Category: Medium

The 7 Cardinal Rules of Life

The 7 Cardinal Rules of Life

Nik

When I was 18, I had no idea who I wanted to be. I was about to leave home and start college, and the only thing I knew was that the future was uncertain.

Before I left, I tried to fight my nervosity in many ways. I read everything I could get my hands on that seemed relevant to my chosen academic field — a mix of business and engineering. I prepared my courses in advance. I sought reassurance from others that I’d chosen a good school and degree.

In the end, what helped me the most was an exercise you could file under “youthful naïvete:” I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down “my 30 guiding principles.” Most of them were simple, like “Let go what must be let go,” “Simplify,” and, “Have no secrets.” I still have the list. It’s on my pinboard. I’m looking at it right now. So why was I naïve to create it?

First of all, I didn’t know that what I’d come up with weren’t actually principles. They were just rules.

The difference between a rule and a principle is that one is merely a guideline that follows from the other. Principles don’t break. They’re universal. Gravity is a principle. Whether it’s you who falls from a skyscraper, your cat, or a 17th century vase, it’s not gonna end well. Gravity makes no exceptions.

In order to deal with principles, we have rules. “Don’t jump off skyscrapers” is a rule and a good one at that. Unlike principles, however, rules break all the time. Often, it’s us doing the breaking — and often prematurely.

Eventually, however, even the best rules expire. It’s part of their design. Once they no longer serve their function, they’re meant to be broken. “Don’t go faster than 30 miles per hour” is a rule. It’s useful on a poorly built road, but once that road becomes a highway, it must be updated.

That’s the second reason my list was premature: In the ten years since I wrote them down, I have broken every single one of my rules. And yet, I’m still glad I wrote that list. You know why? Because the idea that I wanted to live by some rules — despite not knowing which ones or how or why — was enough.

It didn’t matter that the list was arbitrary. What mattered was that it sent me on a path where I would look for rules and principles everywhere, learn to tell the difference, and continue to build my life around them as I went.

Today, what I’m most interested in is neither principles nor rules, but what lives in-between. That’s one of the many lessons I learned along the way: Each rule may have a lifecycle, but that cycle can repeat many times in one life. So if a rule somehow keeps reappearing, keeps proving itself as useful, and continues to hurt if I break it, that rule catches my attention.

Such rules have extended validity and therefore live right between normal guidelines and the base layer of principles. I guess we could call them ‘cardinal rules.’ As you can imagine, they’re hard to come by.

Luckily, I found some.

The 7 Cardinal Rules of Life

In 1995, Studio Ghibli, a Japanese anime company, released a movie called Whisper of the Heart. It’s about two high school students struggling with their artistic callings, their feelings for each other, and coming of age.

About a decade ago, someone extracted seven rules from the film and released them online. The original source remains lost, but they’ve been making the rounds ever since.

Like my own rules, they’re all quite simple, but much closer to timeless principles. So whoever you are, wherever you sit: Thank you.

Thank you for giving us…The 7 Cardinal Rules of Life.

1. Make peace with your past so it won’t mess with your present.

Bill Gates says the worst day in his life was the day his mother died. It’s a simple reminder that we all have regrets.

We all keep past versions of ourselves in a closet somewhere, and every time we open it, we feel pain and suffering. We can’t change the people we once were, but we can make peace with them. Open the closet and let in some light. Reconcile. Otherwise, our past will forever be a drag on our heels.

Life is but a series of fleeting moments, one forever chasing the next. The only place where you can live, act, and make a difference is the present. Today.

2. Time heals everything, so give it time.

Sometimes, you can’t find the power to move on immediately. Sometimes, you really want to kick yourself. That too is part of life. What you can do is allow time to pass.

I know you want to just fix everything and move on, but if you stitch a wound poorly, it’ll get worse down the road. So take time. Take care of yourself. Your health. Your broken heart and broken parts.

Sometimes, even what heals leaves a scar. Those will be with us forever. The least we can do is let them mend properly.

3. What others think of you is none of your business.

Most of our scars come from wounds inflicted by other people. Words can hurt us more than weapons. But it’s not your job to imagine what arrows people might point at you inside their heads. The majority will never fire.

4. Don’t compare your life to others, and don’t judge them.

Instead of taking shots at others, most people decide to draw up — and lose at — another imagined game: Who’s better? It’s a moot question. We have no idea what anyone’s story is like up to the page on which we meet them.

Mark Twain said, “Comparison is the death of joy.” Worse, it’s also the birth of misery. The less you compare, the bigger your capacity for empathy. Meet people on their own terms. You won’t doubt yourself as much and be less prone to jealousy, which only leads to fear, anger, hate, and suffering.

5. Stop thinking so much, it’s alright not to know the answers.

If you’re not supposed to think about others, nor what they think, what are you supposed to mull over? What you think of yourself? Actually, it’s fine to not think so much at all. Answers often come to you when you least expect it.

Make your choices. Choose a path. Be determined. Commit. But, once you have, let the chips fall where they may. You’ll know when to take a different fork in the road.

6. No one is in charge of your happiness, except you.

At the end of the day, what you desire most in life only you can give to yourself. You already have everything. Right inside. Feel your heart. Point at your chest. There. That’s where happiness is.

We spend all this time looking for something we can’t see because it’s not there. The outside world is only as good as what you do with everything that happens in it. Are you cultivating your experiences? Cherishing them?

If not, it’s not fuel or oxygen that’s missing. Only you can relight that fire because it rests deep inside. Choose to kindle that flame. Protect it. Hold up its light. And let it shine for everyone to see.

7. Smile, for you don’t own all the problems in the world.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has over 160 million fans. He gets a lot of letters. But none like Haley Harbottle’s.

Haley has Moebius syndrome. She’s 22. She has never smiled in her life. Haley was supposed to have “smile surgery,” but her anaesthetist made a mistake and she almost died. Soon, she’ll try it again, hoping to smile for the first time.

There is someone on this planet literally dying to smile. Yet here we are, you and I, walking around, often choosing not to extend this simple, near-automatic gesture to uplift our fellow human beings.

Whatever problems plague you in your day-to-day life, chances are, they’re not all that important in the grand scheme of things. We each have our own challenges, but as long as you can smile, do it. Who knows who you’ll infect.

The True Purpose of Rules & Principles

Here’s one more thing I’ve learned about rules and principles: Many rules can follow from one principle, but you can never act on principle alone.

“Friendship should be based on loyalty” is a principle you can aspire to live by, but without the rule of “I never abandon my friends at the last minute,” it doesn’t mean anything.

