How To Survive as a Writer Cover

How To Survive as a Writer

Being a writer is hard. In an interview, storytelling legend and screenwriting teacher to the stars, Robert McKee, explains:

“Your job as a writer is to make sense out of life. Comic or tragic and anything in between, but you have to make sense out of life. You understand what that means? Making sense out of life? And this is why most people can’t do it. Because they can’t make sense out of life, let alone make sense out of life and then express it in writing.”

As writers, it’s our duty to live in our heads. And there’s no place more enticing, more exciting, yet at the same time more dangerous and more terrifying than the human mind. Time and again, we have to venture into this place from which some never make it back. Whatever we bring home we have to process, to shape, to form. Until somehow, something worth saying emerges, which often never happens. And so we have to go back.

For the times we do go “oh, that’s interesting,” we then have to chisel an arrow out of the marble block of messy information. An arrow loaded with emotion, dipped in reason, and wrapped in gold. Because otherwise, it’ll never land in the reader’s heart. And at the end of it?

After all the turmoil, the struggle, and the pain, the best we can do is fire the arrow into a sea of dark faces. Because even if we don’t play for the applause, in the end, our fate lies in the hands of the audience. Always. So the best we can do is show up, shoot, and pray.

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The Strange Law of Love

I met my ex-girlfriend on Tinder. We matched, we met, we were together for almost two years. We broke up two years ago and I haven’t been with anyone since. What I learned is that even when you feel ready, you can’t skip to the end.

You cannot find love by looking for it.

The moment you start searching, you’ve already twisted yourself into a pretzel that’s nothing but a poor copy of the awesome you you actually are. That’s why online dating rarely works out in the long run. Because from the beginning, something felt ‘off.’


In 1951, Alan Watts wrote in The Wisdom of Insecurity:

“I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it the ‘backwards law.’ When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float. When you hold your breath, you lose it — which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much neglected saying, ‘Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it.’”

The law of reversed effort is universal, but it feels beyond unfair that it applies to love. The harder we work for it, the less we get. Back then, Watts said about his book:

“It is written in the conviction that no theme could be more appropriate in a time when human life seems to be so peculiarly insecure and uncertain. It maintains that this insecurity is the result of trying to be secure, and that, contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves.”

There are no degrees to truth, but if there were, his words would rank higher up the ladder today than they did some 70 years ago. In a world that’s always connected, opportunities to feel insecure and uncertain are infinite. And what better way to a sense of security than to commit to a relationship. Forever.

Or so it seems. Maybe the marriages that take the most effort to build are the quickest to fall apart. I don’t know.


It’s a sick, cosmic joke, this strange law of love. Facing its truth, you’re only left with one of two reactions: you breathe or you break. What I do know, however, is that this reaction is a choice.

Love starts with loving yourself. Only then can you give it freely and receive more in return. It’s one of those “when the student is ready, the teacher appears” kind of things. Like attracts like. And if you don’t think you’re awesome, work on it. Do something for yourself. Go to the gym. Start a business. Buy a book. Paint. Whatever gets you closer to being someone you would want to date yourself.

The only person you are guaranteed to spend the rest of your life with is you.

Make sure you’re in great company.

The Cost Of Being An Employee Cover

The Cost of Being an Employee

“Give me a lever long enough, and I shall move the world.” That’s Archimedes. It would take us another 2,300 years, but eventually, we invented the lever. The internet has changed our economy and society more than any other technology before. In The End of Jobs, Taylor Pearson explains how it’s transformed the job market in the past 20 years.

The book is divided into five sections, the first two of which describe the demise of traditional jobs; the last three make a case for being an entrepreneur. To me, it creates a picture of a scale that’s slowly moving from very imbalanced to almost tied, maybe even slightly tipped towards the new side. As such, I think the central message is this:

The gap between entrepreneurship and traditional jobs is closing.

Broadly speaking, Pearson describes this gap in three aspects:

  1. Value for the economy. Large corporations still pull their weight, but add less and less to innovation, especially in the tech, software, and internet space. Meanwhile, one-man shops and small startups unlock value in markets that weren’t profitable before.
  2. Value for the individual. Manual labor is automated or shifted to where it’s cheap, leading to salary wars among traditional firms. But with an internet connection, anyone can run a small e-commerce business on the side, yet still make an extra annual salary.
  3. Risk taken on by the individual. Corporations require neat CVs, expensive degrees, yet often only offer temporary positions. The cost of setting up a website is less than $100 and you can get most resources and services on demand, just in time.

