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From the Ages

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

— Aristotle

From Today

“Lessons come hard only if you’re deaf to them. Don’t be.”

— Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle is the Way

From Us

We learn from failure. But, it turns out, there is an optimal way to receive its lessons. Researchers have quantified the rate of success and failure that leads to the deepest learning.

When we attempt goals that are too far out of reach, we get frustrated or never fully engage with the task. Why pour your heart into something that seems impossible at the outset? We also check out with easy goals. They bore us. Why waste your energy and attention on something so easy?

It can be helpful to occasionally pursue oversized and undersized goals to both push us far outside our comfort zones and for the opportunity to groove in quality practice. But research into mental performance and flow states has long shown that we learn best from goals in the "goldilocks zone" right at the limits of our abilities. We thrive with goals that stretch our skillset and demand focus but that are close enough that we are pulled by their motivational gravity.

Until this week, I've always thought of this principle in subjective terms—I'll know it by feel. For myself, I'll learn the optimal balance based on my levels of motivation and fun. When I teach others, I'll tune my lessons based on my student's body language and engagement. In both cases, fun is the best metric to show that I've found the right balance. But I've just learned that researchers have actually quantified this balance in the 85% Rule: 

We learn best when succeeding 85% of the time and failing the other 15%. 

Only failing 15% of the time might seem very infrequent to anyone who takes a more stern view of education. But the 85% Rule supports the findings of development psychologist Peter Gray, who advises that "learning occurs best in a playful state of mind, and anxiety inhibits playfulness." Succeeding 85% of the time means rehearsing the skills that you’ve already mastered much more often than striving for new ones.

This jives with a well-documented phenomenon in strength training called "greasing the groove." The best way to progress your strength is to devote most sessions to perfecting your form with submaximal loads and only occasionally pushing to failure or attempting new personal records. The more we have grooved in the right patterns, the more able we are to stick to them when the work gets tough.

But playfulness and repetition do not mean comfort and ease. The absence of challenge is boring. Research shows that a failed attempt triggers a response in the amygdala and other parts of the brain and nervous system responsible for focus and coordination. In other words, failure physiologically primes us for rapid learning and coordinated movement to increase our chances of success on the next attempt.

Failure is also fun, especially with the right mental framing. Optimizing for fun often means adding stakes like risk, danger, and the possibility of embarrassment. 

The 85% Rule gives us quantitative guidance for our own learning and advises those of us who teach, parent, and coach others. But we don’t need to record our progress or fulfill the exact ratio to apply this rule to our lives. The key takeaway is that we are best served by a lighthearted and playful approach to learning. Exploration, repetition, and fun are the best ways to learn.

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Marika and I just watched Return to Space, the new Netflix documentary about Elon Musk and Space X. I highly recommend it. It has also left me fascinated by the history of the US space program. I also want to share a collection of concepts for an American space colony. In 1975, NASA commissioned artists to submit renderings of how the first space colony might look. The submissions are fascinating and very nostalgic.

Thank you for reading this week and remember, life is too short to be normal!

Justin

The Basis of Bullshit: Bias, Logical, Fallacy and Our Imperfect Perceptions

 “Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.” –Albert Maysles

Tucked away in the American heartland there is a community standing up against the norms of this crazy world. They are hard-working, educated people, deeply committed to their families and their church. They take the time for the things too often overlooked in American society: family dinners, book-study, donating money, and offering their time for what they consider community service. In fact, they are deeply committed to these service projects, most notably picketing soldier’s funerals and socially progressive institutions with signs like: “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” and “God Hates Fags.”

The town is Topeka, Kansas and this is the Westboro Baptist Church. It is easy to conclude that each of these members is evil, but, from their worldview—their programming, they are the last vestige of human morality. They and everyone that matters in their life is certain that they have the right interpretation of the Bible—that they hold the irrefutably truth about right and wrong, the origins of the universe, the meaning of life, and what happens when we die. With this lens the only kind thing to do for the world is to get the word out that all of us are destined to burn eternally in a lake of fire, unless we change. From their place of certainty, not explaining the consequences is tantamount to watching a child climb into a furnace.

Apart from being a terribly boring way of operating in the world, dogma can make it appear quite rational to do terrible things. When acting based upon faulty assumptions, our flawed species is even more susceptible to poor judgment. The reality is, uncomfortable as it is to admit, we’re all wrong all the time. This becomes dangerous when we delude ourselves into certainty and refuse to confront the flaws in perception that characterize human experience.

Our Flawed Senses

Humans experience the world through flawed senses. Optical illusions, magicians, and marketers repeatedly take advantage of our imperfect perceptions. We’ve all been dazzled and mystified by the necker cube, the Andrus’ impossible box illusion, or your poor performance on this awareness test.

Even more, there are many things we cannot detect. Humans eyes don’t see ultra-violet (UV) light, the electromagnetic wave responsible for sunburns. Bumblebees, ants, and some lizards can see UV light, but humans can’t unless their cornea is removed. This is an advantageous protection, but it also limits our capacity to see reality. If humanity lost all electricity and our environment went completely dark, like the north pole at Winter Solstice, those rare outliers with a greater sensitivity to UV would be the most likely to survive. They’d pass on this trait and collective humanity would literally have a new lens with which to see the world.

Humans don’t see or smell oxygen, but if it suddenly vacated your premises, reading this blog would be the last thing on your mind. You can, however, detect other gases, like methane (men seem to love reminding each other of this reality). Whether we can sense something or not has very little to do with how important it is. Despite the fact that humanity had no way of seeing germs and viruses, they have caused illness and death since the beginning of time.

Our incomplete sensory set is inordinately influenced by our own narrow experiences. Americans assume that everyone needs a car because you “must” drive everywhere, that prescription drug commercials are normal, and that people in third world countries are less happy. A couple of short centuries ago, most people were raised believing women should not have careers or a vote and that slavery was part of the natural human order.

Growing up, I assumed no one talked during football games and everyone lived to debate politics and philosophy, but it turns out some find these proclivities rather obnoxious. When I adopted two black children, I assumed our hair care needs would be similar and that babies would sleep at night. The list of faulty assumptions is endless.

“Our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images, which we did not invent, but were given to us by society.” –Alan Watts

There is a Zen legend about a wealthy man who wanted to learn Zen. Accustomed to getting his way, the wealthy man came to visit a Zen master and said, “I have come for you to teach me about Zen. Open my mind to enlightenment.” The Zen master suggested that they discuss this over a cup of tea. As the wealthy man sat, the Zen master placed a cup in front of him and began pouring. The cup filled, yet he continued pouring. “Stop, the tea is spilling! Can’t you see the cup is full?” the wealthy man exclaimed. The Zen master smiled, saying, “Yes, and you are like this tea cup—so full that nothing can be added. Come back when your cup is empty.”

Meditation is a way of loosening our attachment to prior conditioning so that we can observe reality less distorted by our preconceived notions. While it is near impossible to completely separate ourselves from our deeply rooted social conditioning, the reminder is worth revisiting often.

What we deem normal and correct is most often based on what we’ve seen. We have to hold our opinions to a higher standard than what is conventional, popular, or superficially apparent, or we are all susceptible to our own subtler Westboroisms.

In addition to the biases built from past experience, each of us are subject to a vast number of cognitive biases inherent to human thought—what Warren Buffet’s business partner, Charlie Munger, calls the psychology of human misjudgment. Some of the most powerful include:

• Consistency Bias: The human mind is like the female egg. Once one sperm gets in, there is a shut-off mechanism that prevents any other from getting in. In the United States we have access to as many thoughts and ideas as we want to explore. Yet how many people are raised Methodist and say, you know, I think Hinduism makes more sense? How many even change from Baptism to Catholicism? How many say, you know these three branches of government and bi-cameral legislature have been cool, but the German parliamentary system makes more sense to me? These changes of mind are very unlikely to made without strong social pressure.

• Liking Distortion: Humans naturally hold ourselves and our opinions with inflated regard. Thus, we all see ourselves as above average and gravitate to people who think like we do. It is why we consider our political views obvious to anyone who thinks and everyone who disagrees is an idiot. It is also, probably, why my father was certain I was the greatest high-school football player in the history of the world and why I’ve noticed a similar trend with most parents.

• Social Proof Bias: How convenient that many Americans tend to fall into two neat political parties, each sharing very consistent views with the rest of their pack. Our tendency to believe what others do—social proof—has allowed humans to normalize bizarre beliefs and narrow simplifications even against overwhelming evidence. Hello Westboro. Hello feeding children Pop Tarts for breakfast. Similarly we see the over-influence from authority that was shown in the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments. If wondering how genocide is possible, look no further.

•  Deprival Super-Reaction Bias: Studies suggest that losses are twice as psychologically powerful as gains. We will go to great lengths in order to mitigate small losses while not lifting a finger when modest effort would yield tremendous gains.

• Reciprocation Tendency: The Marketing professor, Dr. Robert Cialdini went around campus asking people to take young children to the zoo. One in six said yes. Then he went around asking different people if they would devote two afternoons a week to watching young children. 100% said no, but he followed that question up by saying, well would you at least take them to the zoo once. By starting with the big ask, he tripled the frequency of people agreeing to take children to the zoo.

• Contrast-Caused Distortion: Similarly, we are easily fooled by contrast. Put a hand in hot water and a hand in cold water, then plunge them both into room temperature water. One hand perceives that water as cold and the other hot, yet it’s the same water. This has tangible effects in sales. That mediocre home seems like a dream after the real-estate agent shows you a few over-priced dumps.

It is with flawed senses, heavily driven by bias and a very narrow set of experiences, that we humans try to make sense of the world and make decisions about the best ways to conduct our lives.

Right and Wrong 

“…when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.” –Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong

 As the reprehensible actions of the Westboro Baptist Church display, there is a better and a worse way to behave. There is a righter and a wronger we should be striving towards and often, it won’t be so obvious. Truth is the bullseye and while we may never be dead on, we must always be striving to approach it.

The inability to find certainty does not excuse the radical subjectivism and moral relativity so commonly adopted as a means to deal with the discomfort inherent in confronting ignorance.

In fact, as we see from the Social Justice Warrior’s desire for absolute cultural tolerance, these are dogmas as non-sensical as any you’ll encounter across the world of fundamentalism. You simply cannot be a feminist while being an apologist for Islam whenever traditions like arranged marriage, restricted female rights, and female genital mutilation come to the surface. The tolerance paradox is that absolute tolerance tolerates the extremes of intolerance. Refusing to look at these uncomfortable realities only ensures they continue to plague millions.

Modern society is obsessed with honoring feelings and insulating ourselves from reality. Consequently, communities fracture and individual neuroses flourish. We suffer from a disturbing proliferation of bullshit and a lack of the tools to effectively identify and deconstruct said bullshit. Schools continue to teach outcomes and answers without the far more important ways to interpret and determine our own answers. An ability to retain information means nothing unless we can filter that information through an effective truth mechanism and understand the inherent flaws in our own perception. We can’t approach truth until we confront cognitive bias and logic.

Learning is the process of improving our capacity to interpret the world so that we are in a better position to appropriately respond and live more fully. If anyone is going to be right more often, it will be because they confronted their own ignorance more often. They didn’t read one book—they read many, some of which of conflicted and caused them to constantly revise past understandings. They didn’t just read, but they took that knowledge and reflected on how it impacted their life. This pursuit of truth is also called growth and it is the foundation of fulfilled living.

Despite having access to more opinions than ever, we are more fueled by confirmation bias than at any time in history. Now more than ever we should seek out unique opinions and perspectives. New jobs, joining new groups, moving towns, and travel are ways of forcing us to question our own socially conditioned concept of normal. Yet, as valuable as these experiences are, with this added context we will be exposed to more opinions and worldviews all full of their own flaws. We have to cultivate the skill of deconstructing beliefs to pull what has merit and to be unmoved by what doesn’t.

The Lost Tools of Learning

“How can juvenile people be expected to self-govern or to navigate an advertising-saturated market economy full of propaganda and untruths? How can they determine fact from opinion or what’s been proven from what might be possible?”–Ben Sasse 

The most relevant critique of modern education and curriculums came in 1948 from Dorothy Sayers. In her Essay, The Lost Tools of Learning, she lamented the removal of Logic and reasoning skills for siphoned off, overly-categorized checklist learning. Society traded depth for breadth and somehow reconceived the point of learning as following directions and attempting to be more like Wikipedia. As Sayers explains,

“We have lost the tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or ‘looks to the end of the work.”

Now more than ever the skills of rote memorization are insufficient. We have no idea what careers will look like in twenty-years and what challenges our people will need to be capable of adapting for. Lets not pretend teachers or google have all the answers and can distill all the wisdom needed for a lifetime. In a world of manipulation and message overload, the only people who stand a chance are those who have a means of distilling truth from untruth.

We need to understand the basic logical fallacies constantly utilized to distract from reality and substantiate oversimplified absurdities. A brief introduction:

•  The Appeal to Ignorance Fallacy: The position that you can assume X is true because there is no evidence proving it isn’t true. Enter anything. You contend that ghosts exist because you can’t prove they don’t.  A girlfriend assumes you flirt with women at work, because she can’t prove you don’t. Any belief or accusation can be justified by this fallacy. This is why the burden of proof rests on anyone bringing charges. Accusations are empty. This fallacy is also used to discredit credible theories with overwhelming evidence based on feelings. For example, people will choose not to believe in carbon dating or that the earth could have existed over 10,000 years ago.

• The False Equivalence Fallacy: This is when you claim that two things are the same, X is the same as Y, typically as a means of dramatizing a problem or discrediting a theory. Any shared trait is manipulated to mean equivalence. For example, in the movie A Few Good Men, two marines follow an order to give a struggling peer corporal punishment and one lawyer compares them to the Nazis at Nuremburg. In this vein, spanking is magnified to child abuse and Al Franken’s inappropriate attempts at humor have somehow put him in a category with Harvey Weinstein. Be on the lookout for this one anytime someone tells you two things are the same.

 This fallacy is, also, especially common with scientific evidence. For example, vaccines save millions, evolution has virtual consensus, 97+% of climate scientists agree with the tenets of human influenced climate change, and there is very little doubt that the earth is over 4 billion years old. Yet, the modicum of uncertainty inherent to all scientific findings leaves all of these “theories” open to arguments that try to appear as equally logical conclusions. They are not.

• The Appeal to Consequences Fallacy: An argument for how true or false X is based on how much someone likes the consequences if X ends up being true. Often this presents in people concluding a belief or reality is true because they want it to be. The most common is probably the daily conjecture that any positive development is proof that everything happens for a reason. Of course this line of reasoning is never applied to starvation in third-world countries, or babies born with AIDS.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it literally justifies any argument based on a person’s wishes. If a person wants to believe they are uniquely victimized so they can wear that badge of honor so desirable in the modern world, then they need only think it. If a person wants to believe that there are no environmental costs to human behavior, then boom it is true because they like the narrative better.

• Affirming the Consequent: If I didn’t go to work one morning, I’d likely not check my work email. I am after all, one of those peculiar beings who only does work email at work. However, my not responding to an email inquiry by noon, does not necessarily prove I am not at work. In fact, I frequently won’t check my email until the afternoon. When you affirm the consequent you assume Y to be true, just because if X were the case, Y would be the outcome. This one can be used to justify any position we currently lean towards from politics, to sports, to I know you’re cheating on me because. An example: If someone were a racist or a sexist they’d probably hire that white guy over that black lady. The white guy got hired, but we can’t conclude the hiring committee was racist and sexist.

