Why Rest Is Essential To High Performance Cover

Why Rest Is Essential To High Performance

On The Tim Ferriss Show, LeBron James said he sleeps eight or nine hours each night. Sometimes ten. And if he can’t get those, he’ll catch up with a two-hour nap. James is a prominent fan of quality shut-eye, but not the only one.

According to ESPN, sprinter Usain Bolt and tennis stars Venus Williams and Maria Sharapova also shoot for an average sleeping time close to the double-digits. Point guard legend Steve Nash told The New York Times that naps on game day are a common occurrence among NBA players — and they help.

The message is that sleep isn’t just beneficial, but essential to top performance.

This is easy enough to understand for physically demanding activities, like sports, but when it comes to knowledge work and creative professions, we have a much harder time accepting the importance of sleep.

And yet, all of us know how tough it can be to host a long meeting or how hungry we are after hours of creativity. So what’s going on here?

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The Only Way to Find Success Is to Relentlessly Forgive Yourself Cover

The Only Way to Find Success Is to Relentlessly Forgive Yourself

Last week, my sister came to visit. It was awesome. We saw Mike Shinoda, got ice cream, and tried lots of great food. I love her and I’m glad we hung out.

But for some reason, whenever I go to an event, a friend stops by, or the week is just generally slow, I still feel like I should get as much done as I usually do. Like I should create the same output, regardless of the time I take off.

That’s impossible, of course. But it creates guilt and that guilt is the real problem. Guilt is a useful emotion. As opposed to shame, it makes us want to step up. To rectify what we did wrong.

But when it comes to being productive, there’s nothing to rectify. It’s not like a crooked picture you can just push back into place. Your life is continuous and each moment is a small dot on a long line. Work is such a big part of that line that it’s impossible to see how each dot shapes it day-to-day, week-to-week, often even year-to-year. Unlike other things we feel guilty about, you can’t just go back to the café, pay the bill you forgot, and reset the karma balance to zero. Because there’s always more work.

And so it may feel like focusing for one hour in the evening makes up for a bad day, but who wants to spend their entire life salvaging leftover scraps of time? That’s a surefire recipe for unhappiness. The solution lies on a higher level.

Who’s to say it was a bad day in the first place? Maybe you needed rest. Maybe you were affected by something in your subconscious. Why can’t we suspend that judgment altogether? Jim Carrey has a great metaphor for our moods:

“I have sadness and joy and elation and satisfaction and gratitude beyond belief, but all of it is weather. And it just spins around the planet.”

Shame, guilt, regret, these are also just weather phenomena. External conditions that’ll sometimes swing by your planet.

Of course, it’s hard to constantly practice this non-judgment in advance. To go into each experience without attachment or expectation. We’re human, after all. We fail. We let things get to us. And so we need to learn to pick ourselves back up. To realize when we’re complaining about the weather and stop.

The only way to do this over and over again, to keep moving forward no matter what happens, is to relentlessly forgive yourself. Forever and for everything. You won’t always do it immediately, but try to do it eventually.

Note that forgiving yourself is not about letting yourself off the hook. It’s not an excuse to not learn from your mistakes. It won’t guarantee it either, but without forgiveness, you can’t learn anything. Because regret is in the way. You must say: “Okay, that’s done, how will I move on and what will I change?”

This applies to all kinds of emotional weather you’ll experience, but when it comes to productivity, to using your time well, it’s especially important. Only forgiveness can remove the friction of guilt. The nagging that prevents you from picking up the pen again. From continuing to just do things.

We all have different definitions of success and that’s a good thing. For some, it’s raising their kids to exceed their own accomplishments. For others, it’s fighting for a cause or using art to change how we think. And some just want to live quietly and enjoy the little things.

But no matter what end work serves in your life, you’ll never do enough of it if you constantly kick yourself.

Forgiveness is the only way.

Why don’t we talk about this? When we’re looking for ways to move on, why do we encourage everything from resting to trying hard to having a purpose to proving someone wrong, but not loving yourself when all of these fail?

I don’t know. Maybe, it makes us feel like frauds. To say “alright, let’s move on,” when others had to pay stricter consequences. Maybe, forgiveness isn’t sexy enough. Not a compelling reason to continue. Or, maybe, it’s the hardest of them all to believe in. To actually mean it when you think it. Or say it.

I’d put my money on that last one.

It’s good to practice non-judgment. It helps me a lot every time I succeed. But often, I don’t. And then I’m wrestling with myself for forgiveness. I’d much rather learn to consistently win that second battle. The first one isn’t lost, but I know I’ll never reach perfection. Forgiveness, however, is always available.

