Author Archives: Life In The Jazz Lane

I remember listening to a podcast by Glenn Loury (a professor of economics at Brown University) where he said that people don’t benefit from being given money as much as they benefit from “increasing their productive capacity.”

I think this is a profound insight, and something upon which I would like to expand here.

The basic subject of this newsletter is

How do I become a more action-oriented person?

How do I go from
waiting,
hoping,
fantasizing,
and pleading
to doing?

What needs to happen for me to make the fundamental shift of perspective from being in the stands to being on the court?

I started with the quote from Professor Loury because “productive capacity” is where the answer lies.

What do I mean by that?

When you center the matter of your productive capacity, everything falls into place.

When you scrutinize, encourage, promote, facilitate, and reward your ability to take action, your actions improve.

They improve in quantity, quality, and spirit.

The more you control and improve your actions, the more your results will satisfy you. By results, I mean the various states of affairs that constitute your life.

Your life is the breakfast you’ve just cooked for yourself. It is not a series of circumstances handed down by some higher power.

In Vasistha’s Yoga, an ancient book of Hindu Scripture of unknown authorship, Swami Venkatesananda’s translation (try saying that name five times in the mirror on a dark stormy night and see if you suddenly smell lamb korma), the following diamond of language is imparted to us:

“And the wise seeker knows:
That the fruit of my endeavor
Shall be commensurate
With the intensity
Of my own self-effort,
And no fate or God may ordain it otherwise.”

Dear reader, if you were to start every day, for the rest of your life, by saying those words, you would become an unstoppable force in no time.

Those words make up the mantra of the action-oriented person, the high agency person, the doer, the winner, the hero. To say there is no power in the world that can deny me the consequences of my actions is to center your productive capacity.

To be clear: of course there are circumstances beyond your control, that you did not choose and cannot change. It is my experience, however, that the only people who invoke such circumstances are those who do not take control of what can be controlled.

How to expand your productive capacity:

Step one: what to do when you don’t know what to do.

This could be an entire newsletter, or even an entire book: how to expand your range of behaviors to the point where nothing can cow you into passivity.

Being action-oriented does not mean that you always know what to do! Productive people do not have all the answers. But what they do have are go-to actions they deploy the moment uncertainty arises. Here are some of them:

Identify uncertainty.
If you can say, “I am unclear on this point,” you are already on the road to clarity.

Confusion has a flavor, so to speak. The moment you taste it, train yourself to stop. Stop, zoom in, and go back over whatever it was you were doing when that feeling hit you.

Maybe it was a word you missed, or misread, or didn’t understand.

Maybe someone glossed over a cluster of behaviors with an umbrella term, and you don’t know the composite parts it covered. Someone said “be more charismatic,” and you don’t know what that means.

You’ve gotten a few steps into a process and find yourself stalling, because you don’t know what to do next.

You have a problem that isn’t going away.

These are all forms of uncertainty. Whenever you don’t feel totally in control of yourself, or totally certain of what it is you’re doing, stop and interrogate the situation.

Uncertainty has two basic forms:

External: not knowing what something is.
Internal: not knowing what to do.

Confront uncertainty by naming it.

Whether you’re in a group or talking to one other person, as crazy as it sounds, you are allowed to say, “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.” You can ask people to repeat themselves, you can repeat back the part you didn’t get, you can politely request that someone elaborate. It’s totally okay.

When you’re not sure what to do next, the process is similar. Here you are, someone who doesn’t know something. The easy, sensible thing would be to ask somebody who does know. That could either take the form of reaching out to someone or, more likely these days, by using the Internet.

One of the beauties of the “information economy” is that for everything you might be curious about there are at least half a dozen other people with dedicated YouTube channels on the subject. How-to guides are not hard to come by.

Get in the habit of referencing them often, even out of idle curiosity (what do I have to do to a surface before applying primer? What special cookware do I need to make a souffle? How do I pronounce souffle?).

Another benefit of going online for how-to help is that you can often get individual steps broken down to the granular level. In some cases, this is as good having someone working with you one on one, if you are sufficiently determined.

When a form of mentorship is required, however, you can’t let your own inhibitions stop you. Find someone who does something well, and buy their time in some way. If this feels awkward for you, don’t worry: you can own the awkwardness. When you call or text, just acknowledge that you feel awkward making the request. Explain what you’re trying to do and why, and give some context, briefly, about how and where you’ve hit a wall in your own efforts.

In my experience, people are not just willing but happy to jump in there and solve a problem with someone – what’s draining is being asked to do something for someone who is themself passive.

Show me that you’re trying, show me where you hit a limit, show me the failed attempts to overcome it on your own, and I can really see that my presence here is necessary. I’m being called upon, not taken for granted, not the enabler of another’s laziness or entitlement.

The other big obstacle to taking action is the fear of making a mistake

Since this is a topic done very close to death in self development circles, I want to give a novel spin on it, if possible.

Live your life like you’re putting together a puzzle.

You’ve got all the pieces in front of you on a big table. You’ve got an image of what the completed puzzle looks like on the lid of the box to keep you going, but mostly what you’re doing is an endless series of trials and errors.

You’re always looking for the missing piece to expand on what you currently have, and the only way to find it is to try however many pieces that don’t fit as it takes until, all of a sudden, you find one that does. And then what? Off to look for the next missing piece, somewhere among the pile of unsorted pieces.

When you try a piece that doesn’t work, you don’t think to yourself, “oh no, I made a mistake.” You just think “this is not the right piece.” You drop it and resume your search. You trust yourself to recognize what two rightly paired pieces fitting together actually looks and feels like. You’re not in your head – you’re just trying things until something works.

Is there more to it than that? Of course there is. But you’ll never discover the “more to this than that” if you become discouraged and slow or even cease your efforts. Action is the source of results, and therefore action alone is the source of the information that gives rise to learning, adaptation, insight, and finally, wisdom.

The real mistake is quitting, not the mistake that makes you quit.

One last comment on this sub topic:

For the truly ambitious, imagine that you are starting something so big that it could not possibly be finished in one lifetime. Think of another person discovering your unfinished work and vowing to see it through. I think this way about the composers and poets that I cherish – that the questions that drove them are alive within me, disquieting me and driving me ever onward. Mistakes are inevitable, but quitting is inexcusable.

Last topic for today:

What to do when you make a serious mistake?

This is a separate question to answer, independently of the just do it ethos imparted above. After all, some things have a vastly narrower margin for error than others. Imagine a surgeon, a bomb squad technician, or a lifeguard having a flippant attitude toward mistakes, and just moving on to the “next puzzle piece” in the way I described above. No. Absolutely not.

The spirit of unrelenting effort and indefatigable optimism must never approach the sort of mania that makes someone indifferent to their mistakes. Care and precision are of the utmost importance. Not for the sake of your reputation, but for the sake of others. Everything you do is for someone. Not in a servile way, but simply in the sense that a verb has an object. A transitive verb. You do X to/with/for Y, do you not?

So, mistakes effect real people. Mistakes by definition expend resources unsuccessfully. Success must ultimately justify the cost of resources expended along the way (another reason why quitting is a serious decision).

Let me then arrive at a salient point:

If you want to stay in the game long enough to finally get it right and justify whatever it cost along the way, you must learn to own up to your mistakes. You must learn to acknowledge them by naming them, and, if necessary, describing them in detail, along with their causes, directly to the person or people impacted by them.

Let’s not sugarcoat this. This can be truly agonizing.

I know I was supposed to do X, and I did Y anyway.
I tried to do X and I failed, and Y was the consequence.
I didn’t ask for help or delegate it because I believe that I could do it.
I became distracted. I was preoccupied with Z.
I was emotional.

If you see what you should have done, outline that in equally clear detail. It really, really matters. Yes, it can be emotionally exhausting to do this. I’ve found that the stinging, burning discomfort of negative consequences, faced forthrightly, reforms behavior quickly and permanently. How many people have forgotten that you can’t touch a hot stove?

When you escape the pain, you escape the lesson, because the pain is the lesson. Bad things are bad because they cause unnecessary suffering. Good things often require momentary discomfort: experiencing each, fully, is how you discern the difference, and thereby come to make prudent choices on a consistent basis.

This point borrows from a central point of last week’s newsletter: it is madness to ignore your own knowledge. When you pay a high price for it, you tend to value it. Pain is a high price.

Tying it all together: why focus on obstacles, rather than actions?

This article promised a discussion of your productive capacity, and how to increase it. By now, it might appear that I have broken my promise.

Rather than give you the secrets to galvanizing yourself into motion, or the best way to collect data on your use of time, your effectiveness and efficiency, I’ve only discussed the ways to remove obstacles to the presumed instinct toward activity. Why?

Because responsiveness is innate. A tiger spends all day tigering. The tiger and its tigering-ness are one, inseparable, impossible to discuss as two different things. Being and doing are the same thing: a light shines. There is no coherent statement about something that is a light and then decides to go and do some shining.

And yet, somehow, people are lost in this navel gazing malaise.

Who am I?

Why am I here?

What should I do?

I submit to you that such thoughts are forms of illness, and you should manage them as one manages an illness: obliterate the cause, and witness a remission of symptoms. Get back to tigering, as it were.

You know what to do, in the sense that the you who is you, and the you who does what it is that you do are the same you. The interruption of this is madness.

You can walk fine – remove the thorn in your heel or the pebble in your shoe or the ill fitting shoe from your foot. Hence, I speak of the removal of impediments.

Responsiveness is innate.

You do wish to win daily and hourly,

you do wish to grow in skill, knowledge, and in the breadth of your behavioral repertoire.

You do wish to become more effective, subtle, at ease with yourself, and respected by others.

If the obstacles to your nature are removed, you need merely remain active in your own way over a long enough time for the desired results to come.

Begin by scrutinizing why you are insufficiently active. Begin demanding more.

Where are the results?

Where is the feeling of vigor, strength, mastery, and dominance?

Where are the big and small questions for me to answer, the missing pieces to find, the gaps in my knowledge, the thing that will soon need maintenance, repair, or replacement?

Where is the flow of inspiration, the bright ideas, the synthesis of carefully gathered information?

Where is the trash heap of discarded dogma, superstition, and fanciful nonsense?

Interrogate, interrogate, interrogate: your mind will confess soon enough.

Welcome, dear reader. Today’s letter is a bit different. The first attempt at what I intend to make into a tradition – publishing a “year in review.”

Here, then, are a handful of ideas I’ve encountered over the last twelve months that have impacted my life in a positive and meaningful way. As you will see in a moment, I’m going to take a single event, or a singular process I concluded during this year, and extract some meaning from it that I think is worth sharing.

Let’s begin.

Pursuing a goal can reveal the impossibility of the same goal.

I had mentioned in a previous newsletter that much of the positive changes that I made in the last few years were spurred on by a breakup. For many people, men especially, I imagine, this is a familiar story.

In this case, I set about making these changes, with increasing diligence and resolve as time went by, because I fully expected to “get back together” with the woman I’d been involved with. There were reasons for my expectations, and they are, obviously, private.

The point is that, eventually, it became evident that not only was this outcome unlikely to be fulfilled, but it was undesirable as well. This isn’t a gossip column, so I’ll leave it at that.

You might think that sounds like a bad thing. Yes and no. It hurt, it was disappointing, and it was terribly disillusioning. But it was some of the most productive discomfort I’ve ever experienced.

