Gateless

Gateless

By Sebastian Marshall and Kai Zau

Copyright

Copright © 2014 Sebastian Marshall and Kai Zau

All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

Author's Reflection: Sebastian Marshall

Author's Reflection: Kai Zau

Capacity

Theory of Capacity

The Biochemical Lever

The Cognitive Lever

The Action Lever

The Environment Lever

Concluding Capacity

Network

Beyond Nodes and Graphs

Character First

Types of People You Need In Your Life

Tools and Strategies

Signal

A 24-Hour Broadcast

The Elements of Signal

Tuning Your Signal

Mistakes to Avoid

Assets

Uncommon Sense

Mistakes to Avoid

Spending Effectively

Meaning

The Authors’ Position on Meaning

All The Resources Resolve To This

What are you doing with your life?

The First Path to Meaning, An Ultra-Clear Meaning of Life

The Second Path to Meaning, The Unclear Path Where You Must Get Proximate

The Third Path to Meaning, Resource Mode

The Fourth Path to Meaning, Search Mode

Contact

If you have any thoughts or questions, please email sebastian@gatelessbook.com or kai@gatelessbook.com.

Author's Reflection: Sebastian Marshall

Author's Reflection: Sebastian Marshall

You ever been outside when it’s really dark out?

If you haven’t, you might not be imagining it right. It’s not scary. It’s more… surreal. It’s like floating in a velvet cloak and top hat, made of the darkest silk… you can’t see anything for the life of you, but there’s a certain smoothness to it.

We rarely get to see such dark times at night these days. “Light pollution,” I think, is the term. And even if you go camping, wouldn’t most people bring their iPhones and gadgets these days?

The first time I can remember being in the darkest of pitch black was at Boy Scout summer camp. For the life of me, I can’t remember the name of the camp — heck, I can’t even remember what state it was in. Colorado? Arizona? New Mexico? Any of those is plausible.

But I’ll never forget the texture of that camp. I doubled up on marksmanship, getting down my shot with a gentle, old-fashioned, iron-sights .22 rifle in the morning. After a lunch of some charcoal-grilled food, it was archery training in the afternoon. I remember that archery range — hard to hit the target, since most of the arrows had crummy, beaten-up fletchings. Boy Scouts, for all their preparedness and Scout Motto and such, tend to beat the heck out of their tools.

It didn’t matter. Crummy fletchings and bad food? Who cares. You’re out past the grasp of the city with all its light pollution. The air was clean, and we picked up little skills here and there — swimming, first aid, how to whittle wood, how to start a fire. Fond memories.

But my most prominent memory wasn’t the satisfying click of the brass casings when switching new ammunition to the bolt-action; it wasn’t watching another poorly fletched arrow veer off course; it wasn’t the grills; it wasn’t the swimming; it wasn’t the hiking; nor was it the camaraderie or skills training.

No, the thing I remember mostly vividly is waking up in the pitch black of night and needing to go to the outhouse.

I mean, you can’t see anything.

This was one of the easiest camps — you didn’t have to pitch a tent. They had old canvas, army-style canopies on big, wooden pallets raised above the ground. I never asked about it, but my guess is that it rained sometimes, and without the raised wood, campers would get washed out in a heck of a bad time. That’s my guess.

So it was easy camping. No pitching a tent. Big, airy canopy, two guys per platform, lots of space compared to the tents you’d normally pack in when camping.

But when you’ve got to go, see, and it’s pitch black… well, that’s an issue.

It dawns on me that maybe no kids from Western Civilization will ever experience that again. Maybe I was one of the last ones, what with all the iPhones and devices and what not.

So, here’s an ages-old, intractable problem: can’t see anything outside, bladder’s full. What do you do?

It’s a harder question than it sounds. The area is unfamiliar. You want to find the designated outhouse; you don’t want to be the guy that makes a big mess right there. But then, there’s the stuff in the ground — roots, brush, rocks. If you’re not careful, you turn an ankle. And you can’t see a foot in front of you.

I stood there in that enveloping black night for a while, confused. I was just standing there. Sooner or later I had to get moving, but I couldn’t quite mentally process it.

The rest of the story is uneventful — I slowly climbed down off the elevated platform, made my way through the brush, and came back a few minutes later. I went slowly.

No, what sticks with me is just how dark it was. I could vaguely feel around in the night, and I could vaguely recall the camp’s layout. But there was no way to see where I was going or to know if I was on the right path. There were no lights. It was a dark night, no moon, nothing to navigate by. The campfires were long past burnt-out. And we didn’t have any iPhones.

***

A common thing for children growing up is to sit around and daydream about if they’d been born in an earlier era. “Oh, if only I’d been born in the Age of Sail, I’d have signed on with a ship and seen the world…”

“Oh, if I’d been born during the oil rush, I’d have built an oil company just like John Rockefeller.”

“Oh, if I had…”

Well — hey, not to be blunt or anything — but you have. We live in one of those eras. It’s a gigantic land grab right now. The old structures of civilization are becoming rapidly obsolete. New ground that’s never existed before is being staked out. I don’t know how I’d calculate it mathematically, but I feel pretty confident saying there’s 10,000 times more opportunity right now than there was in the Age of Sail or early/mid Industrial Revolution.

The thing is, we know what opportunities paid off in the past — looking backwards. We can look things up on Wikipedia on our iPhones; we can consult history for the right answers. But try looking forwards, and it’s just like a dark night at camp. Even trying to get your bearings can make your head hurt when it’s that dark and unfamiliar out.

And that’s the world we live in. The Age of Exploration seems magical and romantic to us, because we know where all the continents are and all the cool ways to get to and from them. But those first explorers — they sailed blindly into the unknown.

We know how the great fortunes were built on railroads, steel, oil, telegraphs. But it was not-so-obvious at the time, when the wildcatters were out digging in the swamps to stake a well, or when oil prices boomed and busted overnight, taking all of one’s dreams along with them. It wasn’t exactly a reputable, prestigious, forwards-looking thing. It was dark then. They didn’t have iPhones to look up what was going to happen next.

There is a certain satisfaction of being in the pure of darkness and away from the light pollution — for a while. But stay too long and confusion and malaise sets in. You need a way to orient yourself.

Today, it’s more possible than ever to get your bearings and to take advantage of all the shifts in the world. Many of the ways are obvious and proven. Many principles are universal.

Yet others are intangible, unintuitive, and elusive. It’s this latter group that we’re most concerned with in Gateless. They are illustrated with examples you can do right away and various methods for thinking, acting, and building your life.

This is a book for thinkers and doers. More than just the latest fluff — it would be such a privilege to us as authors if we can unlock new ways of thinking for you. Let’s enjoy the brisk, dark night that is upon us and the unexplored territory ahead, just waiting to be claimed. You’re already on the path. What follows are some ways to make the journey ever-so-slightly less perilous, to bring peace of mind, and to achieve more rapid success.

***

The premise of Gateless is rather simple. It comes down to four points —

1. Traditionally, people inherited many of life’s resources — identities, skills, friends, credentials, livelihoods, and so on — from a mix of formal and informal institutions. Most of these are intangible but essential to having a thriving life.

It might sound quaint now, but there was a whole mix of things called “social clubs” that were very popular for a long time, at least from the Industrial Revolution until now. Religious worship used to tie communities together, and it was where a lot of your friends and business contacts would come from. Alumni communities were closer-knit then, and the company you went to work for would provide more of your skill-development, pension fund, and so on. Within an industry, these standards were all clearly known and could be counted on.

Today, many of these institutions have entirely dissolved, many are in the process of dissolving, and the remaining ones are rapidly reinventing themselves to better fit into modern life.

We won’t get into a long academic talk about why and how all these shifts happened — it’s not that kind of book — but they did. So we’re just going to say it — you need to manage your own resources now. You can’t count on your educational institution, employer, or the social groups you happen to mix in with to take care of you. There’s still many terrific institutions, and it’s great if you find one where you fit in. But regardless, the responsibility of ensuring that you have the resources to thrive falls on your own shoulders.

2. After years of observations and hundreds of discussions with top performers, Kai and I converged on a universal framework for managing your resources. There are the “Four Currencies” —

Capacity: Your generalized ability to get results and make things happen.

Network: The sum of your friendships, collaborations, and mutual regard with others.

Signal: How you appear to the outside world.

Assets: Your tangible resources (we primarily cover the financial ones).

This is not everything in life, but it does cover the vast majority of situations. These things used to be de facto provided for you if you were in the right communities and interacted with the right organizations. That’s not a viable plan anymore.

In Capacity, we go beyond worn, uninspiring productivity advice to lay out four distinct paths to increasing your personal output. If you can make things happen in general, you’re valuable everywhere. In this transitionary era where the lines between disciplines are blurred and opportunities are plentiful, everyone needs a generalized strategy for getting results.

Likewise, most “networking” advice seems to be written in either a la-la-la happy-go-lucky sort of way (“let’s all just help each other”), or with an icy-cold ruthlessness bordering on sociopathy. Frankly, the whole term “Network” is unsatisfying. We think we’ve given it a better treatment — you absolutely do need to consciously ensure you have excellent people in your life. Being a helpful idealist isn’t enough, but the pseudo-sociopathic path certainly isn’t the answer either.

Signal is marvelous. Amongst the authors’ friends who have achieved prominent positions early in life, this section was consistently flagged as the most valuable for rising fast in the world. We cover the most effective types of credentials in terms of opening doors and getting opportunities — the disparity between the various types is staggering. We also wade into some unpleasant territory about what to do if you’re judged or stereotyped — gender, age, nationality, etc. It’s real and happens every single day, so rather than shy away from political incorrectness, we dive in with practical examples and case studies of people who rose above it.

Assets is the piece that already has the most already written about it elsewhere — so we’re not going to talk about tax-loss harvesting and whether you’re better off investing with a Roth election or not (you probably are, unless you’re in a high tax bracket). Instead, we cover the unintuitive and frequently-mistaken aspects of it — how to avoid the biggest, misery-causing blunders and strategies for spending money effectively so that you actually get what you want.

3. Deliberateness is a theme that recurs throughout the book. Most people leave all this stuff to chance, which is a terrible plan. We want to you walk away with deliberateness in thought, deliberateness in action, deliberateness in defining what matters to you and what doesn’t. The Four Currencies are a framework for getting what you want out of life — not by accidence but by your choice.

4. We also speak of ensuring that you’re consistently finding meaning in your life. At the end, we give some operational guidance if you already know what you want to do, and — just as importantly — ways to thrive and excel and keep going forwards even if you don’t know what your plans are. We go light on the philosophizing and give you a number of practical guidelines to ensure that your efforts translate into a better life.

Here’s hoping you have as much fun and learn as many critical lessons from reading this book as we did writing it. Let us know how the building process goes.

Sebastian

Author's Reflection: Kai Zau

Author's Reflection: Kai Zau

I love programming. If you’ve ever been so absorbed in a sport, or book, or conversation that time simply melted away — that’s the same rush I find in front of a keyboard.

There’s a general misconception about programming, however. It’s that you can sit in front of a darkened screen, Matrix-like symbols floating before your eyes, and instantly understand the whole mess. The Hollywood hacker is a techno-wizard; conjuring up a brilliant social network (or evil computer virus) with a few deft keystrokes.

I suppose it makes for good drama.

In reality, programming is more like the movie Groundhog’s Day — where Bill Murray’s character relives the 2nd of February over and over, getting better at it each time. At first, you don’t understand the code. But then you try things and unravel clues. If you make a mistake, you can rewind, fix the issue, and run it again. You inch towards the solution with each careful revision, just as the character in Groundhog’s Day strove for the best possible version of February 2nd.

It’s a perfectionist’s dream, really. Within the orderly logic of code, you can have the satisfaction of knowing you got the Right Answer. And that’s an incredible feeling.

I used to think that level of satisfaction couldn’t be had outside of computers and mathmatics, considering life’s infinite complexities and ambiguities. But even without structured code or supernatural time travel, we learn from observations, correct mistakes, and improve what matters.

Over time, our eyes do adjust to the dark.

***

I dropped out of university at age 18, fed up with textbooks and hungry for real world experiences. That summer, I worked as a shoe salesman. Another time, I wrote press releases. Yet another, I found myself naively trying to start a restaurant before I was over the legal drinking age.

That first year taught me plenty of lessons, but it was also an uncertain time. Money was tight, friends and family were worried, and I didn’t know how it would turn out. Despite my constraints, I somehow stumbled into a virtuous cycle.

It started with meeting friends and mentors who didn’t think I was crazy. We organized weekly events for local entrepreneurs; those grew popular; that led to a corporate job where I was paid to design software.

Seemingly by accident more than by planning, my decisions interwove to open new doors, and I quickly learned to trust my intuition. Three years after leaving campus, I had enough saved up to quit my job and start my first company.

At some point, people’s reactions towards me shifted from concerned to curious, and they started asking me how I did it. I wanted to say “luck,” but it would’ve been a partial truth. Underneath the serendipity, I felt a mechanical, probabilistic logic at work — just not one I fully understood or could explain. It became a favorite topic of mine.

How do you manage the intangible factors of success?

When I visited my friend Sebastian in early 2014, this question weighed on both of our minds. I was on vacation after finishing the largest contract of my life, and he was organizing an ambitious 14-city recruitment tour for his charity, CPNP/GiveGetWin.

We didn’t set out to write a book at first. Over conversations and coffee, we compared insights on productivity, business, health, money. Our philosophies were often different, but there was a distinct harmony between them.

Inspired, we wrote the first draft during a two-week frenzy in Shanghai. The following months found us refining the book while on an unprecedented journey — through North America with Sebastian’s charity, on a one-way, transatlantic cruise ship to London, from the grand mosques of Istanbul, to the majestic sunsets of Cape Town — all the while refining our theories and putting them to the test.

What resulted is not a mainstream how-to book.

For driven pioneers, executives, and entrepreneurs, this book outlines tactics and mental models for achieving greater results. For those navigating difficult transitions, it’s a guide to “derisking” the unknown and landing on your feet. And most importantly, for people who are just starting (or restarting) their journey, it contains rich examples from across science, history, philosophy, and culture to illustrate all that’s possible.

Whatever path you’re on, I hope you find many gems inside to help you along the way.

Kai

Capacity

Capacity

Theory of Capacity

The Rider and the Elephant

Before the Industrial Age, the greatest power on land was the African bush elephant. Weighing as much as 80 full-grown human men and towering at double a man’s height while solid on four legs, these majestic creatures are powerfully built and muscled. But make no mistake — these are not stupid brutes. Elephants have complex social rituals and can use basic tools to accomplish tasks.

For thousands of years humans have been domesticating and training animals for aid in construction, transportation, and warfare. One of the smartest and most powerful animals, elephants have often been good friends to mankind when trying to achieve things. From the first rise of modern human civilization until the Industrial Age, nothing as powerful as an elephant has been seen on land.

Therein lies a problem and a metaphor — elephants are beautiful, industrious, and helpful to humans, but also incredibly dangerous. Kevin Knodell, a journalist writing on why elephants were not incorporated into armies more often, put it —

“…when put under extreme stress, elephants can become unruly and difficult to control. Some of the more aggressive male elephants would sometimes pick fights with each other, causing major disruptions to operations as well as putting friendly troops around them at risk.”

Elephants could be powerful friends to humans, but also incredibly dangerous and destructive creatures. This metaphor of a rider trying to control an elephant can help us understand our own rational selves trying to control our animal nature.

NYU ethics professor Jonathan Haidt sums it up:

“Modern theories about rational choice and information processing don't adequately explain weakness of the will. The older metaphors about controlling animals work beautifully. The image that I came up with for myself, as I marveled at my weakness, was that I was a rider on the back of an elephant. I'm holding the reigns in my hands, and by pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn't have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I'm no match for him.”

Therein lies the problem. Your consciousness is the same type of consciousness that led to our ancestors building this grand and glorious world we live in. It is a majestic power that operates inside your mind — and one that is often difficult to control.

A Theory of Capacity, I

You’re always creating effects. As you walk into a room, the social texture of that room changes. Every business you patronize, you create for them revenue that affects their profitability and numbers. The work you do makes ripples, sometimes larger or smaller, through the entire world around you.

Your ability to consciously shape the effects you’re creating around you — we call this “Capacity.”

Be sure — you’re creating effects, intentionally or not. But to understand Capacity, imagine a large problem happening and different people you know saying, “I’ve got this under control.”

There are people who, right away, you’d think: “Oh, phew, they’re on it. It’ll get fixed.”

Those people have high Capacity; they can fix things. These people that can always do what they set out to do are incredibly valuable. If you know someone like this, you know how appreciated they are, and how much everyone counts on them.

There are other people who, once they’ve pledged to get it done, you’d think, “They said they’ve got it under control... hmm... there’s a 50/50 chance it’ll get done. I’ll have to pay attention.”

Those people have a lower Capacity, but a decent one; they are unreliable in their results, but can sometimes produce. This is most of us.

And of course, there’s people who, after promising to get it done, you’d feel no reassurance at all. You’d still be looking to get it fixed, because you know they’re not going to get it done.

Low Capacity.

A Theory of Capacity, II

A lot of the things that go towards “Capacity” are things that wouldn’t normally get lumped together.

A greater ability to function when stressed, fatigued, or in distress means higher Capacity.

An ability to spot opportunities as they emerge — higher Capacity, again.

Putting together novel connections to produce better results? That does it.

So does being able to concentrate more.

Being able to speak clearly helps; so does being able to understood the point another person is making.

Being able to understand numbers well is often useful.

Some of these are active processes. Some of them operate in the background. And some of them, people think are aspects of who they are, immutable and unchangeable.

In a world with less defined careers and less clear paths, the simple ability to get a job done is incredibly prized and valuable.

A case could be made that this generalized effectiveness has become the most valuable trade. Specialist’s knowledge still reigns in medicine, law, and architecture, but even these very-established fields are seeing a greatly increased need for people who can learn quickly, adapt flexibly, and produce results.

That is, people who can consciously make effects happen.

People of high Capacity.

A lot goes into this, under many names and categories — health, productivity, meaning, thinking, creating, consistency, training, thought processes, attitudes and affinities, beliefs, prejudices, skills, physical characteristics, mental characteristics, habits, knowledge, and so on — all of this goes into Capacity.

There are many universals, and searching for them and installing them into your life makes you universally more effective.

Levers To Be Pulled

Capacity is easy enough to understand, but tricky to improve. It’s like that rider trying to control an elephant. The conscious, thinking part of you sits on top of a beast that outweighs you by 80 times. You’re smarter than it, but it’s pretty smart too. And if it gets furious and goes on a rampage, it’s very hard to slow it down.

A more mature, happy, well-trained, well-fed elephant doing something it’s done before can do a good job. A hungry, angry, stressed, untrained elephant trying to be coaxed into doing something new is a recipe for a disaster.

Increasing your Capacity is similar — there’s an infinite many sets of levers to pull. There are tips and tricks for managing short term goals, best practices for dealing with in-the-moment emergencies, and long term training regimens for permanent gains.

So, how do you improve your ability to effect results? We’ve divided these “levers” into four categories as a useful starting point —

Biochemistry

Cognition

Action

Environment

The Biochemical Lever

A Rubber Bag

“… the human body is remarkably akin to a rubber bag… This isn't a glamorous topic, but it's worth considering briefly to complete our understanding of the rubber bag. Every day, you put in some quantity of food and drink. For the most part, your body efficiently disassembles these complex substances into their molecular constituents and makes them available to power the cells of your body. As in any chemical process, there's a residue of waste, and your body excretes this in the well-known ways. … Intake, burning, and excretion determine, in large part, how you look, how you feel, and how many years you'll live. They do this because, through simple arithmetic, they control the contents of the rubber bag. Living, as we do, inside the bag, it's worth understanding how we're affected by these processes, then using that understanding to gain control of them.”

— John Walker, “Hacker’s Diet”

Well, there you have it. You body is like a rubber bag with a bunch of chemical processes happening inside of it. Intake of substances, burning/processing those substances, and excreting them determines in large part how you look, feel, and how many years you’ll live.

Consider a time that you had a desperate craving for food, thinking, “I must eat!”

Have you ever stopped and reflected on how odd that type of thought is? It’s disruptive and seems to emerge from quite a different place than when you reason abstractly through ethics or science.

Here’s a strange question — when you seem to get that “I must eat!” feeling, have you ever stopped to consider who that I is?

Food — well, food is commonplace. Food is so common that sometimes we stop thinking about it.

Let’s try a more intense example: consider when someone gets addicted to diacetylmorphine. Diacetylmorphine was brought to market by the Bayer Company in 1895. It was primarily marketed as a replacement for more morphine which was supposed to be less addictive and sold as a cough suppressant.

Of course, diacetylmorphine is a bit of a mouthful, so — as drug companies do — they looked for something more marketable. They eventually settled on the German word “heroisch” — meaning heroic, courage, etc — since the substance seemed to do just that. The final trade name the drug was marketed under by Bayer is still the one it’s known as — heroin.

They blundered. Heroin turns out to be considerably more addictive and more potent than morphine. When someone who is prone to heroin abuse gets in the thralls of the drug, it can become one of the most addictive experiences of their lifetime.

Someone who is “on H” will describe the pain just going away, the pure bliss, whatever — that’s their subjective experience… but inwardly, little tiny biochemical levers are being pulled.

Everything you consume affects your biochemistry to some extent; so do most environments, and a great many of your own thoughts and actions.

We separate out biochemistry as something you can adjust, but it’s worth noting that thinking (“cognition”) and your body’s biochemistry are not actually separate things. Your thoughts are transmitted through biochemistry, little electro-chemical reactions rippling through your brain and body.

There’s a feedback loop here. If you don’t eat, you get hungry. Who is this “you”? There are a great many stories of heroin addicts who were nice, kind, sweet, loving, affectionate, steadfast, all-around-decent people who turned into absolute monsters when they got on the drug (or rather, once they got on the drug and then into withdrawal from it after completing some doses).

When a heroin addict thinks, “I need heroin” — who is that “I” that needs it?

When you think, “I need food” — who is this “I” that needs food? Is the “I” that “needs food” the same highest and best version of you?

The Only Mind Over Matter Trap

As John Walker said: “Intake, burning, and excretion determine, in large part, how you look, how you feel, and how many years you'll live.”

We tend to like to think of ourselves as smart, powerful, conscious, reasoning, moral creatures. But a man without food — his thoughts turn to food.

No matter how smart, conscientious, brilliant, creative, ethical, friendly, cooperative, industrious you are in the “highest and best version of you” — if you go without food long enough, all your thoughts turn to food. It happens faster with water. Opiates — heroin included — can sometimes change a person’s perceptions and desires so incredibly much that they’re effectively different people.

There is a tempting explanation people go to about this sort of thing, a sort of moralizing. It says, “Mind over matter. Perform no matter what. What the body is saying is irrelevant. You have total choice; use it.”

There is something useful to this — it’s rare for a person to accept too much personal responsibility. But it’s also naïve.

The late Bill Walsh turned the San Francisco 49ers around as coach and general manager, going from being the worst team in the NFL to champions in 3 years. He went on to win 5 championships in 14 years, a remarkable achievement, and is regarded as one of the most successful coaches of all time. His son Craig wrote about him:

“In [the old days], one method of ‘toughening up’ players was to prohibit them from drinking any water while they were on the field during practice. Bill Walsh allowed it, because he saw no gain in the policy. In fact, he felt depriving players of water during practice was counterproductive, because it lowered performance.”

The simple fact of the matter is that someone who is dehydrated will have worse physical and mental performance. Perhaps there is some minor adaptive advantage to doing this on very rare occasions. Maybe, or maybe not. But by and large, it’s a stupid and destructive policy that leads to getting worse physical performance out of an athlete, a higher rate of injuries, lower general health, and less ability to practice with excellent form and build great habits.

The old school coaches had a “mind over matter, toughen up, make good choices” approach. There is something to mind over matter. We’ll talk about cognition next. But neglecting biochemistry is ignorant. A dehydrated athlete is literally incapable of the physical and mental performance of a hydrated athlete, and is more likely to get injured. That is a fact; period.

Yet, many people neglect biochemical factors in their own life. If you’re dehydrated, you can’t run as well or as long or as fast. You can’t think as fast and you’re not as crisp mentally. Yet, many people don’t look at what’s going on with their own biochemistry if they find themselves unable to concentrate, if creativity isn’t coming, or if they feel unhappy.

They simply say, “I must force myself to do this!”

This is a naïve view. You cannot simply always think your way out of real, physical problems and constraints.

To hit the highest levels of performance, you need to manage biochemistry. If you’re dehydrated, performance suffers. If you have a bacterial infection, performance suffers. If you have shin splints from stress fractures in your lower legs, running will be much less pleasant, more painful, and more stressful. It will be harder to keep running. Mind over matter helps and it’s part of the puzzle, but not the whole part. You’d do well to stretch, strengthen, and hydrate.

This is obvious in the realm of physical performance. (At least, now it’s becoming obvious — the “no water when training for toughness” was “common wisdom” for a long time.) But people do not apply that same level of rigor to managing their concentration, fatigue, energy levels, creativity, and so on.

Prediction

Perhaps in the future, children will learn the fundamentals of nutrition and biochemistry in schools, including the mechanics of action for the most common ingested substances. After all, universal literacy was a utopian dream not all that long ago.

In the Industrial Age, there was not that much benefit to the average man to having a higher capacity to effect results. Of course, in theory there was a tremendous benefit. But if you had any “cog in the wheel” type job, extra levels of creativity or heightened concentration wouldn’t make a big difference.

If you worked on an assembly line, being a little bit sharper of awareness, having better concentration ability, better clarity of thought — these wouldn’t benefit your career very much. If you were 3% better at working on the assembly line, did you get paid more? Did it even get noticed?

This doesn’t refer just to manual labor. An insurance underwriter would be expected to get through a set number of policies that’s more-or-less normal per day. Slight gains in performance would balance the company’s risk profile, increase profitability and efficiency a little bit… that’s true… but the most likely outcome is that the higher performance wouldn’t even be noticed.

There are fields where a slight improvement from any member of a team made huge visible differences in total effectiveness, and it’s no surprise that much of the pioneering research on the topic came from those places. Modern militaries and professional sports teams both benefit extremely heavily from having healthier, stronger, smarter, faster soldiers and players, and it’s very visible. It’s not surprising that military research and research into athletic performance were two areas that breakthroughs started being made on the topic.

Nowadays, though, the vast majority of us benefit from a boost in thinking and deciding faster, being mentally tougher and more resilient, being able to withstand setbacks better. Professional sports players stand to gain millions of dollars by learning more about how their bodies and minds work. You stand to gain at least tens of thousands of dollars, perhaps much more, at a minimum.

Everyone does.

We’re leaving a time where higher mental and physical ability didn’t make a tremendous difference. Single-digit percentage points of concentration, creativity, or persistence can be worth immense amounts in breakthroughs.

