in the negative, and we should not shy away from it. We should feel negative about some things. We should look at our situation — at times of loss and defeat — and say “this is terrible, I feel terrible”. Those feelings are instructive. Those feelings can be the seeds of appreciation.

This should not surprise us. We should be aware of the necessity of lows in order to accentuate the highs. We should be aware of the fact that life necessarily involves the good as well as the bad. Pleasure can’t be what it is without pain to contrast it. Joy cannot be what it is — and as important as it is — without sorrow against which to compare it.

The Test

A life of only joyful and pleasurable feelings — if not impossible — would simply seem devoid something necessary: those negative experiences to round it out. Yet we seem to forget that as we stumble through life, and we keep grasping for the joy and pleasure, while pushing forcefully away those negative experiences that come hurtling toward us.

Somewhere in there, we have to understand how to relate to all of these experiences, and figure out what a truly good life really looks like.

So here’s a test I’m proposing. It’s a test that if you can pass, perhaps you really understand a good life in a non-superficial way — you have the right balance. Think of your most negative experience you’ve had— one where you felt at or close to your personal bottom. If you can look back on it and appreciate it, then you are doing okay.

Appreciating it means acknowledging that it was bad at the time — that you felt bad, perhaps you were ready to give up. But you can also see how it has helped shape you into who you are today. Assuming you like who you are today, you can appreciate what all that pain and sorrow has done for you.

Those feelings never change into positive ones; they remain painful — that’s why they were so instructive. However, they changed you in a way that now serves to give you joy and pleasure. That’s appreciation. And truly, the more you can appreciate, the more you can live. Because a life filled with appreciation is a life fully lived.

In Conclusion: Staying Sharp vs. Cutting

Eventually, I did turn 11 — in the middle of that fateful summer. Within 6 weeks, my parents had sold our house and moved us to the suburbs — exactly as promised. I would begin middle school as the new kid. But under my belt, I had a summer that I could honestly say I appreciated as it happened. That in turn was the cornerstone a greater awareness I gained of how to appreciate youth, and thus how to appreciate my lived experiences in general.

I think that as we age, there is a sharpness to our faculty of appreciation that tends to become blunted. I’m not sure how it happens, and I’m not sure that we ever can get it back. But I take comfort in the fact that even a dull knife can cut, so long as you’re careful and calculated. So that is what I am trying to do: become more careful and calculated in my appreciation. It involves being present. It involves being still and silent more often. It also involves expecting and desiring less.

Come to think of it, perhaps it is expectations, desires, and future planning that blunt our faculty of appreciation. When you grow up, you have to plan, and you have to grapple with expectations — both yours and those of others. Try to shake them all you like, but such things will always be heavier as you age than when you were young. That’s just how it works.

Aristotle once said something like you are what you habitually do. I guess for the most part, this holds true, but I think there is another formulation: we are what we habitually appreciate. In one formulation, I am a writer. On the other formulation, I am so much more. For obvious reasons, I prefer the second.

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credit: Pok Rie

• There is a difference between having an opinion, voicing that opinion, and acting on that opinion.
  Everyone is entitled to their opinion. But opinions should be handled with care. We must understand that an opinion merely possessed is easy to remedy — you can change your mind. But an opinion voiced or acted upon is much more difficult to remedy.
• Doing a lot, and quickly, is overrated
  The person who does 10 things quickly, and with little thought, often ends up:
  – not needing to have done 5 of those things
  – having to fix or take back 3 of them
  – being unsure in retrospect about 2 of them
• Thinking big often means acting small
  In fact, those who ACT big are often actually thinking small. They’re reacting to the latest and loudest things. They’re grabbing on to trends, trailing indicators, and reactions. 
  Thinking big means knowing that everything big begins small, and that only smaller, well thought-out actions over time will win sustained, repeatable results.
• Feelings are results, too
  It happens all the time — metrics are not met, promises are not kept, or results are not delivered. But the way you are able to make someone feel about you and your efforts — even when you don’t deliver the results — can make all the difference. This means that you are responsible for much more than meeting expectations. You are responsible for making your customer, partner, or whoever feel genuinely good — even when you couldn’t come through for them as promised or expected.
   
  This doesn’t mean you can half-ass it and just charm your way out of it — people tend to be able to sense that pretty easily after it happens once or twice. Rather, you have to come by the trust and good will honestly — by being forthcoming, honest, and genuinely caring about those you serve. There’s no trick to it.
• Everything in moderation — even moderation
  Sometimes, you have to be passionate, other times reserved and detached. If you are always down the middle, unexcitable, cool and collected, you’re basically almost a robot. Moderation also needs to be moderated. A full life will include ups and downs — and honest reactions will mirror those ups and downs. 
   
  For the most part, try to keep your cool. But cool is not really meant to be kept forever. You should get excited sometimes, sad at other times. That is how human life works. Don’t pretend you can completely transcend it — you wouldn’t really want to anyway, it would be terribly boring.

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credit: David Gubler

On Strategy and Rebellion

A big initiative comes down in an email proclamation from the VP of my company. He needs a report on this, that, and the other by the end of the week. Everyone immediately fires off their emails detailing what we need to do, and when. My already crowded inbox becomes more unsightly.

I see these reactionary emails and I get angry. I want to grab my co-workers and scream “don’t you realize? This report isn’t going to change anything! It’s just gathering data to try to get someone far away from everything a little semblance of control!” I stare at my screen, just ready to fire off an email about how I’m simply not going to devote my time to this worthless busywork.

But I stop myself. That train has already left the station, I think to myself. And though that’s a cliché, it’s actually quite on the nose.

Three Vehicles

Lately, in moments of of greater clarity, I have begun to ask myself whether the things coming at me are freight trains, cars, or bicycles.

