Category: Habits

Why You Should Say No More Often Cover

Why You *Really* Should Say “No” More Often

Nik

We all know we should say “no” more often. But we’re nice people and so it’s hard to turn down requests. Ultimately, that’s what most of our yeses go to. Requests. Life is full of them.

Your to-do list is a set of requests. So is your inbox. Your Facebook messages, Instagram DMs, Twitter notifications. Requests, requests, requests. And we haven’t even gotten to friends asking favors. Let alone business opportunities.

When you’re starting out in your career, contacts and customers expect your free assistance while every phone call is a welcome distraction from your underdog status. As soon as you’re seeing some level of productivity and success, you’ll be inundated with opportunities. Let’s partner up, be on my podcast, here’s a paid gig. I call it ‘opportunity suffocation.’

But, at the end of the day, they’re all just requests. No matter how well they’re disguised. And don’t we really know what we have to do? Write more. Pitch more. Practice more. Most of the time, it’s more of the same. Answering requests won’t help with that.

Of course, there are other good reasons to say “no” besides focus at work.

Like time. The big one. The first one they throw at our head. “If you agree to every little thing, you’ll have no time left for the big and important ones.” True. But isn’t that more of a long-term problem? Sure, regret sucks, but I rarely feel like small detours here and there really hurt. Of course, you can’t allow them to pile up, but the time argument feels rather weak to me.

Now, energy, that’s a different thing. A much better reason, I think. Every time I say “yes” when I actually want to say “no,” a little piece of me dies. “Yes” is what drags you out the house on a Friday night when you want to stay in. “Yes” is what sneaks you into a room full of the wrong people. “Yes” is what makes your gut twist in the morning when you drive to a toxic job.

Often, it’s not so much time I’m looking for with my nos, it’s relief. Get that burden off of me! I don’t want to sell my soul, to fake another smile, to pretend I don’t know you’re benefitting more from my “yes” than me. Give me peace of mind. Give me the “ahhh, dodged that bullet” moment. That’s what I want. I care a lot more about that than losing an hour, a day, a week.

Saying “no” isn’t as much about happiness as it’s about not being miserable.

Then again, of course, it’s important for contentment too. But not the way we think. Yes, it’s true that we need space to build our own little forts of happiness. But — and I never hear anyone talk about this — we also need room for randomness. Because, actually, happiness is a very random thing.

The best things in life are side effects. The ice cream parlor you found when you were lost. The old friend you bumped into on the train. The new kind of tea they offered at the cafeteria. But without margin, both in time and energy, there’s no room for any of this. If your schedule, your friends list, your life is too packed with obligations, there’s no space for serendipity to even occur.

Because you’re never breathing. Wandering. Allowing yourself an open mind.

I think that’s the real reason saying “no” is so important. Getting ahead at work, choosing your life’s projects, not being drained by toxic suckers, all of that matters. But if after all of that, there’s still nowhere to go for the moments in your life that truly make it worth living, why do it anyway?

That’s counterintuitive. We all know we should say “no” more often. But we think we should do it because we already have so many good things to fill life with. And while that’s true, the best moments of all are the tiny dots that will cover the gaps along the way. And they’re impossible to visualize beforehand.

“No” feels harder to say. More empowering when we do. But it’s really just a singular defense. A lone disaster averted. It needs time to compound. Our yeses, however, are where the real danger lies. “Yes” doesn’t feel special, but it is. Because it’s a thousand nos combined. A thousand times more powerful.

Every “yes” is a “no” to a million other things, some of which you can’t even imagine. But they might still be the best things that’ll ever happen to you.

Make sure you allow them to exist.

How To Unlock Your Confident Self Cover

How To Unlock Your Confident Self

Nik

On July 16, 1926, Donald Mellett was shot in front of his home. The editor of Ohio’s Canton Daily News had picked a fight with the wrong people.

Over the past 18 months, he had exposed multiple issues of corruption among the Canton police, eventually forcing the mayor to suspend the police chief. But the underworld’s ties ran deep. So deep, that three local gangsters and a detective conspired to get rid of him. Of course, the first official investigation turned up nothing. Eventually, an outside, private investigator cleared the case and all culprits were sentenced to life in prison.

And while it barely registers as a sideshow next to one of America’s most publicized crimes in the 1920s, it’s another life that was at stake which is of interest to us today.

Shortly before his death, Mellett had struck a deal with a visiting lecturer. He’d been so impressed with the man’s ideas that they’d decided to publish them come January, when Mellett was to resign from his editor’s duties.

The morning after Mellett’s assassination, the man received an anonymous phone call, telling him he would leave Canton. He could leave on his own within the hour or wait longer and do so in a pine box — but leave he would.

Terrified, the man got into his car and drove for eight hours straight, not resting until he reached his relatives in the remote mountains of West Virginia. There, he went into hiding. Nobody would see him for months.

The name of that man was Napoleon Hill.

Seven Minutes

Joanna is in her early 30s. She’s tall, blonde, and hyper-competitive. She was a national rower, worked for the FBI, and trained Middle Eastern police forces. At the time she grabs dinner with her friend Kamal in late 2013, she’s already sold two companies, with her third about to go public. He tells the story:

She’s sitting against the wall and I’m facing her. We talk about our lives, things that have really formed us, who we are. Out of the blue, she tells me that, when she was 24, she had a heart attack and she died for seven minutes.

I was like okayyy and so I leaned forward: “I gotta ask: What happened?”

She goes: “I don’t remember.”

She was in a coma afterwards. They brought her out of it and [then] she was in this bubble. She was the Bubble Boy for, like, a month. And Joanna being Joanna she was just working away in the bubble.

But she said what changed there was after that, everything she wanted in her life — like anything — whether it’s love, how she met her husband, her career, whatever she wants to do, it just happens. It comes to her.

So I’m like: “Alright, you know, I don’t wanna have to, uh, die to get that. How do you do it?”

She leans forward and she goes: “You’re gonna think I’m crazy, but…”

“What if this is heaven?”

Ten Days of Dishes

Steven Pressfield published his first successful novel when he was 52 years old. For many decades before, he wasn’t just not writing, but actively avoiding it. In The War of Art, he tells the story of the moment everything changed:

I washed up in New York a couple of decades ago, making twenty bucks a night driving a cab and running away full-time from doing my work.

One night, alone in my $110-a-month sublet, I hit bottom in terms of having diverted myself into so many phony channels so many times that I couldn’t rationalize it for one more evening. I dragged out my ancient Smith-Corona, dreading the experience as pointless, fruitless, meaningless, not to say the most painful exercise I could think of.

For two hours I made myself sit there, torturing out some trash that I chucked immediately into the shitcan. That was enough. I put the machine away.

I went back to the kitchen. In the sink sat ten days of dishes. For some reason I had enough excess energy that I decided to wash them. The warm water felt pretty good. The soap and sponge were doing their thing. A pile of clean plates began rising in the drying rack.

To my amazement I realized I was whistling.

The Other Self

In the fall of 1927, over one year after his disappearance, Napoleon Hill finally left his relatives’ house. On a clear night, he walked up to the local public school, which sat on a hill overlooking the town. For hours, he paced around the building. There had to be a way out!

After all, he’d long done the hard work of compiling his ‘philosophy of personal achievement,’ a task for which he had interviewed hundreds of people over the past 20 years. Suddenly, he remembered something the man who sent him on this quest — none other than Andrew Carnegie himself — had told him during one of their earliest conversations in 1908:

“Along toward the end of your labor, if you carry it through successfully, you will make a discovery which may be a great surprise to you. You will discover that the cause of success is not something separate and apart from the man; that it is a force so intangible in nature that the majority of men never recognize it; a force which might be properly called the ‘other self.’ Noteworthy is the fact that this ‘other self’ seldom exerts its influence or makes itself known excepting at times of unusual emergency, when men are forced, through adversity and temporary defeat, to change their habits and to think their way out of difficulty.”

Hill’s heart leapt into his throat. This was it. His testing time. His turn to prove that his own ideas worked. He would either see it through or burn the manuscripts. This breakthrough came with a weird, but empowering gesture:

When this thought came to me, I stopped still, drew my feet closely together, saluted (I did not know what or whom), and stood rigidly at attention for several minutes. This seemed, at first, like a foolish thing to do, but while I was standing there another thought came through in the form of an “order” that was as brief and snappy as any ever given by a military commander to a subordinate. The order said, “Tomorrow get into your automobile and drive to Philadelphia, where you will receive aid in publishing your philosophy of achievement.”

For the first time in his life, Napoleon Hill had experienced his ‘other self.’