We call the sum total of your ability to effect results “Capacity,” and biochemistry plays a huge part of it. Schools don’t teach it — yet. We can look hopefully to a future where they will.

Caffeine, For Instance

Most people don’t know how caffeine works in their bodies, yet the majority of American adults drink caffeine daily. To simplify greatly, your body produces adenosine as a natural signal to you that you should start thinking about sleeping. Caffeine molecules are shaped similarly to adenosine, and bind to the adenosine receptors without activating them.

Thus, caffeine blocks out your body’s signal to get sleepy. That’s the primary effect. The other effects come from secondarily after the adenosine block. The body, reacting to this strange change seems to then produce dopamine and adrenalin, which do… well, they do a lot of things. But suffice to say, collectively you’ll be both more alert and feel more energetic.

Why does caffeine stop working so intensely over time?

Dr. Arvind Narayanan writes in “The Calculus of Caffeine Consumption” — “Caffeine tolerance builds up rather quickly … that if you drink coffee regularly, pretty soon you start producing more adenosine in response; thus you need your caffeine dose just to get up to your normal level of brain activity, and you're dopey if you don't take it.”

That’s part of the process called homeostasis — the body tries to regulate itself. Basically, simplifying, your body doesn’t want you to refrain from sleeping. So if you start having this adenosine-blocking caffeine thing regularly, your body stops having the novel dopamine/adrenalin reaction to caffeine (the situation doesn’t seem to be a big deal), and your body starts producing larger amounts of adenosine so that you get sleepy.

Thus, you start needing caffeine to counteract the higher amounts of adenosine. That’s where the tolerance, addictiveness, and withdrawal — if you quit caffeine — come from.

Why is this worth knowing?

Because it gives you options to use caffeine in a smarter way.

In the short term, Dr. Narayanan writes of two ways to use caffeine — reinforcing usage and antagonistic usage.

Again, caffeine works by suppressing adenosine (which normally makes you tired), and sets off a minor chain reaction of other hormones in the body.

Narayanan: “Let us examine the way that most people take caffeine — when they feel sleepy (I will call this antagonistic consumption.) This changes the attention level from the green line to the blue line (i.e, it smooths out the fluctuations.) This works great for many people (say, someone that has a data entry job), because maximum productivity is limited by external constraints. Other jobs where antagonistic consumption is essential include assembly line worker and truck driver, where mistakes can be disastrous but there is little to be gained from peak concentration.”

Alternatively, you can do “reinforcing caffeine usage” — which means taking caffeine when you’re most awake and alert already to maximize your alertness and try to make breakthroughs. Narayanan concludes,

“But other jobs, often characterized by a low level of repetition, have a markedly different attention-productivity curve. Academic research, for instance, involves generating ideas that no one has come up with before. … [in these situations] reinforcing consumption helps maximize productivity. According to this strategy, the best time to drink coffee is when you are already very alert.”

Narayanan also gets into useful concerns about long-term caffeine usage —

“Over the long term, consistent caffeine consumption is as good [for productivity] as non-consumption, because of (you guessed it) tolerance. Is there a better strategy? Of course there is. Periodic abstinence lets adenosine levels return to normal. With complete abstinence, it takes 5 days to reach adenosine normality; conservatively, and with imperfect abstinence, a week or 10 days may be required.”

Look — most people drink coffee, soda, tea, energy drinks, all sorts of stuff without knowing what it’s doing in their body. If they spent an hour or two learning what the stuff did, they could use it better and have better lives.

That’s why it matters. Studying a little basic biology and chemistry is difficult at first; there is so much potential information. But over time, it becomes easier — and your life gets better.

Caffeine is just a single example. By learning more about how your body and mind work, you can make simple adjustments to be much more effective.

Moral Fashions and Conformity

"Where there's a Man ... there's a Marlboro.”

— 1950’s Marlboro Cigarette Advertisement

"Take care of the children. Tobacco will kill you, and I am living proof of it."

— Wayne McLaren, Marlboro Man, on his deathbed from cancer at age 51

Most people follow the moral fashions of their day.

The number of cigarettes consumed per adult in the United States each year was negligible in 1900, grew slowly to 1500 per year in 1930, peaked at almost 4500 per year in the early 1960’s, and has fallen off under 1500 again in the early 2010’s. It’s still falling.

To be sure, legislators, educators, and researchers deserve credit for this reduction. But the cynic might suggest that cigarette consumption fell off less because of knowledge about of its damaging effects and more because smoking itself became unfashionable.

Similar patterns follow in food consumption, drug usage, and just about everything.

It’s difficult for a person to abstain from doing harmful things when all of their neighbors smoke, eat sugary junk food, or get drunk regularly. Behaviors get copied; people follow the flock.

Of course, there are free-thinkers and mavericks in any society. Go somewhere where alcohol is completely illegal, and there will be people who assert their sense of freedom and identity by drinking anyways. Go into a heavy drinking society where there is a cultural obligation to drink alongside the boss and coworkers, and you’ll still find mavericks who refuse to drink.

But, by and large, most people follow moral fashions and copy each other. People like fitting in.

The value to breaking free from your nation’s moral fashions in terms of consumption and biochemistry is enormous. Yet, a boy in a culture where it’s “unmanly” not to smoke would generally prefer to light up — and fit in — rather than use stimulants smarter, or pursue relaxation in healthier ways.

Moral Fashions and Conformity, II

The magazine Consumer Reports points out something that… might be problematic: “[Between] 1975 and 2008, the number of products in the average supermarket swelled from an average of 8,948 to almost 47,000.”

And a great many of those 47,000 products are, frankly, terrible for you.

Citi Research reports the retail sales of soft drinks in the United States at over $76 billion in 2014. On the other hand, there’s a whole host of mild stimulants that are controlled or banned in the U.S. for a variety of reasons. Mostly, it comes down to the fact that they have side effects.

Well, that’s true — but don’t those candy bars, soft drinks, Twinkies, cupcakes, and so on have side effects?

Oh, they do —

“More than one-third of U.S. adults (34.9%) are obese.”

— The American Journal of Medicine, via the U.S. Center for Disease Control

There is absolutely no doubt at all that the no-fiber, no-micronutrient, no-satiety, all-sugar drinks like Coca Cola are not good for obese people. At least 1/3rd of Americans should never drink sugared sodas. Yet, soda is fully legal and entirely unrestricted, whereas there’s significant restrictions on buying a mild stimulant like ephedrine, which is synthesized from the ephedra plant that has been used medicinally in Asian countries for many centuries.

Examine.com’s entry on ephedrine — “Ephedrine is one of the four active components of the herb Ephedra. It is able to induce fat loss via increasing the amount of fat available for fuel as well as by increasing heat expenditure. It has been implicated in increasing the Metabolic Rate by up to 5% in humans. […] Ephedrine is highly synergistic with Caffeine, and for this reason is commonly found in something called an ECA stack (Ephedrine, Caffeine, and Aspirin). […] Ephedrine is well studied and a fairly reliable compound, although it does not work under all situations. Although implicated in being able to reduce weight outside of exercise and diet changes it should be taken with a change in diet and exercise in order to maximize effectiveness and minimize side-effects.”

Ephedrine should not be used if you don’t know what you’re doing, and especially not if you have heart problems. You should not take large dosages of it. If you take it, you should talk to a smart doctor about it beforehand. If your doc is onboard with the idea and you use it cautiously, ephedrine can be a huge quality of life boost.

If you’re at-risk, don’t pay attention to side effects, neglect research and doctors, or take poor dosages of ephedrine, it could be very bad for your health.

But, do you know what is very bad for your health? Sodas and candy bars.

If a drug came out that adversely affected over 1/3rd of people who took it, and the only payoff was a little bit of pleasant taste and a little sugar high, there is no chance it would be authorized to come onto the market.

Yet, there are the soft drinks. Meanwhile, if you mention that you were working with a performance-oriented doctor and he prescribed that you take ephedrine hydrochloride mixed with caffeine, that would seem like something “serious and scary” to someone… while they scarfed down a candy bar and drank a soda.

The point is that you need to do research and learn how your body works, think critically, and not follow along with the masses. Soda is socially acceptable now, but it’s very likely that future generations will look back and see it as barbarically backwards. Ephedrine hydrochloride is restricted right now; it’s very likely in the future that a great many people will carefully take it while working with their doctor for its performance benefits, metabolic boost, and other positive effects.

Think critically. It’s how you gain advantages.

Pulling the Biochemical Levers

Why is the advice to “exercise” and “get enough sleep” so trite and unsatisfying?

People parrot the advice so often. What is the response people feel? “Yes, yes, of course I know that! Tell me something more useful!”

Very well; let us try to do so.

“Exercise” is obviously correct advice. Get up, move around. It is good for you on many levels.

But, so often, the advice is either given as a command — “Do your homework. Eat your vegetables. Exercise.”

Or, the benefits are given in medical-speak. “People who exercise are less likely to suffer from heart disease later in life.”

Neither of these are so motivating. “Exercise” gets so easily slotted into the category of things that one is being told to do that one doesn’t want to do.

Abstract and far-future benefits are generally bad at motivating people. “Good health 30 years from now” appeals to only the most long-term of thinkers, and even the most long-term of thinkers are still motivated by seeing progress right now.

Perhaps a solution is to map out what types of physical sensations and states you need in order to live and do the things that are important to you — and then recognizing that you can, with practice, train and tune yourself for those states.

Said a different way, you can actually think about how you want to feel now and in the future — healthy, thriving, vibrant, creative, effective — and build your life to ensure you reach those places regularly.

The “What For” Combats Laziness and Indolence

The idea of tuning your body and biochemistry for specific key performance is nothing new to athletes. Multiple Olympic Gold Medalist Andre Agassi wrote in his autobiography “Open” —

“I sweat a lot, more than most [tennis] players, so I need to begin hydrating many hours before a match. I down quarts of a magic elixir invented for me by Gil, my trainer for the last seventeen years. Gil Water is a blend of carbs, electrolytes, salt, vitamins, and a few other ingredients Gil keeps a closely guarded secret. (He’s been tinkering with his recipe for two decades.) He usually starts force-feeding me Gil Water the night before a match, and keeps forcing me right up to match time. Then I sip it as the match wears on. At different stages I sip different versions, each a different color. Pink for energy, red for recovery, brown for replenishment.”

Athletes have long trained to alter their biochemistry favorably for performance. Marathoners eat different meals, lift different weights, and do different training than boxers. But at any competitive level, both marathoners and boxers know they need to get their bodies’ chemistries as favorable to their endeavors as possible.

Training and tuning your chemistry for athletes is nothing new, but it’s been much slower to transition to general life situations. Most work in medicine and biochemistry is built for people who are sick or deemed sick; healthy people wanting to be healthier, stronger, and more effective is relatively rare.

The causes for this are legion, but one in particular is worth noting again — an increase in your capacity to create effects makes a small gain or no gain when doing straightforward routine tasks, like working faster on assembly line or completing routine paperwork on an insurance policy.

But if you’re on a path where you’re doing non-straightforward tasks to advance your life, then gradually building more Capacity produces huge gains, both economically and in turns of getting what you want in life.

“Exercise” is too broad and bland of an admonition, it is a shame to prescribe it as a chore, and the far future benefits aren’t enough to entice most people.

But the idea of being fiercely creative, being in a thriving peak state more often, having more endurance, being able to react faster and more decisively to crises — these are immeasurably valuable.

When feeling lazy and indolent, “not getting heart disease later in life” might not get you off your butt — but knowing “if I go put my exercise reps in, I’m going to get smarter, more focused, sharper” — that might do it.

Thus, the first prescription for you in regards to managing your biochemistry is to figure out the “what for.”

You’ll want to spend time thinking through what best serves you from the broad groupings of emotion, physical performance, and internal sensations and pressures.

Some workplaces, hobbies, and goals call for being more aggressive — and there is a mix of diet, physical training, structuring your environment, and possibly supplements and intentional and conservative pharmacology that will get you there.

Other workplaces, hobbies, and goals call for steady and enduring concentration — and there are, again, a mix of diet, training, environment, and possibly supplements and pharmacology that lead to having greater wells of concentration at your disposal.

The first step is definitely to analyze and think critically on which mix of emotions, physical states, and internal sensations will help get you where you’re going.

And Then A Decade of Testing Begins

There’s no two ways about it — finding your rhythms and ways of tweaking your biochemistry for optimal performance takes quite a while.

The vast majority of people are nowhere near their optimal performance mix. Basic things like a deficiency in a key vitamin or a mild allergy to a food type of which you’re not aware can take you off that peak and thriving mode, without you even realizing it happened.

This problem is ten times more challenging if you’ve got even slightly abnormal brain development.

Doctors Hallowell and Ratey wrote about the effect of “reward deficiency syndrome” in their excellent work “Delivered from Distraction.” The following excerpt is very technical, but worth it. Stick with it until you understand it —

“People who have RDS are not able to feel pleasure as easily as others.… [They] are not as able as those who don’t have it to reap the pleasurable benefits of dopamine. Dopamine is one of the chief chemical mediators of pleasure. Anything that gives you a squirt of dopamine tends to make you feel good. Exercise can do this. So can making love. So can any kind of creative activity in which your imagination gets deeply involved. So can drinking, gambling, taking extreme risks, eating ice cream and other carbohydrates, taking various drugs, and smoking cigarettes.…

“People who have RDS are more apt to turn to both the good and the bad ways excessively, because moderate ways don’t produce as much pleasure as they do for other people. A good-morning kiss and a hug on their way out the door don’t do as much for them as they do for others. They have to do more to get the squirt of dopamine than other people do. So they do more. They may exercise more than others, or make love more, or engage in more creative activity. And they may drink more than is good for them, or gamble more or eat more ice cream or take more extreme risks, all because they need to do more in order to feel as good as others do with less.”

Bang.

That’s a “willpower be damned” description right there. It brings some clarity that trying to apply willpower to behavior that’s largely generated separately from willpower-controllable mechanisms is foolish.

Hallowell and Ratey speculate that this is much of the link frequently seen between brilliant creativity and self-destructive behavior — Van Gogh and Lord Byron immediately come to mind — engaging in things like substance abuse, violence, crime, and self-harm. This type of person “can’t get no satisfaction,” so to speak — while someone more normal would feel good from putting in an honest day’s work and going home to enjoy time with family, the RDS’ed artist only gets satisfaction from creating masterful works — and the rest of the time, blunts the numbness and boredom with drugs, alcohol, over-eating, getting into arguments and fights and conflicts, and so on.

This is why you need to study biochemistry and test with yourself. It is a long-term process. If you, dear reader, “can’t get no satisfaction” — well, it’s very good to know that in advance.

In that case, you could start being aware of the origins of desperate cravings — again, when you start thinking “I need candy and liquor, right now!” — who is the “I” that desperately needs candy and liquor? Where did that come from?

If — and this is a big if — someone has high levels of pain and anxiety, and low levels of dopamine, and then starts feeling like “I need to do something stupid now” — well, this might just be controllable more easily if someone is aware of it. You can hear plenty of “X saved my life” type stories where a young kid is on a self-destructive rampage path until finding boxing, martial arts, a sport, an art, or something that lets them get those payoffs without the marauding out-of-control destructiveness.

How long does it take to discover how to fine-tune your unique mixes of genetics, chemistry, your body and its various advantages and damages you’ve sustained over the years?

Well, here is the good and bad answer — A long time. It takes a long time. Perhaps a decade. Perhaps longer.

It’s bad because we want instant gratification. It would, of course, be superior to have maxed out performance-optimal chemistry in two weeks if we could get it.

But many interventions to tune one’s biochemistry take weeks or months, even years, to show the true depths of their effects. It’s currently generally agreed among fitness people that, when doing weight loss, 1 to 2 pounds per week of fat lost is a good sustainable target.

If you’d gotten 100 pounds overweight — not at all uncommon in our society — you’re looking at a year or two to get towards your optimal weight for performance. That’s assuming you don’t have any setbacks and need to tweak your diet and attempts towards fitness, which, of course, you probably will.

This depresses and demoralizes people. Quick fixes are desirable. Of course they are; why wouldn’t they be?

But the upside to it, the silver lining, is that it becomes an intensely and insanely satisfying pursuit that never ends.

Most people have no idea of what their minds are capable of. The authors don’t know — but have seen rare glimpses through a mix of training, diet, meditation, and the occasional pharmacology.

When you’ve got the mental processes firing and can write 10,000 words in a day which are beautiful and poignant of good quality writing… again, it is naive to take full credit for that. “I wrote 10,000 words today.” Indeed, yes — but who is this “I,” and how much did this “I” benefit from heightened brain connectivity with faster processing speed and better abstract recall?

When your physical training is such that you can endure and thrive through long runs, spring and jump, do handstands, and squat and deadlift gargantuan amounts of weight, a certain feedback loop takes over. It’s a connection to a raw power source, a presence, a gravity. It takes over, filling one with confidence — and, if going for a difficult athletic performance — perhaps a mix of excitement and dread when trying for that new personal record. But then, the stresses and aggravations of everyday life become somewhat muted under knowledge of one’s own raw power.

Thought is transmitted through the electricity and chemicals that make up our bodies; optimizing the electro-chemical reactions taking place leads to greater capacity for thought across the board.

It is a long game, but one of the most satisfying ones.

Cake

“I… must… eat… that… cake… give me cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… CAKE CAKE CAKE CAKE, GIVE ME THE CAKE OR I’M GOING TO KILL SOMEONE!!”

Who is this “I” that needs the cake?

You?

Okay.

Eating the cake will give you a sugar rush. You’ll get calories into your body and your blood sugar will get up. You’ll probably feel happy for a moment, or at least, the pain will subside. The craving will go away by giving into it. Your body will have more energy to do some things with.

These are not so bad. If you were going to die in 30 minutes, eating the cake might be the perfect mix of short-term and long-term strategy, because you wouldn’t be paying the price in any long-term sense.

Researcher, author, and investigative journalist Gary Taubes does an excellent job explaining what’s going on here in “Why We Get Fat” —

“Sweets, again, are a special case… when you eat sugar… it triggers a response in the same part of the brain — known as the “reward center” — that is targeted by cocaine, alcohol, nicotine, and other addictive substances. All food does this to some extent, because that’s what the reward system is evolved to do: reinforce behaviors (eating and sex) that benefit the species. But sugar seems to hijack the signal to an unnatural degree, just as cocaine and nicotine do. If we believe the animal research, then sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are addictive in the same ways that drugs are and for much the same biochemical reasons.”

Taubes had previously explained that different people store incoming nutrients as fat more readily than others — some people bank calories into fat more easily, some people burn it off and have more energy. A terribly unfair thing: with no difference in behavior, some people get chubbier and simultaneously have less energy.

It gets worse with time — people that tend to have slow metabolisms tend to also eat more, and often eat more junk food, and thus build up “insulin resistance” — which also makes them store more fat!

It’s a vicious cycle. Or, as Taubes puts it —

“Now, how’s that for a vicious cycle? The foods that make us fat also make us crave precisely the foods that make us fat. … The more fattening they are, and the more predisposed you are to get fat when you eat them, the greater the cravings. The cycle can be broken, although it requires fighting these cravings — just as alcoholics can quit drinking and smokers can quit smoking, but not without constant effort and vigilance.”

Vicious cycle, indeed. What’s the takeaway?

Long-Term Biochemistry vs. Short-Term Biochemistry

Most people don’t realize that biochemistry is one of the monarchs reigning the kingdom that is their body and mind.

“I want cake” — who is this “I”? It is biochemical-you. Some deep animalistic part of you is transmitting its demand into your thoughts. You probably think of “You” as the more evolved, thinking, discerning, ethical, smarter you.

Well, there are some language problems here, but let’s keep moving.

If you’re in “I want cake” mode, some mix of the insulin levels you’re secreting, your muscles’ insulin sensitivity, your current feeling of your energy levels, your levels of glucose in your blood, how recently you’ve eaten, your brain’s reward center — all of this is working together to come up with King Biochemistry’s Commands.

There are two ways to deal with this. The first is to — eat cake. In the short term, nothing fixes Oh-My-God-I-Need-Cake quite like eating some cake.

But you could also condition yourself for the long term. Quitting sugars permanently, scaling them back, always consuming them with high levels of fiber, taking something which increases metabolism and suppresses hunger like ephedrine HCL mixed with caffeine (under a doctor’s supervision, please, in conservative dosages, and after doing the relevant research) — these things start affecting your long-term biochemistry.

It’s not just sugar. Biochemistry has its say in everything.

Long-term heavy caffeine users start losing many of the benefits from their caffeine usage, because their body compensates by producing more adenosine which makes them sleepier.

Thus, if you mindlessly slam caffeine every day of your life, you lose the ability to use caffeine as a powerful tool to get cognitive breakthroughs.

The answer is to learn about the stuff, and consider occasionally cycling off of it.

Examine.com — “Tolerance to caffeine is quite unique in the sense that it isn't a mere 'increase the dose to get the same effects' reaction. Caffeine can act drastically different in somebody known as caffeine 'naive' (infrequent using) and caffeine 'tolerant' (frequent using) persons.”

The benefits of caffeine don’t disappear entirely with time, but you lose the ability to get the highest levels of what Arvind Narayanan’s calls “reinforcing caffeine usage” — taking it when already very awake, and ideally when you’re more “caffeine naïve.”

Narayanan explains, “A cognitive bottleneck can only be overcome when attention level exceeds a task dependent, typically very high threshold. Clearly, then, antagonistic caffeine consumption results in worse-than-normal productivity, because it flattens the attention level curve and decreases the fraction of time spent at peak attention level. Instead, reinforcing consumption helps maximize productivity. According to this strategy, the best time to drink coffee is when you are already very alert.”

Committing to no coffee and no caffeine a week or two to reset tolerances sounds like hell to many people. You again have short-term vs. long-term considerations. Periodically cycling off caffeine gives you a more powerful tool to use for breakthroughs, but you’ll feel bad in the short term if you do so.

Of course, one potential solution would to be research other stimulants which have low side effects and work well within your body. There are very many safe stimulants if taken with smart research beforehand and under a smart medical practitioner’s guidance. But as Examine’s Encyclopedia puts it,

“Caffeine is a potent stimulant and typically used as a standard due to its social renown.” Most stimulants — even stimulants with a very long history in other countries of safe usage — don’t have that “social renown,” and thus people get worried. Most people tend to look to what their neighbors are doing — nonstop caffeine usage is normal and commonly done, so people take the short term effects of it, even if there’s better long-term options by cycling off onto a different stimulant for a short period while resetting caffeine tolerance (or just going without stimulants entirely for a week or two, while acknowledging upfront that you might take a productivity hit that week).

Fitness, stretching, hydration, everything you ingest, and much else about your environment affects your biochemistry. The temptation is almost always to do short term measures that are socially normal and morally fashionable, even if those measures are very stupid.

Hungry, upset, or feeling heartbroken? Eat a pint of ice cream.

Tired? Slam the fifth coffee of the day.

And so on.

A better way is to examine what states you want over the long term, start researching and testing ways to get there more often. A particular pharmacological intervention might be well-tolerated by you and perfect for achieving the biochemistry you want (we use “pharmacology” and “pharmacological intervention” to distinguish smart, researched, and safe usages of pharmacology from stupider, more reckless, not researched, and oft-illegal usages of ‘drugs’).

Some supplements and pharmacology can be used long-term for very good results. Very many studies show that creatine monohydrate offers an impressive range of benefits for athletes and moderate benefits for non-athletes, without much risk.

“I honestly see no reason why somebody shouldn't supplement creatine, nor do I see any logical basis for the seeming 'fear' of this compound in society. It's safe, it's healthy, it's cheap, and for most people, it just works. Get some Creatine Monohydrate, take 5g a day, and you're good to go.” — Kurtis Frank, applied dietician and lead researcher for Examine.com

Other biochemical interventions should be short-term. Obviously, antibiotics to kill off a particular infection will be of a short term duration. Likewise, there might be boosts to productivity, creativity, metabolism, alertness, or whatever else that shouldn’t be used in prolonged periods.

Different types of training will be short-term or long-term for you. If you get an injury or see reduced mobility, you might consider significant hours of physical therapy or occupational therapy to get back to a baseline, but then you might just implement a very basic and quick daily stretching regimen going forwards.

You might cut a food entirely from your diet as an experiment to see how it changes how you feel, or you might increase how much you eat for a while if you’re trying to put on muscle mass while lifting weights.

At the end of the day, working on long-term biochemistry offers more advantages than just taking short-term biochemistry fixers. Interventions, training, diet, all the substances you ingest, pharmacology — the ones that give you higher baselines of performance permanently are usually superior to trying to get short term benefits from a quick hit of something. That might be appropriate from time to time, but even then, you’ll want to do research and figure out the most effective, cost-effective, and lowest-side-effect way to get your needs met.

Committing crimes and eating huge amounts of milk chocolate are probably inferior ways to getting dopamine than fitness, healthy competitive endeavors, and an active love life with your partner. Crimes send you to jail and mass quantities of candy make you fat — but very few people think, “I’m feeling bored, listless, restless, and somewhat depressed — I wonder what’s going on in my biochemistry, and healthy ways to solve that instead of the stupid impulse I just had?”

Try to start thinking that way. It could take a while. Think critically on what levels of mental and physical performance benefit you the most, and do the research on healthy and sustainable long-term ways to be regularly reaching those levels. When things are bad and you’re doing stupid stuff, consider what biochemical payoffs might be motivating and triggering the behavior. When you find activities you love, study those too and figure out why — so you can find more of them, and keep enhancing your biochemistry.

The Cognitive Lever

A Laozi Problem

There’s no “gap” between biochemistry and cognition.

This is a subtle, but important point. Your thoughts are transmitted through chemicals and electricity in your body; it would seem to be accurate to say your thoughts more-or-less are chemicals and electricity.

So when we talk about “pulling a cognitive lever” — as opposed to pulling a biochemical lever — what distinction are we making?

And the correct answer is, no distinction.

“The way that can be spoken of

Is not the constant way;

The name that can be named

Is the not the constant name.”

— D.C. Lau’s 1963 translation of the Tao Te Ching

We break apart the pieces of the universe to study and understand them. But the universe knows no distinctions between “chemistry” and “thought.” These are human labels and boxes we draw to try to make sense of the world.

Out there in the world, things are just happening. Inside your body, things are just happening. Your body doesn’t have a “digestive system” that’s separate from your “immune system” — you just have a body, and the various parts of it work, sometimes together, sometimes apart, but truly without distinction or labeling.

Exercising will change your biochemistry, it will change your thinking instantly, and it will affect your thinking a little for quite a while afterwards. Different mixes of chemicals in your body make you think differently. And thinking, like if you get quite afraid, changes your chemical mix.

We draw a little box around “Cognition” — around thinking — but there’s no actual box in actual reality. We just draw the distinction to make it easier to talk about and classify things. There will be substantial overlap between cognition and biochemistry, and there is no problem with that — or rather, any problems are Laozi Problems, problems with our language and distinctions, not any problems with reality.

