There’s roughly 6 billion people on the planet who would trade places with you in an instant. They wouldn’t even have to think twice.
There’s an unlimited buffet in front of us, with anything we could possibly imagine, right there for the taking. An endless selection. We can pick anything we can dream of. What are we going to choose? What are we going to do? What impact are we going to make?
How dare I waste such an opportunity. How dare anyone waste it.
If you searched for diet books right now on amazon, how many results do you think you’d get? Diet books are pretty popular, remember. Definitely more than a couple hundred, right? I would have guessed a couple thousand. I would have been very wrong.
Right now, there are 62,273 results when I search for diet books. Now, there has been some interesting new research in health and nutrition, but dieting just isn’t that complicated. In fact, we don’t even need to be told how to lose weight. We know it intrinsically: eat less, move more. That’s it. So how the hell did we get tens of thousands of different diet books?
The answer revolves around Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss has now authored two bestselling books. His first, the Four Hour Workweek promises a rich life while only working four hours a week (kinda). His second, Four Hour Body, promises “rapid fat-loss, incredible sex, and becoming superhuman”. These have become immensely popular books, some of the most popular and talked about books of the last decade. Both hitting the #1 spots on amazon and the NY Times bestseller list. Now, this isn’t a rag on Tim (both books are actually very interesting). He’s widely admitted that he chose the “four hour” title because it got the best responses in the testing he did before the book launched.
Of course it did.
That’s exactly what everyone is looking for. A workweek that’s over before lunch on Monday? Sign me up! I can be superhuman in 30 minutes a day? Deal.
Everyone wants a shortcut.
Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way. There are all sorts of ways to optimize life: there are tricks to learn and read faster; there are systems you can implement that make you more organized, productive, and effective; there are foods you can eat that are filling and tasty but low in calories and exercises that are so intense they don’t require that much time. But, these are tweaks. At the most basic level, to get good enough at something that it’s going to change your life, or to get good enough so that people will pay you to do it, you’re going to have to put in the time. That’s just the way it is.
Ironically, it took Tim months, if not years, of 80 hour workweeks to build his audience, land a book deal, maintain his audience, write the book, maintain his audience, promote the book, maintain his audience, etc., on top of all the other stuff he had going on. He doesn’t lie about his hectic schedule in his books. His explanation is that he would be doing this stuff anyways. He loves almost all of it; only around 4 hours of each week sucks and feels like “work”. Therefore, he only “works” four hours a week.
The king of the shortcut couldn’t become king by taking a shortcut. That should be all you need to know.
For almost all of hip hop’s existence, rappers and artists were judged, at least to some degree, on how “real” they were. “Real”, of course, didn’t mean honest or sincere, but was specifically defined as having “the right type of background”. Being poor, being raised in the ghetto, family strife or abandonment; these were all evidence of being “real”. Selling drugs, being in a gang, or being a criminal were even better signs that you were “real”. This stemmed from the fact that many of the first superstars of hip hop were many of these things; but, people quickly confused cause and effect. Probably aided by the fact that people were tired of the glitz and production of acts like Madonna and Prince and hair metal, and basically everything from the 80’s, it reached a point were you couldn’t be considered good unless you were “real”.
Then “real” changed. America discovered reality television, first with The Real World, then with Survivor, and then on basically every channel on the dial. Suddenly, America demanded to see “real” people acting “real”. This time, “real” meant “acting absurdly” and “being an asshole”. America loved to watch Russell stab every other Survivor in the back. We loved to watch kids get drunk and punch each other on the Real World. We love to watch those cackling “real” housewives say and do horrible things to each other.
Interestingly, when a cast member finally gets rightfully pissed, the offender often says something to the effect of “you can’t handle me because I’m real” or, “people don’t like me because I speak the truth”. No sweetie, people don’t like you because you’re an asshole.
The problem is that this notion that having no filter, of speaking “the truth” all the time, has become a desired trait. That is, people want to have no filter, to be able to say whatever they want, whenever they want. But, of course, nobody really wants to be around those people. A lot of people want to be a “real” housewife, but nearly everyone would kill themselves if they had to be around one all day.
The bottom line is people don’t want unfettered honesty. Even if that honesty might be constructive or helpful, people will reject you if you put it in the wrong wrapper. “Honey, your ass looks fat”, even if true, even if it serves as a wake up call and prompts weight loss and health gains, isn’t going to win you any points.
People want sincerity.
