habits – Make Beautiful Choices

Do Or Die: rewrite the rules and become exceptional

Welcome back. This week I want to look at a theme that goes by many names, one that I’m certain you’ve discussed and read about before:

Raising your expectations for yourself, and getting better results, more frequently, in the process.

It seems reasonable enough to say that a higher standard of living is synonymous with better quality of life.

It also seems reasonable enough to say that making improvements in one’s overall quality of life is difficult for many.

The reason for this difficulty, in my view, has to do with a distinction that was touched upon in last week’s article: the exception on the one hand, and the rule on the other.

People who get swept up in new year’s resolutions, who make a sudden push in January only to find themselves right back where they started by March, have demonstrated that they see the better behaviors as exceptional, for example.

Therefore, going with this framework, a person who successfully makes changes is a person who rewrites the rules.

Today, then, I will lay out both the process and the mentality by which one rewrites their own rules for the better.

A bit of trite verbiage if you will: exceptional people are not making exceptions, but playing by the rules. They take the rules very seriously – much more seriously than those who are frustrated and underperforming. Said another way, the winners, the people we rightfully admire, have the strongest command of the fundamentals, and therefore the strongest foundations.

I want to lay out some of these fundamentals now, and I intend to do so a bit rudely. Rudely, because rudeness is necessary: people do not change unless and until they can no longer afford to remain where and as they are.

My rudeness is the rudeness in saying YOU’VE GOT TO WAKE UP as you’re sleeping through your alarm the day of the big job interview. From rudeness with love.

Rule Number One: results must be delivered

Let’s begin with an anecdote. Plutarch, famed Greek philosopher, historian, essayist, and priest (at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, the site of the famous inscription, “know thyself”), compiled many of the famous sayings of both named and unnamed Spartans, who were notorious for their terse and acerbic wit.

For example, when asked to come and hear a singer who could perfectly mimic a nightingale, a Spartan declined by merely saying, “I’ve heard the bird.”

The particular quotation that concerns me right now, however, is attributed to Eudamidas:

When told that an old man was “a wise old man and one of those who search for virtue,” Eudamidas replied, “and when will he make use of it if he is still searching for it?”

It is easy to say one is studying something, seeking something, or working on something. These days, we hear people say that they are working on themselves, trying to learn patience, or, god help us, trying to learn humility.

Remember the piercing question of Eudamidas: when will he make use of it?

In other words, does someone who thinks of himself as a seeker also expect himself to find and utilize the thing being sought? In my experience, the answer is a resounding “no.”

To self describe as “seeking” is dangerous: it normalizes incompetence. It normalizes falling short. It’s okay to not be there yet, because you’re “working on it,” you’re “trying,” and you’re, worst of all, “doing your best.”

If searching is the rule, acquiring and utilizing is the exception. Results are the exception. This is the definition of mediocrity.

And, it is more than merely mediocre: it is ignorant. One acquires not by seeking, but by doing. Some examples, to better make this distinction:

Suppose I see someone who is remarkably strong physically. I don’t seek strength, I do things that require strength. I increase the demand for strength, by lifting weights, and the strength is supplied. I eat more, I sleep more, I drink more water, and I religiously avoid anything that diminishes the efficacy of my efforts. I don’t seek strength, I exercise the strength I have, and consume the resources necessary to produce more of it.

Suppose I listen to an interview with an author like Robert Greene, and wish I was as knowledgeable, well spoken and as well read. How would I seek those qualities? By reading more books, writing more often, and having more conversations with more people about the sorts of ideas that interested me. Where is the seeking in this? I see only the exercise of one’s capacity, and the resultant expansion of capacity.

Finally, what does being a better musician mean to me? Does it mean searching for better musical ideas and hoping to one day find and execute them? No. It means parting ways forever with this kind of mousey modesty, and being ever more assertive: writing more songs, spending more time practicing them, recording them more frequently, giving more direction in rehearsals, spending more time listening to music that exemplifies the qualities I wish to promote in my own, and applying more scrutiny to what I’m hearing, rather than merely enjoying what I’m doing.

In short, it means demanding results and delivering them, without exception. Let go of the notion of searching and hoping, and take up the way of having and using. Whatever it is you have right here and now, resolve to extract the maximum use from it on a daily basis: you will inevitably discover that this is the means by which you find whatever you were previously seeking.

Rule Number Two: have only the highest regard for yourself

I here exhort you to redraw your entire cosmology: you do not possess original sin, and you are not awaiting salvation. What you possess, rather, is tremendous potential that must be realized at any and all costs. Think of yourself less as someone trying to find his or her way in a vast world and more like a child of royalty placed prematurely on a throne: the role for you is the role before you now, and you must only grow into it.