For traditional careers, value goes down, while risk goes up. The opposite happens to entrepreneurship, because after the dot-com boom (and bust), it’s become the limiting factor in pushing humanity forward.

“1. The limit is shifting from knowledge to entrepreneurship. The entrepreneurial Complex and Chaotic domains are the ones increasingly in demand.

2. The dominant institution is shifting from Corporation to the Individual (or self). What used to require large companies, technology, and globalization has now been made available to the individual or micro-multinational.

3. The dominant player is shifting from CEO to Entrepreneur.”

But what does that mean for you and me?

Not All Entrepreneurs Make the News

If Pearson’s right and if the trend he describes continues, a lot of people are building the foundation of their career in the wrong sandbox. The internet has driven down the cost of producing goods and distributing them to almost zero, while good jobs are increasingly rare and harder to get into.

Pearson recounts a conversation with a business owner:

“He’d always loved cars and spent time at the race track growing up. He had a moment of realization when he saw that the only way he could ever race consistently was if he became an entrepreneur. In order to race cars, you need lots of money and lots of time. While a high-paying job in finance may get you the former and a beach bum lifestyle may get you the latter, it was only entrepreneurs that had both money and time.”

While the rewards of successful entrepreneurship have always been lots of money, meaning, and freedom, the risk to become one has never been lower. The first part is plain to see. Idols of entrepreneurship are all over the news. But there are no reports about the stay-at-home mom who sells Pinterest marketing services for $100k/year. This second part, the absence of risk, is much less obvious, which is why most people stay on their traditional path.

But however quietly, entrepreneurship, both part- and full-time, becomes the more attractive option with each passing day. And the question isn’t really whether you should start thinking about your options, but how long you can still afford not to.

Walking Up the Stairs

If you’re a startup founder, solo entrepreneur, or freelancer, you’re already taking some or all of the steps Pearson suggests to help future-proof your career. But if you’re a traditional employee, or on track to become one, slowly wading into entrepreneurship may be more appropriate for you.

“The entrepreneurial leap has become the entrepreneurial stair step. The latent demand and lower barriers to entry have allowed more people to become entrepreneurs by easing their way into the process. That’s not to say it’s easy — you still have to climb the stairs, but no longer in a single bound. Stair Stepping lets you build momentum behind your trajectory by developing the skills you need to run an entrepreneurial company.”

The stair-stepping approach Pearson refers to comes from Rob Walling, who built several SaaS tools, until he founded Drip, which was eventually acquired by LeadPages.

The idea is to launch a simple product, like a WordPress plugin, for a fixed price, and promote it through a single online marketing channel. Once you’ve hit a certain revenue threshold, let’s say $1,000/month, you can repeat the same process until eventually, you’re making enough to quit your job. Slowly adding channels and products will also help you build your skillset one step at a time.

The final step is to use your time, once you have all of it back, and any excess capital from your mini businesses to build whatever you want. This is a much better position to launch moonshots from than diving headfirst into a VC-backed venture or betting on a line of work that might soon be obsolete.

It’s 2018. The lever is long enough, but you must stand in the right place to apply it. Only then can you move the world.

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Use This Storytelling Framework to Craft Amazing Narratives

There is a class of entertainment that is underrated, in spite of its external success: stories about telling stories. Hit shows like How I Met Your Mother, Suits, or Gilmore Girls and blockbusters like Ocean’s Eleven, the Bourne movies, and Fight Club all thrive on their characters’ abilities to launch into enchanting monologues at a second’s notice.

Whoever asks Barney Stinson about his playbook, platinum rule, or Valentine’s Day can expect a full-fledged fake history lesson. Despite what the gang might say, they love it. Because who tells stories like that?

Sometimes, life throws us the same opportunity to tell a story however we want to tell it. It might be an essay for a job application, a speech to your old class, or a new acquaintance asking about a childhood experience. But we’re not a character in a movie, so we never have those stories locked and loaded and often butcher them as a result.

How can we change that?