Far and Few

You’ll very likely operate most of your life without too much free-ranging active cognition. The periods of searching actively, intensively, desperately for answers to open questions are rare for most people. The default way is to find basic paths to walk, and then decisions become individual and tactical and not-too-leveraged.

And an unfortunate observation is this — most people do not begin actively seeking out answers to the deepest questions during good times. They tend not to dive deep into philosophy, challenge the doctrines they’ve been operating under, and look to re-architect their life when they’re thriving.

Thus, there is a certain pessimism and set of dark clouds often associated with the search for meaning and what matters. While it should be theoretically possible to go seek meaning when you’re in a thriving, high-positive state, people empirically seem less likely to do so. They search when things are broken, not when they’re good.

As we’ve seen above, “when things are broken” is often a hostile biochemical mix… a lack of harmonious balances in one’s chemical makeup. Thus, the search for meaning is often run on damaged hardware — action-oriented, high-positive, thriving, well-balanced searches for meaning tend to be the rarity.

Well, this is not so much fun to discuss! Yuck. But it is useful to put this stake in the ground. Most people do not make dramatic life-altering shifts very often, and when they start searching for a dramatic life-altering shift, they’re usually in a bad place to be doing great thinking. Most deep investigations into a better life are only triggered by a built up set of dissatisfaction and unhappiness, which is perhaps not the easiest or best place to make improvements from.

But… what if you acted differently? What if, instead of waiting until you were miserable to really search, you started doing so when strong, smart, and healthy? How much difference could that make?

Reflectiveness

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

— Socrates

The Greek states and their successors innovated so much in science, technology, and governance. Many things contributed, but we must first note the culture of reflectiveness they built as a major reason.

It came at a high price. Much of this leisure time was afforded by the surplus of their economies, which usually involved slavery, conquest economies that extracted tribute, or both.

This high price was paid by dispossessed peoples near Athens, vanquished enemies, and the not-always-willing partners in the Delian League. And of course, all those peoples that came under Roman control once Rome took over the banner. And while some of the horrors they bore are unimaginable, we’ve been bequeathed with the fruits of geometry, mathematics, music, philosophy, governance, all sorts of science and engineering and technology.

It is humbling to think of the road that got us here, and the gifts now available in terms of being to examine and reflect.

To really pull cognitive levers — to really use your thinking to expand your ability to make an impact on the world — you must get into the reflective state. There have been many centuries when the ability to stop and think was such a rare and precious thing — you have the ability, and thus should seize it. When you are un-thinking, following patterns that you’ve been following, you can not easily make life better.

Reflection is a luxury. It was tough then, but it’s easier now. Even still, it’s worth noting you have to carve out the time in your day to do it; it does not happen automatically.

Reflective Control

One of the most important and valuable mental states is something we call “Reflective Control” — a state where you’re reflective, but simultaneously not dissatisfied or beaten-down.

Too often, reflection only comes during times of desperate searching. That sort of reflectiveness is also valuable, but we do not need to encourage it. When a person has an existential crisis, that searching starts nearly automatically.

No, there is no need to encourage someone having an existential crisis to search. Rather, it is the people who are somewhere between “okay” and “totally thriving” that stand to benefit most from searching.

It is hard to quite describe Reflective Control in words. It defies words, though we’ve all experienced it.

What it is like? You know it; you’ve had it happen. One minute, you’re going about your life scurrying around, doing this and that, letting the track of background noise play in your head. The world is a blur of daily routine and going through motions — do some work, eat some food, take some leisure, return a phone call you got, get some more food…

The next moment — something seems to take over. The noise fades, the nonsense fades, food doesn’t matter.

An awakeness descends; it’s almost like a loud “BANG!” except for the very quietness of it.

Suddenly, you are alone with your thoughts, aware of yourself and of concepts, and you can actually sit and think about what things mean to you, reason, develop plans and work backwards from visions of a better future…

“Reflective Control” can be seen as short of a control center of life. It’s when you’re fully activated in your conscious reasoning systems, and have largely turned off and tuned out the various autopilot patterns that become carved out in our lives.

We’ve identified three characteristics of Reflective Control. It’s where a person is…

firmly off autopilot,

in a high-positive and high-willpower state, and

is able to take action.

“Firmly off autopilot” — have you ever driven a car? If so, you’ll know that there are routes that, after you’ve driven them dozens or hundreds of times, you can drive them without really paying close attention any more. You don’t need a GPS telling you where to go and you don’t need to pay attention to street signs. You just get behind the wheel… time blurs… and then you’re at the destination.

That’s autopilot.

Autopilot is when you do the same things when you wake up every morning. Still half-asleep, you turn off the alarm clock, and go about going to the bathroom, showering, brushing teeth, dressing, eating — in whatever order and mix of things you do in the morning. It happens automatically; conscious reasoned thinking is not activated.

“Reflective Control” is being “off autopilot” — flying, so to speak, by really feeling the controls in your hands and observing the instruments yourself.

We add the criteria that you’re high-positive and high-willpower. So very often, a person in an existential search for meaning is coincidentally burnt out with bad diet, no exercise, suffering the effects of chronic stress, and generally feeling disengaged.

To be “reflective” is difficult enough, but being reflective while in solid control of your actions is something else. True Reflective Control lets you say, “I know I should exercise more… okay, what do I need to do to give myself the best chances of exercising more? … okay, let me get started with that.” And then, you start.

Hence, “able to take action” — there are many dreamlike reflective states, and these can be very informative about how to live. But it’s when you’re able to dream but then immediately go about building those dreams as you shift from thinking to action, this is where life is architected.

Winning the Control

It’s not always easy to become reflective. Like anything else, it improves with practice. The hardest is getting the first glimpses and tastes of it, if the ability has been buried for a while.

One of the authors has a private theory that a lot of mid-life crises are actually people getting reflective for the first time in too long, and not liking what they see. We all dream and plan big things when we’re young. What happens when we see those dreams and plans give way to automaton-like submission to impersonal forces that care not for us? The realization that this is happening is a Pandora’s Box opening; dread pours forth.

Alas, the average mid-life crisis-goer tries to medicate this problem with purchasing status symbols, doing stupid things, and otherwise running down higher levels of dopamine and adrenalin without truly building a greater foundation of control.

That foundation is necessary. You build a foundation of control. You earn that foundation of control. It comes slowly at times.

It’s clear that someone having a delusional psychological breakdown is not in control of themselves. It’s clear, too, that someone that is “blacked out drunk” is not in full control of themselves.

We have no problem saying those people are not in control. But it’s distasteful to us to think that, perhaps, there is a spectrum of how much in control we are, and sometimes it’s lower than others. If you’ve got biochemical deficiencies, you’re less in control.

That’s obvious, isn’t it? If you’re dehydrated, over-stressed, maximally fatigued, haven’t slept in 5 days straight — then you’re not going to be able to concentrate and will yourself to do difficult things.

Obvious.

After someone finishes running a marathon, they will not be able to sprint as fast. Likewise, after someone does a “marathon” of months of intensely draining work with insufficient recharging, they’ll be less able to mentally sprint fast.

Obvious?

Perhaps not. “Mind over matter.” “Just do it.”

Good advice — sometimes. Other times, not so much.

When the flashes of reflectiveness start coming, you need to start architecting and building and winning the control over. That means getting mental and biochemical things in order, as much as possible, searching and learning where they might be broken and improving them.

Striking Forth From The Base

When you can regularly get into Reflective Control, you’ve got a mighty powerful fortress from which to conduct your operations.

It is not an exaggeration, it is not untrue, and it is not elitist to say that most people do not experience Reflective Control very often.

This is not a value judgment. With each passing year, each of the authors assigns less moral judgment to failures in the world. Most people are busy and run ragged, have no particular mental training, operate in high levels of stress, and do not have excellent habits or hobbies to rejuvenate them.

Those of us that have discovered ways of work, study, and leisure that recharge and expand us are rare and have reached a prized and valuable place. There is gratitude for that, and a wish that more people reach this place, and no disdain or looking-down on people who have not reached it. In past generations, it might have been — quite literally — impossible for someone in a war-torn or famine-ridden region to truly have the breaths of air, seek out the knowledge, and take the gradual upwards trajectory towards greater health and biochemistry and the thriving high-positive peak states that come with it.

If you are not regularly reaching Reflective Control, seek to reach it more often. Carve out space to be reflective and break free from autopilot, get yourself into places that naturally lead to more free thought and escape from routine, and work on your biochemistry so that you feel good, have energy, and can think clearly.

Once these are in place and you’re regularly reaching Reflective Control, you can strike forth from the base to conduct missions that will lead to a much more effective self.

Reflective Control is more-or-less required to regularly pull the cognitive levers with any reliable chance of success. There are other ways to be successful, such as controlling the environment and having an excellent coach or advisor that does the hard thinking and planning for you, and then you simply follow those instructions. We will discuss environment shortly.

But even if you had that, you still benefit tremendously from this ability. Once the base of Reflective Control is built, you can start adding to your arsenal with a wide range of short-term cognitive techniques, destroying long-term cognitive obstacles, and engineering and architecting long-term cognitive infrastructure.

As an aside, we do not think we’ve gone too far with the base/military/missions metaphor here — dealing with your own thoughts and re-writing your patterns is often a struggle, a mighty struggle, and having a place you can come back to lets you keep re-approaching the challenges and re-deploying resources until you finally break through.

Short-term Cognition

“Short-term cognition” is about learning a series of techniques to think better. There are perhaps an infinite number of these. Some are specific to a particular domain, like the concept of using “personas” when doing design. Others are universal, techniques which benefit anyone trying to do anything.

We will cover a few examples, and then generalize.

If/Then Statements to Combat Intrusive Desires

Dr. Peter Gollwitzer is a big deal when it comes to the science of achieving your goals. Since the early 1990’s, he’s released a prolific volume of studies, papers, and techniques on getting to your goals more easily — and often by using very easily implementable techniques.

From a paper with Achtziger and Sheeran —

“Certain inner states are known to strongly imperil goal attainment. For instance … desire-related thoughts (cravings) for unhealthy foodstuffs imperiled the goal of self-regulating eating behavior.”

That’s straightforward enough — “I want cake! Cake… cake… cake…” is dangerous if you have a goal of not eating cake.

Gollwitzer et al continue —

“A key factor in such self-regulatory failures are desire thoughts (cravings) for unhealthy foodstuffs that overwhelm people’s good intentions … The elaborated intrusion theory of desire … proposes that the intrusive effects of desire result from the interplay of automatic and deliberative processes. External cues trigger spontaneous thoughts about the target that are perceived as intrusive. These intrusive thoughts are the result of learned cue—target associations and place little demand on cognitive resources. However, when the intrusive thoughts elicit a strong affective reaction or provoke the experience of deprivation, then the thought will become elaborated, which requires controlled processes.”

Kavanagh and his team were credited for developing the “Elaborated Intrusive Theory of Desire” (EITD). The basic idea is that you walk into a bakery and you smell some delicious sweet bread.

And you think something like, “That smells good… huh, maybe I’d like some bread.”

But, you don’t want to be eating bread. You’re trying not to eat bread. So you go, “No, I don’t want to eat bread.” But then something fires back, going, “But I do… I want the bread… but no, I shouldn’t have it, but I want it… but I shouldn’t…”

We’ve already discussed the endgame of this, which looks roughly like — “I… must… eat… that… cake… give me cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… CAKE CAKE CAKE CAKE, GIVE ME THE CAKE OR I’M GOING TO KILL SOMEONE!!”

(We previously tackled it from a more biochemical perspective. Gollwitzer now helps us tackle it from a cognitive perspective.)

Gollwitzer: “Elaboration alters the prioritization of attentional and working memory processes, making it likely that additional internal/external cues are accessed and that further intrusive thoughts are generated.”

In other words, that first cue — “Maybe I want some cake” — isn’t what does the damage. It’s the repeated negotiation and fighting with yourself that takes over your thinking.

Gollwitzer and collaborators then state the end result — “The processing priority that is accorded to elaborating thoughts about the target explains why progress toward superordinate goals (e.g., the dieting goal) often is undermined during craving episodes.”

Well, there’s some understatement there. “GIVE ME THE CAKE OR I’M GOING TO KILL SOMEONE!! *gulp gulp gulp scarf scarf scarf*” — and “the dieting goal is undermined during the craving episode.” Indeed.

In the paper, Achtziger, Gollwitzer, and Sheeran are trying to figure out if you can stop the elaboration dead in its tracks. They write —

“If people could make use of these inner states as initiators of goal-shielding responses, they would have a self-regulating strategy at their disposal that could be used across all kinds of goal strivings alike as well as across various disruptive situational contexts.”

Yeah, that’s a mouthful. Basically, they want to stop the elaboration dead in its tracks.

In the particular study, they had two groups each commit to cutting down on eating their favorite type of junk food. One group decided to cut down. The other group decided to cut down, and additionally were given the following instruction —

“Participants were asked, ‘Please tell yourself: ‘And if I think about my chosen food, then I will ignore that thought!’ Please say this line to yourself three times and commit yourself to acting on it. When you have said the line to yourself three times, tick this box.’”

The group that were given the “if I think, then I will ignore it” had about double the reduction in eating the junk food.

They repeated the if/then style setup with tennis players. Half of the tennis players committed to playing well. The other half did that, but also sought out their specific worries or anxieties about performance, and created a “If (that negative thing), then I’ll (do positive thing)…” such as —

“Participants were asked to choose those negative inner states from the list that occurred most frequently and had the most detrimental effect on their performance during tennis matches… [such as] negative cognitive (e.g., “not concentrating enough”), motivational (e.g., “feeling self-abandoned”), physiological (e.g., “feeling exhausted“), and emotional inner states (“feeling angry”). Next, participants were asked to identify responses that were suitable for controlling the selected negative inner states [such as] “. . . then I will risk something and play courageously!”, “. . . then I will calm myself and tell myself ‘I will win!’” … By selecting negative inner states and coping behaviors on their own, participants could compose their if-then plans in an individualized manner … Altogether, each participant arrived at four individually chosen if-then plans that had to be written down on a sheet of paper.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it worked. The players who constructed if/then statements to fight off common problems rated themselves as playing better, and were rated by objective tennis experts as playing better.

They summed up — “Study 2 again demonstrated that negative inner states can successfully be used as initiating conditions for goal-directed responses… The consequence is that goal-shielding responses can be triggered by internal cues and thereby increase performance in competition situations.”

This technique is astoundingly easy once you learn it, but incredibly effective at very little mental cost.

Installing If/Then Statements at the Base

Cognitive techniques like “if/then statements” can be installed, but only when you’re reflective enough to stop what you’re doing and analyze why things get off track.

When you’re in your Reflective Control base, you might start asking yourself, “Why do I sometimes skip going to the gym?” You might answer, “Sometimes I feel kind of sore and have a little headache, and I talk myself out of going.”

You start thinking about how you can do better in that circumstance. You remember this “if/then statement” thing you learned. And you put down an if/then statement — “If I feel sore or have a headache, I’ll then take one Tylenol and go to the gym to at least do a warmup. I’m allowed to stop for the day after warming up if I still feel bad.”

How about if you rationalize and talk yourself out of going? You could if/then that, too, with something like, “If I start rationalizing myself out of going to the gym, then I’ll say to myself, ‘Shut up, I’m going to the gym’ — and I’ll immediately start heading towards the gym.”

This will increase the frequency you go the gym.

… Pragmatism

But these cognitive techniques are not magical. A quick look at Gollwitzer’s charts in his research paper shows that the control trying to reduce consumption of junk food had around a 20% decrease in eating junk food, and the if/then group had around a 35% reduction in eating the junk foods.

That’s not a magical -100%, instant quitting, works perfectly every time, no matter what, etc, etc, etc. Of course not. People have been working on self-control for centuries, and there are no complete answers.

The famous scene in the Gospel of Matthew at the Garden of Gethsemane has Jesus knowing he’ll be executed, and upset, and asking his disciplines to pray with him.

“…Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” … Then he said to them, ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.’”

You do not have to be a Christian to appreciate the impact of that scene. Jesus had lived a life of preaching a message, sharing parables, and looking to help people, and things of that sort. His disciplines had supposedly very much committed to following him on that path. And Jesus is asking for some consolation for his sorrow, some help from his friends at a time he feels very bad.

Instead, he finds them sleeping —

“Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. ‘Couldn’t you men keep watch with me for one hour?’ he asked Peter. ‘Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’”

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Indeed.

A certain pragmatism is necessary when installing cognitive techniques. Short-term techniques like using if/then statements give significant boosts, but not magical always-works boosts. Instead, all of these factors work in harmony to each make you a bit more effective at doing what you find meaningful and important to do, and letting you consciously bring about effects in the world.

Pragmatism, and Cycles of Short-Term Cognitive Study

The pragmatism is important because very few techniques work every single time, or work in isolation. Gollwitzer and team’s if/then statements are quite powerful, and give you advantages. They are a very good technique to learn and use.

Every field has its own set of cognitive techniques, reminders, and little mini-skills like this. The builder’s “measure twice, cut once” is a way to teach and instill double-checking before taking the risk of ruining your materials.

The most useful short-term cognitive techniques are the ones that work broadly in many situations — ones to calm yourself down, or perhaps psyche yourself up, ones to evaluate situations clearly, ones to break through if struggling to get started working, ones to push your pace faster, ones to enjoy what you’re doing more, and so on.

Nick Winter, programmer, entrepreneur, adventurer, and author of “The Motivation Hacker” (which has many excellent techniques like this) describes what he does when he’s failing to get done something that’s important to him —

“When I notice myself skipping something more important, I take that as a cue to add more motivation hacks to make sure I do it, since in the long run, that’s much easier then trying to keep doing it with sufficient-but-not-excess motivation.”

The goal with cognitive techniques are to periodically get to your base of Reflective Control and analyze what’s working or not out of what you want to be doing. Then, you note down areas where problems seem to be coming from.

Then, you start searching. Talking to elite performers is always a good idea, both in the specific field you’re trying to excel, and just elite performers in general. Searching the internet, and specifically looking for published research papers offers a wealth of techniques.

This can be a bit unnatural to start; most people do not do this. Once you start the process though, it becomes easy and effortless. You start getting hooks into the subject matter, and it becomes second nature. As you learn who is doing research on various types of techniques, you learn good sources to look for inspiration. As you start asking around about elite performance, you start building a better network of people that know these things and enjoy discussing them.

Short-term techniques are useful. Simple ones that can be practiced — if/than statement type stuff — can offer large gains at very low cost.

Mid-Term and Long-Term Cognitive, I

David Allen is most known for his “Getting Things Done” system, but he had years as a process consultant before he published GTD. In his lectures, essays, and books besides GTD, he relates personal stories from his wealth of experience in making organizations run better.

This passage from his book “Ready For Anything” is important —

“Years ago, a mentor of mine, who’d consulted with several health-care organizations, told me that whenever the front office of a clinic cleaned up the backlog of claims and paperwork and streamlined its workflow, patient volume invariably dramatically increased. He suggested that as long as the reception staff experienced new business as creating more stress (due to clogged systems), they would unconsciously turn it away. … When a ringing phone creates stress at the spinal level, though the words may be ‘Can I help you?’ the underlying communication is, ‘Go away! I can’t handle you!’”

It’s not just an overwhelmed medical clinic. Allen writes of his own experience —

“I’ve learned that what I consciously want is only a fraction of what directs my creative energies. Many times what I think I’ve wanted has lost out to other forces. I’ve had many opportunities cross my path — for more money, clients, responsibility, fun, and personal fulfillment. But because some part of me wasn’t really prepared to handle them (or what came with them), I didn’t recognize them in the moment; and even if I did, I found subtle ways to push them away.”

Mid-Term and Long-Term Cognitive, II

In “Why We Get Fat,” Taubes did a good job of breaking down the biochemistry of how various sugars and other types of macronutrients interact with the body.

One of the more interesting points was that, “Insulin plays many roles in the human body, but one critical role is to keep blood sugar under control. You’ll start secreting insulin (from the pancreas) even before you start eating — indeed, it’s stimulated just by thinking about eating.”

Stimulated just by thinking about eating… an important point. Just thinking about eating causes a biochemical insulin reaction.

We said earlier,

“There’s no ‘gap’ between biochemistry and cognition. This is a subtle, but important point. Your thoughts are transmitted through chemicals and electricity in your body; it would seem to be accurate to say your thoughts more-or-less are chemicals and electricity.”

This whole area is difficult to talk about, because the English language wants to have nouns and verbs, subjects and objects, etc. Thus, you get statements like “Thinking about food stimulates insulin” or “Elevated testosterone and adrenalin make people more prone to being aggressive” —

In reality, they’re not separate things. Your thoughts are not separate from your chemicals and electricity. We stress this point because it’s not commonly understood, and even when people hear it, they don’t seem to get the importance of it.

Of course, you’ve heard of Ivan Pavlov and his dog. Pavlov rings the bell as he serves food. The dog starts salivating and getting excited whenever he hears the bell and gets the food. Eventually, Pavlov rings the bell with no food. The dog salivates and gets excited. The association between the bell and food is made on a deep level; thought and biochemistry are intertwined and the dog is drooling all over the place with no food to eat.

When David Allen writes, “When a ringing phone creates stress at the spinal level, though the words may be ‘Can I help you?’ the underlying communication is, ‘Go away! I can’t handle you!’” — he’s talking about how, after the phone starts ringing, the overworked receptionist feels stressed, is having stress chemicals flow through her body and brain, and this comes across in the tone of her voice, her being terse and unfriendly and sharp to some extent, and the clinic doing worse for its patients.

Mid-Term and Long-Term Cognitive, III

This gives us a very important thing to work on cognitively. If you draw hostile mental associations between a stimulus — which could be anything from a ringing telephone to a planning meeting to doing your taxes to trying to cook — you’re less likely to be able to think calmly and clearly about that area, and less likely to thrive in that area.

We’ve built up to this point slowly, trying to stay on rather firm but not-too-technical ground, because this is an area that’s been ripe with over-promising and under-delivering by authors, professionals, scientists, and the media for quite a while.

It’s the area of how past experiences, beliefs, and associations cause a person to be excited, unexcited, scared, joyful, anticipatory, evasive — or whatever else — on a particular topic.

The link is sometimes overrated and overstated. At other times, it’s ignored completely and a pure-willpower “just do it” approach is advocated — which might or might not be effective for the person getting the JDI advice.

At other times, it’s approached almost mystically and discussed in terms of extracts from ancient and long-dead religions. It’s clearly an area people agree is very important, but it has not been fleshed out well enough yet.

There’s one thing we can clearly say: this area is very important to work on.

Immersion I: Virtual Reality and Imagination

“A short list of areas where Clinical VR has been usefully applied includes fear reduction in persons with simple phobias … stress management in cancer patients … acute pain reduction during wound care and physical therapy with burn patients … body image disturbances in patients with eating disorders ... To do this, VR scientists have constructed virtual airplanes, skyscrapers, spiders, battlefields, social settings, beaches, fantasy worlds and the mundane (but highly relevant) functional environments of the schoolroom, office, home, street and supermarket. In essence, clinicians can now create simulated environments that mimic the outside world and use them in the treatment setting to immerse patients in simulations that support the aims and mechanics of a specific therapeutic approach.”

— Dr. Skip Rizzo in Veteran’s Today, “Virtual Iraq/Afghanistan and how it is helping some Troops and Vets with PTSD”

This is an area where the research is still coming in, but it’s becoming clear that some types of immersion experiences and exposure to an upsetting stimulus — where nothing bad happens afterwards — can lessen the upsetting aspects of it.

In the long piece in Veteran’s Today, Rizzo discusses the history of these types of treatments, which previously started for a wide range of issues, and were only later applied to military veterans. Virtual Reality — constructing digital simulators that are similar in some ways to games, but take a more focused therapeutic approach — is only the latest in a long history of similar thinking, which we can see some variants of going back to ancient times (with greater or lesser effectiveness, and sometimes some unnecessary mysticism thrown in).

Virtual Reality is very evocative and we can see right away how someone could reason through and consider painful memories with the prompt of a VR simulator. But Rizzo writes that this type of therapy didn’t start with VR. Oftentimes, imagination is enough —

Rizzo: “Imaginal Exposure Therapy entails engaging mentally with the fear structure through repeatedly revisiting the traumatic event in imagination, but within a safe environment. In practice, a person with PTS typically is guided and encouraged by the clinician to gradually imagine, narrate and emotionally process the traumatic event within the safe and supportive environment of the clinician’s office. This approach is believed to provide a low-threat context where the patient can begin to therapeutically process the emotions that are relevant to the traumatic events as well as de-condition the learning cycle of the disorder via a process called extinction learning. This is not about erasing painful memories, but rather making it such that that the pain of a traumatic memory becomes more manageable through a therapeutic exposure approach. Persistent efforts to avoid talking about or emotionally processing hard and painful memories, is thought to reinforce avoidance by providing temporary relief and becomes an unhealthy pattern…”

There’s many amazing takeaways in that paragraph from Rizzo — you’re highly encouraged to re-read it closely if you’re going fast. Don’t get intimidated by the technical language.

Immersion II: When Dealing With Less Precarious Ground

Negative experiences in combat — seeing a fellow solider wounded or killed, experiencing survivor’s guilt from that, seeing a civilian killed, needing to make split-second life-or-death decisions and perhaps making the wrong one under the fog of war, and just the general constant never-ending background stress that comes from fighting a counterinsurgency — these are much more potentially traumatizing than the blocks that anything commonly experienced in civilian life.

If memories and associations from those situations can have the negative impact of them lessened through various interventions with a clinician, doesn’t it stand to reason that it should be much, much, much easier and more doable to break down negative associations about more mundane things like cooking or making a sales “cold call”?

When dealing with precarious ground — people that have been in traumatic and dangerous situations — going back and getting exposure to the situation itself in reality isn’t a practical idea.

But if you’ve got a negative association with cooking that’s holding your life back — something as simple as “I can’t cook” or “cooking isn’t for me” — that’s much easier to fix.

The cooking example wasn’t chosen arbitrarily. One of the authors, Marshall, tried to cook without having been taught when first living away from home as a teenager.

He bought a cheap frying pan… and very quickly, the frying pan started to break. Only a few meals into learning to cook, little flecks of cheap frying pan metal burned off into the eggs he was cooking.

A few cooking misadventures later, Marshall gave up on it entirely. “I’m not good at cooking,” he said, “And besides, it’s a waste of time. I’ve got more important things to do.”

So, the extent of Marshall’s cooking for most of a decade was pouring boiling water into oatmeal and stirring it, hard-boiling eggs, eating cans of tuna on pre-chopped vegetables, and occasionally — rarely — heating up soup. The rest of the time, he ate out from restaurants or takeout.

This is not crippling or too terrible, not really, but it’s instructive what Marshall’s thinking on the topic was. Or, non-thinking, rather. Because he didn’t think. He didn’t say, “I tried cooking a few times when I was a teenager, and it didn’t work very well, and maybe I’ll revisit it later with training.”