I ceased my pursuit and moved on, thereby closing a chapter of my life and turning it into something I could process and come to understand. It was not pleasant, or easy, but it was clearly the only right, sane, and dignified path for me.

The way I visualized it at the time was that I was climbing a mountain to reach some kind of shrine or pilgrimage site. I toiled upward, leaving a great many things behind me, and progressing into hitherto unknown terrain, and becoming quite a different person in the process.

When I reached the summit, so to speak, it became evident that the very notion of a shrine awaiting me at the top (the rekindling of this specific relationship with this specific person) was itself among the many things I had outgrown during the climb.

It’s not that there was nothing waiting for me at the top of the mountain; it just wasn’t anything like the thing I’d held in my mind and used as a driver to keep me going. The idea had served its purpose, but ceased to function in my life in a positive and constructive way the moment I reached the summit. To switch metaphors, it would be like pursuing a mirage that, while illusory, still took you in the right direction.

If that sounds dramatic, or far fetched, or hyperbolic, what can I say? I do, indeed, experience life on the kind of scale implied by the language I use.

There are many, many lessons tied up in the experience I’ve just described, and I’m going to explore some of them now.

1.
If you undertake a transformative goal, you will transform beyond the ideas that sparked the transformation, and part of you will have died. Imagine yourself as a butterfly, and mourn the death of the caterpillar that was once you. Mourn, grieve, and let go.

2.
Here’s a controversial and counterintuitive statement for you. It was supremely helpful to think of myself as unworthy of something that I had placed above myself. This goes directly against so much of the self empowerment rhetoric you hear these days.

I believed I had lost something because of my personal moral failings, and that the only solution was to grow in character.

With everyone telling you you’re perfect the way you are, suggesting positive affirmations and positive self-talk, there is much ambiguity about what it means to try to get better.

The truth is, yes, I did need to become a better person. I needed to place an ideal over myself, and strive toward it. For a time, I housed that ideal in the approval of a specific person. I do not recommend this, in the sense that if you were to have a menu of “possible motives for doing something,” I am not saying “pick ‘winning the approval of your ex girlfriend.’”

However, this is where life gets messy. If the caterpillar is destined to become a butterfly, this does not mean that it is somehow better off skipping the caterpillar/chrysalis stage. This is, pardon me, fanciful nonsense.

Nature knows naught of should, only is. The truth is, yes, I made this notion of someone else’s acceptance and approval and love into the chrysalis that dissolved the caterpillar so that it could become a butterfly.

(Dear reader: perhaps, one day, you, too, will be so comfortable with your masculinity that you can liken yourself to a butterfly with a mostly straight face. Do dare to dream.)

3.
The lesson here? You do not, in reality, choose your motivations. You discover them, or run from them. You leverage them, or you suppress them in judgment. I would submit to you that I succeeded because I embraced the motivations I actually had, even if I knew them to be flawed as I was leveraging them.

4.
Another lesson: do not disavow something when you outgrow it. I do not read at a kindergarten level anymore. I also do not disavow my time in kindergarten. I did not disavow my baby teeth when they fell out. Such behavior would be impossible to take seriously. Yet, how often do we deny our previous selves, rather than own them, integrate them, even proudly declare them?

I achieved something of which I am proud, and I corrected my course in life, galvanized by beliefs I could no longer hold today. Maturity is looking at that dynamic with understanding and acceptance.

5.
Let me say a little more about the nature of this “understanding and acceptance.” The measure of a journey is the distance traversed. The degree of change that has taken place. When Lao Tzu says, two stanzas before the famous line, that “a tree great as a man’s embrace springs from a small shoot,” he is making the point I am making now:

The most remarkable thing about that great tree is the smallness of its beginnings – the very idea that something can change that much.

So, to hide the fact that you were once a piece of coal is to miss the thing that really makes being a diamond incredible.

Do not look back and wish you had been different.

I’ve heard many, many people, mostly guests on podcasts who think they’re older than they actually are, talk about their younger selves. They reflect on the anger that used to drive them. Hating where they were at, being mad at their fathers, wanting to prove themselves to the world or to someone in particular.

These conversations always include some words of caution about using “the dark side of the force,” warning people not to use negative emotions for motivation and drive.

Forgive me, but this is a combination of amnesia and hedonic adaptation (taking your current state to be normal).

“I wish I hadn’t been so angry” smacks so much of the butterfly wishing it had never been a caterpillar.

The fact that you now know something shouldn’t turn into the idea that you somehow could have always known it, and yet, inexplicably, you failed to realize it for years.

It is not inexplicable that it took you so long. It is not baffling that you used to be immature, petty, resentful, philandering, ungrateful, spiteful, wasteful, and lost.

Something has to turn a coal into a diamond, a caterpillar into a butterfly, a seed into a tree, a fool into a sage.

Is it becoming of a sage to be confused, even deluded about the arduous journey the fool miraculously traversed to arrive at last at wisdom? No. A sage knows the way. If nothing else, a sage understands exactly this process of change that stands as the bridge between two disparate states. This is the entire basis of the value of his example: change is possible, so says the changed man before you now.

How does the sickness of ignorance truly end?

The seventy first chapter of the Tao Te Ching reads as follows:
–
Knowing ignorance is strength.
Ignoring knowledge is sickness.

If one is sick of sickness, then one is not sick.
The Sage is not sick because he is sick of sickness.
Therefore he is not sick.
–

You could remind yourself of that every day for the rest of your life. That’s how important those words are.

“The sage is not sick because he is sick of sickness.” Sickness is here defined as “ignoring knowledge.”

Wisdom, therefore, is the absolute refusal to tolerate the act of ignoring what one in fact already knows.

People who are halfway wise, then, see that they did know the truth all along. The missing half is the recognition that while they may have known it deep down, they ignored it.

If you just stop at the realization that, “oh, I knew it all along,” it feels good, but it doesn’t last. It doesn’t last because it is inadequate.

It is inadequate because it doesn’t address how someone who supposedly “knew it all along” came to be mired in folly, and in failing to address it, ensures that folly will once again take hold.

How many people can say, in absolute sobriety, yes, I knew it all along, and I ignored it? Who can say, I did the stupid, shallow, selfish, destructive, deplorable thing anyway, even though I knew better?

It takes knowledge of ignorance to say this! And that is strength. The most difficult thing in the world to own up to is the ignoring of one’s own knowledge, because to do so is to truly be sick. Who has the courage to own this?

Wisdom, then, is two things simultaneously:

1.
Knowing that you don’t know everything. Recognizing when you are at the limits of your own knowledge, and not pretending to have something you don’t have.

2.
The refusal to let any real knowledge go unutilized. To be in a perpetual state of accountability to one’s own conscience.

And one becomes willing to hold oneself in a state of perpetual accountability because of having become sick of sickness. Sick of being unaccountable to one’s conscience.

In closing,

Rather than wish you the usual feel good feelings, which I do of course wish you, I will you something more:

That you become downright sick of playing below your level.

I wish for you to own what you know, and own that you used to pretend that you didn’t know. I wish for you to embrace the parts of your life that aren’t Instagram worthy, or that don’t sound like good advice on some podcast but are actually true and useful.

Be a real person, live a real life, admit that you already know how, that you always did, and that you are sick of ignoring your own knowledge.

Thank you for reading, talk to you soon.

-Jas

My dear reader, come with me to the world of make believe.

You’re driving along a familiar street, heading home from work. In the middle of making a left turn, your phone rings. You look down toward the center console to see who it is, but just as you’re making out the name, you hear the honking of another driver’s car horn. You look up, in sudden shock, just in time to see the car with which yours is now colliding.

Nobody’s hurt, but both cars are banged up and will need repairs. You’re rattled, the other driver is angry, and there are now onlookers holding up their phones.

What’s going through your mind right now?

You already know what it is:

If only I hadn’t looked down at my phone.

Why did I do that?

If I’d simply waited until after I’d completed the turn to check it, none of this would have happened.

Whether or not you’ve been in this scenario, you’ve done something that’s triggered an almost identical cascade of thoughts.

Maybe it was something you said during a first date, or an argument, or a job interview. Maybe it was caused by something you didn’t do – forgetting a birthday, the right answer for an exam question, a good point you meant to make in an online newsletter (hey now), or, I don’t know, forgetting to properly close the only door standing between your cat and the Christmas tree before you left for work.

We’re describing a specific form of mental activity, and it has a name: counterfactual thinking.

A concise definition from RMJ Byrne, in Rational Imagination: how people create alternatives to reality (2005) reads,

“Counterfactual thoughts are mental representations of alternatives to past events, actions, or states.”

The study of counterfactuals goes pretty deep, and has a highly technical, mathematical side that deals with probability equations, and is used to create, among other things, software for Poker games.

I say this to drive home the point that when you and I engage in idle thoughts of what might have been, we are, in those moments, as we so often are, standing at the tip of an enormous iceberg.

Creating an alternative version of reality in one’s mind, and taking the alternative versions seriously, can affect our lives in profound ways.

An oft-referenced example is the person who comes in second place in a competition. Suppose there are three finalists, gold, silver and bronze.

The gold medalist is the happiest, unless he has a psychiatric condition. The second happiest person is…. Silver? Nope. Actually, the bronze medalist is happier than the silver medalist. He or she feels great about making it all the way to the top 3 finalists, and is probably looking at his or her performance in a very complimentary light.

Silver, however, is just one or two better decisions away from the gold, and this is maddening. Instead of enjoying a victory over all but one competitor, the silver medalist is sunk in regrets over having fallen short of the ultimate victory.

This is counterfactual thinking spoiling what should be a proud moment.

There are more serious examples. Parents who lose a child to the reckless driving of a third party, where their own child had no fault at all, nonetheless blame themselves in their counterfactuals, not the drunk or distracted driver.

And you can see, counterfactual thinking not only has the power to rob you of deserved feelings of accomplishment, but it can also compound your suffering.

More commonly, counterfactual thinking can send people into spiraling thoughts, also known as “beating yourself up.” Commonplace exchanges can provoke people to loop the event in their mind, mulling it over, imagining alternatives, and feeling worse and worse as it goes on.

One example of this might be passing by a friend or coworker and seeing them fail to greet you in the customary manner. You start to wonder what’s going on. Asking yourself if maybe you’d done something wrong, or wondering if he or she is actually harboring negative feelings toward you.

So, replaying the past can cheat you of the good times, worsen the bad times, and burden everything in between.

What do we do about this?

Let’s start with the example of the silver medalist.

Think in terms of “next time.”

I’m a musician. I play electric guitar, and acoustic guitar when an electric is unavailable. I also compose music. When I was at UCLA, there was one quarter when I was enrolled in three composition courses. I was required to submit four completed pieces of music each week, for ten weeks. That’s a lot.

If I was going to meet my deadlines, consistently, there was no room for hesitation, only execution. Rather than slow down to get everything just right, I did the best I could and addressed what would have been regrets toward the future. When I invariably saw things I wish I had done differently, I used the next assignment and an opportunity to do what I should have done.

You cannot change the past, but you can honor the past, and your feelings about it, by creating a future that demonstrates a mastery of the past’s lessons.

Whatever it is that’s not sitting well with you about your last performance, take those feelings seriously. Don’t let them sink you into a depression, but pick up those feelings and carry them into the future. Invest them into future actions: identify the next opportunity you have to do a similar action, and use it. Make the better choice, employ improved skills.

