Life Archives - Page 8 of 15

Zen Stories for a Calm, Clear & Open Mind

January 11, 2019February 7, 2023 Nik

My theme for 2019 is ‘focus.’ Focus on the work and projects that matter, the people I really care about, and, most of all, focus of the mind. If you’re anything like me — an overthinking introvert with a mind that’s always on — that last one is especially difficult.

Part of it’s just human nature. Our brains are wired to look for problems. To obsess over an issue we can fix. Until we create a solution, which gives us a short burst of relief. Then, it’s on to the next thing.

But for introverts, it’s particularly easy to get stuck on the obsession part. Our default response to almost anything is to think up a maze in our mind, then zip through it until we’ve explored every corner. Like a mouse looking for cheese, even if there’s none to be found.

One of the few things that’s helped me stop spinning in circles in my own head is Zen stories. I’m not sure why. Maybe, I can relate to the imagery associated with Buddhist monks. Maybe, I’m a sucker for allegories. In any case, while some people might think they’re cheesy, they work for me.

When my mind is cloudy, a Zen story can clear it up. When I’m frantic, it calms me down. And when I’m too close to the trees to see the forest, it helps me see.

You may not be an introvert or compulsive thinker, but I hope you’ll still benefit from the following seven stories. I know they’ve done wonders for me.

You Don’t Need Motivation — You Need Rational Habits

January 4, 2019October 2, 2022 Nik

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank You For Being You

December 31, 2018May 10, 2022 Nik

You know what I miss? Unconditional gratitude.

Not even unconditional support, which, if you’re really lucky, you might get from your parents, one friend, or your partner. Just unconditional gratitude.

Everyone always wants something. Most opportunities are disguised requests. Because even the people closest to you don’t think about your needs first. That’s human nature. We think about our own and then hope that, maybe, our needs will align with those of others. And, sometimes, they do.

But, most of the time, they don’t. So we’re not really helping. If I ask you to join me at an event, is it because you’ll benefit or because I don’t want to go alone? If I want to spend more time with you, do I want to infect you with my joy or hope you’ll soften my misery? We can genuinely want to help and think we do, but might still end up projecting our own fears and ideas on another.

The majority of even the nicest things we do is, ultimately, about us. Not the recipients of our generosity. Go through a couple of incidents in your head. It’s true. And it’s shocking how deep this runs.

Since this “feature” has been hardwired into our brains in times of ancient survival, it has lasted us all the way to modern office warfare and is, thus, almost impossible to rewire. But we can choose not to use it.

We can just say “thank you” instead. No further questions. Not this time.

That’s how I want to end the year.

Thank you for being you. For all the mistakes you made and the flaws you found that you wanna change. For the times you did and the times you could not, for one day they will all add up.

Thank you for showing up. To work. To sports. To parties, dates, and family events of all sorts. To your morning run, to your friend’s emergency, to anything fun, and to all kinds of catastrophes.

Thank you for trying your best. I know it didn’t always do, but it’s really nothing but a test. A test of courage, patience, grit, faith, perseverance, and humility. A test designed for all of us each day, including you and me.

Thank you for keeping it together. At least most of the time. We all struggle in bad weather, we all want the sun to shine. Thank you for not losing hope when it was gone, for hanging in there in the night, waiting for the dawn.

Thank you for choosing yourself. For saying “me first” to save your sanity and health. Sometimes, it’s hard to listen to the voice inside, but when we look back it’s what fills us with pride. You at your best is what best serves us all, so there’s nothing to gain from your playing small.

Thank you for supporting the groups you’re a part of. The groups you’re the heart of. Humanity is one big band but on few shoulders every day we stand. Thank you for gluing together those friends, for tough conversations, inside jokes, and lending a helping hand.

Thank you for shaping the future. For growing into it one day at a time. We need your contribution. We need yours as much as mine. It’s something we build as much as we find, to do either takes a present mind.

Thank you for losing your shit. For flying off the handle when life needed a hit. It might not always spin the right direction, but when it stops spinning we’ll drift into regression. Sometimes, to keep going you have to fall apart. Sometimes, it takes shattered pieces to reassemble a broken heart.

Thank you for feeling with all you’ve got. For living your emotions and trusting your gut. For embracing sadness, happiness, frustration, and joy. For leaning in when you could’ve leaned away.

Thank you for mourning what you’ve lost. Life has different prices, but in the end, we all pay a cost. A sacrifice, a bad encounter, a careless attempt or an honest mistake. Different reasons, different times, but no one gets around being, seeing, learning too late.

Thank you for spreading your light. For celebrating, sending out sparks, and shining very bright. For motivating, for inspiring, for pushing others without tiring. Our energy is plus or minus, thanks for ditching bad and choosing kindness.

Thank you for abandoning good in search of better. For breaking rules instead of following them to the letter. For leaping high outside the bowl, aspiring to some higher goal. You mightn’t score in the first round, but jumping helps catch the rebound.

Thank you for being you. I don’t even know your name. But forever be you regardless. Because without you, the world would never quite be the same.

Thank you for being you.

