Welcome back. This week I want to look at a theme that goes by many names, one that I’m certain you’ve discussed and read about before:
Raising your expectations for yourself, and getting better results, more frequently, in the process.
It seems reasonable enough to say that a higher standard of living is synonymous with better quality of life.
It also seems reasonable enough to say that making improvements in one’s overall quality of life is difficult for many.
The reason for this difficulty, in my view, has to do with a distinction that was touched upon in last week’s article: the exception on the one hand, and the rule on the other.
People who get swept up in new year’s resolutions, who make a sudden push in January only to find themselves right back where they started by March, have demonstrated that they see the better behaviors as exceptional, for example.
Therefore, going with this framework, a person who successfully makes changes is a person who rewrites the rules.
Today, then, I will lay out both the process and the mentality by which one rewrites their own rules for the better.
A bit of trite verbiage if you will: exceptional people are not making exceptions, but playing by the rules. They take the rules very seriously – much more seriously than those who are frustrated and underperforming. Said another way, the winners, the people we rightfully admire, have the strongest command of the fundamentals, and therefore the strongest foundations.
I want to lay out some of these fundamentals now, and I intend to do so a bit rudely. Rudely, because rudeness is necessary: people do not change unless and until they can no longer afford to remain where and as they are.
My rudeness is the rudeness in saying YOU’VE GOT TO WAKE UP as you’re sleeping through your alarm the day of the big job interview. From rudeness with love.
Rule Number One: results must be delivered
Let’s begin with an anecdote. Plutarch, famed Greek philosopher, historian, essayist, and priest (at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, the site of the famous inscription, “know thyself”), compiled many of the famous sayings of both named and unnamed Spartans, who were notorious for their terse and acerbic wit.
For example, when asked to come and hear a singer who could perfectly mimic a nightingale, a Spartan declined by merely saying, “I’ve heard the bird.”
The particular quotation that concerns me right now, however, is attributed to Eudamidas:
When told that an old man was “a wise old man and one of those who search for virtue,” Eudamidas replied, “and when will he make use of it if he is still searching for it?”
It is easy to say one is studying something, seeking something, or working on something. These days, we hear people say that they are working on themselves, trying to learn patience, or, god help us, trying to learn humility.
Remember the piercing question of Eudamidas: when will he make use of it?
In other words, does someone who thinks of himself as a seeker also expect himself to find and utilize the thing being sought? In my experience, the answer is a resounding “no.”
To self describe as “seeking” is dangerous: it normalizes incompetence. It normalizes falling short. It’s okay to not be there yet, because you’re “working on it,” you’re “trying,” and you’re, worst of all, “doing your best.”
If searching is the rule, acquiring and utilizing is the exception. Results are the exception. This is the definition of mediocrity.
And, it is more than merely mediocre: it is ignorant. One acquires not by seeking, but by doing. Some examples, to better make this distinction:
Suppose I see someone who is remarkably strong physically. I don’t seek strength, I do things that require strength. I increase the demand for strength, by lifting weights, and the strength is supplied. I eat more, I sleep more, I drink more water, and I religiously avoid anything that diminishes the efficacy of my efforts. I don’t seek strength, I exercise the strength I have, and consume the resources necessary to produce more of it.
Suppose I listen to an interview with an author like Robert Greene, and wish I was as knowledgeable, well spoken and as well read. How would I seek those qualities? By reading more books, writing more often, and having more conversations with more people about the sorts of ideas that interested me. Where is the seeking in this? I see only the exercise of one’s capacity, and the resultant expansion of capacity.
Finally, what does being a better musician mean to me? Does it mean searching for better musical ideas and hoping to one day find and execute them? No. It means parting ways forever with this kind of mousey modesty, and being ever more assertive: writing more songs, spending more time practicing them, recording them more frequently, giving more direction in rehearsals, spending more time listening to music that exemplifies the qualities I wish to promote in my own, and applying more scrutiny to what I’m hearing, rather than merely enjoying what I’m doing.