Choosing Sides

Joanna is at least 70% sure Kamal will recommend she see a therapist. But she says it anyway:

“What if this is heaven?”

Kamal’s reaction, however, is just as surprising as her question:

And then she leans back and it was like — you ever see in the movies when
the camera just spans back and things get really slow? And I was like “oh my god!” and I swear there was a homeless man behind her in the window and he kinda like winks at me and “oh my god!” And, for a few moments, I got it.

She’s like: “I died. How can I prove I’m not on the other side? So, because this is heaven, given what heaven is about, I can have, be, and do anything I want.”

And she’s living that.

On another day, in another time, Napoleon Hill would’ve said Joanna is in sync with her other self.

A Harajuku Moment

What Steven Pressfield learned from his lovely evening writing crap and washing dishes is that even if his work would remain a miserable experience for a long time, he’d turn out okay. That his becoming a writer was inevitable.

This moment, this singular incident of first unlocking your other, confident, determined, relentlessly driven if patient self, is called a Harajuku Moment.

In The 4-Hour Body, Tim Ferriss’s friend Chad Fowler, who coined the term, tells the story of having his own while fashion shopping in Tokyo. Sitting on a wall in the July heat waiting for friends to return, he complained to a buddy:

“For me, it doesn’t even matter what I wear; I’m not going to look good anyway.” I think he agreed with me. I can’t remember, but that’s not the point. The point was that, as I said those words, they hung in the air like when you say something super-embarrassing in a loud room but happen to catch the one random slice of silence that happens all night long. Everyone looks at you like you’re an idiot. But this time, it was me looking at myself critically. I heard myself say those words and I recognized them not for their content, but for their tone of helplessness.

For the first time in his life, Chad realized he was an incomplete person. A man who always saw himself as “someone with bad health.” And that one moment of piercing clarity was enough to spark a drastic change. Harajuku Moments aren’t just for our bodies, but for all walks of life, according to Tim:

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.

In the year following his flash of insight, Fowler lost 70+ pounds. He maintains a good health regimen to this day.

Orders From a Strange Source

For the next two days after his Harajuku Moment, Hill continued to receive “orders” from his “other self,” which he followed to the letter.

As a result, he not only found a publisher for his books but also landed a big, local contract with General Motors to train 15 employees in sales. The money was more than enough to pay for all his expenses, including the expensive hotel his gut had told him to book upon arrival.

Past that point, Hill describes his life in words Joanna might have used too:

From that time right up to this very minute everything I have needed has come to me. Sometimes the arrival of the material things I needed has been a little late, but I can truthfully say that my “other self” has always met me at the crossroads when I have come to them and indicated which path I should follow. The “other self” follows no precedents, recognizes no limitations, and always finds a way to accomplish desired ends! It may meet with temporary defeat, but not with permanent failure. I am as sure of the soundness of this statement as I am of the fact of being engaged in writing these lines.

Lucky for us, Hill didn’t leave it at that.

Not a Miracle Drug

As great as it sounds, so far, all this ‘other self’ talk feels a little esoteric. Magical. Almost too good to be true. While he repeatedly admits he doesn’t quite understand it in its entirety, Hill makes an effort to capture what he knows. In Outwitting The Devil, he describes the “orders” he received:

The instructions were given through the medium of thoughts which presented themselves in my mind with such force that they were readily distinguishable from my ordinary self-created thoughts.

That’s simple. I get that. It’s a powerful gut. A feeling that one course of action is decidedly better, paired with a strong sense of faith that it will work.

We’ve all experienced this. Scientists call it flow. It may have been in sports, a video game, or a great day at work, but, somehow, we strung together a series of gut decisions that just worked and executed them with perfect confidence.

While flow isn’t something we can maintain all the time, Hill suggests our other self is a version of ourselves that can capitalize on it much longer:

You are entitled to know that two entities occupy your body, as in fact two similar entities occupy the body of each living person on earth. One of these entities is motivated by and responds to the impulse of fear. The other is motivated by and responds to the impulse of faith.

Whether you call them ‘entities’ or not, this, too, makes sense. Fear has always been our number one motivator because, for millennia, it had to be. The fear of death is what kept us alive. Nowadays, however, that doesn’t make so much sense. Most of us live in an environment where survival is, mostly, ensured.

But, since so few people do it, acting out of faith and going for what you want often works easier and faster than we’d expect it to. This doesn’t make it a miracle drug or state of enlightenment — just a much better way of doing things, according to Hill:

  • You should know that the faith entity performs no miracles, nor does it work in opposition to any of nature’s laws.
  • Your ‘other self’ will not do your work for you; it will only guide you intelligently in achieving for yourself the objects of your desires.
  • Physically you are the same as you have always been; therefore, no one will recognize that any change has taken place in you.
  • Your ‘other self’ will remain in charge and continue to direct you as long as you rely upon it. Keep doubt and fear and worry, and all thoughts of limitation, entirely out of your mind.

Again, this all sounds wonderful, but, like Kamal asked Joanna: how do you do it? How do you change a fundamental aspect of how the human brain naturally works? You don’t.

You let your mind do it for you.

The High Agency Person

The very nature of epiphanies is that they’re not controllable. This is, in part, why we have so many different stories for people who’ve gone through the same change. Joanna, Hill, Pressfield, Fowler, they’ve all made a similar shift in mindset. But because it was such an emotional experience, something so hard to label with language, they’ve all used different labels.

And while there’s no way for me to influence when and where you’ll have yours, Harajuku Moment, that is, stories like theirs are our best shot. Because they prime your subconscious to look for the same in your own life.

In our case, when looking for our confident, faith-based self, the stories we seek are those of what George Mack calls ‘high agency:’

High Agency is a sense that the story given to you by other people about what you can/cannot do is just that — a story. And that you have control over the story.

A High Agency person looks to bend reality to their will. They either find a way, or they make a way.

Mack picked up the concept from Eric Weinstein on Tim Ferriss’s podcast:

When you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind, how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something?

Weinstein says that most of us pride ourselves in the fact that we’re “grounded in reality,” when, actually, that’s just a different way of saying we’ve settled for average, boring, and conventional.

Most of us who wind up using these sort of strange high agency hacks to negotiate the world have some kind of traumatic birth. We may flatter ourselves that we’re in touch with reality, but in fact, reality is a second-best strategy. If you’re lucky, your family works pretty well and you never leave social reality. It’s only when something goes wrong that you discover: “Okay, the world doesn’t work in any way the way I was told. Here’s the underlying structure.” And what you then have to realize is if you want this at scale, you’ve got to stop relying on these traumatic births. It’s like you’re waiting to get bit by a spider to become Spiderman.

Sure, you could wait for your life to back you up against the wall. Or, you could expose yourself to lots of high agency stories until one kicks in.

You could learn about Steve Jobs’s reality distortion field…

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

…Arnold Schwarzenegger’s strange career path from weightlifter to movie star to governor — all in a country whose language he’s terrible at — or Peter Thiel’s unorthodox approaches to investing and business:

How can you achieve your 10-year-goal in 6 months? What great company is nobody starting? What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

Ultimately, there’s only so much you can do to unlock your confident self. To find your Harajuku Moment. But, once you’ve had it, you can never go back.

Bigger Than You Think

In 2014, Jim Carrey gave the commencement speech at Maharishi University. He shares a lot of wise aphorisms, but none quite like this one:

You will only ever have two choices: love or fear. Choose love and don’t ever let fear turn you against your playful heart. Because life doesn’t happen to you. It happens for you.

This distinction between life happening for us and to us is the same thing Kamal has noticed in Joanna and all the folks that most inspire him:

For all of them, I’ve noticed one pattern — including her — that whatever happens, it’s never like this is happening to me. They all look at life as if it’s happening for them. They fall down, they lick their wounds, they get up, but it always makes them be better.

And then Kamal says something remarkable: It’s an attitude you can choose.

They’ve internalized this attitude and it is an attitude. All of us who try to live this, none of us are unique in that sense. We’re all humans, right? The same minds walking around with the same dramas and same fears. But that attitude that life happens for them I’ve noticed consistently in all the best people I’ve ever met in my life.

We may not be able to unlock our best parts, like confidence, faith, and flow at will, but we can choose to live with an attitude that attracts them, rather than shut ourselves off from the possibility. Of course, this is one of the first things Carnegie taught Hill too:

Let me call your attention to a great power which is under your control, said Mr. Carnegie. A power greater than poverty, greater than the lack of education, greater than all of your fears and superstitions combined. It is the power to take possession of your own mind and direct it to whatever ends you may desire.