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You Don’t Need an Identity to Have a Life

Dressed in a brown, too large sweater, a man is standing in an archway, elbows crossed. It’s snowing. Having waited for hours in the cold, the bank across the street finally opens. He walks in.

Inside the Zurich Community Bank, he writes down a 13-digit number on a piece of paper, which the clerk hands to a more senior employee, who guides the man to an elevator. Down in the vault, a security guard silently gestures him towards the fingerprint identification system. He passes.

As he sits down in a dimly lit cabin, another clerk retrieves a metal lock box, roughly the size of two shoe cartons, from the bank’s walk-in safe. He places it in front of the man, unlocks it, nods, and walks away. After the man’s made sure the cabin curtain is closed, he opens the box.

There’s nothing unusual inside. A bunch of markers, a flashlight, contact lenses, a watch, a credit card, his vaccination record, a USB stick. His eyes quickly scan the contents, resting on one item almost instantly: his passport. He opens it and sits down in the small cabin chair.

After what feels like a lifetime, he nods, but his face is full of doubt. As if to make himself believe, he utters:

“My name is Jason Bourne.”

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How To Eliminate the #1 Cognitive Bias on the Internet

In 1906, famed English statistician Sir Francis Galton visited the annual ‘West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition.’ The 84-year-old scientist was obsessed with breeding in his spare time. While I’m sure he strolled along the stalls amidst curious onlookers, he did find the perfect mix of leisure and work: a weight-guessing contest.

An ox was brought on stage before ‘dressing’, which is butcher speak for slaughter and removal of organs. Contestants could then submit guesses regarding the dressed weight for six pence each, which resulted in a variety of prizes, a cool $6,000 in modern-day dollars for the host, and a data set of 787 points for Galton to play with.

As Galton suspected, not even the few livestock experts among the group guessed the correct weight. The best estimate came in at 1,207 lbs, nine pounds off the 1,198 lbs mark. When he calculated the mean of all guesses, however, Galton was shocked: 1,197 lbs.

Imagined as a single individual, the crowd’s judgement was almost perfect.

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How To Control Your Mind

One of life’s great trilemmas is the tradeoff between money, energy, and time. Maybe you’ve heard someone joke about how you can only ever have two of the three. The punchline inevitably comes with age.

When you’re young, you have time and energy, but no money. As an adult, you get some money, but lose all your time. And once you’re old, you might have cash and hours to spare, but no fit body to enjoy either.

We laugh at this, but at the same time, it scares us a little. Because we know it’s true.

I’ve spent the past four months reflecting on our relationship with technology. After exploring addictions, distractions, and enhancements, I recognize many of our efforts in the tech arena are spent trying to fix this impossible problem. While there are some improvements we can make, we’ll never get a perfect outcome.

And yet, the power to deal with this imbalance has been with us all along.

1 + 1 = 1

We usually think of time as a good way to measure a life, but it’s only a proxy for what we really mean: attention. Think of the wealthy heir, who wastes all his riches, and compare him to the artist who dies at 40, but leaves behind a significant body of work. The things we most want in life, be it money, health, family, status, or impact, are really just byproducts of deliberate attention.

To cultivate said attention, we need more than just time. We also need energy. Time without energy is not spent moving. It is just spent. Most of us start life with an abundance of both, meaning our capacity to synthesize attention is often greatest when we’re young.

Visually speaking, science describes attention like a zoom lens on a camera. If you try to see the whole picture from afar, it takes a while to focus. The more you zoom in, the smaller the segment and the faster you can process it.

If we translate this metaphor to attention the way we just defined it, you can think of your time as a flashlight and your energy as the batteries. You need both to turn it on and point it where you want to go. Yes, it’s true that more time and more energy lead to more attention, but that’s only half the picture.

Like on any good flashlight, you can also adjust the radius of the beam.

One Addiction to Rule Them All

One of the world’s leading researchers of attention, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, wrote about the state of optimal performance:

“Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.”

Imagine you had $100 million and were perfectly healthy. What excuse would you have not to use your attention well? None. Chasing this imaginary state is the game most of us are playing. There will never be no excuses left, but blaming their existence is easier than dealing with them head on. It’s an addictive game too. You can play it your entire life without ever getting close to winning.

David Allen calls this our biggest weakness as humans:

“I think control is the master human addiction. To try to control the world.”