When I was 18, I thought I could rein in the chaos of the world with a few well-chosen guidelines. I was wrong, but I took a step in the right direction: We can never control the world, but in learning to control ourselves, we can get better at dealing with this fact. Structure isn’t something we can project on the outside, but if we cultivate it internally, we’ll be ready to make a change when we need to.

That’s what all this rule-setting and principle-discovering taught me: Learning how to live is an ongoing process. There will always be rules to be updated, principles to be understood better, new ideas to be added to old truths.

We decide who we are in this world not once but with every action we take, every principle we value, and every rule we choose to follow. That is their true purpose: to serve us in our everlasting quest to become.

I don’t know how long the rules from the movie will last for you on this never-ending mission, but, like one of its characters, I’d like to remind you:

“You’re wonderful. There’s no need to rush. Please take your time.”

Your Only Job Is to Let Yourself Be Good Enough Cover

Your Only Job Is to Let Yourself Be Good Enough

Nik

You know that Coldplay song, Viva La Vida? The one with the strings and choir that tells the story of a fallen king:

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning, I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own

I’ve always wondered why it’s such an upbeat song. Why it’s called “long live life” when it’s about someone who’s lost everything they had in theirs. Well, Chris Martin, lead singer of the band, once explained the title.

When he was in Mexico, he went to a museum, and, in there, he saw the last painting Frida Kahlo ever made. It’s called Viva La Vida.

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The 3 Kinds of Overthinking Cover

The 3 Kinds of Overthinking

Nik

Overthinking comes in two flavors: ruminating on the past and worrying about the future. Both offer endless avenues to create a downward spiral of negative thoughts, but, at the end of the day, they resemble two simple fears we all have: a fear of regret and a fear of uncertainty.

Of course, it’s impossible to completely avoid regret and uncertainty in our lives. Therefore, the overthinking outbreaks that result from us being afraid of them are, generally, our most unproductive.

We can’t change what we could have, would have, should have done better, slower, faster, not at all, or not quite the way we did it. We can’t assess the flaws, success, or even likelihood of countless scenarios and eventualities that will never come to pass.

All thoughts in either direction are a waste of mental and physical energy. As soon as reality knocks on our senses or we snap out of our thought bubble and return to it, they go up in flames, having cost us dearly, but gained us little.

There is, however, a third kind of overthinking: Obsessing over solutions to present-day problems.

We source these problems from our recent past or immediate future, then frantically assess options to combat them. If you find yourself musing about 17 different strategies to mellow your explosive temper after lashing out at someone or flicking through book after book to find the best business model for the startup you want to launch, that’s present-day overthinking.

This type of compulsive thinking can often be productive, which is why it’s the hardest to get rid of, to diagnose, and to accept as a problem in the first place.

In fact, as a society, we often celebrate people for performing mental ultra-marathons. We call them successful entrepreneurs. We shower them with money and status and tell them to never stop.

Ask the world’s richest man what his worst fear is, and he’ll say he doesn’t want his brain to stop working. That’s how embedded overthinking is in our culture. But it’s still overthinking, still eating away at our peace of mind and happiness.

To some extent, our problem-solving nature is just that — nature. Our brains are wired for survival and, for the better part of 200,000 years, surviving meant being creative.

Not just in the literal sense of procreating and producing food and shelter from our surroundings, but also in being crafty in planning our next move. How can we cross this field without being exposed? What’s the best way to avoid being seen by the tiger? Those are creative problems. They require immediate thought, strategy selection, and subsequent action.

For better or for worse, however, the world no longer presents us with a single, constant survival problem, framed in a great variety of differing challenges. For the most part, we’ve got that covered.

Instead, we’re now tasked with moderating an entity that’s much harder to maintain than the human body and that we know next to nothing about despite decades of research: the human mind.

Rather than run down the simple 3-item checklist of “food, sleep, exercise,” we now face vast, open-ended questions, like “How do I find meaning?”, “What makes me happy?”, and “How can I best manage my emotions and attention?”

These aren’t simple problems. There are no clear-cut answers. They’re lifetime projects, and we slowly craft their outcomes through the habits and behaviors we choose every day. That’s the thing. We choose. We get to. There’s no pressure to think-pick-act. Only freedom in near-limitless quantities.

As a result, our problem-seeking, survivalistic simulation machine turns on itself. In lack of real, pressing issues to tackle, it finds some where none exist or crafts one from its own imagination. That’s overthinking type I and II. The dwelling on regrets and anxiety about the future.

Or — and this is the brain’s ultimate self-deception — it latches on to a tangible, relatable, available challenge and goes into brainstorm overdrive.

How can I go from zero running experience to completing a marathon in nine months? What podcast are people dying to listen to that doesn’t exist? Is there a way to improve or replace the umbrella? Questions like these make our synapses light up, but whether they find graspable answers or not, it’s easy for them to become self-perpetuating.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting meaningful work and finding happiness through self-improvement, but when these endeavors and the productive thoughts that go into them become ends instead of tools, we quickly drift into self-loathing and misery. So how can we stop at the right moment?

There is no shortage of tactics from science to help us address our past- and future-oriented overclocking. Most of them involve replacing the negative thought with a more positive one, for example by looking at different angles of a situation to make the bad scenario less believable or reframing problems as challenges.

Instead of blaming your soggy shoes on bad luck, you could look to the rainy weather or inattentive driver who splashed you as he went by. Similarly, you could focus on wanting to feel fitter rather than lamenting that you’re out of shape.

There’s also the idea of simply writing down your thoughts for a sense of relief, distracting yourself, and learning to stay present so you can focus on whatever’s right in front of you.

From personal experience, I can say that last one is particularly powerful. Meditation helps me stay aware throughout my day, not just of the negative consequences of overthinking, but of individual thoughts themselves and whether I want to further pursue them or not.

None of us can turn off our inner monologue for extended periods of time. It runs right through each of the 16 or so hours we’re awake each day. But we can decide which thoughts deserve to be chased and which ones don’t. We can learn to let go and return to whatever we we’re doing.

But what do we do when our positive and well-intended thoughts spiral? How do we deal with our entrepreneurial, creative energy when it runs wild?

That, I think, requires one more step: Knowing you are valuable even when you don’t do anything. When I meditate, I constantly remind myself that, “I don’t have to think about this right now.” Lately, I even tell myself: “You don’t have to think at all.”

For me, this realization gets to the heart of the problem: Even when you don’t think, you’re still a valuable, lovable human being.