It’s as if the healthiest option is right in front of us, but we’re too blind or stubborn to use it. Too scared to allow ourselves to move on. Well, I don’t know you, but here’s permission to forgive yourself. I hope you’ll exercise it. It’s time. Have courage. Move on. Turn the page. And don’t look back.

Maybe, life is not about finding the straightest path to success. Or the simplest. Or even the smoothest. Maybe, it’s about finding one, just one, that allows you to get there at all. But that requires letting go of our old beliefs.

Mike Shinoda is a lead member of Linkin Park. On his current record, he’s processing the loss of his best friend and band mate of 20 years. Imagine how much forgiveness that takes. It’s got sad songs, angry songs, desperate songs, helpless songs. But there’s also one that’s light. Optimistic. Forgiving.

Maybe, in our own quest for being kinder to ourselves, all we have to do is act on its lyrics:

And they’ll tell you I don’t care anymore
And I hope you’ll know that’s a lie
’Cause I’ve found what I have been waiting for
But to get there means crossing a line
So I’m crossing a line

Happiness Is Loving the Boring Days Cover

Happiness Is Loving the Boring Days

Out of all the great TED talks that exist, Barry Schwartz’s is easily the best. He talks about what he calls The Paradox of Choice. I’ve gone back to it countless times for countless reasons, but my favorite part is when he shows this comic:

Ask anyone how they feel about their life from ten years ago, and they’ll likely tell you that “those were simpler times.” Less to worry about, more to enjoy. Somehow, everything was easier. Today, it’s all complicated. Always.

“Everything was better back when everything was worse.”

It’s more than a good chuckle. So simple, yet so instinctively true. But why does our gut want to agree so badly when we hear this? Barry explains:

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Be Fast When It Matters Cover

Be Fast When It Matters

If you’ve ever watched a Kung Fu movie, you’ve witnessed a fascinating relationship: the unity of fast and slow.

Be it Bruce Lee, Ip Man, Mr. Miyagi or Jackie Chan, in day-to-day life, the master is always deliberate. Quiet. Almost lethargic. He walks slowly. He talks slowly. He eats slowly. He’s never in a hurry and no matter who bursts in the front door with exciting or distressing news, he remains unfazed.

But then, suddenly, as soon as the fight begins, he is swift like the wind. Each step lands lightning-fast and with surgical precision. His eyes capture even the tiniest twitch in his opponent’s reactions. He chains together split-second movements, every one of which counts.

And then, as fast as it came, it’s gone. The storm is over. The enemy lies on the ground. And the master folds his hands like a closing flower, retreating back into his zen. Back to unity, where another cycle stands completed.

Meanwhile, we’re not even aware this unity exists. We’re just in fast mode all the time. I mean what do we wake up to? An alarm. If that’s not telling, I don’t know what is. And alarmed we are. Getting ready in the morning feels like rushing to the fire truck, ready to race off, to put out the next inferno, to salvage whatever emergency must have waited for us while we were asleep.

Ding! Wake up! Shower! Get ready! Brush teeth! Faster, faster, faster. Only so we can end up missing the bus, idling in traffic, and forgetting our keys.

That’s the thing: Most of the time, being fast doesn’t matter.

We’re optimizing the wrong things. We raise all hell to drive a little faster, leave the house a little sooner, submit the report a little quicker. And then? Nothing changes. You don’t get a medal for reaching the office parking lot first, no one clocks your front door, and, usually, you don’t get promoted for beating a deadline. These are not the moments that make or break your life.

Of course, feeding the beast is fun. It’s satisfying to fuel the rush, to give in to anxiety. It feels efficient in the moment but, often, won’t make a difference in the end. This is something the Kung Fu master is acutely aware of:

Most of life is better lived slowly.

Everyday chores work better when you’re slower. Washing dishes. Folding laundry. Brushing your teeth. You’ll have to do them just once. You won’t break so many things.

Eating is better when you’re slower. We’re supposed to chew our food, not chug and potentially choke on it. You’ll feel full faster. You’ll enjoy the taste more. You won’t mindlessly gobble up junk.

Sex is better when you’re slower. It’s not a race. Either two people win or both of you lose. It’s about caring, communicating, exploring. Not power-humping to see who can finish first and leave the other in their dust.

Talking is better when you’re slower. Pauses allow you to think and help the other process what you’ve said. What’s more, they can help you summon the courage to say what you really mean. And, of course, there’s room to listen.