Trains you can’t stop. You can’t alter their course, no matter how slowly they seem to be going. Their momentum dictates your relationship with them. You either jump on and go where it goes, or you stay where you are.

If you throw yourself in front of it, you get crushed quickly and easily. The conductor, no matter how much they’d like to stop to spare you, can do very little but plow through you, and keep moving with little lost momentum. You ruin yourself for the possibility of future ventures.

Cars you can affect, but only slightly. Your ability to alter their course depends on how much the driver cares about you, compared to their vehicle and destination. You can hold your hands up and stand your ground all you like, but if the driver is not paying attention, or simply doesn’t care much about you — that’s no good for you. If you manage to alert the driver early enough, and they have the reflexes and agility to swerve. You may just survive unscathed.

If all else fails, you can jump and throw yourself into the windshield. You can probably derail the vehicle, but at substantial cost to you.

Bicycles you can stop fairly easily. If it’s going fast and you try to stop it, you can get hurt, but probably not badly. If it’s not going fast, you can have a direct impact in a fairly short amount of time.

The rider can only go so fast, and has very little momentum behind her. Even if she wanted to plow right through you, much of her momentum and direction would yield to your applied force.

The Question to Ask Yourself

In each of our lives, we encounter trains, cars, and bicycles —and perhaps some variations of each (motorcycles?). It’s important to ask yourself which of these you’re facing in moments of anger, frustration, and rebellious angst. Are you staring down the tracks at a barreling freight train, or are you in the path of a leisurely bicyclist? Then adjust your attitude and strategy accordingly.

Don’t get the wrong message, freight trains like cars, can still be stopped. You just need 3 things: time, distance, and communication.
You need time to plan how to stop or divert it.
You need distance to ensure that you’re not thrown into fits by how impending a collision is.
You need communication to relay your message to slow down or divert.

You also have to ask yourself if this train wasn’t at one time a car or a bicycle. Most of them started out that way.

We have to remember that the train’s conductor has to get to work somehow — probably by car. They probably also have to get from their car to the train. They probably walked.

Lastly, we must keep in mind that eventually, even a speeding train reaches its destination — which means it slows and stops. And when that happens, where will you be?

The difficult problems in life 
Always start off being simple. 
Great affairs always start off being small.

— Tao Te Ching

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credit: Christopher Hanewinckel-USA TODAY Sports

Why the NCAA Basketball Tournament is My Favorite Event of the Year

It is officially my favorite time of the year: March Madness — the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. Ever since I was a young boy of single-digit age, I have loved March Madness. It is everything that makes sports great, all in one crazy, two week event. 68 enter, 1 leaves. It is crazy until the end. But as with so many things I love with feverish zeal, not everyone is convinced. So here is my official manifesto: The March Madness Manifesto.

The Road is Long, Rocky, and Unforgiving

There are 351(ish) NCAA Division 1 men’s basketball teams. More continue to trickle in each few years, each representing (ostensibly) the entire student body at an institution of higher learning. They battle it out throughout the year, at first visiting schools they have rarely or never played against. As January rolls around, they settle into their respective conferences — there are 32 of them — to play each other and jockey for position.

As early March approaches, each conference (with the exception of the Ivy League) holds its tournament, the winner of which is automatically in the NCAA Tournament — no matter how bad their season has gone up to then. These tournaments promise a mad scramble of crazy plays, buzzer beaters, and upsets — almost every year. The end result is 32 guaranteed teams entering the big dance of 68 teams. The other 36 teams — the “at large” teams — are decided by a selection committee, which is perhaps my favorite part leading up to the tournament.

The NCAA tournament selection committee is made up of athletic directors and other administrative people in the NCAA. They pour over the records and stats of the teams near the top of the heap, and decide who deserves to be in. It’s subjective, and not without faults, but it maintains an air of mystery and excitement in the weeks leading up to the tournament. It allows for endless speculation and arguments. It makes otherwise inconsequential games really fun to watch.

Then, some Sunday in mid-March, the committee gathers and lays out the bracket, which is revealed to the public in dramatic fashion. They rank the teams they have chosen from 1–68, and place them into four regions. Then the madness begins. Here’s why there’s no better sports event in the country.

Underdogs Rule — as A Rule

Once the 68 teams are chosen to face off, the lowest seeds (16) play the highest seeds (1), and it goes down from there, with the 2 seeds playing the 15 seeds, until you get to the 8 seeds playing the 9 seeds. One would think that the highest seeds would pretty much always win, but that’s only been a given in one case: the games between the 1 seeds and the 16 seeds. A 16 seed has never beaten a 1 seed, though there have been a few close calls. Other than that, there have been a few 15 seeds that beat 2 seeds (in fact, it happened twice in the same year, on the same day!)

And these underdogs don’t just win one game by luck, they have made deep runs in the tournaments, upsetting all of the oddsmakers’ projections. Two great cases come to mind:

1. The George Mason University team made it to the Final Four in 2006 — as an 11 seed. Technically, that means there were roughly 40 teams that had a higher probability of making it over them. They plowed through 4 of the nation’s best teams on their way to being the lowest seeded final four team in history.
2. The 2013 Florida Gulf Coast team became the only 15 seed to make it to the Sweet 16, beating #2 Georgetown and #7 San Diego State — both teams by decent margins — and looked super fresh doing it. This was the first year the team was in the NCAA tournament, and they floored everybody — both because they played so well, and because they pulled off alley-oops and dunks that you rarely see in the big dance. They were having fun, and as a result, they were fun to watch. I still haven’t had as much fun watching games as I did watching them handle Georgetown and SD State.