In a world that guarantees the survival of many but provides existential guidance to none, doing, thinking, solving problems, it all matters little in comparison to us being here in the first place. Right here, right now. It’s a wonderful, rare thing to have been born and be alive today. Enough to be grateful and more than that to be enough.

Type III overthinkers define themselves by how much they think. How many problems they solve, how useful and busy they are, and how many of their own faults they can erase. But even when you don’t think — can’t think, as nature sometimes reminds all of us — you’re still a valuable person.

You might be afraid that people will laugh at you, isolate you, throw you out into the cold. That won’t happen and it’s something you should take comfort in again and again.

Mindfulness is an excellent tool to combat all kinds of overthinking. What allows you to exercise it in the first place, however, is remembering we’ll still love you, even if your mind doesn’t always run like a perfect, well-oiled machine.

Why You Can Do Anything Cover

Why You Can Do Anything

Nik

In the 1970s, there was an electrician in Philadelphia. The man’s job was to install freezing cases in supermarkets. You know, the long aisles with glass doors where you pick up your milk and frozen pizza. To set up his own little workshop, the man bought an old bakery.

One summer, he decided to rebuild the front wall. It was made of bricks, about 16 feet high, and 30 feet long. After he had torn down the old façade, he called his two sons to the site. They were twelve and nine years old. He told them they were now in charge of building a new wall.

The boys’ first task was to dig a six-foot hole for the foundation. Then, they filled it with concrete, which they had to mix by hand. Clearly, this wasn’t just a job for the summer holidays. For the next year and a half, every day after school, the boys went to their father’s shop to build the wall. To the young brothers, it felt like forever. But eventually, they laid the final brick.

When their dad came to audit what they had done, the three of them stood back and looked at the result. There it was. A brand new, magnificent, 16 by 30 feet wall. The man looked at his sons and said, “Don’t y’all never tell me that you can’t do something” — and then he walked into the shop.

The electrician’s name was Willard Carrol Smith. It’s the same name he gave his oldest son, the 12-year-old in the story. Today, we know him as Will Smith.

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Compassion Is How You Free Your Past Selves

Nik

After 33 years in hiding, Superman is forced to reveal himself to the world.

The commander of an ominous, alien ship demands the people of earth “hand over” their visitor…or else. But Clark Kent was raised a reasonable man, and so, to spare humanity the trouble, he volunteers.

Of course, nothing good happens inside the hull of that ship. Hailing from Kal-El’s home planet, the invaders plan to revive their race on earth, using his DNA. For good measure, they kidnap his love in the process and, ultimately, Clark has no choice but to try and escape.

Luckily, his father is there to help. A projection, at least. A holographic memory. As he shows his son a way out of the spacecraft, Clark inquires about the potential of his blood to re-erect Krypton.

“We wanted you to learn what it meant to be human first. So that one day, when the time was right, you could be the bridge between two peoples.”

And then, just as Clark spots the love of his life, hurling towards earth in a broken escape pod, Superman’s dad speaks his last words to his son:

“You can save her, Kal. You can save all of them.”

2D Characters in a 3D World

When I meditate, all bets are off. There’s no way to predict what my subconscious will send back to the surface. The only thing I know is that, sooner or later, every memory I have will make an appearance.

What they all have in common is a prior version of me, a version that’s long gone but whose hologram — like Superman’s dad — still lingers. Usually, each projection is one-dimensional. Focused on one trait, one idea, one action that defined me at the time — and thus the memory.

There’s the me who felt like a true Pokémon trainer, walking around with his GameBoy all day. The me that felt smarter than the other kids. The me who dreamed about changing the world but never did anything. These memories might be true, but they’re all just one part of me at one point in time. Flat. 2D characters in a three-dimensional past.

This week, however, another Nik showed up. A Nik from the future. I’m not sure he was Nik at all. He felt so…weightless. Dimensionless. There was no single fixture pinning him to the back of my mind. He didn’t need to be there. He just was. And even though he didn’t say anything, he still sent a message.

It was the same message his father’s hologram sent Kal:

“You can save all of them.”

No Hope Left

The men are locked high in the oil rig’s central tower. They’re on their last tank of oxygen, and the fire is closing in. There’s no hope left for them.

Two hands scrunch the door like it’s paper, and a shirtless, burning man steps in. Less than a minute later, the men board the chopper to safety. Superman has saved the day.

That’s what my past selves feel like. At least some of them. A group of children, victims, prisoners. Huddled together, sitting in a damp cell, waiting for someone to come and rescue them.

There’s the me that watched too much porn for all the wrong reasons. The me that cried over a girl that didn’t deserve him. The me that hurt his family over his own shortcomings. They’re all so pitiful, sitting there. Now, they do have reason to cry. They regret things. It’s too late for them.

But then, a sound breaks the silence. Heavy iron moving. A door opens and on the cold, hard floor falls a little ray of sunshine.

Who Is This Guy?

I don’t know where the other Nik came from. He wasn’t a person. More of a wave, just…flowing. A glowing wave of compassion.

Light floods the prison. It hurts, but it’s warm. “He sees us,” they think. And, for the fraction of a second, he does. Every single one.

The me who botched the relationship with my idol. “It’s okay.”

The me who fell off his bike and never wanted to ride again. “It’s okay.”

The me who first felt real empathy, listening to a lost artist’s songs. “It’s okay.”

“You’re all here because you can’t change. Your time is over. But you’re still worth loving.”

Damn. Who is this guy? And where has he been all these years?

All Bent Out of Shape

The school bully pulls Clark out of the car and throws him against the fence. Plato’s Republic still in hand, he’s too scared to react to provocations. But with adult bystanders watching, the gang decides to leave. Only one kid remains.

A tap on his knee makes Clark jump. A chubby, redhead boy with glasses extends a hand. Clark gets up. The fence post he held on to is all bent out of shape. Then, his human dad steps in, asking if the others hurt him.

“You know they can’t.”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant are you all right?”

“I wanted to hit that kid. I wanted to hit him so bad.”

“I know you did. I mean part of me even wanted you to, but then what? Make you feel any better?”

And then, as he looks at his father with tears in his eyes, Clark hears the human version of what his real dad will tell him 20 years later:

“You just have to decide what kind of man you want to grow up to be, Clark. Because whoever that man is, good character or bad, he’s…

He’s gonna change the world.”

How To Save Your Past Selves

Who are we in that last scene? The bully? The victim? The friend? I think we’re all of them. Sometimes at the same time.