No, he just had a built-up aversion to cooking, thinking “Eh, I’m not good at cooking — can’t be good at everything” but also — interestingly — he would call it a waste of time.

It was only through immersion when traveling for a bunch of charity speaking engagements at universities with a group of people who could all cook well — Zach Obront, Kai Zau (fellow author), and Josef Wasinski — that Marshall saw that cooking was not, in fact, a big deal.

Chopping fresh vegetables and cooking them in butter — check. Buying de-boned chicken and cooking it in butter — check. Stirring and flipping the food over occasionally — check. Mixing the chicken and vegetables together on a plate once cooked — check.

And that, right there, provides a good meal. Add in some more eccentric types of protein shakes, “mud cake” from Wasinski made with protein powder and eggs in the microwave, and topped with raw cocoa and/or stevia, and there was a whole host of foods Marshall could then cook that were cheaper, faster, and healthier than going out to eat.

Precarious ground with trauma, injury, or danger calls for working with a trained professional. But many of life’s activities are not such a big deal. Burning and breaking kitchenware and getting worthless slop out of the process is not very fun, but learning hands-on how to cook some nice meals with people who can cook is fun. The long-term mental pattern of “cooking sucks and is a waste of time” can be quickly re-written by diving into cooking in a setting where you’ll have help learning.

A Lack of Recognition of Long-Term Patterns

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that every time you think, your biochemistry shifts — sometimes mildly, with just a simple regular transmission of information — and other times radically, as is the case of someone running an event that was great or terrible in their mind.

If you think of food, and especially sweets, you start producing insulin. Higher insulin has a chain reaction and affects storage and metabolization of energy in your body. Start thinking of cake now, and you’re quite literally a slightly different person, both now and even perhaps hours from now.

We don’t even see how these patterns of thought and associations rule our lives.

If your favorite candy is Peanut M&M’s in that bright and smooth yellow plastic package, you might start craving them when you see it. But for someone who had never seen packaged candy before, they might have no reaction.

Easy enough to understand — as Pavlov and his dogs showed us over 100 years ago.

It’s harder to see that things “that we just sort of dislike” are often that way because of the cognition-biochemistry loop.

And again, it’s easy to trace the roots of it back to some past event if there was a striking one. Cheap frying pan flaking off into scrambled eggs is easy to recall.

But irrational dislikes don’t always link clearly to a particular event. There’s a lot of professions that start as “kind of sort of disreputable for civilized people like us” — to the great detriment of the United States, there’s been a broad trend that says upper-middle class people shouldn’t get into skilled trades and become electricians or plumbers and the like.

The link is almost never so clear as “construction… that’s what poor people go to work doing… I’m not poor… yuck…” — it’s just a vague sort of “blah” feeling.

So you have a lot of kids from upper middle class families (and middle class families looking upwards, and lower middle class families looking upwards, and…) that are working white collar jobs stuck in cubicles that they hate, that are poorly paid and not adding so much value to the world — but they’re good with their hands and good at seeing connections between stuff, and hell, if the skilled trades aren’t an honorable and important profession, then what is?

Mainstream views of the skilled trades now might be irrational and counterproductive, but you can see why this sort of thing is hard to discuss, think through, and remedy.

While these types of flaws will likely counteract themselves over decades and centuries, it behooves you to think through things faster. During reflective times, periodically investigate dislikes that might be irrational, and see if there might be something underpinning that.

Observing the Forbidden Activities

Felix Dennis, who built a hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars publishing empire from scratch, wrote in the preface to “How to Get Rich” —

“The writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, once said: ‘Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.’ By which, I suppose, he meant they appear to have acquired characteristics that set them apart … You can see it in the way they walk into a hotel or restaurant they have never visited before. It is the irritating disposition of rich women to haggle in an Oxfam shop over a designer dress — unlike any working-class woman, who would be horrified at the thought of doing any such thing, even though she perhaps needs the discount while the rich woman does not.”

Dennis’s whole work is interesting — he writes with this philosophical detachment, as if having immense amounts of wealth and being very bored of it. It is a good book — useful at times, hilarious at times, and deeply philosophically insightful on occasion.

But that quote in particular stands out. Dennis is driving at one of the fundamentals.

“It is the irritating disposition of rich women to haggle over a designer dress, unlike any working-class woman who would be horrified at the thought of doing any such thing.”

Note the choice of words — disposition. This is something regularly done. The designer-dress-haggling rich English woman he refers to is not steeling herself as if for battle. It is not an intense event. Her palms are not sweaty and she is not shaking from fear when she goes to haggle down the price of the dress.

And Dennis’s working-class woman would be horrified — not a bad choice of words, again. If you’ve ever been “horrified” in a social situation, that kind of embarrassed and awkward and afraid of disgrace type feeling — you know that this is not purely something happening in your head. Your whole body seems to knot up when socially horrified.

Dr. Robert Sapolsky writes in “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” that, yes indeed, when you’re in a “fight or flight” type mode, things are actually happening to make your stomach “knot up”: “[The sympathetic nervous system] is turned on at times when life gets exciting or alarming, such as during stress. The nerve endings of this system release adrenaline. When someone jumps out from behind a door and startles you, it's your sympathetic nervous system releasing adrenaline that causes your stomach to clutch.”

Back to the Oxfam shop. Haggling over a designer dress is… it’s apparently not socially acceptable behavior for a working-class English woman in the times Dennis is writing about, but perfectly acceptable for a rich woman.

The rich woman feels no social horror, no risk of ostracism, and she walks into the shop calmly, picks up a dress calmly, negotiates for the dress calmly, and gets a better price — calmly. No problems. It succeeds.

If a working-class woman had to negotiate for it — perhaps because she was down to her last few pounds sterling and literally couldn’t afford it — her sympathetic nervous system would take over from her parasympathetic, she would get nervous, her stomach would “fill with knots” (the body re-prioritizing mobilizing energy and stress hormones to get you ready to, basically, kill a tiger with your bare hands… or run from it… or whatever) — the knots are the digestive system getting de-prioritized and the adrenalin pouring into one’s body.

Again, we’ve made a category distinction between “biochemistry” and “cognition” but there is no actual distinction. If that woman who is short of sterling goes into the shop to negotiate, she’s likely to have a wretched time, with her palms sweating, stomach feeling knotted up, and all the other chemicals that happen.

But note — it’s not the haggling that does it to her. It’s her own mental associations with the haggling. If you take Dennis at face value, then it seems — ironically — somehow indecent or beneath the dignity of a working-class woman to negotiate over a dress.

This is helpful in understanding why people will neglect to do behaviors obviously beneficial for them. If attempting to do something that you’ve got that kind of mental association with, you go through an intense series of biochemical reactions that come with its own attendant mix of oft-unpleasant emotions.

The Mighty Mental Asterisk

There are many “cowboy type entrepreneurs” out there who have a great set of people skills, a great understanding of making a great product, can sell, are charismatic, work well with their staff, and seem to have a good intuitive grasp of positioning and competitive strategy — but they don’t have any skill with numbers and don’t like numbers.

In epic heroic versions of entrepreneurship, this sort of character is popular, and you hear stories of them breaking through despite their non-financial ways. You hear the famous, probably apocryphal story of Fred Smith — founder of FedEx — being short of money to purchase gasoline for his jets. Having only half the money he needed and not able to get credit, he played roulette in Vegas and won — and had the money to fuel.

A good story. And actually, if $30,000 of fuel is useless to you and $60,000 gets the job done, maybe the correct and logical call in a situation like that.

But, true or not, you’re always going to hear that story. Fred Smith went on to be very successful; there is a whole sort of mythology built around him. In reality, there’s plenty of fine potential entrepreneurs whose lack of understanding of cashflow and hard numbers sink them. A great many otherwise viable businesses break when there’s a short-term credit crunch or an emergency that hits hard, and a better understanding of numbers would have stopped that from happening.

Yet, it’s so easy to get our world views confirmed to us. Basically all of the research in cognitive science agrees about confirmation bias — we see what we already think is true.

Thus, if a cowboy type entrepreneur says, “I don’t like the numbers and that’s not my thing” — a long-term pattern of thinking similar to the poor woman not negotiating (it would be “horrifying”) or the young American who won’t cook (“I can’t cook well… it’s a waste of time anyway”).

But, something funny often happens to that type of entrepreneur — after some large wins fueled by creativity and charisma, they go bankrupt in their late 20’s or in their 30’s.

And then, some of them learn to understand the numbers. And they start thriving to a much higher degree, with the missing link put into place.

Of course, if you tried to tell the young cowboy to watch the numbers when he was bootstrapping his first business using only sheer force of will, he or she wouldn’t listen to you. Because young cowboy-types do get that advice, and don’t generally listen to it.

It would behoove you to defy this pattern. The way to do so is to actively search out skills and skill sets you don’t have, and at least put a “mental asterisk” (*) by it. Instead of saying “I don’t care about the numbers” or “I’m not a numbers person — if we’ve got a great product and the customers are buying, the numbers will work anyways” — you shift that gradually to, “I haven’t been good at the numbers, but I see most successful entrepreneurs have some sense of them… let me put an asterisk by that in my thoughts, let me put a question mark by that.”

You shift your thinking from, “I’m not a numbers person” to “I’m not really a numbers person, but I could learn a bit more about it…”

You shift your thoughts from “Negotiating? I couldn’t do that” to “It seems like a lot of people get a lot out of negotiating… it’s terrifying to me, but maybe I could learn…”

Some people go through radical transformations, but most of us don’t with most of our skills. When your thoughts are “Negotiating? Yuck” or “Numbers? Yuck” or “Cooking? Yuck” — you’ll almost automatically shut down new sources of information and opportunities to pick up those skills.

Just searching out and putting that “mental asterisk” by the skill or activity opens you up to seeing opportunities in that space. That subtle mental shift from “I can’t, and it’s useless anyways” to “I’m not good at it, but maybe I could get better…” — it’s a huge gap.

Searching For Worthy Fields

Unless you’ve found your true calling in life and have already immersed yourself in that, it’s very likely that you know absolutely nothing about some of the most impactful skills and abilities you could develop.

You find these skills by seeking feedback from talented people in your field and in unrelated fields, by doing blue sky type research (Google for random things like “engineers who built successful companies,” “how highly prolific artists do great work,” and so on), and reading biographies and case studies of successful people to extract what they did.

You should regularly search for new skills and abilities to study and add to your life. If your life is going phenomenally well and you’re having an immense amount of development in your effectiveness, you should still do this at least annually, devoting a good chunk of time to identifying new skills and seeking out feedback. If you’re young or not on a track you love and are thriving on, you should do it more often.

Some people “graze” for constant learning and lessons — the founder of Walmart, Sam Walton, was almost literally incapable of passing by a retail store he hadn’t visited without going inside and scouting it out for a new lesson to implement in his chain.

For others, especially in focused disciplines, that would be more distracting — and doing a “search cycle” of looking for new skills would be better done once per year if already having a lot going on, and four times per year if doing just okay.

Either way — search for new skills. Be very aware that your mind will try to shut you down from going into unfamiliar or unfashionable territory. Strike off into that territory anyways, identify things worth learning, and start learning them.

The Action Lever

Conative Knowledge

Let us turn to Stan Rosenthal’s 1984 “An Introduction to The Tao Te Ching” — it is potentially life changing.

“Although we cannot understand Tao [‘the totality of the universe and existence’], we are not prevented from having knowledge of it, for understanding stems from one of the two forms of knowledge.

“It stems from that which is called cognitive knowledge, the knowledge born of words and numbers, and other similar devices. The other form of knowledge, conative knowledge, needs no words or other such devices, for it is the form of knowledge born of direct personal experience. So it is that conative knowledge is also known as experiential knowledge. Cognitive and experiential knowledge both have their roots in reality, but reality is complex, and complexity is more of a barrier to cognitive knowledge than it is to experiential knowledge, for when we seek cognitive knowledge of a thing, that is, understanding of it, the knowledge we gain of that thing is understanding only of its manifestations, which is not knowledge of the thing itself.

“We may seek to understand a thing, rather than to experience it, because, in a world beset with man made dangers, it is frequently safer to understand than to experience.”

We owe Rosenthal a debt of gratitude, and his 1984 “An Introduction” can be found for free online. It is entirely worth reading.

He distinguishes between “cognitive knowledge,” knowledge born of words and numbers and similar devices, and “conative knowledge” born of direct personal experience — or we could just call the latter “experiential knowledge.”

It would be silly to say “experiential knowledge is superior to cognitive knowledge” — both because who is judging, and also because it is not universally true.

Certainly, it seems infinitely safer and saner to get some cognitive understanding of horrors of Europe during World War II, and all the mass atrocities performed. Being able to get some cognitive understanding — theoretical, language-based, thinking — of the concentration camps, the fire raids, the sheer brutality and inhumanity of the Eastern Front — this cognitive knowledge helps us become more compassionate and aware of how the world works. Conative knowledge — direct experience of those horrors — would not be desirable or preferable.

Why mention such a thing?

Well, action can easily be fetishized. There are perhaps 10 million worthy ways to spend one’s time on Planet Earth, and you’ll never get an off chance to do 9.9 million of them or so. Most of us will never reach the level of almost supernatural training that the Comanche Indians or Mongol mounted archers had with their horses. The bond formed and ability to act in harmony between man and animal — this is beyond most of us. Who has horses nearby, the time and training and natural aptitude to learn such a skill?

Yet, it’s beautiful. We can dive deep into cognitive knowledge to learn in our minds, in our dreams, in our inspirations of such a beautiful mind-meld.

Most of us will never excel as painters nor musicians, nor be statesmen and governors, nor research and develop, nor invent, nor, nor, nor — nor all sorts of things.

This is okay. Reality is vast, vaster than one could even imagine. We must not fetishize all action; learning and being enriched by theoretical learning is good too. But then — once we wish to bring effects into the world, it is time to convert cognitive knowledge to conative, to go from theorist to practitioner, to enter the realm of action.

Distinction

Should we make the distinction that there is not a precise difference between “Action” and “Cognition”? Surely, there’s thinking theoretically and there’s experiencing and interacting with reality. But the mind is working and the body is working all the time, a feedback loop, a harmony, etc. We draw the distinctions and categories to make things easier to discuss; categories do not necessarily exist as such in the world.

“TAKE ACTION NOW! YOU CAN DO IT!”

It seems, anecdotally, that most guides to action that get popular recommend a sort of overwhelming force approach to it.

It’s easy to understand why: the majority of people need less strategic, tactical, or operational guidance — they need motivation. Held low to Earth’s gravity, metaphorically speaking, the shining lights of “TAKE ACTION NOW! YOU CAN DO IT!” is what animates them.

Well. Sometimes this is correct. But our goal is not to give you slogans; it is to give you ways to identify where you are currently at, get to places beyond that that you desire to go, and leverage all of it into achieving meaningful things for yourself.

Here is the counterpoint to “TAKE ACTION NOW!”

The Greatest Threat to the Republic, I: Barca Arrives

It must have been humbling to see elephants marching down from the snow-covered mountains, lines of thousands of half-starved, half-frozen, murderous men in their wake.

The year is 218 BC, and the General had done the impossible — Hannibal Barca had crossed the uncrossable Alps and landed in Northern Italy with his armies.

Rome then was not the Rome we in the future know. The hyper-industrious, hyper-prosperous, world-conquering that would lead to the Pax Romana were only nascent sparks.

The world was still beset by turmoil, and the Roman Republic now faced its greatest threat — a professional army under a brilliant commander on the Italian Peninsula.

In an act of cruelty and necessity, Hannibal raids and savages the nearest Gauls to the mountain pass he emerges from, massacring the inhabitants, to feed and re-equip his troops from what remained of their lands.

The Romans are, of course, aggressive people. They dislike having Hannibal on their land. After Hannibal defeats a first skirmishing force of Roman allies (and gains morale), he provokes an unwise attack and lays an ambush at the Battle of the Trebia, destroying the Roman forces.

After the winter passes, Hannibal maneuvers between the chief Roman commander’s troops and the city of Rome, looking to provoke battle. In a massive blunder, the Roman commander Flaminius pursues Hannibal without adequate scouting.

Hannibal hides his troops in a mountain overlooking Lake Trasimene, and Flaminius marches his troops quickly and aggressively along the trail. When the Roman force is entirely outstretched and vulnerable, the Carthaginian forces charge out from hiding places and take the Romans by storm, surprising them and pushing them into retreat into the waters of the Lake before they can form up and offer significant resistance. The Roman forces are entirely destroyed.

We can see hot-headedness is not paying off. The Romans face a threat, indeed a mighty threat, a threat that must be countered. But throwing force headlong at the threat is making their chances worse and bolstering the enemy.

The Greatest Threat to the Republic, II: Enter Fabius

The Roman historian Plutarch, writes of a man who ordered caution instead of impetuousness, and was not listened to —

“After this, Hannibal came into Italy, who, at his first entrance, having gained a great battle near the river Trebia, traversed all Tuscany with his victorious army, and, desolating the country round about, filled Rome itself with astonishment and terror. … But [negative] prodigies had no effect upon the impetuous and fiery temper of the consul Flaminius, whose natural promptness had been much heightened by his late unexpected victory over the Gauls, when he fought them contrary to the order of the senate and the advice of his colleague. Fabius, on the other side, thought it not seasonable to engage with the enemy; not that he much regarded the prodigies, which he thought too strange to be easily understood, though many were alarmed by them; but in regard that the Carthaginians were but few, and in want of money and supplies, he deemed it best not to meet in the field a general whose army had been tried in many encounters, and whose object was a battle, but to send aid to their allies, control the movements of the various subject cities, and let the force and vigour of Hannibal waste away and expire, like a flame, for want of the aliment.”

Do please re-read the end of it:

“Fabius, on the other side, thought it not seasonable to engage with the enemy … [because] Carthaginians were but few, and in want of money and supplies, he deemed it best not to meet in the field a general whose army had been tried in many encounters, and whose object was a battle, but to send aid to their allies, control the movements of the various subject cities, and let the force and vigour of Hannibal waste away and expire, like a flame, for want of the aliment.”

Fabius saw that Hannibal was an excellent commander who was itching for a fight. Hannibal needed to win victories to keep momentum and morale going, to loot supplies, to ransom captives for money, to take money from the defeated, and to win allies and reinforcements from those in the surrounding countryside.

The Roman people, desperate for a leadership change, elected Fabius to the ancient role of “dictator” — supreme authority.

Now in control of Rome, Fabius took a decidedly “unmanly” and “unheroic” course of action — Fabius simply decided to fence Hannibal off and wear him down.

This great and gigantic threat was bottled-up by Fabius, and not allowed to grow; in fact, it was diminished over time.

Fabius chipped away at Hannibal’s forces, looking for where Carthaginian stragglers and weaker sub-commanders were undefended, and sending out quick forces to destroy them while Hannibal was occupied elsewhere.

Fabius didn’t want the fire to spread — he ensured supplies and re-equipment opportunities and money didn’t fall into Hannibal’s hands. Meanwhile, the Roman forces abroad fighting in Carthage’s power centers of Spain and Sicily were doing well, and the Romans were engaged in diplomacy to try to win African allies to fight Carthage with. Fabius decided to keep delaying.

And it worked. Hannibal, the masterful tactician, was stymied in his strategy by the refusal of the Romans to give battle.

The Greatest Threat to the Republic, III: Exit Fabius

One of the highest forms of prestige in Rome was to lay supreme authority back down, so Rome would not devolve into being controlled by a single person or party. Fabius resigns his dictatorship, but encourages his successors to follow the same plan.

“Not long after, Fabius laid down the dictatorship, and consuls were again created. Those who immediately succeeded observed the same method in managing the war, and avoided all occasions of fighting Hannibal in a pitched battle; they only succoured their allies, and preserved the towns from falling off to the enemy. But afterwards, when Terentius Varro, a man of obscure birth, but very popular and bold, had obtained the consulship, he soon made it appear that by his rashness and ignorance he would stake the whole commonwealth on the hazard. For it was his custom to declaim in all assemblies, that, as long as Rome employed generals like Fabius, there never would be an end of the war; vaunting that whenever he should get sight of the enemy, he would that same day free Italy from the strangers. With these promises he so prevailed, that he raised a greater army than had ever yet been sent out of Rome.”

The result is one of the most famous battles in history; even many people with no military or historical training know its name:

Cannae.

It is the greatest disaster in Roman history.

In a move still studied and marveled over by historians, Hannibal placed his weakest troops in the middle of a long outstretched line. The Carthaginian veterans, heavy infantry, and cavalry were on the edges of the long line.

The middle troops knew they were the newest, the weakest, the most lightly armed. But Hannibal stood in the dead middle himself, assuring the men they were no shock troops, and they would prevail that day.

When the Roman forces 70,000 deep attacked Hannibal’s side, Hannibal’s center fought hard but was gradually pushed back, the Romans seemingly winning.

But as they fell back, the hard core of excellent troops on the wings kept inching forwards.

The Romans were being pulled inwards, like being sucked to the mouth of a river — and now were about to be thrown off the edge of a massive waterfall.

Too late! When Rome’s forces had pushed out too far, suddenly the Carthaginians stopped retreating and all pushed forwards hard, disrupting the Roman rhythm and pushing them into each other. Completely surrounded, Roman cavalry already beaten off by superior Carthaginian cavalry, the Romans could not fight effectively in a hot and compressed body of troops, packed together, and contested on all sides.

It was a massacre.

Around 70,000 Romans were killed or captured that day. Roman senators would traditionally take the battlefield too, and Rome lost one-third of its government on that day in combat!

Varro had proclaimed “that whenever he should get sight of the enemy, he would that same day free Italy from the strangers.”

Bold words. Foolish action. Disaster.

The Greatest Threat to the Republic, IV: Enter Fabius; Delay Hannibal; Exit Hannibal

It is one of the oft-debated questions of history: if Hannibal had marched on Rome immediately after Cannae, would Rome have fallen?

We’ll never know. Even without Hannibal marching, Rome moves to the brink of disaster and collapse. Many Roman allies now defect to Hannibal and many previous neutrals declare war on Rome.

Fabius is put back in charge for good; his strategy will be followed for the next 13 years as the Romans switch to looking to endure Hannibal instead of defeat him in a single stroke of boldness.

Rome would now attempt to bend without breaking, to reinforce difficult positions, to stay out of ambushes, and to not let the master strategist and tactician settle the account in a decisive battle.

This bought time for the Roman forces abroad to challenge Carthage’s positions. Scipio — later Scipio Africanus — eventually destroys Carthage’s power center in Spain in a series of daring maneuvers and deft diplomatic skill, and he brings the fight to Africa. Hannibal is recalled by Carthage, and — fighting on African soil for the first time in his life — is defeated at the Battle of Zama. Carthage falls; Roman dominance over the known world begins.

Fabian Strategy

Fabius’s plan worked because Rome had an overall solid base of resources, manpower, and a solid military corps to bring the fight to regions outside of Italy where the brilliant Hannibal was rampaging.

Fabius was originally questioned and rebuked, given the nickname “Cunctator” — “the Delayer” as an insult to a people who wanted decisive battle.

After Varro’s attempt at a “decisive battle” almost destroyed Rome forever, Fabius’s wisdom was understood. Later, was added as a formal addition to his name as an honorific, and he holds a reputation as one of the most steadfast and brilliant of the Romans.

In this day and age, many people have forgotten the lessons of Fabius. Advertisements on the television do not talk about building solidly and protecting your base, expanding your advantages, and gradually corralling your weaknesses. Just the opposite — miracle cures, five-minute workouts for perfect fitness, opportunities to make ridiculous amounts of money in your pajamas with no skill or training…

…well, we’re dealing with a more thoughtful readership here; we need not rebuke those things too heavily. It’s trite, anyways.

But the metaphor of Fabius should stand to all of us. Too many of us, having a fear of something bad in our life, immediately throw the entirety of our energies at it in a single sprint… without any plans, logistics, support, or structures to sustain a long march towards the goal.

It must have been incredibly unpleasant to have Hannibal on Italian soil for over a decade. But it’s more unpleasant to get disastrously routed by foolhardiness.

Many of the obstacles you’ll face can be easily overcome with a patient, attritional style of wearing down the obstacle and repeatedly taking small gains. In doing it this way, you gain morale, insight, small victories, and build up strategies and operations to sustain yourself.

The mighty “DO IT NOW YOU CAN DO IT!!” might have value for animating a person, but how much better is it to measure that your capabilities are able to take on a task and succeed by overcoming every setback, adjusting as (inevitably) necessary, and letting the force of your will gradually overwhelm the various little roadblocks in the way.

How the Thought Turns Off

As you repeat patterns of action in your life, the thinking turns off.

Charles Duhigg writes in the excellent “Power of Habit” about the experience of rats running a maze repeatedly to get cheese at the end —

“And within their brains, something unexpected occurred: As each rat learned to navigate the maze, its mental activity decreased. As the route became more and more automatic, eat rat started thinking less and less.

“It was as if the first few times a rat explored the maze, its brain had to work at full power to make sense of all the new information. But after a few days of running the same route, the rat didn’t need to scratch the walls or smell the air any more, and so the brain activity associated with scratching and smelling ceased. It didn’t need to choose which direction to turn, and so decision-making centers of the brain went quiet.”

This is worth paying close attention to.

When you first reason and act your way through decisions, your brain is lit up with energy and attention, consciously thinking. Rats are sniffing the ground and scratching at the walls and smelling for food. We’re doing similar things as we gauge how to operate in a new environment.

But after you’ve repeatedly done something, you stop thinking through it. Thinking gradually turns off.

It is good and bad. Duhigg explains —“The process — in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine — is known as “chunking,” and it’s at the root of how habits form. … Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit, because habits allow our minds to ramp down more often.”

This means that, although you might start out awkwardly trying to figure things out when playing a new sport, navigating a new office you’ve gone to work at, lifting weights, cooking, or whatever else — as you do it more and more, it becomes natural and smooth.

But the reflectiveness goes away in the process. You’re not stressed and animated and reasoning through things, there is no uncertainty, but the focused intentional reasoning drops off too.

It’s good, because it means patterns can built into your life, making a formerly very difficult task into an automatic one.

It’s bad, because if you don’t pay attention, you’re living your life on autopilot far below what you’re capable of and not achieving the things you find meaningful.

Preparing For The Thought To Turn Off

Duhigg’s book is excellent on habits in general, and offers methodologies for improving them. But when we consider action, before we consider minor individual actions — getting yourself to make the right calls on a particular day — we need to first look at the longer-term campaigns of life. Choosing to learn a new skill, go into a particular line of work, and so on.

The “thought going off” thing happens to every one of us, all of us. You will get into patterns and get onto autopilot. You can resist this to some extent, looking to hit a state of Reflective Control often, but even then it’s not undesirable for the thought to turn off. Being able to show up at the gym and have the “thought turn off” for between 30 and 90 minutes and walking out feeling great, having had a fantastic workout — this is a good thing.