Last Second Antics and Comebacks are the Rule, Rather than the Exception

With 63 games going on in such a short period of time, and each one meaning so much to so many, the players tend to just leave it all on the court. So when it comes to crazy comebacks and last-second “unbelievables,” the tournament always delivers.

Case in point: what is perhaps the craziest comeback in tournament history — the one that proves that it truly isn’t over until it’s over. In the play-in game — to decide which of 8 teams will enter the official 64-team bracket — Brigham Young University was down by 25 points with less than 20 minutes to play. They came back to win. It was crazy.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are the numerous nail-biters — the games that are tied most of the way or see numerous lead changes. They come down to the last seconds, and those last seconds are where the magic happens. The paradigmatic example of this is Christian Laettner’s literal last second shot in the 1992 regional game between Duke and Kentucky. The game was a nail-biter the whole way, and high-scoring, to boot. With 2.1 seconds remaining in overtime, and Duke down by one, they had to inbound the ball from full court. Somehow — seemingly by magic — the ball got to Christian Laettner, allowing him to sink what is referred to as simply “The Shot.” Duke went on to win the championship that year.

You can run all the numbers and use all the prediction methods you like — and people sure do — but it has proven to be thus far impossible to predict winners accurately in the tournament games. In large part, that’s what is so fun about it. It is many things, but always unpredictable. We know there will be upsets, but it’s always a question of who will do it — and it almost always comes from an unlikely team, in an unlikely way. Once that happens, some teams that people have picked to go deep into the tournament end up gone — the brackets have been busted.

In nearly every year, 99% of brackets have been “busted”, and are no longer perfect after just the first day of games. It just gets worse after that — but also way more fun to watch. No one has ever — at least to the knowledge of the public — made a perfect bracket. In fact, in 2015, Warren Buffet offered $1 billion to anyone who could pick the perfect bracket. This year, he’s offering any Berkshire Hathaway employee (or employee of one of its subsidiaries) $1 million a year for life if they pick a perfect bracket through just the sweet 16 this year. With one day of games done, and more upsets bound to happen today, it looks like Buffet will get to keep his cash. But that will never take the fun out of trying — at least not for all of us involved in office pools. We all try our best to predict the winners, but in the end — just like in the tournament itself — the underdogs often end up with as good a chance to win as the favorites.

My Love Affair

Every year now, for the past 5 years, I prep for the Madness by pulling data on each team — as much as I can get. It goes into a spreadsheet, and I try to figure out the best way to compare stats: effective field goal %, turnover rate, 3-pointers attempted per game, fouls per game, and on and on. In the end, I spend so much time doing that, and never perfecting it, that I pick half with stats and half with my gut. By the end of the second day, my bracket looks like a 4-year-old could have picked just as well. But I friggin’ love it.

I will continue to try to find the secret sauce, to search for the method that will help me predict the upsets that no one else sees, and give me an edge in picking the brackets. I know that my chances are infinitesimal, but somehow, that motivates me even more — because wouldn’t it be crazy awesome if I did it?

Long after my bracket has no chance of winning the office pool, I still love watching the games. I almost always root for the underdogs. It’s just so much fun to watch them take it down to the wire and win it when they weren’t supposed to.

Ultimately, there is a larger phenomenon at work: sports is the last bastion of entertainment that is truly live and unscripted. Reality TV has now perfected the air of suspense, shock, and crazy outcomes on live TV — but it is all predetermined. When The Voice or Survivor airs, someone knows who has won — it has to be that way in order for the show to happen. But in the games we watch, it is literally unfolding in front of our eyes. No one has inside knowledge, no one knows how it’s going to end. It is literally as real as it gets. I guess for me, when 80% of the players are just college kids — like I once was — most of whom will just go on to live a life much like mine, it’s fun to see them participate in something so crazy and awesome.

It’s madness, and I’m mad for it. Let’s play some ball.

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credit: Piamen Agov

How to Be More Thankful by Default, and Reap the Benefits

There is all sorts of evidence to support the claim the gratitude is good for us. Those who practice gratitude tend to be both mentally and physically more healthy. They tend to be happier. The list goes on. In short, having that attitude of gratitude is key in cultivating a richer life — in the short-term and the long-term.

Most of the things I’ve read about gratitude tend to speak of it in the abstract. The tips center around the attitude of being grateful itself, rather than focusing on the potential objects of gratitude. That makes it harder to actually go from being pretty ungrateful to an attentive and appreciative person. Allow me to give an example.

Let’s assume that you’re a busy, distracted, stressed, person who is genuinely interested in cultivating gratitude. You read somewhere that you should start recording things you’re grateful for every day (keeping a gratitude journal), and that will help you become more grateful and mindful — so you try it. You sit down at the end of your busy day, and you fill in the stock answers: you’re grateful for your significant other, your friends (who you haven’t called in months), and your health. Boom, you’re done.

But here’s the problem: gratitude lists like that are just going through the motions, and will hardly ever work because they are flowing in the wrong direction. In order to cultivate gratitude in a mind that is used to being busy and preoccupied by the day-to-day happenings, you need to meet it on its own terms: the specific, day-to-day things.

Get Specific About Your Gratitude

A good post on practicing gratitude at Happify lays out the principle of specificity quite well:

The best way to reap the benefits of gratitude is to notice new things you’re grateful for every day. Gratitude journaling works because it slowly changes the way we perceive situations by adjusting what we focus on. While you might always be thankful for your great family, just writing “I’m grateful for my family” week after week doesn’t keep your brain on alert for fresh grateful moments. Get specific by writing “Today my husband gave me a shoulder rub when he knew I was really stressed” or “My sister invited me over for dinner so I didn’t have to cook after a long day.”