Do You Believe in Ethical Wealth?

December 26, 2018September 17, 2023 Nik

In Germany, we have a saying: “Geld stinkt nicht.” It means “money doesn’t stink” and goes back to emperor Vespasian.

Urine builds ammonia over time, which can be used to tan leather. Therefore, the Romans collected it in public urinals. When Vespasian levied a tax on those, his son Titus challenged the ethics of this move. The emperor grabbed some of the money and held it under Titus’s nose. “Does the smell bother you?” “No,” his son replied. “And yet, it’s made of urine.”

Eventually, the phrase morphed into “pecunia non olet” — “money has no smell.” When we use it today, we usually mean the exact opposite. It’s code for “something’s fishy here” or “don’t ask where this came from.”

Given how old this story is, this meme has influenced our culture for a long, long time. That’s a problem because now, a lot of us think money stinks.

Everything I Know Is True – My Entire Life in 55 Lessons

December 19, 2018May 18, 2022 Nik

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke once said:

“Death is being alive and not knowing it.”

I guess until 2012, I was dead. It’s not like I wasn’t living. I was trying my best and, most of the time, I was happy. But I didn’t realize it and so I was unable to appreciate the vastness of this incredible experience called life.

I didn’t know who I was. How much I could change. That I could shape life as much as it could shape me. So when I read something that hinted at these things for the first time, I began a lifelong journey: the quest to know myself.

Seneca said it takes a lifetime to learn how to live, just like it takes a lifetime to learn how to die. But with each new piece of the ever-changing puzzle you find, you get a little closer to your true self. To being alive and knowing it.

More importantly, you’ll develop the confidence to express that self. To not be trapped by dogma and societal doctrine. I’ve only just begun, and there’s infinitely more to discover, but here’s everything I know to be true right now.

The most important part of figuring out how to live is asking the question.
“I don’t know” is not an admission of defeat, it’s the start of empowerment.
Most of the solutions to life’s challenges lie in sitting with yourself.
The only person you’ll spend the rest of your life with is you.
Imagination is our most powerful ability. It is also the most dangerous.
If you run out of kind words for yourself, stop talking.
Empathy is learning to look in the mirror and not hate what you see.
The truth about ourselves is what we choose to believe.
Freedom is always internal. Whether ‘to’ or ‘from,’ it starts in the mind.
Having a choice matters more than whatever choice you make.
Love is not a noun, it’s a verb. And it starts with loving yourself.
We should believe more in what we create, less in what we emulate.
We can’t choose what we’re raised to value, but we can choose to change.
What we learn alone is what we carry into our interactions with others.
All relationships in life have mutual effects. Everything is connected.
Comparison is not just the death of joy, it is also the birth of misery.
It’s better to be curious than judgmental and impossible to be both at once.
Study the failures of those around you, not the wins of those far away.
Our fixed point of view is an individual limit, but a collective strength.
Changing your perspective is hard, but let it always be your first try.
How much we learn is limited by how open-minded we are, not time.
Aging won’t free you from stupidity. Only learning will.
A mistake is only as valuable as the time you spend thinking about it.
Minimalism is not about physical space, it’s about making room to think.
Every lesson in life comes at the expense of unlearning another.
Seeing clearly is holding different truths in your head at the same time.
The more you listen, the smarter you get. Listening leads to learning.
The smarter you get, the more you listen. Learning leads to humility.
The best tools always put you in control, even when you’re not using them.
Books are infinite. If you treat them right, they’ll keep on giving forever.
We can’t delegate our responsible use of technology to technology itself.
When we make technology our ideology, we let our tools form our identity.
You don’t need an identity to have a life.
The only way to stay true to who you are is to change every day.
There is no right set of habits. Just the ability to adapt at the right time.
Know how to build and break habits and you’ll always flow with change.
Reality consists of subjects and verbs. We supply all the adjectives.
The only place where we can truly live is the present. It all happens here.
Peace of mind relies on having faith in present-you.
Often, the easiest way is the hard way. More effort, but less competition.
Few things that are risky are actually dangerous.
Social acceptance is a bad metric for making choices and tracking success.
When the outside world is loud, be quiet inside.
Your work should reflect who you are, not what you want your life to be.
Detachment bears authenticity, expectations cloud your thinking.
The easiest way to attract what you desire is to deserve what you want.
Wanting what makes you happy requires wanting the right things.
Half of happiness is learning to love everything you don’t have.
If you travel because you’re unhappy, you’ll never reach your destination.
Happiness is a spontaneous byproduct, not a permanent state.
Death will be an interruption.
Your legacy will be determined by the perception of others. Not you.
Everything that’s part of the grand circle is destined to die. Including us.
What you do in your one life will be everything you ever do.
If we act accordingly, life is long enough for most of us.

How to Really Develop Self-Awareness

December 12, 2018May 18, 2022 Nik

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Math of Knowing Who You Are

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Value of Character Snapshots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning an Inch Into a Mile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Single-Thread Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Why You Should Trust People First

November 30, 2018May 8, 2022 Nik

We used to be best friends. Now, I hadn’t heard from her in six months.

