Productivity 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.

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.

What Are the Habits of Successful People?

December 5, 2018June 1, 2022 Nik

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

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

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

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

What We Look For in Habit Bundles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thinking Is an Infinite Habit

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

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

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

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

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

The question is if yours is getting better.

Habits Are Both Causes and Effects

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Polar Opposites Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Task Designed Uniquely For You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just do yourself a favor and ignore the title.

What Is the Future of Learning?

November 28, 2018June 30, 2022 Nik

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

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

Can I be a professional translator without any credentials?

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

Do summaries of existing book summaries make any sense?

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

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

The Half-Life of Knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Scary Future to Imagine

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Case for Selective Intelligence

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

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

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

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

But with each passing day, intelligence slowly displaces knowledge.

The Problem With Too Many Interests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Curious Boy

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

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

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

“How did you learn all this, Isaac?”
“From you, Pappa,” I said.
“From me? I don’t know any of this.”
“You didn’t have to, Pappa,” I said. “You valued learning and you taught me to value it. Once I learned to value it, the rest came without trouble.”

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

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

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

The Value of Integrative Complexity

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Matter of Being

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A learned man once went to visit a Zen teacher to inquire about Zen. As the Zen teacher talked, the learned man frequently interrupted to express his own opinion about this or that. Finally, the Zen teacher stopped talking and began to serve tea to the learned man. He poured the cup full, then kept pouring until the cup overflowed.
“Stop,” said the learned man. “The cup is full, no more can be poured in.”
“Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions,” replied the Zen teacher. “If you do not first empty your cup, how can you taste my cup of tea?”

I Spent My 20s in College Libraries and Came Out With a Career

November 16, 2018February 28, 2024 Nik

I’d love to tell you that, to me, the library has always been a magical place – but it wasn’t.

Having grown up in a pile of books in a home where the walls were already lined with literature, library visits were rare and, often, disappointing. Our local, small-town book collection didn’t feel as refined as the one we had at home and due to funding issues, the place itself always seemed to teeter on the brink of foreclosure.

Today, you can get most books rather cheaply right from your couch, but there are still many reasons to go to the library beyond selection and price. Sadly, I never found those reasons when I was younger.

But when I started college, all of that changed. I’ve spent the majority of my 20s in campus libraries and, to this day, they’re the only kind of office I know. As it turns out, the library is more than a place of knowledge and wonder.

If you want to shape, even invent your own career, it’s a factory of dreams.

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 Be An Extremely Productive Creative

October 31, 2018February 28, 2024 Nik

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

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

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

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

Why We Need Breaks From Tech To Use It Best

September 21, 2018May 10, 2022 Nik

One of the funniest moments in the Iron Man films happens when Tony Stark finally answers a question that’s crossed every viewer’s mind at least once:

“How do you go to the bathroom in that suit?”

With a first slightly contorted, then visibly relieved face, he tells us at his 40th birthday party: “Just like that.”

While it’s great that Mark IV’s filtration system can turn pee into drinking water, it doesn’t bode too well for a public icon to showcase lack of control over his own bodily functions. Not that his mental faculties were any more capable, because he is utterly, completely drunk. Wasted beyond repair.

Tony Stark might be wearing the suit, but, in that scene, he is not Iron Man. Just a dazed, desperate man, stuck in a million-dollar piece of technology.

Even the biggest talent with the best set of tools can achieve nothing if their mind isn’t in the right place. Of course we aren’t genius, billionaire, playboy philanthropists, but there’s still a lesson here that pertains to us:

We, too, over-identify with our devices.

A Bubble Made of Algorithms

After revealing his secret identity to the public, Stark had to defend his unique, metallic property in front of the US Senate. A few days prior to his birthday bash gone off limits, he refused to hand it over to the state, claiming he’d “successfully privatized world peace.” Just imagine that pressure.

Actor Robert Downey Jr. commented on his character at the time:

“I think there’s probably a bit of an imposter complex and no sooner has he said, ‘I am Iron Man –’ that he’s now really wondering what that means. If you have all this cushion like he does and the public is on your side and you have immense wealth and power, I think he’s way too insulated to be okay.”