Carnegie was a well-read man. When he was a young boy, a local colonel opened his personal library of some 400 volumes every Saturday night — an opportunity Carnegie always took. It’s not hard to imagine he read a few Stoic texts, which, over 2,000 years ago, already harnessed the same idea: the one thing we control, the only thing, really, is our mind and its perceptions.

I’m no expert on the ‘other self’ and I’ve only ever caught glimpses of it myself. But, once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. And so I wish nothing more for you than to find your Harajuku Moment. To see this distinction between faith and fear. To learn to live your life with courage, confidence, and the relentless spirit it takes to get whatever you want. Until then, I wish you the attitude that will help you find all of these things. You’re a lot bigger than you think.

“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

— Marcus Aurelius

You Don't Need Motivation — You Need Rational Habits Cover

You Don’t Need Motivation — You Need Rational Habits

Nik

I know, I know. It’s a new year. The last one sucked, but screw that, 2019’s here! With all the bells and whistles. Oh, you’re gonna do so much.

First, you’ll get your workouts back. Then, you’ll improve how you work. You’ll see more, live more, get more done. And, of course, you’ll finally start writing.

Except you’re not doing 2020-you a favor with any of this. Let alone 2030-you. God knows about 2050. But this? Forget it. It’s a charade. We did the same one last year, remember? The reason we keep doing it is that we spend all of December convincing ourselves that this year, this time, it will be different.

It won’t. The year you’re waiting for — the year you manage to somehow magically extend your January-motivation through the entire 12 months that follow — will never come. You don’t need motivation. You never did.

What you need are rational habits. Patterns that make sense.

When it comes to your health, brushing your teeth is a rational habit. That one’s obvious enough, so we do it. Sleeping 7–8 hours a night? A much tougher sell already. But it’s just as rational. So are getting fresh air, not overeating, and a light workout routine. The problem is, often, we only end up with these by accident. If ever. But what if you were intentional about them?

If you want to be an artist, waking up early is a rational habit. Write before work, and you’ll be under pressure. You’ll also be satisfied all day. Write after work, and the urgency is gone. The couch looks tempting. You’re tired. And drained from fretting about that hour all day. So you’re more likely to fail.

For every goal you can think of, rational habits exist. They either support it directly or make it more likely you’ll follow through on the actions that do.

Painters must paint. Entrepreneurs must open shop. Most of us function better in the mornings. Most of us feel tired after work. That’s not to say there can’t be the usual exception to the rule, but, in most cases, the same rational habits will make sense for the people chasing the same goals.

Rational habits sidestep motivation because they don’t depend on your mood. They minimize the impact of external circumstances on your ability to follow through. And their fallback versions are still more satisfying than even the best failed attempt. Rational habits bank on how your brain works.

Override your autopilot? That won’t last. Good luck changing 200,000 years of human nature. Just point it in the right direction. Ask if it’s an autopilot you can trust. That’s a control function, not a new system you build from scratch.

Our minds are pattern-seeking machines. Always have been, always will. Where there’s a loop, they’ll latch onto it, hold it tight, and try to never let go. Your job is to hang out around the right loops. Let your brain do the latching.

They say you’re the average of the five people around you. That’s character. But your behavior, that’s the average of your five strongest habits. Your most enduring patterns? Like it or not, they dictate your actions and, thus, results.

Science suggests 40% of our daily activities are habitual. Maybe it’s more. As long as the actions moving you towards your goals are included, you’re set. But there’s a high chance they’re not — and ‘occasionally’ won’t do the job.

Usually, what we want isn’t unreasonable. We know we can do it. It just takes longer than we think. We need grit, patience, and flexibility along the way. But, for some reason, the bigger, bolder, and more unlikely our goals become, the more we believe we’ll achieve them with a massive, one-time push.

I think the opposite is true. The more irrational your goal, the more rational habits you need to accomplish it. Only sane compounding patterns can sustain you long enough. Because you’ll need even more grit, patience, and flexibility.

You need rational habits for an irrationally great life. It’s not intuitive, I know.

But if you want to write a bestselling novel, starting with a daily tweet makes sense. Announcing your commitment, betting on it, and creating a vision board, however, do not. They might help you write the tweet and that’s fine. But none of it will get you there. One is the reality of being a published writer — it takes years of practicing the craft — the other just a story that covers it.

So you might as well start with tweets. But start writing. Forget ‘big goal, big motivation.’ Go for ‘big goal, small action.’ Hang out with the right habits. Take it slow. Experiment. Make it tiny. Make sure you succeed. Stay rational.

Where is motivation in all this? You’re right, it’s not there. And that’s why it’s hard. Because where’s the excuse? After all, now you can’t blame an elusive concept when you fail. It’s your fault. Because you broke the commitment. Because you skipped the small action. That sucks to suck up. But it’s true.

Motivation isn’t something we can properly maintain. Rational habits are. They’re rooted in action, not inspiration. And there’s always an action you can take. No matter how small. No matter how long it takes for the habit to form.

If this all sounds sad at first, give it some time. I think it’s empowering. Lose a dependence, gain actual agency. Better to face hard truths early in the year than a big, mystic failure at the end. That’s a rational habit too.

I hope my brain will latch on. But if not, I’ll just do it again until it sticks.

What Habits Does Your Best Self Not Have? Cover

What Habits Does Your Best Self Not Have?

Nik

“Perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Success and self-improvement are two different games. They correlate, but only to a certain degree.

When I sleep eight hours, get up early, then follow a morning routine, that’s good for my well-being. It supports my physical health and aligns my day with our natural circadian rhythm. It’s also productive. I can start work earlier and capitalize on my high alertness in the mornings.

But when I then decide to stay up late to finish some of that work, that’s just productive. Not healthy. The former was a move in self-improvement with spillover benefits. The latter was a success play at my well-being’s expense.

The number of win-win moves is limited, so after you’ve made them all, finding the line between the two is important. You can then spend your time becoming ever healthier, fitter, smarter — or you spend it working.

What most of us do, however, is split ourselves straight down the middle. We think we’re optimizing, when, actually, we’re playing different games at different times. One day we leave work early to support a friend, the next we cancel dinner plans to write our novel.

Unless you deliberately take one side, which most of us aren’t ready to, there is no easy solution to this problem. We want to be rich and we want to be good. We want to have it all.

I’m still young and naive, still foolish enough to believe I can. And while I’m never quite sure about which habits to add, I realized I can do something else in the meantime: I can just take some away.

We might never find the perfect balance between success and self-improvement habits, but we can eliminate the ones that hurt both.

We can give up what was never our best self anyway.

1. Give Up Reducing Your Dimensions

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.”  —  Walt Whitman

Every time I say no to one thing, but yes to another that’s roughly the same, my head hurts. It shouldn’t. It’s our brain’s pitiful attempt to build a consistent identity in a world that’s anything but.

There are a million reasons to change your mind from one second to the next, but you don’t need a single one of them. You don’t owe anyone an explanation. Justifying your existence decision by decision is exhausting. It just keeps you from doing what matters right here, right now.

Stop compressing a thousand layers into one. You’re not a diamond. You don’t thrive under pressure. You crumble. Live large. Be multi-dimensional. Explode into one thousand directions.

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”  —  Walt Whitman

2. Give Up The Imitation Game

“We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate.”  —  Bruce Lee

When you copy, you’re always in good company. You’re never really alone, but, often, you also don’t stand for anything.

When you stand for something, you know. Because your legs are shaking. When’s the last time you chose to do something not because it’s cool or useful or even valuable? When’s the last time you said: “I’m going to do this because it’s me?”

There’s all this talk about reinventing ourselves, but most of us never invented ourselves in the first place. Creating your life is the scariest thing you’ll ever do. But it also breeds confidence. It helps you step up and speak your truth.

Slowly, then surely, until you do it all the time.

3. Give Up Looking In Favor Of Seeing

“Must there be a Superman?”  —  “There is.”  —  From Dawn of Justice

When we look, we look for things. When we see, we just see what’s there. Our best self never jumps to conclusions because there’s never enough context to safely land anywhere.

What if you could suspend all your judgments in mid-air? Let them hang there, like laundry on a line. And then, you’d turn back and see. See ideas, opinions, opposites, and superstitions. But you’d always see two sides of one coin. One reality.

And you’d realize truth and knowledge are often subjective. Even your own.

4. Give Up Living In Outcomes

“That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be.”  —  Saul Alinsky

Professional traders don’t know which direction markets will turn. They bet on one side and form a contingency plan. They don’t need the world to be a certain way because they act with what’s given. In the long run, probabilities ensure they win.