We shove our past selves into a corner and we yell at them, hoping we’ll get a response. Some kind of explanation of why we let ourselves down. Often, there isn’t one, or we don’t like the one we hear. Meanwhile, the victims are cowering against the wall. Further bottling up their pain and regret — bending the post out of shape. But then what? Make us feel any better? No. But we can also choose to extend a hand. To be our own, chubby, nerdy little friend.

Compassion is a lot of things. Sympathy. Empathy. Patience. But it always starts with acceptance. A non-judgmental, holistic view of who you are. That’s how you open the gate and free those prisoners. That’s how you save your past selves.

I don’t know how you’ll find your compassion, but whenever it happens, you’ll realize it was always there to begin with. Slumbering deep inside yourself. Sometimes, you need to meditate to wake it. Sometimes, you just need a friend. Or something else entirely.

What I know for sure is that the memories you hold hostage are memories of a person worth loving. They were never one-dimensional. That’s just a result of storage compression. You’ve always lived in a three-dimensional space.

It’s true that we sometimes make one-sided decisions. We’re not perfect. But in being our own bully or best friend, we decide who we grow up to be. Good character or bad. One day, one decision, one memory at a time.

That character may not change the world, but they will definitely change our world. Yes. We’re not Superman. We can’t save everybody. But we don’t have to. There are a lot of us. If we each free our past selves, that is enough. I know it doesn’t always feel like it, but I promise:

You can save all of them.

You Control Your Thoughts, Not Your Impulses Cover

You Control Your Thoughts, Not Your Impulses

Nik

When you’re hungry, are you actually hungry, or do you just think you’re hungry?

“What a dumb question,” you might think, “of course I know when I’m hungry!” But do you? There’s plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise.

For one thing, 70% of Americans are either overweight or obese. Not all those cases might be the result of overeating, but a lot of them are. At some point in their lives, two out of three people in the United States have lost the connection between how much they should eat and how much they actually eat. Chances are, that initial question has something to do with it.

You may not have a weight problem yourself, but you sure know what it’s like to eat something you shouldn’t have. We all do. Who can blame us? So many tasty snacks, so many great TV shows, modern technology just makes it too easy to keep munching chips long after you’re satisfied. Clearly, we can’t always tell reality from fiction when it comes to our stomachs growling.

Why is that? Let’s do a thought exercise to understand what’s going on.

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We Used To Just Live Cover

We Used To Just Live

Nik

I remember simpler times.

I remember a time when I woke up every morning and didn’t immediately know what time it was. Sometimes, I looked at the clock on my nightstand. Sometimes, I didn’t. I just…woke up. That was my task for the first few minutes of the day. Wake up. Realize that it’s another day. Another day that would be good or bad, long or short, slow or fast, but another day that would be, above all, full of life. Not devices and tools and to-dos. Life.

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You’re Not Lazy, Bored, Or Unmotivated

Nik

I don’t know you, but I know this: You have internet access and enough time to spend some of it reading.

This is obvious to you and me, but this non-observation tells me two further, much more interesting things about you:

  1. You are in the top half of humanity’s wealth distribution. That’s right. You may not live in Singapore, Dubai, or even the US or Europe, but access to this all-powerful tool alone puts you in the top 50% — because the other half isn’t even online yet.
  2. You are fighting the modern human struggle. Since you’re here, reading, you’re not busy surviving. You’ve got the basics covered. Food. A roof over your head. It may not be great, not what you dream about at night, but, where you live, the basics of civilization are in place. You know you’ll be around tomorrow. You’re fighting to thrive, not survive.

In this fight, this lifelong battle to fulfill your potential and build a life that makes you happy while also giving you a sense of meaning, you’re not dealing with physical obstacles. You’re trying to defeat abstract enemies.

There’s no one blocking the road to riches. Anyone can get on there. There’s just the market, and, yes, it’s a tough place. But people pay for things every day. Good products, good services, good people win.

There’s no obscure cult guarding the secret to happiness. It’s all in your head. And your hands. Happiness is a consequence of the decisions you make and the people you choose to engage with. Your actions, your emotions, your choices are what you have to work on.

Even if you are facing challenges with physical constraints, like excelling at sports, overcoming a disability, or moving to a place with more economic opportunity, these real-world barriers aren’t what’ll stop you from living the life you want. It’s the hypothetical, made up, self-conjured concepts in your head that will ruin you.

Concepts like laziness, boredom, self-doubt, procrastination, and everything Steven Pressfield would subsume under the term ‘Resistance.’

I’m here to tell you: All these concepts are one and the same and there’s only one way to deal with them.

You’re not lazy. You’re not bored. You’re not unmotivated. What you are — what all of us are — is afraid. And the only thing we can do that really helps — the only line of motivation we’ll ever need, the only piece of self-help advice that actually works — is a three-word sentence Nike turned into the most successful marketing slogan of all time after slightly tweaking a serial killer’s last words in 1988: Just do it.

You’re Not Unmotivated

“I’m not motivated” is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. What does that even mean? Not motivated to do what? Work? In that case, aren’t you motivated to avoid it? You’re always motivated! Every action human beings ever take is driven by some kind of incentive.

It may not always be an obvious one, like money, but it’s always there. It could be a social incentive, some form of status among your peers, or an ethical incentive, the relief of feeling like you did the right thing, but behind every action lies a driving force, whether it’s happiness, or peace, or satisfying your conscience.

So if you work the counter at a sneaker store and hate every second of it, you’re not unmotivated to change. Heck, I bet you wish you could change much more so than the annoying corporate hack who’s on his third side hustle and pseudo-spiritual journey to inner peace already. But there’s something holding you back. For some reason, it feels like you can’t change no matter what you do. So you don’t even try. But that’s entirely different from not being motivated and it’s only a sign that it’s time to dig into this feeling.

You’re Not Bored

I talked to a girl on Tinder. She was a scrum master and physiologist. She was in business school, but, really, she wanted to study fashion and launch her own creative company. As soon as we touched upon her dream, the conversation tapered off.

Messages took days to come. She was “busy.” On vacation. Didn’t feel like small talk, but wasn’t interested in real talk either. Or getting coffee, for that matter. When I asked her why she even used the app, she spoke the most common lie in the world: “I’m bored.”

She wasn’t bored. Just like you aren’t bored. No one is ever bored anymore. Why should we be? There’s no reason to. We’re 100% connected, 100% of the time. You couldn’t even be bored if you chose to. And that’s the problem: We don’t even try to choose to be bored.