• The Strawman Fallacy: When you are winning an argument, someone will often repeat back your argument in far weaker, overly-simplified terms. This is rampant in a world engineered for outrage and not trained for nuance. The most overwhelming example I’ve seen is in Cathy Newman’s interview with Jordan Peterson. Here is a segment where they discuss the wage gap:  

Newman: … that 9 percent pay gap, that’s a gap between median hourly earnings between men and women. That exists.

Peterson: Yes. But there’s multiple reasons for that. One of them is gender, but that’s not the only reason. If you’re a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis. You say women in aggregate are paid less than men. Okay. Well then we break its down by age; we break it down by occupation; we break it down by interest; we break it down by personality.

Newman: But you’re saying, basically, it doesn’t matter if women aren’t getting to the top, because that’s what is skewing that gender pay gap, isn’t it? You’re saying that’s just a fact of life, women aren’t necessarily going to get to the top.

Peterson: No, I’m not saying it doesn’t matter, either. I’m saying there are multiple reasons for it.

Newman: Yeah, but why should women put up with those reasons?

Peterson: I’m not saying that they should put up with it! I’m saying that the claim that the wage gap between men and women is only due to sex is wrong. And it is wrong. There’s no doubt about that. The multivariate analysis have been done. So let me give you an example––

 The entire discussion follows in this mind-numbing and duplicitous pattern.

• The Ad Hominem Fallacy: Attacking the person and not the issue. For example, “Oh you think I shouldn’t be smoking, Dad. You are one to talk. You and mom drink every weekend.” That example actually combined ad hominem and false equivalence. This has to be the most common tactic in any argument because it is far easier to break people down then their positions. Jordan Peterson, again offers a great example. In his debate on political correctness, Michael Dyson repeatedly distracted from Peterson’s points by concluding he was, “Just a mean mad white man.”

It is important to remember, still, that there are times that a person’s character is relevant, particularly if they are in a role where they will have to enforce moral standards.  

• The Slippery Slope Fallacy: This fallacy distracts from the argument at hand by concluding that if something happens it will set off a terrible sequence of events. The argument against legalizing marijuana is often based on a fear for what other drugs are going to become legal next.

 Of course, like ad hominem, slippery slope thinking can have some merit. There is a need to be wary of the unintended consequences we’ve often seen accompanying increased government intervention. For example, in colonial India, the British government wanted to reduce the number of deadly cobras around the country so they enacted a policy where the government paid people for dead cobras. Seeing a financial opportunity, the native Indians began breeding more cobras and the cobra population quickly tripled.  

•  Argument Ad Populum: This is claiming something must be the case, because most people believe it or operate based on its premise. For your own sake, run very far from this fallacy! Life is too short to be normal. Most kids eat dessert for breakfast. Most people have more debt than savings. Every single NBA player shoots free-throws underhand despite substantial evidence that underhand shots are more mechanically advantageous. And this brings us back to Westboro.

 “The truth will set you free, but first it’s going to piss you off?” –Unknown

Interpreting the world and making judgments is essential to individual and collective success. For individuals, the unwillingness to confront reality is a primary cause of neuroses. Collectively, we see cognitive bias and an inability to detect nuance at the root of every destructive movement from McCarthyism, to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, to the modern Social Justice Warrior.

How can we strive for truth if we are only governed by feelings? This is why truth must be foundational in any society or relationship. It is a prerequisite to growth.

As uncomfortable as it may be, we are all wrong. Constantly. Yet, we must act and be active players in our lives. It is essential to not only accept our own fallibility so we can learn from failure, but to strive towards improving our capacity to see truth. Even though our lens will always be skewed, we can consistently pull away weeds to experience a far more accurate, empowered reality.

If interested in exploring this topic further, I highly recommend Dr. Jonathan Haidt’s, The Happiness Hypothesis. Also, in my book, Setting the Bar (which, I’m happy to report, is now being available through Wal-Mart) I quote Daniel Schmachtenberger’s brilliant argument for what skills schools should focus on in the 21st century: 

“The only answer out of the oppression or chaos is the comprehensive education of everyone and the capacity to understand at least three things: They have to increase their first person, second person and third person epistemics.

Their third person epistemics is the easiest—philosophy of science, formal logic, their ability to actually make sense of base reality through appropriate methodology, and find appropriate confidence margins.

Second person is my ability to make sense of your perspective. Can I steel-man where you’re coming from? Can I inhabit your position well? And if I’m not oriented to do that, then I’m not going to find the synthesis of a dialectic. I’m going to be… harming something that will actually harm the thing I care about in the long run.

And then first person. Can I notice my own biases and my own susceptibilities and my own group identity issues and whatever well enough that those aren’t the things that run me…?

We need a new cultural enlightenment now where everyone values good sense-making about themselves, about others, about base reality, and good quality dialogue with other people that are also sense-making to emerge to a collective consciousness and collective intelligence that is more than our individual intelligence…. it’s cultural enlightenment or bust as far as I’m concerned.”

Thank you for reading!

Life is too short to be normal,

Shane Trotter

This week we’ll look at how the same cognitive bias that co-opts our political process also corrupts our personal goals. Let’s get into it!

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Are Your Goals Distracting From Your Goals?

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I’ve broken countless hearts in my life and most of my heart-breaking took place at work. My younger brothers used to joke that I told people that they are fat for a living. Their assessment was not entirely wrong.

I used to work for a mobile body composition testing service. I traveled to gyms and corporate wellness programs to test body fat and lean mass percentages before and after a fitness and nutrition challenge. When I returned to retest after six or eight weeks, I found a common trend. Upon first sight, I could often tell that a person had lost several inches from their waist. When I offered admiration for their hard work, nearly all of them would shrug off the compliment, tell me that they hadn’t lost any weight, and admit to seeing zero change in their physical appearance. I would let this dismissal pass until we got the results from their retest.

Their hydrostatic weight test would confirm my observation and show that they had reduced their body fat by a few percentage points. They hadn’t seen a drastic change in their total weight because they had gained muscle while losing fat. When I told them that, for example, they had lost eight pounds of fat while gaining five pounds of muscle, their outlook shifted entirely. Instantly, they could deem the last six weeks a success. Their total weight did not reveal the entire picture. They hadn’t failed. They just used the wrong metric to measure their progress.

Similarly, the people who weighed themselves daily often made less or even negative progress. Obsession over total weight led many people to restrict their daily calories, causing them to lose muscle. This also causes your body to act as though it’s in crisis—your body sees a famine and hangs onto its precious energy stores, ie. body fat. Rather than being an angel of good news, I often had to deliver a disappointing message: Yes you’ve lost weight, but most of it was muscle and you’ve actually gained a few pounds of fat…sorry.

This trend can arise anywhere, far beyond our simple health and fitness goals. In any new change or old pattern, we can fall into the trap of aiming our efforts to satisfy a specific metric rather than our primary goal.

When the Metric Becomes the Goal

Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. We often need many different measures or metrics to track our progress toward a goal, but when we shift our focus to meet only those metrics we distract from (or even reverse) our progress. This seems counterintuitive. How could a focus on approval rating interfere with a candidate’s main objective? How could a focus on grades diminish a student’s ability to learn? How could tracking daily calories stunt progress toward your dietary goal? When we zoom in too far on any one metric, we can lose sight of the larger picture. Goodhart’s Law serves as a stark reminder of what happens when we focus on outcome over process.

The executive management at my last corporate engineering job fell into this trap when tracking our sales numbers. The sales and marketing departments’ combined goal was to communicate the value of our products to encourage people or companies to buy them. The weekly and quarterly sales figures of the various product lines gave a measure of how well the company was accomplishing that goal. But, placing too much emphasis on the sales metrics—the number of units sold, the quarterly revenue or any other specific metric—over that primary objective encouraged the company to compromise its values.

The sales team would make last-minute deals at heavily discounted prices to meet their sales goals. The sales quotas—meant to measure how well they were demonstrating the value of our products—now became the goal itself. The company shifted tactics to satisfy a specific metric. The sales team not only failed to measure their effectiveness but eventually undercut the value of our designs as vendors learned to wait until the end of the quarter to place discounted orders. They succeeded in meeting their sales quotas but did not actually meet their original goal to communicate the benefits of our products well enough to sell them at our standard price.

Goodhart and the Political System

A recent CNN morning show hosted a discussion of the Democratic party debate from the previous night. While examining the two frontrunners for the 2020 Democratic nomination, the hosts commented on the different tactics that each employed and how their strategies evolved over several debates to boost their approval rating. One host suggested that Elizabeth Warren dodged one pressing question well but that Trump wouldn’t allow her to skirt an issue so easily, insisting that if she wins the nomination she will need to refine her tactics on that particular issue. I thought:

This exemplifies everything wrong with our political system. The fact that coverage like this has become the norm is the deepest problem of all. Is this sports or politics? Aren’t the candidates supposed to use the debate platform to outline their views and explain why their proposed changes will best address the current issues?

The candidates' approach and the mainstream media’s coverage of their tactics completely distract from the true purpose of the election—to find an executive who can lead us toward a better future. Their approval ratings and debate “success” are only supposed to be measures of how well each candidate accomplishes this primary goal. Instead, these candidates (bolstered by media coverage) changed their tactics to directly improve their ratings. By pandering to a specific metric, they forestall or even damage their progress toward their initial objective to clarify their values and proposed changes.

The To-Do List Double-Edged Sword

A to-do list can be an effective tool to collect and prioritize work. I use a daily list to help me accomplish my essential tasks, but I have to be extremely wary to maintain the purity of my list. It can easily become a justification for distraction rather than a tool for focus.

The top of my list is always filled with the most important and essential tasks. These fill my attention and naturally flow out first when I build my list. But I have to force myself to stop there. If I continue listing, eventually I’ll draw from the bottom of my mental priority barrel. I’ll list errands, housework, and what I call “admin work” (paying bills, organizing files, responding to non-essential emails, and giving Shane the constant positive reinforcement that he requires to get out of bed each day). When we look around and try hard enough, we can create a nearly infinite list of admin tasks.

Even when I list only the essentials and sit down to my first vital piece of creative work, I still feel the inevitable resistance rise. Wanting to feel the “success” and satisfaction of crossing items off my list, I’ll add a few menial tasks to the bottom. From there, I can justify opening my email or closing my computer altogether to start a podcast and clean the house.

Lists are an elegant tool, but only when we use them to prioritize and motivate the essentials. When the metric of checking off list items becomes the goal, we feel incentivized to fill our lists with the low-hanging fruit that distracts from our original goal: focused work on our essential tasks.

The Dark Side of Fitness Tracking

There is an obvious upside to the Fitbit, smartwatches, and other similar step-counters and fitness trackers. Inherent in measuring your daily steps and calorie expenditure is the challenge to maintain your daily streak or continually outdo yourself. Add in the social component of friendly competition and you’ve created a very potent motivating factor. But, in no other area can our metrics co-opt our progress than in fitness and nutrition tracking.

Counting calories, especially with little regard for where those calories come from, is laughably ineffectual. Logging and controlling your macronutrient levels can give a more accurate picture of your overall nutritional landscape. But without considering countless other factors you can “succeed” in meeting your quotas while failing to improve your health. It is possible to fulfill a “healthy” macronutrient prescription by eating only donuts, cookies, and bacon.

Similarly, to focus simply on burning calories gives no priority to how you do it. You might choose exercises that burn many calories quickly but do not serve your larger goal of becoming leaner and stronger. You might neglect movements with a longer learning curve but that bring greater long-term payoff for your mobility or coordination. You might repeat the same few high-caloric-output activities and never seek out new exercises or movement patterns. Max Shank likens “burning calories” to “killing time,” two phrases whose very wordage demonstrates how hollow they can be.

Calories measure the amount of work that you do. They say nothing of the effectiveness of that work toward any higher goals. With a focus on burning calories, you can delude yourself into believing that you are making progress while neglecting your true fitness and movement goals. Your efforts could be as meaningless as cleaning the bathroom while your essential project awaits your return. To burn calories, do jumping jacks all day. To move better, build strength, and develop a more intimate relationship with your body, remove your focus from your caloric output.

Defining Better Metrics (or Maybe None At All)

We need to periodically check in with our progress. We need metrics that measure our current place relative to where we started and where we’re headed. Without good metrics we cannot tell the difference between steady progress, walking in circles, or moving backward. You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

By their very nature, metrics only measure a single aspect. Focus on only a single metric means inherently ignoring many others. We need to look at a broad array of metrics for our success, but also think intentionally about what each measure might be telling us. Reality is often very different from our initial perception.

When you obsess over any single metric, you ensure that you’re failing to understand the whole picture. You distract from your original objective or, worse, move in the opposite direction than you intended. You gain body fat while believing that you’re getting healthier. You pander to specific demographics to improve your approval rating but demonstrate your superficial values and lack of moral fiber in the process. You burn a ton of calories without actually moving closer to any of your fitness goals. You get to feel “productive” while remaining blissfully ignorant of your procrastination and lack of focus.

You have to measure your progress, but select a set of metrics that give the most accurate assessment of your primary goal. Then, do not put undue faith or meaning into any one metric and always try to see the greater truth behind the numbers. Keep an internal measure of “success” rather than allowing the external metrics to define your journey.

While we need to check in occasionally, sustainable growth and progress come from setting a direction rather than a destination. We built the 30x30 challenge around the tools that help you discover and define your direction. It provides a launching point to develop healthy patterns and trends while instilling the core habits that will allow you to maintain them. Regardless of how you define your goals, set your sights on a specific horizon and allow the individual landmarks to reveal as you approach.

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Thank you for reading this week and remember, life is too short to let the dashboard pull your attention from the road and the scenery!

Justin

It seems a particularly potent message for the middle of summer—a time where we often find the flexibility to have the sort of novel experiences that often bring about the most profound realizations and transformations. Enjoy!

Transformative Experience: Changing Thoughts and Feelings Through Action

“These waters must be troubled before they can exert their virtues.” –Edmund Burke

“Reed’s car keeps stalling out,” my wife informs me as I come in from work. “It will start after a jump, but then dies mid-drive. We left it parked in the Starbucks off 157. It’s less than a mile from a Pep Boys, but I was afraid if he tried to drive there, it would die on 157 and he’d be stuck. I couldn’t just leave the kids in the car and push with him, you know? Will you take care of it?”

Reed is my brother-in-law. A recent graduate of the University of Texas, he has been the most loving, competent, over-qualified childcare imaginable these past 5 months. “Of course. I’m on it! Let’s go, Reed.”

Fast forward thirty-minutes. My wife’s fears prove warranted. Reed and I are in the middle of 157 pushing a 2008 Honda Accord, while three lanes of northbound travel converge into two, furiously passing us on the right. Standing in the middle of rush-hour traffic, you can’t help but feel exposed. Driving is usually more like a video game. Rain bounces away. Dust and bugs are evaporated imperceptibly. There is no real sense of the speed you’re travelling; no bite from the external temperature; no connection to the terrain, or the violence of the cars passing by—you are completely insulated often to the point of becoming mindless. But that veneer of security is ripped away as soon as your feet hit the pavement. Suddenly, there is a keen awareness that contact with any one of these two-ton beasts would be your end. Senses are heightened. The mind completely present and adaptable—unconcerned with the past and future. It is go time.