Once you stop judging what’s around you and stay flexible yourself, you won’t require life to give you the outcomes you hope for. You’ll just work with whatever outcomes you get.

That doesn’t make you weak or less determined. It grounds you in the present. It makes you strong.

5. Give Up All Happiness Outside Yourself

“Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions.” — Dalai Lama XIV

James Altucher once told a story about Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch-22. Heller was at a fancy party in the Hamptons. Some guy pointed at a young fund manager and said: “He made more money last year than you’ll ever make with all your books combined.” To which Heller replied: “That may be, but I have one thing that man will never have.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“Enough.”

Creating yourself, non-judgment, living in the present, these are all ways to find contentment in what you do rather than who you are.

At the end of each day, you should look back and be happy about whatever steps you took, even if they’re part of a struggle. Draw strength from how you deal with what you’ve got, rather than how close you get to who you’re not.

When you work only on deserving what you want, all happiness rests inside yourself. You will always have enough.

6. Give Up Waiting

“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.”” — Kurt Vonnegut

Regret happens when we stop living — either because no one’s watching or because too many people are. Opinions and loneliness freeze us in time when there’s really no reason to wait. To do what you want to do. To be who you want to be.

The person who should be most excited about everything you do in life is you. And that should always be enough to start.

7. Give Up The Make-Pretend

“You should think of the word depressed as ‘deep rest.’ Deep. Rest. Your body needs to be depressed. It needs deep rest from the character that you’ve been trying to play.”  —  Jim Carrey

There’s a fine line between behaving like who you want to be and pretending you already are. One is changing into the best version of yourself, the other living out the parts of it you’re jealous of.

Of course, the latter only drives you away from it. It’s a shadow character, breaking out in cold sweat on stage. True liberty is being the guy or girl behind the curtain, putting in real sweat, because you’re not worried about taking the spotlight.

Credit always finds a way to those who deserve it.

8. Give Up Anything But Loving Yourself

“Love yourself like your life depends on it.”  —  Kamal Ravikant

Most of our life’s story is dictated by the one we tell ourselves in our head. What we often don’t realize is that when that story gets ugly, we can stop talking. We can wait for kinder words.

What’s more, we can practice finding them. We can work on our self-targeted adjectives because all adjectives are made up anyway. So you might as well love yourself.

The truth about ourselves is what we choose to believe. If you love yourself first, you’ll always build on the right foundation. From there, you can pick whatever belief most serves you right now.

Once you learn to do that without rejecting the limits of physical reality, you’ll have all the agency you ever need to flourish.

Success and self-improvement may not always go hand in hand and perfection is nothing we can ever reach. But your imperfect best self can do more good than a shadow version can imagine in its dreams.

Maybe, that’s what it’s really about. To find out wanting it all isn’t wanting all that much. At least not for who you were always meant to be. Maybe, this is our best source of hope.

Maybe, it’s the only one we need.

Self-Awareness Is Not a Character Trait Cover

Self-Awareness Is Not a Character Trait

Nik

“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” — Edward J. Stieglitz

While this quote makes it clear that time is a bad way to assess the quality of a human life, it also begs a question: how do we best measure our lives?

When you think back, do you recount how much you did? How much you made? How happy you felt on average? Me, I’m turning inward this year. The more external a measure, the lower my chances of living up to the standard I set. There’s no perfect tool, but I like this question for year-end reflection:

How much have I learned about myself?

It acknowledges outcomes as side effects and zones in on the parts you control about your character, identity, and behavior. Living in sync with your natural tendencies while adjusting to your life’s context is a good way to be happy and content, at least most of the time. You don’t stress about externals. You know you’ll get there by getting better. And syncing is how you’ll do it.

But when I tried to answer this question, I realized I was about to give not just a bad, but a completely wrong answer. Does that make it a bad question?

I think it’s something else. I think we have the wrong idea of self-awareness.

Woke Is Always the Wrong Word

I don’t like the word ‘woke.’ Used to create or point out a lack of awareness around societal and racial issues, it does much for the marketing of an important movement, but little to actually build the understanding this movement seeks to create. Because what it does is split the world in two.

You’re either awake or you’re asleep. It’s a binary state and so, for the people using words like ‘woke’ to identify with or isolate from others, it’s very easy to fall into a worldview that’s binary too. In reality, all of life happens on spectra.

I might be well-aware of some racial issues and completely oblivious to others. What’s more, I only have a chance of recognizing each one in its own context. Unless my mind is in the right place at the right time, I can mistake the cashier’s being unfriendly for being racist or vice versa. I’m not big on politics, but it’s easy to see this how this debate could get very ugly, very fast.

But it needn’t be. Maybe, we just have to reconsider our chosen language. What if we used words like ‘responsive’ or ‘sensitive?’ Words that live on spectra already. It’d make our efforts so much more productive.

When it comes to self-awareness, we have the exact same problem.

There Are Two Kinds of Dictionaries…

I’m not an etymologist, but I don’t think it’s foolish to assume the words ‘aware’ and ‘awake’ being in close relation. The German ‘gewahr’ means roughly as much as the former, ‘wahren’ equals ‘to protect,’ to keep in its current state, and ‘wachen’ literally means to stay awake and potentially guard something.

Clearly, some connection to our state of consciousness exists. But that’s not what we think of when we talk about self-awareness, is it? We see it as a character trait. A quality. And a rather permanent one at that.

Just like an aggressive social revolutionary, we want our world to be binary. To split neatly into two categories. We talk about “self-aware people” as if that call was as easy to make as “he talks loudly” or “her hair is curly.” It’s not.

And yet, even most dictionaries focus on self-knowledge as a feature:

The quality or state of being aware; knowledge and understanding that something is happening or exists.

But if you find a good one, like Wiktionary, they’ll include another definition:

The state or level of consciousness where sense data can be confirmed by an observer.

It might seem like I’m nitpicking, but when you try to better understand how you live and move in this world, the distinction between these two definitions makes all the difference. One describes self-knowledge as static, the other as a state of observation. Mere presence is enough. You’re self-aware long before you draw conclusions and file them away. Just observe and you’re there.

Self-awareness is not a characteristic. It’s a cognitive state.

Closing the Archive

When I try to judge my year by how much I’ve learned about myself, I’m making two false assumptions in one go:

  1. There is a fixed set of equally fixed elements to discover.
  2. Knowledge about those elements will serve me permanently.

The truth is that, besides my physical features and abilities, there’s very little about myself that won’t change. That I can’t change. I have no interest in learning to play the guitar, but if I did it anyway, maybe I’d enjoy it after a certain amount of practice. Accepting the status quo is only useful if I’m not looking to change it.

Instead of considering self-awareness to be this internal archive of facts about who we are, we should dedicate ourselves to mastering the cognitive state. To build the thought habit of being conscious of our actions and feelings.

Being self-aware is like being alert or attentive or quick-witted. Sometimes you are, sometimes you’re not. But the degree to which is measurable. We can design tests to measure how quickly you respond to stimuli or count how many puns you drop in an hour. In theory, self-awareness is the same.

Except there’s no device for this yet. Imagine you had a written list of all your thoughts for one day. You could scan it for observations about your actions and emotions, then calculate how much of the time you were self-aware. How much would it be? 1%? 3%? 0.1%?

In any case, it changes the nature of the big, year-end question.

A Simple Behavior Instead of an Elusive Quality

Having external goals can be useful. They’ll spur you on in a certain direction and, to some extent, reaching them can make you happy. But if they’re all you measure your years by, you’ll likely have a bad time.

Measuring your inner progress and drawing satisfaction from how much you did for what you actually control feels relieving and adds balance. Problems arise when we impose the same standards of false permanence of external goals on our development as humans.

The difference between self-awareness as a steady set of ideas about yourself and a cognitive state you can practice is the same as the difference between knowledge and intelligence: one leads to a never-ending struggle for more, the other provides a daily standard that’s possible to live up to.

It’s not how much self-knowledge we’ve accumulated, but whether we assessed our thoughts and feelings at the right times that matters. Don’t ask how much more you know about yourself now than you did a year ago. Ask:

How much time have I spent observing myself?

Of course, this is only one aspect of the grand puzzle, but self-perception as your default cognitive state — or at least for a large chunk of the time you spend awake — seems, to me, a battle worth fighting.

It’s not bent on perfection or pinning down what can’t be fixed in place. Instead, it allows adaptation and encourages deliberate change. It’s a simple if hard to attain behavior, not an elusive quality. And it can start small.

Oh, and I have this feeling that, at the end of next year, you’ll feel a lot better about yourself when you look back.

