Month: August 2022

In a part of the Old Testament supposedly written by King Solomon, he warns his followers of the futility of ambition: “I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity, a pursuit of the wind.”

When he quotes this line in The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle notes how frustrating of a realization this must be: “If nothing can give you true fulfillment, what is there left to strive for, what is the point in anything?” Ultimately, it is a crossroads we come to, he believes: “When you reach this point, you are one step away from despair and one step away from enlightenment.”

Imagine a child, literally chasing the wind. What a laughable endeavor! “Stop, child,” you might say. “Don’t you know the wind is so much faster than we are? You can never catch it!” While the child is at least having fun, however, when we chase the wind as adults, we usually do it with gritted teeth. We take it very seriously, despite knowing deep down that it is “a laughable endeavor.”

Want a fast car? You’re chasing the wind. How about a big house? You’re chasing the wind. Do you wish to be famous? You’re chasing the wind. Desperately craving a relationship? You’re chasing the wind. Think perfect abs will get you respect? You’re chasing the wind. Longing for an island vacation? You’re chasing the wind. And if you believe more money would fix all your problems, you are also chasing the wind.

“Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you joy,” Tolle writes. “Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of Being. It is your natural state, not something that you need to work hard for or struggle to attain.”

You’re already perfect. You have all you’ll ever need. Enjoy everything under the sun, but don’t chase the wind.

It’s the wrong word. You don’t want your mind to be full. You want it to be empty.

When I first got deep into improving my life one habit at a time, I eventually ended up in a rabbit hole of constant judgement, both of myself and everyone around me.

“I’d love to say ‘I don’t mind’ and mean it, but it’s never true. I do mind. I mind everything,” I wrote when I finally noticed. If you’re in a state of constant awareness but use said awareness only to fuel the relentless judgement machine that is your mind, your presence is totally wasted. It does not bring peace at all.

When we speak of mindfulness, we mean presence as in “fully accepting the moment,” but in that state, our mind is far from full. We don’t mind anything as in “be annoyed by,” and we are definitely not mindful in the way people mean when they tell us to “be mindful” of certain things, usually dangers and threats. We’ve got the terminology entirely backwards.

What we really mean is actually mindlessness. Not mindlessness as in “carelessness,” as in being totally ignorant of our surroundings. The mindlessness we seek is one where we are in absolute unity with the present moment. We are so “here,” alive in the now, that our mind finally shuts up for once. That’s the state we want, and it’s much closer to mindlessness than mindfulness.

Then again, what can we expect from a species that sells each other $200 headbands to meditate, an activity that is, by its very definition, about doing (and needing) nothing at all?

Don’t try to be mindful. You’ll only drive yourself nuts. Learn to be mindless. Update your definition of the word, and you’ll see the true path to inner peace more clearly than ever before.

The first rule of being a spy is that you must not be noticed.

In The 39 Steps, Richard Hannay finds himself alone in the Scottish countryside, with no one around but the gangsters on his heels. When he finds a lone road worker, he offers to take his position for a few hours. With great effort, Hannay adjusts his attire down to the laces on his shoes. He even throws dirt into his eyes to make them less recognizable.

“A fool tries to look different,” Hannay asserts. “A clever man looks the same and is different.”

This very principle will later help Hannay uncover the mastermind behind the evil operation he is attempting to thwart, and it behooves us to honor it as well.

We are not spies, of course. We are individuals realizing a dream, and most of the time, the world won’t care all that much what it is and why we do it.

Every now and then, however, we do bump into a societal wall. Some of these encounters we can’t avoid, and in those, we must stand our ground. At some point, you’ll have to tell your parents you want to be a dancer, not a doctor.

Most of them, however, we can just slide right by. Go unnoticed, like Richard Hannay, the inconspicuous road worker. You can be a fly on the walls of society, then return to your basement and keep tinkering on your dream.

Unless telling the whole world about your dream is part of your strategy to make it come true, for example to give yourself an extra push of accountability, don’t take the rebel role too far. Some people lose themselves in it. They start caring so much about looking like a rebel, about making sure they proclaim their individuality at every turn, they forget about the dream. Originally, the rebelliousness was just an attachment. Now it has usurped the dream itself.

Most of the time, there is no use in looking flashy, arguing with strangers, and causing a scandal at every party. Don’t be a clown. Be a spy. You know your goals, and that is enough.

May your mission be your greatest success.