When you’re in that off-autopilot, high-positive/high-will, action-capable state, you’ll want to very pragmatically assess your options. It’s during these times that you can break free from the worn footpaths of your life, and navigate to new ones.

But, it would be wise to realize that the ability to strike off in unknown directions is a limited ability. It almost surely can not be done constantly; and besides, you wouldn’t want to do it constantly even if you could.

Thus, when you’re sitting there with your maps and guidebooks and research and you’re very positive and reflective and smart, you want to actually plan to make it onto worthwhile paths, but then to navigate them successfully. That means being deliberate about what you want, and being pragmatic as to what you need to get there.

Thinking and Planning as an Action; Deliberateness

“... 168) Don’t act before thinking. Take the time to come up with a game plan. Take at least a few hours to think through your plan. Those hours will be virtually nothing in relation to the amount of time that will be spent doing, and they will make the doing radically more effective.”

— Ray Dalio, billionaire founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater, in “Principles”

We’ve spoken of thinking in terms of how short-term thoughts affect your ability to do things, the feedback loop of thoughts turning into more thoughts, the feedback loop of thoughts affecting biochemistry, how biochemistry dictates thoughts to a great extent, how there is a rare valuable “Reflective Control” state of thinking and being that lets you make great changes, and how negative associations with a certain stimulus can shut you down from even considering certain worthwhile thoughts.

Now, we speak of thought in terms of action. We speak of the “action of thinking” — of thinking as an active, deliberate, intentional, coordinated process.

Sometimes it might make sense to just “jump into action” — many people are far too risk-averse, and simultaneously they’re content to fritter away time on entertainment activities that they don’t even enjoy very much while being afraid of doing things that they might fail at.

Fair enough. Much of recent advice and guidance has been in opposition to that.

“TAKE ACTION NOW! YOU CAN DO IT! YOU WON’T DIE! REALLY, IT’S NOT A BIG DEAL AND YOU SHOULD TAKE SOME ACTION!”

This is fine advice. It’s often correct advice. It’s worthwhile advice in many circumstances. For people with not-too-much going on, it is perhaps the most important advice and encouragement they could get.

But once you’re already on the path, really looking to excel and gain advantages and thrive and do things, once you’ve already got some good things going on, a base worth protecting and expanding — now it is time to set aside “You can do it” as an operating mantra, and integrate regular intense thinking/planning sessions into your life.

Dalio’s Principles have a wealth of gold in them. Bridgewater’s performance is legendary in the finance world.

Elsewhere in Principles, Dalio writes — “You will be much more effective if you focus on diagnosis and design rather than jumping to solutions. It is a very common mistake for people to move directly from identifying a tough problem to a proposed solution in a nanosecond without spending the hours required to properly diagnose and design a solution. This typically yields bad decisions that don’t alleviate the problem. Diagnosing and designing are what spark strategic thinking.”

Note in particular: “It is a very common mistake for people to move directly from identifying a tough problem to a proposed solution in a nanosecond without spending the hours required to properly diagnose and design a solution.”

We should identify thinking and planning as a useful action to take at the start of any serious campaign. This is where you ask questions like,

What am I trying to achieve here?

Why am I trying to achieve it?

How will I know I’m successful?

When do I want this to be complete?

How much time do I estimate this will take?

What’s my budget in time and money for this?

What are the most likely pitfalls?

What key advantages can I build for myself early?

What scares me the most that would make me unlikely to finish?

How good am I at achieving and finishing things like this in the past?

When will I check in and see how it’s going on waypoints?

Who can help me stay on track with this?

What other types of allies, friends, and support do I need?

If I hit major setbacks, what will I do?

Under what circumstances would I quit, abandon, or change this plan?

How much effort and time do I want to make under this plan before reviewing and considering changing it?

And so on.

A Very Important Question

Before we continue, here is a question you need to answer honestly about yourself —

“If you got a big new opportunity kickstarted in your life, do you have the operations, structure, and ability to sustain it, keep it going, and grow it?”

This is an important question. There’s legions of advice that assume without asking that your answer is “yes” or “no” — and if they’ve got the wrong answer for you, then it’s the wrong advice for you.

Ray Dalio has billions of dollars in personal net worth, Bridgewater has expansive cashflows and profits and reserves, they’ve got amazing operational ability, and a veteran well-trained highly loyal and excellent staff.

If Dalio or one of his top people discerns a new opportunity or new pattern in the world, they can charge after it rapidly after getting their plans together.

But on the flip side, most young people — not all, but probably a majority — haven’t figured out their working cycles, don’t have great personal operations, don’t have much capital and finances to seize long-term developing opportunities, and don’t have a trusted cadre of staff, partners, and advisors to help them sustain great things they have going.

If you have the ability to keep growing and expanding opportunities as you seize them in a sustainable way, then speed becomes paramount. If there’s no cost and no danger in taking new opportunities, speed of implementation basically determines the rate of your growth.

If the advantages you’re gaining slot in nicely to your already well-running life and amplify and multiply and synergize with what you’re doing, you can seize those edges rapidly.

But no-one is always in that position. If you currently have somewhat shaky habits, have never yet thought about and consciously designed your workflows… and if you lack the physical resources to scale up opportunities as they come at you… then it really behooves you to slow down and make sure you can actually capture and benefit from the gains you’re trying to get.

One of the authors, Zau, started with almost no resources. He was able to build up to a large volume of resources by going extraordinarily deliberately — often slowly — in architecting plans, and consolidating all the gains from the opportunities he won. Every time he completed a new consulting assignment, he would methodically detail what lessons he learned, make notes on what new skills he might want to learn to amplify it, discuss with the client precisely what future opportunities there are together, get detailed feedback and reviews, and add the work to his portfolio and polish it.

As a result, his consulting rates rose rapidly. Whereas most people are too busy working to actually consolidate gains from the opportunities they get, Zau moved slower and took those gains. A deliberateness about getting all gains usually exceeds unsustainable, volatile brilliance.

A rule: if you’ve recently been able to have great things happen (met wonderful new people, getting job offers or sales or clients in your career/company/contracting, have learned new things and started putting them into place, found new highly fulfilling hobbies, etc) but you find you keep abandoning plans that are working for no good reason, then you need to slow down and spend more time in planning, including figuring out how you are going to consolidate your gains.

If you’re in a place where you can rapidly add gains and scale up without taxing your resources, then speed becomes the name of the game. Bear that in mind, and that much of the following advice applies more-or-less depending on your current operational ability to capture and consolidate gains.

Bringing Internal Resources and Weapons Online

“Motivation is fuel for life. Without motivation, you can’t get out of bed. With just enough motivation (“Can’t be late again…”), you eventually get out of bed, but not before twenty muddled minutes of half-dreamt schemes for skipping out today. With a little extra, suddenly it’s not so bad (“Breakfast!”). But when you have sixty extra gallons of it, you leap from bed as if it’s Christmas and you’re pretty sure the big box in the back is the new Xbox. More motivation doesn’t just mean that we’re likely to succeed at a task, but also that we’ll have more fun doing it. This is what we want this is why we hack motivation.” — Nick Winter, The Motivation Hacker

This applies especially if you’re doing something you’ve often failed at in the past, or if you’ve recently had a hard time consolidating gains.

If that’s the case, then “dive right in” might not be the correct course of action. If you already know how to lift weights, for instance, and you’ve gotten to the “advanced beginner” stage four or five times before quitting, the right answer is likely not “Fifth time is the charm!”

It’s likely to slow down and get your internal resources together.

Winter writes about increasing motivation in his excellent book, The Motivation Hacker. Here he is again —

“When you know you’re going to succeed, motivation abounds. When you think you might not be able to accomplish a goal, then motivation suffers. Fail once, lose some confidence and motivation, try less, fail again, and repeat until there’s no hope left. It’s easy to start sliding into this hole, you fall fast, and once you’re at the bottom, it seems as if there’s no light by which you start crawling back up to the surface…”

Not so pleasant, despite it being true! But,

“The converse is true, too: success begets confidence and motivation, which begets more success, and pretty soon you’re fearless… And with a little planning and a lot of motivation, you can climb as high as you want.”

At this early stage, it’s worth getting a plan on paper that includes realistic targets — Winter and many others recommend starting with small, very achievable targets and growing from there — and then also analyzing where things could go wrong and when you will re-assess.

If you’ve not gotten great results in the past with the approach you’ve tried and you’re not sure why, it’s very worth researching what successful people do in that area, and making plans to do that.

If you’ve fallen off from a core thing you want to do in the past after getting success, now is the time to start planning if/then statements and mentally readying yourself for those things to happen.

Picking specific “stake in the ground” dates is useful at this point — times when you’ll evaluate whether what you’re doing is working or not. When an injured athlete goes through rehabilitation, they work with their physical therapists with targets for health, flexibility, mobility, pain, and so on — and have a rough calendar of when they should be able to resume activities like drills, throwing, light running, heavy running, 80% speed practice, full speed practice, and full competition. The calendar dates get adjusted based on progress, but simply having the calendar is very psychologically useful.

Back to Habits

If you’re looking to make a habit for more-or-less permanent, you want to set things up so that it can become one of those automatic just-happens-now-things that Charles Duhigg talks about in The Power of Habit —

“This process [of habit building] in our brain is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if the particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop — cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become intertwined until a powerful sense of anticipation and craving emerges.”

You can see clearly the ever-reinforcing process between action, cognition, and biochemistry.

Entrepreneur Zach Obront described the sensation: “It sounds silly, but when I discovered a recipe I really liked for a great protein shake, I started going to the gym more. If I was a little tired when I got home, I’d ask myself, ‘But don’t I want a protein shake?’ And the answer was — yes. So I’d go to the gym, and then come home and have my shake.”

It seems almost ridiculous at first that a small reward like a protein shake would be more motivating than excellent health, but that’s how we’re wired. Laugh if you want, but Obront’s setup works.

You want your life to have pragmatic time slots that respect your biochemistry and cognition in what you want to do, and this is doubly true if you want to do something more-or-less forever.

If you walk home from work, the difference between having a gym that’s en route on the walk vs. having a gym that you’ve got to walk an extra distance past your home is immense.

Likewise, it’s worth being pragmatic about your biochemistry. Judgment is almost always compromised with fatigue, and people very rarely realize that their judgment is compromised. So if there’s anything you’re trying to do regularly, it’s a risky gamble to do after the 10th hour you’ve been awake and once you’ve already done a lot of cognitively or physically demanding tasks in the time.

You must learn how to build habits effectively, jumping off from the points here into further study. Look for new sources — the bodybuilder and entrepreneur James Clear is also an excellent writer on the topic — and ensure that you’ve got a pragmatic, sustainable mix of cues, routines, and rewards.

Completing Campaigns and Getting the Gains, I

Habits are things you want to do more-or-less forever.

The other type of key action-taking is large-scale once-off pushes to get gains — you can call them “campaigns” or “projects.”

The world gets more project-heavy each and every year. Technologies and entire industries are being obsoleted rapidly. Established older industries have established processes and need less initiative, planning, dreaming up new projects, and getting them into place. But those industries are being disrupted now, and it’s largely project-driven.

There’s more opportunities than ever. No one has quite realized or quite remarked on the fact that it’s now possible to talk to anyone on an internet connection, for free, anywhere on Planet Earth using Skype or an equivalent.

This is an exceedingly big deal. People haven’t quite realized the implications of it — most social circles (and project initiations) still get clustered in an unnecessarily close geographical area. This will change — oh, it will change. It has to change. The people that stick to linear close-by geography exclusively are going to get heavily disrupted. It’s already happening.

Nevertheless! That is largely a tangent. The point is, the days for creative and smart people of inheriting a set of repeatable duties and doing them over and over again until retirement — these days are ending, perhaps already ended. Even regular employees in repeatable tasks are going to be pressed into service in quality improvement, kaizen, and efficiency initiatives.

Thus, you better get good at starting, managing, and concluding projects. It is a project-centered world we enter. Much of the very big opportunities available to you will be projects to complete.

Completing Campaigns and Getting the Gains, II: Starting

There are many models of project management. Almost all of them break projects into different phases.

When you see this theoretically before having exposure to a lot of projects, it can look on first glance to be a useless academic exercise.

It’s not.

Oh, no.

The different stages campaigns go through are very real, and being bad at one of them without realizing it can dramatically hold back your progress.

The pretty good textbook “Project Management: The Managerial Process,” Fifth Edition, has these four steps in Project Management —

Defining: 1 Goals, 2 Specifications, 3 Tasks, 4 Responsibilities

Planning: 1 Schedules, 2 Budgets, 3 Resources, 4 Risks, 5 Staffing

Executing: 1 Status reports, 2 Changes, 3 Quality, 4 Forecasts

Closing: 1 Train customer, 2 Transfer documents, 3 Release resources, 4 Evaluation, 5 Lessons Learned

This is fairly typical. It’s more-or-less a checklist of stages that a typical large project would go through.

Dalio, in Principles, talks about his “5-step process for achieving what you want” —

Set Goals: Higher-level thinking, synthesis, visualization, prioritization

Identify and don’t tolerate problems: Perception, intolerance of badness (regardless of severity), synthesis

Diagnose the root causes: Hyper-logical, willing to “touch the nerve,” seeing multiple possibilities

Design a plan for eliminating problems: Visualization, practicality, creativity

Do what is set out in the plan: Self discipline, good work habits, results orientation, proactivity

This can be a little overwhelming. Let’s look at a model that looks at why people fail at each stage, instead of just what’s required for that stage.

Completing Campaigns and Getting the Gains, III: Marshall’s Project Management

One of the authors, Marshall, runs a nonprofit that currently operates on a 100% volunteer basis — no salaries, no benefits, and no convenience expenses of any sort. This means that the organization needs to have razor-sharp utilization of people coming in — with no coercive authority and an inability to “throw money at the problem,” a lot of projects still need to happen.

Observing what volunteers succeeded and failed, as well as seeing clients succeed and fail, and friends, Marshall came up with a five-step model —

Dream and Define

Clarify, Assign, and Initiate

Produce, Manage, and Police

Finish

Debrief and Consolidate

The first three stages are all fairly self-explanatory — you start by abstractly thinking through and searching for what you need. You want to get lots of input, look for case studies and historical comparables, and look for inspiration. You want to run diagnostics like Dalio describes to find where things aren’t working, and potential solutions. You want to look at industry best practices in your industry that you aren’t doing yet, as well as personal productivity best practices, and look at experts and role models.

Some people are very good at executing, but not dreaming things up. If that’s you, it’s highly advised that you win over the confidence of some people that have excellent abstract creativity and creative thinking. The further sections on Network and Signal will be of great value on this topic. It’s also recommended you don’t go into business with an “idea person” who can’t execute or any such thing; ideas run out of value relatively quickly, and all members of a team should have some stage 3 or stage 4 execution ability.

After that comes clarifying exactly what you want to do and why, assignment (who is doing it? — answer is just you if it’s a solo project, or otherwise recruiting help), and then beginning. This is a stage most people go too quickly through, and something we’ve tried to get across in this section about action in general.

If you’re doing something reasonably complex that’s going to take around 100 hours, spending 3-5 hours really planning it out well, or even longer, will almost always save you more time than it costs. As Dalio writes, “It is a very common mistake for people to move directly from identifying a tough problem to a proposed solution in a nanosecond without spending the hours required to properly diagnose and design a solution.” We all love action, but complex multi-week or multi-month projects almost always benefits from foresight, looking for solutions, clarifying exactly what you want to get out of it, and so on.

Finally, you start producing (doing the work), managing (communicating and checking in if you’re collaborating or have hired someone), and — if it’s relevant — “policing” (ensuring new systems are being used, new rules are being followed, etc.) This is good work habits in general, and everything else in Capacity applies here. “Policing” might sound like too strong of a word; a lot of it is actually troubleshooting, mentoring, teaching, and figuring out why things aren’t working and aren’t being used. You have to self-police if you’re working with yourself and trying to install new ways of doing things — but again, don’t let any heavy-handedness or intimidation or “fear of the law” be applied — it’s mostly very friendly.

And then, you get to the stage where you need to finish. This deserves special attention.

Completing Campaigns and Getting the Gains, IV: Finishing

“Finishing” deserves special attention — because many people self-destruct at this stage.

When projects get near completing, pressure generally starts to mount, especially if it’s a project that hasn’t been done before. For whatever reason, a general weight starts to set in and “things start to go wrong” — in reality, “things starting to go wrong” are usually unforeseen problems or unplanned-for needed resources… but it feels like things regularly go wrong at the end. Hence the famous joking quote, “When you’re 90% done, you’re half-finished.”

This is the stage, too, where perfectionism emerges. Perfectionism seems to be a defense mechanism that people use to protect themselves from a fear of rejection. When you release imperfect work into the world, people can judge you, which feels bad to most people, but specifically very, very, very bad to some people. If this is you, you’re liable to self-destruct at this stage.

In “The War of Art” the historian, bestselling author, and screenwriter Steven Pressfield anthropomorphizes “Resistance” as a hostile enemy.

He writes, “Resistance Is Most Powerful At The Finish Line —

“The danger is greatest when the finish line is in sight. At this point, Resistance knows we’re about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything its got.

“The professional must be alert for this counterattack. Be wary at the end.”

In preparing this work and testing these concepts thoroughly, the authors asked entrepreneurs, company owners, financiers, professors, and just otherwise smart people about this. Something like, “I’m investigating why projects don’t get done — it seems a lot of people self-destruct right at the finish line, totally irrationally… no reason to fail… but they do — fail. Do you know anyone that has a pattern of doing this?”

The personal anecdotes heard in response were legion. Almost everyone knows one person of prodigious talent who has self-destructed.

One anecdote was about a woman who was on pace to be an elite musician. In her early teens, her talent was obvious and she received a full scholarship to train in an elite music high school in the United States. After completing that program, she was preparing to go to university. Her brilliance had only continued, and she would have her pick of universities with a full scholarship again. When it came time to finish the application for her school of choice, she only had a single task left to do — she needed to make one single more recording of her playing a song she’d already played many times.

She didn’t do it. She was unable to do it. Her application was unfinished, and she didn’t go to university for music. The story, as it was related, is that she never seriously played music again.

Well, perhaps it wasn’t her calling? Sometimes we can see the error of our ways only when a long commitment is in sight, a path in life we decide we don’t wish to walk. This is entirely reasonable.

Ten years later, the woman — still brilliant and diligent and everything else — had seemed to find her calling doing innovative nonprofit work. She started her own nonprofit, and scraped and scrapped and bled to get it going. Then, she finally broke through and started receiving accolades. Foundations were eager to support her work, they finally were well-funded to run programs, and they scaled up an excellent team.

On the verge of establishing this nonprofit as a long-term force for good — a total and enduring victory firmly within sight — she decided to lay off all the staff, liquidate the nonprofit, and return the money to the foundations. The people she wanted to help were not going to be helped, and she was in the wilderness again.

Don’t think this a rare and mysterious story. Every person in a mentor, employer, or teacher role has many stories of this kind.

An acquaintance of one of the authors trained hard to become an excellent mathematical poker player, and he lived in a country where it was legal and unrestricted to do so. He did well. But then, randomly, he decided to start playing games he didn’t know how to play, stopped playing his game of choice, and lost all the money he built up. He quit poker forever.

He next started a small niche online business. He poured his sweat and blood into it, scrapped and saved, and started making it work. But after finally breaking through and making the first few thousands of dollars of profit, he decided he disliked this type of business and sold the assets he’d built for it for a fraction of what he’d already earned from the business. He moved on.

The pattern repeated. He launched a magazine with a brilliant specialist in a niche field that was totally underserved. It was beautiful. It was amazing. The production quality was unreal. It got very popular very fast. They had their pick of delivering some of their own services in that market or continuing to grow and then supporting themselves on advertisement.

You can guess what happened next. After a minor hiccup — really something very, very trivial by most people’s standards and the kind of normal stupid little aggravating thing that happens when pioneering a new business — he then quit and gave the whole business to his partner in that field, leaving the partner totally bewildered and scrambling to make it work.

“The danger is greatest when the finish line is in sight. At this point, Resistance knows we’re about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything its got.”

Indeed.

Completing Campaigns and Getting the Gains, V: Preparing

Projects and campaigns get more difficult at the end.

This pressure doesn’t affect everyone — some people are natural consolidators and good at finishing and getting gains. If so, this is less an area of concern for you — but you still ought to be wary and take note of what happens to many people, and note that it just might happen with a business partner, employee, collaborator, supplier, key client, or even yourself when moving into a field where more of your identity is at stake or some such.

Be wary.

It’s not clear exactly when a campaign moves into “finishing mode,” but at some point it’s time to start closing the loops, checking the boxes, getting the details cleaned up, compromising on some of the stuff that just ain’t happening in this version, and getting the thing out the door.

Sometimes it sneaks up on you. You’re grinding away in production mode, settled in for the long-haul, taking out big chunks of work on the project. And then — huh, the end is in sight.

This is when many people melt down.

Be wary!

Seriously, just awareness of the problem is half the cure. Pressfield’s “War of Art” is excellent on the topic. It’s like a breath of fresh air. Many artists and creators get much consolation out of it.

Pressfield offers some suggestions — good suggestions — but frankly, the virtue of the book is just that it lets you put your finger on the fact “The Resistance” is kicking in. It lets you get wary.

Once you’re wary, you can put defenses in place. The first is taking care of yourself when you see the finish line. You want to push hard, but if you push too hard too early and burn out, have an illness or injury, etc — this can cripple success. Don’t sprint right when you get into finishing mode and drop dead on the finish line.

You don’t want to do any self-destructive sprinting until you’re very, very, very certain that that sprint will get you all the way over the finish line. Recall Varro with his boldly stupid proclamation “that whenever he should get sight of the enemy, he would that same day free Italy from the strangers.” He sent tens of thousands of Romans to their death for his impetuousness.

Be measured; have reserves. Push hard when pushing hard will end things, as Scipio Africanus did — he destroyed the Carthaginian base in Spain, negotiated diplomatic relations and recruited allies in Africa, destroyed lesser Carthaginian armies in Africa, and finally then committed his forces to the decisive battle at Zama.

It’s fair to say that someone too close to a project can’t evaluate it correctly at the end. Is it good enough? It’s hard to say. Projects almost always fall short of the idealistic best-case scenario.

A technique for finishing projects — an overwhelmingly useful, incredibly helpful, incredibly powerful technique, maybe the most powerful single technique in this book even though it sounds simple — is to bring in an expediter / finisher / ally with no preconceptions at the end of the project.

You can’t abdicate authority at this stage — you need to be present and keep working. But if you were a musician struggling with the weight of the future and unable to record that last song, how hard is to ask a favored uncle, cousin, or teacher and say “Can I stay at your house over the weekend? I want you to ensure that I sit in a room and record music until the song is done. Don’t let me leave your house without a recording, even if it’s not perfect.”

All manner of athletes, executives, and increasingly high-performers in many fields have coaches and advisors. Someone that has enough domain experience to know what’s “good enough” and what isn’t, and with enough credibility and trust to say, “Shut up, you’re making a big deal about the wrong thing. Get it done.”

Facing down a powerful enemy is terrifying. There is no shame in that. And we gain courage and morale by having moral support from smart people who care about us. This is obvious. Don’t self-destruct alone. It’s foolish, and frankly — unnecessary.

What else? Manage your biochemistry. Enough sleep, doing physical training, doing de-stressing activities, planning a vacation for immediately after the final push so you know you’ll be allowed to recover — these things are wise to do. Many artists and achievers use some sort of stimulants like coffee, energy drinks, copious amounts of sugars, etc, to finish. The authors are against heavy sugar usage — yuck — but there’s a reason the pattern recurs. It is worth considering as part of the preparation for the final march to conclusion, but you’d do well to ask that trusted advisor/expediter/ally who is helping if they think it would be wise or not.

When it’s finishing time, it’s time to clear the decks. Postpone secondary projects, don’t open new threads, and give yourself enough space to push through and finish. Many people underestimate the finishing time and fall just barely short — obviously, this is no good. If it’s happened in the past, it’s not a tremendously bad thing — it just means you should be wary of it going forwards.

In general, when at the verge of finishing a campaign, it’s not time for deep psychoanalysis and working on your long-term cognition and beliefs. Just finish; you can figure out your own psychology later. But it is worthwhile if you’re not in the middle of the final push to explore finishing. Lots of talented people work with official or unofficial therapists.

Lastly, keep asking, “What’s the minimum standard we need to get this out the door? How do we get there as quickly as possible?” when the pressure is on. Study finishing, learn how to scope down, learn how to satisfice — some people are blessed with natural affinities in these areas, but many aren’t and there’s no shame in that. Learn how to finish; finish; win.

Completing Campaigns and Getting the Gains, VI: Consolidating

Completing a project shouldn’t be the end. Obviously, celebrate after winning. The vast majority of dreams are never realized. The failure rate among official projects is staggeringly high, and the never-actualized rate among dreams must be over 99%.

Celebrate.

But then, don’t settle. Jeffrey Gitomer, an exceptional sales trainer, recommends regularly studying every successful sale, great account, and great client or customer you win over.

He notes that salespeople brood and reflect over failures and think and ruminate when things are going badly, but that most of the biggest gains come from looking at what went well and ensuring that happens systematically.

You want to explicitly debrief your successes. The nice thing is that everyone likes success and there’s not enough of it in the world — if you say to a fellow-high-achiever, “Hey, I just had a huge win — can I talk through it and analyze it with you for lessons?” — the answer will almost always be yes.

You want to extract noteworthy events, and make the best practices repeatable. You’ll also want to consolidate the relevant gains in terms of network, signal, and assets — which is covered in the rest of the book.

Explicitly make time not-so-long after a project concludes to harvest all the gains. Debrief it with smart people; they’re almost always happy to do so. Get feedback on how you can leverage the newfound success, and do it.

The Action -> Character Conversion

It would be fair to say that “character is expensive, but then it is free.”

What is “character”? It seems to be a feedback loop between a person’s long-term cognition, habits, and decision-making — people come to see themselves as “the kind of person who is reliable” by repeatedly being reliable, and suddenly decisions fall into place to always do the reliable thing.

You can explicitly work on your character, and create projects to improve your character. Here is one of the more famous and noteworthy examples of it —

“… I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wish'd to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined.” — Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

Franklin listed on paper the virtues he wanted to develop, things like —

“Temperance: Eat not to fullness; drink not to elevation.”

“Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.”

“Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.”

Thinking is expensive and taxing. If there is a universally correct course of action that can be followed in a situation without thinking, it’s a tremendous boon.

This is doubly so when it stops us from performing poorly during bad times. Towards the end of the day, we are more fatigued than in the morning, and prone to make bad decisions.

Character becomes a shield against that. After two pints of beer, when Franklin is offered another one, he might say: “No, I’m not getting drunk” — because he’s, in his mind, “not the type of person who would get drunk.”