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How to *Really* Develop Self-Awareness

Nik

Born 5,000 years ago, Warren Buffett would’ve been some animal’s lunch.

“I can’t run very fast, can’t climb trees. I mean I could tell that animal that is chasing me: ‘Wait till you see how I can allocate assets!’ [But] it wouldn’t have made any difference. So here I am. I’m born now. Just very, very lucky.”

When Buffett says ‘lucky,’ he means having a mother who was great with numbers and very ambitious; a father who was a stockbroker, loved people, and valued integrity. Most of all, he means being a natural reader with an interest in money, born into the world’s largest capitalist society right after a major crisis. Born to think. Born…to become the richest man on earth.

Buffett’s scenario played out as an extreme but, one way or another, all successful people get paid to think. They amplify their decisions with leverage, such as labor, capital, and technology. And the more society values the outcomes of these decisions, the more leverage accumulates around these thinkers. In Buffett’s case, people are dying to give him more money to invest.

That must be fun because at 88 years old, he’s still working. Still thinking. 80% of his workday, five or six hours, is spent reading newspapers, financial reports, and then pondering the business world and the opportunities in it.

But it’s not this kind of thinking that set him on his path.

One of Buffett’s most popular ideas is the circle of competence:

“I stay within that circle and I don’t worry about things that are outside that circle. Defining what your game is, where you’re going to have an edge, is enormously important.”

When it comes to stocks, this translates to only investing in industries he understands, businesses he can evaluate, and people he can judge accurately. Looking back on his stellar track record, it’s clear Buffett nailed this process of defining his circle of competence. How did he do it? Why was he able to?

Well, for one thing, he’s been working on it for as long as he’s alive.

The Math of Knowing Who You Are

Warren started studying math when he was less than seven years old.

“I like numbers. It started before I could remember. It just felt good, working with numbers. I was always playing around with numbers in one way or another. And it was fun to have a bunch of guys over and have them betting on which marble would reach the drain first.”

Math is a thankful subject to start getting to know yourself around because it neatly separates your hypotheses into right and wrong. With the right inputs, you can come up with reasonable guesses for who will win the marble race. Just like you can double-check your compound interest calculations.

Outside feedback on your decisions and behaviors is the first level on which you can develop self-awareness. That’s all your circle of competence is — an understanding of the larger context you live, move, and act in; where your limits are and what reactions certain choices will cause.

The good thing about developing it through trial and error is that the lessons are immediate and the data is guaranteed. Your environment and those around you will inevitably provide you with feedback. Sadly, this also means the “error” part isn’t avoidable. When failure is necessary, learning hurts. It also requires keeping an open mind and that’s something we’re really bad at.

If you make a habit of this state, however, it comes with great upside. Suddenly, each setback becomes an invaluable point of data. A brick in the wall that is the border of your circle.

For Warren, a profitable business could still be a lousy one, a young manager still one with experience, his strange breakfast still one that makes him happy.

And while he struck out with few investments, he learned from those too.

The Value of Character Snapshots

Today, Warren Buffett is known for investing in high-integrity teams and companies. But that’s not what he learned from his professor and mentor:

“I’ve been taught by Ben Graham to buy things on a quantitative basis. So I went around looking for what I call ‘cigar butts’ of stocks. The cigar-butt approach to buying stocks is that you walk down the street and you’re looking around for cigar butts. And you find this terrible-looking, soggy, ugly-looking cigar. One puff left in it. But you pick it up and you get your one puff. Disgusting. You throw it away. But it’s free. And then you look around for another soggy, one-puff cigarette. Well, that’s what I did for years. It’s a mistake.”

The pinnacle of this approach was buying Berkshire Hathaway in 1965, the company Buffett still runs today. He bought the stock hoping for a tender offer, but when that came in $0.125 short, he angrily grabbed a majority share and kicked out the management team. He later flipped his approach:

“Now, I would rather buy a wonderful business at a fair price, than a fair business at a wonderful price.”

Such change happens at the second level of self-awareness: your beliefs and attitudes. It’s about knowing which traits and patterns define your character and how you can map your behavior and decisions accordingly. Outside feedback might support these transitions but won’t originate them.

The best way to enable them, I believe, is to track your character over time. Whether you take these snapshots daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually, only you can decide. But a journaling practice helps. Reflected writing based on prompts makes your inner workings explicit.

Buffett does this with his annual shareholder letters. Each year, he must justify his decisions. He has to keep track of his reasoning, the thinking that came up with it, and make sure that thinking rests on values he feels comfortable living each day. If the values change, so will everything else.

Turning an Inch Into a Mile

When he was a teenager, Buffett ran away from home. After just a few miles, the police returned him and his two friends to their respective families.

“My dad never really gave me hell about doing this, but he finally said, ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you can do better than this.’ And, just saying that, I mean, I…I felt like I was letting him down, basically.”

Sometimes, a single incident shapes us forever. His father being his biggest hero, hearing the disappointment in his voice must’ve felt awful for young Warren. But instead of pushing those feelings aside, he tuned into them. The shift he initiated back then would go on to affect how he built his firm:

“We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative, and we look for integrity. And if they don’t have the latter, the first two will kill you. So it’s that third quality, but everything about that quality is your choice.”

Choices like that take place on the innermost level of self-awareness: observing your thoughts and feelings in real-time. It’s the most powerful because it’s the earliest in the chain of elements that determine how your life unfolds. Adjusting here will ripple indefinitely into the future; the values and beliefs you form over time and the actions you choose as a result of those.

It’s also the most taxing, the hardest to cultivate. But if you learn to seamlessly tap in and out of your endless stream of thoughts and feelings, you can pull out any one of them, hold on to it, face it, and cause massive, long-term change. Not because you’ll act big, but because you’ll act immediately.

There is no one way to achieve this mental presence, but the underlying habit is making time to observe. Hence, many approaches rest on paying attention to physical sensations for minutes at a time. You can start with your breath, skin, posture, or body language, then expand this to other activities, like walking, reading, or sports. Eventually, you’ll layer emotional perception on top of everything you do, making it your default mode of consciousness.

Buffett discovered all this early, but, just like his financial decisions, it needed time. That’s his big secret. Not compound interest. Compound self-awareness.

A Single-Thread Revolution

When we ask how to live a good, happy life, economic success is only one part of a much larger answer. It always requires luck and timing, but our modern society of networks disproportionately rewards thinkers armed with leverage.

To get there, we first have to figure out how, when, and where we think best. Why we think. And what shapes that why. That’s a job for self-awareness.

We’re all given lots of chances to develop this capacity in the form of real-world feedback. When reality and our expectations clash, we find out if we’re right or wrong, but learning requires lots of wrongs — and being willing to.

Deeper change happens when we monitor the fundamental aspects of our character over time. Regularly assessing our beliefs and attitudes reveals which ones we’ve merely adopted as opposed to those which serve us best.

Our strongest reinventions, however, begin at the primal level of thoughts and feelings. Those who learn to dive into their own psyche during transformative experiences will form the power to change every single thread of the self. These slight tweaks compound into revolutions of character down the line.

All of these begin as habits of action, but what we’re ultimately looking to improve — the habits we want to compound — are our habits of thought.

“It’s the habits that you generate now on those qualities. Or those negative qualities. In the end, those are habit patterns. And the time to form the right habits is when you’re [young]. Someone once said: ‘The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they’re too heavy to be broken.’ I see people with habit patterns that are self-destructive when they’re 50 or 60 and they really can’t change it. They’re imprisoned by that. But you’re not imprisoned by anything.”

This may be the one aspect on which he and I disagree. I’d stick with that last point: You’re not imprisoned by anything. It might not get you wealth or fame or beauty, but compounding your thought patterns will make you a better person. In a world where animals don’t eat humans, that’s always worth it.

It’s never too late to stop being your own brain’s lunch.

What Are the Habits of Successful People?

What Are the Habits of Successful People?

Nik

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is one of the best-selling books of all time. The advice is solid, but there’s one huge problem with it: the title.

Having sold some 25 million copies and still spreading at over 100,000 searches per month, it forever continues to etch four ideas into our minds:

  1. There is an ideal combination of habits that causes success.
  2. That combination is finite.
  3. That combination is timeless.
  4. That combination is the same for everyone.

Sadly, none of these ideas are true. Let’s address them one by one.

What We Look For in Habit Bundles

In late 2016, 13-year-old Danielle Bregoli went on Dr. Phil with her mother. One sassy line later, she was a media sensation. The internet abounds with viral case studies like the “Cash Me Outside” girl, which is the first thing that should give us pause when relating success to habits.

