Inspiration Archives - Page 11 of 18

How To Avoid a Life of Regret

December 7, 2018October 1, 2022 Nik

I’m sitting alone in my apartment. It’s Sunday night. Too late to be productive, too early to sleep, and I’m too hungry to do either. A flash of insight reveals my immediate fate: dumplings.

I don’t know where the gods of culinary inspiration sent it from, but the thought instantly grows roots. As they wrap around my stomach, squeezing it ever tighter, I message some friends to see if anyone wants to go.

One said he was out of town. Another on a date. Some didn’t reply and one already ate. With “no”s piling up faster than even the speediest cook could fold and fry the delicious dough bags, I began to think.

“Maybe, I should just stay in.”

“I still have food at home.”

“It’s cold out anyway.”

But then, another observation — not sent by a god but my gut — hit me. It took some mental debating, but, eventually, I snapped out of it.

“Screw it. I’m getting dumplings.”

I got dressed, walked to the restaurant, went inside, sat down, ordered, and, within a few minutes, I was munching on a dozen of a Chinese delicacy called wonton. The owner even gave me a free mango pudding for dessert. Score!

I won this round, but the conversation that had to happen earlier in my head for me to do so was just one of the many encounters we all have with a dire, devastating force called ‘potential regret.’ What was really going on was this:

I was afraid of doing what I wanted because I was alone.

A Feature We Can’t Turn Off

Being alone is a weird state for a social animal. First, there’s the physical discomfort, from the silence to the goosebumps to the sensory triggers our brains begin to manufacture. Then, there’s the psychological toll.

If you’ve ever sat with emptiness for a while, you’ll have noticed that, at first, your mind continues to tell the story it always tells. Maybe, it’s the one about work or the one about the friend you just dropped off or the one about what you should eat. Maybe, you’ll even flick through a couple of those. But soon you’ll realize — and this rarely happens in everyday life — that you are telling yourself a story. That most of what you do is just fighting your inner silence.

We’re having this big, public discussion about our technology fostering a culture of escapism, but if we’re honest, that’s nothing we needed devices for. It’s built into the human experience. A feature we can’t turn off. We say we ‘think,’ but mostly we’re just letting whatever thoughts come wash over us.

To some extent, this is normal. Permanently squeezing your gray matter with pressing questions — “Who am I? Why am I? What is life’s purpose? What’s mine? Who am I meant to be? And why am I not there yet?” — only drives you insane. But if we shut them down every time they creep up, we stand to lose our minds just the same.

The way we architect this second, equally inevitable collapse, however, is a lot more fascinating.

Agency Over Accomplishment

When she asked 90-somethings what they regretted most, Lydia Sohn made a fascinating discovery: old people don’t get nearly as much satisfaction out of their past careers than young people expect out of their future ones.

“Their joys and regrets have nothing to do with their careers, but with their parents, children, spouses, and friends.”

As it turns out, it’s not their work, but their relationships that contributed most to their happiness. They didn’t crave a longer list of accomplishments, but more quality moments with their loved ones. This finding contradicts the popular idea that our life’s happiness curve shapes like a U-bend, with spikes early and late and a big trough in the middle. People felt their best while being hard-working fathers and busy housewife mothers (and vice versa).

Bronnie Ware, a palliative nurse, regret researcher, and author of a popular book on the topic, identified a different, but equally powerful source of remorse: living a shadow-life.

“Of all of the regrets and lessons shared with me as I sat beside their beds, the regret of not having lived a life true to themselves was the most common one of all. It was also the one that caused the most frustration, as the client’s realization came too late. ‘It’s not like I wanted to live a grand life,’ Grace explained in one of many conversations from her bed. ‘But I wanted to do things for me too and I just didn’t have the courage.’”

Everyone is different and no one person’s experience can dictate your own best path of action, but when it comes to aging, the advice of those who’ve done it already is sure worth considering. These two insights are interesting all on their own, but if we piece them together, we can learn even more:

We may be our best self when we’re not focused on it all that much.
In order to feel like we are, we need to decide some things on our own.

Whether they were happily married or not, these people’s relationships with their partners took a back seat as their family grew. But for those where either ended up suppressing their own desires altogether, a busy life turned into an estranged one — and that’s not something we’re fond of looking back to.

Now I’m really glad I decided to go eat those dumplings.

Miserable Always Does The Job

A friend of mine is currently trying to settle on a topic for her thesis. But, as she says of herself, she’s not very decisive. After researching multiple angles and approaching several faculty members, it came down to two options. When she got accepted for only one, I congratulated her. I was wrong.

Having had no clear preference for either topic before, she was now sad about one road being blocked — and back to brainstorming more options. This may sound silly, but it’s not uncommon. A very real struggle for a very real group of people, particularly those around my age. We know we have a wealth of options, so we try to look at them all, and, without ever deciding, feel bad about the ones we miss, the ones we might have missed, and the perfect ones we think should exist somewhere, even though they never do.

We know abundance does this to us from science. Barry Schwartz wrote The Paradox of Choice about this. The more choice, the harder it is to choose and the easier to make mistakes. And even though finding ‘perfect’ is as impossible as it ever was and we know it, we’re still disappointed if we don’t.