We might not fly halfway around the world in seconds to fight for what we believe in, but then again, we kinda do. Thanks to our smartphones, we now carry the whole world in our pocket. As with Tony’s suit, it is precisely the power they bestow on us that insulates us.

Tony’s resources are near-unlimited; so are our options to do, to be, to create with a few taps. He’s a fast learner; we can now teach ourselves anything. Tony’s got JARVIS to manage everyday needs, we’ve got Siri. The list goes on.

And yet, no matter where he goes, Stark is seen not as the man inside the suit, but the superhero it represents. Similarly, we, in many school yards, lecture halls, and offices around the globe, are often judged by the brands, the products, the tools we choose — and our phones top the list.

The comparison might be exaggerated, but, while we’re not quite as closed off from reality as Stark, we’re still isolated enough to be often busy celebrating our power instead of using it, let alone use it well.

In Amusing Ourselves To Death, written in 1984, author Neil Postman made one of the rarer, more accurate predictions about computers:

“Years from now, it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”

While it’s hard to argue with the former point, the latter is a little more complex. We can now work anywhere, create anything, and access all the world’s knowledge. At the same time, we rarely tap into these possibilities, often spending our days chasing mindless distractions. The balance always changes, but we all know what it feels like when it’s off.

But where does this disconnect come from when it does? Why is there such a big gap between the power of our tools and our efficiency in using them?

I think it’s because of how we value them. Not too little, but too much.

The Huxleyan Warning

Postman’s timing in publishing the book was no coincidence. After discussing the issue at the Frankfurt Book Fair that same year, he dedicated most of its pages to answering a single question:

“Which dystopian novel most resembles our world today?”

Taking sides with Apple, he eventually concluded that 1984 wasn’t like 1984, but more accurately reflected the ideas in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

“As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.
What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.
Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.
Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.
Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.
In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain.
In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us.
Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

There are lots of arguments to be made for both sides, and which one comes closest depends heavily on the circumstances of your life. But while no book will ever describe our exact reality, if we at least consider Postman’s Huxleyan warning, we can ask another interesting question:

“What would the things we love ruining us look like?”

And today, we, the human species, love one thing above all else: technology.

The Most Powerful Ideology of All

Commenting on Apple’s ad masterpiece, Youtuber Nostalgia Critic remarks:

“Yes, Apple will save us from the terrifying 1984-style future. For as we can clearly see today, no longer are people lined up like cattle for hours and hours on end! No longer will people dress alike in cold, colorless environments! No longer will any cultish-style groups gather to honor a grand, controversial leader! And, most importantly, no longer will we be brain-dead, lifeless zombies who plug ourselves into the machine of life we can also call ‘The System.’”

Whether you imagine an iPhone release queue, the architectural style of Apple Stores, their Genius staff uniforms, a furious debate about Steve Jobs, or people with AirPods, staring at their screens, the irony of history is clear.

It might not be quite as bad as an actual surveillance state, but 30 years later, the former leader of the empowerment revolution has managed to become the world’s first trillion-dollar business only on the back of evolving into the exact thing it used to despise. And regardless of where you stand on the issue, the comparison alone proves a point Postman also makes in his book:

Technology is ideology.

Historically, the most successful ideologies have been those with the best stories. Religion, politics, science, the narratives surrounding these world views have always, for better or for worse, dictated not just what we do, but how we communicate, even see ourselves.

So what ideology could possibly be more powerful than one embedded in our modes of action, of communication, and of self-perception themselves? Enter, the smartphone. The chief representative of tech. One tool to rule them all, enabling us to do, talk, and self-reflect, both in a literal and figurative sense.

How could we not have adopted it wholesale? The story is just too good.

Besides the smartphone, no other icon symbolizes this triumph of technology more conclusively than Iron Man. The fictional character is the smartest man on the planet, his weapon the pinnacle of tech. The real guy in front of the camera is one of the highest-paid actors, making some $200+ million from his work with Marvel, the most successful movie franchise of all time.

Back on earth, though not for long, Stark’s real-world counterpart Elon Musk is worshipped as the god of our tech startup movement, meant to usher in our civilization’s next age. But, as another famous comic book figure claimed:

“If God is all-powerful, he cannot be all-good.
And if he is all-good, then he cannot be all-powerful.”

When tech becomes ideology, tools become identity.