Again, there is nothing for you to seek: you are here now, and there is a life for you to live right here and right now. Seeking negates having!

Redraw your cosmology: the sun, the sky, the steady passing of time that exposes the consequences of all actions, the people who brought you into this world and the others who educated and mentored and befriended and challenged you – all of this is an endorsement of your existence, confirmation that you are here, that you belong here, that space is made for you wherever you go. Even and especially when others disagree, resist, or reject my ideas, this only proves I am a force that must be contended with, must be answered and countered in some way by others.

Until you are prepared to grant this much, and to take it to be the normal state of affairs, you will always be wondering about and seeking to establish or convince yourself of what is actually nothing but the backdrop of all life, the simple fact of your existence.

Grant yourself some importance, some respect! Not in an egotistical sense, but in the sense that there is important work that awaits its completion by your hands, and it will not settle for another’s.

In the words of the Tao Te Ching, “why should the Lord of Ten Thousand Chariots act lightly in public?” You do so little, try so feebly, adhere so inconsistently, because you believe it doesn’t matter anyway. You matter to the extent that you treat yourself like something that matters.

As for me, I wrenched my life from the jaws of self defeating ideas and decided to claim as much meaning as I possibly could from the time that remains, and I will continue until some insurmountable force appears before me to say: this is it, there is no more knowledge, no more insight, or accomplishment, or improvement, or understanding, or maturity, or contribution, or love and companionship and friendship and cooperation and collaboration for you to partake of. There is a ceiling, and this is it.

Are you where you are because some such force has appeared before you, like Christ at the Mount of Olives, or are you simply not even trying?

The wise seeker knows,
That the fruit of my endeavor
Shall be commensurate
With the intensity
Of my own self effort,
AND NO FATE NOR GOD
SHALL ORDAIN IT OTHERWISE.
Vasistha’s Yoga, trans. Swami Venkatesananda

Rule Number Three: embrace hatred.

We return again to my beloved Spartans, conveyed to me by the pen of Plutarch.

Before I reprint and expound on a series of pungent quotations, however, I should back up and justify what appears to be an unjustifiable, even irresponsible use of words: embrace hatred.

It’s not what you have, but how you understand and utilize it that matters. To the determined, resourceful person, anything and everything can be and is employed toward the end of perfection: of oneself, one’s life, and one’s every undertaking.

If you were short, should I tell you, “don’t bother, shorties can’t win?” Should I tell you the same if you’re a woman, an ethnic minority, or someone attracted to the same sex? Should I say that something about you disqualifies you from the contest altogether? No. I should say, learn to play by the rules, as skillfully as you possibly can, built in handicaps notwithstanding, and you’ll receive whatever marks you earn fair and square.

This extends to attributes of the psyche as well. If you are loving and kind, you can win. If you are cunning and competitive, you can win. And, I dare to say it, if you are hateful, you can win.

To reiterate: what disqualifies you is a violation of the rules, or what you do. Not who you are or how you feel.

I believe this is clear enough.

Another concept we are going to need: the yin and yang symbol as a model for a binary system. A world of black and white opposites, but not so rigorously segregated as “black and white” implies. A little bit of black in the white half, a little bit of white in the black half, creating balance within each half, rather than balance existing “on the whole.” The Yin and Yang Binary represents the appropriate integration of opposing energies at the local level, not merely at the level of abstraction.

This matters, because nobody actually lives in the average household, with the average family and income and budget and back problems: we only occupy the particular, which merely contributes to a sense of what is average. “Average” as a data point does not truly exist.

Why say all this? Because hate has a place in your life at the local level. It isn’t simply the case that all the perfect woke coastal snow angels of love and empathy have to balance out the hateful idiots in fly over states – YOU have to strike the appropriate balance between love and hate within yourself.

This is impossible if you cannot admit to being in possession of hatred.

Back, then, to the Spartans.

“When asked how one should remain a free man, [Agis, song of Archidamus] said, “by despising death.”

“Questioned as to how he gained his great reputation, [Agesilaus] said, ‘by having despised death.’”

“Certainly when somebody asked what gains the laws of Lycurgus had brought Sparta, [Agesilaus] said: ‘contempt for pleasures.’”

When someone was asking [Cleomenes son of Anaxandridas] why the Spartans do not dedicate the spoils from their enemies to the gods, he said: ‘because they come from cowards.’”