This works better than “I’m grateful for my family” because it speaks more directly to how our minds work. Your mind may visit the realm of abstract concepts like “my family”, but it doesn’t live there. Your mind lives in the realm of experiences — sensations, feelings, moments. That’s what it understands. When you train it to realize gratitude for those things, you can then become more grateful overall.

I have recently begun trying to practice gratitude, and I’ve done it by not only going more specific (as illustrated above), but also more mundane. I focus on the everyday interactions between myself and others. I am thankful that the server at the burger joint I went to last night kept asking us if we needed anything. I’m thankful that my co-worker took the ball on answering that email that I was having trouble figuring out how to handle. I’m grateful for the work ethic of the people who got up even earlier than I did to plow the roads in my neighborhood yesterday.

Find the Hidden Things in the Process

As I have begun to get specific about gratitude, I have realized that so much of what we have to be specifically grateful from to day to day is hidden from us. There are entire networks of service and support that — when they’re working as intended — are meant to be virtually invisible to us.

Think of the traffic lights, water, natural gas, and cell phone service. All of these things take thousands of labor hours, maintenance, execution of intricate processes, etc. People work hard to hold up this complicated world we live in, and we’ve largely gone numb to it. The task of specific gratitude, then, should be to start becoming re-sensitized to all of the support that we each receive every day. It’s there; you just have to become aware of it.

Once you begin to take on the mindset of specific gratitude, you should begin to see many of these hidden things. You’ll start thinking in terms of the chains that link it all together. You buy some eggs at the grocery store. The eggs got there by an air-conditioned truck, which was driven by a dedicated driver, who picked it up from a farm where a family wakes up every day to ensure the health of the hens. That family, in turn, relies on roads, irrigation, seed providers, and fertilizer manufacturers on a daily basis.

Acknowledge People as Ends, Not Means

A key part of the whole process of specific gratitude is realizing that in most cases, the things we should be grateful for are things that are done by people. People exercise their efforts and abilities to do the things that help to make life better for so many of us each day. When we begin to look at things in this way, a few things happen:

• we become more patient, because we understand all that is involved in everyday things
• we become more understanding, because we see the complexity and amount of coordination involved
• we begin to see people more like they see themselves — that is, as ends, rather than as means to our ends

This last point is important. So often, we see other people as mere means to some end that we’re chasing. The barista making your coffee, the clerk scanning and bagging your groceries, the mechanic working on your car’s radiator. Our interactions with those people is so often distorted by why we’re interacting with them — because we want them to provide something to us. But those people are not merely the services they provide — means to our ends. They are ends in themselves. As the philosopher Immanuel Kant put it:

In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what on the other hand is raised above all price and therefore admits of no equivalent has a dignity.

The more we begin to see other people as more than the services and products they provide to us, the more we can truly be grateful for what they do for us. To me, that is the end-game of gratitude practice — seeing each person as a full person — over and above what they do for us. When we do that, the unfair expectations, the lack of understanding, the impatience — all of that falls away. That’s powerful stuff.

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credit: Pixabay

On the Inner and the Outer Scorecards, And How We Measure Ourselves

Of my many shortcomings, one of them is surely that I care quite a bit what other people think of me. In fact, there are times when I care too much about what others think of me. So much so, that I make decisions based on how others might view me, rather than my values or priorities.

In his book The Snowball, the oft-quoted Warren Buffett poses an interesting question:

The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard. I always posed it this way. I say: ‘Lookit. Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?’ Now that’s an interesting question.

Interesting question, right? Most of us — myself included — want both of these things. We want to be smart, productive, fit, etc. — but we also want people to see us that way as well. In fact, often times, we will place way more emphasis on people thinking we are doing well, then on actually doing well.

What drives this? Well in part, our own tendency to jump to conclusions on limited data makes us think that how others appear tells the whole story. But that’s a mistake.

Front Stage and Backstage

A great illustration of this comes courtesy of Ross Grant:

Social media has made access to other people’s lives incredibly easy for us….Never before have we had this kind of ability to broadcast what’s going on in our lives to the entire world with the click of a button.

BUT WE MUST REMEMBER, what we are seeing is ONLY a person’s ‘front stage’.

Behind the scenes that person’s ‘backstage’ is no doubt just as chaotic, if not more so than ours….
As human beings, we forget this — we only see the ‘front stage’ and fool ourselves into thinking that the person who shouts the loudest about success must have a wonderful life.

I make this mistake all of the time. I am constantly looking at other peoples’ front stages, and judging my own backstage against that. Other people seem to have it together, have confidence, and float through life. But that’s their front stage. I have no idea what’s going on behind the curtain of the appearance they curate for the public.

When you think about it, it’s impossible to see your own front stage as others do. You can look at all the pictures and videos of yourself that you like, but you will always insert your in-depth backstage knowledge in your assessment. It’s like an editor watching the film she worked on. As good as it looks on the screen, she can’t help but remember how messy it all was. She’ll never see the film like the fresh-eyed audience does.

Living Internally

So we can’t really benefit from trying judge how we’re doing by looking at others. We also shouldn’t worry so much about what others think about how we’re doing. Success, it seems, is more internal than external. It’s not about whether you’re running as fast and keeping up with others. It’s about whether or not you’re hitting the mile markers that you’ve mapped out for yourself.

What’s more, when we’re making a map for our lives, we have to strike a delicate balance when figuring out our intended destination. To a certain extent, we can’t avoid relying on others to help us map out our life’s journey. But we can’t rely too much on others, because when that happens, we lose our internal guidance — which is what Buffet was talking about.