This is the exact problem that befalls Stark in the movie. Once he can no longer separate the iron from the man, he is completely incapacitated, reduced to blowing up watermelons in mid-air with a suit that could save millions. That’s not what he built it for.

Just like we didn’t invent the smartphone to stop thinking. What good is a device that connects you to four billion brains around the planet if the best you can think of doing with it is playing Candy Crush, taking selfies, and ordering more toilet paper?

Tony Stark built the first Iron Man armor from scrap metal in an Afghan cave. Much less a suit than a pile of alloy plates, it was barely capable of protecting him long enough to face the crossfire, defend himself, and catapult him out of reach for his enemies. But it was an extension of his mind that saved his life.

With each future iteration, however, it became less of something he used and more of something he was. Until, one day, JARVIS couldn’t help but note:

“Unfortunately, the device that’s keeping you alive is also killing you.”

Unlike Tony, however, who has actual reason to fear for the arc reactor in his chest, we don’t depend on the functionality of our devices for survival. Not in the slightest. But you’d think we do. Because we’ve never been educated about technology’s ideological nature and the incapacity it produces when fused so irrevocably with our identity.

This education, may it come early from our schools or late from within the medium itself, is also the solution Postman proposes:

“For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are. It is not important that those who ask the questions arrive at my answers. The asking of the questions is sufficient. To ask is to break the spell.”

The most obvious of those dangers, one that could lead a society to be at the whim of its own tools, is its reliance on their ubiquity. And we? Well…

A tendency to overexpose ourselves to the available is in our very nature.

The Right We Must Claim Back

There is one big difference between Orwell’s Big Brother and Apple’s twisted fate: the pain modern consumers put themselves through is entirely self-inflicted, even voluntary. Talk to the first person in line for the new iPhone; you’ll find they couldn’t be happier.

It’s almost as if the promises of technology — the feelings about this great future bound to come — are more important than whether they come true. That’s why Postman turned to Huxley. Because unless we start questioning, smartphones are no better than soma, the legal drug we freely buy that keeps everyone satisfied, ignorant in bliss.

But despite having no apparent side effects, soma is still toxic. Anything is, if you’re immersed in it 24/7. This goes for any substance, matter, and physical item, but also for any thought, any feeling, any idea and state of mind. It goes for the use of your smartphone, your laptop, and your TV, as much as it goes for criticism, a new company policy, and even happiness.

At the end of Brave New World, one character sees behind the facade of controlled, poison-induced euphoria. As a result, he claims back his right to unhappiness. To danger, struggle, and pain. But with that, he also claims back his right to freedom. To goodness, art, poetry, religion, and change.

What we have to demand back is the right to be separate from our technology. To not be identified with our tools. The human self has always been a complex structure, made of millions of facets. It’s an armor alright — and, yes, it gets shattered — but it’s one we can always reassemble, as long as we pick up the pieces. If we neglect this fact, we lose our sense of distance between who we are and the tools we use to project that self onto the world.

Without this distance, life is one big blur, and then we die. Ask any struggling artist, any aspiring entrepreneur, any coping single mom and any ambitious manager. To get past, disengage. You are not your devices. You are not your tech-powered job. You are not a future citizen of a technology-fueled utopia.

You are a human being, alive today. Right here, right now.

That’s all you ever need to be. For the rest of your life.

How’s that for distance?

Better Than Utopia

In the end, Stark had to lose almost everything, his health, house, reputation, even one of his suits, to rediscover who he was. A tinkerer at heart. All he was missing was distance. One hard look from afar and even his life-threatening problem was solved. That’s the beauty of clarity. It works instantly.

In Huxley’s book, two other characters are punished for their questions with exile. One laments the thought, while the other welcomes his new destiny. The villain himself, however, has always known distance to be a reward. For the same reason, our tech icons limit access to their products for their kids.

For us, the now-slightly-more-educated, the solution is as simple in theory as it is hard in practice. For it’s a solution we must not just plug in, but live every day. That’s what’s changed. Slowly, but steadily. Especially since 1984.

Being disconnected must now be a conscious choice.

It used to be our default state, because our devices wouldn’t permit our availability at every hour and location. Now they do, which means it’s on us to turn them off and be unreachable in the moments for which we should be.