What my friend is doing — what most of us are doing — is not distracting ourselves with meaningless entertainment or existential problems.

We do it with an abundance of good options that don’t reflect who we actually are.

For a lot of us, life is too easy. We know we’ll get dinner. A date is just a swipe away. Our work may be boring, but it pays. At worst, we’ll cancel Spotify. But instead of using all this amenity and time to figure ourselves out, instead of saying “this one feels like me” and running with it, we choose whatever outcome we get to be the one that makes us feel miserable.

But, as we learned from those senior to us, being happy is not about choosing the best, but about loving what you have chosen. How much you dictate the outcome won’t matter nearly as much as having had a say. Whatever agency you have, as long as you don’t second-guess yourself, you’ll likely be content.

And sometimes, that is as simple as eating the first food that comes to mind.

Everything Starts Small

Maybe, you really want to try a new style of pasta. Or to go see that movie. Or just get ice cream. But then you ask around and find out no one wants to go. They might be busy. Maybe, they’re not around. Not hungry. Or they don’t want to hang out today. That’s okay.

What’s not okay is what we usually do next: we stay at home.

We choose to feel sorry for ourselves instead of doing what we want, even if no one’s stopping us.

We do it because moving in a state that’s already uncomfortable when you’re still is extra disconcerting. We do it because we pressure ourselves to optimize among a sea of options despite secretly knowing most of them are irrelevant to us. And we do it because of what people would think; what they would say if they caught us being happy on our own.

I love sharing. I love doing things together. But when your support goes down the tube, you can’t just throw your life right after. Don’t stop living when no one’s watching. Have pride. Get dressed. Show up. Not for others. For yourself.

The person who should be most excited about everything you do in life is you.

But if you can’t live true to yourself when no one’s around, how do you expect to do it in the face of a growing set of responsibilities? How do you expect to do it with more and more agents thrown into the picture? A partner, two kids, an elderly parent. A team you’re leading, a host of fans, or a stubborn boss?

What we want is rarely impractical. Eating alone doesn’t make the food taste worse. But sometimes, it is uncomfortable to be authentic. To act on what you know you want. And yet, we can’t let that prevent us from going after it.

Because it starts with dinner or a movie, but that’s not where it stops.

One day we resort to frozen pizza, the next it’s going back to our shitty job. All because we were too scared to be the lone fighter for the right cause. Yes, your friend should not have chickened out on that startup idea. Yes, finding a great job takes time. But you were never meant to face those struggles unprepared.

Because staying true to yourself, like everything, starts small. It’s not about nailing your Ph.D. or choosing the perfect partner. It’s about listening to your gut when you want to eat dumplings.

Even if it means that, sometimes, you’ll have dinner by yourself.

What Are the Habits of Successful People?

December 5, 2018June 1, 2022 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:

There is an ideal combination of habits that causes success.
That combination is finite.
That combination is timeless.
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:

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.
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.
Your habits are cause-and-effect relationships between you and your environment. Keep analyzing both to know when to change and how.
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?

November 28, 2018June 30, 2022 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

November 14, 2018June 23, 2022 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.

How To Deal With The Adversities Of Life

November 11, 2018October 1, 2022 Nik

On July 19th in 64 AD, a fire broke out in Rome. Within just six days, the world’s most prosperous city was almost completely destroyed. Ten out of Rome’s fourteen districts burned down to the ground, leaving dozens of buildings in ruins, hundreds of people dead, and thousands more homeless.

To this day, historians argue whether emperor Nero ordered the fire himself to take credit for the splendor of a rebuilt Rome. Regardless of the disaster’s origins, rebuild the city he did, in part thanks to a big donation from Lyons.

Just one year later, Nero had a chance to return the favor: Lyons, too, burned down. While he sent the same sum, Rome’s premier philosopher thought about the irony of it all. Remembering when he stood in the rubble of his own city’s decimated remains, Lucius Annaeus Seneca shows empathy for a friend:

“Sturdy and resolute though he is when it comes to facing his own troubles, our Liberalis has been deeply shocked by the whole thing. And he has some reason to be shaken. What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster. The fact that it was unforeseen has never failed to intensify a person’s grief.”

You may not have had to mark yourself as ‘safe’ on Facebook during a fire, an earthquake, or a tsunami, but you’ve surely had things go very wrong very suddenly. Maybe you got fired instead of promoted. Maybe a loved one died unexpectedly. Maybe an illness disabled you for three months out of the blue.

We’ve greatly reduced the toll on human life taken by natural disasters since the Roman age, but as individuals, we’ll all encounter surprising twists of fate at least a few times over the course of our life. If these twists are unfortunate, their suddenness adds to our pain. At worst, it might incapacitate us for years.

When adversity is all but guaranteed, how can we stop it from paralyzing us?

The Jurisdiction of Fortune

Never one to point out a problem without a solution, Seneca offers multiple comforting alternatives. The first and most obvious is preparation:

“Therefore, nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all problems, and we should consider not what is wont to happen, but what can happen.”