There is a term used these days, “retail therapy,” to indicate people buying consumer goods impulsively to make themselves feel better. While the range of goods and services would be a lot smaller in 1700’s America, it was still a reasonably wealthy country with lots for sale.

So let’s say Franklin has recently got a large payment for some printing work he has done, and yet is in a bad mood — maybe he just had a breakup with a girl he loved. Does he go out and buy himself a bunch of new clothes and shoes?

No, because he thinks “…I shouldn’t buy this stuff I don’t need, I’m a frugal person who doesn’t waste things.”

That character trait of “Resolution” is particularly valuable — when the quitting impulse or self-destruction impulse hits, he says, “No, I always perform what I resolve.”

Training in character traits means repeatedly making decisions and taking actions in support of that trait. Eventually, you don’t have to push yourself any more. If you’re “a naturally clean and orderly person” in your mind, you just always clean up after you cook, always straighten up your bedroom, always order things, and so on.

There’s nothing mystical about character. Nick Winter wrote of his conversion as such — “With a long history of realizing that I always feel better after I get up or work out or study or accomplish something, no matter how tired or sore I think I am beforehand, the generalized cue of “I don’t feel like it” has been largely rewired from the “Quit” response to the “Do it so I can feel better” response.”

That is character.

It’s almost miraculous-seeming how much benefit can be derived from explicit character training. Occasionally think through what you’d benefit from installing, discuss it with others, and implement a training regime as a project. Pick a character virtue and explicitly focus on improving for a period of time. This results in improving in that area, and previously difficult decisions start becoming automatic.

Character is expensive to train, but then frees you from a thousand difficult decisions at weaker moments.

Putting the Action Puzzle Together Impulse Control, I

We’ve spoken largely of action in broad brushstrokes, the trails you cut through the forests that become paths over time, the charting and navigating of those paths through thinking and planning, and the difficult expeditions into uncharted ground.

There is one final piece of the puzzle of action: actually getting yourself to do, in the moment, what you want to do consciously.

This is harder than it sounds.

“For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. … For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. … O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

That’s from Saint Paul, probably the most important person in the spread of early Christianity after the death of Jesus.

You don’t have to have any connection to appreciate Paul’s broad effectiveness — he was an incredible writer, orator, politician, and diplomat. He converted very many to Christianity, codified and added a lot of tradition and precedent, and spread it across the Roman sphere of influence.

In short, he was highly effective. He’s one of the chief architects of the religion that came to dominate world affairs for centuries.

And yet, in that excerpt from Romans 7, you can read the visceral self hate and questioning. Paul is regularly identifying pious actions he wants to do, but then he doesn’t follow through and is bewildered as to why, while regularly giving in to actions he doesn’t want to do.

This is an old problem. Every society that flourishes and thrives eventually has writers, philosophers, and theologians try to tackle the problem.

The problem of Saint Paul turned out to be a common one — it is difficult for man, in any era, to do what he intellectually wants to do.

The early Christians teachers turned outside of the direct canon, and took two Roman pagans who had excellent works on the topic — they took the brilliant orator Cicero’s masterpiece “De Officiis” — on duties — to go along with the Stoic philosopher Seneca’s treatments of the topic.

It is no wonder the Christians adopted the beliefs of the Stoics. Take De Officiis; it is simple and beautiful as it goes through a number of pragmatic concerns. Cicero writes —

“That moral goodness which we look for in a lofty, high-minded spirit is secured, of course, by moral, not by physical, strength. And yet the body must be trained and so disciplined that it can obey the dictates of judgment and reason in attending to business and in enduring toil. But that moral goodness which is our theme depends wholly upon the thought and attention given to it by the mind.”

What Cicero is saying is that moral goodness is secured by practicing good morality, but that requires intense physical training and discipline in order to get your body listening to the thoughtful judgments you’re making. And this sort of training starts in the mind.

It’s worth noting that people of many different moralities can embrace this view — “moral goodness” doesn’t mean Cicero’s particular style of it, from 2000-some years ago. Whatever you deem good and worth of your time, you can train this ability into yourself.

Putting the Action Puzzle Together Impulse Control, II

We can call this skill “impulse control.”

In the course of our lives, due to how our minds work, impulses arise. Thoughts come to mind, associations come to mind. It seems we don’t have a full and complete control over which thoughts come — we can shape it through what stimulus we expose ourselves to, and we choose to give a thought more or less attention. But either way, thoughts are coming.

Many of these thoughts are not-so-good. If you’re sitting down wanting to compose a piece of music and you start thinking, “This is crazy, I have no chance of doing this, I’m terrible at this, I hate this, I should really get up and take the dog for a walk” — well, this can stop one from composing a piece of music.

Some of these thoughts can be dealt with through precise cause/effect setups that you use to mitigate them You can set up if/than statements as a first line of defense against intrusive thoughts, you can recruit an ally or expediter to help get through the hard finishing line of a project, you can work on developing the identity and character trait that always has you cleaning or being courteous or spending money well.

But something else can be done over and above specifics — you can train the ability to manage your thoughts and impulses, in a universal sense.

Buddhism does not have any sort of monopoly on this, but mindfulness meditation is one of the oldest, most known, most proven ways to get a better understanding and mastery of your thoughts and impulses.

In traditional mindfulness meditation, you simply sit down, pick a single thing to focus on, and try to do nothing except focus on that thing. Focusing on your breath, for instance, is a common one.

So you’ll sit down, perhaps set a timer beforehand (five minutes is plenty if you’re getting started), and just pay attention to your breath. Inhale, feel the air coming in.

Exhale, feel the air going out.

En route, literally feel the air moving through your nose or mouth, down the throat, and into the lungs filling with air — and the pattern happening in reverse as you exhale.

This sounds simple, but it’s deceptively hard to do. Thoughts will come at you. Good ideas will come — “ah, I’ve got a good idea for marketing copy I should write.” Worries will come up — “I didn’t pay that parking ticket yet!” Random things will come up, like remembering lines from a movie or cartoon. You might realize you haven’t seen The Usual Suspects in a long time and you’d like to re-watch it. Oh, a friend just recommended Goodfellas last time you mentioned crime movies — is that worth watching? But I don’t really have time to watch movies lately, I’ve been so busy, maybe —

— wait, I’m supposed to be meditating!

The key is not to get aggravated. Your mind will spin up a bunch of random thoughts, long chains of desires or worries or just sheer random nonsense. The key is not to get angry, upset, or flustered — but rather just to re-focus your concentration on your breath, and just keep breathing, and experiencing the breath.

The value of the activity is not so much “succeeding” at it, but rather that you start to realize the nature of your thoughts.

Often, desires or cravings feel overwhelmingly like they need to be satisfied immediately, and fears and unpleasantries need to be fled from immediately.

In “Everyday Zen,” Charlotte Joko Beck talks about how you can’t fight off thoughts very well, but they’ll just run their course if you let them —

“The best way to let go is to notice the thoughts as they come up and to acknowledge them. “Oh, yes, I’m doing that one again” — and without judging them, return to the clear experience of the present moment. Just be patient. We might have to do it ten thousand times, but the value for our practice is the constant return of the mind into the present, over and over and over. Don’t look for some wonderful place where the thoughts won’t occur. Since the thoughts are basically not real, at some point get dimmer and less imperative and we will find there are periods where they tend to fade out because we see they are not real. They will just wither away in time without our quite knowing how it happened.”

Perhaps the most interesting phrase in that paragraph is “less imperative” — thoughts become less imperative when you start observing them. Nope, you don’t need to immediately stop what you’re doing and work on the great idea you had. Nope, you don’t need to go eat the cake. Nope, you don’t need to flee from some intimidating work you’re doing.

Thoughts arise; sometimes they’re desirable, sometimes they’re unpleasant, but in the end, they’re just thoughts.

There’s many other ways to train impulse control. Any time you feel a desire, craving, have a thought arise, or feel compelled to do something — you can simply acknowledge the thought, and choose to act on it or not. This process of training impulse control is very worthwhile, and gives a better grasp on one’s thinking and action across perhaps all disciplines.

Mindfulness meditation is not a bad place to start. Most meditators are happy to share and walk you through how they do it if you ask nicely. Marshall, one of the authors, learned from Brian Sharp and Leo Babauta, two veteran meditators, when traveling in Shizuoka, Japan.

There’s also organizations that provide instruction in meditation. Zau, one of the authors, learned by doing an immersive retreat and learning Goenka-taught Vipassana Meditation. Goenka offers retreats which are supported by donations only, and free to attend. It is an intensive experience where you practice silent meditation 11 hours per day for 10 days.

Meditation isn’t the only way — you can devise your own exercises where you feel thoughts and impulses, observe them, and take alternative action. Military training, athletic training, and religious training might also offer other worthwhile starting places for the study of impulse control.

Putting the Action Puzzle Together Impulse Control, III

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

— Mike Tyson

Fatigue, injury, fear — or anything where you’re “punched in the face” — means potentially a loss of reflectiveness, and maybe even a loss of an ability to think clearly at all.

Many people try to counteract this by not ever being tired, injured, or scared — but that’s a little impractical, don’t you think?

Josh Waitzkin, in “The Art of Learning” describes how, when he was younger, distractions would cause him to lose games of Chess and just be aggravated in general —

“Kids have trouble focusing for so long and strange things happen to a young mind straining under intense pressure. One day I was working my way through a complex position in a tournament at the Manhattan Chess Club, and a Bon Jovi song I had heard earlier in the day entered my mind. I tried to push it away and return to my calculation, but it just wouldn’t leave me alone. At first this seemed funny, but soon the song eclipsed the chess game. I couldn’t think, and ended up blundering and losing.”

At first, Waitzkin was annoyed and confused by this. But eventually, he decided he needed to train —

“…I took the bull by the horns and began training to have more resilient concentration. I realized that in top-rank competition I couldn’t count on the world being silent, so my only option was to become at peace with the noise.”

He devised exercises for himself, like playing to loud music — sometimes music he liked, other times music he disliked. And he looked for other opportunities to find stressors and get comfortable with them —

“…I frequented chess shops near my home and played speed chess in clouds of [cigarette] smoke, which I have always hated.”

Over time, dealing with difficult situations — “punched in the face” type situations — became easier and easier, as his training generalized.

He writes about playing against strong Soviet players with ruthless coaches that encouraged the kids to make noisy distractions by tapping pieces during intense moments — and even kicking under the table.

“One of these boys… had the habit of kicking me under the table during the critical moments of the game.”

And,

“He would also get up from the board at tournaments and talk about the position with his coach, a famous Grandmaster. … No one could prove what was discussed because of the language barrier, and the truth is it didn’t even matter. While valuable chess ideas might have been discussed, the psychological effect was more critical. Opponents felt hapless and wronged — they took on the mentality of a victim and so half the battle was already lost.”

Waitzkin goes on to describe dealing with this by channeling and using the emotion that’s being felt —

“The nature of your state of concentration will determine the first phase of your reaction [to an emergency or unexpected event] — if you are tense, with your fingers jammed in your ears [to block out noise] and your whole body straining to fight off distraction, then you are in a Hard Zone that demands a cooperative world for you to function. Like a dry twig, you are brittle, ready to snap under pressure. The alternative is for you to be quietly focused, apparently relaxed with a serene look on your face, but inside all the mental juices are churning. You flow with whatever comes, integrating every ripple of life into your creative moment. This Soft Zone is resilient, like a flexible blade of grass that can move with and survive hurricane-force winds.”

It is a difficult place to reach; the authors do not claim to be able to regularly reach this state. But it is there, and it is magnificent when you can thrive in harmony with chaos happening around.

A practical suggestion, in the meantime, is to gain exposure to unfavorable circumstances to make one stronger at life. While it might seem a little silly on the surface, it is fantastic advice to go work on something relatively unimportant and tedious while in the middle of incredibly unfavorable circumstances.

Learning to work when it’s noisy, when aggravating people are around, when injured, when fatigued, when ill, etc — these are valuable life experiences. We’ll speak briefly next about setting up a favorable environment, which can be a huge multiplier. But the highest form of multiplier is not needing a favorable environment at all, and being able to flexibly thrive anywhere.

The Environment Lever

Note

Some of the largest short-term payoffs will come from better organizing your environment. This means reducing costs to getting things done, setting up positive multipliers and inspiration, setting things up so that good habits and best practices happen automatically, and otherwise reducing friction to doing what you want.

We will spend less time focusing on environment here as much of this is covered later in the book.

There is also something to be said for learning how to thrive despite the environment, as discussed in terms of Waitzkin earlier. Yes, being in a cloud of secondhand cigarette smoking with rock music blaring is not the most conducive environment to play Chess — but you can’t control what tournaments will be like, so you better be ready for when life throws curveballs at you. Long-term biochemistry, long-term cognition, and excellent patterns of action come with you as you go through your life; environments, less so. So while there’s huge boosts to be had here, and definitely take them, it is also advisable to learn how to thrive without needing a perfect environment.

Eliminating Distractions

“It takes superhuman effort to focus on a task when you’re surrounded by distractions. But when you remove distractions in advance, no such effort is required: concentration flows. The motivation hacker learns to anticipate and eliminate distractions and temptations, making it trivial to follow through on her plans.”

— Nick Winter, The Motivation Hacker

Distractions sap cognition. You’ll recall that Dr. Gollwitzer wrote about how a simple thought of desire turns into intense cravings. It starts with a simple stimulus —

“Hey, that smells good — what is that?”

Pretty soon, you’re in extreme zombie scavenge mode.

“I… must… eat… that… cake… give me cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… cake… CAKE CAKE CAKE CAKE, GIVE ME THE CAKE OR I’M GOING TO KILL SOMEONE!!”

We’ve already discussed this from the biochemical perspective — modify your diet, get less insulin resistance, etc.

We’ve discussed it from a cognitive perspective — techniques of thought to stop elaborating thoughts repeatedly.

And the final piece of cake puzzle is to just not have cake around.

This is not a completion solution — there is a fairly large surface area of cake across the world.

And as you build more capacity and ability to focus, it matters less — but in the short term, eliminating distractions and temptations entirely can make things much easier.

This isn’t just about cake. The key to success here is to study and reflect to see precisely where you get off track. Reflectiveness, again, is useful. People descend into destructive alcoholism or addiction to street drugs by not thinking and reflecting on the topic, rationalizing things away, until they’re quite bad. In order to improve your environment, you need to recognize what stimuli are dangerous triggers for you.

Advice to clean up the environment around you is commonly given and have been addressed elsewhere. If you remove the television from your home, you’ll watch less television — but you already knew that. If you remove the junk food, you’ll eat less junk food — but you already knew that, too.

One that’s especially worth discussion that you might not have thought of — most people probably do not think of the setup of their computer as their “environment,” but it certainly is so. We all spend so much time on computers these days that it’s absolutely necessary to master the computer — so it doesn’t master you.

There’s numerous applications to self-restrict computer usage. The authors heavily use each — one of the authors, Marshall, uses an app called “Self Control” which puts a permanent block on distracting sites. When he finds himself spending inordinate time on a site, he’ll block it for a month or two, and review periodically. Sites to play Chess online regularly get blocked by Marshall, as do sites that actually offer a lot of smart discussion and learning if they’d been leaned on too heavily for procrastination and gotten addictive: Hacker News, Reddit, and Quora are all excellent resources, but all cycle onto the block list periodically if they’re getting inordinate time. Marshall also keeps strict rules about never installing games on his smartphone, and will only play games on his computer a few days out of the year.

The other author, Zau, creates a second user account on his computer away from his normal work account and sets parental controls that only allow 60 minutes per day of usage. While playing a game like X-Com or Faster Than Light, Zau is limited to 60 minutes and sets the machine up to notify him every 15 minutes that his time is running out. In a strange way, this also makes the games much more enjoyable, because they don’t feel like an infinite time sink.

Another app, “Freedom,” is commonly used about the tech/production social circles Marshall and Zau run in. Freedom lets you block all internet usage for a period of time. It sounds ridiculous at first, but results seem to indicate it works.

You might also benefit periodically from isolating yourself from technology and fun things in a cabin or other wilderness type setting, or other type of restrictive environment — Marshall intentionally takes long-distance trains and ferries regularly when he needs to do deep work and can’t be distracted. (About one-third of this book was written when Marshall and Zau took a ship across the Atlantic together from Florida to England — which was surprisingly inexpensive and very conducive to focus.)

Periodically analyze what distractions are setting you back, and set to fencing them in, or eliminating them temporarily or permanently.

Automatic Behavior Cues

You want to, whenever possible, build automatic behavior cues into your environment. If you move to a distance where you can walk or cycle to work, you’ll get more motion into your life.

It’s worth being strategic picking where you live as well as temporary bases on vacations and other travels. If you can situate a healthy cheap restaurant and your gym on your normal daily walking path, the odds of eating healthy and doing fitness goes up tremendously.

Chaining these behaviors together is particularly effective. Mason Currey’s “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work” looks at many different artistic and technical fields, and what people at the height of success in their work did in those areas.

Here’s his profile of Soren Kierkegaard —

“The Danish philosopher’s day was dominated by two things: writing and walking. Typically, he wrote in the morning, set off on a long walk through Copenhagen at noon, and then returned to his writing for the rest of the day and the evening. The walks were where he often had his best ideas, and sometimes he would be in such a hurry to get them down that, returning home, he would write standing up at his desk, still wearing his hat and gripping his walking stick or umbrella.”

Kierkegaard benefited from a work/reflect/work cycle, and set his day up around it. Likewise, it’s possible to stop in the same café every day before work or after work, and always write, or always plan, or always whatever — we start drawing mental associations with our environment when we do the same things repeatedly.

If you have some activity you want to regularly do, consider “chaining” it into a routine, marked by physical locations where that activity always happens.

A Surplus of Necessities; Or At Least, No Deficit

The “Asian Ruby 2” Hotel in Saigon, Vietnam is nothing special. It is clean and the beds are comfortable. It is expensive by Vietnam’s standards — where you could get a large palatial apartment for about $15 per night, the Asian Ruby 2’s $35 per night price tag makes it not cheap in comparison.

But it has one thing going for it: a very, very long breakfast hour.

The AR2 serves breakfast from 6AM to 11:30AM, a full five and a half hours of eggs, meats, fruits, Western food, Vietnamese food, and coffee — oh so much coffee.

This has a certain effect: you can wake up early, sit down in the AR2’s pleasant dining room on a white tablecloth, and work. You need not think about food. If you take a plate of food with you when you leave the breakfast area of some fruits and other food that holds up well for a few hours, you can literally go through an entire stay in Saigon without eating outside of the hotel.

This sheer abundance of food takes away all considerations and necessities of finding food, which takes surprisingly much longer to deal with than most people think. It’s quite likely that the average person spends an average of one to two hours per day locating food, going towards the food if served elsewhere, waiting for the food to come if at a restaurant, cooking if at home, shopping for food, waiting in line at grocery stores or convenience stores, etc, etc, etc.

This can be relaxing and de-stressing — but it’s inarguable that it consumes a lot of time and mental energy, which — if it were handled with no mental cost — could be deployed elsewhere productively.

There is thus an advantage to having a nearly infinite surplus of whatever basics you need. If you ever miss a gym session because your gym clothes are dirty, if you ever eat a poor quality meal at a restaurant because were out of decent food at home, if you let your schedule get interrupted by demands to get new printer ink or printer paper or dealing with mundane concerns — this might be a sign to build a larger surplus of what you need.

In particular, it’s always worth exploring for ways to have food completely handled with minimum time — the authors cannot possibly get across how much the time savings can be when infinite healthy food is available. It is very much worth searching for and experimenting with.

Reference Groups and the People Around

“Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.

“The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.

“What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to.” — Paul Graham, “Cities and Ambition”

Graham — who built and sold one of the world’s first web apps, and then founded Y Combinator, the most influential tech accelerator in the world — goes on to describe how cities speak to you in many ways, from whether you see more books or televisions when there’s open doors or windows in the summertime, and the conversations you overhear.

He concludes: “No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.” And he recommends finding the right city that provides the right kind of encouragement for the things you want to do.

This is hard to argue with. We’ve all had the experience where accidentally start copying the word choices of people we’re spending time with. Marshall gets a particular kick out of seeing words like variance, constraint, satisfice, sample size, counterfactual, Laozi Problems, and ceteris paribus all start coming up in the language of his friends and associates.

It goes multiple ways — if the people nearby talk about “bro’ing out hard,” you’re more likely to feel like bro’ing out hard is normal behavior.

There’s a term the sociologists use for it — “normative behavior.” If you’re around a place where most of the people don’t like to work too hard, don’t like to work too fast, and try to get maximum profit while putting in minimum effort — somewhere like Morocco, for instance — it makes you feel like that’s normal and acceptable behavior.

It’s subtle how it shifts you, but the shift undoubtedly happens. If you walk the streets out of Tokyo, you’re going to naturally become a little softer-spoken, more groomed, and more polite. Without any instruction to do so, it just sinks into your behavior patterns.

A particularly strange phenomenon worth remarking on is what happens when you see someone who is less smart than you, doesn’t have particularly special talent, and is succeeding at a high level in business or the arts or a particular endeavor.

The thought is something like: “Hey, that guy is an idiot, and he’s doing it. Why aren’t I?”

It turns out that many fields are not so difficult and don’t require superhuman gifts. Moroccan style driving of cars and motorbikes would be criminal in Canada; Canadian style driving would get angry shouts and yells in Morocco.

The places you go and the people you associate with have dramatic effects on your behavior. It’ll sink into every ounce of your being, in many ways both overt and subtle. Choose this especially carefully.

More on Environment Later

Many aspects and best practices for environment — buy the best tools, evaluate the cost of durable items on their per-usage basis, and so on — will be covered later.

In the meantime, start analyzing how you can improve your environment by removing costs, drains, and constraints — but simultaneously train your biochemistry, cognition, and patterns of action in order to not need a perfect environment to produce.

Concluding Capacity

Valuable

Our definition of Capacity — “the ability to consciously effect outcomes in the world.”

This is, even just in the abstract, one of the most desirable skill sets, and one of the most highly paid ones.

Again, consider when you’re having a problem, and someone says to you, “Don’t worry about — I’ll handle it.”

With some people, you’re immediately relieved and reassured. You know it’s going to happen, and maybe don’t even need to check in on them much at all. This is a person of high Capacity, and it’s incredibly valuable and reassuring.

Next down the scale is someone who might get it done, but will need coaxing, reminding, and so on, and in the end it still might not be done right. This person can maybe be worked with, but it’s more of a hassle and much less enjoyable.

And finally, there’s people whom you just smile politely at when they say that, and keep looking for solutions — because you know that they’re not going to get it handled and can’t get it handled.

The first of these people — the one you can just trust to get it handled well without managing or monitoring or coaxing or reminding or cajoling — this person is very valuable.

Capacity For Sale

The vast majority of people end up doing work for wages for at least some part of their lives. Directly and indirectly, your general Capacity — the ability to consciously effect outcomes in the world — determines how well you’ll be paid.

In a direct sense, the salesman that closes more deals will get better commissions, the programmer that consistently writes great code will get more job offers, and the manager that consistently brings out the best in the people she’s managing will get promoted faster.

But it’s not just direct effects — the ability to learn itself is driven by your Capacity. If you decide to become a good salesman, programmer, or manager, you dedicate yourself to a course of study and get better.

In fields that require credentials and accreditation, like law and medicine, it’s the capacity you’ve built that will get you into and through law school or medical school.

Better at Everything

Higher Capacity means being better at just about everything — not just work. It makes you more able to take up a fitness regime, take up a hobby, be a useful and effective figure in your community, deal with and get results in stressful situations, champion worthy causes, and perhaps even have more fun in the process.

It directly makes you better, because you can do more. And it increases your potential to learn, grow, and get the building blocks and resources in place you need to be good at things.

It’s a big deal.

The Tricky Part of Capacity Building

Why, then, is there so relatively little focus on this origin of all other results? Capacity is where things start and end, alpha and omega; it is where you transform yourself and transform the world. Shouldn’t there be more effort put into it?

It’s a vexing question, at first. Just being able to effect outcomes consciously is incredibly valuable. You can make things happen.

Is this not one of the most valuable of all things?

And here is perhaps the answer — we’ve never had a society more into learning, literacy, numeracy, self-development, and all manner of study into professional development, hobbies, and so on. People are trying.

But “Capacity in the abstract” is hard to build because there’s no set curriculum.

No Curriculum

There’s many general “best practices” and useful skills and tactics to be learned, but there’s no general curriculum on how to be able to effect results.

It depends tremendously on your personal genetics, background, the skills you already have, your preferences for workflows, the types of things you’re doing, and so on.

This is unsatisfying answer for most people. People don’t like ambiguity. That’s one reason you get marketers advertising miracle solutions or “guaranteed to work systems” — that don’t always work, of course.

Likewise, doctors often are not sure that a particular treatment will be effective for a patient, but patients demand that the doctor act like they’re certain. So you get the “haughty doctor tone,” even as doctors are often very humble and express and discuss their uncertain cases among colleagues.

Marketers and practitioners shouldn’t be blamed for offering false levels of certainty — people in aggregate demand it, and people who don’t give in to that demand don’t go as far.

But the fact is, figuring out your optimal workflows, habits, nutrition and fitness and biochemistry, mix of thinking skills, short-term and long-term patterns of thought, operations and how you manage complexity, the way you set up your environment, what tools you use, prioritization, and so on — it varies, it’s personal, and it’s custom.

There are universals, many of them. But even among the universals, some will give you dramatic and near-instant life-changing improvements, whereas others will give you just a small edge.

Most people do not like this. They seem, intentionally or not, to want to be told what to do. They want things simplified. But if you embrace the challenge, become something of a scientist, and constantly shape your thinking and performance — it is a marvelous journey that leads to becoming marvelously effective. What follows are some guidelines for that path of improvement.

The Growth Mindset

Stanford Professor Carol Dweck has spent over 30 years researching into developmental psychology.

She discovered that one of the most consistent advantages is seeing one’s characteristics from a “growth” point of view instead of “fixed.”

Dweck quotes sociologist Benjamin Barber: “I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures.... I divide the world into the learners and non-learners.”

Dweck’s research identified this pattern, that when children believe that things like intelligence and skill are fixed qualities, they get terrified of failure — because that means they’re stupid and unskilled, permanently, as who they are.

Dweck: “Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character—well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.”

In short, people who don’t believe they can evolve feel immense pressure to always succeed and not fail. It turns out to be a recipe for growing a lot less —

“We offered four-year-olds a choice: They could redo an easy jigsaw puzzle or they could try a harder one. Even at this tender age, children with the fixed mindset —the ones who believed in fixed traits—stuck with the safe one. Kids who are born smart “don’t do mistakes,” they told us. Children with the growth mindset—the ones who believed you could get smarter—thought it was a strange choice. Why are you asking me this, lady? Why would anyone want to keep doing the same puzzle over and over? They chose one hard one after another. “I’m dying to figure them out!” exclaimed one little girl. So children with the fixed mindset want to make sure they succeed. Smart people should always succeed. But for children with the growth mindset, success is about stretching themselves. It’s about becoming smarter.”