The strict meaning of the word is nearly identical, but where honesty is cold and blunt, sincerity connotes helpfulness. A sincere opinion comes from a desire to build, not a desire to destroy. It’s hard to ignore a sincere opinion because when you hear one, you can feel that someone is trying to help. So don’t be “real”. Don’t be “honest”. Be sincere. It might mean you have to bite your tongue once in a while, but you’ll be much better off for it.
And, if your opinion about something doesn’t come from a desire to build, to better, to enhance, it’s probably better left unsaid. After all, your “honest” opinion isn’t likely to be heeded anyway.
I believe that the very purpose of life is to be happy.
– Dalai Lama
This quote has been dredged up again recently, floating around the internet for the last few weeks drawing criticism. Many people, especially, it seems, minimalists, pseudo-intellectuals, and all manner of “spiritual” or religious folks seem to have taken offense. They view the quote as shallow, or hedonistic, or materialistic, or self-centered, or as something that goes against some basic tenet of their belief system.
Of course, the end of the quote is invariably left out:
From the very core of our being, we desire contentment. In my own limited experience I have found that the more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being. Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease. It helps remove whatever fears or insecurities we may have and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. It is the principal source of success in life. Since we are not solely material creatures, it is a mistake to place all our hopes for happiness on external development alone. The key is to develop inner peace.
Going back through the annals of philosophy, this view, that happiness isn’t rooted in external stimulus, is shared by pretty much everybody. Even thousands of years ago, when Aristotle argued that “happiness is the meaning and purpose of life”, he went to great lengths to explain that “happiness”, or more accurately eudaimonia, is not something related to physical satisfaction, but instead is a life of virtue, justice, and struggle to be excellent.
So, saying that the purpose of life is to be happy doesn’t really go against any religious teaching. It doesn’t advocate the pursuit of immediate gratification or carnal pleasure. It doesn’t advocate accumulation of stuff. It does just the opposite: it challenges you bust your ass and be a better person.
Who has a bigger influence on the person you turn out to be: your parents or your friends?
Since at least the days of Freud, psychologists believed parents were the overwhelming factor in how their children turned out. But, it seems like more and more people are recognizing the power of peers. I don’t think this comes as a massive surprise to anyone who made it through high school. Certainly the way you dressed was influenced more by your friends than your parents. We had roughly 6 decades of children who wouldn’t be caught dead wearing the previous generation’s styles. Certainly the language you used, the specific words and phrases, was friend-dependent. The type of music you listened to was probably also heavily influenced by your friends. The types of movies you saw, the types of jokes you told, the types of sports you played or hobbies you got into were likely all guided, in one way or another, by your friends.
So why should we expect this to stop at superficial things like the kind of music we listen to or the way we describe something we like? (cool in the 50’s, groovy in the 60’s, solid in the 70’s, awesome in the 80’s, rad in the 90’s, tight/sick/etc. in the 00’s…)
We shouldn’t. Our friend’s influence over us goes much deeper.
Work ethic and success, just like music or language, can be learned through osmosis as well. Of course, the flip side of this is even more true: sloth and failure can be learned even faster.
So, we have a choice: surround ourselves with people who are capable, driven, creative, talented, and likely better off than we are, or, surround ourselves with people who are lazy, disinterested, hedonistic and likely worse off than we are. The choice is harder than it reads on paper: hanging out with people who are better off than you are can be challenging: it’s easier to feel inferior if all your friends seem smarter, have better careers, live in nicer houses, drive nicer cars, and eat at better restaurants. It’s also pretty easy to feel good about yourself when all your friends are losers.
But, only one of those groups is going to make you push yourself to get better, and likely help you out along the way.
Most people are satisfied with the best the world has to offer.
There’s actually quite a bit of social pressure to be satisfied by the best. I’ve eaten with people at some of the world’s best restaurants who refuse to send back poorly cooked food or complain because, well, they’re at one of the world’s best restaurants. I’ve seen people lavish praise on the best rated wines, hotels, cars, universities, mentors, friends, and just about everything else, when that praise clearly wasn’t deserved. Maybe they think that if you’re not satisfied with what’s supposed to be the best, you’re some sort of snob, or elitist.
But that’s ridiculous. The world only advances because someone isn’t satisfied with the best the world has to offer. Edison wasn’t satisfied with the best kerosene lamp in the world. He wanted an electric light. César Ritz wasn’t satisfied with hotel rooms that didn’t have electricity, telephones, and bathrooms. Steve Jobs wasn’t satisfied with, well, just about anything.
If you’re not satisfied with the best the world has to offer, change it. You’ll be in good company.