In a sense, when we live by an external scorecard, it’s like being the driver of a car and allowing every passenger to shout directions at you — and you follow them all. If you figure out where you’re going, and learn to trust your sense of direction, you need not listen to the backseat drivers. Know where you’re going, how you’re going to get there, and keep your eyes on the road. The backseat drivers can shout directions until they’re blue in the face, but you aren’t listening to them.

Yes, it’s easier said than done. It always is. But it’s important to read and write about the hard things. It is hard to live by a completely internal scorecard. It is hard to remember that what you see in public is not how people are in private. But you need to remember these things. So I’ll repeat them, in a list — because we love lists, don’t we?

1. Live by an internal scorecard, rather than an external one.
2. Don’t compare what people look like on the outside to how you feel on the inside.

Simple enough.

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A Poem

Public Domain

I say
I do say
If I do say so myself.

Do you say?
Does who say?
If I say, I betray my stealth.

I am, a gamble
For lack of bettors
or just better
whether a writer, or mere typesetter.

I am, then

The best of of what the worst could be
The rest of what there used to be
The nest from which so few can see
Don’t waste your strength to get to me
Because there is no me, you see?

They say the most romantic men were genocidal
I say that most permanence is tidal
Truth, then what?
Truth, then what?!

When I say
What you say
It gets around
To you.

It does, but when?

In due time
In whose time?
Undoubtedly, a fool’s time.

credit: Lo (via Flickr)

“Not everything that can be counted counts.
Not everything that counts can be counted.”
– William Bruce Cameron

I once had a boss who — to his credit — gave me free reign to mostly do whatever I wanted at my job. It was great, for a while. He gave me objectives once every six months, I went on my merry way, and did my thing. We met again six months later, and reviewed how I did.

In the interim, I engaged in a bunch of projects, created great working relationships with a bunch of people at the company, and learned more than I ever could had I been kept in my silo, focused on the numbers.

But during my last 2 performance appraisals with him, the inevitable “areas for improvement” came up — and the same one was in both: “being results oriented”. In his eyes, I was doing a lot of stuff, but I was not driving toward results.

He was right — I wasn’t driving toward results. But to me, that wasn’t a weakness.

The Invisible, Immeasurable Results

In my boss’s eyes, there were projects I was involved in that didn’t have immediate and direct results. There was no specific metric we tracked at the company where he could point to the number and say that it was bigger because of me. At the time, I just didn’t think that way. To an extent, I still don’t. It took me a while to figure out why, but I think I understand it now.

I have come to realize that there are both visible and invisible results. There are the ones we can measure very easily, and the ones that we can’t. For those invisible, and nearly immeasurable results, we can perceive them — get a feel for them — but they’re not exactly quantifiable. They don’t fit into a cell on an excel spreadsheet. But that doesn’t mean they don’t matter.

In fact, the immeasurable results are the ones that are often the most sustainable. Because they are gradual and almost organic, they become part of the system — whatever system that is — and they hang around naturally.

So getting Q4 sales up 40% by doing all sorts of crazy things and bending over backwards looks good in Q4 — but that’s about it. How’s the following Q1 looking, champ? How about the next two quarters ?Looks like even more back-bending if you want to avoid looking foolish, or just tiring yourself out.

Think Long-Term

I’m not arguing against aggressive growth goals for companies or people; but I am cautioning about them. The more aggressive the results you want, the more you have to understand how unsustainable they will likely be. Also, the more aggressive the goal, the more unnatural things you’ll have to do — and keep doing — in order to get there and stay there.

All this is to say that while quick and easily measurable results look good, the barely measurable changes — the hard to quantify ones — stand to bring the most benefit in the long run. I would hope that the long run is what nearly all of us are interested in. So I would think that this advice applies to most of us.

I’m not alone here. In fact, the Academy of Aerospace Quality at Auburn University has a handy table showing the differences between two kinds of management: Process-oriented, and Results-oriented. Check it out:

courtesy of http://aaq.auburn.edu/node/984

Most of this stuff comes straight out of Masaaki Imai’s beloved Kaizen writing. Focusing on the process, not necessarily the results, can actually have profound and long-lasting results. What’s more, once you get the improvement from it, you know how you got there, because you were focused on the process. The same can’t necessarily be said about results-based thinking.

This all goes hand-in-hand with thinking gradual, long-term, holistically, and carefully — and then acting accordingly. Believe it or not, that kind of strategy still works! Crazy, right?

Look, my old boss didn’t leave me without any lessons. He did help me to balance how I work, by getting me to step out from in the weeds every once in a while. But I still won’t push for results for the sake of results — knowing that they aren’t sustainable.

I focus on the process, the people, and the fairly un-glamorous things that aren’t necessarily moving the needle quickly and drastically. I like to think that it’s led me down a better path.

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credit: Tookapic on Pexels

What Happens When We Can Always Consume Whatever Media We Want, Whenever, Wherever?

I was listening to two friends talk about some of the shows that they’ve gotten into lately. House of Cards, Stranger Things, The Man in the High Castle, and so on. They are cord cutters — they don’t subscribe to cable TV, nor do they watch broadcast TV. Their media lives are lived entirely on demand.

I have cable, but by and large, my household’s media consumption is also on demand. We decide when we’re watching something, and what we’re watching, from a menu of choices. Whatever we feel like, whenever we feel like it — that’s what we consume.

My online life is much like that, too. I scroll through Twitter, look at apps like Longform, Instapaper, Medium, and Pocket. I get the stories when I want them, from the sources I want, and there are way more than I could ever read. I simply don’t have to deal with someone presenting media to me. It’s a buffet, not a meal. I pick what I want, when I want, and ignore the rest. I can go back as many times as I like. The supply is virtually endless.