Here in the eye of the storm, it suddenly dawns on me that I am smiling euphorically. To passersby I must appear unhinged, but I feel downright giddy. Our mission is clear. Pep boys stands about 600 meters up a mild incline. In 500 meters we can veer into the safety of a left turn lane before crossing three lanes of traffic to arrive at our destination.

A man in his mid-30’s runs across the street to join. He is instantly my brother. All the normal pleasantries are somehow hilarious transposed against our current challenge. “Oh you’re in consumer finance. I bet that’s interesting.” We quickly find ourselves joking and laughing despite the lactic burn that fills our legs.

The three of us now push as one, never considering fatigue or self-pity. If anything I pity the masses streaming by. Daydreaming through their daily rhythms, absent of the vivid intensity gifted by our predicament. As we draw nearer our excitement mixes with anxiety. How the hell are we going to make this left turn against the flow of three lanes? No one says anything about it, however. Not until a slight opening emerges. “That’s as good as its gonna look! Push!” I don’t know who ushered the command (probably me; I’m a bossy bastard), but we all dug in and sprinted against the vehicle with surprising effectiveness. The car cleared all traffic and pulled into Pep Boys with time to spare. Or so I thought until I saw my comrades foot….

Just kidding. We were all fine, so we bid each other ado and I headed home to watch Game of Thrones.

“These (peak experiences) are moments in which you are lifted out of the daily grind and you sense that there is something larger and more sublime in life that you have been missing…. These moments can come from exerting yourself past what you thought were your limits. They can come from overcoming great obstacles…. You want to deliberately go in search of such moments. Stimulate them if you can. They have the effect… of altering your attitude for good. They expand what you think about your possibilities and about life itself, and the memory is something you will always return to for extreme inspiration.” –Robert Greene

Experiences like these are far too rare in our convenient, safe world. It is all too easy and common to sleepwalk through our days doing empty, paycheck driven work in pursuit of more comfort and security, all the while distracting ourselves with sweets and tweets. Purpose grows rare. Purchases and easy pleasures serve to numb the angst of meaninglessness.

Our large, highly-developed infrastructures preclude the need for rising to any occasion or banding together to get a job done. We’re conditioned to expect the government or AAA to step in and solve each problem. Occupations compartmentalize. Communities isolate. We drive on stressed, busy, and engulfed in shit we hardly care about.  

Then on rare occasions there is a great storm. Trees fall. We come out of our houses, talk to our neighbors and connect through shared experience and a common mission. As Sebastian Junger shows in his amazing book, Tribe, over and over again humanity rallies together in times of war, natural disaster, and general chaos to find purpose and improved mental well-being. When the trial ends, people almost universally look back fondly and claim to miss it. Upon reflection, they find that before this event they were not fully activated. The stasis that defined their lives was not full living. If we were only fortunate enough to have disaster strike with some regularity, we might transcend the mental desperation of our time and live more fully.

I’m not so deluded as to be ignorant of the death and destruction wrought by disasters. I don’t actually hope for war or typhoons. But I do wish we could all have intermittent, unpredictable chaos that forces us to rise to the occasion and remember that we should strive to be capable of more. Just as I want my children to face pains and struggles so they grow up truly empathetic, competent, interesting, and well-adjusted, I wish a healthy degree of adversity for you.

As usual the ideal is a balance, only perceptible when we appreciate the nuance. I love my routines and the productivity they endear. An introvert, I crave silent mornings to write and calm evenings at home alone with my wife and children. I’m delighted to live in a world with low infant mortality and infinite access to information. Our good is oh so good, but that does not negate the growing challenge of purposelessness and alienation that defines our time. Depression, anxiety, obesity, drug overdoses, and suicide are all at unprecedented highs and the growth curves show no signs of leveling.

While there is great joy to be found in simple daily rhythms and inner calm, we require intermittent strife and time outside our comfort zone in order to grow and be fulfilled. Even more, there is a large difference between a sense of calm which only follows true confidence and the far more common apathetic, mindless malaise that is usually accompanied by hidden anxiety.

The Standard Model

“The disease of our times is that we live on the surface. We’re like the Platte River, a mile wide and an inch deep.” – Steven Pressfield

The challenges of modernity find their origins in the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Western society began to question all its traditional institutions and the structure of society changed radically. Populations exploded, transportation quickened, people moved to cities, and life took on a frenetic pace. All of a sudden our world offered boundless possible beliefs and a seemingly infinite number of career options. The world, today, has only moved further in this direction. Soren Kierkegaard, a 19th century Danish philosopher found that most people responded to this immense freedom by becoming both lost in the infinite and lost in the finite.

To be lost in the infinite is to be paralyzed by the abundance of options. For most of human history, there weren’t options. You hunted, gathered and helped the tribe survive. More recently, you took on the family farm after your father died, or married a farmer and raised children. Today you could be anything—a doctor, lawyer, real-estate agent, salesman, teacher, engineer, entrepreneur, or any of a billion other options, all of which come with their own pros and cons. You can move anywhere, adopt any religion, love anyone, say anything, and, generally, live any way you want.

The cruel twist to all this freedom is that the more choices we have, the more irrational those decisions become and the more unsatisfied we are with each decision. Each choice is subject to far greater buyer’s remorse as we remember the upside of all those other options we could have selected. Most importantly, as psychologist, Barry Schwartz, details in his book, The Paradox of Choice, we are far less likely to make any decision. Overwhelmed by the number of choices we spin our wheels in infinite analysis. This is what it means to be lost in the infinite. Picture the 22-year-old college grad who moves back home and spends his days scrolling through social media, playing video games, defining every disadvantage, critiquing everyone, and waxing prolific about things he might someday do.

It’s far easier to lose ourselves in voyeurism and point out where everyone else is wrong than to take any action. Action invites failure, pain, critique, and all those antecedents of growth and purpose. Most today, employed or otherwise, find themselves frequently lost in the infinite—pointing out the flaws in other people’s efforts and everywhere society falls short of utopia, all the while avoiding life in favor of mindless distractions. The masses are hypnotized by social media’s infinite scroll of redundant self-promotion and outrage. Which brings me to the finite.

To be lost in the finite is to be lost in the Standard Model (yeah it’s capitalized—we, henceforth, dub thee a proper noun). For those unfamiliar with this central IHD concept, the Standard Model is society’s norms as we know them. It is the promise of happiness and fulfillment if you just follow the expected and “normal” path through Western life. You know… get good grades, go to college, study a practical subject, get a job, buy nice things, get married, buy bigger, nicer things, have kids, overprovide for and overprotect those kids while indoctrinating them in this standard model, retire, spoil your kids’ kids, die. That’s the macro picture. The micro looks more like this:  

Wake, work, TV, bed.

Wake, work, TV, bed.

Wake, work, TV, bed.

Sprinkle in a little social media, a lot of food, some commuter stress, and a few thousand birthday celebrations, gender reveal parties, and awards ceremonies, and that is the Standard Model.

Not that any part of this is inherently wrong. Marriage, kids, college or any other Standard Model choices could be profoundly positive decisions in your life—but, usually, only once you have analyzed how they are typically practiced and defined a more constructive, thoughtful approach. Furthermore, everything from TV and social media to awards banquets can be wonderful given the right spirit and dosage. Yet, guided by the chief values of our Standard Model—comfort, convenience, being liked, being right, and having more—this finite path leaves the masses living, to quote Thoreau, “lives of quiet desperation.”

Social proof pulls us towards both the finite and the infinite. To escape this broken model, we must act, despite our choice overload, and we must act differently, driven by a more fulfilling set of values. This is extremely difficult. Most want to be normal and accepted. Deciding to chart our own course not only invites criticism, but guarantees repeated failure. Yet, this is the only route to growth and creating a more inspired existence.

Escaping the Standard Model

Values are the operating system that determines most of our decisions. They are a preference hierarchy that grows more sophisticated as we mature. My two-year-old son gets into everything. He must experience the world so he can determine preferences—ice cream tastes better than broccoli. As kids mature they become capable of valuing more than just immediate gratification. Teenagers tend to value peer feedback over parental advice. Adulthood is about developing complex values—everyone wants me to go to the bar, but I’m more worried about feeling decent for my morning workout and being productive tomorrow.

The most common path to rewiring our values—the operating system that determines most of our decisions—is to identify the characteristics of good and bad values, reflect on your past actions and the values they indicate, and then define new values and the actions they necessitate. It’s a useful process that I recommend for everyone. Still, all that work tends to be very wordy and abstract. Values have trouble taking root without a lot of reflection. There tends to be a large gap between our logical mind’s detached musings and the reality of daily living where we are governed far more by emotion. Values are not tangible, yet their outcomes are. Thus, a more effective avenue for re-coding values is to start at the endpoint—action.

Put another way, self-development is usually conceived as an intellectual pursuit. You read the right things, listen to the right messages, reflect, mentally rehearse, and expect change to follow. Thoughts are supposed to change feelings and actions. But, we should look to work the process in reverse, as well. The right actions are even more effective at changing our feelings and thoughts. A powerful experience will often do more to change values than any workbook.

We’ve all known someone who was hopelessly immature and destined to go nowhere. Life was a party and she seemed to only care about seeking more pleasure and debauchery. And then you bump into her five years later and, as if by magic, she is a freaking inspiration. She has cleaned up, quit smoking, and now heads a non-profit dedicated to anti-malaria efforts across Africa. “What happened?” you ask. “On a whim, I joined a trip to Uganda to help hang Mosquito nets. It was summer, I was bored, and I figured it was a way to travel and get my parents off my back. Once I got there and saw the immense need something got into me.” Her experience triggered a chain reaction of unconscious value transformations that changed every pattern in her life. Similarly, the video-game junkie, gone Marine may have heard the words discipline, duty, and resiliency before, but they didn’t take tangible form until boot camp. He now lives according to a clearly defined code, but only because of the physical exhaustion, the meticulous inspections, the arduous punishments, and the brotherhood these fostered.

Talk is cheap. It’s easy to intellectually conclude that X is a better value than Y—health over immediate gratification; trust over promiscuity; learning over dependency. But emotions usually drive our actions and they don’t speak in words. Emotion is literally a physical manifestation. As any meditator can attest, each has its own sensations. Emotion speaks in feelings. It listens to action and changes through experience. So, the question is, what actions drive the development of more fulfilling values? Now we’re getting somewhere.

Truth Through Trial  

“Tao (the way) that can be spoken of is not the constant Tao.” –Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Reading, self-educating, and studying, while essential to the development of the human spirit, particularly in this age of artificiality, are still not sufficient for our self-realization. Yes, we must play with ideas and continue to cultivate the mind, but there is far more than just the theoretical.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, a 20th century British philosopher, posited that objective truth existed, but language was entirely insufficient for revealing that truth. In his mind asking someone to describe love, flow, beauty, purpose or any of life’s most important concepts is like asking them to build you a house with a bottle of Windex. Or, as host of the Philosophize This podcast, Stephen West, put it, “To Wittgenstein, asking a question like what is the meaning of my life is like inquiring: How much red paint would it take to be funnier than sound waves? It just instantly shows the person’s hand as someone that is confused about the limitations of language.” 

Truth feels paradoxical, because life is endlessly complex. By acting you confront what is real. To be lost in the infinite is to be consumed by the maze of linguistic possibility, constantly confronting the dead-end of utopian delusions. Absent of a path that can be perfectly defined, the only safe route is in identifying the errors of others while living passively. We live in a world of critics, too afraid to jump into the arena.

The modern world works hard to remove hard experiences and allow people to avoid as much discomfort as possible. Yet, these conditions leave us ill-suited to create a meaningful life. It is hard to be a real, authentic person or to even know oneself until you face some real shit. As Jordan Peterson says, “You don’t know yourself, until you test yourself.”  

In the face of inconceivable convenience and impulse overload, we need to get out of the car and reconnect with the chaos of reality. By entering this raw, vulnerable space life can take on vivid depth and color. It isn’t just philosophical musing. In my next piece, I’ll advocate a structured path to spur meaningful, purpose-cultivating actions. It turns out societies have always had traditions for prompting those universal human experiences that unlock deeper existence, lodge values, and reveal more than words ever could. For now, I’ll introduce these universals and clarify the human needs that necessitate such practices.  

Your Mission if You Choose to Accept It

Humans are tribal animals. Like all animals we are driven by instinct. As my father, the philosophy professor, often mused, our primary instinctive behavioral responses include: fighting, feeding, fleeing, and intercourse. The four F’s. Above these instincts are the human needs, which each of us try to meet in a variety of manners. The most obvious are the physical needs: water, food, shelter, and fire.

Unlike simpler animals, however, our complex brains go far beyond these survival needs. We have emotional needs that are every bit as vital. Tony Robbins believes we have four needs of the personality: certainty, variety, connection, and significance. He contends that we must meet these needs via growth and contribution or we will be unfulfilled.  Sebastian Junger distills these needs down to: connection, competency, and authenticity.

Despite the semantic differences between Robbins’ and Junger’s theories, they basically say the same thing. It all starts with parental and tribal love. That is the foundation for our growth—the stability that both allows and should prompt us to get out of our comfort zone in pursuit of becoming more capable. That process will reveal purpose, forge emotional intelligence, and enable authenticity. Continuing to grow in pursuit of our purpose builds self-awareness and makes us capable of contributing to others. 

In the modern world our physical needs are met so effortlessly that we are rarely prompted to essential experiences that make us capable of meeting our emotional needs.  Without deep challenge we remain a shell of ourselves. That safe, comfortable cocoon is a breeding ground for neuroses and depression.

Lasting fulfillment requires that we struggle against an ever-evolving series of worthy opponents, both literal and figurative. We all want to be the hero of our own story. Integral to the archetypical hero’s journey, is that we all must confront our deepest fears. It could be that certification test you’ve always needed to pass, a risky project, or a business you’re too terrified to start because you subconsciously know you’ll have to learn through a lot of failure. There may be a real physical challenge you’ve always shied away from—a marathon, the Go Ruck challenge, or something more solitary. Maybe it is just moving out on your own or moving cities so you are finally forced to stand on our own two feet. Whatever it is, it will be a little painful. A part of you has to die for a greater you to emerge.

Yet, again, we can get so lost that we struggle to decipher what challenges we authentically want and what just sounds good from within the Standard Model. Self-discovery is a process. Action tends to reveal and spur greater inspiration. Thus, societies have always centered around universal experiences central to growth and maturation at all ages.

The universal experiences that, until recently, have been shared across all peoples, religions, and tribes include:

• Fasting

• Fighting

• Finding Food

• Foot-driven trek

• Frequent and extended time in nature

• Building/creating

• Art

• Giving to charity

• Meditation

• Gratitude or prayer

• Play

• Fellowship

From now on I’ll refer to these as Pillar Experiences. Clearly some of these can and should overlap. I’ll expand on each in my next article, but lets just focus on the broader picture. 