It’s dark out. Your windows are steamed over, caused by the temperature differential between your warm bedroom and the cold morning. Your alarm clock trips, and your favorite song blasts from it speakers. You wake up, stumble out of bed, flip on the lights, turn on the shower.
Little more than 100 years ago, just four generations, people couldn’t even dream of the kind of life you take for granted less than 60 seconds into your day. Automatic, clean central heating. A machine that wakes you up on time, playing a your choice of nearly any song ever recorded. Constant, instant, unlimited electricity. Constant, nearly instant, and nearly unlimited hot water, on demand.
We give a lot of credit to things like the iPhone. “This has more computing power than Apollo 11, you know.” But we don’t even think about the things that truly make modern life possible. Until they fail. When there’s a major power outage, cities instantly shut down. People don’t even know what to do. They can’t work, most of their entertainment options are gone; half of them can’t even cook. When your water gets shut off, you can’t shower, you can’t brush your teeth; you can’t really cook, either. If your heat’s ever gone out in the winter, you know how miserable it is to get out of bed in the morning.
These major inconveniences serve as important reminders. Without them, it’s easy to take our conveniences for granted for years at a time, since these outages get less and less frequent as our societies and technologies improve.
There’s no reason to wait for a real inconvenience. It’s easy enough to live a life of poverty for a day or two each year, as many ancient Greek philosophers did. Not only does it help us to appreciate what we have, it also reminds us that, even if we lost it all, we’d still be able to cope just fine.
In The Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi has Daniel-San spend his first four days of training waxing his cars, sanding his floors, and painting his house. As Daniel-San is about to quit in frustration, Mr. Miyagi reveals that what he’s really been doing all that time is not waxing, or sanding, or painting, but perfecting the basic blocking motions, which are fundamentally important in karate.
The basics are never sexy.
In the sushi world, apprentice chefs don’t touch fish for months after they begin training. Instead, they do nothing but make rice. The reason is obvious, if you’ve ever eaten bad sushi: if the rice isn’t good, it doesn’t matter what else you do. You can’t have great sushi without good rice.
We seem the same problems in virtually every other field. In math, if kids don’t fully and deeply understand the basics, they won’t ever be able to do the higher level work that comes later on. In medicine, if you don’t really understand the basics of anatomy, you’re never going to be a doctor. If you don’t know how to read a decision, you’re never going to be a lawyer. If you don’t know how to properly structure a sentence, you’re never going to be a writer.
Too often, we skip ahead to the next step, without putting in the time to get good enough at the important thing.
What would you do if you got rejected, not once or twice, or even a dozen or two dozen times? What would you do if got rejected 60 times?
Kathryn Stockett decided she was going to succeed, no matter what:
A year and a half later, I opened my 40th rejection: “There is no market for this kind of tiring writing.†That one finally made me cry. “You have so much resolve, Kathryn,†a friend said to me. “How do you keep yourself from feeling like this has been just a huge waste of your time?â€
By rejection number 45, I was truly neurotic. It was all I could think about—revising the book, making it better, getting an agent, getting it published. I insisted on rewriting the last chapter an hour before I was due at the hospital to give birth to my daughter. I would not go to the hospital until I’d typed The End. I was still poring over my research in my hospital room when the nurse looked at me like I wasn’t human and said in a New Jersey accent, “Put the book down, you nut job—you’re crowning.â€
It got worse. I started lying to my husband. It was as if I were having an affair—with 10 black maids and a skinny white girl. After my daughter was born, I began sneaking off to hotels on the weekends to get in a few hours of writing. I’m off to the Poconos! Off on a girls’ weekend! I’d say. Meanwhile, I’d be at the Comfort Inn around the corner. It was an awful way to act, but—for God’s sake—I could not make myself give up.
The important lesson here isn’t that persistence pays off. It usually doesn’t. Not if you define persistence as “continuing firmly or obstinately in a course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition” or “specific, habitual behavior”. If you persistently bang your fist against that stone wall, eventually you might break through. The problem is, there aren’t that many stone walls left in this world. The things you want to do likely can’t be accomplished through brute force.
Kathryn didn’t succeed because she shotgunned out the same book out to 60 agents. Brute force wouldn’t have been any help here. As she says, she was constantly rewriting it, tweaking it here, changing it there. She didn’t call the gatekeepers morons because they didn’t recognize her obviously blinding genius. She took the criticism. She took it and she busted her ass to make her book better.
She succeeded because she committed to making her book as good as it needed to be to get published.