Often, in spite of having the right intentions, that’s what we’re doing. Less Facebook, more time, less email, more energy. They’re all small steps in the right direction, but by taking them we lose out on a much bigger one:

What if we just maximized the attention we can get from whatever time and energy we have right now?

This is a slight, but significant difference. Allen noticed it too:

“Not ‘be in control,’ because that’s something that we work with, something I think you need to develop, but trying to control externally the world is a big addiction.”

Deliberate attention is good. Aware attention is better.

Talking to Ourselves

Even if you’re loaded with spare flashlights and batteries, you can’t just point your attention once and then go straight forever. You’re going to get lost. Naval Ravikant calls this ‘monkey mind:’

“The reality is if you walk down the street and there are a thousand people in the street, I think all thousand are talking to themselves in their head at any given point. They’re constantly judging everything that they see. They’re playing back movies of things that happened to them yesterday. They’re living in fantasy worlds of what’s going to happen tomorrow. They’re just pulled out of base reality.”

He explains that as children, we’re very connected to the real world, a trait we lose as we grow older and start long-range planning. While some projecting is necessary and useful, we tend to go overboard rather quickly. We get stuck in our visions and wave our attention spotlight around uncontrollably.

So, to get where we want to go, it’s not enough to be deliberate in using our attention. We also have to observe it. Therefore, looking inward and reflecting on where you deploy your attention is equally as important, if not more, than how much you can muster.

This isn’t easy, but Naval has some ideas:

“I’ve taken on this idea that I want to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking, which is hard. If I say to you, “Don’t think of a pink elephant”, I just put a pink elephant in your head. It’s an almost impossible problem. It’s more something that has to be guided by feel, than guided by actual thinking or thought process. I’m deliberately cultivating experiences, states of mind, locations, activities, that will help me get out of my mind.”

Funny how that works, isn’t it? In order to get more control over your attention, you have to let it go.

Wrong Means, Right Ends

Csikszentmihalyi’s book is titled Flow. The name itself suggests the loose nature of the state.

“To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.”

But it is not just letting go of external rewards. Flow also requires a certain degree of surrender to the task at hand. You don’t beat a hard level in a video game on first try, you beat it on the 17th attempt, when you barely care any more, but the gears magically click into place.

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.”

Subconsciously, we know this. We induce chemical reactions in our bodies in hopes of controlling our attention all the time, according to Naval:

“In some sense, the people chasing thrills in action sports or flow states or orgasm or any of these states that people really strive to get to, a lot of these are basically just trying to get out of your own head. They’re trying to get away from that voice in your head and this overdeveloped sense of self.”

Food, alcohol, drugs, sex, exercise, these all rest on a choice to direct our attention a certain way and then let it drift for a while. We can use this same choice to recalibrate our attention flashlight, minus the escapism.

What blocks our way usually isn’t the obstacle, but our brain’s obsession with it. Once we let that go, we immediately regain internal control, even long after external control has gone. There are many ways to achieve this:

  • Meditating.
  • Taking a walk.
  • Visiting a place that triggers nostalgia.
  • Immersing yourself in a task that’s either repetitive, like washing dishes, or continuous, like reading, for an extended period of time.

Whatever the activity, if it puts you in a meditative state it helps you make this mental shift. Over time, you’ll see you can do almost anything this way. Allen agrees this is very productive:

“Being able to let go and say ‘wait a minute, let me just accept what’s going on, cooperate with what it is and then be in control of myself.’ But be aware of whatever’s new, whatever’s current, whatever’s present. Letting go is probably the idea that made the biggest difference in my life.”

The result is peace.

No Strings Attached

When you direct your attention once, but then adjust focus intuitively as needed, you get a calm mind. This is a state worth cultivating, Naval says:

“You can think of your brain, your consciousness, as a multi-layered mechanism. There’s kind of a core base kernel level OS that’s running. Then there’s applications that are running on top.

I’m actually going back to my awareness level of OS, which is always calm, always peaceful, and generally happy and content. I’m trying to stay in that mode and not activate the monkey mind, which is always worried and frightened and anxious, but serves incredible purpose. I’m trying not to activate that program until I need it. When I need it, I want to just focus on that program. If I’m running it 24/7, all the time, I’m wasting energy and it becomes me. I am more than that.”

No matter how much attention you can create, spend it right here, right now. Not up in the future, not down in the past. The most peaceful place on earth is always the present.