Taking this seriously means putting pen to paper.

Do I know what to do differently next time?

Am I capable of doing that?

If not, what skills do I need to learn in order to become capable?

Do I need to read a book, adopt a habit, break a habit, or raise my standards?

Who are the authorities on the relevant topic and what are their most popular or highly rated books?

I’ll take a page out of Patrick Bet David’s book and say that if you take a full year to read 20-25 books on a subject, all of which having over a thousand four star reviews on Amazon (as the determinant of whether or not to purchase it), you will be operating at a completely different level.

If you subscribe to the 10 best YouTube channels on the subject, and follow the Twitter accounts of the top authors, you will be digesting helpful information around the clock.

This is how you attack a problem seriously. This is how you change from idly wishing you had done a better job to being someone who is doing a better job.

Unless you believe that winners win by accident, you can study and copy the behaviors of winners and begin winning more often and by larger margins fairly quickly. But wishing is impotent. Action is everything. What I’ve laid out above will solve any deficiency in skill and make regret a thing of the past (see what I did there?).

Now, let’s move to the more serious example of experiencing a personal tragedy or trauma.

Because we’re not talking about performance of an iterative activity, there is no sense talking about skill sets, habits, and what to do next time. This is a matter of emotional coping: what’s done is done, and you need to heal.

This is a good time to remind you that I’m not a therapist, and this is a mere newsletter, not medicine or medical advice. If you think there is something in your life that requires the assistance of a professional, by all means go that route.

That being said, here are some tools that can help put the past behind you, and clear the path for the future.

Make sense of the past through writing.

Writing is different from other activities like speaking aloud or pondering in your head. It forces you to construe ideas in a logically coherent sequence. In a sense, you are decluttering your thoughts by making them conform to the demands of the written word. Just as no new objects are added, and no old objects are taken away, but an orderly room is a very different place from a disorderly one, so too is your mind a different place once your thoughts have been subjected to the rigor of writing. Embrace this process the same way you embrace basic habits of hygiene – this is mental hygiene.

In addition to journaling about the event, make deliberate plans with friends and family. Be in supportive environments. I put this after the exhortation to do journaling for a reason. If you make time for writing first, you won’t use your friends for therapy or for ruminative venting. Instead, you can have intelligent and productive discussions about what’s happening in your life, because you’ve already done a good deal of the work before meeting with them. They can help you see what’s in your blindspots, or simply show you by their presence that you’re not alone.

But, your own participation in your healing has to come first – leaning on others without doing everything you can to right yourself first is codependent behavior, and people with healthy boundaries will not respond well to that.

Make sure you’re being a good friend to yourself, and then let your friends be there for you.

Lastly, let’s discuss the idle counterfactual thinking that seems to randomly pop up and spoil the moment. The self defeating thoughts. The idea that the present is negatively constrained by the past.

I used to be terrible about this kind of thing. I used to think the solutions to my problems were all located in missed opportunities in the past. Wishing I’d been born with different genetics. Wishing I’d gone to different schools. Wishing I’d been parented differently. Wishing I’d worked harder and cared less about the approval of the opposite sex. Wishing I’d never discovered drugs and alcohol. And so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

Much of what I said about the silver medalist can be applied here. Goals in the future are a surefire way to draw your thoughts away from the past.

But, sometimes, deeper transformative work is necessary. I actually found that the reading of history books dramatically changed my relationship to the past, as well as my relationship to society and even to western civilization itself.

First of all, when you read history, you stop thinking about the little things, the arbitrary circumstances that could have been better. You are confronted with a mountain of worse. The past is nothing but a litany of worse circumstances. Poorer options. Lower likelihood of success, unimaginably greater likelihood of tragedy.

Specifically, I did a bit of reading into Greek history: Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Xenophon’s Hellenica, the histories of Herodotus, and Plutarch’s writings on Sparta.

One thing that happens really quickly? Your capacity for complaint dries up, like ice cream hitting a hot sidewalk. The majority of Xerxes’ army died of dysentery, dehydration, diarrhea, hunger, and weather exposure on the way back to Persia following the unsuccessful military campaign. For this reason, people were eager to die in battle: at least it was a good story. At least someone might mention it in the future. There are no heroic ballads about so and so shitting himself to death (pardon me) somewhere in central Asia.

Pick up a damned book (I just gave you four) and see for yourself how absolutely awful life was for absolutely everybody, even royalty. Go read about how Babylonians forced their women to sit in a temple until a man used a token that made him entitled to sex. The pretty ones got the ordeal over with quickly. Other women had to wait there for days on end until unenthusiastic and undesirable men got around to them. The women literally had to sit there, once in their lives, until a man approached them for sex. They couldn’t leave until then. Really think about the kind of world we’re talking about here.

Oh and no antibiotics, no vaccines, no central heating, no Neosporin, no sliced bread, no Radiohead, and no road head. Nothing but dirt and poverty and occasionally the discovery of the Pythagorean theorem.

I’m drumming this in, mercilessly, because the study of history absolutely disabuses you of the lunatic notion that there is something holding you back. The idea becomes utterly untenable. This commandment I place over you today: thou shalt read history!

One additional benefit I received from my studies was the sense of continuity: I am the inheritor of a long tradition, reaching back eons. A desire arose in me to fulfill my role in this long line. In my own way, and on my own terms, but in view of, and with reverence to, the unalterable record of the past. I saw that my own life would eventually become an unalterable record as well, and that it was in my hands. The pages of history are not filled with the names and deeds of people who gave up in the face of discouragement. It seems clear enough that there are great people, that there always have been, and that it is up to us whether or not there always will be.

I’m speaking this way not to indulge myself but to impart something of the mentality. Some problems can be solved by following steps somewhat mechanically. Others have to be solved by thinking of the world and of one’s self in a different way. Nothing changes your perspective more broadly and consequentially then the study of the past. Reading is how you control augmentations to your perspective. Recognize that power and utilize it to your benefit. Greedily and ruthlessly.

A final review before we conclude for today.

When you are ruminating over your own performance, think in terms of “next time.” Identify what is missing in your arsenal, in your behaviors, your knowledge, and your experience, and seize upon opportunities to reiterate. Do this in writing. Do everything in writing. Live and breathe the written word.

When you have suffered a tragedy or a traumatic experience, use writing to unburden your mind and to declutter it. Organize the experience in your mind using casual language. What caused the events? What emotions did the events cause in you? What realizations about life have been caused by the events and your response to it? Causal language restores order to your world.

Once you have the self regulation part down (the journaling), move to co-regulation: be with people. Let them know what’s happening in your life, and let them be there for you.

When it comes to more generalized feelings of if only, solve this by expanding your basis of comparison. Read a book! Podcasts and audiobooks are okay, of course. But I will never stop insisting on literacy. You will thank me one day. Eat your greens and stay in school.

The past can be either an obedient servant or an abusive master. Reading and writing is what makes the difference. Bringing order to your mind makes the difference. In just the same way that a cluttered room rules you, an orderly room serves you.

Make order out of chaos and be free of the past.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

Jas

As the song goes, “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.”

And what does this mean for most people? More time spent with immediate family, distant relatives, and family friends. Holiday parties. The kids are on winter break.

For many of us, the time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s is a time of maximum communal saturation: there is no other time in the year when we have this much contact with this many people.

Some people love it, some people hate it, and most people are presumably somewhere in the middle:

Yes, it can be a hassle,
No, it’s not always comfortable making smalltalk with people I otherwise never talk to,

But I wouldn’t really have it any other way.
And why not? Because there’s deliberate focus on togetherness, on gift giving, on ritual, on culture, and, actually, on happiness.

We’re exhorted, endlessly, ad nauseum, to be cheerful. I think this is good advice!

As someone who can tend excessively toward seriousness (I know this comes as a shock to many of you), I like that Christmas songs, and Christmas movies, are so insufferably upbeat. I like that they back you into a corner and force you to participate, to laugh and smile, and to see the good in yourself and others.

And, I like it because it works. Being asked, cheerfully, to cheer up, doing nice things for people who are also doing nice things for you – where’s the problem?

However, let’s just admit it:

it’s unsustainable.

It’s overkill.

It does stress people out.

We overeat, overspend, and often overly compare ourselves to others and feel as though we fall short of some abstracted ideal that very few people actually embody. People who expect the holidays to somehow make the rest of the year “worth it,” or to redeem their relationships, are a bit sad and naive.

The problems with the holidays come from excess, and the excess comes from its scarcity: the year culminates in these few days, and it’s inexcusable to squander it, the same way that it’s inexcusable to squander the summer.

But there’s a little glimmer of what might be possible for us if we were to make life feel a bit more special a bit more often.

With that in mind, we arrive at our subject for today:

How to better participate in your relationships and your culture year round.

How to extract the best of what “The Holidays” foist upon us, and consume that essence in digestible doses all year round.

Before I lay things out in prosaic detail, mostly in the form of dry instructions, a word of clarification about exactly what we’re after and why.

All of this, all the writing I do here, is about being a better person. A more happy, principled, purposeful person. I share these articles so that you might do what I do: create more structures in your life that tilt you in the direction of realizing your potential, and of truly becoming the person you, your parents, and your society hoped you’d grow up to be.

This is always and only about becoming someone the world would be proud of producing. That means cynicism cannot be tolerated. It means shallowness cannot be tolerated. It means you do things, not just talk about them as if you do. It means parting with your selfishness, with your facades, with your compensatory bravado, and committing yourself to goodness with the sincerity of a child.

All of this is to bring you to a place where you can say “peace on Earth, and goodwill toward men,” unironically, and have that mean something. We cultivate physical strength, intellectual rigor, and moral courage, so that we might resist the entropic forces of time, the death by a thousand cuts that see most people slide into complacency, mediocrity, and willful blindness. We do this so that we might one day be called good, and perhaps even remind others by our example that goodness is real, and goodness matters.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about how to use the coming year to more fully participate in our relationships and our society.

Part One: understanding and appreciating others.

The following exercise comes from The How of Happiness, by Sonja Lyubomirsky, with some minor modifications by me. Specifically, I’ve just expanded it into a 12 month program. Here it is.

Make a list of twelve people in your life. If you’re in a relationship, your boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife should be at the top. Then your parents, siblings, close friends, and so on. Twelve people who matter to you.

On a sheet of paper or a digital document, create a list going from January to December. Assign one name to each month.

Under each name, create a four item list, labeled, respectively,

Positive attributes
Positive memories
Charitable explanation
Shared values/beliefs/goals

So, here’s how it works. For each month, spend a little time once a week, really no more than 30 minutes, say, on a Sunday evening, writing about the important people in your life.

For week one, as the prompt suggests, just list off the things you like about this person. It could be anything, and nothing is too small or too private to write down. Nobody sees this but you.

For week two, recount a happy memory of this person. Again, this is fairly straightforward. Nothing fancy here, and there’s no trick to it. The trick is to actually do it, not just think about doing it and then talking as if you’ve done it (that’s a recurring theme).

Week three is the more difficult exercise. Recall a time when this person disappointed you, and make the most robust defense you possibly can for their actions. If this individual was on trial for this incident, think of yourself as the defense attorney, whose words are making all the difference. Really put yourself in someone else’s shoes, perspective, motives, and so on. Without distorting the truth one iota, offer a defense.