In short, it means demanding results and delivering them, without exception. Let go of the notion of searching and hoping, and take up the way of having and using. Whatever it is you have right here and now, resolve to extract the maximum use from it on a daily basis: you will inevitably discover that this is the means by which you find whatever you were previously seeking.
Rule Number Two: have only the highest regard for yourself
I here exhort you to redraw your entire cosmology: you do not possess original sin, and you are not awaiting salvation. What you possess, rather, is tremendous potential that must be realized at any and all costs. Think of yourself less as someone trying to find his or her way in a vast world and more like a child of royalty placed prematurely on a throne: the role for you is the role before you now, and you must only grow into it.
Again, there is nothing for you to seek: you are here now, and there is a life for you to live right here and right now. Seeking negates having!
Redraw your cosmology: the sun, the sky, the steady passing of time that exposes the consequences of all actions, the people who brought you into this world and the others who educated and mentored and befriended and challenged you – all of this is an endorsement of your existence, confirmation that you are here, that you belong here, that space is made for you wherever you go. Even and especially when others disagree, resist, or reject my ideas, this only proves I am a force that must be contended with, must be answered and countered in some way by others.
Until you are prepared to grant this much, and to take it to be the normal state of affairs, you will always be wondering about and seeking to establish or convince yourself of what is actually nothing but the backdrop of all life, the simple fact of your existence.
Grant yourself some importance, some respect! Not in an egotistical sense, but in the sense that there is important work that awaits its completion by your hands, and it will not settle for another’s.
In the words of the Tao Te Ching, “why should the Lord of Ten Thousand Chariots act lightly in public?” You do so little, try so feebly, adhere so inconsistently, because you believe it doesn’t matter anyway. You matter to the extent that you treat yourself like something that matters.
As for me, I wrenched my life from the jaws of self defeating ideas and decided to claim as much meaning as I possibly could from the time that remains, and I will continue until some insurmountable force appears before me to say: this is it, there is no more knowledge, no more insight, or accomplishment, or improvement, or understanding, or maturity, or contribution, or love and companionship and friendship and cooperation and collaboration for you to partake of. There is a ceiling, and this is it.
Are you where you are because some such force has appeared before you, like Christ at the Mount of Olives, or are you simply not even trying?
The wise seeker knows,
That the fruit of my endeavor
Shall be commensurate
With the intensity
Of my own self effort,
AND NO FATE NOR GOD
SHALL ORDAIN IT OTHERWISE.
Vasistha’s Yoga, trans. Swami Venkatesananda
Rule Number Three: embrace hatred.
We return again to my beloved Spartans, conveyed to me by the pen of Plutarch.
Before I reprint and expound on a series of pungent quotations, however, I should back up and justify what appears to be an unjustifiable, even irresponsible use of words: embrace hatred.
It’s not what you have, but how you understand and utilize it that matters. To the determined, resourceful person, anything and everything can be and is employed toward the end of perfection: of oneself, one’s life, and one’s every undertaking.
If you were short, should I tell you, “don’t bother, shorties can’t win?” Should I tell you the same if you’re a woman, an ethnic minority, or someone attracted to the same sex? Should I say that something about you disqualifies you from the contest altogether? No. I should say, learn to play by the rules, as skillfully as you possibly can, built in handicaps notwithstanding, and you’ll receive whatever marks you earn fair and square.
This extends to attributes of the psyche as well. If you are loving and kind, you can win. If you are cunning and competitive, you can win. And, I dare to say it, if you are hateful, you can win.
To reiterate: what disqualifies you is a violation of the rules, or what you do. Not who you are or how you feel.
I believe this is clear enough.
Another concept we are going to need: the yin and yang symbol as a model for a binary system. A world of black and white opposites, but not so rigorously segregated as “black and white” implies. A little bit of black in the white half, a little bit of white in the black half, creating balance within each half, rather than balance existing “on the whole.” The Yin and Yang Binary represents the appropriate integration of opposing energies at the local level, not merely at the level of abstraction.