Sir Ken Robinson once said that university professors tend to consider their bodies mainly as “a form of transport for their heads.” “It’s a way of getting their head to meetings,” he said. Robinson was joking, of course, but today, especially with remote work on the rise, we can observe a similar pattern of disembodiment at work: People write emails as if they sent them to robots, not other people.

I run several newsletters, and you’d be shocked at some of the responses I get. To be fair, people often do expect to be heard only by bots and automations, but it’s a trend that is now spilling over into our peer-to-peer communication.

Just this week, someone personally insulted me and told me to “f*cking stop sending emails.” I get it. Everyone gets a lot of email. No one wants more, especially not the advertising kind. But how little responsibility we are bringing to the table here shows how thinly stretched our collective emotional capacity is these days.

After all, no one forced you to sign up to the newsletter. You did it. And if you don’t like it, you can also undo it, with a simple click on the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of every single marketing email sent in the last 20 years. I’m always surprised to see how many people do not manage this simple task yet try all kinds of “code words” in their responses to get the emails to stop coming.

The other, more important aspect, of course, is that behind every email address, there is a human being. Always has been, always will be.

Would you go to your bakery and call the man behind the counter an asshole and yell at him to give you “some f*cking bread?” Of course not. You can see the cashier. You must look him in the eye. His mere physical presence demands a minimum of decorum, and 99% of people are happy to comply with the invisible rules of societal interaction 99% of the time.

In an email, however, it’s easy for those rules to fly out the window. Typing a quick line or two feels more like hacking together a snippet of code for the command console than making a request to a person, but the latter is what all emails are, no matter how much you wish them to be as efficient as an order given to an algorithm.

Most of your emails go to strangers or people you don’t know all that well. This is not a reason to be rude. To the contrary: It is a reason to be extra kind. The person behind the email knows nothing of your troubles. They have no idea why are you writing to them today. Equally, you do not know whether they are having a bad day or a good one. What if their dog died this morning? What if they only slept five hours because their baby kept crying?

A good rule of thumb for writing any email is that you should treat the recipient like someone who just traveled a long distance to meet you: Make sure you get to business and value their time, but also cut them whatever slack they might need.

There’s a person behind every email address who’s as deep and complex as you are. Be kind when you talk to strangers.

In some ways, The Last Kingdom is what Game of Thrones should have been: A never-ending power struggle minus the completely irrational plot twists. Then again, despite being comprehensible, the changes of heart Uhtred of Bebbanburg must endure from those he serves are no less ridiculous than a boy-king killing a courtesan with a crossbow.

Uhtred wins a decisive battle for the king, both with his information and his sword, and is rewarded only with debt that ties him to the ruler for the foreseeable future. Uhtred defeats the leader of the Danes, and someone else takes the credit. He delivers another king from slavery and puts him in power, only for said king to ship Uhtred off as a slave himself.

On and on the cycle goes: Uhtred shows loyalty, and the world spits in his face. In that sense, he is not unlike Jon Snow, the tragic hero of Game of Thrones who, if you ask me, is the one guy doing everything right yet never seeing anything for it.

Both Jon and Uhtred are what a similar character, The Boss from Metal Gear Solid, would call “loyal to the end.” All three are so principled, so unyielding, that they will take their belief all the way to self-destruction if they must – and that is the drawback of this noble approach: If you act only from conviction, your loyalties must inevitably change, and they will likely change in a way that will often keep you from being rewarded for your dedication.

Uhtred sways between the Danes and the Saxons, Jon Snow flip-flops between the Night Watch and his family, and The Boss pits her truth against her country. As a result, the latter concludes:

“As long as we have ‘loyalty to the end,’ there’s no point in believing in anything…even in those we love. The only thing we can believe in with absolute certainty is the mission.”

Uhtred heals the king’s son and loses his own. He helps his lover become a ruler, but to be one, she must withdraw from the relationship. Loyalty born from principle is, by definition, loyalty that transforms with time. When we change, so do our values and, as a result, the causes we believe to be the right ones.

It is not an easy life, a life of loyalty to the end. There is no perfect resolution. You can sign up for a system you’ll eventually lose faith in by the time you collect its greatest rewards, or you can stick to your guns and have them be the only ones you can 100% rely on.

There is something, however, that even those loyal to the end can believe in: The example they will set for others. No matter how much hardship it comes with, loyalty to the end is awe-inspiring. Deep down, most of us wish we were half as principled as our heroes. But are we ready to persevere when those very principles will turn against us?