These exercises were ritualized and practiced in most human societies. After years of training, elements were combined into a Rite of Passage. This deeply challenging experience would demonstrate an individual’s maturation into a capable, honorable, and self-actualized member. As such, successful completion warranted both the perks and expectations of full membership. This ensured both the survival of the tribe and the fulfillment of the individual.

As industrialized societies grew more stable and affluent, it became possible for civilizations to operate without every member becoming brave, virtuous, and useful. Consequently, cultures have slowly moved away from these expectations. Yet, in doing so they are neglecting the essentiality of these developmental experiences for the individual’s fulfillment.  

This is what religions and moral philosophies have always known: we are in need of self-discovery and self-mastery, and this only comes through practice.

"A soft, easy life is not worth living, if it impairs the fibre of brain and heart and muscle. We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage... For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out." –Teddy Roosevelt

By identifying the principles behind the pillar experiences, Justin and I aim to create a structured model for incorporating these practices into life. Shared experiences can, then, foster a community that supports one another in pursuing meaningful work and escaping the Standard Model. After all, being the weirdo is far easier when you know there are others like you.

Still, no one can act for you or tell you the way. Purpose and passion only follow action and sacrifice. We have to invest ourselves towards worthy causes. What is worth struggling for? What task scares you, yet badgers your subconscious—taunting you to become what you’re capable of? Is it not the perfect time? It never will be. You could build your own Rite of Passage, explore our Essential Guide to Self-Mastery, or investigate any of the pillar actions for yourself. No plan is perfect. Act anyway.

The path of least resistance may be normal and easy, but it leaves us feeling empty. Life is too short to be normal. When we find ourselves listlessly lost in the scroll, perhaps the answer is a question: What is the mission?

I’ve also come across a quote recently that tells of the much broader implications of the ideas in this essay. Computer scientist Alan Kay on seeing problems from a different angle:

“A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points."

And now:

A Higher Perspective

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I recently moved to the mountains. I live above the 8,000-foot elevation and frequently hike, run, climb, and mountain bike above 10,000 feet. 

I am always struck by an indescribable wonder at such great heights. Everything seems more expansive and I cannot help but feel light and optimistic. I am not the first to report such a positive shift from a visit to the mountains. This effect is more than the obvious awe of the vastness of your surroundings. At higher elevations, the horizon is literally lower. When you stand several thousand feet further from the center of the earth, you can see further around its curvature. The landscape beneath you and the sky above you both appear grander.

A simple shift in vantage turns an otherwise ordinary landscape into a stunning vista.

Everyone should take trips to the high mountains as frequently as they have access. The effects on mental health and overall happiness are without comparison, but this is more than a case for mountain life. Understanding how elevation can shift our perspective of our surroundings teaches us an important lesson about how to view life’s circumstances.

When you are in the depths of a bad situation—illness, familial conflict, the end of a relationship, loss of a job, depression, or any other dark place that seems to shrink the walls around you—it is often impossible to find any light or optimism in the world. But to pass through a dark time, we must always maintain that the world is full of light, even if (and especially when) it does not seem to shine on us.

In these moments, we see the world from a lower elevation, sometimes so deep it’s like trying to take in your surroundings from the bottom of a well. But just because we are incapable of seeing them does not mean that beauty or vastness does not exist around us. Seen from a higher vantage our surroundings would appear entirely different.

Moving higher shifts your perspective. At the lower point, it’s difficult to see that any better outlook exists. While it does not make the climb out any easier, remember that any change in perspective will motivate you to continue climbing. 

All we can do in these moments is begin to climb, however slowly. With each incremental move higher, our horizon recedes into the distance, revealing all the beauty we knew was there but could not yet see. 

Recommendations for me?

I’m nearing the end of Walter Isaacson’s incredible biography of Ben Franklin. In the last year or two, I’ve made an effort to read more memoirs and biographies and would love your recommendations. Please comment or reply to this email. Thanks!

Life is too short to be normal!

Justin

ONE FROM THE AGES

Aristotle on the importance of having standards that are earned:

“Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.”

ONE FROM TODAY

Jonathan Haidt on the relationship between standards and mental health:

“Some constraint is good for us; absolute freedom is not. Durkheim, the sociologist who found that freedom from social ties is correlated with suicide also gave us the word “anomie” (normlessness). Anomie is the condition of a society in which there are no clear rules, norms, or standards of value. In an anomic society, people can do as they please; but without any clear standards or respected social institutions to enforce those standards, it is harder for people to find things they want to do. Anomie breeds feelings of rootlessness and anxiety and leads to an increase in amoral and antisocial behavior…

One of the best predictors of the health of an American neighborhood is the degree to which adults respond to the misdeeds of other people’s children. When community standards are enforced, there is constraint and cooperation. When everyone minds his own business and looks the other way, there is freedom and anomie.”

Source: The Happiness Hypothesis

ONE FROM US

Last week, I gave a presentation titled: Cultural Causes of Declining Mental Health. Since the Covid-19 lockdowns, socioemotional learning and mental health have been buzz topics in education. But, as I’ve tried to make clear in my book and many other presentations, these trends were overwhelmingly evident before Covid-19. It’s essential to take this into account when trying to reverse these trends.

Speaking to a large group of educators, I set out to explain many of the misconceptions that sabotage our attempts to improve mental health, and which often make things worse. The most important concept I wanted to convey was that the way to address mental health wasn’t to spot treat individuals who were struggling. Rather, it was to address the underlying cultural causes. As I said:

“We tend to look at mental health (physical too) as an individual problem. These people need individual counselling for their individually dysfunctional brains. They have X imbalance in their individual brains and individually need Y intervention to fix it.

And for those who don’t have clinical depression or a full-on “disorder,” but maybe are just a little unsatisfied with their life, we have self-help. 

But the real source of and most profound solutions for this mental health epidemic are usually cultural. Look to the environment for the source and the solution.”

Many students and adults live in a world with nothing that is bigger than them—no apparent meaning. Raised on social media, reality television, and incessant advertising, their minds descend into a never-ending feed of entitlement and self-promotion. They feel aimless and angsty. But they aren’t motivated to do much about it. How do you even begin to help? 

These issues go deep. Many students today have a large void in their development where exploration and discovery was supposed to be. Their natural sense of curiosity has been obstructed by the ever-present allure of screens. The result is that they have not cultivated a foundation for future interests. As occupational therapist, Victoria Prooday, explains:

“Using technology as a “Free babysitting service” is, in fact, not free at all. The payment is waiting for you just around the corner.  We pay with our kids’ nervous systems, with their attention, and with their ability for delayed gratification. Compared to virtual reality, everyday life is boring.”

But just as significant, today, more and more kids grow up disconnected from a clear model of what it means to become an adult and, consequently, from any desire to become anything more. The heroes of today are almost exclusively celebrities—Kardashians, YouTubers, and the like. The rites of passage today are automatic. Keep showing up and you’ll graduate high-school. Turn 18 and we will call you an adult, even while your bills are paid and meals provided. There are routes to distinction, to be sure, but fewer formative challenges that everyone is expected to experience and fewer standards that everyone is expected to meet. This takes the pressure off, but it has a way of leaving one feeling hollow and uninspired. 

Low expectations have the same effect on adults. I’ll never forget a conversation I had with a colleague of mine at the end of the first full school year after Covid. He commented that after months of COVID-19-related confusion and criticism, school administrators didn’t care what was happening in each classroom. As long as teachers didn’t invite any more complaints, they’d be left alone. This, along with a number of other frustrating policies, had led to decreased student and teacher effort. As he said, “My job has never been easier, but I’ve never enjoyed it less. Jokes don’t land like they used to. Conversations are dull. Everyone is just trying to get through the year. I go home feeling dirty.” 

By contrast, challenging work has a way of fostering greater connection, laughter, and zeal for living. When people have worked hard for something, they tend to care more and to be more bothered by those who would cheat the system. After reading an article I wrote for Quillette on lowered education standards, my father, the MD, PhD and late-blooming video-gamer, shared a fascinating insight. He identified a specific excerpt from near the end of my article, where I write:

"I have a radical idea. Assign grades based exclusively on academic performance—the quality of the writing, the accuracy of the math equation, the understanding of the historical themes. Grade everything for mastery, alone, and consider it a breach of ethics to do otherwise. Most students would work far harder, learn far more, and come to enjoy it. They’d invest enough to cultivate more rewarding interests and become better citizens. Some would not rise to the occasion and would be left behind. But that is already happening."

His response:

“It occurred to me… that your idea is precisely the approach that is applied by video game developers when they design games and award achievement trophies. On the video game websites (e.g., Reddit), players complain vehemently when other players find and utilize ways to "cheese" a game and "beat" the game without actually mastering the skills (for difficult games like Dark Souls, these "skills" are infinitely more difficult to acquire than the skills we currently teach in schools). One of the things I've seen over and over again in the Dark Souls online conversation is some new player complaining that the game is "too hard" and asking for an easy way to get through a difficult task. The answer is always resoundingly the same, so much so that it's become cliche: "Get good."

If video games, subject to relentless pressures from consumers, can employ such demanding standards (and in many cases, MUST employ them in order to maintain market share), then perhaps schools could meet them part way and demand at least a modicum of excellence.”

There is a sense today that standards are rigid and outdated. To some degree, this is warranted. Too many of the people who cling to standards push them in the wrong way (standardization) and do so out of a crotchety mix of self-promotion, disdain, and an unwillingness to adapt. These are the teachers who would rather make a kid feel like crap for being born into this generation than help them transcend its traps. Still, this does not disqualify the importance of standards. Nothing has been worse for our culture than the dissolution of our shared standards. Nothing would do more for our kids and our communities than to clarify cultural ideals, set expectations, and enforce standards of excellence. 

Many people, especially within education, believe they are being “nice” by lowering standards and making life easier on kids. But all this does is to keep them a more limited and fragile version of themselves. Strong expectations promote connection through mutual values and capacities. When standards  are reduced, we see just the opposite. 

Justin has moved to new cities many times. He’s mentioned to me that the first thing he does anytime he moves somewhere new is to find a Crossfit gym. Justin and I have both written critiques of Crossfit, but we recognize how amazing Crossfit gyms are at building culture. Their success is built on creating really clear standards and methods to measure development, and adding to that a support system that cares about the integrity of those standards. The program follows a consistent set of mini-rites of passage that pull people together to celebrate each other and help everyone find new levels within them. At the end of the day, this is what life and community is all about. 

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Thank you for reading! This was a heavily edited and modernized version of an article I wrote over a year. Please share with anyone you think would find this interesting. 

Also, if you are interested in the concept of standards, Josh Berlotti and I had a great conversation about the power of standards on his In Search of Wisdom podcast a couple weeks ago.

Life is too short to be normal,

Shane 

From the Ages

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. ”

— William James

From Today

Economic and political scientist, Francis Fukuyama on the untapped human yearning to prove oneself:

“if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”

“a civilization devoid of anyone who wanted to be recognized as better than others, and which did not affirm in some way the essential health and goodness of such a desire, would have little art or literature, music or intellectual life. It would be incompetently governed, for few people of quality would choose a life of public service. It would not have much in the way of economic dynamism; its crafts and industries would be pedestrian and unchanging, and its technology second-rate.”

Source: The End of History? by Francis Fukuyama

From Us

IHD makes me better. My writing here requires that I constantly seek new ideas and test them against my current beliefs. Writing to an audience also puts me into a role of responsibility and trust that requires that my words are some combination of interesting and valuable, lest I disappoint you or waste your time. That never comes easily. On the other side of this exchange, I get to feel that I am contributing to the world in a positive way and I get to build relationships with all of you who engage with our work (please reach out, we absolutely love to hear from you!).

In the big picture sense, IHD is a pure and noble pursuit of two brothers-in-arms hoping to affect positive change. But we also have a strong intrinsic drive to continue that comes from entirely selfish motivation.

Often translated as “spiritedness,” thymos is an ancient Greek concept and harkens back to the heroic ideal of Homer’s classics. We could just as easily translate it as soul, heart, or any other internal forces that drive impassioned action. It is our drive for personal significance and it can express as both a positive and destructive force. It is what drives heroic and selfless acts but also, no doubt plays a role in the swirl of deranged emotions that motivate school shooters. I first came across the concept in the work of Francis Fukuyama, quoted above, where he describes thymos as “the side of man that deliberately seeks out struggle and sacrifice, that tries to prove that the self is something better and higher than a fearful, needy, instinctual, physically determined animal.”

The great boon of our time is that we can be anything, do as we please, and create and connect in ways unimaginable to the first 99% of all humans who have ever lived. Yet, this freedom and ability bring a responsibility that no human has ever had to face. Our tribal and early agrarian ancestors had far fewer options for their lives, but their cultures provided a life-defining purpose. Healthy expression of thymos was almost guaranteed as they took on some role that was both difficult and specialized but also highly valued by their community. We are now the sole masters of our existential well-being. We humans of the last few hundred years are the first in history to have the ability to define our own sources of meaning. Self-determination, it turns out, is a beautiful opportunity yet a burden that we are not well-equipped to handle.

Life fulfillment is a two-layered approach. First, we need to recognize that we are animals who require a variety of biological necessities. We must honor these basic needs. However, meeting our fundamental “survival” needs does not guarantee fulfillment. In fact, when we attempt to fulfill our higher-order, uniquely-human needs for meaning and purpose through those same biological methods (sugar and sex to name a few), we are destined to fail. We need to understand and honor our need for thymos.

Thymos is the human desire to separate ourselves from the animal world and from the rest of human society. It is the belief that we all hold, to varying degrees, that we can rise to become something greater. As Fukuyama writes, “not all men feel this pull, but for those who do, thymos cannot be satisfied by the knowledge that they are merely equal in worth to all other human beings.” Our legal and cultural ideals that uphold human dignity cannot alone make us feel significant. We have a deep need to prove our worth.

I think about thymos in two ways. First, it is our desire to improve and grow. Progress feels good. This can come from increasing your physical strength in the gym, feeling yourself hone a new skill, or seeing a return on all the hours that you poured into a new business. To paraphrase Nietzsche, happiness is feeling your powers expand. The second aspect of thymos is much trickier to fulfill in a wholesome way. I define this aspect as significance, borrowed from Tony Robbins’s framework of the six human needs. Significance is tricky because we can work towards unfulfilling ends that masquerade as true significance—fame, recognition, or attention. It gets trickier still because when we elevate our need for significance above other areas we can soil an otherwise wholesome pursuit with co-opted intentions.

As an example, I’ll return to my personal relationship with IHD. We began IHD with pure intentions to put forth ideas that we thought would help people create fulfilling lives in the modern world. This remains our mission. However, we also feel personally significant along the way—a little biological and emotional reward for doing something good. But like any reward, too much can distract from the original goal. Like any metric for success, pandering directly toward things that make us feel significant will turn out to be corrosive to our personal well-being (and in turn, to the success of IHD). If we simply acted on our need to feel important, we couldn’t serve all of you (or ourselves) well.

Self-serving needs (partially) drive everything that we do. We are also driven by selflessness, charity, and the common good, but no one is above the personal feel-good chemicals that come from recognition and significance. A healthy balance comes from the unapologetic admission that you feel these pulls. Pushed to a dark corner, away from conscious awareness and control, our basic emotional drivers can steer us off course. Brought into the light and honored for the turbo-boost it can provide, your need for thymos can help push you in the best possible direction. It’s certainly been working with me as I write this, keeping my butt in the chair and fingers on the keys.