Was it really her continued, bad behavior that led her to 15 million Instagram followers and a record deal? Or the fact that said behavior was on national TV at the right time? Maybe, it’s not so much the combination of our habits, but of our circumstances, that turns our efforts into hits and misses.

And yet, our habits do influence these circumstances. What’s curious is that we insist on bundling them when determining how much.

Imagine a writer’s perfect routine was to wake up, brush her teeth, then write. If it’s the overall blend that’s ideal, each deviation would lead to work that’s worse. But it’s easy to imagine that if she skipped brushing her teeth, nothing would change. It’s the writing that counts. At the same time, she might one day add a habit, like an afternoon run, that does improve her performance.

Most of the time, what we look for in habit bundles is support for the one constant that matters. But in doing so, we add complexity that soon clouds the importance of the very thing that works. One day you wake up earlier to write more, the next you do a 7-step morning routine, but forget the writing.

The more variables you consider together, the less likely it becomes that your hypothesis is right. Be happy if you find one habit that works. That allows you to push for better and better circumstances. To change the odds in your favor.

Because even if you do it forever, it’ll still take luck to make it on Dr. Phil.

Thinking Is an Infinite Habit

Being paid by the hour sucks. Besides making me feel like a machine, it also assumes I am one. That everyone doing that task delivers the same, uniform output of equal quality. Worse, it neglects that knowledge compounds.

If it takes me an hour to write an article, was that an hour or an hour plus four years of writing? Actually, it was all of that plus 27 years of life experience.

“In the same way that we form habits of action relating to our environment, we also form habits of thought when it comes to how we think about the world.”

What Zat Rana hints at is not just that thinking is habitual too, but that our patterns of thought cascade, informing everything we do, as well as how we process each experience. And while we sometimes get stuck in these mental loops, the brain is in a constant state of change. Thinking is an infinite habit.

We want to believe that, if only we did the same three, five, ten things each day, we’d inevitably find success. But that was never an option in the first place. Because even if we did, the way we think about these things, and, thus, do them, would change. The only mind that doesn’t evolve is one that’s dead.

The question is if yours is getting better.

Habits Are Both Causes and Effects

When I first learned about habits, I thought I would run some experiments, then, eventually, settle on one of the many finite, ideal sets we now know don’t exist. But while each habit mattered for a time, I’d always find myself in need of another one. Or had to let one go. Because it didn’t serve me anymore.

What I learned was that habits are both causes and effects. Deliberately adopting a habit will alter the outcomes of your life, but some of these altered outcomes will also change which habits you’ll want or have to adopt. Just like the right combination only exists at fixed points in time, so do the ideal moments of when to adjust it. If our writer is about to catch a cold, even the most inspiring afternoon run will negatively impact her output the next day.

Trends change how business works. History changes how the world works. Time changes how we work. And all of it requires changing our habits. So rather than trying to extract timeless practices, we should focus on being malleable. On not resisting our brain’s desire to upgrade itself.

Take a snapshot of any successful person’s current habits and ask: how many times must that set have changed to get them where they are? By the time you answer, it’ll have changed again.

Our total amount of data now doubles each year. In such a world, learning isn’t optional. It’s necessary. Day by day, adaptation replaces information. And as intelligence overtakes knowledge, old behaviors must make way for new ones. They’ll either stop working for you or the world you live in, but they will.

The person who’s unfazed by that is the person who can shape habits at will.

Why Polar Opposites Work

Richard Branson had no intention of starting Virgin Atlantic. As a ruse to impress his future wife, he claimed wanting to buy Necker Island, which they were promptly thrown off of when the owner found out they lacked the money. Their return flight was canceled, so he chartered a plane, sold out the seats, and the rest is history. Jack Ma, however, had every intention of reaching every single Chinese citizen when starting Alibaba.

Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Warren Buffett are avid readers. Gary Vaynerchuk, Steve Jobs, and Kanye? Not so much. Edison trashed 1,000 experiments, James Altucher 18 businesses, and Marylin Monroe both her pin-up and her modeling career. J.K. Rowling went to over ten publishers, Bocelli played at bars till age 33, and Tolkien released Lord of the Rings when he was over 60.

To quit or not to quit? To read or not to read? To set goals or to have fun? The reason all of these work despite being polar opposites is the truth we’ve been building towards with this article:

There is no such thing as the one, ideal, timeless set of habits of successful people.

Take Arianna Huffington’s habit of sleeping eight hours per night. We can observe that habit only because it’s pronounced. Noticeable. The same goes for all distinct behaviors and character traits we see when we look at our idols.

If an attribute endures, it’s because at some point that person decided it was either a strength of theirs they should double down on or a weakness they shouldn’t bother trying to resolve. We can’t know which is which, but we can point to one trait and corresponding behavior that facilitates such insights.

That habit — the one all logic and data point to — is practicing self-awareness.

A Task Designed Uniquely For You

Ideas being wrong has never stopped our culture from growing around them.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is just one of many books, people, and trends that the $10 billion self-help industry is built upon, but it’s an epitome of the world we now live in: The demand for common behavior patterns leading to worldly success is sky high, and educators are happy to supply.

And while the 200 million search results for “habits of successful people” are, for all intents and purposes, 200 million different ones, maybe they should be. At least this mess forces us into independent inquiry. If we summarize our four refutations of those initial ideas, it seems that’s exactly what we need:

  1. You’ll still need luck before and after, but if you find one or two behaviors that move you into the right direction, those are usually enough.
  2. You can’t possibly maintain the same habits forever based solely on the fact that your thinking keeps changing. Focus on trying to make it better.
  3. Your habits are cause-and-effect relationships between you and your environment. Keep analyzing both to know when to change and how.
  4. Separating your habits into useful and not useful is a task bestowed uniquely on you and only doing it will reveal the right consistencies.

Even in humans, self-awareness is a rare trait. Children develop the basis of this ability, self-perception, only at 15–18 months old. In cultures less focused on the individual it happens much later still, sometimes not till age six.

Our Western concept of success is far from perfect, but it comes with a lot of freedom and room for self-expression. If that’s what you want, self-awareness is one of few catalysts that has a meaningful chance of helping you get there.

Practicing to observe your own existence and its interaction with the world can take many forms, such as walking, reading, and meditating. You could keep a journal, engage in thought experiments, or track your behavior.

The underlying task, however, is regularly setting aside time to think. As long as you do that, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, too, will be a great read.

Just do yourself a favor and ignore the title.

What Is the Future of Learning?

Nik

“A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.” 

— Bruce Lee

In the past four years, I have asked a lot of foolish questions:

Can I be a professional translator without any credentials?

If I want to be a published writer, should I still ghostwrite for money?

Do summaries of existing book summaries make any sense?

The seemingly obvious answer to them all is “no,” yet I did all those things anyway. And while some led nowhere, others now pay my bills. Often, the only way to get satisfying answers is to try, especially with foolish questions. The beauty of daring to ask them, rather than accepting the answers society gives you, is that you’ll have many more unexpected insights along the way.

Like that, today, the answers are always less valuable than the questions.

The Half-Life of Knowledge

In 2013, we created as much data as in all of the previous history. That trend now continues, with total information roughly doubling each year. Michael Simmons has crunched the numbers behind our knowledge economy:

You probably need to devote at least five hours a week to learning just to keep up with your current field—ideally more if you want to get ahead.

Bachelor’s degrees in most European countries consists of 180 credits (EU schools tend to use a quarter credit system as opposed to the semester hour system typical in the U.S.), and each of those credits is worth about 30 hours of studying time. That’s 5,400 hours. Sadly, what you learn from those hours starts decaying as soon as you’ve put in the time. Scientists call this “the half-life of knowledge,” a metric that’s decreasing fast.

A modern degree might last you just five years before it’s completely irrelevant.

Since new information is now generated more and more rapidly, it takes less time for said information to lose its value. Back in the 1960s, an engineering degree was outdated within 10 years. Today, most fields have a half-life much less than that, especially new industries. A modern degree might last you just five years before it’s completely irrelevant. Even with a conservative half-life estimate of 10 years (losing about 5 percent each year), you’d have to put in 270 hours per annum just to maintain those initial 5,400—or about five hours per week.

As a side effect of this global, long-lasting trend, both the time we spend attaining formal education and the number of people choosing this path have increased dramatically for decades. Years of schooling have more than doubled in the past 100 years, and in many countries, it’s common to study for some 20-plus years before even entering the workforce. In the U.S. alone, college enrollment rates have peaked at over 90 percent of the total population in the age group around secondary school completion already.