Week four is easier: talk about what you have in common. Avoid petty or superficial things. Talk about values, aspirations, and beliefs. In what ways does this person also have a bit of what makes you a special and worthwhile person?

The next month, repeat these steps for the next person on your list. And so on, until, by the year’s end, you’ve done these writing exercises for the twelve most important people in your life.

The purpose of this exercise is to make you more in touch with the humanity and the admirable qualities of the people in your life. What makes them lovable, valuable, and memorable to you.

You don’t need to inform any of them that you’ve been writing about them, but if doing so makes you want to call, or make plans, or do something nice for them, obviously, do so!

Something that has served me very well has been the decision to give more of myself to what is already present in my life. Not to seek newer and better but to give newer and better energy to what is already present. To observe more closely, to engage more deeply, to make more time, and to express more appreciation.

You will only be happier with yourself and your life if you invest this kind of good thoughtful energy into your existing relationships. Keep a journal as you go through this process, and consider sharing your results in the form of a social media post or newsletter like this one.

Step Two: culture matters.

Just as there’s more to being social than social media, there’s more to culture, to the arts, than what you’re probably streaming over Netflix and Spotify.

Let’s think back to our introductory discussion about Christmas. When I think of culture in that context, I think of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet. I think of artistic works that were labored over by tortured intellectuals with drinking problems, repressed sexual identity issues, terrible childhoods, and so on. You know, the formula for greatness.

Jokes aside, major holidays are also times when we are somewhat compelled to participate in culture: in things many find dry, but are deeply enriching if you can get over the aspects of it that are removed from our contemporary sensibilities.

I’ll confess a bit of my own personal bias: in my years of listening and reading, I’ve found that I very much resonate with things that come from the 19th century, or were raised on the works of the 19th century. Literature, poetry, classical music, nonfiction – I don’t wish to go back to another time, but most of what is truly dear to me, that I probably wouldn’t share with just anybody, was made in the hundred years spanning 1870-1970, give or take.

Why do I tell you this? Because, for this next exercise, I’m going to suggest that you participate in some aspects of culture that might be closer to my interests than yours. These activities occur once per month, so I’m going to ask you to suspend disbelief, withhold judgment, and keep an open mind. Try to be curious. If nobody showed up in your life to make fine art, drama, and orchestral music cool in your eyes, do allow me to do so now.

Here’s what I’m asking you to do:

Do a Google search for the best three art galleries in [name of your city]. Write them down. Do a Google search for the best three museums in [name of your city]. Find the largest theater in your city and bookmark their calendar in your web browser. Ditto for the local symphony. Once per month, visit these places in the following schedule:

Art galleries: January, May, September

Museums: February, June, October

Theatrical productions: March, July, November

Symphonic performances: April, August, December

Find someone you know who loves this sort of thing, and invite them with you. Or go alone. But go. You will be surprised how thought provoking this sort of thing actually is. As cliched as it might sound, going to places like these will expand your horizons. It puts you in touch with cultural traditions, with schools of thought, and with crafts that have been with us for a relatively long time. What you’re seeing when you go to galleries, museums, theaters, and symphony halls are the things that make Western civilization special, that not everybody has, and which have not been around for all of human history: the flowering of the human intellect and its creative, expressive capacity to a level of great artistry and mastery.

For those of you who are looking for a way to inject more meaning, more depth, and more appreciative contemplation into your life, the two programs outlined above represent a formulaic approach guaranteed to produce results. This might just be the thing you’re looking for. Or, even if you wouldn’t say anything is missing from your life, you could view these programs as a kind of fun experiment, just to see what happens.

As always, the results come to the doer, not to the non doer. Good luck.

Thank you for reading, talk to you soon.

Jas

This newsletter is going to start a bit differently. It starts, in fact, with a poem by Wallace Stevens. You’ll see why soon enough.

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm


The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.


Take a moment to let all that sink in.
Read it again. You can do that – this isn’t a race.

He’s describing a high state of attainment –
The reader became the book.
The summer night was like a perfection of thought.
The scholar to whom his book is true.

He paints a picture of a student, or seeker, craftsman, or practitioner who is totally at one with the craft itself: the words were spoken as if there was no book.

And yet, there is still the faintest indication of strain, of effort:

The reader leaned above the page.

Wanted much most to be the scholar to whom his book is true.

It’s the leaning above the page, in an attempt to lean into this final arrival at mastery, that concerns us today.

I’m going to grant the assumption that you want to become your own version of the reader described in Stevens’ poem: at one with your craft, whatever that is. Wherever your skill and fluency levels are now, you want to take them further. As far as you can.

And, you should want this for yourself. Engaging in highly skilled activities at an expert level makes you happy. Learning and growing makes you happy.

When you sufficiently challenge yourself to the point that your capacity grows as a direct result, you cannot help but become an optimist: you have hard evidence that progress is possible, and that you are capable of it. The future could theoretically be spent making progress in all kinds of ways, toward a goal or goals of your choosing.

A future filled with positive possibilities is a source of meaning, inspiration, and happiness.

As Stevens says at the end, “the truth in a calm world…is the reader leaning late and reading there.” The meaning of life is found in the expert striving at ever greater excellence.

In just a moment, I’m going to give you some strategies to enable you to cultivate higher levels of skill.

Before I do so, however, I want to get some unpleasant, sobering truths out of the way.

Yes, this has to be difficult.
No, this cannot be fun and easy.

Cal Newport, author of Deep Work and So Good They Can’t Ignore You (among others), clued me into a significant concept – the distinction between what is commonly called dopamine-driven motivation, and what I’ll call aspirational motivation.

Let me explain.

Dopamine is about immediate response to stimuli. I do this and it feels good: I’ll keep doing it. For the sake of brevity (yes, I’ve heard of it), we’ll leave it at that.

Notice anything about that framework? It feels good, so I’ll continue? It doesn’t account for the people who persist in unpleasant, even gruelingly difficult work for the sake of far off rewards.

Surely you don’t think that learning a foreign language, or writing on a highly technical subject, or lifting weights until you wish your parents had never met, or practicing an exceptionally unwieldy passage in a classical composition, or running long distances feels good.

I can tell you now: it does not feel good.
And yet, all of those activities can be totally absorbing.

I know that I’m doing something right when my brain feels like it’s about to snap as my eyes move over an especially difficult paragraph in a book, or when I find a way to make my hands play some passage from a piano sonata by Mozart on an electric guitar, or when I read through the sheet music of a solo by tenor saxophonist John Coltrane.

I know I’m doing something right when I’m not totally sure what to say or how best to say it but I continue searching my mind for the words, striving to advance a conversation, to make myself clear, to elicit further clarification from someone else, and to establish real understanding and agreement about what has happened and where we go from here.

It’s the exact same way my muscles feel when I’ve actually gone to failure:

I don’t know if this can go on for even one second longer, but let’s try to keep going.

Why do I know that means I’m doing something right?

Because this is how I know I am becoming “the scholar to whom his book is true.”

I know that the actions I am taking, and specific ways in which those actions are stimulating growth, are deeply connected to the fulfillment of my ideals.

This is what leaning above the page feels like: there it is, the abundant garden of knowledge, the shelter of expertise, the security of knowing oneself to be solid and competent, and all I have to do is enter into it.

Every moment spent at the limits of my capacity is a moment in which I grow stronger, smarter, wiser, and happier.

This is aspirational motivation: emulating the conduct of people I admire, even and especially when it means doing unpleasantly difficult things, because it advances me in the direction of the fulfillment of my values, not just my concrete objectives. Hyperbolic as it may sound, when I am struggling through something difficult in a literary or musical context, I feel as though I am fulfilling my destiny.

The way this actually works, in scientific language, is by tapping into Episodic Future Thinking, or EFT.

EFT is a fancy term for thinking about the future. Specifically, it means thinking about it with enough clarity that your brain interprets the imagined future scenario as something you’re about to do.

For example, if you imagine yourself standing at home plate, holding a bat, and a baseball hurtling toward you, can you visualize yourself swinging the bat?

Can you hear the loud crack of the wooden bat connecting with the ball?

Can you feel the shock of the successful hit hurting in your hands?

Can you see the ball shrinking as it goes up and away from you, and the uniformed members of the opposing team chasing after it on bright green AstroTurf?

If you’re a painter, imagine yourself walking someone through a gallery installation of your work. How many pieces are there? How big or small are they? How are they lit? What do they depict? How do the colors appear? How are these pieces made?

This is Episodic Future Thinking. According to an article by Jane McGonigal, there are 3 basic steps when you engage in EFT:

1. Scene Construction: using your memory and experience to construct as lifelike and detailed a picture of the imagined scenario as possible.

2. Opportunity Detection: what does the scene represent to you, and what actions are required to bring it about?

3. Emotional Response. If done properly, you’re going to feel feelings. These are just as real as emotions caused by actual events.

EFT is how you get yourself to do the difficult, necessary, and not necessarily dopaminergic activities that bring about the realization of your goals and ideals. Why? Because you see the future clearly enough to see the road you must walk to arrive there, and you experience the emotions that follow from doing so well enough to feel familiar with it. It becomes real in your mind.

In Cal Newport’s words, EFT motivation beats dopamine motivation. It simply comes from a deeper place, even physiologically: 11 regions of the brain are activated when it’s done properly. Read Jane McGonigal’s article on EFT here:

https://ideas.ted.com/mental-time-travel-is-a-great-decision-making-tool-this-is-how-to-use-it/

Finally,
FINALLY,
We can discuss how to actually work hard.

When you’re in step 2 of EFT, “Opportunity Detection,” the part of your brain called the putamen summons the right actions from your working behavioral repertoire. These are the actions that your brain believes to be causally linked to bringing about and fulfilling the scenarios you imagine.

Here are the requirements for effort that expands your capacity and moves you toward your better future self:

Work on more challenging material.

How do you know material is sufficiently challenging? Mistakes are inevitable, even when you try as hard as you can to avoid mistakes.

You should feel physically uncomfortable, and maybe even a little tickle in your brain.

If you know to aim for a palpable level of discomfort, to the point where you really have to struggle to maintain focus, then you won’t quit when that discomfort surfaces.

Even if you can’t endure it for longer than 30 minutes at a stretch, negotiate with yourself to try to do just a little more. Try to actually get to the end of your capacity to continue. Read about the Zone of Proximal Development to understand this better.

You need feedback on your work.

You are working beyond your current capacity in the interest of achieving things you have never achieved before: you are not the expert here. Expert feedback is critical.

Find people in your life who consume the sort of material you are trying to produce at an expert level. For example, I show my newsletters to people who have worked as counselors, who have been published, and who read the experts in my field. They will be honest with me, regardless of how it makes me feel.

You can and should use YouTube and Twitter/X to supplement this. Videos by people like Cal Newport, Alex Hormozi, or Dan Koe can be a valuable “reality check.” Similarly, you can change your life by simply watching five minutes of David Goggins YouTube shorts a day.

“Do something everyday that sucks.”
When David reminds you, you listen.

Rest and recover.

If you work hard, pushing yourself past your limits, striving to reach a standard modeled by an expert and professional, you will be exhausted. In some ways, you haven’t worked hard enough if you’re not exhausted. But hard work has to be followed by intentional rest.

Sleep is what allows your work to move into long term memory, where it eventually becomes muscle memory.