“As some Athenian was reading a funeral eulogy in praise of men killed by Spartans, [Ariston] said: ‘what, then, do you think was the quality of our men who defeated them?’”

A picture has surely emerged, by now, of the sort of hatred I am referring to, so that we might finally understand what it means to “embrace hatred.”

A love of life that is given an intimidating ferocity by the attending hatred of death. A love of strength and vitality that is inseparable from a hatred of weakness. A love of victory that is tempered by a disdain for the evident inferiority of the defeated. A deep sense that some people are simply better than others, that superiority can be proven by contest, and that better people are entitled to more, and entitled to rule.

Said another way, Aristotle wrote in The Nicomachean Ethics that “an honorable man is a disdainful man.” I believe the meaning of this statement has been made clear enough by now.

It is not enough to like the idea of one day achieving something:

You must hate the thought of failure
Hate the thought of being right where you are now in another ten years,
Hate the thought of your parents or spouse or children making excuses for you,
Hate the thought of breaking the promises you’ve made to yourself and others,
Hate the idea of squandering your potential for the sake of episodic pleasantries,
Hate the idea of wasting your life.

When I start to falter on my path, an icy, humorless auditor within me rises up to scowl and cast a rigid index finger down like a punishing lightning bolt as if to say, get back up, get to work, and get it done.

I wish to close with a poetic representation of precisely this kind of wrathful contempt, embodied perfectly by Wallace Stevens in his poem Puella Parvula (Latin for “quiet little girl”). I can only say this so well, but Stevens says it perfectly:

Puella Parvula

Every thread of summer is at last unwoven.
By one caterpillar is great Africa devoured
And Gibraltar is dissolved like spit in the wind.

But over the wind, over the legends of its roaring,
The elephant on the roof and its elephantine blaring,
The bloody lion in the yard at night ready to spring

From the clouds in the midst of trembling trees
Making a great gnashing, over the water wallows
Of a vacant sea declaiming with wide throat,

Over all these the mighty imagination triumphs
Like a trumpet and says, in this season of memory,
When the leaves fall like things mournful of the past,

Keep quiet in the heart, O wild bitch, O mind
Gone wild, be what he tells you to be: Puella.
Write pax across the window pane. And then

Be still. The summarium in excelsis begins…
Flame, sound, fury composed… Hear what he says,
The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale.

In summary,

Part with excuses and demand results. Come to view results as normal, and lack of results as abnormal.

Hold yourself in the highest regard, and then ceaselessly demand that your behavior rise to meet your own standards.

Finally, you must have contempt for whatever is beneath you, that threatens you, that brings you down, that would seek to poison you and strip you of your sense of purpose, that would tell you you are unworthy of your aspirations and potential. Let that contempt become that which fuels you, like the mighty imagination that triumphs like a trumpet over the blaring elephant on the roof.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

-Jas

If I Only Had A Brain: the basics of a neuroprotective lifestyle

Arthur Fletcher famously said, “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.” This sentiment was later echoed by then-Vice President Dan Quayle – “what a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind.”

Now that I’ve indulged in an esoteric dad joke, there is a lot to say about safeguarding, not wasting, the treasure that is your mind.

Your brain controls everything your body does, and is of course the seat of your entire perceptual and conceptual life: every thought you think, every observation you make, every moment that life pours in through your senses, begins and ends with the brain.

Let’s have a look at everything the brain actually does, according to biofeedback-neurofeedback-therapy.com:

While I’m interested in the brain, and it’s a subject that is touched on in my newsletter about Episodic Future Thinking, I do not have a technical background in medicine, neuroscience, or neuroanatomy. Therefore, I do feel not unduly hesitant to continue “talking about the brain.” Googling does not an expert make.

What I do want to talk about, and what I feel perfectly qualified to talk about, is the journey to reclaiming my own mental power, and what I’ve learned along the way.

Like many people, at some point in my life I realized that I didn’t feel as mentally sharp as I used to. That my mind wasn’t filled with exciting thoughts. That I couldn’t remember the name of the last book I’d read, and that even reading silly articles shared to Facebook felt like a chore. I remember seeing large blocks of text and glazing over, just like some people must feel when they stand at the bottom of a long flight of stairs – I can’t do this.

I’m happy to say that I’ve remedied this. I took my mind back, so to speak, and I use it every day to enrich my life.

Whether it’s reading challenging books,
Researching, planning and writing newsletters,
Reading sheet music and learning new music,
Writing music,
Improvising guitar solos with my band,
Or listening to music analytically,

I put my mind to work every day. The more I do the sorts of things I listed above, the happier I am. Not just that, the sharper my mind becomes, and the greater the variety of ideas I consume and consider and digest, the more reasonable I become.

