Since January 2024, I’ve published 34 posts on topics like the personal unconscious, time, the future, anger, the body, therapy and food. This is about 10 posts less than last year. If I didn’t feel like I had anything to write about, I simply didn’t write anything. Experimenting with different styles and formats (eg. A conversation, a how-to guide or very short sentences) helped a bit. Personally, 2024 has been about unravelling compulsions, whether it be habits or feelings like anger or resentment so that I can make more normal choices.
On average I record 5-7 notes to myself per day into Apple Notes. Topics range from dreams to creativity to philosophy and everything in between. Many are too personal to be of any use to share publicly. The majority are only one or two sentences that I think are worth saving. Below, I’ve curated 189 of my favorites.
Tranquility is nothing less than the good ordering of the mind
Marcus Aurelius
Thoughts like to be believed
You’re staring at a computer screen. There’s an important task you need to do, but you’ve been avoiding it. It needs to get done. And you should have finished it yesterday.
Thoughts, images and sounds, rush through your head.
This is just like the last time I did something like this, you think, remembering something you’d rather forget.
It’s normal to think about the future. But it’s a shame that doing so can makes us feel bad.
Many of the thoughts we have can be negative and self-referential. “I can’t do this” or “I always do badly when I do things like this.” These might feel like truths, but usually are vague, black and white generalizations. The words always, nobody, never are good tells someone is generalizing.
And if you believe these thoughts, ta-da, you’ve magically created a belief.
If you start to look out for them, you’ll hear this sort of thing everywhere. Here are a couple I overheard at my local triathlon club:
I can’t run that fast anymore.
That’s it, I’ve done my hour.
I can’t go fast, it’s all moderate.
I couldn’t help but swim butterfly, now I’m dead.
I’m done.
Beliefs drive behavior
If you know the belief, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out what the behavior will be.
For example, if you’re absolutely certain you’re bad at public speaking, you might decline invitations to speak or present. You’ll make up all sorts of intelligent excuses and stories to avoid doing it. You might speak less in meetings, even if you have good ideas. You might depend more on notes. If there’s no way out of this ‘unpleasant’ task, you might get stressed, sad, angry. Hours before the presentation you get more and more irritated until you need to ‘take a walk and clear your head’.
Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with preparation, organization, or de-stressing. And maybe you really do need more time. But these sorts of thoughts tend to get whisked into the foamy, fearful feeling of dread that has been generated by an unconscious, negative belief: ‘this is not going to go well.’
In comparison, someone without that belief, might approach the same task calmly, cooly and confidently. They might not be smarter, or any better at doing the job, they’re simply not talking to themselves in such a negative way.
A task is easier if you’re not thinking ‘this is going to be a pain’ or ‘I have no time to do this.’
There’s no rushing around, because who’s telling them to rush?
There’s no endless revisions and re-work, because who’s telling them it’s not good enough?
There’s no impatience when they are interrupted, because who’s telling them they ‘can’t stop working’?
If belief does seem to drive our behavior, should we all try to be more positive? It likely doesn’t hurt. And since it was popularized by Norman Vincent Peale in the 50’s, positive thinking has been claimed to solve everything from shyness to world peace.
We can also practice challenging beliefs. Pronouncing that you’re ‘ugly’, might sound and feel like a truth, but with some light challenges we can uncover that it’s just a transient opinion.
Are you always ugly?
Who says? According to whom?
Compared to who?
How do you know?
What do you mean by that?
But to do a good job, we don’t need to be filled with positivity. We just need to stop telling ourselves it’s going to be bad.
Think of your mind like an extremely powerful computer. It’s great at analyzing, abstracting and reasoning. Next time you are looking through a spreadsheet or a to-do list, notice how it effortlessly orders information, matches patterns and makes snap decisions.
Yet there’s a big limitation. A blind spot. When we solve a problem consciously, we tend to shut down other alternative ways a problem can get solved. Our mind doesn’t like to admit that there’s potentially a lot of other ways to solve a problem that it is not aware/conscious of.