You do not need to perform more than 60-90 minutes per day of truly focused, intensely demanding work. Even world class performers recognize an upper limit of 4-5 hours per day.

Take breaks, refresh yourself, and sleep deeply for as long as necessary. Be kind to yourself.

In conclusion, I again encourage you to fall a bit more deeply in love with an ideal that inspires you.

For me, it is the scholar to whom his book is true, for whom the summer night is like a perfection of thought.

Where has your ideal best been expressed? Is it in a book, a poem, a movie, a painting, a song? Is it in the example of a historical figure, or a relative, a mentor, or a friend? Think about it. Find something that seems to embody greatness, and imparts a hunger for greatness to you when you think about it.

For me, I imagine myself climbing a staircase carved out of a mountain, leading to a kind of temple where Igor Stravinsky, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Claude Debussy, Wallace Stevens and John Coltrane are waiting for me, waiting for me to earn the right to be counted among them.

Who is it that will be there to welcome you?

Thanks for reading, talk to you again soon.

-Jas

It’s Monday morning, somewhere between 8 and 8:30am. Your phone just dinged to notify you that your Lyft/Uber is downstairs, and you’re heading toward the front door, quickly checking your pockets for your keys, phone, and wallet.

Your wallet.
Back pocket?
Empty.
Inside jacket pocket.
Empty.

You take off your bag,
open it,
rummage inside.
Not there.

Frustrated, you hurriedly brush loose papers off your desk hoping to spot the frayed black rectangle underneath.

Not there either.

Your phone dings to let you know that Edward will be departing soon.

You’re cursing out loud, and, at the last moment, you spin around to see, wedged between a bottle of dietary supplements that doesn’t belong on the bookshelf and the book that does, the little black Where’s Waldo.

Finally.

Maybe Edward is still waiting at the curb. Maybe you will get to work on time-ish. But you’re rattled. You’ve lost some degree of your composure, and the day is only starting. You haven’t even gotten to work yet, and you’re already feeling like you’re due for a break. You already feel somewhat defeated.

This is what it means to live with clutter. If you could relate to my anecdote, you’re far from alone.

Everyone loves to chew on some juicy statistics – it’s the intersection of math and gossip – so let me give you some alarming stats about clutter, courtesy of Kathy McEwan, who runs a professional decluttering service:

84% of Americans report being disorganized to the point of feeling stressed about it,

54% say that they are overwhelmed by clutter, and

78% have no plan for dealing with it.

25% are late for work because they can’t find a necessary item, and, get a load of this,

25% of people have incurred late fees because they can’t find the bill.

All because they have stuff that they use without putting away afterwards. Because they let things pile up instead of throwing them away. Because they buy more things than they can store properly, even if they did have the wherewithal to put them away promptly after each use. Not only do they (we, really) have more stuff than they can take responsibility for, they have more stuff than they actually use.

The oft-referenced Pareto distribution, more commonly known as the 80/20 rule, applies to possessions as well: we use the same 20% of our stuff 80% of the time. Or more. A great deal of what we have effectively serves no purpose but to get in the way of us accessing and utilizing and caring for the things we actually need.

I’m sorry but that’s just crazy. You know it and I know it – this is unhealthy and abnormal. If you’re anything like most people (you probably are, and that’s actually fine), you know damn well this is the case, and you’re probably a little embarrassed about it.

I go in waves with being on top of this myself. Some days are better than others. However, I’ve mostly gotten on top of this, and my bad days today are better than what my best days used to be. I’m gonna show you how to make a similar change in just a moment.

Before I go on, I want to clarify the issue of scope. What I’m not going to do today is make a case for minimalism. I’m not going to tell you that you should change the way you live, or change your value system.

I’m not here to criticize you for being “materialistic.” Material possessions can promote positive feelings of

comfort,
security,
ownership,
agency,
and convenience.

I embrace these feelings and I have nothing but gratitude for the physical possessions which impart them. My high minded books are just material possessions at the end of the day, just like my guitars. I didn’t always have them – I’m glad I do now.

But your possessions, the stuff contained within the walls of your home, should never be a source of stress.

What I’m going to advocate for today is that you accept a certain maintenance cost that you pay, with your time and energy, in exchange for your sanity: meaning, you keep your floors and desks and drawers tidy, and your home promotes mental health. The extent to which it falls into disarray is the extent to which your own domain, your own kingdom, silently militates against you, draining you of morale, focus, optimism, and your sense of agency.

Your home is supposed to recharge you.

I’m happy to say, even proud, if I may, that I live in a kind of heaven of my own making. I have a small but very orderly apartment filled with luscious green plants, books, paintings, musical instruments, and enough space to enjoy them. When I look across my room to see my guitars and plants resting on top of my amplifiers, all beneath an enormous printing of Breugel’s Tower of Babel, I see an environment that reminds me of who I wish to be, and continually steers me toward the fulfillment of those aspirations. It feels refined, elevated, comforting, and entirely of my own making. The kind of place you would see and say, “it totally makes sense that you live here.”

I said two important things there: it’s small, and I have enough space. Both those statements are true because I do not tolerate clutter. Am I perfect in my fastidiousness? No. But tidying up my home has become an activity that I regard in exactly the same way I regard showering, brushing and flossing, and grooming: these are the operating costs for starting and ending my day.

Keeping things clean and orderly keeps me feeling in control of my world. It makes me capable of seeing myself as someone with self respect, dignity, purpose, and poise. My life matters to the extent that I treat it like something that matters. The easiest way to do that is by cleaning, decluttering, and organizing.

Here’s what to do.

What follows now is a series of principles for you to adopt. Modify them as needed, and consider enlisting a professional if my advice is insufficient, but this should be a perfectly reasonable place to start for most people.

Daily, weekly, and monthly cleaning.

10-15 minutes of tidying up, every evening, should be sufficient to keep your home orderly. When you draft your written to do lists for each day, always include “tidy up” as the beginning of your evening routine. Put it in your calendar, set an alarm, and pick out music to put on as you clean. Some kind of lofi instrumental hip hop/electronica usually works wonders. Repetitive, soothing, crisp and hypnotic: that’s what usually gets me into the proper frame of mind.

Designate one day a week for laundry. Make this an invariable commitment. I never have that much laundry to do because I do it weekly like clockwork. Again, this is in my calendar, with notifications set to ding ding ding me into action.

Fold it the second it comes out of the drier. Make your sock and underwear drawer look immaculate. You will be immensely pleased with yourself.

Twice a month, wash all your bedding.
Once a month, vacuum everything.
Once a month, clean all glass surfaces and doorknobs.

What if this isn’t enough?

If you implement this weekly, biweekly, and monthly cleaning and decluttering schedule, it should feel good to spend time at home.

Another thing that should happen if you follow this program is the recognition that more is needed.

If you pursue your interests, grow and evolve, you’ll probably collect more possessions as a result, directly or indirectly. I’m quickly amassing more books than I have space for, and it won’t be long before I have to purchase another bookshelf.

You probably have a similar situation on the horizon. There is only so much that tidying, organizing, and routine cleaning can accomplish: you may need a hardware upgrade.

Perhaps, before you move on from reading this article (thank you, by the way), you might take a moment to acknowledge the nature of the next purchase you will have to make, and even begin browsing on Amazon (or equivalent) now.

Procrastination breeds self contempt.

Contempt and Gratitude: the two wings of the orderly bird.

Life is about more than merely following prescribed routines because they are effective. The reason they are effective is because they are rational responses to valid emotions.

When you are in a cluttered, cramped, unclean space, I want you to recognize your contempt for such a place. Recognize the feeling of your precious mental energy, the jewel of your thinking mind, becoming entangled in the madness that is clutter, like an insect caught in the web of a spider. A sane person acts on this contempt, just as a sane person rests when tired, and eats when hungry.

When you recognize your contempt for disorder, and act on it, immediately if possible, you are acting like someone on the side of life – you are resisting and forestalling the entropic forces in your environment, the chief of which is death. This is what it means to choose life, to choose harmonious order and growth and overcome decay and deterioration.

Similarly, I want you to dote on your possessions like you would dote on a puppy. Look at what these things do for you. Look at the way they perfectly hold their structures, holding steady as you remove the dirt from them, obeying the will that brought them into form by holding your books, your clothing, your documents, and so on.

Our ancestors had nothing of the kind. Each of us has things that people could have scarcely imagined a hundred years ago. And, a hundred years is nothing. In 1940, a third of American homes didn’t have running water. Seriously.

Look at your furniture and your possessions and say “thank you,” with real fondness. See what you would otherwise take for granted, and show it care.

That’s all for today. Thank you for your time. Talk to you soon.

Jas

Today we’re going to focus on the negative.

The bad days, the blunders, the lapses in judgment, the cheat days, the days when you don’t adhere to your routines or follow your own advice.

Everyone has them: I do, and so do my heroes. So, surely, you do as well.

In today’s newsletter, the subject of discussion is something I like to call Raising the Floor: elevating the lowest point that defines one end of your life’s ups and downs. The other point, of course, being your best days.

We’re not going to talk about how to have more good days, but, rather, how to make the bad days not nearly as bad.

In just a moment, I am going to prove to you, both mathematically and psychologically, why raising the floor will do far more to benefit your life than raising the ceiling, so to speak.

Once I provide you with both persuasive evidence and reasoning for my claim, I’m going to outline very simple strategies for you to implement. It will not take a long time for you to see this working in your life.

And, further proving my point, the good parts in your life will provide you with significantly greater benefit without having to improve directly.

Bad hurts more than good helps.

I said I would prove this point mathematically. Let’s suppose you have $10. You lose 20% of it. Now you have $8. You rebound and gain 20%. Does this put you back to $10? No, it doesn’t. 20% of 8 is 1.6, not 2. You need a 25% increase for $8 to become $10 again. This only gets worse the more you lose. If your $10 takes a 50% loss, bringing you down to $5, you need a 100% increase to make it back to $10. Clearly, the more you lose, the harder it becomes to get back on track.

The psychological equivalent of this is called negativity bias. According to a study published in 2013 at the Leipzig center for Evolutionary Anthropology by Amriha Vaish,

“specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.”

Vaish goes on to explain that negative reinforcement is more efficient than positive reinforcement: lessons are learned more quickly, and are forgotten more slowly.

Furthermore, negative information carries more weight than positive information, and requires less “cognitive processing.” This makes negative information easier to focus on, and even appear to be more “sophisticated” than positive information.

Finally, negative information is weighted more heavily in decision making.

Negativity bias is first demonstrated in infancy, and continues into adulthood.

What this amounts to is something very close to what was shown by our mathematical example: negative hurts more than positive helps.

Bad days, bad behavior, bad feelings: they all seem more important to you and others than the positives. Negativity feels like the truth, whereas positivity feels like a fairy tale.

Negative experiences are not easily forgotten, whereas it can be harder to focus on, and later recall, positive experiences.

I could say more but I think you get my point: negative experiences are much better at defining your sense of self and the world than positive experiences. For that reason,

The decrease of bad is more important than the increase of good.

Think of this as an example of the 80/20 rule, where 20% of your experiences determine 80% of your feelings about your life.

If you improve the nature of those negative experiences,

if you make them less costly,
easier to recover from,
less demoralizing,
and less painful,

You will, by definition, receive a greater benefit to your quality of life than by making equally significant improvements to your positive experiences.

Think about it:

Do you need to buy the perfect gift more than you need to not forget the birthday?