This fixed mindset is more dangerous to one’s development now then ever before. Peter Drucker, arguably the father of modern management, wrote: “In forty-five years of work as a consultant with a large number of executives in a wide variety of organizations—large and small; businesses, government agencies, labor unions, hospitals, universities, community services; American, European, Latin American and Japanese—I have not come across a single “natural”: an executive who was born effective. All the effective ones have had to learn to be effective. And all of them then had to practice effectiveness until it became habit. But all the ones who worked on making themselves effective executives succeeded in doing so. Effectiveness can be learned—and it also has to be learned.”

Dweck’s “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” lays out many guidelines for improvements in this area, but a first logical place to start would be realizing if you have any fixed mindset type beliefs in any core area.

Dweck talks about when people fail and speak of themselves — “The fixed mindset creates an internal monologue that is focused on judging: “This means I’m a loser.” “This means I’m a better person than they are.” “This means I’m a bad husband.” “This means my partner is selfish.”

Her guidance? “The critical thing is to make a concrete, growth-oriented plan, and to stick to it.”

A Conversion of Pain to Growth

The backgrounds and memoirs of successful athletes offer excellent insights into dealing with failure. When a company fails, or a politician loses an election, or a statesman’s reform fails to achieve its ends — these failures are often slowly realized, and not clear as to when precisely they happened.

Athletics is different. When you lose in a competition or sporting event, you know. You have to face, right away, the agony of defeat. And reading about the psychology of those who went on to become champions, and how they dealt with adversity, is useful.

The greatest basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan, famously didn’t make the varsity team in high school. What’s less known about the story is that anyone would have been a long shot to make it.

Here is Thomas Lake writing about what happened after interviewing Jordan’s high school coach, Clifton Herring:

“In those days it was rare for sophomores to make varsity. Herring made one exception in 1978, one designed to remedy his team's height disadvantage. This is part of the reason Mike Jordan went home and cried in his room after reading the two lists. It wasn't just that his name was missing from the varsity roster. It was also that as he scanned the list he saw the name of another sophomore, one of his close friends, the 6'7" Leroy Smith. Over the next three decades Jordan would become a world-class collector of emotional wounds, a champion grudge-holder, a magician at converting real and imagined insults into the rocket fuel that made him fly. … Jordan quickly became a jayvee superstar.”

A “fixed mindset” athlete would also be intensely disappointed, but the disappointment would translate into “I guess I’m not so good.” Jordan, instead, translated it into a raw fury to do better.

The pattern recurs over and over again by top competitors.

Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote of coming in second place in the IFBB Mr. Universe competition —

“It wasn't until the pose-off that I realized how close a contest it was. There were guys here I'd never seen before. Frank Zane, in the medium class, had unbelievable cuts and an elegant posing routine. He posed gracefully, like a matador, like a dancer. His body seemed to have been tooled down with the chisels and gouges a sculptor would use on mahogany.

“The announcer called out my name for second place. I was stunned. Frank Zane had won the IFBB Mr. Universe. I came in second, on grounds that I was not defined enough, not perfectly developed. I was just the biggest, not the best.

“That did a little number on my mind. I went away from the auditorium overwhelmed, crushed. I remember the words that kept going through my head: "I'm away from home, in this strange city, in America, and I'm a loser. . . . " I cried all night because of it. I had disappointed all my friends, everybody, especially myself. It was awful. I felt it was the end of the world.

“But I've always been resilient. A day later I had gotten myself together. I'm going to pay them back, I thought. I'm going to show them who is really the best. I would train in America. I would use their food and their knowledge and work it against them. I would make it in America too.”

You can see Schwarzenegger going through a similar pattern as Jordan — at first he thinks he is destined for greatness. When he has a setback, he’s devastated — at first. But instead of letting it define him, he keeps working harder, adjusting his game plan, knowing he can grow and excel more.

No one likes failure, especially failure for events we’ve trained for and worked hard to succeed at. But the ability to convert failure into motivation to grow more becomes an incredibly useful technique, something to focus on during dark times when feeling lost and afraid. Growth is possible, and more work in developing will pay off.

Scientist Mode

In the paper “Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas,” the late UC Berkeley and Tsinghua University professor of psychology, Seth Roberts starts by looking at where new ideas come from.

Roberts: “Little is known about how to generate plausible new scientific ideas... Scientists sometimes forget about idea generation... Scientific investigation [is often implied that it] begins when the scientist has a hypothesis worth testing. The book says nothing about how to obtain such a hypothesis."

In it, he goes on to describe how long-term self-experimentation has helped him find many practical and useful events. Here are his results from tracking his sleep —

“While recording every awakening, I also wrote down other information about my sleep, including when I fell asleep and got up... In 1990, I got a home computer, which made analysis of this data much easier. In 1993, I looked at a graph of sleep duration over time. It showed that several months earlier my sleep duration had decreased 40 minutes per day — a change I hadn't noticed.

“The decrease had happened at the same time I had lost about 5 kg by eating less highly-processed food. That is, I ate food that was closer to its natural state (e.g., more fruit, oranges instead of orange juice, rice instead of pasta, vegetables instead of bread, other baked goods, and delicatessen food). Letting Day 1 be the first day of the dietary change, comparison of Days -500-0 to Days 51-550 shows the decrease in sleep duration was highly reliable, t(880) = 6.89, p < 0.001. The weight measurements ended because the scale broke. I never regained the lost weight.”

The fancy statistical stuff and p-scores aren’t important. What’s important is that Dr. Roberts found he was sleeping 40 minutes less per day after losing 5 kg after modifying his diet to eat less processed foods.

That’s a huge result. 40 minutes extra time per day for work, for enjoyment, or whatever one pleases. It’s a huge gain.

The thing is, different gains accrue to different people. If a person is lactose intolerant and doesn’t know it, cutting dairy products might have a huge quality of life boost. Others can tolerate dairy better, or perhaps even function well on it.

Again, many people don’t like ambiguity and confusion and work. They like things wrapped in a neat little package that tells them precisely what to do. But, all our bodies respond slightly differently. The only way to know is to try different ways of living and working, and see what works for you.

Measuring helps; being precise helps. But even doing things informally and mentally checking in with how you feel can be huge. Playing with different technologies and different environments to see how that interacts with your workflow and production is obviously always smart. So is learning different disciplines and hobbies — meditating, trying different types of fitness and sports, trying different dietary modifications, reading about different systems of ethics and decision-making, and so on — and then trying them out.

You must experiment and test different ways of living and working to find what works best for you. There are best practices and universal principles, but even these will differ in how much they affect you.

Breakthroughs

“Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was. "Light! give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour. I felt approaching footsteps. I stretched out my hand as I supposed to my mother. Some one took it, and I was caught up and held close in the arms of her who had come to reveal all things to me, and, more than all things else, to love me.”

At 19 months old, the Keller family’s darling baby came down with a serious illness. Fever gripped the little girl, and after the terrible illness, she was left without the ability to speak or see.

This was the end of the 1880’s, in a world crueler and colder than today. A poorer world, both materially and intellectually, one in which being different than the norm could easily commit a person to a life of physical and intellectual poverty.

The Kellers were not deterred. Her mother and father worked hard to reach out to the luminaries of the age, eventually reaching the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who had been working with deaf children.

Bell referred the Kellers to a progressive teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan.

Sullivan took the little girl by the hand, and worked hard to open the world back up to her.

Hellen Keller later wrote: “The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrasts between the two lives which it connects. It was the third of March, 1887, three months before I was seven years old.”

The lessons weren’t easy.

Anne would place a doll in Hellen’s hands, and then slowly trace out the letters D… O… L… L… onto Hellen’s hand.

After some practice, Hellen was able to trace the letters back. D… O… L… L.

It was imitation — she didn’t understand the meaning yet.

Anne kept tracing letters and Hellen spelling of words like hat, cup, and walk.

This went well enough, but there were difficulties trying to explain the difference between a mug and the water inside. Hellen was having a hard time grasping that the M… U… G… was the object she held, and the W… A… T… E… R… was inside it.

Trying to teach Hellen the universality of language, Anne got a second doll and explained that it, too, was a D… O… L… L…

But it was frustrating and aggravating for Hellen. She wrote later: “One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan put my big rag doll into my lap also, spelled "d-o-l-l" and tried to make me understand that "d-o-l-l" applied to both. […] I became impatient at her repeated attempts and, seizing the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor.”

Anne remained patient.

Hellen later wrote about the momentous breakthrough moment: “We walked down the path to the well-house […] and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.”

There are two big takeaways here.

The first is — patience. It may take multiple attempts to establish something important in your life. If you think it’s likely worth it, keep at it. Results will come.

The second is even greater — before Anne Sullivan went to work repeatedly on the patterns of language with Hellen Keller, Keller felt like “Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began…”

And then one day, the breakthrough —

“Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!”

It would not be crazy to say that there are skills and methodologies in the world that you do not know about yet, that will set you free the way the language broke through to Hellen Keller.

For a person who just gets into stupid arguments all the time, a book like “Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most” by the Harvard Negotiation Project authors might be life-changing, letting one finally separate out the parallel discussions of what happened, how each party feels about it, and what the right next actions are. It’s potentially life changing if one has lots of arguments, like finally getting the imprint of language matched to sensations out in the world.

Likewise, project management might be life changing; so might getting over a particular fear, or learning about an allergy, or discovering the environment that inspires you, or a particular craft or skill or discipline that’s incredibly life affirming and important to you.

Oftentimes, we don’t even know life can be better in the areas that we’re out in the fog — but there is always room for improvements. A solid base of a growth mindset, a scientist’s view towards regular experimenting, and looking for new ways to push through the fog and see it clear — this will lead you to becoming ever more effective, being able to do ever more here on Planet Earth, and to have a very good time in the process.

Network

Network

Beyond Nodes and Graphs

There Is No Network

Frankly, the authors don’t love the word “network” or “networking”… there just isn’t anything better that’s not too wordy or too contrived.

One speculates whether “networking” has such a bad reputation because of the impersonal-seeming nature of it.

Sitting with a friend in a comfortable cafe with a strong coffee in hand… Recounting adventures, swapping stories about your lives, and planning how to keep moving up in the world. Is this “networking”? Is this person “a node in your network”?

It seems absurd. It doesn’t capture it. It’s so… impersonal. Clinical.

The word “network” could imply some abstract graph of interconnecting dots and lines. But in reality, it’s so much more than that — it’s about the living, breathing people you choose to share your life with.

At the same time, just accepting randomness coming and going is no solution.

Aristotle wrote, when talking about virtue and goodness in life, that “to entrust to chance what is greatest and most noble would be a very defective arrangement."

Friendship, camaraderie, working together, helping each other — these are some of the most beautiful and noble things we do. And the sum of your friendships, collaborations, and mutual regard for others becomes your… well, network.

Don’t let the word stop you from realizing the robust importance of it, and definitely don’t leave it to chance.

Networks Are Necessary For Monumental Tasks

When people think of the 1960’s American Civil Rights Movement, they tend to think of the dramatic moments. Moments like Rosa Parks’ arrest for refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white man and especially Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream Speech.”

But consider the backdrop for the 1963 Dream speech. It’s striking not just because of its oratory, but also because of the setting. Between 200,000 and 300,000 people attended the March on Washington and heard the speech at Lincoln Memorial.

This took a huge amount of coordination between civil rights leaders, church leaders, people in government, local communities, and the press.

One of the reasons the event was so striking is because the sheer number of people who are there and the fact that it was well-covered and broadcast through the United States.

All this took coordination of people, and existing relationships made it all possible. The relationships and long-term goodwill, trust, and cooperation between people who already knew each other in advance of the event made it possible for such a huge number of people to converge on Washington and participate.

It's Hard to See What Isn't There

Try this: imagine someone who you met that’s been incredibly important to your life. Someone you’ve shared lots of memories with and who’s helped you develop and grow as a person.

Now imagine if you’d never met them.

How different would you be? How much worse would your life be?

Here’s the crazy thing —

There are people out there who could’ve been just as important to you as that person, who you didn’t meet… just because of accident.

It’s equally true that some of the most amazing people in your life — people who you’ll have incredible adventures with, who’ll help you in remarkable ways, who’ll shift the course of your entire life for the better — you haven’t met yet.

Some of your closest friends, confidants, and colleagues are out there, and you need to go find them in order to benefit from knowing them.

We hurt when things are taken away from us. But the fact is, your life — right now — could have a lot of brilliant, exceptional, fantastic people, with great character, who can be greatly helpful to what you’re doing. And if you haven’t taken the time to go get those people into your life, your life — this very day, this very moment — is worse for it.

It’s a big deal, if you let the thought truly set in. The cost of not seeking out great people in your life is incredibly high.

Character First

Winning Friends and Influencing People

First published in 1936, there’s a reason that “How To Win Friends and Influence People” has sold over 15 million copies and has never been out of print.

If you read a summary of the key points of the book, you’ll read points like —

“Don't criticize, condemn, or complain.”

“Give honest and sincere appreciation.”

This is good advice, but perhaps not the reason the book is so popular.

In fact, the summaries are a little misleading. Carnegie doesn’t open a chapter with “Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain” — and it isn’t in the chapter title.

Rather, he opens with stories about people like how the mobster Al Capone saw himself as a good person, or how Abraham Lincoln learned not to criticize when he was challenged to a duel after insulting someone.

They’re interesting; you’re just drawn into Carnegie’s world right away. He keeps sharing stories and little quandaries, and you can start to feel the principles downloading into your mind.

The chief thing that Carnegie did was amazing — he managed, using simple stories and basic points, to start to awaken a shift in thinking in his readers.

There are some basic prerequisites to being successful at expanding your network, but they all boil down to this: it’s a lot easier to meet people if you’re both likable and useful.

But trying to be useful and likable through sheer individual actions is a recipe for disaster. But you can automatically be likable and useful by building elements into your character of being magnanimous, kind, cheerful, forgiving, optimistic, and pragmatic.

Carnegie succeeds — almost to a magical extent — in bringing about these changes via the lessons he shares and simple guidance he brings.

For instance — “Let's cease thinking of our accomplishments, our wants. Let's try to figure out the other person's good points. Then forget flattery. Give honest, sincere appreciation. Be 'hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise,’ and people will cherish your words and treasure them and repeat them over a lifetime — repeat them years after you have forgotten them.”

Good advice. But it’s not advice on a particular action in the moment, is it? It’s instead advice to be more aware and less self-centered over time, to become more sincere and gracious. The person of high-awareness, fully-focused on being useful and of service, who is sincere and gracious — this person finds respect and open arms where ever they go.

We currently live in a society that largely focuses on instant gratification. And that’s fine, who doesn’t like a tactic or two? But to really thrive in building fantastic relationships and an excellent, reliable network — you will have to develop your character.

The following are a selection of mindsets and virtues worth developing. Some core fundamentals like self-esteem and self-regard are not covered; they’re covered very well elsewhere. We aimed for universally-applicable topics that don’t get as much attention as they should, given their importance.

Radical Personal Responsibility

The victim sees himself or herself as acted on by outside forces. They say things like: “He didn’t give me the job. She’s unfair. I’m depressed because the weather is terrible. My boss is an idiot. I can’t put in good work when management doesn’t support me. I’m getting bad grades because the professor hates me.” And so on.

There are two problems with this way of thinking.

The first is that it disempowers a person from being able to change anything. The second is that it’s incredibly unpleasant and unenjoyable for other people to listen to.

Radical personal responsibility looks at it in a different way. It’s a near-delusional worldview in which everything — from the idiot boss, to the hateful professor, and even the depressing weather — is your responsibility.

To take an extreme example — if it’s a miserably cold winter and you hate it, you think, “It’s on me that it’s miserably cold out.”

Now, it’s absurd to try to assert control over the weather. But once you assert a radical personal responsibility over the situation, you start to think things like — “Ok, it’s my responsibility to deal with this. What can I do? Hmm. I can get much warmer and more waterproof clothing. Or I could move closer to the train station so I don’t have to walk in the cold as much. Or I could move somewhere else. Or I could learn to not be so bothered by it and appreciate the winter world around me more.”

Asserting personal responsibility to a radical extent creates options, but more importantly, it’s almost always appreciated. Your boss might well be the biggest idiot on the planet, but if you thrive anyways and become a top producer in spite of it, your name will inevitably be on the lips of anyone talented at the company as someone to watch and a first candidate to recruit away from the company or promote. And you learn the skills of producing and stacking up wins, which is useful for your own development.

Learning how to negotiate and understand unreasonable people, like a potentially unfair professor, goes a long way too. Many people throw their hands up, complain, and accept their lot. But taking charge and taking responsibility means doing everything you can to mediate the situation, and you’ll learn a lot from it. If the professor was genuinely corrupt — say, marking down anyone who refused to pay the professor money for grades — perhaps you’d be the person to de-throne that corruption and bring it to the attention of the authorities. Radical personal responsibility creates options. Most people complain to feel better about themselves and accept their lot; you don’t.

It’s mentioned here, in Network, because it’s critical in your conversations. Almost always in the first conversations with people you meet, you’ll be asked what you’re working on. In second conversations, if the person likes you, you’ll be asked what your current challenges are. This is where help is about to arrive — but what will you say?

If you’ve asserted responsibility and refused to accept badness from a victim’s perspective, you’ll be a magnet for help. You might say something like, “Well, I’ve been trying to learn sales to market my startup, but the market seems to really lean heavily on big companies. I’m sure I can crack this nut and I know have something great to offer, but I’m going to have to figure out how to do it. Any thoughts?”

The underlying content might be very similar to a victim’s — you’re trying to build a business, and having a hard time getting traction because people seem to prefer big suppliers. But that very subtle difference, where you’re asserting responsibility for making it work, makes all the difference in the world.

Your worldview surfaces constantly in your language.

Be Service Minded Without Being Servile

A genuine desire to help other people goes a very long way. Being “service-minded” means thinking and scanning for ways you can help people, being genuinely interested with their deep concerns, being willing to go out of your way to help.

This is key. You likely have already heard it before. Most smart advice on networking says something like “give value first” — but the key here is, you must avoid being “servile.”

Humans are pattern-matching animals. Once they match you to a pattern, they fall into a similar pattern of how they act in response to you.

If you match the pattern of how they see, for instance, the maid who cleans the house, then you’ll be treated similarly to how the maid is treated.

It’s not intentional; it just happens near automatically. A very bad and common mistake made by people who are young or new to sales or entrepreneurship is coming across servile instead of helpful.

You want to be service-oriented and genuinely aim to be helpful. But, to give you a mental picture — nothing in your tone or demeanor should suggest you’re on your knees holding up whatever service you’re doing as a gift that you’re begging to be accepted.

There are a few good places service can come from isn’t servile.

One is from specialization and expertise in a particular area. If you have knowledge, skills, or experience that others consider valuable, you can present that as a trusted advisor to whoever you’re speaking with. Certainly, a business mogul’s attorney is lower in the hierarchy than the mogul, and yet the attorney speaks with knowledge and expert status about the law.

Alan Weiss is one of the top-earning solo consultants in the United States, and he constantly emphasizes to young consultants that “peer status” with the client is critical. That means engaging who you’re speaking with as more-or-less an equal. It’s especially important when meeting with people whose time is especially in-demand.

This doesn’t mean you need to pretend that you’re further along than you are. But you can genuinely admire someone, acknowledge their achievements, and yet relate to them as someone on the path dedicated to the same results.

Note this because it’s important: if you act as a peer to people who are further along than you are, you will with 100% certainty alienate some people. Some people don’t want to be treated as a peer by someone they see as less established or more junior than them. The tradeoff is that you have the chance to become genuine friends with people when you do this, without the pretenses and hierarchy and nonsense that dominates most people’s interactions once they’ve reached a high level. It’s a tradeoff to make carefully, but worth considering.

At times, taking a clear subordinate role is the way. If you do this, think in your mind of being a “most trusted lieutenant” or something along those lines. Someone’s right-hand-man is not someone who bows and scrapes; they act with dignity. There might be some hierarchy there, but then again, there might not.

If you’re subordinate to someone you meet or someone who is helping you, act like one of their officers. That means you still need to be intelligent, report how things are going on the front, inform them, question things you don’t understand, and so on. It makes you more valuable.

Then, yes, help. Add value. Do it as an expert. Do it as a peer. If you’re a clear subordinate, that’s fine, but still do it with dignity. No one likes the servile nature, any sort of suck-up-ness, and it’s a common mistake that people make. Serve everyone you admire; never be servile.

A Celebratory and Expansive Attitude

The act of celebrating wins is a powerful, necessary, and yet, sometimes forgotten part of the journey.

If someone helps us make the meal, they need to be invited to the feast. Take the time to share your victories with friends and collaborators — be generous with gratitude and respect when the wins happen.

In a world where most people spend days working long and thankless hours, genuine appreciation stands out like a bonfire on a dark horizon.

You’ll have your ups and downs, of course. Especially if you’re doing anything interesting. But you should always try to remember the recent wins and give credit to everyone who helped you any step along the way. At some point, that might be dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people.

That doesn’t mean avoiding deep subjects and getting input on challenges and setbacks, too. Nor does it mean bragging about your own accomplishments. But always include people in the celebration and how you appreciate their support. A thank-you letter. A tasteful gift. An invitation to the ceremony.

Follow-up news of recent victories with excitement and details about the next goal. This let’s other people volunteer ways to continue helping, setting the stage for a virtuous cycle of growth and progress.

The person who graciously shares credit and who always makes the people around him or her look good — that person is never short of friends or opportunities. The person who projects an exciting trajectory and an aura of inevitable success — that’s the kind of person other excellent, high-achieving people want to know and spend time around.

These things naturally make you more positive, optimistic, and almost certainly help you become more well-liked by others. Become celebratory and expansive in both your mind and conversation.

Sincerity

Sincerity is rare and precious. Most people are, intentionally or not, insincere. They mix in with lots of people they “feel just okay” about, gossip about them behind their backs, complain, and then act nice to their face.

Gossip is incredibly common — and incredibly destructive. A person with a love of gossip has something defective about them and can’t be trusted.

Most people would more-or-less agree with much of that, and everyone appreciates sincerity.

So why isn’t it more common, then?

Because it’s expensive to establish.

The only way to be truly sincere is to work very hard and spend a lot of time making it so you’re around people who you’ll always benefit from being sincere with.

This is rare. If you stumbled into the camp of a fanatical death cult, you don’t exactly benefit from pointing out the flaws in their worldview.

To a much less extreme extent, a lot of places run on dysfunction, rumor, innuendo, minimal civility, few gestures of goodwill and genuine attempts at mutual understanding, and people barely tolerating each other.

You just have to get out of those places. Sincerity doesn’t thrive there.

A rule you could consider adopting — never ask for favors from someone you wouldn’t be happy to help equally as much. Again, it’s difficult. You might have opportunities to take a job or financing or something valuable from someone you genuinely dislike or don’t respect.

Try not to.

Your goal must be to associate with people for whom you have genuinely high regard, who know it, who trust you, who you trust, and to have such goodwill that if things do get into a situation of friction or conflict, you can talk about it openly without risk.

It takes hard work to put yourself in a position where genuine sincerity thrives, but building any sort of network on any sort of insecurity is building your castle on quicksand. Do the work to get into places where sincerity can thrive, and cultivate the virtue of sincerity constantly.

Preparation

Do not waste people’s time.

Do not waste people’s time.

Do not waste people’s time.

This is a cardinal rule.

It is especially important when meeting people who are busy, and the most talented and exceptional and best-intentioned people are very often busy.

Preparation is something of a character trait — a person who just automatically prepares and sees it as a core duty they have — and something of a skill to be learned.

Before you meet anyone, take time to research them. Know the basics of what they stand for and what they’ve done. If it’s potentially an important meeting, call mutual acquaintances and ask about the person. Get to know them.

Get to know a bit about what they care about, what they think about, and so on.

Depending on what you’re doing with your life and why you’re meeting people, you’ll evolve your own ways of preparation over time. If you’re in sales, freelancing, contracting, or looking for a job, you should learn the recent innovations at the company you’re talking to and get a rough idea of their culture and their numbers. If you’re working with people in academia, journalists, or others with public writing, read a few pieces — try to find some best-of’s and recent work. If you’re working with musicians, look into where they’ve played recently and with whom. And so on; this applies across disciplines.

This is a practicable skill and becomes natural over time. It means installing a mindset of preparation. It means knowing, deep down, that a small amount of preparation translates into much better outcomes.

Knowing this principle in the abstract is not enough. Regularly review this and study it thoroughly. The less you waste of other people’s time, the more others become open to helping you.

Thresholds Regarding Character and Introductions

It can be hard to see how working on your character directly builds a better network. Yes, it’s obvious that every interaction has a chance to go a bit better, but what does that actually mean? How much character improvement is enough? How do you know if it’s working?

These are all good questions. Here is a topic that throws it into stark understanding —

Introductions.

Introductions are one of the fastest and most consistent ways to building an excellent network. Excellent people tend to mix with other excellent people. If you meet and get along with a single person who is fantastic, the odds are they could introduce you to a lot of other people who could be excellent friends, colleagues, clients, and generally important people in your life.

But it’s not equally easy to get introductions for people. There’s three basic thresholds of whether someone will introduce you or not, and it all comes down to a subtle assessment of character.

1. People don’t want to introduce you.

In this first tier, the person you’re meeting doesn’t like and trust you enough to make introductions. After all, every introduction is an implied “vouch” for you — if someone introduces you and you’re inconsiderate or the person you meet has a bad time, that reflects really poorly on the introducer.

In this instance, you’ll see that it’s usually how the other person perceives your character and what you’re doing that potentially holds you back.

2. People are willing to introduce you if there’s a good reason.

This crosses an important threshold — once here, people will introduce you if there’s a particularly good reason. It means you come across like a decent person, trustworthy, considerate, with basic social graces, etc. But even here, your network grows slowly.

Most people are in this place. They’ll get introduced if there’s a good reason to introduce people — and these are helpful — but the next threshold is very good to cross.

3. People are excited to introduce you as much as they can.

Once you cross this threshold, the amount of “work” you’ll have to do to meet new people when expanding your network starts to fall off dramatically. Once here, people will introduce more people to you than you can handle, and you’ll see exponential growth in the amount of people you know.

Why do people do this?

Because you consistently — always — make them look good.

If you’re always prepared, have smart things to say, and just come across as a standup guy or gal, it becomes easy to get introductions. And this is where working on your character (plus a few other considerations we’ll cover) makes all the difference.

It really can’t be overstated how much life changes when people will introduce you to anyone they know, and go out of their way to do it regularly. Everything becomes easier and more enjoyable.