Humans aren’t perfect. Our brains are flawed and as individuals, we all have a unique, but limited perspective. Nonetheless, being the simulation machines that we are, few things are inconceivable to us. We might never be able to expect everything, but we can make a lot of accurate projections.

We can ruminate on the duration of the good times we live in and consider what’ll happen if they end. We can extrapolate some of the bad eventualities bound to come and make guesses where they will come from. Finally, we can acknowledge that, contrary to Murphy’s law, not everything that can go wrong will — but it might. As we make plans and execute them, this helps.

The second thing Seneca offers to his friend Liberalis is perspective:

“Therefore, let the mind be disciplined to understand and to endure its own lot; let it have the knowledge that there is nothing which fortune does not dare — that she has the same jurisdiction over empires as over emperors, the same power over cities as over the citizens who dwell therein. We must not cry out at any of these calamities. Into such a world have we entered, and under such laws do we live.”

It’s true that life may sometimes render even our best efforts useless, but in this powerlessness, at least we are not alone.

Even nature itself is no match for a universe governed by the forces of change, Seneca says. Mountain tops dissolve, entire regions perish, hills are leveled by the power of flames, and landmarks are swallowed by the sea. And yet, not one of these events can live up to the rumors about it we indulge in. Especially because often, setbacks are actually the beginning of something better.

While these are all formidable coping mechanisms, somehow, none of them seems to capture the true essence of the problem. Lucky for us, Seneca did.

Finding True Equanimity

Despite Seneca’s various attempts at providing relief, when it comes to fate’s toughest blows, there is a sense of discomfort that’s hard to shake. The mere thought of losing a friend or watching our house burn sends shivers down our spine. That’s because at its core, all adversity reminds us of a dark truth:

“It would be tedious to recount all the ways by which fate may come; but this one thing I know: all the works of mortal man have been doomed to mortality, and in the midst of things which have been destined to die, we live!”

We live in a world in which everything has been designed to die. Including us.

As a result, it matters not so much if our misfortunes are unpredictable or if they happen to someone else rather than us, for these modalities merely determine the intensity of the underlying, universal reminder: all things die.

It’s painful to watch anything crumble, knowing full well we’re bound to meet the same fate one day. Every dried plant, every dead animal, every decaying building, broken chair, and crumpled piece of paper; they’re all constant little notices that, one day, our time too will be up.

Facing this truth is uncomfortable, but it is exactly in this confrontation where true equanimity lies. According to Seneca, death is the equalizing constraint allowing us to “make peace again with destiny, the destiny that unravels all ties:”

“We are unequal at birth, but are equal in death.”

Emotional suffering is a subtle complaint about the unfairness of life. Why didn’t your relationship last? Why weren’t our career expectations met? Why do fake news, armed robberies, and disturbing videos exist? All of these are moot questions once you accept that everything eventually comes to an end.

We can’t predict all of life’s eventualities, but we also don’t need to, because every possible outcome is still an outcome that will pass. Life has always consisted of both creation and destruction, the universe’s balancing forces.

If anything, we are the ones beating the odds. Our very existence is defiance. Maybe that’s why we’re so easily upset by it. We’re the ones who get to live the longest, to witness the world and what’s in it, to contemplate the circle of life.

This is the condition we lament when, actually, we should be grateful for it.

A Strange Fact of Life

Earth has always wreaked the occasional havoc on its inhabitants. And while our grasp on fortune’s worst calamities gets stronger and stronger, no one can dodge all of life’s curveballs.

Because abruptness adds emotional anguish to our many challenges, Seneca suggests we should prepare for all imaginable possibilities. Like setting the dinner table every night, it won’t protect us from uninvited guests, but it’ll allow us to welcome them when they show up at our door and at once begin.

We are also not alone in facing our ordeals, for fate makes halt for none. Neither our cities nor our neighbors will be spared; even nature must remake itself. Luckily, every rock bottom we hit is a chance to build something better.

Unfortunately, none of Seneca’s great advice can shield us from the true source of adversity’s paralyzing discomfort: we live in a world destined to die. The transience of life is tragic and we don’t like being reminded of it.

At the same time, it is this very fragility that unites all things in the universe.

Only if we embrace it can we move past the expendable questions that make our lives miserable. There is no need to prepare for every case, because all cases are subject to change. Mortality is the great equalizer, but what prelude could offer more cause for gratitude than the experience of being human?

It goes back only to medieval Persian poets, but the old adage might as well stem from our favorite Roman philosopher himself: this too shall pass.

It’s a strange, but also rather beautiful fact of life, don’t you think?

How To Be An Extremely Productive Creative

October 31, 2018February 28, 2024 Nik

The difference between hitting the golf ball at its center or one millimeter below is the difference between the rough and the green.

When we tell artists all they need to succeed is to create daily, we’re telling them to omit that difference. This is a disastrous disservice. It’s close to, but not quite the truth and, as such, potentially more dangerous than a blatant lie.

We all know quantity begets quality. Picasso created 50,000 pieces, Stephen King wrote some 80 books, and Jimi Hendrix recorded close to 200 songs despite dying at age 27. An immense body of work can’t guarantee you’ll be a great artist or a rich artist or even a famous artist. But if you’re a professional artist, at least you’ll maximize your chances. The math checks out.