This week I needed to create a prototype that threaded a few disparate ideas together. I didn’t exactly know what this was going to look like, or how I would get this done. But I had done a similar task many times before. My conscious mind expected that I would sit down, think about it, and we’d reach some sort of happy conclusion. In other words, I’d use all the things I was conscious of and throw it at the problem and hope something sticks.
When I reflected on the completed prototype, I realized it had benefitted from several things that I wasn’t previously aware of. I had short conversations with several other people who had worked on similar things, and got ideas from them. I received a last minute change in requirements, that changed the focus of the prototype. These previously unknown inputs helped to create a better solution.
To allow novel solutions, we need to give up control and to some degree authorship. And that can be really, really uncomfortable. Let’s say we are really concerned about a friend who is drinking too much. We’re concerned about their physical and mental health and we’re worried something bad will happen. To help solve this problem we’ve talked to them. We’ve thought deeply about it. We’ve come up with ideas. We’ve tried all sorts of interventions, but nothing has worked. In other words, we’ve done lots of things to solve this problem for them. But one day, they drink way too much and get hospitalized from poisoning. It’s scary but they recover, and more than that, they stop drinking. They’re healthy and happy – all because they drank too much. Maybe not the most elegant solution (or the best example – don’t do this), but it worked didn’t it? In fact, problems are solved all the time without your conscious involvement.
We can also invite our subconscious mind to help out, the part of you that solves problems when you are in the shower, sleeping, walking the dogs or any other time you’re not trying to ‘crack’ the problem with sheer willpower. Another word for this would be relying on intuition over intellect. I’ve written a little more about the power of intuition here and talked about it here.
This is nothing new. And there are a million lateral problem solving methods and frameworks for you to pick and choose from. But it’s helpful to remind ourselves that we don’t always need to think our way out of a problem alone.
July 12, 2024 @ 1:22pm – The Mission, San Francisco
Don’t let, don’t let, don’t let money fool you
The O’Jays
I’ve always liked saving money. I receive money, and whether it’s two or two thousand dollars, I move it off to one side, and don’t touch it. End of story. A small pile of gold two dollar coins on my dressing table. A check from my grandpa that I deposit as soon as I can. Pocket money. My sister and I both had piggy banks. Hers was never more than a quarter full. Mine was heavy and barely touched. Hers a rowdy bar. Mine a rarely visited temple.
It physically hurt to lose money. Of course, it’s pretty rare to actually ‘lose’ money. But I worried about spending too much of it. I felt like if I didn’t pay attention at the supermarket, I’d buy the ‘expensive’ version of something and the next minute I’d be broke. My friends couldn’t wait for their paycheck to drop into their account. They’d refresh the page, waiting for it to appear. I never even liked looking at my bank account. I’d wince if the figures looked ‘low’. When I started a new job, I’d wait for several paychecks before I took a glance, and even then it felt like it would all easily be gone soon.
In my 20’s, I started making American money. The best kind of money, right? I learned a little more about saving. Investing. Retirement accounts. Mutual funds. Compound interest, the eighth wonder of the world, I read books by people who were really good about talking about saving money, like Ramit Sethi and Dave Ramsey. That mustache guy. Stories of people scrimping and saving and buying a house, or retiring early. These stories were mythical to me. The crowning achievement of my life was a three month emergency fund. But why stop there? It was no longer about an emergency.
I saved money because it felt good, not because it was smart. It might look like discipline, but it’s really not. It’s not wisdom either. It felt good. Of course, I’d never admit that to myself. There’s always a good, sensible reason to save. A house. My future. The bad economy. A rainy day. It felt good to ‘stay in’. It felt good to say no. To throw away stuff I didn’t use. It felt good, just like it felt sickening to blow hundreds of dollars on booze.
I’m not even interested in money. The money in my account was like a strange, mystic totem, a rock sculpture in a forest. Purely symbolic. I read financial advice not to learn, but for reassurance and validation. I didn’t get happiness from finding ways to get more money. No matter how much or little I earn, payday doesn’t thrill me more than any other day. I’m not the kind of person to find ways to lower my tax. Or even cut my utility bills. And those are great ways to save more money. Go figure.