We just pretend we are so we can keep filling our days with meaningless little distractions, like empty conversations on Tinder. Not because we love our entertainment so much, but because we know what lies beneath the stillness: existential dread. Go through the door of boredom, and that’s what you’ll find. The great scientist and mathematician Blaise Pascal once said:

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Zat Rana has a wonderful interpretation of what he means:

At its core, it’s not necessarily that we are addicted to a TV set because there is something uniquely satisfying about it, just like we are not addicted to most stimulants because the benefits outweigh the downsides. Rather, what we are really addicted to is a state of not-being-bored.

Almost anything else that controls our life in an unhealthy way finds its root in our realization that we dread the nothingness of nothing. We can’t imagine just being rather than doing. And therefore, we look for entertainment, we seek company, and if those fail, we chase even higher highs.

We ignore the fact that never facing this nothingness is the same as never facing ourselves. And never facing ourselves is why we feel lonely and anxious in spite of being so intimately connected to everything else around us.

So no. You’re not bored. You’re terrified of being alone with yourself in your own head.

You’re Not Lazy

Laziness is the scapegoat of everyone who’s trying to capitalize on your claim of “being bored.” “You’re not bored — you’re boring!” is what they’ll tell you. You need a hobby or a calling or a $250 fitness program with a personalized meal plan.

Of course, this too is nonsense. Laziness, like boredom, doesn’t exist. Psychology professor Devon Price explains:

If a person can’t get out of bed, something is making them exhausted. If a student isn’t writing papers, there’s some aspect of the assignment that they can’t do without help. If an employee misses deadlines constantly, something is making organization and deadline-meeting difficult. Even if a person is actively choosing to self-sabotage, there’s a reason for it — some fear they’re working through, some need not being met, a lack of self-esteem being expressed.

People do not choose to fail or disappoint. No one wants to feel incapable, apathetic, or ineffective. If you look at a person’s action (or inaction) and see only laziness, you are missing key details. There is always an explanation. There are always barriers. Just because you can’t see them or don’t view them as legitimate, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Look harder.

Once again, it’s not a lack of motivation, an inexplicable unwillingness to act that obstructs your path to success and happiness. It’s the invisible boundaries in your head that you’re tripping over — sometimes without ever moving at all.

Medicating the Symptoms of Our Only Disease

Laziness, boredom, procrastination, these are all excuses. Not as in “we suck because we succumb to these,” but as in, “we accept these as real problems when they’re just the symptoms.” Because that’s what they are. Surface-level phenomena that all lead back to the same root cause: fear.

My dad once told me this story: A colleague was driving to an appointment with a customer. As he was overtaking a truck, the truck moved into his lane. Seeing his car get crushed from the passenger side and compressing towards him, his animal instincts kicked in. Unleashing an ancient roar at the top of his lungs, he ripped out the gear lever of his automatic gearbox with one hand.

This is an automatic gearbox:

Image via Wikipedia

Clearly, we’re not talking about breaking off a knob on your radio. It’s a heavy piece of machinery, and the lever is properly fixated on it with multiple layers of further constraints built around it. That’s the power of fear. It can make you do unimaginable things.

Luckily, my dad’s co-worker survived the incident unscathed, but now imagine turning this same power not onto your physical environment, but against your own mind. That’s what you’re doing. That’s what you, and I, and everyone you know who’s struggling to realize their dreams is doing.

We’re taking this unbelievable source of raw power and, in lack of real-life threats to hurl it against, we turn it on ourselves. Of course, we don’t do it in outright, uncontrollable fits of rage — at least not most of us and not most of the time. We do it by self-medicating. By concocting and treating symptoms, like laziness, boredom, and other seemingly minor, but actually soul-crushing patterns.

John Gorman calls it “building around fear:”

Fear doesn’t manifest itself like you think, because often times we don’t give it the chance to. Fear isn’t always the sweaty palms that stop us cold in a job interview — fear is generally what prevents us from applying in the first place. It’s so subtly limiting that we often build around it without even noticing it’s there.

That’s why our long list of symptoms is so widely condoned and accepted. Society is playing a big, global, silently agreed upon game of “let’s hide the truth and move on with our day.” We want the cover-ups. And so in our day-to-day, it all looks the same; it all looks harmless.

The thing with fear is on a surface level it’s indistinguishable from laziness. 90% of the time it’s the former, and 90% of people will assume it’s the latter.

So instead of seeing everyone rip their gear levers out of their cars, we see them staring at their phones on the subway. We see them eating 4,000 calories in a single meal, playing 12 hours of video games in a day, or consuming weed, alcohol, and potentially worse drugs in the span of a few minutes. We see their outraged comments on social media, their finely curated highlight reels, their long or short list of small or intense vices, and we think, “Hey, these must be valid issues I have! After all, they have them too.”

No. The one true problem we all share is fear. We just choose to medicate it differently.

The Dog That Keeps on Chasing

Just like there is no reason to be bored anymore, there is no need to have any other problem in your life than fear. I mean, geez, that list is long. The number of things you can be afraid of is endless.

You’re afraid of dying early despite having no factual indication whatsoever that warrants believing you actually will. You read about plane crashes and armed robberies and natural disasters and newly discovered parasites and it all feels like it’s out to get you when, in fact, they’re all 0.01% incidents spun perfectly by the media to drill into your not-very-thick-skinned amygdala.

You’re afraid of being alone because well, existential dread, but also because it looks weird and gets weird looks, and if your parents haven’t asked why you’re still single yet, your friends most certainly have. You’re afraid of not meeting social expectations even though we all keep telling each other there are no more social expectations, afraid of talking the way you want to talk with your boss, your customer, and especially the dude you keep staring at at the café because for all you know, he’s your boss’s boss.

You’re afraid of writing chapter one of your book because who thinks that’ll ever work out, but you’re also afraid of wasting ten more hours watching Game of Thrones, especially now that you’ve already seen the whole thing twice. You’re afraid of never being rich, but not nearly as much as you’re afraid of losing whatever little you have, because how are you supposed to live without your IKEA living room table, your $500 iPad, or your custom-design wall decal of a world map highlighting all the places you’ve visited already?

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I could keep going all day. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of looking stupid, fear of losing something or someone, fear of fear, fear of wasting time or not having enough, fear of not being good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, thin enough, or inadequate in any sense whatsoever — your mind is littered with fear.

There are real fears, fake fears, the kind of fears you can neatly convert into boredom or laziness and dismiss at the surface, and the kind that makes you freeze right down to your bones in front of your computer screen despite absolutely nothing happening at all.