The Shifting of Choice

This is the new model, and it’s been happening since the early 2000’s. Choice has been shifting from producers to consumers, and now it is almost entirely in the hands of consumers.

Consider the 1970s. There were a handful of TV stations. Albums were on Vinyl. You had to put in serious effort to consume a piece of media or art. The producers had the choice of what to present and when, where, and how it could be consumed.

The picture is starkly different 40 years later. The producers still choose what to present, but by and large, consumers control the when, where, and the how. In short, consumers control the context of consumption. As a result, cohesion and curation kind of go out the window.

Albums, shows, and films can now be watched in disconnected chunks, in different places, and in different orders. It’s the difference between a 4-course meal presented in a certain way for maximum effect on the palette, and a disordered grazing of random dishes that might have at one time been a meal.

Losing Cohesion and Curation

Lately I’ve gotten to wondering: in what ways might this on demand way of life be harming us?

We used to be presented with media. TV stations played shows at certain times, and only a few shows. Newspapers only produced a finite amount of stories — what was in the physical paper each day, and that was it. Now that I can click around to wherever I might want to go — skipping so many pieces of media — what might I be losing?

The positive arguments for on demand and media proliferation are easy to find. More media means alternative views, a more lively conversation between opposing views. More media means more choice for people, more outlets for expression, and so on. That’s what we’ve gained. But consider what we might have lost.

For one thing, I’m losing the ability to avoid confirmation bias. If I have a set view on a topic, I can search and click around until I find some piece of media that supports it. I needen’t bother taking in data that contradicts my current view. I can’t see that as anything but harmful. I think that’s not a prospect to take too lightly.

I’ve also lost cohesion and context. Cohesion means something in media and art. The album — that paragon of cohesion — is nearly already a thing of the past. There is no real order to songs anymore. The order is relative to the user — who may not even have the entire album — just the song or a few of them.

To me, that’s a tool of expression that artists have lost. They can’t even so much as nudge you to listen to a whole album in order anymore. Sure, you could always skip around before — on CDs, tapes, and vinyl — but you had to buy the whole album. You had skin in the game. That simply isn’t the case anymore.

An Analogy

If I can draw on an analogy, it’s as if media had previously been a visit to someone’s home — the producer’s. They had prepared something for you, and you would sit there and agree to engage with them for as long as you were willing. There were only a handful of other invitations that could cause you to up and leave. It was, by and large, an experience.

Now the engagement is much less like a social visit to a home, and more like speed-dating. You meet at some place that you — the consumer designates. If it’s a busy place, you have a rendezvous filled with distractions, you zone out wondering about the others you could be talking to, and you leave prematurely. Connections are made by chance, and how long do they last? How rich are they? I think a lot about these questions.

It seems that choice is good, but it’s been well-argued that too much choice is bad for us. So whatever the merits are of the on-demand consumption culture, we need to be mindful of what we stand to lose because of it.

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credit: Derek Key

We’re Deathly Afraid of it, But it May Be the Secret to a Good Life

There is an old saying that even a broken clock is right twice a day. Consider how that compares to a clock that is still ticking, but set to the wrong time.

While the former clock may not be moving, just by staying put, it still gets it right twice per day. It does so consistently — predictably. The latter clock — still moving and expending energy — never manages to be right, despite all of its movement.

Almost sounds like a Zen koan, doesn’t it?

I guess it kind of is a koan, but the moral is simple. When all else fails, pursue consistency.

Whatever your endeavor, there will be times when you’re uncertain about the approach you’re taking. The doubting then creeps in: Will it work? Was I crazy to start doing this? I can still back out…

When that happens, think about the clocks.

If you second-guess yourself and change your plan quickly, you’re the second clock. You are still ticking, expending energy, but you’re off the mark. The target you’re aiming for either isn’t moving, or is moving in a different direction than you are. It should be pretty clear then that until you get your bearings, continuing to move will do way more harm than good.

And yet, we do this constantly. We tend to feel that doing, moving, acting is somehow better than not acting, waiting, being still. But why is this? It’s wasteful.

I think it’s because we tend to feel uneasy when we’re not moving, doing, or talking. Just think back to the last time you were having a conversation with multiple people, and there was a silence.

How tense did you feel? How tense did everyone else look? They were so uneasy with not doing — not talking, that you could feel it, right? They weren’t just uneasy that they weren’t talking, but that someone wasn’t talking. How odd. Why should we feel that way? And yet, we do.

It’s because we can’t handle stillness. When things are still, we are not being distracted by actions. Our energy has nowhere to go. We’re used to being tired, stressed, and being either pushed or pulled. When we’re allowed to just be, and not subjected to pushes, pulls, and distractions, we end up having to create our own from within.

How absurd. But that’s our human absurdity. And you have to laugh a little at it before you can work on changing it.

So, this is me laughing at it. What will follow for me — and I hope for you readers — is the next step of getting more comfortable with stillness. Not just stillness, but its companion, silence.

What I am trying to do these days is to break down that feeling of unease that comes with not acting, not speaking. At that point, I can realize that stillness is powerful. It can rejuvenate. It can clarify. It is powerful, truly. But I can no longer be afraid of that power, because I can wield it. When I do that, I can get a lot more done— interestingly enough — by doing a lot less.

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credit: Luke Goodsell

When I was 23, I was pretty sure I knew more than most people. In my own mind, I was so damn wise — so informed, and intelligent. I simply didn’t have the time to waste listening to the advice of others. I was on my own path to greatness — or so I thought.

So imagine my surprise when, within a year’s time, it all came crashing down around me. I found myself way off of the path I thought I was on. I had been kicked out of grad school, I was forced to move to an unfamiliar place, with people I didn’t know. I had no job, and no money, and no idea what I was going to do with myself.