My last “Hey, how are you?” had disappeared in the vast nothingness universe of unanswered WhatsApp messages.

Eventually, I thought she didn’t care anymore. That she had silently deleted me from her life, just like we now nuke our relationships by unfriending people on Facebook. You know, without ever telling them.

I was sad for a bit, but these things happen. Friendships die. Connections fizzle out. The shared culture you’ve developed takes on a life of its own and, once you stop tending to it, spins out of control. It slowly circles from meaning into emptiness, ultimately landing right next to that last WhatsApp message.

Ironically, one of our last talks had been about just that. The fact that losing touch is a sad, but sometimes healthy and necessary, part of life.

Then, two weeks ago, I stumbled over some old Tinie Tempah songs. Instantly, my mind slingshotted into a nostalgic flashback. I remembered the time we spent raving in clubs with the gang. I remembered how we yelled “tsunami!” all the time for no reason. I remembered how we blasted his songs driving around in the summer.

And so, in a moment of vulnerability, I sent a message:

You’ll always be the first person I think of every time I hear Tinie Tempah.

She replied:

That’s the best message I got all week!! So glad to hear from you!

We started chatting and caught up. Before I could even start to wonder why she didn’t message me all this time if she were so excited about talking to me, she said something that perfectly explained it.

That same week, she had met a mutual friend of ours, who, like her, had recently entered the workforce. After the usual “how’s your job,” “fine,” and “what else is new,” my friend confessed she was having doubts. That not all was great at work. That she was having second thoughts about her choice.

Suddenly, the girl she talked to opened up. She too wasn’t happy.

And then my friend said the sentence that stuck with me: “I think she just needed a trust advance.”

As it turns out, so did my friend.

A trust advance is reaching for a stranger’s heavy bag on the bus and saying “let me.” They might flinch, but they’ll usually be thankful for your help.

A trust advance is shouting “hold the door” and hoping the person in it won’t take your out-of-breath-ness as a threat. They’ll rarely shut it in your face.

A trust advance is admitting that you just don’t feel like it when someone asks you to join their spontaneous soirée. That you’re not in a good place.

A trust advance is not deflecting the “why” that follows. Because the only way to find out whether they meant it or not is to give an honest answer.

A trust advance is being the first to say that “some things about my job really suck,” to deliberately turn off the highlight reel and start with the real stuff.

A trust advance is picking up a loose end even if someone else left it hanging.

A trust advance is saying “I’m sorry” before you’re sure you screwed up.

A trust advance is texting “I miss you” without context because feelings don’t need one. They’re true the second you have them.

A trust advance is choosing to show your private self in public, even if it means you’ll be exposed. But maybe you’ll get others to show theirs.

A trust advance is tearing down a wall without knowing what’s on the other side. You might be carried away by the wind, but you also might make a new friend.

By and large, we live in a world where our biggest concerns are our careers, our relationships, and our happiness. Most of us are not running through the wilderness trying to survive. More people in the world die from too much food than too little. More from self-harm than violence.

As a result, cooperation now carries disproportionately greater reward than competition. It’s what allowed us to create this world of abundance in the first place. We haven’t figured out how to allocate it best, but we’re getting there. And while the world isn’t perfect and never will be, cooperating humans win.

Therefore, most of the risks we take are risks of rejection, of being exposed and vulnerable. But they’re not risks of survival. They’re problems of ego, not existence. Being laughed at, being told “no,” being rejected romantically—these are not matters of life and death.

Trust advances multiply. You hand out one, and they’ll hand out five more.

We forget this. Our brains haven’t caught up. They still equate “I’m sorry,” “I miss you,” and “I need help” with “I’m gonna pet this tiger.” But they’re not actually dangerous. We fear these things because we can’t control them. That they’re really unlikely to happen doesn’t register. We’d rather have a definitive threat we can respond to than a vague improbability that’s out of our hands.

When I reached out to my friend I felt weak — but actually, I was the strong one. Sending that message felt like caving, like giving in. In reality, I was the one showing up—the one saying “here I am.” Yes, I exposed myself. Yes, I was vulnerable. But it was an act of courage, not defeat. And in today’s world, at least most of the time, courage is rewarded, not rejected.

The best thing you can do to be of service; to be a good friend, partner, parent, even stranger; to be the person we all want to be around, is to be vulnerable.

There’s this popular line that “everything you want is on the other side of fear.” But fear is nothing I can act on. I think everything you want is on the other side of being vulnerable. That’s something I can do. I can always hand out more trust advances.

No one spends their day obsessing about having to buy toilet paper. We’re all thinking about deep stuff, all the time. Let’s use our time to talk about these things. You might still get hurt, but the risk pales in comparison to the reward.

Being vulnerable tears down walls between humans. Behind those walls are trust, love, honesty, joy, resilience, friendship, and lots of other magical things. What’s more, each wall that crumbles hands more people a hammer. Trust advances multiply. You hand out one, and they’ll hand out five more.

Give trust first, and the world will shower you with trust in return.

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?

Category: Life