Now, here’s the thing: In order to deal with all these fears, you could spend thousands of dollars to further support the billion-dollar self-help industry which lives off reaffirming all your irrational jitters and nods along fiercely whenever you talk yourself into yet another cover-up. You could buy a new book from a new guru each week, collect a stunning array of probably-placebo supplements on your shelf, and attend a new seminar with a new pyramid scheme that is totally going to work every six months. Or, you can wake the hell up.

Wake the hell up and realize: it’s all the same thing. It’s all. The same. Thing. Fear. There is nothing else and there never was. Never will be. It’s the same, godawful, rotten, dark creature that’s always plagued us, and it will continue to invent new tricks till kingdom come. But, at the end of the day, it’s all fear.

You have to find a way to live in spite of fear.

That dog is going to keep chasing you until you die. And some days, it will get to you. But it can never — never — stop you completely. You have to keep moving. Always. Forever. The day you run into the bright light at the end of the tunnel, I want you to look back and give the finger to that dog trailing behind. Smiling. “Screw you, I won this! I made it. And I did it my way.”

The Cure

Now, I’m not qualified to talk about fear any more than the guy at the corner store. I hold no degree in psychology, no certificate from some brain research institute, heck, I have zero formal training as a writer. But, like you, I have lived with fear my whole life. And, somehow, I’ve still arrived here. I have a job I love, lots of time, few complex structures in my life, and would describe myself as a happy, positive, optimistic person. I don’t know much and have my own issues to resolve, but I sure feel okay taking life one day at a time. And I think that’s what it’s about. Beat the dog. Again. And again. And again.

My theme for this year is ‘Focus.’ Across all areas of my life, I’m trying my best to drill down to what really matters. Projects. People. Parts of those projects and how I talk to those people. How I manage my time, my energy, my life.

The one thing that has helped me show up consistently in spite of fear, particularly with writing, but in other places too — and I have thought long and hard about this — is some version of Nike’s glib, cliché, annoyingly obvious slogan: Just Do It.

Because besides being glib, cliché, and annoyingly obvious, it’s also universally, inescapably true. “Just Do It” isn’t an elegant solution and certainly not a perfect one. It’s not dismissive or snobby but empowering and humble. It’s motivation. Inspiration. Action. Energy. And truth. And that’s why it’s the most brilliant piece of marketing of all time.

People don’t realize how deep this slogan is. I don’t think the creators did when they came up with it. They didn’t mean it to be. But it is. However, you can’t see that when you get hung up on its immediacy. “If it were that easy, don’t you think everybody would ‘just do it?’” No, no, no. You’ve got that all wrong. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about something a guy named Marcus Aurelius told himself 2,000 years ago:

“You must build up your life action by action, and be content if each one achieves its goal as far as possible — and no one can keep you from this.”

If all we did was focus on the task right in front of us, we’d accomplish 99% of our goals and then some.

Sure, we’d still have to pause and reflect on occasion, and not all goals would turn out to be worth chasing in the first place, but we’d just…get there. Don’t you get it? This is everything. All you need. The whole strategy. But it’s more than that still. It’s also a tactic. Because another consequence of a relentless bias towards action is that there’s no room for self-doubt. You don’t have time for big picture concerns when you’re doing. And I don’t mean running around all day like a rat in a maze. I mean steadily engaging and re-focusing on the task at hand. Even if it’s relaxing. Whatever the next small step is. Because the next small step is always doable.

Let’s talk a little more about what living “Just Do It” means.

“Just Do It” as a Strategy

A strategy is a long-term approach to getting what you want. A set of behaviors you’re committed to, a line of principles you’re unwilling to compromise.

Amazon’s strategy is to be the most convenient place on the internet to order stuff from. That’s “the way they do business.” Almost everything they do serves that strategy. The whole point of a strategy is that it can’t possibly work out tomorrow. It’s only efficient if you stick to it, and, because it’s a fundamental guideline in how you make decisions, it’s hard to change. If Amazon changes their strategy, all their hard work goes out the window. If they started being hell-bent on quality, they’d have to shrink their product range to the point of inconvenience. So they don’t. The strategy is set and maintaining it all these years has served them well.

Using “Just Do It” as the strategy, the operating system of your life, means committing to figuring it out on your own.

No more gimmicks. No more wholesale adoption of get-rich-quick schemes, diets with pointless rules (“never eat celery!”), and fake silver bullets you know can’t possibly keep the promises they make. You chase your goals based on what you believe in. If you think art should be free, then make art for free and get sponsors or donors. If you don’t believe in remote work, rent an office and hire locally. If you see the people in your country just not getting what you’re trying to do, move.

“Just Do It” is the best advice because it’s the only advice that works.

When I started writing, I gave lots of specific tips in my articles. “Here’s how to set goals, have a morning routine, be productive.” But specifics are full of hindsight bias. I’m only giving you the final 10% that worked and that worked for me in particular. The last iteration of all the cycles I’ve gone through. The messy 90% of the journey that led me there? I left those out completely. I might have tried 15 different things over the course of two years to finally nail my morning routine — but now I’ve turned that last, functioning process into a pattern and am telling you how to do just that step by step.

Am I even talking to the right person? Who is it for? Because if I’m talking to “me-from-two-years-ago,” then I’m talking to the wrong crowd. And if I do catch you at the point where you’ve covered the 90% of your own journey, well, then what do you need me for? My specific advice is only going to work for a tiny fraction of people who happen to be in the right place at the right time and for whom it will click immediately. Everyone else who still needs to go through the random 90% in their journey will be left out in the cold. Still feeling alone, still stuck with their fears. Except now, they’re disappointed too.

“Just Do It” may not be perfect, but at least it clears the air from the start: Yes, you are alone, but you also have everything you could ever need to figure things out. You will make many mistakes, and you’ll have to take responsibility for each and every one of the countless choices you’ll make on your own dime. But since no one on this planet can give you the perfect answers to the questions created by your unique, once-in-a-lifetime circumstances, choosing proudly and continuing to move forward is not just the best thing you can do, it’s also the right thing you should do.

That’s why I now keep saying things like “just start” and “get off your butt” and “go do things.” Because specifics won’t help. Fear or no fear, for each next challenge and next chapter, you’ll have to get through that messy, random part. You have to make your mistakes. Forget the advice. The empty promises of “proven plans you can follow.” There is no such thing. Summon your confidence. Be proud of who you are. Have faith in yourself. Pick your own battles and how you’ll try to win them. Commit to “Just Do It” as your strategy of getting everything you want out of life.