Does your partner need to hear something that makes them feel good more than they need to know that you’re telling the truth?

Do you need to do a perfect job more than you need to not be late to work?

Do you need to perfectly adhere to a nutrition plan more than you need to stop abusing drugs and alcohol?

So what do you do?

As Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, “simplify your problems.”

STEP ONE: TAKE INVENTORY

Don’t think about your entire life. Break it up into categories. Take four sheets of paper. Label them, respectively,

Health
Finances
Relationships
Work

Pertaining to each category, simply ask yourself, “what am I doing that I need to stop doing?” The answer will come immediately. Write it down. Just one problem at a time. One, and only one, problem per category.

STEP TWO: STRATEGIZE

Are you consistently late for work? You strategize by time-blocking the day backwards from your arrival time.

By what time do you need to be on the road in order to arrive 10 minutes early?

If you want half an hour to enjoy breakfast before leaving, when do you have to wake up, shower, and prepare food? How loud does my alarm need to be? What’s the minimum amount of sleep I can get without sleeping through my alarm?

Get granular. Solve the problem. Leave nothing to chance. Account for the time, but don’t make a plan that requires you to be heroically effective. Your only goal is to not be late!

Similarly, if you forget birthdays, just put them into your calendar, with a reminder occuring one week and then one day in advance. All you gotta do is call or text the day of.

Overspending on dining out? Buy bonehead meals you can prepare at home.

Overspending on Lyft/Uber? Set the departure time that allows you to use public transit.

Make the plan.

If you need to quit smoking, drinking, drugs, even caffeine, this is more complicated. But make step one a thorough investigation of the withdrawal symptoms, how long it takes to detox, and which methods of quitting have long term success. Treat it seriously as though you expect to succeed. No more halfhearted empty promises. Square up like you’re about to get into the ring with Tyson.

STEP THREE: EXECUTE AND REVIEW

You need a weekly check-in when implementing these kinds of things. Run your plan to the best of your ability for a week.

On Sunday evening, spend an hour reviewing your performance. What was it you failed to account for the first time around? What did you learn about yourself that you couldn’t have known before making the initial effort? Redesign, or, and this is often the case, simply refresh your mental picture of what you’re trying to do.

Don’t let the entropic forces of time and fatigue compromise your efforts. Just review, and remind yourself. Think of every day like it’s the first time.

STEP FOUR: RINSE AND REPEAT

Do all this all over again every 3-6 months, with new problems. If you’re really good at this you can break a bad habit a month for a year. Twelve months later you have twelve fewer holes in your canoe. Notice how you’re barely spending any time bucketing water out of the hull, and the oar is almost entirely being used to drive you forward?

That’s what we’re talking about here: freeing up energy for better things. You’ll get better at life, without even trying to, simply by resolving the problems that split your energy.

Identity them, draft solutions, implement them, and then review them often until you get the behaviors right. Put in enough time and energy that you become intolerant of your mistakes, until you feel deserving of victory.

You will have so much respect for yourself if you do this.

That’s all for now. Thanks for your time, talk to you soon.

Jas

In his book Money: Master The Game, Tony Robbins wrote, “complexity is the enemy of execution.”

To ground this in experience a bit more, think back to the last time you swung by the supermarket on the way to a party, hoping to quickly grab some snacks to give to everyone.

You’re in a bit of a hurry, and you haven’t prepared a shopping list, but this shouldn’t be a big deal, should it?

Except it is. You get to the snack aisle and it’s floor to ceiling options. You see all the classic if somewhat basic choices, whatever you personally like, and then what seems like countless other things you’ve never even heard of before. All with shiny, colorful labels.

Stopping to take it all in, you quickly freeze.

Which one is the right choice?

You start to wonder about all kinds of things. What do they like? I can’t bring that! What about this one? Am I going to look like an idiot if I just go basic? The longer you hesitate, the further you are from a decision.

You’re in your head, wasting time, and for nothing. This was supposed to be a quick in and out, and, while it’s not an inconsequential decision, it shouldn’t be difficult. But it feels difficult because you’ve got too many options.

This is called “information overload,” and it’s a real thing.

Just a quick Google search returns concerning statistics:

27% of people surveyed reported using 11 or more sources of information daily.

35% of people feel information overload is negatively impacting their job performance, and

76% say it contributes to workplace stress. All in al

80% of workers worldwide report feeling information overload.

According to research published in Frontiers of Psychology in June of 2023, “the amount of information that is created every two days is roughly equivalent to the amount of information that was created between the beginning of human civilization and the year 2003.” Most of this information is consumed through the screens of computers and smartphones.

In general, information overload is associated with significant decline in performance, poor decisions, and disruptive interruptions that undermine quality of focus and attention span. Decision fatigue, ego depletion, burnout… It’s all related. From the plethora of chips to the avalanche of slack messages, the surplus of options and information is dragging you down.

Wise people simplify their lives

While there’s a longer conversation to be had about self trust, drawing boundaries, and learning to either automate or delegate specific decisions, today’s letter aims at something simpler:

What’s the good enough version of the recurring, mundane decisions I have to make?

What’s the set it and forget it version that I could probably continue with, without further examination, for the rest of my life, and be totally fine?

Today I’m going to survey a number of topics that impact your life on a recurring basis, and provide you with the general guidelines that keep you on the right track. You can vet them all, or you can apply them and see for yourself.

The point of today’s letter is to get you through the checkout aisle with those snacks, back on the road and headed to the party.

Because, that’s the point, isn’t it? To go on with your life? If looking for the perfect chip really is what’s occupying all your time, it’s probably time to talk to a professional.

But if you keep switching up your weight lifting routine, your diet, your morning and evening routines, your supplements, and so on, it’s quite possible that you’re

1. Not progressing in these areas
2. Confusing the hell out of your body and mind
3. Depleting your mental resources
4. Not putting adequate energy toward more important things.

That last one is the big one.

Unless this is what you do for a living, I submit to you that you don’t need to be using the best possible toothpaste, the best possible incline dumbbell technique, or using the best pink noise machine on the market to sleep for the exactly right duration that delivers you into each new day ready to break another Tour de France record.

You just need the good enough version because there is something you are on this earth to do, and it’s time to get after it. It’s time to buy the damn chips and head to the party.

So, without further ado, here is your cheat sheet for all things necessary but mundane. Lock these in, and free your mind to answer bigger questions. Open your note taking app and follow along, copying the bold faced terms, and inputting your own info as needed, and then starring or pinning the doc so you can access it easily until this is all ingrained.

Here’s what I’m going to cover today. Here are the snacks we’re deciding on in advance:

Water
Food
Sleep
Exercise
Morning Routine
Evening Routine

Water.

Drink .5 liquid ounces of water per pound of bodyweight. I weigh 180lbs give or take. That’s 90 oz water, or .7 gallons. I have a .5 gallon water bottle, so I have to drink roughly one and a half full bottles daily.

Right now, go calculate the amount of liquid in ounces that your water bottle holds, or the glass you’d prefer to use, and divide half your bodyweight by that number. That’s how many times you have to fill up and drink all the water it can hold.

You do this in the first ten hours after waking. So, divide 600 (the number of minutes in ten hours) by the number of bottles of water YOU have to drink. That tells you how far apart in time to space each one. Use a timer on your phone. After a week this will be totally ingrained.

To review:

Your weight in pounds ÷ 2 = liquid ounces of water daily.

Daily water requirement ÷ volume of water bottle/glass = how many full glasses you need to drink.

600 ÷ the number of glasses = how often, in minutes, you need to drink a full glass.

You can do this.

Food.

Today we are just focusing on how to hit your macros. You need a certain amount of fat, protein, and carbohydrates.

Go straight to a macronutrient calculator, input the requested info, and set it to autopilot. Use this one: https://www.calculator.net/macro-calculator.html

In general, animal protein is vastly superior to vegetarian protein. Are there weird anomalous exceptions? Yes. The exceptions that prove the rule, as they say.

If you eat beef, chicken, and fish to hit your protein requirements, rice and some fresh fruits to reach your carb intake, and some good grass fed butter to fill in whatever fat content the meats didn’t supply, you have hit your macros with very clean, very easily digestible food.

Use butter, not seed oils.

Obviously if you need to do something else for whatever reason, go do something else. But use the macro calculator, calculate what to eat by reading nutritional labels on foods, and be done with it.

Extra pointers: eat two or three solid meals a day, with the noontime meal being the heartiest. Evening carbs are okay.

You should be totally done consuming all calories at least three hours before bedtime. This is not a minor point.

Sleep.

Sleep is huge, and your life will never be the same once you get this right.

8 hours. Period the end. That’s your target. Will you always hit it? No. Should you make it a much bigger priority than it probably is now? Yes.

Shift that 8 hour block around as needed, but don’t shrink it. Make this the one inflexible thing so that you have to say no, or rework, finagle, whatever it takes, to make your life work without sacrificing sleep on any chronic basis. It will kill you.

We’re going to discuss evening routines later in this post, which are largely geared around ensuring sleep quality. But your bedtime has to guarantee eight hours of sleep.

Exercise.

Fitness regimens are meant to support your life, not take over your life. That being said, I love working on my physical fitness, and I love what it does for me outside of the gym.

One day per week, go in there and perform this workout:

Seated pectoral fly
Incline bench press/dumbbell press
Close-grip, palms up lat pulldown
Deadlift

That same day the next week, go in and do

Leg press
Leg extension
Hamstring curls
Calf raises (standing or seated)

The same day next week, go in again and do

Lat raises (machines or dumbbells)
Rear delt (machines or dumbbells)
Barbell or dumbbell curls
Tricep pulldown (with a bar, not a rope)
Seated tricep press down or tricep dips

The same day next week, go in and repeat the “leg day” workout.

For each exercise, do ONE SET TO FAILURE, meaningful until the point where you cannot perform another complete rep. Ideally, the amount of weight you use will take you to failure within 6-10 reps. This is referred to as high intensity training or HIT. It works.

Each time you come back in to repeat a given workout, you should be able to lift more weight. Increase the weight for each exercise by the minimum increment possible. You want to stick with this long term, and overexertion makes that almost impossible. Go easy, and be consistent.

Muscle growth is stimulated in the gym, but takes place while resting. If you lift until failure, but doing no more than one set, once per week, you will have given your muscles the signal to grow, and the opportunity to do so.

Walk for twenty minutes after each meal. Finish your food and start walking. Set a timer for ten minutes. When you hear it ding, turn back.

Optional: run 1-2 miles every morning, but only once your body adapts to the weightlifting routine outlined above.

Morning Routine.

This is less important than your bedtime routine. If you slept properly, you should just wake up and get to work. Here’s the routine that will never fail.

Wake up.
Drink electrolytes in a tall glass of warm-hot water (I like LMNT. Order it today).
Go “number 2.”
Brush and floss.
Take a shower, end with 2 minutes of COLD water.
Drink another glass of hot water.

90 minutes after waking, have caffeine. Do not exceed 400mg, and do not consume any more caffeine during the afternoon. Be one and done with caffeine. Personally, I’m working to reduce my daily caffeine intake little by little.

Okay, you’re now set up for the day.
Get to work!

Evening Routine.

Use a stopwatch to time this whole thing. Don’t rush, but record how long it takes, and factor that into your bedtime. Sleep is life.

Take magnesium supplements with raw honey and MCT oil.