Making decisions is better when you’re slower. Especially the big, life-defining ones. Like what to work on, where to live, who to marry. Our gut really screws us on these things. We jump into them too fast. We tell ourselves it’s “just for now,” and then we wake up five years later, wondering where time went.

Yes, sometimes, it really matters to be fast. But those moments are few and far between. A life-changing opportunity. A physically dangerous threat. These are not everyday situations.

That’s why Bruce Lee’s “be like water” analogy has remained so popular to this day. It perfectly captures this balance, this default slowness we need.

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.”

Water is a slow judge. It presents itself like a blank sheet of gift wrap, asking: “To what surface should I conform?” As if slowly feeling the shape of an object in the dark. One touch, one brush, one tap at a time. Then, it adapts. But if we want to do this, adapt like water, we must question each situation anew.

“Empty your mind. Be formless. Shapeless. Like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow, or it can crash.”

Despite having no form and being infinitely soft, water is one of, if not the strongest element on earth. When there’s even a tiny path, water will trickle along. When there’s no path, it’ll silently, almost immovably wear away the stone. And if the terrain is wide open, it can transform into a raging torrent. Thanks to this never-ending balancing act, water always finds its way home.

“Water may seem to move in contradiction, even uphill, but it chooses any way open to it so that it may reach the sea. It may flow swiftly or it may flow slowly, but its purpose is inexorable, its destiny sure. Be water, my friend.”

Like water, the Kung Fu master is fast when it matters. And when it doesn’t, which is most of the time, his default is to stay calm. To move slowly.

The words ‘early’ and ‘late’ only affect us in extremes. Too early, too late, these can make all the difference. What falls in between barely registers. There’s always another bus coming, another task waiting, another deal to be made.

Be fast when it matters. When you are, be swift like the wind. But don’t spend life quicker than it already runs out. It passes fast for all of us. When there’s no need to rush, to fight, to struggle, to crash, be calm like a pond.

Remember that life is balance. Unity. And every spectrum has two ends.

If you practice it long enough, maybe, we’ll call you master one day.

14 Life Lessons From and for a 28-Year-Old Cover

14 Life Lessons From and for a 28-Year-Old

The most memorable birthday wish I ever received was my dad’s in 2017:

“Stay as you are by changing every day.”

I’ve tried to heed this advice ever since, but it never seemed more relevant than today. 28 does feel different. At 27, I still thought of myself more as “a kid in his 20s” than “an almost-30-year-old.” But I don’t think it’s the numbers. They’ve never mattered to me all that much. I think it’s the experience.

In the past twelve months, cumulative growth has really kicked in. Personally, professionally, financially. I don’t feel like a greenhorn anymore, struggling to build a foundation. More like a survivor, sitting on a base plate made of concrete. Battered, but here to stay. Here to make a serious dent.

There’s much foolishness left in me, but it’s a lot less than it used to be. I now am, as Oscar Wilde said, “not young enough to know everything.” I am, however, old enough to realize I know very little, that it’ll always be very little, and that that’s okay. As I keep finding more dark spots on the map, I question which ones I need to shine a light on. If I really need to close all the gaps.

The following lessons have been 28 years in the making. They’re both from and for a 28-year-old. Reminders about which gaps to close and which ones to leave alone. Hang in there, kid. Stay tough. Keep surviving. Here’s to 28!

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The True Purpose of Productivity Cover

The True Purpose of Productivity

There’s a reason why most productivity advice fails to make any meaningful difference in your life over the long run. It’s not that the hacks and tricks and techniques don’t work. They do.

It’s that we see this kind of advice as the best possible way — the pinnacle, really — of improving our productivity. But it’s not. It’s based on a set of false assumptions. It misses the true purpose of being productive because it neglects how humans function at a biological and psychological level.

Imagine the perfect week. A seven-day stretch where you manage to do not just everything you aspire to do, but all the little things you conceive of along the way. The “I need to call mom”s and “I should pick up milk on the way home”s too. Where your plans fit into your calendar like a key into a lock, and your work assembles itself like a neat puzzle, perfectly abiding by the ever-looming deadlines of the ticking clock.

If you’re like me — a human being subject to their own, chemical reward system and a host of cognitive biases — this week has never happened in your life. And it never will. Because it’s a myth.

But that’s exactly what endless time optimization strategies are chasing. They pretend this week exists. If only we could chase it down once, we’d know how to catch it again and again. That’s nonsense, and its underlying assumption is deeply flawed: If you can hack yourself to do ever more, you’ll eventually reach a point where you can do everything you need to in any given week.