But it takes more than just creating daily. That part is important, but when I look back on two years of weekly newsletters sent without fail, I see not one habit, but a conjunction of three, all of which support one another.

What If Our Addictions Are What Makes Us Successful?

September 25, 2018September 17, 2023 Nik

I have a theory:

Everyone’s addicted to something.

Not addiction in the clinical sense. I’m not talking about a chemical imbalance that might lead to substance abuse. That should be treated professionally.

When I say ‘addicted,’ I mean that you do something just a little more than you probably should. And even though sometimes that “just a little” isn’t all that little anymore, if you had a shrink, he wouldn’t recommend sending you to Shutter Island just yet.

Here’s an example: When I was 15, I was addicted to soccer tricks.

I would watch all the Nike commercials and try to copy the moves those guys had. For about three years, I spent three, four, sometimes eight hours a day outside or in our basement and practice. I found a community online and we had competitions. We filmed videos. And in Germany, we were the first few dozen people to kickstart this movement.

Sadly, my knees are f*cked. Always have been, really. But putting constant pressure on my legs and jumping up and down on the tarmac didn’t help. So in 2008, I made a final video, then quit. I wasn’t forced to. It was a decision.

Here’s another example: When I was 18, I was addicted to video games.

I’ve been a gamer since I was 8. That’s when my parents gave me a Nintendo 64. I’ve played everything from Super Mario to Final Fantasy, from Pokémon to Call of Duty, from Warcraft to Blobby Volley. From 16 to 18, I spent my nights playing Counter-Strike on modded servers, trading items in Diablo 2, and kicking alien-ass in Halo sessions with friends.

But when I was 18, I really hit my stride. I bought an Xbox 360 and started chasing GamerScore. Every game had a maximum of 1,000 points you could score for achieving various things. Usually, that meant beating the story on all difficulty levels, completing side quests, pulling off certain stunts, kills, etc.

It’s the perfect system. On top of the flow experience you get from each individual game, you now have an incentive to play as many games as possible. What more, it allows for optimization, because you can focus on the 20% of tasks that give you 80% of the points, then move on. Sometimes, I would get 2–3 games from the video store on Friday, beat them all over the weekend, then return them Monday and pay 3–5 € per game. It was fun.

There was only one other guy in our city who did it as “professionally” as I did. I never caught up to him, but I was at 24,500 GamerScore before I quit. After my first semester at college, I realized it wasn’t a priority, so I sold my Xbox and that was that.

Do these things officially qualify as addiction? I don’t know. But in hindsight, I can tell you that’s exactly what they were. Because that’s what they felt like. They weren’t bad, crippling addictions. I enjoyed them. I was happy. But addictions nonetheless. From the outside, however, most people would have called them hobbies. Some might have called them excessive. But the one thing every person would have told you is that I was good at these things.

I was successful.

I have another theory:

All worldly success follows from channeling our addictions.

Let’s take your hypothetical friend John. John is the Fonz in your college class. He has the face of an angel and the tongue of a stand-up comedian. His hair falls in waves when he hops into his Camaro convertible and drives off. As a result, he always has two girls on every arm and a whole lot more chasing him. He gets more Tinder matches in a day than you get in three months.

As you would expect, John is constantly “going steady” with someone else. And when something does turn real, he disappears into his new relationship for a few months, only to emerge again at the fall term frat party with an empty passenger seat. In short: John’s got game out the wazoo.

To the outside world, John is successful. Men think he’s a hero, women desire him. Inside, however, John might be completely happy, completely miserable, or one or the other, depending on the time of day. We can’t know.

But even just looking from afar, if you strip away our various, often crooked definitions of success, you can see that John is simply addicted to love. Every aspect of it. No matter how much of this addiction is enabled through luck vs. conscious effort, it’s the lens he chooses to live his life through.

That’s not to say we can’t have multiple lenses. You can be a little addicted to love, a little to food, and a little to video games. As a result, you might be in a stable relationship, only slightly overweight, and halfway decent at Call of Duty. But it’s not as “productive,” to use the word in a perverted sense, as an all-out addiction to only one of the three.

Whatever messed up standard the world has to measure how successful you are at something, if you’re addicted to it, you’ll do just fine. The problem is that the world seems to have twisted standards for everything.

But is that really a problem, then?

I have one last theory: it’s all meant to be this way.

Addictions are the clips the universe puts on people’s wings, for if humans could fly, they’d be burned by the sun.

I don’t think people without these minor addictions exist. But I also don’t believe this mythical, balanced person is an ideal we’re meant to aspire to.

Excessively engaging with the world is our way of dealing with the ridicule of the cosmos. We’re dropped into this life knowing full well we can’t take anything out of it when it’s our time to leave — and we’re supposed to play nice? I don’t think so. I think we should cause all the ruckus we can.

What’s dangerous is when we let the world’s corrupted standards dictate where we spend our disproportionately allocated chunks of time. It’s okay for inner motivation to trigger our irrational dedication to something, but outer success can never be the reason to keep it around.

When I quit freestyling, that was me finding the strength to prioritize my health over being a pioneer. When I quit gaming, that was me forfeiting a competition where there was nothing to win except respect.