Life is too short to be entirely selfish or entirely selfless,

Justin

I had a great conversation with Josh Berlotti on the In Search of Wisdom Podcast, which published this past week. He titled this episode The Wisdom of Standards. I hope you’ll check it out.

Now, let’s jump into today’s stuff!

From the Ages

“A man is worked upon by what he works on.” - Frederick Douglass

From Today

Author, Mark Manson, on why you need to find worthwhile problems. 

“I once heard an artist say that when a person has no problems the mind automatically finds new ways to invent some. I think what most... people consider life problems are really just side effects of not having anything better to worry about. It then follows that finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most important use of your time and energy.”

Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***

From Us

For about three years while in college, I spent the majority of every day fearing fear – trying to argue my way out of an obsessive anxiety disorder. I’ve recounted the details a few times and usually credit exposure therapy and meditation for helping me retrain my mind. However, my first big breakthrough actually came from a program called the Linden Method. 

Charles Linden created this program after stumbling onto a cure for his own agoraphobia, a crippling social anxiety disorder. Linden claimed that all anxiety disorders stem from a fight or flight system that has gone haywire as a result of our hectic, unnatural lifestyles. The subconscious mind is somehow tripped into a perpetual state of threat detection. His solution was a combination of relaxation techniques and a steady diet of heavy mental engagement. He recommended getting a notebook and filling every second of every day with mentally stimulating activity – the more challenging and immersive, the better. The mind was looking for a problem, so give it plenty to chew on. 

I went to work filling my days. As a book-loving college student, I already had plenty to keep me occupied. When I started obsessing, I could plan my critique of John Rawls’s political theory or recount Piaget’s stages of cognitive development. I printed off a folder full of riddles for the times when I needed something more. My favorite was Einstein’s famous five-houses riddle, which took me about four days of steady work (I still contend every high-school student should have to work through it before they graduate). 

The Linden Method was not a cure-all, which is why I usually credit meditation for overcoming my anxiety. But meditation may not have been as effective if I had not first learned the power of redirecting my focus toward solving better problems. The two approaches balance each other well. One built the capacity to relax and allow thoughts to come and go without over-reacting. The other taught me to focus my energy on a more productive endeavor. 

We’ve all heard that we should focus on what we can control. This is one of those obvious truths that is much easier said than done. The problem is that we often interpret this as “stop focusing on the thing you can’t control.” Like telling someone not to think about an elephant, this directive has a way of emphasizing the thing you want to stop focusing on, leaving you frustrated by your inability to stop thinking about it. When you focus on not hitting the ball in the water hazard, your mind just hears “water hazard.” Likewise, when you think about trying not to be anxious or depressed, then you’re just obsessing about feeling anxious and depressed. 

Often, the best strategy for improving our lives is to identify hard problems that we want to tackle and specific behaviors we want to adopt. Solving problems is inherently pleasurable. It is what the brain was made to do. This is why we love shopping, crime mysteries, and telling other people how to solve their problems. Our brain loves to be engaged and play with different scenarios. 

Frustration stems from problems that we don’t want or that we are not making progress on. I did not want my weed-eater to break this weekend. I did not want my child to get sick nor to shuffle my schedule. In college, I could not think my way out of anxiety and the more I tried, the worse it got. Some annoying problems just need to be endured, but sometimes they are an opportunity to take a new perspective. For example, I hated math in high-school and convinced myself that I was not a math person because I had friends who picked up new concepts more quickly. But when I got to college and I got all hot and bothered about trying to get a 4.0, I found math enjoyable. Science too. I put the necessary work in so that I wasn’t feeling behind in every class and, all of a sudden, it was just a fun puzzle. That revelation was unbelievably empowering. 

It can be useful to take some time and think about the quality of your problems and the ways in which you relate to them. Is there a common thread between many problems? Are you constantly plagued by your lack of organization? Are you always expecting other people to accommodate your emotional state? Finding the root of many problems can be a good way of finding a more important challenge to work on. 

Today, one of the most common problems is the combination of expecting not to have any problems and not having any problems that feel worthwhile. Young people in particular can get so lost in their infinite social media scrolls that they don’t care about anything else. A malaise settles over their life and they become apathetic. In short, they lack problems that they want to solve. In the absence of worthwhile problems, the mind goes to work finding problems like FOMO, depression, and keeping an account of every possible way life has not been fair. 

The absence of good problems invites bad problems. Thus, as Mark Manson suggests in today’s quote, one of the best things we can do is to actively find better problems. In the short term this may be doing a Sudoku or learning to replace a weed-eater carburetor this weekend. But the problems that create a sense of purpose are usually problems that connect you with other people. There is nothing like sharing a sense of mission. 

Regardless, the best place to start is by actively pursuing better problems. Action creates more opportunities and more understanding of what to pursue next. Over time, you may find there are more problems that you want to tackle then you have time for. And that’s a good problem to have. 

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Thank you very much for taking the time to read today. This Stuff is a re-push. It originally published on May 4, 2021. Please share if you think someone else would find it valuable.

Oh, and if you aren’t currently in the middle of a juicy problem you are trying to work out, I challenge you to Einstein’s riddle. Einstein estimated that only 2% of people who tried would successfully work through it, but I think it is more a feat of endurance. As Einstein, himself, said, “It’s not that I’m smart. It’s that I stay with problems longer.”

Life is too short to be normal,

Shane

Now to the stuff!

From the Ages

“They can because they think they can.” 

—Virgil, The Aeneid

From Today

Author, Michael Lewis, on the stories we tell ourselves:

"As I’ve gotten older—I would say starting in my mid-to-late 20s—I could not help but notice the effect on people of the stories they told about themselves. If you listen to people, if you just sit and listen, you’ll find that there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves.

There’s the kind of person who is always the victim in any story that they tell. Always on the receiving end of some injustice. There's the person who’s always kind of the hero of every story they tell. There's the smart person; they delivered the clever put down there.

There are lots of versions of this, and you’ve got to be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become you. You are—in the way you craft your narrative—kind of crafting your character. And so I did at some point decide, “I am going to adopt self-consciously as my narrative, that I’m the happiest person anybody knows.” And it is amazing how happy-inducing it is."

Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #427

From Us

When pharmaceutical companies run trials for a new drug, they don’t just compare the results of people who use their drug against those who don’t. They also have to run trials against people who are given placebos—that is, people who believe they are getting a drug treatment, but who are actually only receiving sugar pills, or something comparably inconsequential. Drug companies don’t just have to show that their treatment is more effective than no treatment, they also have to show that their treatment is more effective than a fake treatment. And for good reason. The placebo effect is extremely well documented. Believing you are receiving some treatment is proven to have tremendous healing effects. 

The placebo effect isn’t reserved to just drug treatments. It applies to everything from cryotherapy, to cupping, to KT tape, to giving your children band-aids and ice. A large part of the success of any intervention comes from the belief that said intervention is working its magic. But this phenomenon goes even further. 

In a scene at the end of the original Space Jam, Michael Jordan gives a halftime speech to his downtrodden Looney Tunes teammates. They are being pummeled by the mighty Mon-stars. Jordan tries to motivate with a heroic call to “fight back,” but the Tune Squad is unmoved. They sit there looking helpless, disinterested, and defeated. Then, Bugs Bunny swoops in and says, “Great speech… but didn’t you forget something? Your secret stuff.” Bugs has taken a blue water bottle (filled with normal water) and written: “Michael’s Secret Stuff” on it. The implication being that Michael’s greatness comes from this magical elixir. The Tunes devour the water and run out of halftime convinced of their expanded powers. 

The same idea is conveyed in countless other stories. In My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the father believes Windex fixes everything and so, it does (a bit of confirmation bias here too). In Bull Durham, Kevin Costner’s character explains why the star pitcher should maintain his run of abstinence, saying, “If you believe you're playing well because you're getting laid or because you're not getting laid or because you wear women's underwear, then you are.” This is the power of belief. Belief can heal. Belief can energize. Some beliefs can even lengthen your life.  

In a fantastic TED talk, psychologist Kelly McGonigal explains how her own oversimplified view of stress had led her to reinforce a destructive message about stress. She begins by highlighting a study that tracked 30,000 Americans for eight years. At the beginning of the study participants were asked two questions: 

1. "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?"

2. “Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?”

Then, after eight years, they found out which participants had died. Those who claimed to have experienced a lot of stress in the previous year were 43% more likely to have died. This confirms the predominant, simple view of stress being harmful. But, as McGonigal found, people who experienced a lot of stress were only more likely to die if they believed that stress was harmful for their health.

Alarms should be going off. Psychologists like McGonigal had been telling everyone (based on the simple reading of the stress research) that stress was bad for your health. But it turns out stress was only bad for your health if you listened to what these psychologists had been telling you and came to believe that it was bad for your health. If you had a lot of stress but didn’t believe that it was harmful you’d be no more likely to die. “In fact,” McGonigal points out, such people “...had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.” No wonder all those presidents are living so long. Stress doesn’t kill people. Believing stress is bad kills people. Yet, all the experts have been telling us stress is bad for us. 

How often do we make people more brittle, powerless, and unhealthy by implanting negative self-fulfilling prophecies? Parents convince themselves that they need to feed their kids “kids foods” because they won’t like actual food. In schools, we identify SPED students, label them, modify their assignments and meet with them every year, all the while reinforcing the belief that their learning disability limits and defines their intellectual abilities. We tell students that they are fragile to emotional slights, that every obstacle is traumatic, and that people’s disadvantages usually define them. Under the guise of empathy, we ingrain fatalism. 

Your beliefs will often determine your reality. In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor identifies a psychological principle known as the Tetris Effect named after a study which found that people who played hours of Tetris each day reported that they began to see the physical world as if it were a game of tetris. Whether staring at their pantry or the skyscrapers of a city, they couldn’t stop themselves from flipping objects around in their head and fitting them together in new ways. I’m sure this made them great at packing luggage into the trunk of a car. More significantly, this shows how our minds can be shaped to filter the world through any lens we reinforce. And there is no neutral here. Our language, the media we consume, and our daily habits all conspire to create the filters we view the world through.  

Try this:

Look around you and identify everything that is a shade of gray…

…

Now close your eyes and tell me everything you saw…

… that was blue. 

You missed most of that didn’t you?

Your mind finds what it sets out to find. So be careful what you focus on. You can train your mind to interrupt unproductive patterns and reinforce very different narratives. Train it to find what will amplify your capacity, your empowerment, and your fulfillment. 

Cognitive Behavior Therapy, perhaps the most effective known therapy for combatting depression and a host of mental disorders, works by identifying dysfunctional belief patterns (negative tetris effects) and re-programming them.  Some of the most prominent distortions it sets out to short-circuit:

• Mental Filtering Toward the Negative (the world conspires against me…)

• Emotional Reasoning (the belief that every negative emotion must be true)

• Mind Reading (assuming other people’s bad intentions…)

• Black and White Thinking (a situation is good or bad; people are good or evil)

• Catastrophizing (projecting the most devastating domino effect from every event…)

• Over-generalization (one bad date = I’m a bad dater and will never find love)

• Fallacy of Fairness (“People who go through life assessing whether something is ‘fair’ or not will often end up feeling resentful, angry, and unhappy because of it.”)

All of these are mental narratives that many people have programmed their minds to fit their experiences into—the opposite of rose-colored glasses. CBT works by teaching people to spot these distorted patterns, write them down, and then work out better interpretations to replace them.

There are so many little habits in my life that I hold dear. Exercise, cold-plunges, mindfulness, etc. But I’m becoming more and more convinced that a frequent gratitude practice/prayer is probably the most mentally transformative thing you can do. Gratitude works by training the mind to notice opportunities and frame events in a positive way. 

But a word of caution first. You can’t go into gratitude training by seeking to create any specific feeling. Fighting, fleeing, and seeking feelings is a sure way to induce anxiety and frustration. Instead, make it a practice of showing up and seeking to identify specific things you could be grateful for, with no expectation of any feeling. Set specific times to show up each day and reinforce the sort of thinking you want to ingrain by going through a battery of questions. Here are mine:

• Over the past 24 hours, what have I benefited from?

• What moments could I be grateful for?

• Today is a day of my life that I can never get back. Who do I want to be? What impact do I want to make? How do I want to make people feel?

I give myself a couple minutes to focus on each question. Often, the first thirty seconds are the slowest and then things just fall out. By the end I’m usually surprised at how many awesome things happened that I almost forgot about.

You can turn this into a daily journal practice or fit it in a couple times a day by turning it into a pre-meal prayer where the first two questions are “Thank you God for…” and the last are, “Please help me to…”

Regardless of how you do it, just commit to making gratitude a habit. It will do great things for you, if only you believe it will. 

—

Thanks for reading today. If you, like me, are a bit obsessed with the power and self-fulfilling nature of beliefs, I’ve written a bit more on it here and in my book. Also, if you are like me, this line of thought probably prompted you to think: “But there is no way to make yourself believe something you don’t actually believe. So, does this mean honest skeptics are doomed?” It seems the answer is actually “No.” A great podcast here that goes into the research on open-label placebos. People have had great benefits from taking a placebo that they know to be a placebo, presumably, because it reminds them of the power of their minds to induce healing, energy, and strength. The take home message, everyone needs to get a bottle of Michael’s Secret Stuff. 

Life is too short to be normal,

Shane

From the Mid-century

In preparation for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

From Today

Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence.

- Steven Pressfield, Turning Pro

From Us

I don't have as many goals as I once thought. My guess is that you don't either. But I suppose this depends on what we call a goal.

I recently came across an important distinction from Tiago Forte:

• A goal without a project attached is just a dream.

• A project without a goal is just a hobby.

When we want something, no matter how badly, but do not make any plans to accomplish it or take any action toward it, this is a dream. We don't earn the right to call something a goal until we actually work toward it by making a personal sacrifice in service of this future. This is more than mere semantics—the distinction matters. Talking about your goals with others or even opining about them in a journal can give you a little taste of the joy that comes from actually working toward them. These small and frequent sips of satisfaction can fool us into believing that these abstract "goals" are a concrete aspect of our life, even though we haven’t moved any closer to them.

Given this distinction, how many goals do you actually have? You don't need to search your heart or mind for this answer, it is revealed in the ledger of your past actions. What did you actually do? For how long? Under what directive? Can you point to any concrete planning or actions taken toward that goal? How have your habits changed to bring you closer to your goal?

This set of past actions also reveals Tiago's second point between goals and hobbies. In looking at how you spent your time, can you be said to have any projects or simply a bunch of hobbies? This was the most revealing question for me. I do have distant dreams, but I mostly fall into the second trap. I am always working toward many things at once but often fail to give any single pursuit my full effort and, worse, I rarely create a concrete plan to achieve any of my "goals." It is far more accurate to say that I have a rich set of hobbies but very few goals. Even our work with IHD, for Shane and I both, more often falls into the category of a hobby with unfrequent but focused periods toward a distinct goal.

There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. They just give a framework for honest assessment. Dreams are wonderful. They are fun. They inspire. They connect us to something outside ourselves. And they can motivate eventual action. We need hobbies too. We need activities that we do simply for intrinsic joy and nothing else. We don't need to excel at everything or monetize every passion project. But elevating our hobbies and dreams in our minds to the status of projects and goals skips the most critical steps: planning and consistent action.