Luckily, it was at that time that I started to listen to the advice of others. There is one piece of advice that sticks with me to this day — one that I will bring up in conversation every once in a while.

There is a difference between simple and easy. Do not confuse the two.

You see, “simple” means the opposite of “complicated”. Simple means “easily or readily understood”. But what it doesn’t mean is “easy to implement”. In fact, an add-on to that piece of advice above is this:

The simpler the thing is to understand, often the more difficult it is to do.

Here’s an example. You’ve probably heard someone say “always be honest”. That’s simple. It’s hard to imagine a principle any simple than that. It’s also hard to imagine a principle that is more difficult to actually follow in practice. Think of all of the times when honesty seems to be detrimental to your goals, when it will prove inconvenient, when it will set you back. Given our usual motivations, it’s incredibly difficult to be honest all of the time.

Here’s another example: be true to yourself. That is pretty damned simple, right? Just be who you are, don’t put on airs, come to grips with your feelings, desires, and values. Be true to those things your actions. Don’t second-guess yourself, don’t be afraid, be boldly you. Again, It’s hard to think of something that is more difficult to do than that. And yet, it’s so easy to understand.

These days, I’m a lot more humble about what I know and what I don’t. I am sure that I know very little, and I try (but keep on failing) to act accordingly. I seek out all of the advice that I can get.

When I succeed at being humble, I receive more valuable insights. When I remember that the simple things I have heard about are also very difficult things, I’m a little easier on myself, and in turn, on others.

So I guess I would urge everyone to embrace the simple — for living simply holds great rewards. But whatever you do, do not expect it to be easy.

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I write a lot each day. About 12 hours (or more) of my day are spent hunched over a keyboard, clickity-clacking away at some email, blog post, or note. And though I have already written so much throughout my life, I always fee like two things are true:

1. I need to write more — a lot more. In fact, we all need to write more.
2. Writing still feels utterly magical. Which is why #1 still holds true.

What do I mean when I say writing is magical? I really do mean magical.

The second definition — specifically the portion about being removed from everyday life — is what I mean when I say that writing is magical. When done correctly (by which I don’t mean done well), writing can transform your thoughts and feelings into something more — something powerful. That’s the magic.

Writing Reveals Meaning

We are all living a story, but we’re not all aware of the ins and outs of those stories — both our own and those of others. Writing helps you understand what is happening in your own world, what is happening in the worlds of those close to you, and what all of it means. It doesn’t happen right away — no deep understanding does.

You will have to spill a lot of ink, but if you keep doing it, you will begin to see a clearer image of things come to the fore. Your own narrative materializes. It’s a curious combination of discovery and creation. You see what was already there, but hidden. You also inject something new into the mix. You cut through the thicket to forge a path heretofore untrodden.

Writing Clarifies

My wife watches a lot of true crime shows, which means that I do as well. What I’ve learned from watching these is that interrogation is a useful tool. Good detectives will sit down with a suspect and begin chiseling away at the hard surface they’ve projected. They ask the same questions over and over — and they do so on purpose. They want the truth; they want to understand. But as any good detective will tell you, the best results come when whoever you’re interrogating feels like they can open up to you.

When you write about what you’re thinking and feeling — just like when interrogating a suspect — you will get a lot of false starts. Like someone being interrogated, you will frantically stutter through false narratives about yourself. You’ll prattle on about what you think you should feel, what you think you should want — whatever sounds good. But if you keep interrogating yourself, eventually you will open up. You will have sifted through all the emotional and intellectual noise, pinpointing the clear signal. That is magical, because understanding yourself better — especially after being confused and laying it all out — can be transformative.

Writing Strengthens

Ideas pop into your mind much like infants pop into the world: naked, weak, and unformed. And like infants, ideas need to be nurtured, they need care and attention in order to turn into what we hope they become. Writing provides all of that. It is the swaddling clothing, the feeding hand, the nurturing guide to your ideas. Writing puts your ideas into battle with reality, where only the strongest ones survive — and they are stronger as a result.

I have yet to find a time where I was stuck on how to solve a problem, or what to think about a topic, and writing about it didn’t help. The obvious reason is that writing walks hand in hand with thinking. It lays out your ideas in front of you, in real time, where you are forced to deal with them — to accept, reject, or refine them. Those ideas worth a damn stay, the rest fall away. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. What you’re left with is a stronger set of ideas, a stronger sense of self. You’re still you, but now you know better who you are.

As often as you can, as sincerely as you can: write, think, and write more. Don’t stop until the ideas do…which is hopefully never (or when you die).

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credit: Thomas Leuthard

A Poem

When we leave this all

remember why we were there,

for all

of those who care

it might be a blessing,

though vainly disguised.

But when we get out, we may find something

to gain

something to lose,

either way it’s the same.

Because when you think about it,

there is much more for the white

and less for the blues

as if anything said through clenched teeth

could ever be good news.

So not for monotony,

but I think I may have had a damn good time.

And the dichotomy is sharply seen

at this point of the line,

where the credits are rolling over.

So for those traveling far

remember the faces that you are

and crack a smile

lest someone crack it for you.

Do please let the feelings go

and make sure they never know

where you hid your gold.

Until then

time and again

keep what is fleeting

because permanent things hurt

the most.

–a toast–

A Short Apropos Poem

The only way that I can keep going on

is to remember that like you, I love.

Like you, I thirst

I hunger

I yearn

I hurt

I do all of these things — nay — they happen to me

as they happen to you.

My heart treads a different path, but beats just as hard

as yours.

The blood is as dark and red

as yours.

My convictions push me as hard

as yours.

We are so alike, and yet we are so in denial

of that fact.