This matters, because nobody actually lives in the average household, with the average family and income and budget and back problems: we only occupy the particular, which merely contributes to a sense of what is average. “Average” as a data point does not truly exist.
Why say all this? Because hate has a place in your life at the local level. It isn’t simply the case that all the perfect woke coastal snow angels of love and empathy have to balance out the hateful idiots in fly over states – YOU have to strike the appropriate balance between love and hate within yourself.
This is impossible if you cannot admit to being in possession of hatred.
Back, then, to the Spartans.
“When asked how one should remain a free man, [Agis, song of Archidamus] said, “by despising death.”
“Questioned as to how he gained his great reputation, [Agesilaus] said, ‘by having despised death.’”
“Certainly when somebody asked what gains the laws of Lycurgus had brought Sparta, [Agesilaus] said: ‘contempt for pleasures.’”
When someone was asking [Cleomenes son of Anaxandridas] why the Spartans do not dedicate the spoils from their enemies to the gods, he said: ‘because they come from cowards.’”
“As some Athenian was reading a funeral eulogy in praise of men killed by Spartans, [Ariston] said: ‘what, then, do you think was the quality of our men who defeated them?’”
A picture has surely emerged, by now, of the sort of hatred I am referring to, so that we might finally understand what it means to “embrace hatred.”
A love of life that is given an intimidating ferocity by the attending hatred of death. A love of strength and vitality that is inseparable from a hatred of weakness. A love of victory that is tempered by a disdain for the evident inferiority of the defeated. A deep sense that some people are simply better than others, that superiority can be proven by contest, and that better people are entitled to more, and entitled to rule.
Said another way, Aristotle wrote in The Nicomachean Ethics that “an honorable man is a disdainful man.” I believe the meaning of this statement has been made clear enough by now.
It is not enough to like the idea of one day achieving something:
You must hate the thought of failure
Hate the thought of being right where you are now in another ten years,
Hate the thought of your parents or spouse or children making excuses for you,
Hate the thought of breaking the promises you’ve made to yourself and others,
Hate the idea of squandering your potential for the sake of episodic pleasantries,
Hate the idea of wasting your life.
When I start to falter on my path, an icy, humorless auditor within me rises up to scowl and cast a rigid index finger down like a punishing lightning bolt as if to say, get back up, get to work, and get it done.
I wish to close with a poetic representation of precisely this kind of wrathful contempt, embodied perfectly by Wallace Stevens in his poem Puella Parvula (Latin for “quiet little girl”). I can only say this so well, but Stevens says it perfectly:
Puella Parvula
Every thread of summer is at last unwoven.
By one caterpillar is great Africa devoured
And Gibraltar is dissolved like spit in the wind.
But over the wind, over the legends of its roaring,
The elephant on the roof and its elephantine blaring,
The bloody lion in the yard at night ready to spring
From the clouds in the midst of trembling trees
Making a great gnashing, over the water wallows
Of a vacant sea declaiming with wide throat,
Over all these the mighty imagination triumphs
Like a trumpet and says, in this season of memory,
When the leaves fall like things mournful of the past,
Keep quiet in the heart, O wild bitch, O mind
Gone wild, be what he tells you to be: Puella.
Write pax across the window pane. And then
Be still. The summarium in excelsis begins…
Flame, sound, fury composed… Hear what he says,
The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale.
In summary,
Part with excuses and demand results. Come to view results as normal, and lack of results as abnormal.
Hold yourself in the highest regard, and then ceaselessly demand that your behavior rise to meet your own standards.
Finally, you must have contempt for whatever is beneath you, that threatens you, that brings you down, that would seek to poison you and strip you of your sense of purpose, that would tell you you are unworthy of your aspirations and potential. Let that contempt become that which fuels you, like the mighty imagination that triumphs like a trumpet over the blaring elephant on the roof.
Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.
-Jas
Make Beautiful Choices 