These addictions were initially fueled by fun, but once the world pushed the right buttons, my ego took over and it became very easy to see my limitations. When that happens, the only answer is to let go. You’ll either find your way back or realize it was never the right addiction in the first place.

This isn’t meant to advertise this definition of ‘addiction.’ I’m not saying we should all dig our own rabbit holes. If you have your balance and like it, by all means, enjoy. What I am saying is that if you’re already down the burrow, don’t worry. Most of us are. Just don’t let the world shut you inside.

Me? Nowadays, I’m addicted to art. I work way more than I should and I can’t stop thinking of things I want to create. Sooner or later, the world will probably tell me that I’ll have to keep doing it in order to nail its definition of success. Whenever that happens, all I want is to remember why I started.

I hope I’ll be able to. I really like this one.

Why We’re Afraid of Being Alone

September 11, 2018September 22, 2022 Nik

Located at 2709 East 25th Street in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a grey, one-story building. Nested among trees, with concrete walls covered in poison ivy, it’s so inconspicuous it almost seems to merge with its surroundings.

Inside, however, lies the most terrifying room in the world. It looks like this:

It’s not like people are tortured inside the anechoic chamber at Orfield Labs. But when researchers close the door and shut people in absolute, perfect silence, few can bear the experience.

In a room so quiet you can hear your own breath, heartbeat, blood flow, even your bones’ grinding noise, things get uncomfortable real quick. First, people lose their balance. Hearing helps us move, so in a space without sound, we must sit down. Soon, the ear begins to exaggerate, even fabricate its own noises, like a heavy hum or ringing sound. Some start to hallucinate.

While most people give up after minutes, once an hour passes even the toughest have had enough. That’s because — and this relates to actual torture — the pain we suffer in complete quiet is not physical. It’s mental.

Our biological aversion to silence is only a symptom of a much deeper, more elemental problem: we’re fundamentally afraid of being alone.

The Story That Never Stops

Locking yourself in a room that resembles the infinite, noiseless vacuum of space might be an extreme example, but there are other signs of our discomfort with nothingness. Some are rather obvious, like the constant engagement with our many technological devices or the frequent desire to escape our state of consciousness using music, drugs, sex, or alcohol.

Others hide on a less visible level, like what happens when we wake up alone in the middle of the night: We immediately start telling ourselves a story.

Maybe it’s a scary story about a stranger in your house, or a story about the coming day that excites you. It might even be a mundane story that makes perfect sense. But it is always a story your mind has conjured for the sole purpose of distracting you from the fact that, right now, there is only you, wrapped in darkness and silence.

If you pay attention to it, then pause, you’ll notice it’s only when there’s no story that the real suffering begins. Maybe that’s why the story never stops.

We rise from our beds in the morning and the voice in our head starts talking. We tell ourselves a story while we get ready for work, another one on the way, several dozen while we’re there, more at home, and the last one right until we fall asleep. Fascinating, right?

It’s almost as if consciousness itself is an endless fight against inner silence. That’s the most elaborate, universal scheme of escapism I’ve ever seen.

But what is it that makes solitude so terrifying?

Seeking Answers in an Answerless World

When asked what makes America the greatest country in the world in the opening scene of The Newsroom, one panelist answers with “freedom and freedom.” It’s true. No other country has placed this good higher in its value chain. And while most countries have been following in America’s footsteps, the weight of that freedom in the 21st century is now crushing us.

Not quite coincidentally, right after the atrocities of World War II, when the importance of freedom was clearer than ever, a philosophy trying to describe this burden arose. The core idea of existentialism is that “existence precedes essence.” That means you simply are — and it’s your job to give life meaning.

As seekers of answers in an answerless world, our main frustration therefore lies with choice. That’s why, when you dig into the ideas of Sartre, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus and others, you’ll find they all have their own terms for the oppression inherent in freedom. Some call it ‘anxiety,’ others ‘angst’. Sartre refers to it as ‘anguish’ — the painful awareness of free will and choice.

Today, we live in a world where individual freedom is more accessible than ever. It’s not universal yet, but reaching more people by the day. As a result, existential crises are at an all-time high. Young people get them earlier, older ones more often, no one seems to be spared. Sadly, our philosophers leave us only with questions. Questions, such as:

Who am I? Where am I going? What’s the meaning of life? Of my life? Who do I want to be? And why am I not that person?

That’s why, when we’re alone, there’s always a hint of anxiety in the air. All you’re left with when you take out your earbuds and turn off your phone are these daunting, existential questions posed by the freedom we value so much.

Naturally, rather than face them, we prefer to plug the music back in and run away from them full-time. We all go overboard with sensory pleasures one way or another. Some of us chase the thrill of orgasm all their lives, others drown their inner turmoil in whiskey, some forever dull their senses with TV.

We seek reassurance in stimulation. That’s what the story in our head, the constant engagement, the flow state experiences are really for. Because whenever the stream of ‘everything’s-fine-at-least-for-now’ stops, it’s like someone pushes us into that room and shuts the door behind us. Silence.