I have a friend who is more of a ‘maximiser’. She’s always looking for ways to get more out of money. She has a ton of deductions on her tax return. She studies the tax code so she can part with less of her pay. She loves sales, deals. She’s doing something funny with her house. Something about investment property. I’m more simple. I see money, I save it.
One day, my addiction to saving went away. I think it was when I bought my apartment. When I was looking for a place to buy I noticed I cared less about the price. I just wanted a nice place to live. And when I finally pulled the trigger, all those acorns I had been squirreling away were gone. Of course, they weren’t really gone, they had just shape shifted. But I wasn’t even thinking about return on investment. I just wanted my own place. In that moment, money had turned from something sacred to something ordinary. Some small print on a contract. Most my battles in life feel like they are internal. Perspecties, attitudes, emotions, memories, dreams. But this was external. I had to move some coins from one place to another.
Am I a spender now? Just because I no longer see myself as a ‘saver’, doesn’t mean I’m a ‘spender’. There’s more than two ways to be with money. But I no longer feel really good about saving money. I have to admit, I miss that feeling. I no longer wince at spending ‘too much’ on a sandwich at the airport. I don’t miss that. I don’t think it’s ‘good’ to save money, just like it’s not ‘bad’ to spend it.
I invite you to use your money appropriately It’s not appropriate to worry about $5 difference in your energy bill. It’s not appropriate to buy a new smart phone every year. If you are thirsty, buy water, don’t buy a dual-fuel outdoor pizza oven. What matters is the compulsion. There’s making money and then there’s “I have got to make money“. There’s saving money and then there’s “I have got to save money.” See the difference?
Whenever we pluck the fruit of creativity from the golden tree our other hand plucks the fruit of destruction.
Robert A. Johnson
The body is bad at productivity. But we’ll show it what to do. Eyes open. Brain on. We are pretty good at ignoring hunger and tiredness and sadness if we really try. Yes, okay, there’s burn out, but that’s really a temporary thing. You can always start being productive again.
Tim Ferris showed us that there are ways to get productivity wrong. Being efficient, he says, is “getting good at a certain task, whether or not it is important.” Efficiency is the wrong way to be productive. Instead, we must be effective, and do what’s important.
We can be good at linking our happiness to the success of our business or the results we achieve at our job. At the end of the quarter, or the year, we know exactly how much we’ve produced. We know if we did a good job or a bad job. Guilt and shame can be very helpful in letting us know that we didn’t produce enough. In some cases, we weren’t efficient or effective. But that’s good to know. Next year we’ll put more effort in. We’ll step it up. We are very good at feeling guilty.
In 2022, I spent some time in El Salvador. My plan was to take a break between jobs. I’m not sure where that idea came from. Maybe I was a little burnt out. But instead of doing nothing, I reminded myself that I need to be productive. Any little quiet gaps in the day, even when I thought I finally had nothing to do, I always managed to open my laptop and find something.
Some days you wake up and you’re really not feeling it. Our energy does seem to wax and wane. But with the rise of productivity tools like Notion, we are good at always improving how productive we can be. Maybe we learn how to use tags to organize our thinking and quickly find old notes. Maybe we use large language models so we can finish our work faster. We are very good at finding new tools that we can use to our advantage. I’ll admit, it can be tiring to be machine-like, and there’s always the worry that the machine can do it better. But I think it’s fine for now, as long as our productivity is going up.
We are really good at being productive, rational and orderly. These things seem to fit together nicely. This is the public face that we present to others. We turn up on time, say the right thing and get all of our work completed to a good standard. Of course life is made up of opposites, and there is another side to this squeaky clean image. Sometimes we can’t help bursting out with a rude remark, a filthy curse word or do something dirty and gross. But we are very skilled at hiding that sort of behavior. That type of thing isn’t going to help us to reach our goals, or be a better person, so it’s really best not to talk about it. Ultimately, we are in charge of ourselves and the decisions we make.
We’re very good at productivity these days, that’s clear. But we can put down the efficiency and effectiveness and see that there’s always work to do. And work can be fun. Work is just what we can do during the day with our time and energy. In fact, we can’t help but work. We are natural workers. Sleeping and eating just happens. Work just happens too.
Once you finish feeling bad about how productive you were this year, get to work.
Buddha Bike 