Be Water, My Friend

This is all very confusing and paradoxical, which is the perfect indicator that it’s natural.

Even if you had 100% of your attention at all times, you would choose to turn on the autopilot occasionally. Watching a movie, reading, music, or sensory experiences, like being outside, eating, swimming, you want your mind to wander during those. Creativity, inspiration, love, that’s when they happen.

At the same time, frantically chasing impulse after impulse, without any awareness of where your attention goes, would be equally disastrous. Who’s planning your goals, checking your direction, paying the bills, if you’re busy slinging feces at the other monkeys in the park?

So, what do we make of this imbalance? Let the pendulum swing, for true control comes from the inside. To lead an empowered life, you needn’t command what happens in it.

Know that while behavior change is helpful, it’s a pebble in the powerful river that is your mind. Remember to look inward and work with what you have. Choose where to go and when to flow. Don’t escape, exist.

Pay attention to your attention, and you’ll always be on your way.


This post is the last in my AntiTech series, where we use technology to fight technology in order to get back what we lost: our time and our attention. You can find an overview here.
Everything Popular Is Wrong Cover

Everything Popular Is Wrong

We remember Oscar Wilde as a poet, a playwright, a player who’d write. Most of us associate him with drama, both in his work and life. The Picture of Dorian Gray, a few pithy lines, an early death.

But when I look at the sea of thoughts that unravels when you click on the author of the most popular quote on Goodreads, I see none of that. I see a philosopher, full of contrarian ideas, paradoxes, and lots of new angles to look at life from.

They remind me of the beliefs of a philosopher we can still talk to: Naval Ravikant. After reflecting on an interview he did with Shane Parrish, I can’t help but notice that some of the most popular sentiments floating around Medium and the web are, well, just sentiments.

“Everything popular is wrong.” One of Wilde’s many polarizing statements. It may be hyperbole, but it’s a starting point for originality. In the echo chamber of self-improvement, some ideas have been circulating for so long, we’ve stopped questioning them.

What if we considered the possibility that these ideas are false?

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All You Need to Know About Stoicism in One Table

In a very personal TED talk, Tim Ferriss shares the story of his almost-suicide. Struggling with depression more than the average person, he says he’s spent a great deal of his life finding ways to improve emotional resilience.

The best tool he’s found so far also happens to be the source of his best business decisions, he claims: Stoicism.

Right after, he admits: “That sounds…boring.”

How could something that helped one person both prevent the worst kind of death and make millions be boring?

Yeah…how?

Right Time, Wrong Dress

I chose Latin as my second foreign language in high school when I was 13 years old. It turned out to be a great choice, not just because Latin holds the roots of many European languages, but because of the history education you get alongside those.

In a German book with the translated title Latin Is Dead, Long Live Latin!, author Wilfried Stroh notes:

“Let’s not forget Cicero, the self-made man who turned from humble beginnings to Consul of the Roman Republic. Understanding him and other ancient philosophers, like Lucretius, Seneca, Augustus, and of course poets and historians, that’s why we study Latin, not in order to decorate ourselves with fancy quotes.”

Isn’t this the exact thing we’re trying to do today? Some of the most popular articles online try to help us understand people like Ray Dalio, Taylor Swift, and Elon Musk. Rome’s emperors, poets and philosophers are our modern day billionaires, singers, and hedge fund managers.

We want to decode their way of thinking, their philosophy, for our success. It is no coincidence, then, that many of the people who are building the future use the same, ‘old’ thinking that worked for our ancestors. Their brain software is Stoicism.

However, because of its origins, we don’t look at it that way. Since it’s hidden behind the intimidating curtains of education and history, most of us don’t look at it at all. We hear the right buzz words, like success, wisdom and living a good life, but then words like virtue, fortitude, and providence enter the picture, and we’d rather flip right back to Youtube.

It’s funny. Language is the perfect gateway to this incredible area of study, yet today it might also be the biggest obstacle. We’re scared to read texts written in Old English, let alone learn Latin or Greek, so we miss out.

Hence, when people like Tim call Stoicism “an operating system for thriving in high-stress environments; for making better decisions,” what they’re doing is translating to help us pick up the thread.