Suddenly, the questions become really loud. There’s nowhere to escape. But since we’re so busy engaging with the world in ways we hope will comfort us, we miss the reassurance from realizing we don’t need to. In hopes of not going insane, we drive ourselves insane.

And yet, the music stops for all of us anyway.

The Inevitable Truth

Imagine a single person, representing all of humanity, being locked inside the anechoic chamber. What would she do? I think she would scream, yell, and shout. As loud as she can. Until she is exhausted, ultimately arriving in the same silence where she began.

I think this image delivers an apt description of the world’s character as a whole: restlessness. But a body, an animal, any moving object, really, no matter how fast it goes, must eventually come to rest. It’s a law of physics.

The analogy here is that when we choose overstimulation, a burnout becomes inevitable. We all land in the occasional, long stretch of inner silence sooner or later. We can find it at the end of a burned down candle or face it in the comfort of our own choice. But we must all deal with it in time. Because for all the decision power we have, it does not grant us freedom from truth.

The truth I see here, at the bottom of all this, is sobering: I think we are alone.

As Twitter-philosopher Naval puts it, “life is a single-player game.” We’re born alone and we die alone. In between, we must learn to know ourselves, love ourselves, lose ourselves, find ourselves and do all of it over again. All of your life’s most important moments, you experience alone. You suffer pain alone. You enjoy the dopamine high of victory alone. Even things you experience in the presence of another person — your first love, first kiss, first time — you ultimately live through inside your own head and, thus, alone.

At first, that makes everything sound even scarier. But it’s actually beautiful.

First, loneliness is an absolute necessity to deal with life’s important questions. All of the noise and distractions don’t help. They make things worse. Because while sitting in discomfort won’t always guarantee the best outcome, running away will always lead to regret.

Second, our singular, unchangeable perspective on the human experience is what makes us unique. If our point of view wasn’t locked at the individual level, our species en masse would never have ventured this far. What each of us brings back from their own depths of quiet makes us stronger as a whole.

Lastly, and this is where the true beauty of facing your own desolation lies, we have solid evidence to believe it improves us as individuals. For over 3,000 years now, we’ve had a name for practicing the discomfort of nothingness.

It’s called meditation.

Engaging With Emptiness

Steve Orfield, the founder of the silent lab, has noticed something in his visitors throughout the years. Those suffering from autism, ADHD, or other conditions of anxiety and hyper-sensitivity enjoy the anechoic chamber. They say it’s calm. Peaceful.

There’s something to be said for quietness if the people who run from it end in overstimulation and burnout, while those with ailments around those things prefer it. Maybe it’s because the silence of reality is the best reassurance. It’s relieving to disengage, almost remove yourself from the world, and observe that it keeps turning for a while.

But doing that requires focus. When you pause your inner monologue, you need somewhere to pull your attention. Maybe it’s the image of your own, empty head. Or a tiny, visual or haptic sensation. The most common place people choose, however, is the one we all share: our breath.

In. And out. In. And out. Reducing your own expenditure of energy to a minimum is a deliberate decision to rest. It’s like taking a stand at the shore of the ocean and then letting the waves wash over you. The silence. The questions. The loneliness. Everything.

When you open your eyes, you’ll realize you’re still here. A survivor. And while everything’s the same, something’s always changed. I’m not a strict meditator and I don’t think it only works as a rigid practice. To me, the point of it is to engage with emptiness. To carve out a small space in your mind, sit there all by yourself and draw strength from that. You can do that anywhere, anytime.

Even the idea of a one-minute meditation on the subway reminds me of Will Smith’s observation about skydiving: “The point of maximum danger is the point of minimum fear.” It doesn’t make it less dangerous to venture into the depths of your own mind. Just less scary.

But that alone makes it an experience worth having.

The Outside World and Us

As the world provides us with more and more freedom to self-actualize, the mental weight of that freedom gets bigger and bigger. Instead of facing what may be too much to lift, we’ve become masters of avoidance to the point of feeling physical discomfort with silence.

We flush our senses with emotions, running from the quiet in which difficult questions arise. In doing so, we miss the hard, but comforting truth that life is ours to live and ours alone.

Like the ancient tradition of meditation shows us, solitude is not a state to be feared, but one to enter prepared and practice. Engaging with discomfort allows us to focus our attention, accept what we can’t change, and address what’s important. And there’s more than one way to do it.

It takes lots of effort, but learning to enjoy solitude will make us more comfortable with our limitations, imperfections, and, ultimately, ourselves.

The outside world is louder than ever. Let’s meet it by being quiet inside.

The Hero in All of Us

September 5, 2018August 14, 2023 Nik

In the early 1960s, the team of a Manhattan comic book company was on a roll. They had just created a slew of characters that quickly became popular among fans. But when they wanted to create yet another hero, they got stuck:

“The thing with a superhero that you have to get is a unique superpower. Well, we already had somebody who was the strongest guy in the world, somebody who could fly, and so forth. I was thinking: ‘What else is left?’”

As they thought about what to do, one of the writers looked up and saw a fly, crawling up the office wall. He thought to himself:

“Wow! Suppose a person had the power to stick to a wall, like an insect…”

The name of that writer was Stan Lee. And then, he created the best superhero Marvel ever made.