Creating distance takes practice. But with patience and time, we can unwind what’s entangled. Separate, once again, man from machine. Let them coexist.

Only then can we build something better than utopia: a life true to ourselves.

Our Greatest Asset

I don’t know you, but I know technology has profoundly affected your life. May it continue to do so in the best of ways. But if you ever feel trapped, and we all sometimes do, look for the disconnect that comes from being too close.

The world has always been a forward-thinking place, but if we only believe in technology, we hand it the reigns to take on a life of its own. Sometimes, the life it takes is ours. And we might not even notice.

The truth we’ve forgotten is that it’s never too late for us to take it back. We exist not because, but in spite of everything. Always have. This is our greatest asset. The only reason we need.

Iron Man carries his name not for the metal plates surrounding his body, but for the mind of the man who builds iron things. Between the two must always be distance. Only when it vanishes does the entire construct collapse.

As users of modern technology, we hold a similar responsibility: We need a healthy separation from our tools to build authentic selves. In the fight against the odds that is our life, we must first turn off our phones, so that we may then use them to build meaningful things. What both these aspirations require is distance. The physical, as well as the mental kind.

A real bathroom break should not be where it ends, but it sure is a start.

How To Stay Calm While Chasing Big Goals

September 14, 2018September 30, 2022 Nik

When my best friend and I graduated high school, we came up with “the List.”

We thought about our wildest dreams and put them on a timeline. Three months, one year, then five, then ten. There was only one problem: they were all stupid goals. Like, downright delusional.

For starters, our top priority was to become a billionaire. And it only got worse from there. We thought we’d have made it if we managed to…

Own a car for at least $100k, a penthouse, and a private jet.
Get one of those black credit cards that probably comes with its own yacht.
Spend $1,000 in a club in a single night, all cash, and oh, pour some Cristal on the floor.

If you’re not facepalming yet, now would be a good time. I wish I could go back and punch that kid square in the face. But despite the horrendous outcome, there’s one thing I have to give him credit for:

For the first time in his life, he made a conscious effort to think about what he wants.

What Most People Get Wrong About Setting Goals

If you never reflect on your desires, you live your entire life driven by impulse.

This happens to a lot of people when they bury their childhood dreams deep inside and stop questioning the status quo. Wake up, go to work, hit the gym, have a few drinks, zone out in front of the TV. Then, at 63, suddenly realize what you’ve missed all these years.

While we have no way of knowing for sure unless we’ve lived it, the alternative might be just as painful: You’re constantly fretting about what goals to chase. Did I pick the right one for this year? What if this is a mistake? Was it a good call to leave that job? When am I gonna have time to paint?

We tend to think tracking our goals will always lead to a better result, but that’s only true for the completion of the goal itself, not how we feel about it when we’re done. We miss the bigger point:

Keeping score always leads to anxiety.

The price of tracking your goals is doubt. Worrying is a natural, human behavior; one that is inseparable from the process of organization. It’s true, we can go after both our big goals and the small ones, but one always comes at the expense of the other. The tension of having to manage the ratio, the pain of choosing which to sacrifice, over and over again, will never go away.

As a corollary, the person who satisfies only their short-term needs might eat one big bowl of regret some day, but for 40 years or so, they avoid the stress of managing desire. That’s no small thing. Again, we can’t know for sure, but my guess is that much of that same regret is also baked into our prioritization of dreams. Except it’s unconfirmed. We create it in our own heads by doubting our decisions.

The result is that we can either ignore our goals, ride the wave, and roll the dice with long-term regret or suffer constant, short-term discomfort from fretting about our choices, but feel more in control about the life we build.

From a cosmic standpoint, this is rather hilarious. There’s a good chance we’re all left with the same amounts of joy and pain. The procrastinators and the go-getters. The only part we get to decide is how we distribute them over the course of our lives.

Most of us opt for the latter. It often feels better to have chosen something, even if the choice ended up being wrong. At least you made the call.

But the behavior that follows is somewhat paradoxical.

Adrift the Ocean of Desire

When I made that list eight years ago, I, too, chose to choose.

Since then, I’ve written, crumpled, highlighted, marked, taped, and trashed hundreds of lists of goals. Because sometimes, the only way we can deal with doubt is by caving. By saying “alright, I think I screwed this one up,” and tossing the plan.