In the modern world, we fetishize and identify with our goals. We publicly declare them in hopes of conflating them in the minds of others, as well as our own, in hopes that the wanting of something makes us closer to the type of person who actually embodies it. We all know the type of person who is perpetually trying to quit smoking, but we cannot find any evidence of this "trying" other than dreaming of the day when it will be true. Many of us have a similar relationship with getting into shape, saving money, and writing our novels. With enough dreaming and talk, we delude ourselves into believing that these pursuits are a concrete part of our life despite having no plan or consistent work toward them.

Accomplishing a goal requires action. This is obvious. But action is more than a means to accomplish a goal. It is a spiritual act. Action is a communion with the force that animates us. Dreams are not just fanciful thoughts to entertain us. They pull us up to be something greater and we should see them for what they are, a calling forth from a divine source. Our dreams and ambition are, as Steven Pressfield says, the "primal and sacred fundament of our being" and to work toward them, through action, sacrifice, and commitment is to honor the deepest part of our being. Intentionality feels good. Action, then, is an end in itself.

The intimidation that we feel in starting something new and the difficulty we face in remaining consistent are the forces that give a goal-driven journey its meaning. This resistance prevents us from transforming our dreams into goals but it is this transformation, though dedicated action, that brings far greater fulfillment than the final accomplishment.

So we must ask ourselves, what "goals" do I have that are actually just dreams? What can I do today to bring an amorphous, gaseous dream into the solid form of a goal? Equally important, what dreams are best left for later, and whose calling I can ignore until the time is right? And finally, what distant dreams can I recognize as such to release my expectation that I will someday accomplish them, freeing me up to pursue my real goals?

We only have enough commitment for a few true goals at a time. Let us choose wisely and let us choose with our hands and feet as much as with our hearts and our minds.

***

Related Articles

• Intentionality Feels Good

• How to Want Fulfilling Things

A personal update

Marika just raced at the Hyrox World Championship this past weekend in Las Vegas. Check her out!

Thank you so much for reading this week and remember…life is too short to be normal!

Justin

Simon Drew is an awesome guy doing really cool things on The Walled Garden, and this conversation was a blast! 

Now to today’s stuff! 

From the Recent Ages

For magic and applied science alike, the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men; the solution is a technique, and both in the practice of this technique are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious.” —C.S. Lewis

Source: The Abolition of Man

From Today

“There are websites for “weld porn,” and the mere fact that this is so should be of urgent interest to educators. Education requires a certain capacity for asceticism, but more fundamentally it is erotic. Only beautiful things lead us out to join the world beyond our heads.” —Matthew Crawford

Source: The World Beyond Your Head

From Us

I took up guitar in January. If you’ve never played guitar you probably imagine it is fairly easy to learn. After all, you’ve seen thousands of videos of people singing away, smiling, and performing without seeming to give a second thought to the beautiful sound emanating from their guitar. Most assume that with a little work, playing the guitar is basically autopilot. 

But this is far from true. It takes thousands of hours just to be able to string together a song without long, awkward pauses between every chord transition. When first learning a chord, you’ll take many seconds to place your fingers just right and somehow it still won’t sound right. It requires a matter of feel that only comes with considerable repetition and it’s easy to get discouraged. But eventually—and far before you are anything that would resemble a decent guitar player—you feel the pure bliss of progress. You play a song or a section of a song. You make music and it is addictive. 

In modern times, you can listen to any song you want at any time you want to. In fact, you can pick stations that learn from your likes and dislikes in order to consistently bring you better and better selections. The technology learns to deliver you exactly what you want to listen to, even without your input.

But 100 years ago, very few homes had a radio. The only way to listen to music on-demand was to make music or find friends who could make music. Thus, it was far more common for the average person to persist past the inevitable frustrations that come with learning to play an instrument and to have achieved a level of musical competency. Technology has made it easy to hear great music. On one hand that is wonderful. But the inevitable (and de-humanizing) effect of this is that it also reduces the incentive for people to cultivate their own musical competency.

As with music, 100 years ago, there was no way to entertain yourself but to read, take on a hobby, or to interact with other people. Twenty years ago you had to knock on a door or at least pick up the phone to get a friend's "status update." There was no way to get a date with someone you were attracted to other than to get the courage to put yourself out there and persist through the awkward trial, error, and rejection that characterizes early romantic interests. 

Author Andy Crouch often refers to such uses of technology as magic. Tech gets us what we want—some basic need or desire that we want so much we’d have previously worked tirelessly to be able to get it—but it gives it to us without the pains of skill acquisition. 

Google Maps. Magic.

Video games. Magic.

Social media. Magic.

Tinder. Magic.

Porn. Magic.

Door Dash. Magic.

Amazon. Magic.

Each of these magically meet deep needs without requiring anything of us. By doing that, they remove the situation that would have once prompted us to become something more—to develop skills that would be a springboard to higher quality living. We get what we want (or at least a shell of it), but don’t have to work to acquire the skills that were once a prerequisite to that pleasurable desire. This feels great…at first. But, in the long run, it leaves us feeling used and as if we are wasting our potential.

Still, technology is not evil. The guitar is, itself, a technology. As is everything from skateboards to written language. And those computery things we typically think of as technology are not evil either. The computer has been a medium for incredible procrastination and distraction in my life. But it was also an indispensable medium for writing and researching my book. 

In his book, The Life We’re Looking For, Andy Crouch makes an essential distinction that can help us discern what tech use is productive and what is basically tech junk food: the difference between instruments and devices. Devices are magic. Devices remove or reduce the need for skill. They give us what Crouch calls “power without effort.” Instruments, by contrast, require effort to master. They are technology that is used to assist our own personal expansion. They augment our innate abilities and allow us to do things we cannot do alone, but which still requires us to engage with the world as it really is. Think of written language and the way it has expanded human potential. 

Making this distinction is quite helpful with technologies like the computer and smartphone, which can be both an instrument and a device, depending on how they are used. With Crouch’s structure in mind, you can change your phone settings to reduce “device” time and insert prompts to reflect before mindlessly slipping into scroll mode. 

For example, I’ve changed my phone’s unlock background to a wallpaper that says: “Do You Really Need to Unlock Me Right Now?” On the back of my phone I have a sticky note that says: “Why?” While not full-proof, these have helped spur a moment of reflection before I open Pandora’s box. Why do I need to use my phone? Do I have an explicit purpose in mind or am I grabbing the phone simply to stifle boredom? I want to train myself to mentally call-out the reason for using my phone before diving in. If I learned anything from my April Digital Declutter, it is that wonderful things often come when you interrupt that tendency to grab your phone every time you realize you don’t know what to do next.

—

Thanks so much for reading and sharing with your kindred spirits!

Life is too short to be normal,

Shane

We just passed the fifth anniversary of IHD (the site isn’t quite that old but it's been five years since Shane and I began to collaborate on a project that would eventually morph into IHD). In these five years, we’ve written quite a bit on gratitude. We also devoted a significant aspect of the 30x30 to gratitude—it’s one of the three core habits that make up each day and the topic of one of the first lessons.

While we still feel that gratitude is a vital part of a good life, our thinking has evolved a bit. Today, I want to look at that evolution and highlight a few different approaches to gratitude as a sort of virtual roundtable discussion. These are articles from us, both from the distant past and recent months. I’ve also included some thoughts from other thinkers that I value. This reflection on how my personal thinking and practice have evolved has been very illuminating to me and I hope that you enjoy this nuanced look at gratitude in the modern world.

Demonstrations of Gratitude (3 min)

I wrote this in August of 2018 about the distinction between expressions of gratitude and demonstrations of gratitude. Expressing our gratitude is wonderful—it is important to tune our focus to all the good things in our lives and nothing builds an intimate connection better than telling someone how much you value their role in your life. However, this approach falls short of demonstrations of gratitude. In this article, I give the example of writing someone a short, handwritten letter instead of a phone call or email. The extra investment can go a long way.

Face Your Fear (14 min)

This is Shane’s telling of his struggle with Puro O, a form of OCD. His story is inspirational but the takeaway from the whole article is even more powerful. The greatest challenges that we face are always our greatest teachers. Understanding this and learning to lean into it as you face a present struggle is perhaps the most potent form of gratitude that we can practice. 

How I Accidentally Started Praying (and why it's now the most important thing I do) (7 min)

Written only a few weeks ago, this is how my personal gratitude practice took on new significance. My old practice of considering all the positive forces in my life began to feel rote and forced. I’m not sure how this new practice emerged but it holds a much deeper place in my life than gratitude journaling or meditating ever did.

The Good World by Charles Eisenstein (5 min)

Similar to how my practices begin to feel forced, Charles sees a similar inauthentic quality in attempting to create feelings of gratitude. He asserts that real gratitude comes only from knowing that the world is good. I like this idea but also see the paradox that to “know” anything with certainty about the forces at play in the world might be considered an act of faith. This shift in perception also creates another paradox—how do we come to see the world in a different way without first practicing a new way of perceiving it? In our experience, innate perceptions and feelings of authenticity arise as a response to intentional practice, not the other way around. And for a bit more context, Shane and I have each looked at this paradox from different angles, here and here.

***

This is far from a comprehensive look at the research behind intentional practices such as Naikan journaling and gratitude meditation, but often a collection of anecdotes can be just as illuminating. We would love to hear your thoughts on gratitude and intentional practice as well. Please comment and tell us about any practice you follow. How has it evolved? Does it feel authentic? Did it always?

Thank you for reading this week and remember, life is too short to be normal!

Justin

Also, today’s Stuff can be read without context, but it is best seen as a continuation of the argument I made on April 12th in How to Want Fulfilling Things. Onward!

From the Ages

“Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.

When goodness is lost, there is kindness.

When kindness is lost, there is justice.

When justice is lost, there ritual.

Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.”

Source: Chapter 38, The Tao Te Ching, Gia-Fu-Feng and Jane English Translation

From Today

“While the people who navigate life through bargaining and rules can get far in the material world, they remain crippled and alone in their emotional world. This is because transactional values create relationships that are built upon manipulation.”

Source: Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope

From Us

The Tao Te Ching aims to help people bring themselves into accord with the Tao, which can be roughly thought of as the way of the universe. To harmonize with the Tao requires you to drop categorizations and reductions so that you can see reality as it truly is, unclouded by the assumptions most people typically bring to their daily experiences. This is meant to produce a more natural, harmonious, and intuitive way of life. 

Taoists often refer to an ideal known as Wu-wei, which is typically translated as effortless action. The first line excerpted above—“... when Tao is lost, there is goodness.”—focuses on just this. When people are in harmony with the Tao, they have no need for concepts such as goodness or virtue. They naturally behave in a way that observers would label virtuous, but they do it out of their innate flow. They have no ulterior motives and they are not trying to conform to anyone else’s desires. Most notably, they aren’t blinded by their own fixation on embodying a specific virtue. To the Taoist, this last part is important because, as another translation states, “The man of low virtue can lose sight of some virtue by never losing sight of it.” 

But this man of “low virtue,” who insists on trying to embody virtue through effort and self-reflection, is still very much preferable to your average dude. In fact, in my last Stuff on cultivating the right emotions, I argued that it was important to take this low virtue approach. My contention is that the Taoist conception of effortless virtue is not quite as innate as many Taoists would like to believe. With really good models, some virtues might seem innate. But, more often, this reflexive goodness is only possible after first committing to the sort of self-cultivation they refer to as a life of low virtue. Virtues become automatic and intuitive, because they’ve been identified, contemplated, and practiced.  

In his book, Everything is F*cked, Mark Manson explains how values evolve as we mature. As young children, we’re basically pulled along by nothing but our desires to gain pleasure and avoid pain. As we mature, we develop the ability to consider long term cause and effect. We can decide to do “the right thing” (even if not for the right reasons) because there are downstream benefits. We can study to get better grades and have better career options. We can exercise to look or feel better. As we become true adults, according to Manson, we begin to do things for no conscious reason other than that they are the right thing. Ulterior motives erode. I chase down my napkin when the wind blows it away, not because I want people to praise me for not littering, but because it is right. There is no why. 

To some extent, maturity is about eliminating our whys so that we can live with more Wu-wei. But to do this often requires that we train and arborize certain intuitions. 

The remaining devolution described by the Tao Te Ching seems to capture much of what we see in modernity. I’ll quote the rest again, so you don’t have to reference above:

When goodness is lost, there is kindness.

When kindness is lost, there is justice.

When justice is lost, there ritual.

Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.

As concepts of character were devalued and moral relativism proliferated, schools and mainstream opinions placed more focus on just “being kind.” Yet, as I explain in chapter 2 of my book, unmoored by deeper values, this kindness has often been used to justify mass infantilization and dependency. With greater infantilization, unselfish kindness then erodes in more people and we have to resort to justice (the law) more often to mediate human interactions. But of course law without common values or virtue becomes nothing but a vehicle for exerting power. When our legislators, leaders, and institutions grow corrupt, then all we have are empty rituals. This is perfectly embodied by the modern school setting where teachers and administrators are governed by a set of policies that they know to be misguided and ineffectual. Yet few ever utter a word. It is just the way it is.  

The scale and heterogeneity of modern society contribute to this. As societies become larger and more complex, determining what actions are best becomes much more complicated. Virtue is not nearly as natural a consequence of the environmental defaults. In larger societies, people are more disconnected from the effects of their work and the work of others. They can operate with more anonymity and society can flourish despite the incompetency of many of its members. Thus, it's possible to believe that it is kind to perpetuate other people’s dependency and impulsivity. People can go their entire lives without having to cultivate the sort of virtues that naturally develop when one is working on skills and contributing to society.

But modernity is not going away. So here are my take home messages from this meditation:

1. We should take the cultivation of virtue seriously if we want to live well. The Tao Te Ching argues against cultivation, but, again, I think that in modern society early cultivation equals later freedom. This isn’t as rigid as it sounds. In fact, it is the route to effortless action. 

2. Virtues are often cultivated by diving deep into skill development. Training is clunky at first but it creates effortless action by making excellence a habit.

3. Lean into Dunbar-sized groups (based on Dunbar’s number—roughly 150 members or less). There are many social and individual benefits that come from contribution to a community. When we invest in the people and groups around us, good things often happen by default. Life becomes more effortless—more in line with the Tao.

4. And read the Tao Te Ching if you haven’t yet. An easy, short daily reader. I’ve been through it a few times now and every time I open it again I feel a bit more peaceful and a bit more aligned with nature. You don’t have to agree with every line to benefit.

   ---

   Thank you very much for reading and sharing with your kindred spirits! Have a great week and, as always, life is too short to be normal.

   Shane

From the Ages

Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.

— Aristotle

From Today

I may have introduced the concept of Audience Capture...you have to put out poisonous tweets for the people who follow you, who you wish would not follow you...you have to make sure, in some sense, that they understand that you're not there to flatter them. It's important to have a certain amount of antagonism, at a healthy level not at a psychotic level, with one's own audience…I don't want them to say: "Oh, well Eric said it so we can stop thinking." [I make] an active attempt to avoid those who would capture me...How do you avoid being captured by your own incentive structure?"