It’s always the right time for Stoicism, but it’s always wearing the wrong dress. To the outsider, it looks like a raincoat for a sunny day. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

In fact, you can find everything you need to know about Stoicism in a single table.

Three For Three

If only we dare to look just a little closer, we can instantly see that Stoicism is, above all, about simplicity — and a philosophy built around this idea can, by definition, not be complicated.

Take its location of origin, for example, the stoa, which you see in the titular image of this post. Nothing more than a walkway with a roof, it was a place for people to gather and exchange ideas, so the first Stoic, Zeno, just stood up and started talking.

Another one of modernity’s great translators, Ryan Holiday, therefore hits the nail on the head when he says:

“Stoicism is a philosophy designed for the masses, and if it has to be simplified a bit to reach the masses, so be it.”

He promptly delivers on said promise at the end of The Daily Stoic, a collection of quotes from famous Stoics, with the following table:

Simplified a bit from the source.

It contains everything you need to know. Everything. Let’s break it down, starting with the labels.

The blue, left column contains, bottom to top, the three parts of the self, which determine how you navigate your life.

  1. First, you perceive the world and its events, which prompts you to desire certain outcomes while wanting to avoid others.
  2. Second, those two prompt you to want to act in certain ways, while refusing to do other things.
  3. Third, whether your will allows or rejects any given impulse determines what you’ll actually end up doing.

The idea is that the better you get at perceiving the world, the faster you become at cataloguing impulses, which, in turn, makes it easier to give in to the right ones and block the rest.

While Ryan described these three elements extensively in The Obstacle Is The Way, the main takeaway here is that everything — everything — starts with perception.

Moving to the green, top row, left to right, we see the Stoics’ three disciplines that shape our perception, action and will.

  1. First, we must study and learn more about the world and our place in it. Which events can we influence? What’s best for the common good? And, most importantly, what is true?
  2. Second, this learning enables us to practice certain behaviors and character traits, like duty, taking initiative and good judgment.
  3. Lastly, by practicing these things we receive excellent training in the highest goods of the Stoics: discipline, justice, courage, and wisdom.

Once again, while this is technically a chain to work through, it is important to remember that all it takes for the rippling effect to kick in is to start studying.

One Question Is Enough

So far, we learned that good will and good action start with clear perception. Proper practice and training are the consequence of study. As a result, we get a singular starting point for becoming Stoics: studying our perception.

If the goal is to move up and to the right, towards wisdom, then the place to start is at the bottom left, in the realm of physics.

Therefore, you really only need to do one thing to become a Stoic: Learn to recognize what’s in your control and what’s not. Sure, there are specific habits to practice and more to find out, but if you intently focus on this one aspect, the rest will follow.

Epictetus, another famous Stoic, confirms:

“Of these areas, the chief and most urgent is the first which has to do with the passions, for strong emotions arise only when we fail in our desires and aversions.”

Hence, again and again, Stoicism comes down to a single question:

“What do I control here?”

Imagine you looked at every situation in life that way. The weather, annoying people, your mood, frustrations at work, unlucky, even disastrous events, it’d all spin around you like moons orbiting a planet — they’re there, but you don’t mind them. Effort, goodwill and hope, on the other hand, will be at an all-time high. After all, these are fully within your control.

That doesn’t sound boring at all, does it?

What Philosophy Is Really For

Further selling Stoicism to the audience, Tim says it “decreases emotional reactivity, which can be a superpower.” Given it could save a student from suicide as much as it could keep an NBA star from losing his temper, he claims the stakes are very, very high.

But there’s more to Stoicism. A bigger end game. Something…simpler.

Think back to your happiest moments in life. What went through your head, if anything? Who were you with? What did you do or had just achieved? Chances are, they were like listening to a Stoic talk on a sunny porch: simple.

Happiness is rarely the result of pulling off complex schemes. It’s raw, like the events that precede it. Kissing the love of your life, knocking out a great stretch of work, sitting in the grass, feeling the wind.

This is something even fewer people understand about Stoicism than its simplicity: It’s a philosophy of happiness.

It might be just a side effect, but it’s a profound one nonetheless. That’s why it’s no surprise that Tim ends his talk on a note sent to him by one of his most treasured mentors:

“I could not imagine a life more beautiful than that of a Stoic.” – Jerzy Gregorek

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Self-Improvement Has Made Me Worse

When Batman meets Superman for the first time in Dawn of Justice, you instantly know who’s in charge and who’s in trouble.