I keep forgetting, but I’m trying to remember

to channel the faith in my cause

into faith in us, that you and I

can be an us again.

That we are like me

and like you.

Like you, I forget this from time to time.

But that is okay, because you do, too.

We can forgive — people like me,

like you.

Lewis Pugh beginning a swim across the North Pole (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Which is exactly why we need to do it

Think about the most notable creative works that you’ve encountered. How many of them don’t in some way work against the received “wisdom” about what was possible, or what was commonplace at the time? How many of those works don’t swim (in some way) against the current, or forge a previously untrodden path (to further mix my metaphors)?

I believe that nearly all of the notable works in the densely woven tapestry of human creative history have done just that. That’s why we who do creative work have to continue to try to do the impossible.

Momentum Is Key

Creative work is difficult, which is why it’s so captivating to observe. One of the most difficult aspects of creative work is initiating, and then maintaining momentum. We often place hurdles in front of ourselves at the very beginning of the creative journey, as we start to work on a project. We tend to do this — either consciously or subconsciously — by getting critical much too early.

We begin assessing whether or not our desired outcome is even possible, when we’ve barely even become aware of what it is we’re trying to do. Think about what this does to us, psychologically. It places roadblocks in front of us; it impedes — nay, prevents momentum. It is like placing a hurdle 2 feet in front of the runners at the starting line of a race. Only a lucky few would be able to surmount such an obstacle so early in the race — they have no time to get into a stride. When we concern ourselves with possibility as we try to do creative work, we begin dropping hurdles in front of ourselves far too early.

Why can’t you just get started and get something — anything — down on paper? After you do that, and start your mad creative dash, then you can stop, take a breath and assess whether what you’ve been pursuing looks like it can actually be done. You may be surprised as you find yourself zig-zagging and changing direction as you work.

Creative momentum is a powerful thing. It is well within the realm of possibility to begin with one desired result in mind, but shortly after that, find yourself on an entirely different path — and moving swiftly at that. Yet, in all that momentum, you likely will not have stopped to ask yourself is this thing I’m doing possible?

In many ways, creative work is about answering that question in the affirmative. It is about being uncertain — perhaps doubtful — as to whether or not x is even possible, and yet because of that (rather than in spite of it), you press on — press forward — toward x.

Impossibilities Abound

“Nude Descending a Staircase, №2″ by Marcel Duchamp

Consider the Cubism movement in visual art. What an ambitious goal it was, to portray all of the perspectives of objects, people, and scenes simultaneously to the viewer — to stand outside of the boundaries of time and space — conveying that transcendence visually.

The impossibilities abounded! And yet, the likes of Duchamp, Braque, Picasso, and their cohorts did just that. Even if you, dear reader, are in the camp that believes they did no such thing, did they not at least show that it is (after all) possible? Didn’t they shed the necessary doubt on the impossibility that previously seemed so damned certain? Perhaps the product did not look the way that you expected it to look, but is that their problem, or yours?

Put aside your expectations of what you think a thing should be like — how it should be received. It will only get in the way of actually creating something — or at least some part of something — special.

You can revise the meaning of the terms of your expectations, and of your purpose, to fit what you did end up creating. Just say to yourself “this thing is [adjective x] and though it doesn’t appear that way, here’s why it actually is [adjective x] after all.” Now that’s creativity.

Even if the creation itself is not conventionally creative, your interpretation will be. And that kind of post-creation creativity can then further make those who consume the work that much more creative by challenging them to adopt an unconventional interpretive standpoint. It can be literally transformative. And isn’t that — after all — what creative work should be?

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Stumbling, Bumbling, but Mostly Coherent

I can’t remember the first time I heard the word “cool”, but I feel like I instantly knew what it meant. I think there’s something in the sound of the word itself — the way the sound waves bounce off the tongue on that last “l” sound. The way your lips have to be pursed like you’re blowing smoke rings, or kissing a seductive stranger. The way it all begins in your throat — almost guttural and filled with bass.

But I feel like coolness — for most of us — is much like the way Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart thought about pornography:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.

We can spot cool. Miles Davis, a young Bob Dylan, Simone de Beauvoir. The list zig-zags through history. But what is it that makes them cool? Why is it that they just strike us as cool?

I think that though it seems to be something we see, it’s actually happening well below the surface — we just happen to catch a feeling by looking at those who have grabbed onto something.

What I think they have grabbed onto is an ineffable existential understanding of the human condition. They have tasted the absurdity of the web we weave, the futility of worry, the ineffectiveness of expectations and desire, and are shrugging it all off before our eyes — and it bewilders and amazes us.

A lot of people think that true cool comes from just not caring. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Being cool requires the kind of not caring that comes from countless deep and dark moments of really caring — solitary and searching moments. Moments where emotional intensity builds to a crescendo of intimacy with the secrets of the universe, and collapses into exhaustion and repose. But we never see those moments. We just see the results — and we are enchanted.

I think that cool is the result of taking a long hard stare at the abyss, the abyss which — as Nietszche warned — stares back. It’s the result of staring at that abyss as it stares back, and refusing to flinch. It is desiring what everyone desires so badly and so much more intensely, that you no longer desire it. It is life after life after death — a post afterlife. It is to be so utterly authentic that it becomes clear that there is no self to be true to. It is the kind of obfuscation that can only come from being completely and totally clear. It is all of these things wrapped up into one.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I don’t see cool as much as I used to. It may be that I’m not seeking it out like I used to, but I just get the feeling that cool has eluded us at this time in history. I’m sure that we will once again encounter it, and it will feel just as it used to. Until then, however, I keep an eye out for it. Not too eagerly, of course, but just kind of leisurely, and, well — cool.

What about you? Yeah, you there. What say you?