Only time will tell, but your show is not over yet. You are a long way from your last season, and it’s never too late to fight for what you believe in.

There are more movies than you can ever watch, more books you can ever read, and more sports than you can ever master. You must make peace with this.

It’s hard. I know it’s hard. We’re finite players in an infinite game. But a bucket list will only wear you down.

I make those lists all the time. I save movies I want to watch, articles I want to read, and don’t even get me started on books. I even put them in notes all over the place only to have to consolidate them later. I create many buckets, and I put too many items in each of them. The result? I’m carrying a lot of heavy buckets!

The problem with to-do lists for the fun things in life is that when the time comes to have fun, the lists feel like work. Which of these thousands of movies should I watch? Which of these dozens of games should I play? If you’ve ever spent 30 minutes trying to pick a movie, a third of which you could have watched in that time, you know FOMO can destroy even the most joyous of activities.

The solution is to toss out the list or, at the very least, be disciplined in only using it when you really need it. Don’t grab three movies off IMDb to watch on the weekend. You’ll end up with five new ones on there by Monday, and it’ll make your weekend feel less relaxing. Anything can be strenuous if we make it so.

Whether it’s in the world of work, self-actualization, or fun, it is always you vs. infinity – a battle you cannot win, except by stopping to treat it as such. Go with the flow, do what you feel like, and enjoy the infinite game. Your bucket will always be there to glance into, but, most likely, you’ll find there’s always plenty to do even if you don’t.

My great-grandmother used to gargle with butter to stave off infections. One day, as my family and I were reminiscing about this and other fun quirks of our relatives, my sister said something remarkable: “You rarely know when it’s the last time, do you?”

She wasn’t talking so much about people dying, although that too can, sadly, happen anytime. It was more about the last time you sleep over at your grandma’s house, the last time you go to an after-school chess club, or the last time you see a friend because after that, they’ll simply no longer visit your town.

First times are always obvious. Our brains are extra alert, and we remember a great deal about them. Last times usually happen without our knowledge, so there’s no way we can try extra hard to commit them to memory. It is only years later that we might notice: “Oh yeah. I used to do this thing. When did I stop? And why?”

You can’t remember every last time like your first, but it helps to remind yourself that last times are always coming. Every now and then, consider that “this time might be the last,” and you’ll savor happy moments more, and with bad moments, you’ll be more forgiving.

One day you’ll no longer walk in on your great-grandmother gargling with butter, and whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing, it is a thing worth observing.

When I was eight, my dad and I played Mario Kart on Nintendo 64. Most of the time, I won. As I got a little older, the Mario Kart games kept coming, and I kept winning. Eventually, all of my family felt it was impossible to beat me. I was the king of Mario Kart, and for years, it stayed that way.

Today, we mostly play video games when my sister’s boyfriend is around, and I must tell you: It is impossible to beat him. I’m still a decent Mario Kart player, but he is just next level. And it goes beyond Mario Kart too. With the exception of trivia and the odd win here and there, he can handily beat me at almost any game.

What do I have to say for myself? Nothing, except: That’s life! Sooner or later, someone better will come along. Like on the race track, there is a time to floor it, and a time to get out of the way — especially when it’s Mario Kart, a game in which the top-ranked professional player earns $450/year.

We all feel sad when we have to hand over a crown, even if it’s just the one we got at Burger King. Like that piece of paper, however, most crowns aren’t worth all that much. We play games to play, and we should remember that in most arenas, we compete only for fun. Don’t ruin it by taking it too seriously, and don’t clutch your trophy when it’s time to pass it on.

When the next generation comes along, marvel at their level of skill. Learn from them. Remember it’s okay to lose at Mario Kart, and reserve your ambition for the races you truly want to win.

In college, I first discovered the limits of knowledge. There was so much material to study, it was impossible to retain it all. I had to pick which buckets of information to focus on, and in more than one exam, I stared at questions to which I did not have the correct answers – or any answer, for that matter.

What I learned, however, was that even when you have little to no knowledge pertaining to a question, you can still have a go at answering it. Maybe you can derive a partial answer from what you do know or come up with a creative, out-of-the-box solution. Worst case, you can always take a stab in the dark and hope your subconscious will send up an idea that the corrector will look upon favorably.