The larger our ocean of information, the less valuable each fact in it becomes. Therefore, the knowledge bundles for college degrees must get bigger and, thus, take longer to absorb. But the ocean also grows faster, which means despite getting bigger, the bundles don’t last as long. It takes a lot of time to even stay up to date, let alone get ahead of the increasing competition.

Instead of flailing more not to drown, maybe we should get out of the water.

A Scary Future to Imagine

While it’s important to dedicate time to learning, spending ever-increasing hours soaking up facts can’t be the final answer to this dilemma. Extrapolate the global scramble for knowledge, and we’d end up with 50-year-old “young professionals,” who’d retire two years into their careers because they can’t keep up. It’s a scary future to imagine but, luckily, also one that’s unlikely.

I saw two videos this week. One showed an unlucky forklift driver bumping into a shelf, causing an entire warehouse to collapse. In the other, an armada of autonomous robots sorted packages with ease. It’s not a knowledge-based example, but it goes to show that robots can do some things better than people can.

There is no expert consensus on whether A.I., robotics, and automation will create more jobs than they’ll destroy. But we’ll try to hand over everything that’s either tedious or outright impossible. One day, this may well include highly specialized, knowledge-based jobs that currently require degrees.

Knowledge is cumulative. Intelligence is selective. It’s a matter of efficiency versus effectiveness.

A lawyer in 2050 could still be called a lawyer, but they might not do anything a 2018 lawyer does. The thought alone begs yet another foolish question:

When knowledge itself has diminishing returns, what do we need to know?

The Case for Selective Intelligence

With the quantity of information setting new all-time highs each year, the future is, above all, unknown. Whatever skills will allow us to navigate this uncertainty are bound to be valuable. Yuval Noah Harari’s new book asserts this:

In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all, to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.

The ability Harari is talking about is the skill of learning itself. The 2018 lawyer needs knowledge. The 2050 lawyer needs intelligence. Determining what to know at any time will matter more than the hard facts you’ll end up knowing. When entire industries rise and fall within a few decades, learning will no longer be a means but must become its own end. We need to adapt forever.

Knowledge is cumulative. Intelligence is selective. It’s a matter of efficiency versus effectiveness. Both can be trained, but we must train the right one. Right now, it’s not yet obvious which one to choose. The world still runs on specialists, and most of today’s knowledge-accumulators can expect to have good careers.

But with each passing day, intelligence slowly displaces knowledge.

The Problem With Too Many Interests

Emilie Wapnick has one of the most popular TED talks to date—likely because she offers some much-needed comfort for people suffering from a common career problem: having too many interests. Wapnick says it’s not a problem at all. It’s a strength. She coined the term “multipotentialite” to show that it’s not the people affected but public perception that must change:

Idea synthesis, rapid learning, and adaptability: three skills that multipotentialites are very adept at and three skills they might lose if pressured to narrow their focus. As a society, we have a vested interest in encouraging multipotentialites to be themselves. We have a lot of complex, multidimensional problems in the world right now, and we need creative, out-of-the-box thinkers to tackle them.

While there’s more to it, it’s hard to deny the point. After all, some of these thinkers work on some of our biggest problems. And we love them for it.

Jeff Bezos built a retail empire and became the richest man in the world, but he also helped save an important media institution and works on the infrastructure we need to explore space. Elon Musk first changed how we pay and then how we think of electric cars, and now how we’ll approach getting to Mars. Bill Gates really knows software, but now he’s eradicating malaria and polio. The list goes on.

The term “polymath” feels overly connoted with “genius,” but whether you call them Renaissance people, scanners, or expert-generalists, the ability they share stays the same: They know how to learn, and they relentlessly apply this skill to a broad variety of topics. In analyzing them, Zat Rana finds this:

Learning itself is a skill, and when you exercise that skill across domains, you get specialized as a learner in a way that someone who goes deep doesn’t. You learn how to learn by continuously challenging yourself to grasp concepts of a broad variety. This ironically then allows you to specialize in something else faster if you so choose. This is an incredibly valuable advantage.

Beyond learning faster, you’ll also innovate more, stay flexible, stand out from specialists, and focus on extracting principles over remembering facts.

To me, that sounds exactly like the person an unpredictable world needs.

A Curious Boy

In 1925, one year before he entered school, Isaac Asimov taught himself to read. His father, uneducated and thus unable to support his son, gave him a library card. Without any direction, the curious boy read everything:

All this incredibly miscellaneous reading, the result of lack of guidance, left its indelible mark. My interest was aroused in twenty different directions and all those interests remained. I have written books on mythology, on the Bible, on Shakespeare, on history, on science, and so on.

“And so on” led to some 500 books and about 90,000 letters Asimov wrote or edited. Years later, when his father looked through one of them, he asked:

“How did you learn all this, Isaac?”

“From you, Pappa,” I said.

“From me? I don’t know any of this.”

“You didn’t have to, Pappa,” I said. “You valued learning and you taught me to value it. Once I learned to value it, the rest came without trouble.”

When we hear stories about modern expert-generalists, we assume their intelligence is the result of spending a lot of time studying multiple fields. While that’s certainly part of it, a mere shotgun approach to collecting widely diversified knowledge is not what gives great learners special abilities.

What allowed Asimov to benefit from his reading, much more so than what he read or how much, was that he always read with an open mind. Most of the time, we neglect this. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how we learn.

In order to build true intelligence, we first have to let go of what we know.

The Value of Integrative Complexity

Had Asimov learned to read in school, he likely would’ve done it the way most of us do: memorizing or critiquing things. It’s an extremely narrow dichotomy, but sadly, one that sticks. Rana offers thoughts about the true value of reading:

Anytime you read something with the mindset that you are there to extract what is right and what is wrong, you are by default limiting how much you can get out of a particular piece of writing. You’re boxing an experience that has many dimensions into just two.

Instead of cramming what they learn into their existing perspectives, people like Asimov know that the whole point is to find new ones. You’re not looking for confirmation; you’re looking for the right mental update at the right time.

With an attitude like that, you can read the same book forever and still get smarter each time. That’s what learning really is: a state of mind. More than the skill, it’s receptiveness that counts. If your mind is always open, you’re always learning. And if it’s closed, nothing has a real chance of sinking in.

Scientists call this “integrative complexity”: the willingness to accept multiple perspectives, hold them all in your head at once, and then integrate them into a bigger, more coherent picture. It’s a picture that keeps evolving and is never complete but is always ready to integrate new points and lose old ones.

That’s true intelligence, and that’s the prolific learner’s true advantage.

A Matter of Being

Your brain is like a muscle. At any moment, it’s growing or it’s deteriorating. You can never just keep it in the same state. So when you’re not exercising your mind, it’ll atrophy and not only stop but quickly reverse your progress.

This has always been the case, but the consequences today are more severe than ever. In an exponential knowledge economy, we can’t afford stale minds. Deliberately spending time on learning new things is one way to fight irrelevance, but it’s not what’ll protect us in the uncharted waters of the future.

The reason the wise man can learn from even the most foolish question is that he never assigns that label in the first place.

Beyond being carriers of knowledge, we need to become fluid creatures of intelligence. Studying across multiple disciplines can start this process. It has many advantages—creativity, adaptability, speed—but it’s still not enough.

If we focus only on the activity of learning, we miss the most important part: Unless we’re willing to change our perspective, we won’t grasp a thing. It’s not a matter of doing but of being. The reason the wise man can learn from even the most foolish question is that he never assigns that label in the first place.

And so it matters not whether we learn from our own questions or the insights of others, nor how much of it we do, but that we always keep an open mind. The longer we can hold opposing ideas in our heads without rejecting them, the more granular the picture that ultimately forms. This is true intelligence. It’s always been valuable, but now it’s the inevitable future of learning.

Bruce Lee undoubtedly possessed this quality. By the time he died, he was a world-renowned martial artist, the creator of an entire philosophy, and a multimillion-dollar Hollywood superstar. All at only 32 years old. Long after his passing, one of his favorite stories captures both the essence of his spirit and how he became the cultural icon we still know and love today:

A learned man once went to visit a Zen teacher to inquire about Zen. As the Zen teacher talked, the learned man frequently interrupted to express his own opinion about this or that. Finally, the Zen teacher stopped talking and began to serve tea to the learned man. He poured the cup full, then kept pouring until the cup overflowed.

“Stop,” said the learned man. “The cup is full, no more can be poured in.”

“Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions,” replied the Zen teacher. “If you do not first empty your cup, how can you taste my cup of tea?”