When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world; try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life.
Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact: everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
There is no child on the planet who is afraid of the dark.
They’re afraid of not being able to see what’s around them. They’re afraid of the unknown.
We all are.
While fear of pain drives us to act immediately, to avoid a flame or a bear, fear of the unknown drives us at an even more basic and fundamental level. Nobody is really afraid to lose their job. They’re afraid of not knowing how they’re going to support their families. They’re afraid of not knowing where their next rent payment is going to come from. They’re afraid of not knowing what’s going to happen; if worse comes to worse, are they going to be able to afford to eat in six months? What if they get sick? What if, what if, what if.
This fear is so deep seated that it’s not surprising what kind of stories we’ve invented about the biggest and most certain unknown: death. Stories so vivid and revered that people structure their days to worship them, craft their personas and lives around them, and make themselves miserable following them. All because they desperately want to know what’s going to happen.
This fear seems totally backwards.
If we’ve trained ourselves to imagine monsters in the closet, or financial ruin as the result of being fired, or eternal torment as a result of pretty much anything humans do naturally, certainly we can train ourselves to do the opposite. To imagine a muse who whispers great ideas to us from under our bed, or financial opportunity when we get fired, or eternal bliss as the natural end of all of this. All we have to do is change our perception.
Think about it this way: when has an actual unknown ever had disastrous, long-term consequences in your life? The answer is probably never. Whatever has happened, you’ve somehow made it through. Since that’s the case, and that will certainly continue to be the case, there’s no real reason for most of us to fear the unknown. Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it and make it through to the other side.
If we perceive these unknowns as opportunities, as adventures, as experiences, imagine how much more free we’d be.
Remember when you were in 8th or 9th grade? King of middle school? Big man on campus? Remember what happened just a short year later?
Back to the bottom of the totem pole.
You were no longer bigger than all the other kids. You weren’t the most talented or the smartest. You didn’t know anything about the new world you were in. All the Juniors and Seniors got the girls. But slowly, you grew up and got faster and bigger and smarter. Soon enough, you were a Senior. King of high school. Big man on campus.
But then it happened again. Back to the bottom of the totem pole.
Whether you went to college or started working straight away. You were no long bigger than all the other guys. You weren’t the most talented or the smartest. You didn’t know anything. All the Juniors and Seniors, or managers and bosses, got the girls. But slowly, you grew up. You learned the ropes; you got smarter and bigger and faster. Soon enough, you were a Senior, or a great, seasoned employee, or whatever.
And then it happened again. You graduate and enter the workforce, or go on to get an advanced degree, or you get promoted. All the sudden, you’re in a new world yet again. And again you’re small, and slow, and dumb, and feel awkward.
If you’re smart, this will happen to you over and over and over again throughout your life. If you’re good, there will never be a point where you can say, well, I’m done learning, I’m done hustling, I’m done scrapping. You’ll constantly be adding new skills, mastering new things, and taking on new challenges. And anytime you take on new challenges, you’ll be starting at the bottom.
So, get rid of the fantasy of becoming big man on campus and then coasting the rest of the way. Ironically, if and when you make it there, the only way to stay is to keep going back and starting at the bottom.
You only get about 30,000 days, if you’re lucky. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably got less than 20,000 days left.
That’s if you’re lucky.
You might get cancer; you might have a heart attack or a stroke; you might just get cleaned out by a bus when you’re crossing the street, or a drunk driver when you’re on the way home.
Rather than let this thought scare you, embrace it. What are you going to do to maximize that remaining time? How are you going to wring as much as possible out of each one of those remaining days? What’s your goal? How are you going to make it happen?
Plans, the individual steps you think you’re going to take to accomplish something, are good. But, plans have this nasty tendency to fail pretty regularly. One of the steps just wasn’t feasible, or other people don’t do what they’re supposed to, or options that were once open close, or any number of things get in the way. Life always gets in the way.
Goals are better. Goals, or missions, or destinations, or whatever you want to call them, survive when the plan fails.
If Step 4 of your eight-step plan goes to shit, it’s easy to give up. It’s easy to say your plan was bad, or that you’re not cut out for it, or that the goal itself was impossible. But the plan and the goal aren’t intertwined like that. Maybe your plan was bad. Maybe it was impossible to execute as designed. That doesn’t have anything to do with the ultimate goal. It just means you’ve got to figure out a new plan.
Always be mindful of the goal, not bound up in the plan.
Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions — not outside.
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Book 9 ¶ 13
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