Surprisingly, I often found answering the harder questions more fun. When you know you know the answer, you’re desperately trying to fetch it from the depths of your mind. There is nothing more frustrating than to know you have the information yet not be able to retrieve it. And for everything that was easily accessible, I would just scribble it down as quickly as I could, trying to save time for the remaining questions.

Once I had filled in everything obvious and given up on what I decided I could not remember, however, the blissful part of the exam began: Now I was free to dare, guess, imagine, and learn. There was no baggage of existing knowledge holding me down (at least none that I knew of), and I could take my sweet time in simply trying to craft the best answer I could.

In other words, I was no longer trying to pass an exam. The test had already taken place, and from here on out, any further points were a matter of fate. I was just learning, and, like most people, I enjoy learning very much. Or, as Bruce Lee sometimes called it, “knowing.”

One of Bruce’s greatest contributions in the realm of not martial arts but education was his distinction between knowledge and knowing: “Knowledge is always of time, whereas knowing is not of time. Knowledge is from a source, from an accumulation, from a conclusion, while knowing is a movement.”

In Bruce’s view, “knowing” does not simply mean retrieving previously gathered knowledge. It is its own activity, and it can happen even without the presence of knowledge. Bruce used the words “learning” and “knowing” synonymously: “Knowledge is of the past; learning is in the present, a constant movement, in relationship with the outward things, without the past.”

Bruce was a practitioner. He knew you could study the martial arts for decades in the abstract yet never be able to land a single punch. Knowledge sits in the realm of theory, but knowing can only happen in reality.

Bruce was also a student of Zen. He believed that true understanding only happens when the mind shuts down, not when we are deeply entrenched in thought, digging for facts. Knowing is being present. It is the state of perfect synchronicity with life. Call it flow, if you like. Just like a martial artist executing a sequence of movements perfectly, you are fully engaged with the material, eager to absorb and connect rather than trying to dissect it conceptually by bombarding it with your thoughts.

Unlike knowledge, knowing is not rigid. “The additive process is merely a cultivation of memory, which becomes mechanical,” Bruce says. “Learning is never cumulative. It is a movement of knowing which has no beginning and no end.” When you focus on learning more so than knowledge, you stay adaptable. You keep an open mind, ready to adjust to any situation.

Knowledge is cumulative. Intelligence is selective. Learning means only taking what you need to handle whatever is going on right now. No more, no less. It is a matter of effectiveness – dispensing with everything unnecessary – over efficiency – acquiring as much as possible and neatly organizing it.

In today’s world, knowing displaces knowledge by the day. There is ever more information being created at an ever increasing speed, and it is no longer feasible, nor necessary, to keep up, for new insights replace the old ones faster than we can remember either.

You can’t always “know” as in “have knowledge,” but you can always “know” as in “learn.” Don’t be obsessed with knowledge. Let old facts go freely so you can focus on learning in the present. When you’re in the habit of knowing, you can handle anything – even an exam full of questions to which you don’t have the textbook answers.

When you think you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re asking people the wrong questions.

Everyone you’ll ever meet knows something you don’t. It may not be a hard fact, and it may not be something related to the subject at hand. It may not even be information at all. It might be a social skill, emotional resilience, or an admirable attitude earned over years.

The problem is if you don’t look for what other people can teach you in the periphery of why you got together, you’ll think they can’t teach you anything at all – and that’s never true. Worse, you’ll treat them accordingly. If you approach everyone with the respect you’d show a mentor while waiting for them to drop some valuable knowledge, however, any interaction will flow as smooth as a river, regardless of the occasion.

Yes, maybe John can’t help you fix the code for your plugin, but if you go into the meeting expecting just that and nothing more, how inclined will he be to try hard and help? Maybe John can’t fix the code now, but maybe John is much more likely to become able to fix the code than you are, if only he looks up and learns a few new things. If you afford John the courtesy of assuming he knows something you don’t, code-related or otherwise, there’s a higher chance he’ll make sure of it – even if it means he’ll only help you tomorrow, not today.

“Oh, you know how to set up a tent? I’ve always wanted to learn, but my parents weren’t big campers. Maybe you can teach me sometime.” How would you leave a meeting in which you got such a compliment? Probably thinking something along the lines of, “What a nice person! Let me go and try to help them.” If all they said was, “No no, you can’t help with what I need,” well, then why would you even keep thinking about the problem? That’s right – you wouldn’t.

Stay humble, nice, and curious. When you think you’re the cleverest person in the room, usually, the only one you’ve out-smarted is yourself.