As a result, we might sway wildly between extremes. One day, you might decide to become a world-class music producer and that, from here on out, the only thing you’ll focus on is releasing a new beat every week. But four weeks in, you realize the memories of Friday night poker with your friends are more important. So you stop.

That cycle might go on for years. Ironically, this is not unlike the mindless procrastinator, who reacts to all the antics of his mind instantaneously. And while some of this course-correcting is normal, if we do it too often, it’s as if we’re adrift at sea, tossed about by waves of desire, with zero control at all.

But wasn’t that what we originally demanded? Isn’t it control that we chose to pay the price of stress for? What a mess! Obviously, there’s no perfect solution to all this. But I’d still like to show you one tool that has particularly helped me in dealing with it.

I call it my Not-A-Bucket-List.

A List With a Strange Purpose

A lot of useful metaphors exist that can help us balance our goals. There’s the story of the teacher, filling up a jar with rocks, pebbles, sand, then water — to show the most important things have to come first or there’ll be no space left.

Then, there’s the tale of Warren Buffett and his pilot. Apparently, he told him to make a list of his top 25 career goals, then split it into the top five and the remaining 20. Instead of telling him to allocate his time equally, Buffett then said he should toss the second list and avoid it at all cost.

A Not-A-Bucket-List is basically the opposite of the second list. Unlike goals 6–25, which still feel like you should prioritize them, there’s nothing on there that means a lot to you. Nothing you’d die regretful of, having left it undone. It is a list of all the things you’d be happy to sacrifice for a greater goal.

I keep mine in my notes on my iPhone so I can add to it whenever, wherever. I use five categories:

Stuff

I really wanna buy a sandwich maker. Except I’ve been getting along fine without one for the past eight years. I’ve also been procrastinating on buying a new watch after my old one broke. And ordering a 23andMe kit. Don’t even get me started on online courses. Then again, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Books & Reading

If I read all the books and articles recommended to me, I’d be the smartest guy on the street — because I’d literally be homeless. Life is short and I wanna get things done. I love reading and I do a lot of it, but there’s never enough time to read everything.

Movies

Watching a movie a day and then writing about it is the easiest way I can think of to start your career as a writer. And while I write about movies a lot, I already have more ideas than I can write about. Sorry, Netflix backlog, you’re gonna get longer.

Fun Business Ideas

It would be really cool to start gaming again and make a Youtube channel. Or create mashups of my favorite songs. Produce electronic music, rap, and open a café. But none of it is worth sacrificing what I’ve built with writing so far.

Call-A-Friend

We all like to tell ourselves we’re a good friend and to a few people, we are. But most of our kindergarten, high school, and college friendships fade as we get older. Instead of convincing myself I can hold on to all of them, I’d rather admit that other things are more important, but note the names I fondly remember. This way, I can always pick up the phone and call them if we happen to find ourselves in the same place at the same time.

The goal of a Not-A-Bucket-List is to never look at it.

It shouldn’t become your go-to list to pick the next movie. Just the place you turn to if you want to watch a movie and haven’t already got one in mind. Nine out of ten times I open it, it’s to add something, not pick something.

That’s how a Not-A-Bucket-List helps you find peace of mind. Because the little things are accounted for. Even if all they do is catch dust.

The Question That’s Left

Becoming aware of our desires is a gift. The first time it happens, we dare to dream big. Too big, often. Soon, we realize we’ve awoken to a new, just a different struggle: balancing our lofty aspirations with our modest goals.

And while the emotional turmoil of forsaking goals altogether might be the same, picking our battles and keeping score gives us the comforting feeling of having done the best we can do. That’s an effort worth making, but one that is easily negated when it’s met with constant doubts and countless, unnecessary changes of plans.

A Not-A-Bucket-List can help you acknowledge the fact that you, like all of us, have many dreams and plans, but not enough time to make them all come true. After making and throwing out many goal lists over the years, I find it one of the most useful tools to stay calm while trying to accomplish big things.

It’s almost as if the sole act of writing something on that list makes it less important. Maybe it does. But what’s most beautiful is that there’s ever room for more. Because the biggest question will always be left:

What are you willing to happily sacrifice all the little things for?

Category: Productivity