Five minutes of stretching:
Lunges: 30 seconds each side
Quad stretches: 30 seconds each side
Downward facing dog: 30 seconds
Repeat the sequence once.

Lukewarm shower
Wash your face
Brush your teeth
Floss
Neti pot (get it on Amazon)
Apply a nasal strip.

Get into bed.

At home I use:
blackout curtains,
a weighted blanket,
and a pink noise machine (the sunrise Alarm from Hatch Sleep: I highly recommend).

In conclusion,

If you do all these things, and you are otherwise healthy, it won’t be long until you are feeling and looking your best. You can do this on a consistent basis without any major changes.

Save this article, create quickly accessible notes that you can reference, and ingrain these habits. Then, take your conscious attention and put it toward higher things.

That’s all for today.

Thanks for your time, talk to you soon.

Jas

Today we’re jumping straight in

(Hi good morning nice to see you):

You have probably been thinking of success all wrong.

Whether you’re after

Enlightenment
Financial freedom,
Living your best life,
Or “finally having your shit together,”

You basically want to be

In a good place, am I right?

You expect that someday you are going to arrive. Arrive in a better body, a better career, a better disposition, and an overall better life. At some point along the way, things are going to come together and you’re going to be on top of it.

The high level

Today I’m going to show you why this isn’t what you’re really after, and why the real goal is psychological maturity, rather than “success.” I’m going to talk about:

the misguided ideas that produce unattainable and counterproductive ideas of success,

the price you are probably paying for these incorrect beliefs,

what you can hope to find along the yellow brick road to the much higher, and actually much more attainable goal of maturity,

and what you can begin doing right now, today, to shift course.

I can talk about this process and share it with you because I’ve done it.

I was once deeply confused about the very things I’ll be illuminating today. My confusion caused me a degree of suffering, which in turn caused me to seek, and be truly open to, real solutions.

I say this because, as a side note, you ought not to shut out your own feelings of suffering: they are trying to draw your attention to what needs fixing in your life, and are meant to keep you in pursuit of solutions. The solutions are there, but only someone present to this suffering can bring him or herself to actually reach out and sieze them.

Okay, back to our topic.

The first concept I need to introduce is

Utopian Fallacy.

The belief that life can be perfected once and for all. The world’s problems can be totally solved, and if they haven’t been solved yet, it only means we haven’t

Tried hard enough
Sacrificed enough,
Cared enough, or
Found the right method.

People who think this way tend to be very frustrated. Frustrated with themselves, their jobs, “society,” their relatives, and so on. “Why can’t I/you/we/they just ____?” In short, it’s the refusal to accept one’s current reality because things should be different, and they could be, if only XYZ thing could finally happen.

I had my version of this, and while it wasn’t restricted to this area of my life, it was most clearly seen in my practice of yoga and meditation. In many ways, the yoga world gave me the mind virus of Utopianism in the form of spiritual enlightenment.

I could become totally nonreactive. I could, and was expected to, go beyond my ego (whatever that actually means). I should think, speak, and act in a spiritually elevated way. I shouldn’t ever become angry, or judgmental, or horny, or self interested.

These fundamentally human characteristics were problems to eradicate, and they could be eradicated through spiritual practices.

The answer was always more: more advanced techniques, practiced for longer durations. If you missed a day, or started after dawn, or had impurities in your diet, lifestyle, etc, and you were, pardon me, fucked.

It’s unlikely that you had the same experience, but you may have had similar ones.

Dieting? Exercise routines? Therapy? Working on yourself? Professional development? Striving for a perfectly happy relationship?

Despite your sustained and laudable efforts, you haven’t gotten that magical feeling you were hoping for. Even worse, you have felt it at times, making you think that it’s possible to grasp and hold onto it permanently, and that its continued ephemerality reveals some flaw in your methods or perhaps even in you as a person.

This has eventually discouraged you, and you find it harder and harder to summon the same levels of enthusiastic effort that you once had. Maybe you feel “old” as a result. When people don’t know what to do about something, they tend to shut down around that topic, no matter how important it is.

Essentially, Utopian Fallacy has got you feeling stuck, and dreaming of a better place.

Don’t search for a better place wherein to arrive someday, but live today in a better way.

When you’re stuck in a bad place, you have stuck thinking. Your only concept of a better life is to be stuck in a good place.

Can you see why this is doomed to failure? When you have prison thinking, rigid thinking, you dream of a beautiful prison cell with plenty of food, space, furniture, and conjugal visits (yes you do; don’t lie).

In other words, you have to think about things in a different way. Give up on the current goals you have, because they are the goals of a person you do not truly wish to be.

A stuck-thinking person thinks that

getting everything right is the solution.

That problems have to be solved once and for all.

That human frailties are something to be ashamed of, something to hide, and a basis for unworthiness.

This has gotta go, and let me show you how.

Instead of thinking of life in terms of a map, being in one place and trying to get to another, think of it like a solid, rigid, cold ice cube that wants to turn to soft, yielding, and flowing water.

The ice cube is a block, which you can only engage on the surface. Water is something in which you can swim, something you can engage with at levels of true depth, something with which you can become fluent.

The journey you want is not the journey from one place to another, but the journey from fixity to fluidity.

When I was trying to be the perfect yogi, I was closer to the icecube: my emotions and behaviors were objects that I had to control, and the locus of control was external:

in techniques,
mantras,
pretty beaded necklaces,
impressive morning routines,
and a long list of dos and don’ts.

While this might look, to the outside world, like someone taking charge of his life, I was still totally unable to engage with my self directly.

When did this change?

Not until years later, when I read On Becoming A Person by the pioneering psychotherapist Carl Rogers.

In the pages of this book, he explained, from numerous angles, and illustrated, with countless examples from therapy sessions, what the journey from a bad life to a good life looks like in practice.

How real people experience and talk about it. What generalities emerge from decades spent working with real individuals.

It truly enabled me to see my past, my present, and my future, inasmuch as I could see where it was that I seemed to be headed, in light of the similarities between myself and the examples he gave.

Essentially, people improve their lives by becoming less rigid, distant, and impersonal in their thinking.

They go from holding things at an arm’s length, dealing mostly with inflexible constructs and concepts, mostly with the past, and other people, to dealing with the ever flowing process of feeling within themselves here and now:

“It seems that gradually, painfully, the individual explores what is behind the masks he presents to the world, and even behind the masks with which he has been deceiving himself. Deeply and often vividly he experiences the various elements of himself which have been hidden within. Thus to an increasing degree he becomes himself-not a façade of conformity to others, not a cynical denial of all feeling, nor a front of intellectual rationality, but a living, breathing, feeling, fluctuating process-in short, he becomes a person.” (Rogers, On Becoming A Person, p.114).

What happens when you make this change?

Little by little, as I moved in the direction described above, I came to accept myself. I came to admit to the thoughts, feelings, ideas, and actions that I was unable to face in the past. Instead of feeling threatened by them, threatened by anything that contradicted the story I wanted to tell about myself, I could acknowledge the contradictions.

I could allow myself the feeling of shock, disappointment, surprise, self admonition, and occasional wry humor at the sight of my imperfections, mistakes, immaturity, arrogance, insecurities, and so on. For the first time in my life, I was simply owning them, rather than deflecting, blaming, self flagellating, or running away.

I wanted to know myself. I wanted to actually be myself. Meaning, I wanted an ongoing flow of contact and communication with the experience of being me. I wanted the real thing, and “real” became more important than “comfortable.”

Perhaps paradoxically, the problems gradually melted away in the face of my own self acceptance. You might say that the more I wanted to really know myself, the more I became someone you’d want to know.

The inner atmosphere of acceptance allowed something in my inner person to relax, and I thereby released many negative patterns, self defeating attitudes, harsh mannerisms, and cowardly, escapist tendencies.

And, what took their place?

The same openness that allowed me to embrace my flaws also allowed me to move toward my ideals. I started responding openly and receptively to feedback. I would incorporate it, and abide by it. I became more proactive in facing my problems, seeing them as solvable. I learned to persist in the face of skepticism, resistance, delayed gratification, and the initial clunkiness of a new endeavor. More and more often, I hung in there until the job was done, overcoming a lifelong pattern of drooping effort when I was only halfway there.

Over time, all these behaviors compounded on themselves. I gradually became very connected to an inner drive to do good, to be a creative positive force in the world, and to connect with things outside myself as an agent of positive change. Not in a forced way, but in the sense of let’s see what happens to this thing/person/situation if I give it my very best. Only good things have come from that, including the courage and self respect to deal with the not so good things that inevitably happen.

I know you want some version of that in your life, because this is fundamentally what life is about: being a real person, living a real life.

You kinda just automatically get your shit together and start moving in the direction of living out your higher aspirations once you get that down: once you can embrace yourself as a flow rather than an object, and allow the unconscious processes within you to resolve problems, rather than treating yourself like an object that can only be engaged by other objects.

Essentially, when you change from fixity to fluidity, nothing else in your life has to change, because you become aware, adaptive, responsive, realistic, and comfortable with reality. You don’t become perfect, but you become capable, engaged, earnest, and proactive.

So what do you do?

I’ve made this into four steps for you.

STEP ONE: stop assaulting your senses.

You need an inner environment of calm, open, understanding and acceptance for this to work. You can achieve this by

Getting more sleep
Eating better food
As little added salt and sugar as possible
Working out hard in the gym a few times a week
Taking long walks alone
Generally choosing to soothe rather than stimulate yourself.
Reading books rather than scrolling through your phone.


STEP TWO: choose activities that promote self awareness.

This is where I tell you that you simply need to read books. My thinking and behaviors changed because I became aware of them. I became aware of them because I introduced myself to new concepts that allowed me to see myself with a constructive framework.

The conceptual framework of “move from fixity to fluidity” allowed me to see things in that way. It clarified what to aim at, what to discontinue, what to choose, where to place my effort, and so on. This came from reading.

This is not to say that YouTube is off the table. Watch videos on psychology, communication, attachment theory, relationships, and therapy related content.

Be careful not to overwhelm yourself, and allow plenty of time to process information.

When you begin to feel like you’re only learning how screwed up you are, recognize it as a phase that will pass. But you simply have to invest in your fluency and literacy in this topic. You never get anywhere by winging it.

STEP THREE: practice stoic indifference toward your subjective moods.

The ultimate Stoic is Epictetus. His short work The Enchiridion, can be read in an afternoon. You may or may not like it, but it will teach you how to be less of a flailing victim and more of a rock of stability.

Stop viewing your life as the life of a drug addict, always chasing a high, always viewing your quality of life as nothing more than the quality of your mood right now, and learn to persist at difficult things regardless of your mood.

All talk of motivation, inspiration, and even discipline, is shown to be the self congratulatory fluff that it is in the sober light of Epictetus’ enduring words and ideas. Embrace them and become an adult at last.

This is how you develop the courage to face your subjective reality: it may be happening within you, but, if you can observe it, on a deep level, it is not you. It is information which you cannot afford to ignore. There’s a difference. Live in that difference.

STEP FOUR: consciously reframe your goals.

You are not looking for something outside of you: you are looking to become someone with whom life can do business. That is to say, a mature person.

There is no shortage of opportunities, collaborators, resources, or desirable romantic partners. The limiting factor is you and your relationship to yourself.

View your self as the thing into which you must invest. Reorganize your life around the cultivation of noble virtues.