Numbers Don’t Lie

When you ask people who their favorite superhero is, most of them will tell you it’s Batman, or Superman, or maybe Wonder Woman. But when it comes to holding a place in our hearts, there is an undisputed #1. No other character is printed on more t-shirts, embossed on more mugs, featured in more video games, or sells more Halloween costumes than him.

When the cards are on the table, Spider-Man is the most popular hero of them all. We might be more curious to see the latest Superman blockbuster, but when we have to vote who we’ll stand for with our money, who we’re proud to side with in the most public of ways, we will choose Spidey every time.

But why?

The World Before Spider-Man

On the surface, it doesn’t make much sense for a teenager with the abilities of a spider to be the most beloved by fans. After all, he’s just a kid, and a nerdy one at that. Plus, for a supposed superhero, he sure has the weirdest set of powers. Aren’t our idols meant to be larger than life? Inspiring figures we can look up to?

I think that, until our awkwardly dressed web slinger came around, they were.

With the exception of Captain America, prior names in history’s long chronology of superheroes mostly credited their abilities to supernatural causes. Their back-stories are full of meteor impacts and secret alien societies on planets far, far away. This somewhat isolated them from readers before they even turned the first page. And yet, it made for a great escape. Who wouldn’t want to fly like an eagle, swim like a fish, or see through walls with their eyes? If even just for a few hours and only in their own head.

But when Spider-Man swung along, he did something no magic savior that came before him ever could: he brought the realm of heroes down to earth.

Our Friendly Neighborhood Loser

When you examine the origins of Spider-Man, it’s easy to wonder about the reasoning behind many of the creators’ choices. Why would they make him a teenager? The teenager was usually the sidekick at best. Why even make him human at all? And not a particularly strong specimen either.

While I don’t think Marvel made all these decisions on purpose, they happened to come together in a fascinating way:

Everything that initially made Spider-Man a weaker hero also made him a stronger human being.

He’s not the heir of a billion dollar empire. He’s not an immortal, bulletproof alien. Or born a genetic freak. Peter Parker’s parents died when he was very young, but that aside, he’s a normal kid from a normal family, living a normal life. Like the majority of comic book readers, he goes to school. And his biggest struggle is one most of us are painfully familiar with: being a nobody.

Until, one day, he gets bitten by a radioactive spider and everything changes.

A Familiar Transformation

It’s not just Peter Parker’s life pre-costume that resonates. Even his path to becoming a hero contains elements that speak to us on a subconscious level. His abilities have their roots in scientific experiments, not wizardry. They’re a stretch, sure, but they still feel believable.

What’s more, unlike an exaggeration of existing traits, like superhuman strength or the ability to run at lightning speed, being equipped with an awkward combination of new physical features forces our hero to figure out who he is all over again. Something we all go through in puberty. In that sense, even his strange set of new skills contributes to his relatedness.

To top it all off, even after Peter Parker’s physique has changed, he is still a loser. A teenager in way over his head. If he doesn’t learn fast, he won’t be a very useful guardian. But the more he practices, the more he’s forced to sacrifice his relationships, even his dreams. Sound familiar? That’s the pain of anyone trying to accomplish anything meaningful ever. As a result, Spider-Man is the most relatable superhero of all time.

But there’s something more to the story. A connection that runs even deeper.

The Origins of Ambition

There’s one more thing that sets Spider-Man apart from his contemporaries: he never wanted to be a hero. He didn’t choose to pick up that cape, to become a symbol, to take the serum. Instead, he’s the victim of an accident at the science fair.

Like a kid being pushed into a pool, Peter Parker is a guy like us, thrown into exceptionally cold water. Only once the damage is irreversibly done does he decide to take responsibility and tackle the task life’s burdened him with. That’s the most honest explanation of ambition I’ve ever seen.

I think in our own lives, it works just the same. Some day, a vial breaks and the liquid is released. Like the spider venom seeping into Peter Parker’s veins, it permeates slowly, but the switch can never be un-flipped. It’s impossible. You can’t go back. And, as in Spider-Man’s case, a great many variables must simultaneously fall into place to cause this triggering event.

Usually, it’s a mix of trauma, naiveté, regret, fear, anger, and, out of all things, self-love. Before I started writing, I began to fear a conventional desk job career. I regretted not starting anything earlier and I was naive enough to believe I could make a living telling stories. Adversity inspires humans to do great things.

Sometimes, it’s a small crisis, like what character can keep up your winning streak, or wishing desperately for a beautiful stranger’s kiss. Sometimes, it takes an outright catastrophe, like a cheating spouse or a terrible illness. But it always takes some crisis for humans to see they have great power.

And with that power comes great responsibility.

A Calling for All of Us

People love to split the world into two camps. They think there are the superheroes, and then there’s us. The losers. From day one of his fictional existence, this is the biggest misunderstanding Spider-Man was meant to clarify. He teaches us is that, in reality, the loser and the hero are the same.

Due to his lackluster, mundane life and his accidental, almost traumatic transformation, Spider-Man cannot be a hero defined by his feats or even his features. He must be a hero defined by his character. And we all have one of those. If some heroes are nothing but the random result of their environment, then what’s to stop us?