Don't Imitate Successful People – Learn From Your Mistakes Cover

Don’t Imitate Successful People – Learn From Your Mistakes

Nik

Do you feel let down by all the advice—books, articles, interviews, podcasts—from and about successful people? Of course you do. These people have an additional 10, 20, 30 years’ experience—even if you’re the same age. You can’t make up the difference by reading a few articles. You have to invest years of time and cultivate the right habits. But here’s the thing about habits: They are both causes and effects.

Take Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, who is known to start his day at 3:45 a.m. Maybe he has always woken up at this hour, and eventually that habit played a role in his achieving his current position. Or perhaps it’s a habit after the fact; simply a coping mechanism to stay on top of his 800 emails per day. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. Cook rose through the ranks and changed his alarm so he would rise earlier. Little by little, one day at a time. Sometimes it may have been a preemptive move and other times a more reactive one.

Our advice culture has imposed a singular, narrow view on a question that has as many answers as there are people on this planet: How should you live?

Life isn’t a straight line. Most relationships are bilateral. Two things that are connected tend to influence one another. It’s rarely as simple as X leads to Y. We see Banksy shredding their own painting and wish we had the courage to pull a creative stunt like that. But maybe bold Banksy is the result of hundreds of much smaller, less significant creative acts. Maybe Y led to X.

Our advice culture has imposed a singular, narrow view on a question that has as many answers as there are people on this planet: How should you live? This view is like looking at an iceberg through a telescope. You see only what’s on the surface, but it’s a focused picture, so you think you are seeing everything. The view confuses specificity for entirety. With habits, there is no entirety. You have to keep adapting, honing, changing.

There is no one uniform set of habits that leads to success. It has never existed and it never will. We can find many unique habit sets that correlate to success, but that doesn’t mean any one has a higher cause-to-effect ratio than another. Plus, whatever set you choose will continue to change and evolve. Instead of listening to the people who hand us a telescope, we must think independently. We must look at ourselves.

Striking Thoughts is a compendium of 825 aphorisms from Bruce Lee. It’s a collection because, unlike many sources of advice, Lee didn’t believe it was necessary to follow one correct set of ideas in order to live a good life:

Independent inquiry is needed in your search for truth, not dependence on anyone else’s view or a mere book.

This may sound daunting, as we tend to want simple solutions to difficult problems, but according to Bruce, neither actually exists. There are only questions and answers, both of which are hard-won products of thinking, and neither can provide universal solutions that last forever.

In science, all hypotheses must be falsifiable. If you can’t disprove a claim, you can’t test it. Even the best theories are just constructs made of hypotheses, waiting to be proven wrong, waiting for you to provide evidence that will make them collapse.

What’s unfortunate about mistakes is you have to make them.

In our lives, that evidence is mistakes. A mistake is valuable because it falsifies a prior assumption. Unlike a successfully cultivated behavior that may or may not lead you where you want to go, a mistake gives you a single raw point of actual data as to what not to do. Mistakes make you think.

What’s unfortunate about mistakes is that you have to make them. The only way to the data leads through failure. There is no way around this. We will all make many mistakes in our lifetimes. What differentiates us is whether we’re willing to learn from them. Are we willing to think? To sit with the mistake until we’ve extracted the data?

Lee describes the archetype of the person willing to think in “The Parable of the Butcher”:

There was a fine butcher who used the same knife year after year, yet it never lost its delicate, precise edge. After a lifetime of service, it was still as useful and effective as when it was new. When asked how he had preserved his knife’s fine edge, he said: “I follow the line of the hard bone. I do not attempt to cut it, nor to smash it, nor to contend with it in any way. That would only destroy my knife.” In daily living, one must follow the course of the barrier. To try to assail it will only destroy the instrument.

In other words, never learn the same lesson twice. You will only lose your edge.

The simplest way for a child to learn not to touch a hot stove is to touch a hot stove. The pain is powerful and immediate, and so is the lesson, but it also leads to a burned hand. If you hold your hand just above the stove, your hand might still hurt, but you’ll learn the lesson without burning it. This is following the course of the barrier.

To a certain extent, you can learn from other people’s mistakes. You can think about their burned hands and extract some data. But the further you move away from your own life, your own circle, the higher your hand lingers above the stove. At some point, you won’t feel any heat, so you can’t learn. While it’s better to study the failures of the people around you than the successes of distant or unknown people, nothing beats independent inquiry. Gather your own data. Falsify your hypotheses. Dare to make mistakes.

In his introduction to Lee’s book, John Little notes that we are encouraged—and often choose—to look outside ourselves, to anyone but ourselves, to find answers to our biggest questions. He points to one of Bruce’s aphorisms: “We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate.”

When it comes to the premier human inquiry, the issue of how we should live, imitation isn’t just a terrible answer. It’s a way to avoid asking the question. As long as we do that, it won’t matter when we get up. Even if it’s at 3:45 a.m.

What Is Love? Cover

What Is Love?

Nik

Everything I learned about love growing up was wrong.

You know, the kind of stuff Ted says on How I Met Your Mother every time yet another ex calls him out on his insane obsession with Robin:

“That’s more than crazy. I don’t think there’s a word for what that is!”

“Actually, there is a word for that. It’s love. I’m in love with her, okay? If you’re looking for the word that means caring about someone beyond all rationality and wanting them to have everything they want, no matter how much it destroys you, it’s love!

And when you love someone, you just, you…you don’t stop. Ever. Even when people roll their eyes or call you crazy. Even then. Especially then. You just — you don’t give up, because if I could give up… If I could just, you know, take the whole world’s advice and, and, move on and find someone else, that wouldn’t be love.

That would be…that would be some other, disposable thing that is not worth fighting for. But that is not what this is.”

I love that show, but the one thing I’m more heartbroken about than the fact that it ended is that it spreads ill-advised definitions of love like this one. If you’ve heard it often enough, it takes a long time to unravel all that nonsense.

The ancient philosophy of Stoicism is, at its core, about a single skill: learning to recognize what’s in your control and what’s not. And while the Stoics weren’t exactly known for their romantic insights, a similar dichotomy torpedoes our modern understanding of love.

We’re so intent on seeking it outside ourselves, on finding the noun — the feeling — in another person, that we forget it’s the verb we control. The action. The choice. Most of all, we forget that love starts with loving ourselves.

It requires no one’s presence but our own.

Love is rolling out of bed after hitting snooze seven times, yawning, scratching your head, and saying: “Okay, how can I win this day?”

Love is looking in the mirror and not mentally attacking what you see.

Love is dressing not the way you hope will impress people or whatever you feel like, but dressing the way you need to dress to be your best self today.

Love is greeting people on your way to work, even if you’re not looking forward to the first task you have to take care of once you arrive there.

Love is pouring so much of yourself into something you make that the thing itself becomes as vulnerable as you are worried that it’ll get shot down.

Love is releasing that thing and hoping it’ll fly but not kicking yourself if it doesn’t, because it’s still a thing, not you.

Love is tweeting a joke at your own expense because you can take it while the person who needs to read it the most can’t.

Love is using social media to highlight others, not yourself.

Love is sending the last message in a chat not to check the box or brag about it, but because you want the person on the other end to feel cared for.

Love is opening an empty file at 10:35 PM, long after you know that day has come and gone, and staring at the blinking cursor for 25 minutes regardless.

Love is making pain a meaningful part of the way, not a hopeless dead end.

Love is turning off the Wi-Fi and knowing you’ll make it through the night.

Love is caring more about your own, irrational deadlines than any of the world’s countless societal ‘obligations.’

Love is dancing to the music the same way when people are watching that you would if you were alone.

Love is settling for “I started” not “I finished.”

Love is realizing when you’ve run out of kind words for yourself and then choosing to stop talking.

Love is forgetting your own story for a while and listening to the one nature tells you; in the wind, the ocean, the trees, in every ray of sunshine and every raindrop falling from the sky.

Love is helping someone in need, not because they deserve it, but because you can. And most of the time, the person who needs your love the most is you.

Love is a river. All it does is flow. Water has no smell. It’s transparent. But always moving. A powerful force if it needs to be, gentle whenever it can.

Love springs eternal from the well inside your heart as long as you go fetch water. It’s a habit. A routine. A daily practice that takes lifelong commitment.

It’s not a disease. True love can’t poison you. It’s not loud and it’s not irrational. It’s not an emotion and no external experience. Just one of many behaviors each and every one of us gets to choose, day-in and day-out.

Whether we make that choice or not is entirely up to us. That’s not something the characters in our stories tell us because it doesn’t look glamorous on the big screen. But every dog has his day. So while he may not think of the right behavior, let alone the right person, even Ted Mosby has a point when he says:

“Love is the best thing we do.”