Once you have learned to stop harming yourself (step one),

to use that newfound self trust to delve more deeply into your mind (step two),

and then learned to not be ruled by what you find in your own depths (step three),

what naturally follows is constructive action: now that all of you is truly on the same team, make it a winning team by investing in your strength and your skills. You will then be fit for the journey your life was always meant to be.

IN SUMMARY

Utopian Fallacy is what turns success into a fixed state of paradise located outside of you in the future, and burdens you with impossible demands and an unreasonable view of yourself and the world.

Wishing to finally arrive at a good place is an example of Utopian Fallacy.

You overcome it by moving your focus inward, toward a more fluid, immediate, personal and unflinchingly intimate engagement with yourself.
You do that by establishing the frameworks that support this process, which you get from reading Carl Rogers.

You don’t magically cease to have problems, but what you now have is the maturity to deal with them. That might not sound sexy, but it really is the secret sauce.

Good luck. I am building a consulting practice around the kind of work discussed here. If you’ve read this article and know you’d like to get a bit more hands on, and get more into real specifics, simply contact me on whatever platform you found this.

Thanks for your time, talk to you soon

Jas

This is going to hurt for a sec.

I say this because today’s topic is not easy: not easy to talk about, not easy to hear about.

We’re talking about heavy stuff: shame and self loathing.

And why are we discussing these agonizing topics?

Two main reasons:

1. They can be solved
2. They must be solved

And I’ll tack on a third:

3. They are difficult to solve, and far too few of us ever actually do.

I have, and I did so methodically.

After we sufficiently explore the seriousness of this topic, I will convey my method.

But you have to walk with me through some scary dark places first.

Speaking of method, you may already be asking yourself, why is this essay formatted in such a strange way?

Because shame is deeply intertwined with concealment, making it difficult to approach and confront.

Extraordinarily difficult.

Strange methods are necessary. Weird but effective: like a dill pickle kettle chip.

Shame hides. It makes you hide. Lots of bad things are downstream from this:

Inauthenticity
Dishonesty
Manipulative behaviors
Self sabotage

Shame is the feeling that there is something wrong with me, and it is the silent killer.

Looking back on my life, I can say with total certainty that shame was the problem. It was quite literally the root of all my suffering and the sole, insurmountable obstacle to my success. If I laid out for you the full extent of the opportunities, privileges, good fortune, and goodwill that I squandered, believe me when I say that you would be in tears. The cost of shame is beyond reckoning.

Conversely, every good thing that has happened to me after a certain point in time, the sudden and swift positive changes, the decisive actions, the ability to attract, retain, and build upon positive opportunities, and the sudden disappearance of myriad problems, has all followed from finally learning how to deal with shame.

Shame made me unable to give and receive love.

It made me defensive.

It forced me to say the wrong things, in the wrong tone of voice.

It made me harsh, hypercritical, and alienating.

It made me rigid, rejecting, self-indulgent, entitled, secretive, and self-involved.

It made me gratify my needs and impulses in non-straightforward ways.

It also made me unable to truly apply myself and to do real, hard work for any sufficient period of time. Lack of belief in my own goodness and potential made me unwilling to take the risks required of real effort.

In short, shame gave me much to be ashamed of. If there was something wrong with me, exposure equaled death. Yes, death. I lived my life as though I was carrying an awful secret that would see me ostracized, humiliated, and destroyed were it to be exposed.

The ways in which I compensated for this are, frankly, entirely inappropriate to discuss publicly. Much of it is heartbreaking and gut wrenching to hear. I have said as much as I’ve said up to this point for one reason:

To whatever degree you also carry this with you, my words are making you uncomfortable. That discomfort is the urge to avoid, the urge to conceal.

And I say to you now, with real solemnity,

That which is concealed will never go away,
That which is concealed will always defeat you.

In the words of Carl Jung, that which you fail to bring out from within yourself will destroy you.

You can no more go about a happy, successful, love-filled life while harboring shame than a flock of sheep can go about their lives whilst harboring wolves.

The wolf, the dragon, the monster, the giant brick of black tar sitting upon your heart

Must be destroyed forever.

There is no other way.

I always knew this, but it was just too damn scary. I was too scared to admit that I was scared. Until one day I, pardon me, got my ass handed to me in the form of a devastating breakup. After everything I’d been through, all the ups and downs of my life, finally, my shame had exacted a price from me that I was unwilling to pay. Finally, an army had to be recruited, trained, and sent into the cave where the dragon lay waiting.

Perhaps it was because I was finally at an age where I saw that life was finite. I was unable to believe that an unending series of second chances were available to me like cans of Coke from a vending machine. I saw that I would never have a good life, I would never achieve anything, and no one would ever stay by me, if I did not solve this once and for all.

And so I began to live my life differently. I began to console myself, rather than medicate myself. I began to write down my feelings, rather than run away from them.

Little by little, one day at a time, one hour at a time, I was learning how to be a loving companion to myself. I started showing up for myself, being there for myself, keeping promises to myself, and investing in myself, really for the first time in my life. And it worked.

While I don’t think it’s entirely appropriate for me to “take a victory lap,” because there is so much work to be done, I’ll just bullet point some highlights, and then we can get into how to systematize this for yourself.

I became a self contained person with nothing to prove. I learned how to identify, explore, and resolve issues. I learned how to apply and sustain effort in order to break patterns, learn better ways, and live by them. I learned to sufficiently raise my standards and demand excellence from myself in order to achieve success in the endeavors I undertook. I learned how to self regulate, how to acknowledge emotions and deal with them constructively. I learned how to actually share myself with others and eventually how to really be there for them. My life became a real life, solid to the core: not a performance, not compensatory, not a sham. Real, solid, and good.

So what did I actually do?
What did I do that you, too, could do? And do now?

I’ll start with some conceptual underpinnings, and quickly move to an actionable, replicable process.

If I could boil it down to one thing,

I began to earn my own approval.

Approval, or healthy pride, is the opposite of shame. If you want to be rid of something, you cannot create a vacuum where it once was. You must cultivate its opposite. The solution to darkness is not the “absence of darkness” but the presence of light. The solution to hunger is the satiety following a meal. The solution to weakness is strength.

This sounds obvious, but so many of us, literally every unsuccessful and unfulfilled person, commits the error of trying to make negative things go away rather than canceling them out with the cultivation of the corresponding positive things. Be positive: create material good to remedy the material bad.

For the things you must do. Buckle up. We’re not making a souffle here (thank God): we are becoming better human beings.

Become your own loving family

Start to think of yourself as two different people who cannot escape each other. Not a body and a mind, but an inner child and an inner parent. Your nonverbal undercurrent of feeling is the inner child, your constant inner monologue is your inner parent. The latter is always talking to the former.

The inner child is your emotional life, and your source of energy, creativity, “intuition,” and feeling. Your quality of life is totally equivalent to the happiness and fulfillment of your inner child.

The inner parent is the regulatory agency of the inner child. This ranges from harmonious, adventurous partnership to belittling, neglectful abuse.

Happy people have their own version of the former, and unhappy people have the latter.

By simply becoming aware that a conversation between the inner child and inner parent is constantly taking place, you suddenly have the option of taking control of it.

Awareness is key. Awareness is the road to redemption.

Action item: read Self Parenting by John K. Pollard.

This is a quick read, and arms you with necessary conceptual understanding to set yourself on the right path. You can literally read this in an afternoon.

Essentially, your inner child loves to be given activities to do. It loves to win the love and approval of the inner parent.

You can leverage this knowledge and deliberately set yourself challenges to accomplish, encouraging and rewarding yourself along the way. Start doing this, and the inner child will begin to open up more to the inner parent.

You care for your inner child by cultivating a healthy and mature relationship with it. This follows the same rules as any other relationship. I have boiled this down to four components:

trust,
activities,
compensation, and
negotiation.

Step one: trust

Respond in a reassuring way to your feelings of discomfort. You do not need to capitulate, but you do need to respond and acknowledge. You have to be there for you. Ignoring yourself is abusing yourself.

Step two: activities

Provide yourself with fun, challenging things to do. Think about the things you enjoyed doing as a kid or young adult, and gradually dial them back into your life. Go find your favorite TV shows, movies, and books from your childhood. They’re all there on the Internet. This will help more than you can anticipate.

Also, kids love to be active. Run around outside. Take walks in nature. Climb up hills, rocks, whatever. Don’t be imprisoned in your body, but recognize it as a vehicle through which you experience the world. Be daring, adventurous, and expressive. You will like yourself more if you do this.

Step three: compensation

Find ways of rewarding yourself for undertaking and completing the above challenges. This will grow your capacity to take on challenges in the future, as it fills you with enthusiasm to take on difficult things with the expectation of future reward.

Decide in advance what the rewards will be. This prevents you from rewarding yourself with unhealthy behaviors. Your inner child does not want to get drunk, high, or have meaningless sex: these are all acts of self abandonment, and they are never, ever acts of self love.

Rewards can and should always serve your sense of pride and accomplishment. Why are pride and accomplishment so important? Because they negate shame. Doing things you know you shouldn’t do, and pretending it’s okay to do them just because people you respect will never find out, proves that you are not someone you respect. Gotcha there, didn’t I?

You will have to raise your standards. If you do so in the way I’ve described, you will like yourself and trust yourself more and more with each incremental increase in the demands you place upon yourself. Winners are not ashamed of themselves. Give yourself chances to win.

Step four: negotiation

Healthy, happy relationships are a negotiation between equals who each need each other’s willing cooperation. Don’t assume that the inner child and inner parent will always agree! The way you deal with disagreement is by negotiating.

How to negotiate with yourself:

Rather than denying yourself, punishing yourself, or forcing yourself, reason with yourself. Treat yourself as you would someone who you absolutely need to go along with you on something, but could also easily beat you in a fight if you were rude or coercive.

Leverage the power of rewards. Maybe you don’t love the diet you have to follow, or the taxes you have to do, or the bills you have to pay, or the job you are currently in. But you can incentivize yourself to do the difficult, necessary things by scheduling fun and lighthearted things during the evenings, weekends, and so on. Plan them and take them as seriously as you take the hard, tedious tasks that everyone has to do.

If you really are in a spot you know you can’t stay long term, start to spend your free time cultivating alternatives. For example, I’m pursuing the path of a writer, and eventually a consultant and business owner, because I don’t wish to rely on my “day job” as I currently do.

Summary and conclusion:

Face difficulties, and life is easy. Do things the easy way, and life is hard. Facing shame is hard, and scary, but if you’ve read this far, you now possess the necessary tools to overwrite shame with approval and pride.

Approval has to be earned: it cannot be demanded. Use the methods I described above to learn what your criteria for approval actually is, and work with yourself to put your own approval within your reach.

Treat your conscience like an all-seeing god that cannot be deceived, coerced, ignored, or bribed.

Do nothing you do not approve of, and do nothing that makes you feel unsafe.

Really get into the idea that you have a pure, innocent, enthusiastic child inside of you that you can take care of and go on adventures with. This can totally transform your life for the better. When you are lost, cynical, or defeated, come back to this.

Use Pollard’s text as a reference guide. The ideas and the language are simple, clear, and effective.

If you’ve read this and you know you’ll need help implementing these ideas, don’t hesitate to reach out to me by whatever channel you found this article.

Thanks for your time, talk to you soon.

Jas