If you’ve ever had even a great week, you know that’s not how humans work.

First, our brains are wired to seek problems. Calm isn’t exactly our default state. So whenever we’re done fixing one thing, we naturally look for the next. Second, we love the dopamine hit of hitting even the tiniest goal way too much to just pass up on the opportunity to complete another one. Finally, we tend to think that all our time is ours, that life won’t interrupt, and that we know not just how much we’ll be able to do in advance, but also how long any given task will take. None of these are true, all victims of the planning fallacy.

Clearly, the do-more-until-you-can-do-everything approach can’t work. And that’s why gimmicks and tactics can’t possibly be the best productivity advice.

But what happens if we reject it? If we flip the basic assumption on its head? Maybe, we’d find an entirely new purpose of productivity. I think we would.

If you assume you can never get everything done, that you have no way of knowing how much time you’ll have available, and that you’ll often misjudge your own abilities and the hours required along the way, going for the maximum number of tasks instantly becomes a wholly futile effort.

By imagining the opposite, you’re forcing yourself to come up with a new definition of what being productive even means. To me, it means making good-enough progress on what I care about the most amidst the chaos of life.

The way you do that is by managing your expectations of time, much more so than managing your time itself.

Once you accept that life is riddled with chance, coincidence, luck, you’ll see productivity in a new light, with a new purpose. You’ll feel incentivized to build a different system. One with lots of buffers and room to fail. A system that’s optimized for minimum stress instead of maximum effort.

You’ll still have your goals, your to-dos, your milestones, but you won’t throw a tantrum every time you fail to check every one of them off your many lists. You’ll have compassion for yourself. More for others, too. You’ll learn to flow with life, around life, through life, rather than compartmentalizing it. You’ll be happier, less prone to burnout, and taste more of that elusive state of calm chasing checkmarks can never bring.

True productivity happens in your mind, not the outside world.

It happens when we learn to sit with our pattern-seeking machines without acting on them. When we say “thanks for the dopamine” and choose not to chase another hit. When we begin to find true comfort in the fact that we are imperfect beings acting in an imperfect world, rather than fighting the truth and the time we have so little of.

Only if we build our idea of this important concept on the fundamentals of what it means to be human can we erect a construct that lasts. An understanding that’s not sprawled with flawed assumptions.

Maybe, at the end of the day, we’d even get more done. Not that that matters.

Because that’s not what productivity is about, is it?

How To Unlock Your Confident Self Cover

How To Unlock Your Confident Self

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

303 Life Lessons We All Learn But Keep Forgetting Cover

303 Life Lessons We All Learn But Keep Forgetting

I used to think beyond 7th grade math is only useful for physicists and statisticians. After the rule of three, which allows you to calculate discounts on prices, diminishing returns start to kick in fast.

I’ve remedied that view a bit; geometry and calculus have led to some of histories strongest philosophical insights, but I still like to imagine a world in which our high school table of subjects includes:

  • Human behavior.
  • Relationships.
  • Communication.
  • Body language.
  • Personal finance.
  • Etiquette.
  • Career discovery.
  • Work habits.
  • Creativity.

Until that happens, however, I’m grateful for people like Alexander J.A Cortes, who compile the curriculum of such a school of life for us to learn it now, as adults. On February 25th, he shared a tweet storm previewing his next book titled Untaught Truths of Adulthood, which went viral.

As I read through his nearly 100-tweet-long outpour of life lessons, many examples from my own life popped up in my mind. It’s only natural, for all of us learn many of these things, but we never articulate them. I reached out to him and asked whether he’d be up for a collaboration: The result is his treasure trove in long-form, with my experiences as backup to his insights.

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What Is an Identity? Cover

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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Move Slower: How To Deal With the Fastness of Life Cover

Move Slower: How To Deal With the Fastness of Life

In investing, there’s this idea of a backdoor play.

For example, in 2014, Facebook announced it was going to use satellites, drones, and lasers, to bring the internet to the unconnected. Now, instead of buying Facebook stock and hoping they would succeed, you could’ve tried to figure out who they’d get the equipment from and buy their stock. Because even if Facebook failed, they’d purchase a lot of parts in the process.

In that sense, one of the best backdoor plays on cryptocurrencies must have been Twitter. The stock is up 100% year to date, partly because the platform dominates the crypto discussion.

While there is a lot of noise around this heated topic, a few clear voices stand out. Like Luke Martin, who’s amassed close to 150,000 followers in less than 8 months. One of Luke’s core ideas is to move slower with your investments.

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