— Eric Weinstein on Rebel Wisdom

From Us

We are about midway through our 30-day digital declutter. Out of necessity, I’ve allowed email to be one of the few digital tools that I'm using this month, but I’ve tried to put limitations in place because I know that even my inbox can be a source of distraction. The declutter also offered a great opportunity to opt out of many of the newsletters that have provided more noise than value.

As I began The Great Unsubscribing, I noticed a common theme. The voices that I was choosing to tune out had all begun to focus too heavily on a single issue. They had developed a shtick and, even in the cases where I mostly agree with their central stance, I could unsubscribe and feel confident that I would not be missing anything new. 

This type of shift in writers and creators can come from a number of different motivations, although the polarity of the COVID debate created a more precarious landscape than ever for those with a public voice. Shawn Stevenson of The Model Health Show podcast (someone whose two books and past podcasts I still recommend) began to talk almost exclusively about the sins of big Pharma and the mismanaged public response to COVID. Even though I agree with much of his central premise (though not his more recent conspiratorial musings), I wasn’t finding anything new. This shift might have come from his strong personal convictions, or it could be the result of an increasingly prevalent concept known as “audience capture,” which motivated him to give the people what they wanted. He began to serve up more of his best-performing content rather than pursue the broader holistic health and nutrition message that used to characterize his show.

Though the COVID era seemed to make audience capture an especially easy trap to fall into, we can find similar capture in nearly every other cultural issue. For example, those who stand firmly in one dietary camp (veganism versus meat-eating) and those who take a hardline position on one side of the political debate are equally incentivized to shift their messaging toward topics and tactics that they know will please their audience.

This is nothing new. Audience capture has been possible long before the age of the internet creator. Writers and editorial institutions have always had to battle between seeking outright truth regardless of public sentiment and the desire to pander to a large audience. While I love that the Patreon and Substack monetization model creates a direct relationship between a creator and their audience, it also amplifies the allure to give that audience more of what they want and expect. This is as true for the vegan blogger and the Paleo podcaster as it is for the political pundit and the COVID-era commentator. 

Avoiding audience capture might be too much to expect in the new internet creator landscape. While the new information economy gives many more voices a chance to shine and make a living as writers, video creators, or cultural commentators, we also lose something in the process. National newspapers and TV stations used to manage some semblance of balance and nuance with an editorial staff and a commitment to publish opposing views side by side. Rather than these features being built into an institution, this burden now falls on the individual creators or on us as the consumers. We must now select the voices that we tune into and tune out from a nearly infinite set of options. Some will inevitably traverse this precarious landscape better than others (Shane and I, fortunately, have each other and he certainly set me right about an earlier draft of this very newsletter). The occasional inflammatory video might be fun, but ultimately they are empty calories—we come to them for a sweet treat, not substance. The Digital Declutter has provided me with a nice inflection point. I’m now trying to prune the voices that make up my information diet so that only level-headed and nuanced views remain. Like spring cleaning or trimming bushes, this seems to be an essential periodic practice for the modern news climate.

It’s not too late to join us for the final third of the digital declutter by becoming a member (sign up here). You will still find great benefit in 10 days of more intentional tech use.

Thanks for reading this week and sharing this with someone who would enjoy it.

Life is too short to be normal,

Justin

Refer a friend

“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.” —John Stuart Mill

From Yesterday

“Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.” —C.S. Lewis

Source: The Abolition of Man

From Today

 “Virtue ethicists have long held that cultivating appropriate emotional attitudes is a key part of learning to live well and act virtuously.” —Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko

Source: The Good Life Method

From Us

In the time since my book was published last November, I’ve turned my attention to trying to spur actual, local change. It is one thing to imagine what a better world might look like, quite another to navigate the trials, errors, and creative adaptations necessary to move a stubborn world despite its current momentum. 

My first step was to launch a high-school men’s group, The Order of Arete, dedicated to exploring the deeper questions of life, primarily what it means to live well. We are  a group dedicated to living by a higher code. As such, it is invitation only. I took a month to talk to teachers and coaches so I could identify and reach out to the right candidates. In late January, we held our first meeting, where I passed out manuals and explained my vision and expectations. 

Since then, every Monday and Thursday at 6 am, I lead a group of impressive 16 and 17-year-old young men as we jump into a 3-minute cold plunge and then discuss a reading. I’ve found, at the expense of my ego, that the conversations get really good when I restrain my desire to jump on my soapbox and, instead, lean into Socratic questioning. 

Last Thursday, I asked them whether it was possible to be happy even if you had not cultivated the virtues we’ve discussed like courage, fortitude, self-mastery, and wisdom. The majority said that they thought that some people could be happy while mindlessly pursuing superficial gratifications. They mentioned friends who blew off school and did nothing but play video games and who seemed quite happy. I then asked whether they themselves would be happy under these circumstances, to which they gave a resounding “no.” So what’s the difference between you and these peers of yours? Why is the life of impulse good enough for others but not for them? 

After a reflective silence, one wisely posited that you could only be happy without striving for virtues if you had never experienced the deeper sense of pleasure that came from committing to a deeper life. After you’d had certain experiences, realizations, and connections, an immature, hedonistic existence was no longer palatable. And even if they could, they insisted, they would not want to become ignorant of the duties and challenges that came along with their convictions. They had cultivated a taste for more meaningful living and were now incapable of finding happiness by more superficial means. 

Many people notice a similar phenomenon with their health. They spend years eating, drinking, and avoiding movement with little regard for their bodies. But something triggers a change and they start building better habits. It is usually one thing that leads to the next. They begin exercising, which makes them want to support the work they are doing by eating nutritious meals. As they dig into this world, they are soon exposed to the merits of better sleep, better breathing, and many other ideas that they apply over time, infusing them with even more vitality. 

When these people do allow themselves cheat meals and reprieves from their new habits, they’re almost always shocked by how bad they feel. Invariably, you hear them saying things like, “Is this how I always used to feel?” or “How did I used to drink like that all the time?” Part of this could be that they have lost their tolerance for sugar and alcohol, but, for the most part, they are recognizing how bad they had gotten used to feeling all the time. Going forward, they still enjoy the fun of going out for pizza, but can’t imagine returning to their old ways—when pizza was just a meal like any other.

Unfortunately, most people never get to this point. Having never been exposed to healthy habits and having never developed a love for physical activities, they aren’t able to dig deep enough into their lifestyle change to cultivate the necessary change in desires. 

This process is similar to the acquisition of any skill. I’m learning guitar. This skill, which was interesting in day one and two, quickly became frustrating over the course of the next weeks and months. I found myself repeatedly googling things like, “Is it normal to struggle when making transitions between guitar chords?” Turns out it is. Only very recently (after over three months of practice) I have begun to notice some significant strides. I’m beginning to be able to make something resembling music and it has grown addictive. I now can’t imagine quitting, though I would have loved to just a month ago. Having persisted through some early struggles I now have a taste for guitar that, I expect, will keep me playing for years to come. The same is true of skateboarding, skiing, or most rewarding endeavors. You have to do the thing long enough to develop a love for it.

As Notre Dame philosophy professors Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko note in today’s quote, virtue ethicists think it is essential to develop our tastes for good living. In this way, we not only build our capacity to live more meaningful lives, but we also drastically expand the good we can do in the world. 

So what does this look like? I like to view virtues like the Greeks did, as particular human excellences which propel you towards realizing your potential—towards self-actualization. A great way into this is to commit to any craft. For example, my son has been learning to ride his bicycle. I’m amazed at the virtues he’s had to cultivate to finally find success: persistence, patience, courage, self-awareness, and more. He had a breakthrough last night and rather than wanting to quit, something clicked and he would have ridden all night If I let him.

Another way to traini virtue is to explore transformative experiences, particularly with groups who value the virtues you aspire to. For example, most people recognize that their relationship to technology has grown dysfunctional. We are junkies for distraction, information, and entertainment who can’t wonder about tomorrow’s weather without being swept into an unintentional Instragram scroll. To cultivate a taste for more balanced living, Justin and I, along with many IHD members, have committed to a 30-day Digital Declutter this April. It has been insightful, but I’m shocked to find that it isn’t nearly as hard as I expected. In fact, I think I’m starting to like it.

Thank you for reading today! If you are still interested in jumping on the challenge (a hair late is no reason to miss out) and would like to learn more, here is a video explanation and another amazing article from Andrew Sullivan where he explains his own experience overcoming what he calls an epidemic of “Distraction Sickness.”

Have a great week and, as always, life is too short to be normal!

Shane

“Journaling is like whispering to one’s self and listening at the same time.” 

Source: Dracula

From Today

“The spiritual journey is not about acquiring something outside yourself. Rather, you are penetrating the layers and veils to return to the deepest truth of your own being.”

― Ram Dass, Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart

From Us

A few months ago, Marika and I did a 30-day journaling challenge together. I've been a near-daily journaler for about 10 years, so it may seem a rather unchallenging challenge, but I found benefits from those 30 days that go far beyond what is normal. These new benefits come from one seemingly underwhelming shift: I repeated the same prompt every day. The magic was in the repetition. The same simple prompt. Everyday. For 30 days.

This challenge was designed by Alex Banayan, the author of The Third Door, in order to help people discover purpose and passion. It's very simple. You answer the same three questions every day for 30 days. The only rules are that you must write by hand and spend at least 15 minutes writing to discourage you from simply jotting down a few quick thoughts and moving on with your day. You are allowed and encouraged to write much longer if you’re inspired to. 

The three questions are:

1. What most filled me with enthusiasm today?

2. What most drained me of energy today?

3. What did I learn about myself today?

You are not allowed to read any of your previous entries until the end. On day 30, you read each day from the beginning, looking for the patterns that inevitably emerge, and write a final entry that summarizes your responses to each question in a single sentence, like a catchy headline. It is also worth noting that the first question intentionally says “enthusiasm,” whose etymology means “to be inspired or possessed by a god.” Write about the times when you light up with purpose and effort rather than times when you felt contented, comfortable, or “happy.”

Journaling of any sort is a great way to check in with your internal state—a way of taking your mental/emotional temperature. But nearly all aspects of ourselves that can be measured and observed are in constant flux. Our actual internal temperature varies throughout the day and across the various seasons of the year. So do our body weight, levels of various hormones, and even our height and the size of our feet. Nothing is constant so no single measurement can give a complete picture. 

One cholesterol reading or a single blood sugar test does not give enough data to inform a proper course of action if one is required at all. But, observe those markers over a course of weeks or months and you have a much more comprehensive understanding of a person's internal workings. Similarly, we tend to be oblivious to our internal state and to the patterns that are arising in our lives. Even the most self-aware can miss things about themselves that would seem obvious to another person. That is the beauty of this journal challenge. Checking in with the same simple questions each day reveals a more accurate representation of who you are currently and helps you uncover the direction that your subconscious might already be leaning. When you see patterns about yourself emerge in writing—that you tend to complain about the same relationship or that a few seemingly minor actions bring the bunk of your passion—it becomes much easier to see them and honor them. Sometimes we need to be hit over the head with this stuff.

But journaling this way is not only about uncovering an accurate version of yourself. As your deeper patterns come to the surface, you also cannot help but change things along the way. This challenge subjects you to the observer's bias (or the observer-expectancy effect)—a cognitive bias whereby the observer or experimenter unconsciously affects the outcome of an experiment. In this case, you are far from an objective observer. When you pay keen attention to how you are feeling, the things you want to create in your life, and what you've learned about yourself each day, you cannot help but make subconscious (or conscious) positive shifts.

I subtly began to focus more on the pursuits that meant the most to me. I dropped a few commitments that were a net drain. And, I shifted my perceptions of many "negative" events—when I see my most sour interpretations so naked and plain on the page, their power dies, they shrivel and fossilize as the ink dries. They need a host to survive.

And here's the catch: I didn't even finish the challenge. I only did about 25 days out of 30 and I never did the final reading and examination. Perhaps I would have found even more benefit from following the rules more strictly. The magic of this challenge, though, is not in the number 30 or in the prompt itself—the questions intentionally direct you to themes that often emerge from any loose journal practice. The magic is in how the repetition tunes your mind to maintain a long-term focus on these themes. By paying attention to the right things over time, you prime your mind for positive change, intentionality, and self-understanding.

I cannot recommend this challenge enough. It is also a great companion challenge for those of you who are joining us for the 30-day digital declutter this month. You can do this simple 15-minute journal when you might have otherwise scrolled your phone or watched Netflix. I'm confident that it will be equally valuable for you!

Here are a few additional resources on these same ideas:

• Why You Need to Daily Journal and How to Make it Easy

• Alex Banayan on  the Aubrey Marcus podcast

One final thing

Phil White, a friend and mentor to us both and a huge contributor to Shane’s book publishing process, just launched a podcast with Phil Afremow called Champion Conversations. The first episode is with, author and breathing expert Patrick McKeown and offers incredible insight into using your breath to control and maintain many aspects of your mental and physical health. We recommend that you check it out (if it fits in your rules for your digital declutter) and rate and review it to help their launch. 

Thank you for reading this week and special thanks to Alex Banayan for inspiring this challenge and essay. 

Life is too short to be normal!

Justin

Now to the Stuff!

From the Ages

Aristotle on the need to train virtues so that the right emotions are elicited in the right way.

“… both fear and confidence and appetite and anger and pity and in general both pleasure and pain may be felt both too much and too little, and in both cases not well; but to feel them at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of virtue.” —Aristotle

Source: Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2

From Today

Today I’ll feature a longer From Today and let it do much of the heavy-lifting.

This is from The Every, by David Eggers. The Every is a fictional tech company, but in a world just like ours. Delaney, the main character, is talking to Kiki, who is the exact opposite of unplugged—tracking every possible life metric and on every self-help app. The quote picks up right after Kiki has answered a phone call in front of Delaney.

“Hello!” Kiki said, and pressed her finger to her ear. She began a very loud conversation with what Delaney took to be an elderly person. In the middle of the conversation, Kiki put herself into a plank position, with her phone beneath her… She carried on the conversation while her triceps strained and vibrated, and when she was done, she sat up, rolled her eyes and sighed in immense relief. 

“My uncle. He’s in Argentina. One of my OwnSelf [an app] goals was to have more contact with my family down there, and it’s working out so well. Twenty-two calls in the last week, which is a few short of my goal. And I get some of my ab work done at the same time.” 

“Twenty-two calls with relatives in one week?” Delaney asked.

“It’s a start,” Kiki said. “I’ll get better” She was planking again. “My core needs more attention,” she said. “And I’m supposed to lose four pounds. Are you on OwnSelf yet?

Delaney worried about Kiki losing any weight. She couldn’t be more than a hundred pounds, her arms no thicker than a garden hose. “Who told you to lose weight?” she asked. Instantly she wondered what the AI would make of that [all conversations are graded by an AI]. It was borderline.

“My body mass index is not ideal,” Kiki said. “I got a notice. But it’s doable. Hey, you don’t speak French by chance, do you?” Delaney did not. “No,” she said …

“It’s fine,” Kiki said. “I’m trying to practice, and I figured we might as well speak in French if you knew any. I’m trying to get in twenty minutes a day, but I’m thinking it’d be easier to overlap somehow. Like I tried exercising in French but that didn’t work.”

Kiki’s mind was pinballing, her eyes hyper-alert and unsteady.