I listen better.
I speak more fluidly in conversation.
I consider opposing opinions and different sorts of people more easily.
I have a better attitude about work,
a better attitude about resolving disagreements or addressing complaints,
and I generally think that I’ve become a better person the more I’ve invested in my mental and intellectual fitness.

According to Britannica.com, intelligence is defined as “the mental quality that consists of the abilities to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, understand and handle abstract concepts, and use knowledge to control an environment.”

So, you don’t have to share my idiosyncrasies or niche interests to put a value on your brain power. I mostly listed off my own because I knew it would make you think of your own preferences in contrast or congruence to mine. Your preferences, your ways of thinking, are what I want you to be thinking about here: think of all the reasons you cherish the incredible gift that is your mind.

Because it is a terrible thing to waste, and, indeed, it is terrible to lose it, I want to share the practical Thou Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots of mental acuity.

What are the habits and lifestyle choices that keep your mind right beside you like a faithful servant? What are the things that degrade and vitiate it, that you really need to stop doing?

Let’s start with the helpers.

STEP ONE: THOU SHALT

DIET
A “Mediterranean Diet” is considered to be neuroprotective. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, olives, and fish.

I’ve gradually moved more toward this diet over time, although I eat more steak than fish. The foolproof rule to follow is to eat single ingredient foods.

Today, for example, I ate a salad with Swiss Chard, red butter lettuce, grated carrots, and a simple dressing of olive oil, apple cider vinegar, sea salt, and lemon juice. Then I had a burger seared in an air fryer. I’ll have an apple, an orange, and a banana after that, and then another protein dense meal (let’s be honest – it’ll be another burger, cooked “war crime rare”), and that’s it. That’s all the food I’ll eat today. Two meals, with some fruit in between. Zero snacking.

I also use things like ginger, turmeric, black pepper, ground cumin and coriander, all the chai spices (cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, clove), and raw honey as well.

I eat a lot of food every day. I get plenty of protein, fat, carbohydrates, and micronutrients. I never really feel hungry in an unpleasant way, but I never feel uncomfortably full either. I don’t feel bloated, sluggish, or, god forbid, brain fog. I feel clear headed after I eat. I’m writing this newsletter right after finishing a meal, and that’s because of what I eat and how I eat it.

If you tailor this to your specific tastes, you’ll feel wonderful. I do, all day long.

Quick caveat: I’m not even touching the domain of supplements, herbs, or nootropics in this article. It’s a standalone subject that requires its own newsletter. For the time being, it should suffice to say that eating clean, whole foods, plenty of animal proteins and fats, and good carbohydrates from fresh fruits and vegetables is a, pardon the pun, no brainer.

EXERCISE
Both cardiovascular exercise and strength training play an important role in your mental well-being.

Think of yourself as the thing you really are: an aggregate of various systems that ultimately make up an organism called a human.

A human is, at bottom, a primate that is tasked with surviving and thriving in its environment.

Physical activity tells your brain that your body is laboring to survive. Supply and demand, my friends: voluntary exercise levies demands, and your brain responds with the supply.

The supply of what? Of energy, alertness, and the availability of memory, vocabulary, and whatever other behavioral tools you will need. The law of the body is use it or lose it.

SLEEP
When you sleep properly on a nightly basis, you live in a heaven of your own making. I discuss the ideal nightly routine and how to optimize your sleep in a previous newsletter. Right now, I simply want to impress upon you the ways in which respecting your body’s need for sleep will reward your brain.

According to Kathleen Digre, MD, in a June 2023 article for The University of Utah, sleep helps with five distinct areas of brain health:

Restoration and repair
Memory consolidation
Cognitive performance
Brain development
Emotional regulation

Read her whole article, which I’ve linked above, for a deeper understanding.

Now, whenever I talk about sleep, I invariably receive pushback in the form of I don’t have time. Let me address that with a bit of an aphorism:

You can have anything, but not everything.

Time is finite, but sacrificing sleep only sacrifices your quality of life, and should only be done out of real necessity. For most people, it happens because they don’t know how to end a day.

I can’t spend all evening writing, working out cool ideas on my guitar, reading about art history, catching up with a friend over the phone, watching a movie on Netflix, and tidying up at home.

I have to make choices.

I have to say yes to something and no, not to something else, but to everything else. For every one activity I’m doing at a time, I am abstaining from every other possible activity at that moment.