“Just Do It” as a Tactic

A tactic is a short- to medium-term course of action that serves as an attempt at living up to your strategy. “Given our strategy, this is the next thing we’re going to try.”

Going back to Amazon, Prime is a tactic. Launching a program that offers faster delivery, exclusive products, and extra discounts at a fixed price per year gave them the answer to the question: “Will people pay us to make ordering online even easier for them in a predictable, calculable way?” Based on the revenue they made from the new service, they concluded the answer was “yes.” Had it been “no,” then Amazon would’ve shelved Prime and that would’ve been the end of it. Compared to the commitment required by a strategy, a tactic is just a wet wipe. If it’s not enough, you toss it and pull out the next one. No hard feelings.

“Just Do It” as a tactic is refusing to let everyday hurdles get to you while relentlessly focusing on the next, smallest action you can control.

Your boss didn’t like the presentation? Fine, you do it over and show her again. You’ve run out of clients and your freelance business never really got off the ground? Fine, you shut it down and start from scratch. The girl behind your dream profile ghosted you for no apparent reason and made you feel miserable? Fine, you delete the app and try another way of meeting people.

All professional athletes ever do is to focus on the next play. How do we convert this move? How do we recover these inches? How can I get the ball out of the bunker? All year you worry about minutes, inches, seconds — and by the end of it, you’ve won the championship without ever thinking about it. Michael Jordan’s so-called “next play speed” was less than a second. He’d score, run back to defend, steal the inbound pass, lose the ball, then run down the opponent.

A “Just Do It” approach to managing your day-to-day brings down your next play speed, and you’ll be happier because of it.

The faster you can re-center after you complete something or get rattled, the better. Having a high next play speed also leads to improved happiness because it simply leaves you with little time to even worry about the picture. There’s no wiggle room to dance around your fears, but also not enough space to let them get to you. What’s the next play? What’s the next play? What’s the next play? That’s all you’re ever asking.

Again, this isn’t to say you should never rest or that you’ll never have moments where the dog creeps back around the corner and stares at you with unblinking eyes. It’s to say that, with this focus, it’ll happen far less often and you’ll feel more confident in handling it when it does. Once you’ve chosen a strategy, a set of long-term plays you want to make, forget the big picture. Keep your head down. What’s the next play? Figure it out. And then just do it.

Make a Promise to Yourself

I don’t know you, but I know this: You’re fighting the modern human struggle. You have been equipped with everything you need to accomplish everything you’ve ever dreamed of and a whole lot more. You’re not scraping around the bottom of human existence. You know you have it in you, and the only thing that can make it all come crashing down are the ghosts inside your mind.

Those ghosts are here to stay in all their nefarious, despicable, irrational forms, but you and I both know you can’t let them stop you. You won’t let them stop you. You’re going to use your gifts and use them to the best of your ability to fulfill your potential.

You’re not unmotivated. You’re not lazy. You’re not bored. In a world where you walk around without blinders on, these things don’t exist. You are afraid. Like me. Like your neighbor. Like all of us. We are all afraid. And yet, we are still here. So every day, choose to be here. To hold a flashlight in the face of your demons and say, “I’ve played your games before. I know who you are, and you all look the same to me.”

Nike’s simple, mainstream, maybe even trite but genius mantra is the perfect reminder of how simple and straightforward, yet how demanding and strenuous this lifelong battle is. “Just Do It” is the song we grew up on, the ad that made us smile and clench a fist in fierce resolution. It may be a corporate marketing ploy, but it’s also the spirit of human potential, of the original American Dream.

Using this motto as both your strategy for living your best life and the tactic to see it through will accelerate and clarify your personal growth in ways no self-improvement gimmick ever could. It’s a contract, a promise to yourself to live life on your own terms and not be swayed by the events in it or the tricks your mind plays on itself. It’s not a miracle drug and it won’t lead to a guaranteed happy ending, but I think it’s our best shot at looking back on the brief time we spend on this earth with pride instead of regret.

And if that’s not a cause worth fighting for, a promise worth keeping, then I don’t know what else to tell you. Except “Just Do It.”

All Suffering Is Desiring or Resisting Change Cover

All Suffering Is Desiring or Resisting Change

Nik

A man was gifted a plate by his wife. It had beautiful drawings. The man was an antique dealer. Every day at the market, he would eat lunch from his plate.

Soon, his wife passed away. The man was grieving, but he still ate from his favorite plate every day. One day, the plate fell down and broke into a thousand pieces. The man was devastated.

A fellow stall owner told him: “I know someone who can teach you how to fix it. But he lives far away.” The man went to seek the plate fixer. After one year of traveling, he found him. The plate fixer helped the man reassemble the pieces and the man returned home.

At first, he was happy. But the plate never felt quite the same. One day, it broke again and, again, the man was devastated.

Another stall owner told him: “I know someone who makes plates just like this one. But he lives far away.” The man went to seek the plate maker. After one year of traveling, he found him. The plate maker taught him how to make his own plate and, with it, the man went home.

At first, he was happy. But still, the plate never felt quite the same. One day, it broke again. Again, the man was devastated. But he was tired. He could not travel far anymore.

A fellow stall owner told him: “I know someone who sells plates just like this one. He has a new stall on the market.” Happy that he wouldn’t have to travel far, the man went and bought a plate just like his.

At first, he was happy. But that plate, too, never felt quite the same. One day, it broke again.

As the man looked at the broken pieces on the floor, a stranger passed by his stall. He said:

“You are lucky. It was just a plate.”

At that moment the man was enlightened.

The first of the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism is suffering. They call it ‘dukkha.’ It has many definitions, including pain, grief, sorrow, stress, unsatisfactoriness, and misery, but I think the simplest term that captures it in our modern times is ‘unhappiness.’

Our suffering isn’t physical, at least not most of the time. It’s emotional. One way or another, things don’t go how we want them to, and we face emotional pain because of it. This pain isn’t random. We inflict it upon ourselves. That’s the lesson of the above story.

All suffering is resisting or desiring change.

When change wants to affect us and we reject it, we suffer. When we wish for change and none occurs, we suffer.

Like the man in the story, we fight the current of events instead of floating in it, and each time it carries us away, we scream. We go on symbolic journeys to preserve what can’t be preserved — or to change what can’t be changed.

The man held on to his wife’s plate because it gave him a feeling of permanence in an impermanent world. He resisted change. When it broke, a change occurred without his consent, and he suffered from that too.

The great lengths he went to in order to fix and replace his plate are a series of escalating commitments in this fight. But each time he succeeded, he found permanence still wasn’t restored. Something always felt off. Only when he was too tired to continue fighting and a random stranger pointed out the vanity of his efforts could he see clearly: the only way is acceptance.