Source

After crashing the Batmobile and interrupting Bruce Wayne on his rogue mission, Superman tells him to ‘bury the bat’ and let it go, putting mercy before justice. Of course Batman doesn’t, swearing revenge.

Lately, I feel a lot like Superman in this scene. With a stern look on my face, I swoop in to try and fix other people’s mess, but don’t get much credit for it. This is a cause for concern, but not about those other people, about me.

A lot of us strive to become superhuman, but this pursuit has a shadow. It looms ever closer and if we don’t watch out, it’ll swallow us whole.

Despite our best intentions, self-improvement can make us worse.

When Mindfulness Isn’t Optional

Over the past three years, I’ve gotten really good at noticing things. Not just about myself, but others too. In fact, I now can’t not notice things.

I notice when 10 out of 10 people on the subway are on their phone, when the dude in front of me is switching only between his sports betting account and Tinder and when the guy four seats over wastes all his time instead of working. I notice people who are always late, always behind and always broke and I can pinpoint exactly what needs fixing.

Now, I finally noticed that all this noticing is driving me nuts. I’d love to say “I don’t mind” and mean it, but it’s never true. I do mind. I mind everything.

Mindfulness is a gift when it’s directed inward, but outward? Not so much. It’s a good thing to realize you’re biting your nails, but constantly observing other people’s behavior? That’s a curse.

Why?

Comparison Is the Road to Madness

Mark Twain remarked that “comparison is the death of joy.” But, and this is worse, it’s also the birth of misery.

Comparing ourselves is an instinct as fundamental as survival itself. If Gronk can outrun the bear, pick the right berries and get the pretty neanderthal lady, maybe you should be more like Gronk. In a modern society built mainly on and for individual freedom, however, this is useless.

And yet, every notice is a new chance to compare. He eats well, I should eat better. She wastes time, I’m more productive. Even if we rationally estimate our own abilities, comparing still hurts us, an Oxford study suggests:

“The findings potentially have implications for social interactions in the workplace as well as clinical disorders such as depression.”

Interesting, right? Confidence and clinical depression can have the same source: comparing yourself to others. Most of the time, the results of your comparisons don’t even matter.

You’ll land in a bad place anyway.

Judgement Is Never Just

Most people make poor choices. They don’t want to worry about money, or getting up early, or if what they do matters. They, however, would never consider these choices poor. That label is pure judgement on my part.

The problem is that with so much mindfulness, millions of mini comparisons, judgement itself becomes a habit. This is a common side effect of self-improvement. Since it’s all about getting better, you’re left with only two opinions of other people:

  1. They’re better than you.
  2. You’re better than them.

Whichever one you settle on, you lose. This is self-improvement’s dark secret.

The Price of Self-Improvement

When you constantly compare yourself and decide you’re worse, you spiral into depression. But what happens when you think you’re better?

Imagine you’re Superman. You don’t need to compare, you have actual proof: you can’t die, you know everything and you’re physically stronger than anyone. You’re the ultimate success in self-improvement.

Unlike most of us, Superman didn’t choose his superiority, but he paid the same price: loneliness.

Sebastian Marshall perfectly described it in an essay 6 years ago:

You know what I think it is? You won’t be understood once you step off into the abyss. The more you do it, the more people won’t understand.

The second guy I mentioned, the effort guy? He’s got coworkers right now he can commiserate with who understand him. The business idea I mentioned to him doesn’t exist right now and there’s a demand for it. His income is such that even with a low price point he could still make 2x-3x what he’s making now and fulfill a market need.

But then what? Then he’s the only guy doing this thing. No commiseration. People won’t understand him as much. And the more you do that, the more people don’t understand. If you keep taking all those edges that no one else will, pretty soon your neighbors don’t understand you, can’t understand you.

It’s just you.

The higher you climb on the mountain, the thinner the air gets. More success, fewer fellow climbers, until you’re left with only one truth:

You’re the best, but you’re alone.

The internet is full of posts telling people how they can become the best. Be more creative, more productive, more aware. But once you achieve that, once you’re better, faster, stronger, how do you blend back in?

Even if you become superhuman, you’ll still spend your life among mortals. How do you deal with that? I see no posts about this issue.