For if the only thing that really sets Spider-Man apart is his courage in the face of adversity, then he’s the first to send a message all superheroes were actually meant to send. A message one of his masked colleagues put so eloquently:

A hero can be anyone.

It’s not just that we, as individuals, feel we could be Spider-Man. It’s that we collectively realize any one of us could be Spider-Man. Because all he did, despite struggling with the hand he was dealt, is give his best to do good in this world. I think this is incredibly empowering.

It is also a good reminder to never belittle those with less ambition. Because no one ever knows if your switch has already been flipped. You might not notice it today, or even tomorrow, but in time, you will show us all. For all we know, you’re just like Spider-Man. Or all of us, really.

A superhero in the making.

How To Use Idleness To Combat Setbacks

August 28, 2018October 1, 2022 Nik

Around 300 BC, a wealthy merchant set out on a voyage from his home in ancient Cyprus, Phoenicia, to Piraeus, a harbor town close to Athens.

Having almost made it to his destination, his ship crashed and went under, including the precious cargo. Luckily, he survived. Eventually, he reached Athens, and, once there, decided it’d be best to not do anything for a while.

Enjoying his newly found spare time, he spent most of it walking around the city, exploring. One day, he came across a book store, went inside, and picked up the first book that spoke to him. Its title was ‘Memorabilia.’ In the book, a man named Xenophon described episodes of his mentor’s life and how he tried to help others. That mentor was the famous philosopher Socrates.

The merchant was so inspired that he asked the owner of the store where he could find more men like Socrates. As fate would have it, another well-known philosopher happened to walk by, so the owner simply pointed at him. The merchant approached the philosopher and they started a conversation. After a while, he decided to stay and study under the philosopher’s tutelage.

He never left Athens again.

The Dangers of Importing Philosophy

Throughout history, many ideas from the ancient East have permeated into the newer, Western parts of the world. The most popular one, one that seems to be inseparably tied to our modern culture, may be the Japanese ideal behind the phrase “nana korobi ya oki.” It roughly translates to “fall down seven times, stand up eight” and is a reminder of the value of resilience.

This idea is deeply embedded in our Western concept of what makes a good life. It is the sole topic of thousands of podcasts, has given birth to countless books, and is the central theme of most conversations around, even our very definitions of success. And yet, in this historic game of telephone, it seems along the line half the message was lost. One aspect we completely neglect.

The Japanese have always been equally as slow as they have been perseverant.

That’s not a bad thing. To the contrary, it allows for deliberate action, refined decisions and the utmost respect of others in seeing them through. As Roman poet Ovid would put it: Dripping water holes the stone. And when you fail, the speed with which you bounce back has big implications.

What we tend to emphasize is how fast a person can stomach a setback, rather than how strong they return. Each defeat is supposed to be followed with an immediate, new attempt. On to the next one. Isn’t that how we say? But when you rush to recover from failure, springing from rock bottom like a jack-in-the-box, you’re likely to run into the same concrete wall, just faster. You’re not just too distracted to see what went wrong, you’re too busy to even look.

And, especially today, there’s a lot to be said for looking.

The Fortuitous Castaway

The name of the merchant was Zeno. Zeno of Citium. Once he dove into the ideas of philosophy, he found them to be so important that he saw no fate but one in which he spread and taught them for the remainder of his life.

To better understand the teachings of his master, he practiced discourse while pacing up and down a prominent, public square in Athens. As he became more articulate, people eventually gathered to hear him speak. When he parted ways with his teacher some 20 years later, his own pupils would come to be known as Zenonians.

Today, however, we call those people Stoics. Zeno is the founder of Stoic philosophy. 2,000 years later, it is one of the fundamental pillars of Western history. An entire branch of education is dedicated to studying, interpreting, and understanding its ideas. We teach Stoicism to children in schools and every month, over 300,000 adults turn to Google to learn more about it.

Ultimately, all of this goes back to one man’s decision to bounce back slowly. Instead of racing to recover his cargo, make the next trade, or return home with the next ship, he allowed the dust to settle. Once it did, he was able to see a new path and step on it with confidence.

I’m sure he would agree that sometimes, idleness can lead to amazing things.

A Chance For Quiet Observation

I’m not a boxer, so I can only imagine how much strategy follows being knocked down, but even if you know you can get up again, wouldn’t it be smart to stay down till the count’s at nine? They’re just seconds, but seconds of recovery nonetheless.

What’s more, they’re seconds of quiet observation. They give you a chance to catch up on your environment. Get a feel for what’s going on. Of course, life is not a boxing match. You can stay down for a while. Take some time to think. Even look at the stars. And, once you do come back, you’ll come out swinging.

But when we respond to setbacks with ever more aggressive attacks, we rob serendipity of the space it needs to unfold. It’s impossible to contextualize individual events when they’re inches from our face. We need time to process, to let our guts digest the experience. So that they may lead us in the right direction going forward.

Whether it’s the same direction we used to have or an entirely new one, we can’t know in advance. But I have a hunch that those, who take a deep breath and stay idle for some time, will often quote the words of Zeno looking back:

“I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered shipwreck.”