“Did I ask you before what your sleep average was?” She asked, and didn’t wait for an answer. 

“Did you hear the new research says ten hours is ideal? The guy who did Bananaskam [an app] sleeps ten hours a night. In a shroud! A few nights ago I went to bed at eight, and I thought I slept enough, but then the sensors didn’t count my hours as high-quality sleep. So last night all I could think about was sleeping in a high-quality way, and I ended up not sleeping much at all. So while the goal has gone up to ten hours, I’m down to 6.4.”

A tiny laughtrack burst from her oval [like an Apple watch]. “We should laugh. I’m low on laughter, too. Is there something funny we can talk about?” Delaney tried to think of a joke. She could never remember jokes. Her face must have been contorted in concentration because Kiki let out a long, trilling laugh…

“Do you think you’re taking on too much?” Delaney asked. 

Kiki was bent over, trying to regain control. She raised a finger to ask for a moment. A few seconds later she unfolded herself to her full height and breathed a series of measured breaths.

“Such a funny face you made!” she finally said. “Boy, I had a good laugh there.” Then she checked her oval to see if the laugh had registered. Satisfied, she smiled. “What did you say again?”

From Us

In The Every, Eggers does a brilliant job of showing how, in our advice-saturated, tech-metricized world, good goals and seemingly positive products can have a disastrous effect on individuals and on the quality of the larger social ecosystem. Kiki, like so many other characters in this story, is just a caricature of many people we all know (or, perhaps, are). 

We stress ourselves out trying to keep up with all our content streams or trying to implement all the latest life-optimization advice. Then, we find ourselves doing high knees as we brush our teeth at night so we can hit an Apple Watch goal. Dance, puppet, dance. 

Without boundaries there is really no way to use modern technology without it using us. Even among healthy, intentional people, tech has a way of working around our boundaries and inserting itself into more and more aspects of our lives. But we can regain perspective by blocking out an intentional period to disentangle ourselves from our immense web of tech tethers. We need time to re-evaluate how we want to be, how we want to spend our lives, and how we can ensure our tech is actually useful in furthering those goals. 

Many of us delude ourselves into thinking that our own tech use is innocuous. Because of my job or my kids, it is necessary for me to check email all evening. Or: I just scroll Instagram in every spare moment because I like it. For most of us, these are rationalizations—what Justin calls “junkie-logic.” We humans have a fantastic capacity to rationalize our own behavior while seeing the ills of others in perfect clarity. We love giving advice, but hate getting it. 

In this spirit, Justin, me, and many IHD Members will be taking April to do a 30 day Digital Declutter (as inspired by Cal Newport). The basic idea is that you eliminate all non-essential tech from your life for 30 days. For purists that means you can use tech at work, for work, but:

• No social media, 

• No streaming video services, including Youtube

• No email on your phone

• No smartwatch

• No podcasts, TV, etc.

As with our bi-annual fast challenge, you might want to try a softer version where you allow yourself one or two specific podcasts and an hour of television at the end of the day. I am going to take a month off of podcasts, but will allow myself to still listen to Audible during commutes and household chores only, to music while I workout, and to make phone calls and respond to texts from my immediate family (these are important to my daily life—I won’t use text for conversations). For these few exceptions, I have defined very specific boundaries. Try to avoid blanket exceptions such as: I’ll give up Instagram but Twitter is ok. 

At minimum for this challenge to be beneficial, it is important to restrict any tech use to very specific, pre-selected times and to eliminate social media, phone email, and any app that you check for notifications. Trust that the world will keep turning and you’ll find insights from this experience. 

Also, I recommend thinking about how you will fill the extra time. Can you carry a book with you that you read in those moments you would be scrolling TikTok or watching YouTube videos? Is there a skill, like guitar, you could practice? Could you sub a once tech-saturated time with phone calls to important people in your life? Reflect on how much differently you may have used your time just a couple decades ago.

The goal at the end is to be able to operate from first principles to add in tech only as it is useful for your deeper life mission. As Cal Newport frames it, you want to be able to say: “This is what I want to do with my life. How can tech help?”

If you’re interested, in this video Newport gives a wonderful description of the rationale for the challenge and how to get started. 

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We will be hosting the 30-Day Declutter challenge discussion within our member's community. You can participate in this challenge for free by signing up for a membership and using the code digital-declutter (first month of membership free). Whether you become a member or not, I hope you will join us! The self-mastery and perspective that come with this challenge are essential ingredients for living well in the modern world. 

Thanks so much for reading! 

Life is too short to be normal,

Shane

Before we jump into this week's Stuff, check out a recent interview that Shane just did on the Talking to Teens podcast. The host did a wonderful job in preparing and conducting this interview and it shows in the quality of the conversation!

And now to the Stuff.

From the Ages

“Whenever you get an impression of some pleasure, as with any impression, guard yourself from being carried away by it, let it await your action, give yourself a pause. After that, bring to mind both times, first when you have enjoyed the pleasure and later when you will regret it and hate yourself. Then compare to those the joy and satisfaction you’d feel for abstaining altogether. However, if a seemingly appropriate time arises to act on it, don’t be overcome by its comfort, pleasantness, and allure—but against all of this, how much better the consciousness of conquering it.”

— Epictetus

Source: Enchiridion, 34

From Today

Cal Newport on intentionality:

“The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists.”

Source: Digital Minimalism

From Us

Like the junk food diet that most of our parents warned about, our digital diet is too high in junk. As Cal Newport explains above, this junk media diet mirrors our addiction to sugar. It’s enticing and even a certain kind of delicious, but ultimately empty and regrettable. And, as with sugar, taking back control of our consumption leads to a sense of freedom, empowerment, and joy that no dopamine hit can match. In simple terms: intentionality feels good.

As you begin to make positive lifestyle changes of any sort—better exercise and nutrition habits, quitting drinking or smoking, or being more open in your relationships—a strange phenomenon arises. The individual rewards are wonderful but there is more to the story. Beneath the practical benefits that come from these changes, you feel a glow of pride and self-love that isn't a direct effect of the new habits you've put in place. The energy that you feel from improving your nutrition pales in comparison to the empowerment you feel for making the change. Exercising conscious control in your life brings some of the most profound and rewarding feelings available to us. Intentionality feels good. 

We don't want to feel that we are puppets, pulled about by the whims of impulse. Agency gives our life a sense of progress. With intentionality, we feel that our life is headed somewhere, but also that we are the ones in power. We come to realize that the outcome of our choices is less important than the fact that we are making them well. The self-love required to make a firm decision in your life and the discipline to hold the line that you set for yourself feel far better than any of the direct results of those choices. The best words for this feeling are "meaning" and "purpose."

Perhaps the most important arena where we need to flex this power today is with our technology use. While our phones might not cause as much immediate destruction as substance abuse, they are equally addictive and, worse, the most readily-available, socially-acceptable hit in existence. Imagine a junkie whose stash magically refills in their pocket—always available, always calling, and no one deems a quick hit mid-conversation as shameful. This comparison is hardly sensational when we look at some of the statistics on smartphone use. While polling varies on the topic, on average American check their phones at least 96 times each day while one poll reported this as high as 300 times. All of these checks add up to between two and four hours of total daily hours on our phones.

Within the unique set of challenges of modern life, mastering your technology use (most specifically your smartphone ) is the lead domino for better habits and healthier life. Create healthy boundaries around your phone and you will master what is likely the strongest pull on your attention and time. This single act pays a huge return—building momentum for other changes and setting the precedent of agency and autonomy. Intentionality begets more intentionality. A conscious plan to limit your phone use and replace those countless reclaimed hours also gives you the chance to build new, productive habits and better relationships.

A Digital Declutter

To put this principle in action, we (me, Shane, and many of the Seekers) will do a digital declutter in April. This challenge is inspired by the 30-Day Digitial Declutter that Cal Newport lays out in Digital Minimalism. We have outlined our specific guidelines and recommendations and will share a challenge field guide with our membership group, but essentially this is an elimination diet for your digital technology. We will eliminate ALL non-essential technology from our lives for the month of April (essential means that eliminating it will not interfere with your livelihood, so email at work is fine, but Instagram, Tiktok, and most random phone email checks probably aren’t). This extended fast breaks the impulse to reach for your phone and removes your ability to mindlessly scroll, stream, and surf. At the end of 30 days, you reflect and re-introduce any and all technology that you believe adds value to your life. The whole point is to first break the automatic use and then create an intentional set of tech guidelines for yourself that align with your personal values and serve your unique circumstances. 

We will host the challenge discussion within our member's community (where we have already begun to lay out our personal guidelines for this challenge). You can participate in this challenge for free by signing up for a membership and using the code digital-declutter (first month of membership free). 

Thank you all for reading this week and we hope that you'll join us for a focused, intentional, and distraction-free April!

Life is too short to be normal,

Justin

From the Ages

"It's easy to work when the soul is at play"

— Emily Dickinson

From Today

Poet May Sarton on the importance of rest:

"I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged, damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room."

Source: Journal of a Solitude

From Us

In the fitness world, we teach the concept of "active rest." Your body needs to rest and recover between intense training sessions but being a couch potato is not the best way to accomplish this. Active rest is something between complete lethargy and intense training—movement and exertion but not enough to wear down your body.

Active rest days are a chance to move your body in ways that feel restorative and to engage in activities purely for the joy of them. A light run, hike, or bike ride. Yoga class. Pick-up sports. Surfing. Yard work. Playing outside with your kids. And while these movements aren't going to be written into any structured strength program, we need to view them as an integral part of our training. Active rest is not an interlude from regular training, but a foundational element of any effective and sustainable program. 

Active rest is not a bonus, it's part of the program. I used to coach athletes to "earn your next workout." You need to engage in some active rest and recovery to earn the right to your next gym session.

I've recently begun applying the same strategy to my work life. I use my days off, not to sleep in and sit around, enjoying the sloth only possible on the weekends, but to do the activities that most call to my soul. Oftentimes, this doesn't appear very restful at all. 

But here we need to define true rest. Rest isn't about subtraction—the removal of all work and toil and stress—but the active creation of peace in our lives. It's about serenity, tranquility, and restoration of a deeper sort. Rest is an intentional practice, not a byproduct of simply removing work.

I don't have a terribly high-stress job, but my deadlines and projects often linger with me outside of work hours. What's more, my work schedule brings me more stress than the actual work itself—I fret about how much it keeps me from writing, IHD, coaching, and my other creative and passion projects. This time crunch makes me slowly eat into my active rest. 

We recently began to observe something of a Sabbath. We reserve a full day each weekend to be in nature. Most weeks, it's an all-day hike. This has been our favorite option because after many hours in nature, with our phones at home, breathing clean sagebrush-scented coastal California air, and taking in the expansive views, we settle into a  different mode of being. Short walks are great (we often take one before dinner) but during a long bout in nature, your system morphs—slowing, easing, forgetting the work, and remembering the rest of the world. These full days out are distinct from the rest of the week and provide a much more thorough internal peace than kicking back with my feet up ever could.

Active rest doesn't require nature or physical activity. I have a similar relationship with skateboarding, surfing, woodworking, reading fiction, and writing without a purpose (at least at the onset). Active rest is to intentionally immerse yourself in something that makes your soul sing. This time is not merely for fun—something superfluous to be reveled in when you have the time—it is as vital to your life as your work; as vital as exhaling before your next inhalation. Each makes the other possible. Each provides the energy to animate the other.

Thank you for reading this week and remember: life is too short to be normal!

Justin

And now to today’s Stuff!

From the Ages

“Anyone not wanting to sink in the wretchedness of the finite is obliged in the most profound sense to struggle with the infinite.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

From Today

“As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, it debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.” 

— Barry Schwartz

Source: The Paradox of Choice

From Us

A couple of weeks ago I was granted one of those rare, precious parenting moments. The kids were both at Grandma’s and I found myself with a quiet morning all to myself. I had three hours before I needed to get the kids and I was already done with my morning routine. The possibilities seemed endless. So I reached for my Audible app to play a United States history course that I had been making my way through. But, hardly a minute in, I began to wonder:

“Should I get a bit more ahead on War and Peace instead? (we’re reading a chapter per day this year). Or should I keep reading Theodore Rex since I’ve already read the allotted chapter of War and Peace today? Or should I take some time and listen through some more of those podcasts on the war in Ukraine? Don’t I have a duty to be an informed citizen? Or should I do some IHD work? I do have a busy schedule coming up and it would be nice to get ahead. Or should I write that letter for Ace’s fifth birthday? Or should I start planning how I want to sod the front yard this spring?”

I imagine you’ve been here. Overload. Monkey mind. Decision paralysis. The paradox of choice. Whatever you want to call it, it is the defining struggle of modernity. We don’t know how to best spend our precious moments. We have infinite options and our brains don’t know how to make sense of them all. Consequently, we tend to spin our wheels and regret whatever we eventually decide upon, if we can even decide at all.

We aren’t good at having too many choices, and that is not a good thing for a world defined by infinite choice. You can be anything, live anywhere, play any sport, read any book, take on any hobby, or choose any lifestyle. We are constantly exposed to other options, many of which are actively sold to us—“Hey, join us as we read War and Peace this year”—and, in our finite lives, we only have time to actually do an infinitesimally small number of the things we think we’d like to do. 

So what do you do about this…

I won’t pretend to have all the answers. But my solution to this challenge is multi-pronged. First, we have to clarify our values so we know how we want to spend our lives. Meditate on what will matter on your deathbed. How do you want to be remembered? What will you wish you spent more time on? Get perspective.

We also have to recognize the realities of our distraction-inducing world and work to shape our own environment so that we are reducing friction to the behaviors we’d like to choose and increasing friction between us and the behaviors we’d like to avoid. This includes:

• Forming desirable habits: e.g. Cold plunge and then exercise each morning. 

• Practicing environmental design: e.g. Delete email and social media apps from phone.

• Setting rules/automatic defaults for ourselves: e.g. Only check email at 10:30 am and 4:00 pm. No grabbing your phone without an explicit reason—stop and grab Kindle instead. Taking an actual sabbath where work is not allowed. 

(For more on this sort of thing, we have a free ebook, Making Changes that Stick, and a daily habit program, The 30x30 Challenge.)

But perhaps most fundamentally, the secret to living well in the age of infinite choice is to make peace with the fact that we can’t do everything we want. We can only pick one hobby to learn right now. We will not be able to read every book. And we can’t actually give every relationship the amount of care we would like. If there is anything you can take from my frenzied attempt to optimize that morning of bonus time, it is that over-optimizing is a trap. The problem with having too many good choices is that no matter what you choose, the opportunity cost will be high. You get something wonderful—something that is likely so magical that it would have been impossible a couple centuries ago—but you also close the door to many other magical options. 

Theodore Roosevelt once said that comparison was “... the thief of joy.” Modernity has a way of constantly making us compare our own state to what it could have been. This is a mental pattern that takes work to overcome. Usually, we will have many good options. It doesn’t matter what we pick. We just need to pick one and move forward without giving any energy to that pesky little voice, which is bound to second-guess us. We have to get better at applying the skills of meditation to these little moments so that we can give ourselves fully to whatever wonderful task we choose. 

Thanks for reading today and sharing with your kindred spirits!

I hope you have a wonderful week!

Life is too short to be normal,

Shane