Everything in life is transient. Every human, every animal, every building, plant, and inanimate object. Every element, every atom, every speck of dust is a tiny traveler going a small distance in a long, universal journey that’s much larger than any of its individual parts.

Nothing lasts forever. Not just the material, the intangible too. Feelings change. Relationships end. Attitudes evolve. Our feelings, thoughts, opinions, they all meander through our lives and might end up opposite of where they began. Cities collapse. Conditions turn. People die.

All we have is impermanence and it’s depressing. We also rarely control when change occurs. We desperately want to, but all we can do is give our best and hope for the result we desire. As soon as we become attached, we’ve set the gears of suffering in motion. Instead, we should bend with the wind.

“Notice the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survive by bending with the wind.”

— Bruce Lee

The Buddhist life is a life of practicing acceptance. Acceptance is the only thing that works because change is the only constant of life. It comes when it comes, and you’ll meet it when it does. This applies to the trivial in life as much as it does to the substantial.

You slept poorly today? Okay, accept, move on. Your new job sucks? Okay, accept, move on. You missed the bus? Okay, accept, move on. Your grandfather died? Okay, accept, move on.

This isn’t to say you’ll always accept easily and move on quickly. It’s to say you can learn to always do both eventually. Accept life’s permanent impermanence and odd timing of uncomfortable change, and suffering disappears.

At the end of the day, remember you are lucky. For you’re still here, and it was just a plate.

Bullet Time: How To Live A Fully Engaged Life Cover

Bullet Time: How To Live A Fully Engaged Life

Nik

The Matrix revolutionized the film industry in many ways. One of them was the introduction of bullet time. It’s a visual effect that allows the viewer to transcend time and space.

Instead of seeing a scene from just one angle in one moment and another the next, you can now witness the same moment from multiple perspectives.

As a result, you can watch the hero not just dodge bullets, but dodge them in style and slow-motion.

At the time, this was a huge innovation. Now, the movie is 20 years old, and others have taken the concept a lot further, like Wonder Woman, Resident Evil, and X-Men. Today, the effect is standard practice in hundreds of movies, which makes it, well, just another visual effect.

At the same time, it’s still not your average action flick gimmick.

When you’re watching a movie, the moment bullet time triggers, you’re taken three levels deeper into the experience. Instantly. Time slows down. You look around. You get to see all aspects of a scene, not just the one the director deemed most relevant.

Suddenly, you’re more invested into everything that happens. Because you’re a bigger part of it. That’s why bullet time was such a brilliant invention and one of the reasons why the movie has become a piece of film history.

So how did they pull it off? How do you shoot a bullet time scene?

As the making of explains, the film crew built a special-purpose camera rig with over 120 cameras. They arranged them in a circle and built a system to trigger them at certain frame rates and in a certain sequence.

Each camera was height-adjustable, allowing the viewer’s perspective to follow a path of any shape. An s-curve. A stoop from above. A downward spiral. All in slow motion. Now that’s some commitment to the viewer.

Despite its action-packed disguise, however, The Matrix is a philosophical movie. At the end of the day, it explores fundamental issues of technology, culture, society, and religion. It’s not easy to digest. It takes a while to sink in. And every element of the film somehow connects to these themes.

Bullet time is no exception. There are two lessons from this cinematographic innovation that transcend great filmmaking and instead instruct us on — I think — how to live a great life.

1. If you want to live deeper, you have to slow down

Bullet time is the movie-equivalent of stopping your walk, looking around, and embracing the moment. Where are you right now? What is it like?

In order to experience something, you have to be there. Not just physically, but mentally too. You have to allow your senses to take in the scene. Not only parts of it. Everything.

Like the creation of a bullet time scene, that takes time. As John Gaeta, the Visual Effects Supervisor of the film, said: “It takes some pretty heavy thinking to get it together.” For some final results, they had to shoot the same scene dozens of times and then blend together individual cuts, as well as interpolate and digitally extend what you ultimately see on the screen.

Taking time to ‘be there’ in your life, to really experience what’s going on around you, is also a matter of effort and intent, but it yields the same result the effect does in the movie: you’re more invested in everything that happens.

The only way to be all-in on life is to savor every moment.

You can’t do that when you’re rushing through. You have to slow down. Thankfully, the film technique also provides instructions on how to do that.

2. The way you slow down is by observing

In physics, there is something called the quantum zeno effect. It says that if you continuously measure and observe a system of quantum particles, that system freezes in its state.

As the ancient philosopher Zeno, to whom the effect owes its name, poses in a paradox: If a flying arrow appears to be at rest in any particular instant of its flight, doesn’t that actually makes it motionless? It’s a fascinating question.

The real-life equivalent is staring at a stranger on the far side of the street until they stop and turn around — they felt you looking at them. Maybe you feel it’s hard to get work done or perform a certain task when someone’s watching you. That too is the quantum zeno effect. It’s not necessarily that a system can’t change while you’re watching it — it’s just harder for it to do so.

A corollary of all this is that the more time we spend seeing, noticing, examining the world and its events, the more alive we’ll feel.

The more we observe what goes on around us, the slower time passes.

With bullet time, it took 120 cameras taking thousands of pictures to film a scene that ultimately happened in seconds. Only by greatly increasing the number and perspectives of the things they captured could the producers make the scene feel slower to the viewer.

In our lives, intentional observation leads to a similar outcome: we get more out of our time.

The Matrix sends countless messages and will be the subject of analyses for decades to come. But its most universal one, transmitted both through its plot and the way the film itself came together, is that everything has something beneath its surface.

With bullet time, John Gaeta knew it would change how movies are made:

“It’s all baby steps towards something much larger that won’t be commonplace really for a few years, but there are people around the world scratching their heads about a new way to photograph things. It’ll be as revolutionary as when cameras came off sticks and went to a crane, when they came off cranes and went to steadicams. We’re talking about cameras that are now broken from the subject matter, that are virtual. So that’s the next phase.”

I don’t know what exactly lies beneath the surface of your life, but I know there’s an ocean of emotion, experience, and insight, waiting to be explored.

In order to do so, to find something, to reveal the truth, we must go deeper. Descending to these depths takes time and can only be accomplished through intent and careful observation. But if we take responsibility for those tasks, we can expect to live true to ourselves, to really enjoy our time, and to be fully engaged in life.

So go ahead. Hit the button. Trigger bullet time.

If you let us know what you find, you might even cause a revolution.