By the time I have died I will have done what I’ve done, and will have not done vastly more. I can’t read every book I want to read. I can’t write every song I want to write, I can only have so many conversations with the people I care about.

Life is about making room for YES by first saying NO. See the NO as a creative act, as the primer that goes on before the paint. The paint of YES.

ACTIVITIES
There are some hobbies that do wonders for your mind. Things like

Chess
Learning a musical instrument
Dancing
Puzzles
Developing a new or existing skill
Meditation and breathwork
Eating unfamiliar foods

All aid in the development, and slow the aging of your brain. Other activities include brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand, alternating between reading aloud and being read to (this requires a partner), adding up loose change in your pocket by feel alone, and rearranging or even inverting household objects. Read more about “neurobics” in this medically reviewed article by Laurence C Katz and Manning Rubin for thehealthy.com

BILINGUALISM
Lastly, speaking more than one language, or bilingualism, has been widely studied in the context of its positive effects on the brain.

According to a 2012 article for Trends Cogn Sci by Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I.M. Craik, and Gigi Luk, bilingualism aids brain development in children, and delays the onset of neurodegenerative illnesses like dementia in older people. Bilingual people perform better at both verbal and non verbal tasks, and studies suggest that the ability to suppress one language in the act of selecting another boosts their agility to discriminate between essential and nonessential information and stimuli. Read the whole article right here.

Simply put, start learning a foreign language. If you already know one, use it more often. Write, converse, journal, read, watch movies, and listen to music in another language. Is this easier said than done? Of course. But make it fun. You are sure to expand your horizons by doing this, which avails you of another brain-benefitting activity, forming new social connections.

PART TWO: THOU SHALT NOT

Now that I’ve given you a number of ways to be kind to your brain, here are some quick reminders for things to minimize or eliminate. I’ll keep this brief, as most of these are common sense.

AVOID PROCESSED FOODS
If your food has fine print, just say no. According to the Harvard School of Public Health, “people who eat diets high in ultra-processed foods, such as packaged cereals, frozen meals, and sweets, may have a higher chance of feeling depressed and anxious than those who eat fewer of these foods—and they may also have an increased risk of cognitive decline.”

The same goes for alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes. Usually I would mount more of an argument here, but I’ll keep it simple and say you know perfectly well that these things are bad for you. You know they make you feel bad, and think poorly, and that your life would be better without them. Why should I spend time convincing you of what you already know?

A perennial theme of writing, of my philosophy, is to obey your own conscience. The body of these articles is nothing more than elaborations on that sole commandment.

MINIMIZE SCREEN TIME.

I think we can agree that smartphones and social media are double edged swords. They’ve forever changed the way we learn, communicate, connect with others, and develop subcultures. They are also uniquely detrimental to emotional and psychological health. Social media use has been compared to gambling and drug use with respect to its effects on the brain (read the study here). Here is a chart from Michael Sandberg’s Data Visualization Blog

Social media makes you crazy.

In an interview with Michael Rich, MD, and director of the Center for Media and Child Health at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, Debra Bradley Ruder writes:

“The growing human brain is constantly building neural connections while pruning away less-used ones, and digital media use plays an active role in that process. Much of what happens on screen provides ‘impoverished’ stimulation of the developing brain compared to reality.”

The article goes on to discuss the effects of blue lights from screens on sleep quality, and the deteriorating effects of social media use on the reward centers in the brain and impulse control.

Author and associate professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, Cal Newport, has said repeatedly in interviews and podcasts that, unless you use social media for your job, you should delete it altogether. And, if you use it for work, you should remove it from your phone. He speaks of social media on your phone the way most of us think about smoking cigarettes: an indefensibly bad habit. Listen to him discuss social media here.

IN CONCLUSION

The path to a lighter, stronger, happier mind is one laid with life affirming choices.

Say yes to eating well. To sleeping 7-8 hours a night, every night. Say yes to being active, to learning new things, doing familiar things in new ways, changing up your routines and your environments. Say yes to exploring another language, and the entire world that opens up to you. Essentially, say yes to a life of both exciting challenges and self care.

And also, say no. Say no to bad food. No to bad sleep. To smartphone and social media addiction. Use screens for learning, and for focused periods of entertainment, but not as a way to avoid boredom. Let your mind wander, and don’t feed it non-stop digital junk food.

The good news about the road to a healthier brain is that the journey is the destination, the same way that running itself confers the benefit, not the crossing of the finish line.

That’s all for now. Take care of yourselves.
Thanks for reading, talk to you soon.

-Jas