We’re so worried about acquiring power — over our minds, our bodies, our time — that we forget learning how to use it responsibly to serve the world we live in.

And so, often, by the time we get it, we’re victims of our own success.

Running From Mediocrity, But Where To?

It all happens slowly, of course. One day you opt out of binge drinking, the next you tell your friends to get their shit together and two years later, you run your own dev shop while they extended yet another semester.

You notice, you compare and through the years, you silently collect millions of judgements until you conclude you’re alone. You might succeed in self-improvement, but fail in being human.

This is the dangerous path many of us are on. I know I am. I must find a way to turn off my comparison machine, because it’s been running too long already. That’s the big, wicked twist of the story.

In that scene from the beginning, I’m not Superman. I’m Batman.

A lot of us are. The frustration from the loneliness of our path makes us bitter, impatient, and angry. So we abandon our true mission, one comparison at a time, until we can retreat only into our lonely cave of judgment. Not despite, but because we come out on top.

You may feel you’re ready to pay the toll of self-improvement, but you still might not like who you turn into. We think we’re improving ourselves, when actually, we’re becoming the villain of our own story.

If you run away from mediocrity, but right into malice, what good does it do?

On Sweeping

For Clark Kent, the option to compare went out the window when he was a child. The moment he pushed the first school bus out of the river, any doubts were gone: if he goes rogue, we all die. Lucky for us all, before putting on his cape, Superman turned his powers inward.

That’s what we must do and it’s much more important than how much power we have. The problem is neither other people’s indifference to, nor our obsession with self-improvement. It’s the comparison that stinks.

Be better for the sake of being a better you, not better than everyone else.

There’s not much to gain from Pomodoro timers and dollar cost averaging for the people who enjoy their lives precisely for the lack of those things. It just so happens that because I care about self-improvement, I care about you-improvement too. Because then we could nerd out together. But we can’t and so I feel lonely.

It is my duty to deal with that loneliness and make sure it doesn’t drag me down. There is no ‘other people’s mess’. Just my mess. Nothing to swoop in for. The dirt is in front of my own doorstep, waiting for me to sweep.

You have a dirty doorstep too. Only if we all sweep will our streets be clean.

Superman Is Dead

When the world asked him to, Superman turned himself in. When the world asked him to, Superman appeared in court. Knowing full well the rules did not apply, he abided by them anyway, for the sake of the greater good.

Source

In a sick twist of fate, meeting the renegade bat led to his doomsday. As the ultimate of human evolution, Superman paid the ultimate price. It’s what makes it so hard to get out of the trap: You can be a saint and still lose.

That’s why the movie is beloved by hardcore fans, but commercially, far from the success it should have been. We don’t want to see the hero do everything right and then die. We know life’s not fair, but we hate to be reminded of this reality.

And so, as he tries to build a new team of heroes in a post-Superman world, Batman is too late when he realizes it was never his turn to judge:

Alfred: “You’ve got a team here!”

Bruce Wayne: “Superman could bring this team together better than I ever could. His strength…”

Alfred: “Doesn’t matter how strong you are or what abilities you
might have…”

Bruce Wayne: “He was more human than I am.”

— Silence —

Bruce Wayne: “He lived in this world. Fell in love, got a job. Despite all that power. The world needs Superman.”

Finally, Batman learns a true hero is not defined by the superiority of his power, but by the times he chooses to wield it. This moment is called a Harajuku Moment. Coined by Chad Fowler, Tim Ferriss defined it in The 4-Hour Body:

“It’s an epiphany that turns a nice-to-have into a must-have. There is no point in getting started until it happens. No matter how many bullet points and recipes I provide, you will need a Harajuku Moment to fuel the change itself.”

We all need such a moment in our quest for self-improvement. You have to acknowledge you’re not a hero to start acting like one. I had mine when I read this quote in The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday:

“When philosophy is wielded with arrogance and stubbornly, it is the cause for the ruin of many. Let philosophy scrape off your own faults, rather than be a way to rail against the faults of others.” — Seneca

Superman is dead. We must become our own heroes, or his sacrifice was in vain. I don’t know where you’ll find your Harajuku Moment, but you need one. Until then, until we learn to use our powers, the best we can do is ask:

What would Superman do?

Most of the time, he would probably just keep sweeping.