Types of People You Need In Your Life

Nearby Influences

It’s practically unavoidable. The more time we spend with someone, the more we subtly become more similar to them. With no conscious effort, we pick up our friends’ quirky phrases. We adjust to the frantic pace of city-dwellers or the laid-back tempo of those from the countryside. We catch ourselves saying things that our parents used to say.

Because of this, the top five people you spend time with have a disproportionate impact on your life. Note — these aren’t your five closest friends or your five most important contacts. These are just the people you happen to be spending a lot of time around — at the moment. Some weeks, it’s your closest friends and family. Other times, it’s coworkers. And yet other times, it’s complete strangers who you’ve just met.

If you admire someone’s character, spending more time with them means that their character will eventually rub off on you. If you genuinely dislike someone’s character, well, their character can still rub off on you. So you must periodically calculate this out on paper.

Make a list of top people you know, who you admire, and who could make a big positive impact in your life. Then, make a list of the people you’ve spent significant time with in the last month.

Do these lists overlap? If not, why not? How can you make them more similar?

This doesn’t mean you should be ruthless. It is recommended that you keep being helpful and courteous to people you spent lots of time with in the past even if you start to drift apart. But you only have 168 hours each week, and the people you spend that with becomes who you are.

Periodically figure out who you would like to spend more time with, and look to find opportunities to spend that time. Simultaneously, if there are people that are making you a worse person by being around them, it is crucial to reduce the amount of time you spend with them.

Friends

It seems that in the hyper-technological world people now have more “friends” but their friendships run slightly less deep.

The key to turning “friends” who are actually just friendly acquaintances into actual, real, sincere friends — is mutual time and shared experiences.

Aristotle wrote: “Friendship requires time and familiarity… a wish for friendship may arise quickly, but friendship does not.”

It is absolutely natural and normal to meet someone and wish for friendship with them, and has been true at least since Greek times. However, it is generally seen as unfashionable to admit that in this current age. If you wrote publicly, “I met John Smith the other day, and I admire his character. I wish to become friends with him, and will deliberately seek to do so” — it would likely not go over well.

It doesn’t seem to have always been this way. Perhaps we romanticize fate and accident in this day and age. Perhaps the world seems too calculating now, and we like the idea that people stumble into good things out of a purity of emanating goodness.

This is, of course, nonsense. The person who isn’t deliberate in friendship winds up with fewer loyal friends and, overall, has a less enjoyable life.

That’s an unfashionable point these days, so you might keep your intentions to yourself. But when you meet someone, ask yourself privately and in your own head and heart, “Do I want to be friends with this person?”

If so, go out of your way to create possibilities for mutual time, shared experiences, and even shared burdens — “eating salt together” as Aristotle would say.

Timing can play more or less of a factor, but if you wish to be friends with someone out of regard for their character, it’s hard to go wrong. A person with the right mix of virtues and character will always come into some mix of advantages, whereas a person with many advantages but poor character will be ever at risk of losing it all.

Cultivate your friendships intentionally and intelligently. When you meet someone you possibly like and admire, ask yourself if you want to be friends with them. If so, go regularly out of your way to get time together in person and have new experiences together. After some mutual regard and trust has been established, look to begin helping each other. This leads to friendship over time.

Project Partners

It’s difficult to get things off the ground on your own. Having someone to partner with on a creative project, business idea, event, or other civic/community activity greatly increases success rate. It’s also a great way to get closer to someone you already know a bit.

If you’re doing anything non-traditional in terms of career — any sort of freelancing, consulting, contracting, entrepreneurship, or creative endeavor — it’s incredibly valuable to establish a vetted set of people you can do projects with.

The key here is to start small. When you’re young and inexperienced in business, everyone seems great. Most people are not, in fact, great people to work with.

Only a small fraction of people are actually good at followthrough when not directed or pushed, which is why most people join other organizations and don’t self-generate their own projects, don’t self-study, and take minimum initiative to innovative within their organizations. That’s not a negative judgment; it’s a fact.

Of that fraction of people who do naturally pioneer, innovate, invent, and take action — not all of them will be a good compliment to you or fit with your personality, goals, and working style.

That’s why it’s key to start with a small project. You want to do something of a rather small scope, ideally something that can be finished quite quickly, with not so much money or importance tied up in it.

You spec out your small project, you do it, you see how it goes. Do this with many people. Sometimes the projects won’t come together. Sometimes they’ll come together ok, and that will be the end of it. Other times, you’ll get the start of an amazing collaboration partnership.

To find good project partners and collaborators, look for someone who has a good history of finishing things. Look for a track record of good performance — in other words, investigate their Signal closely. Look for Artifacts of successful past performance, and third-party endorsements and references.

After that, if you meet someone you like and think would be a good match, you can say something along the lines of, “I’d like to do something with you at some point. Let’s keep our eyes open for it.” Put that out there with people you regard highly and respect their body of work, and see what happens. You don’t want to rush into something that’s a poor fit; you want to find a potentially very useful thing to do that suits both of you well.

Mentors

A mentor is someone who is further ahead of you in an area you aspire to improve in and who takes an interest in helping you.

Successful people regularly get asked for advice. However, very few people actually put aside their own preconceptions to listen to the advice. Even fewer people listen the advice and execute on it promptly.

The number of people who listen, execute, and then follow-up with a gracious thank-you? It’s incredibly rare.

And because of this, it’s actually relatively straightforward to meet mentors. Reach out or otherwise meet people who you admire. Ask for a small, relevant piece of advice. Then execute on it immediately, follow up, and say thank-you.

Similar to a budding friendship, look for more opportunities to spend time together and do activities together. Establishing mentorship takes a while and is hit-or-miss, but is not fundamentally difficult. More tools on that topic in a moment.

Exemplars

Warren Buffet described his discussions with his partner Charlie Munger: “He's given me a lot more advice than I've given him. He lives a very rational life. I've never heard him say a word that expressed envy of anyone. He doesn't waste time on senseless emotions.”

They built Berkshire Hathaway to being one of the most successful companies of all-time, and became billionaires in the process.

Both were obsessed with learning, discussion, and analysis. And that obsession played back and forth on each of them.

Munger was a hyper-rationalist, and Buffet credits a lot of his success to Munger’s hyper-rationality rubbing off on him.

In your own life, you want to seek out and get involved with people who are exemplars of virtues you want to develop more of in yourself. A love of learning, loyalty, critical thinking, excellent communication skills, innovation, courage — these are all qualities that are absorbed by being around people that have them.

People wind up being an exemplar of a particular virtue through different ways. Sometimes it comes through intensive focus and study — Munger and Buffet, intentionally developing their learning and investment abilities.

Other times, a person picks up a general characteristic early in life, perhaps from their parents or community. Then, it becomes a building block of their identity, and they constantly act in line with that.

The first and second type of person are a bit different in how you interact with them. Someone who has intentionally cultivated something from scratch can and often will discuss the topic in explicit terms, and if you bring unique questions and good preparation to meeting someone who is an expert, they’ll likely respond.

Someone who has a virtue but doesn’t intentionally train it — a person who is naturally very welcoming or steadfastly consistent, for instance — might not be able to discuss it beyond the basics. They might not even be interested if you bring up the particular topic, but you can come at it in a more roundabout way by discussing their origins, asking why they made a particular decision, and so on.

Regardless, the first key is to look for people with broadly good character who are absolutely exemplary on a virtue you hold dear. Trying to become more of a smart risk-taker is hard when you do it by yourself; most of us have many biases and fears against it by nature. But if you regularly spend time around people who take measured risks, you hear about them regularly, and discuss them, your own confidence will go up in that space.

You become like who you’re around. Before you fill in any other aspects of your Network, look for people who are Exemplars of virtues you want in your own life. A good place to start is writing down who you want to be and the key parts of yourself that you’ll need to evolve to be that person, and then seeking out those who embody those characteristics.

Connectors

Skilled connectors usually have a mix of hyper-humanitarian idealism mixed with a sheer strict pragmatism.

Take Abraham Sorock, the head of the Jewish Cultural Moishe House in Beijing. In addition to running his own technology/recruiting firm ATLAS, he runs a regular speaker series at the Moishe House that consistently hosts people from the largest businesses, nonprofits, embassies, and trade organizations.

Over his years in Beijing, he and the fellow Moishe House residents invited high-caliber speakers and curated events with a variety of Embassy officials, with the head of the Ford Foundation, and a whole lot of other people with great stories to share. This, in turn, brought the whole community out and established friendships and relationships. Within a few years of doing this, Sorock knew just about everyone in the Beijing expatriate community.

He is hyper-humanitarian and is happy to help just about anyone doing anything virtuous. If you show up in Beijing and are referred to him, he can set you up with just about any type of introduction you need in China.

To get in with a connector, you want to mix the group ethos of being giving and socially savvy along with being genuinely useful. Abraham is always looking for new world-class speakers, for anyone doing innovative U.S.-China cultural work, Israel-China cultural work, large companies operating in China, technologists, and other skilled experts.

Michael Roderick in New York City follows a similar pattern. He runs ConnectorCon, a conference specifically dedicated to being someone who puts groups and organizations together. Here’s how he describes it:

“Participants learn to be more in tune with the needs of others and to make thoughtful introductions. ConnectorCon focuses on the idea that there is no competition, only specialization. Through these conferences we hope to build a powerful community of thoughtful connectors who recognize the power of living in a world of abundance rather than scarcity.”

This kind of hyper-humanitarian ethos is paired with a very strong pragmatism. In the world of an Abraham Sorock or a Michael Roderick, they’re remembering how you can help other people they know.

We’ll talk more about the tools you use to build your Network momentarily, but for now keep these points in mind —

1. “Super connectors” are people that know dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of people well. They make lots of introductions and help many people. They’re incredibly useful to get in with, and once you meet a connector that you really admire, you should go out of your way to stay in touch and build a relationship with them.

2. Most connectors naturally have a very strong humanitarian/helpful ethos. When you have a hyper-public reputation and strong social ties, you basically have to be a good person to maintain that. You’ll see that the vast majority of hyper-connected people are good people, and strongly weight being courteous, helpful, and humanitarian in turn.

3. Paradoxically, they also have a firm mechanical understanding of human relationships. After someone like a Sorock or Roderick respects you, the next thing to remember is that they’ll be mentally classifying you by what you can do for other people. A journalist, a venture capitalist, or someone with a specific domain expertise all have obvious connotations and are easy to remember, but if your points are more subtle it’s important to point them out and demonstrate them (ideally they’re just on display in your Signal anyways).

4. Also — hyper-connected people are busy. So be prepared and keep it to the point, while being a good person at the same time.

Clients, Customers, Employers

The more people you have a good relationship with who would be a good fit for your services, the better. Obviously, someone who is an entrepreneur, consultant, contractor, etc, needs clients or customers.

But even if you’re traditionally employed, you want to be making relationships with other hiring managers, owners, and executives in your industry or that use your specialty regularly.

Good work environments can turn into bad work environments with a single bad manager or external event. Sometimes jobs stagnate, or perhaps you master every skill you’re using there.

Already knowing many people with a demand for your skills means you’re not going to be trapped.

In general, these relationships are established like any other. Again, obviously, look for people whose character you regard. Doing business with someone you don’t admire is tough; working for someone you don’t respect or admire would be even worse.

If you’re in an independent role where it wouldn’t be seen as a conflict of interest, it’s very useful to go in and offer to do something small for a company. Many people take lunch meetings, but offering to sit on a sales meeting, operations meeting, design session, or anything else — if you’re respected enough — is a great way to win trust and regard. In a session like that, mostly just listen and ask questions. Make any valuable suggestions or feedback that you can.

Alternatively, you can do small projects with people in your industry/specialty but off of work time. If you meet someone at the local Chamber of Commerce, if your kids go to the same school, if you’re part of the same church — offer to do something jointly in one of those places, similar to the above.

The key point is, you want to help people who would benefit from working with you know what it’s like to work with you. Make those relationships, and go a step further if possible — do some minor work together, so you can get a feel for each other’s style.

Tools and Strategies

Choose a Lens

To network effectively, you want a “Lens” to filter all your activity through.

One of the biggest things that hold back young ambitious people is that they have nowhere to focus their efforts.

The thinking might go: “I know I want to do business of some sort… but I don’t know what… I’m learning some management, some marketing, some operations… how do I reach out to people? Who do I reach out to? What do I do?”

The answer: Pick a lens.

A Lens is a core activity that you can filter everything you learn and do through.

Let’s say you’re a student on campus. Again, ambitious, business-oriented vaguely, not sure about anything else.

What you should do: Pick a single club, activity, line of work, business, or project — and then filter everything you learn through that.

For instance, you could join the campus investment club and look for a leadership position in it. From there, it would be natural to reach out to people nearby who are in finance, who are investors, executives, people who have sold businesses or otherwise dealt with a lot of capital, and so on.

It’s easy to call up, say, a local banker and say: “Hi, I’m the Vice President of the Campus Investment Club… we were interested in getting to know you and how you invest, and what it’s really like in banking.”

At events, you can mention you’re studying business and helping run the Campus Investment Club.

You can ask other leaders how they keep successful groups together, how they manage, how they promote, and so on. You can filter all your reading and lessons through how it can be shared with the Investment Club and discussed, or applied to growing the group.

It doesn’t have to be a club. You could decide to write a research paper on a topic and use that as your lens. Again, it gives you a reason to call people. It gives you something you can say when you meet people: “I’m studying business at the university, and I’m writing a research paper on the differences between large corporations and medium-sized businesses.”

You could start a small business or freelancing service, and run that as your Lens.

A Lens gives you a way to see the world, a way to think about problems, and a way to communicate to other people about what you’re looking to do.

Another example. Let’s say you’re a 25 year old programmer at a big corporation with a crummy IT department that you don’t like, and you’re not in a top city for technology.

In programming, a vast amount of the technology that powers the internet (and computers in general) come from “Open Source” — programmers who collaboratively volunteer to develop software. They work together to create cool technologies, test them, and improve them together online.

Joining or starting an Open Source project is a good Lens — you can run all your new programming lessons through it, reach out to other programmers and people doing interesting stuff in Open Source, and you can look to meet other collaborators.

Alternatively, you could start the first tech meet-up in your city for your programming language, to share ideas and learn.

Your Lens doesn’t have to be directly related to your career — it could be a creative project while you’re just holding down a job to pay the bills. Again, it would give you a primary way to look for lessons and give you something to think about, and it would give you a reason to reach out to people.

You can change your Lens; you’re not married to it. You might make your primary Lens being an officer at a club on campus or writing a nonfiction book for a year, and after that’s finished, make it something career-oriented or entrepreneurial.

It is recommended that you present just one at a time, two at most. If you have only one thing you’re doing, it becomes easy to ask for and get introductions and establish a clear Signal to people you meet. If you have more than two, people are less likely to help since you’ve given them too much to think through, and the default is to just refrain from the thinking.

Pick a Lens; it’s immensely helpful in turning ideas into action, and in meeting people.

Follow Up Systematically

Derek Sivers has lived an interesting life — he describes himself as “a musician, programmer, writer, entrepreneur, and student — though not in that order.” Most well-known for founding CDBaby, the largest independent music distributor online which he later sold for $22 million, he’s also a beloved figure in the startup community and a regular presenter at the TED Conference.

Sivers keeps in touch with hundreds (maybe thousands) of people regularly, and is always known for giving a helping hand and being gracious. In his essay “Stay in close touch with hundreds of people,” he explained the reasoning —

“It's a shame when you get lost in a project, or go out on a tour, or get stuck in a demanding relationship, and find out that all of your old contacts have dried up. You go to call a booking agent you used to see weekly, and she says, ‘I’m sorry - I don't really remember you. You're going to have to remind me…’”

A common problem. The solution he learned —

“A successful publicist advises that you secretly give everyone in your phonebook an A, B, C, D, or F. That's your A-list (call every 3 weeks), B-list, (every 5 weeks), C-list (every few months), D-list (twice a year), and Friends.”

Sivers goes on to describe how there’s many people he would have lost contact with had they not been diligent in following up, and recommends generally reaching out unselfishly and saying hello periodically.

It’s a requirement when you know thousands of people, and want to stay in touch with them.

Some people would recoil at the idea of marking a frequency of how often to call people. The idea of putting someone on the “D list” as mentioned just doesn’t seem… nice, cool, humanitarian, and in the spirit and value of people.

And there’s truth in that. But, what’s the alternative? Checking in with people randomly? Losing contact with someone amazing just because you weren’t nearby each other at the moment?

Human memory only goes so far, and using some kind of organization and deliberateness actually makes you more courteous and more sociable — it ensures you’re reaching out regularly and not losing touch with people that you’ve found meaningful in your life.

Intimacy, Relevancy, Character

To figure out how well your network fits with what you want to do in the world, evaluate along three lines

how relevant each person in your network is to your goals and life,

how intimate you are with each person,

and the character of each person.

A “higher quality network” is one where you’re more intimate with people of excellent character who are relevant to what you want to do in the world.

The model that Derek Sivers learned from the publicist does this implicitly — rating people A, B, C, D based on how often you ought to be in touch. But for greater insight, you can break it down more precisely.

To start, write down on a piece of paper the 50 to 150 people you know most well.

Then, write down next to their name how “Relevant” each person is to what your current core goals and purposes are on a scale of 1 to 50. Be sparing putting someone down as “Relevancy 5” — that might be only a few people who are real trailblazers and key people in the field you’re in.

Relevancy is pretty straightforward, and people tend to naturally come up with good numbers for it. Intimacy is a little trickier, because it’s so subjective. But is it? There’s actually a way to make it objective. Try this —

The person only vaguely knows who you are, and might or might not remember you.

The person knows who you are, but won’t always take your phone call.

The person will take your call every single time you call, and call you back if you miss each other.

The person will actively help you if you ask, even if there’s nothing explicitly in it for them.

They’ll “tell you where the bodies are buried.”

As you can see, this maps from almost strangers at 1 to acquaintances at 2, then starting to become friends at 3 (they respect you enough to consistently take your calls), to friends at 4, and really close confidants and intimate friends at 5.

It’s a pretty objective scale.

If you write down numbers 1 to 5 on Relevancy and Intimacy, you start to get a really good picture of your network. Ideally, you want to be close with lots of people who are very relevant to your life.

You’ll likely be surprised if you mark these numbers down. If you’re like most people, the first thing that’ll stand out to you is that it’s likely the people that are most relevant to your life are also the ones you’re least intimate with and followup with the least.

People tend to get intimidated when they meet someone who is “powerful” or “accomplished” — and there’s something to that, but people are people. Almost everyone who does this exercise realizes they don’t reach out enough to people they’ve met who could really help make a big boost in their lives.

You’ll want to fix that.

But — !!!

Remember this. If you take nothing else, remember this:

Character is more important than anything else.

The attitudes, habits, world views, politics, personality — even the way you speak and language you choose — this is hugely affected by the people you have in your life.

“Character” is harder to nail down. There’s no numerical scale for it. But you should be constantly looking to become closer only with people of excellent character.

You’ll almost certainly have opportunities in your life to advance yourself by mixing in with someone of slightly bad character. Maybe they’re a little sloppy, or a little dishonest, or whatever else.

Avoid it.

When you’re around people who are honest, diligent, friendly, hard working, who like to evolve, who are conscientious, and so on — this makes life easier and more enjoyable. And more importantly, it makes you more like that. Doing the opposite, no matter how promising the opportunity, is a recipe for long-term disaster.

That’s not to say that everyone in your network must be a saint. Actually, navigating relationships with people who are highly relevant to your life or are gatekeepers or stakeholders — but who have poor character — is an important skill. But be very careful not to nurture and develop those relationships with people with poor character. You become like the people you’re around.

Online Surface Area

When you know what you want — make sure you’re passively broadcasting it on all your online profiles.

Most websites give you the opportunity to do a short description of yourself or an “About” section, and most people waste it by listing: “I’ve been an HR professional for X years, blah blah blah.”

Much better to write, “I work as an HR professional, and lately I’ve been training in how to ensure a higher volume of highly qualified applicants come into the company automatically. If you’re in HR, a business owner, or have experience on the topic, message me and let’s compare notes.”

Most people likewise waste their away message on instant messenger with something like, “I like fluffy clouds; they make me happy.”

Again, much better to include something you want there. It gives people who are interacting with you exposure to how they can help you.

Finally, it can be good to add to your email signature something like —

“Currently training in Project Management: Coordinating multiple people, resources, timetables, technology, communications, un-sticking things, setting requirements, managing inputs/outputs/deliverables, etc. If you're performing at a high level in one of these areas, message me and let's talk. If you know someone who is, forward this to them and I'll be grateful.”

Or whatever else is useful to you at the current moment. Don’t miss these small opportunities to be constantly increasing your surface area without any effort — they add up.

Going to Events

“I have a confession to make. I've never been to a so-called "networking event" in my life. If properly organized, these get-togethers in theory could work. Most, however, are for the desperate and uninformed. The average attendees are often unemployed and too quick to pass on their resumes to anyone with a free hand—usually the hand of someone else who is unemployed looking to pass on his resume. Imagine a congregation of people with nothing in common except joblessness. That's not exactly a recipe for facilitating close bonds.” — Keith Ferrazzi, Never Eat Alone

The advantage of events is that there are a number of people there who are generally in the frame of mind where they’re willing to meet people.

There’s not much to be said about events that hasn’t been said elsewhere ad infinitum. Here are a few brief points if you’ve only rarely (or never) sought out events —

It’s a skill like any other skill. If you haven’t gone to events before, you start just by looking up online or asking around what’s happening, and showing up. You can largely figure the rest out. There’s usually no downside; if you don’t connect with anyone there, nothing is lost; if you make excellent friends, it’s worthwhile.

Go with a friend or acquaintance of yours if you don’t want to go alone.

Go to things that you genuinely enjoy and appreciate and it’ll be easier and more enjoyable.

Some events you’ll go to will be lame. Feel free to leave early. It’s not the end of the world.

A Genesis Contact

You can’t wait for this to happen and can’t rely exclusively on it, but it’s like magic when it does.

A “Genesis Contact” is someone who helps set you up entirely in a city or industry. Some people, for a variety of reasons, become happy to take you under their wing and show you around to places.

Why would someone do that?

Partially, it’s a personality thing. Someone who is established as a leader and likes to take care of people, if they like and regard you well, will bet on you.

And don’t forget: that’s precisely what it is. A bet. If you’re introduced at a number of events and to a number of people by someone and you do something impolitic, that reflects pretty badly on the person who took you under their wing.

Recognize that. It’s not to say be cautious or inauthentic. But remember, when someone decides to take you to a variety of places and introduce you, especially if they do it multiple times, you become like an ambassador for them. You need to raise the bar on being gracious in this case.

Signal

Signal

A 24-Hour Broadcast

Salesy

There’s a term that everyone in sales or marketing knows very well — “salesy.”

Being “salesy” means you’re doing sales wrong. Salesy feels inauthentic, disingenuous, insincere, inimical to real and meaningful dialog.

People don’t trust salespeople, and salesy salespeople are the least trusted of all.

This does present a legitimate challenge, though: a lot of the products and services in the economy are complex enough that they still are primarily sold through… sales.

So what’s a salesperson to do? Well, the good ones train themselves to not be salesy. The best salespeople almost universally genuinely regard their product or service as excellent, refrain from selling to someone who the product isn’t a good fit for, and conduct themselves in a way where they’re sharing useful education, getting to know a person’s goals who might want to be, and helping that person evaluate if it would be a good fit for them.

Salesy is the opposite of that. When someone “seems like a salesperson” to you, that means they’re doing it wrong.

Signal is like that. Signal is hard to truly see, because it’s invisible if it’s being done right. Your Signal is everything you’re consciously and unconsciously broadcasting about yourself.

You are broadcasting an immense amount of things about yourself, as is everyone else who isn’t a hermit in the mountains. If you’re interacting with other people, they’re constantly forming opinions and judgments of you.

Those judgments and opinions are hugely important for everything you want to do in the world. Everything from simple things like how welcoming and friendly people are to you will be dictated by your signal, all the way to if you get a competitive job, are able to get a meeting with someone, and whether people will collaborate with you.

Signal affects who will want to meet you, and who will come into your life without you looking for them. It has a huge impact on how easy or difficult is it to get resources or cooperation — the most effective people, and people that control a large amount of resources are almost always busy… before anyone introduces you, they’ll mentally check to themselves if you’ll be taken seriously. The most desirable companies to work look for people who have particular characteristics on display. And it subtly affects how much time someone allots if they go to meet you, how excited and prepared they are, and quite literally thousands of large and small factors… that are rarely explicit but always present.

As you move through your life, everyone is matching you against patterns they already have in their mind. Do you seem trustworthy? Skilled? Competent? Like “their kind of person”? And so on.

People usually don’t give this much conscious thought, and these judgments are often snap judgments — and possibly quite unfair, often prejudiced, and always greatly simplified. The totality of you is never examined; people’s minds are lazy and opinions do not shift easily once formed.

Getting your Signal working well for you is critical for success. But it’s hard to see outright, because Signal done well doesn’t seem like signal at all. The salesy salesperson doesn’t do well; the person desperately trying to appear something often appears the opposite.

And yet it’s of the utmost importance and will have a huge multiplier on every interaction you have across your entire life.

Broadcasting

You can imagine your Signal as a television broadcast going out into the world.

Every TV channel is broadly known for certain kinds of content, attracts a certain kind of audience, turns off other audiences, gets some advertisers interested, and other advertisers not interested. The Cartoon Network — which shows cartoons — is obviously quite different from the news network CNN, which is different from “Music Television” — MTV.

Each of these channels broadly has connotations which come to mind when you think of it, but they’re actually made up of many component pieces.

The news network CNN came to great prominence by being the the only news outlet broadcasting from inside Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991. This single moment of having intensive in-depth coverage of a major unfolding war greatly pushed CNN forwards, and over a billion people watched CNN’s coverage of the war.

This became a building block of CNN’s success, a major one. But all sorts of different building blocks are constantly interacting. The particular anchors CNN signs on, the type of programming they running, their logos and branding, and the tone of the news all matter.

Things somewhat peripheral to the channel themselves matter a lot — other networks carried CNN’s content during the Gulf War, which led to more exposure, being memorable, and credibility.

The way CNN’s founder, Ted Turner, talked about the channel gave it a boost too. Always an outgoing personality and a natural promoter, Turner would say: “We won't be signing off until the world ends. We'll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event.”

You can think of your own Signal similar to building a new television channel. You’re broadcasting something all the time. The most prominent programs and events you run will affect your signal the most, but people won’t tune in equally. The vast majority of people watching in that era knew of CNN for its coverage of the Gulf War, whereas other people might watch their debate and talk programs, or might not.

If a network has a mix of high-quality programming and poor-quality programming, its Signal can get diluted. People who get excited about the channel start to watch more, but then it falls flat. Likewise, a single negative moment that is someone’s first exposure can poison a person’s impression of the channel.

Signal in the Wild

Your own “Signal” is always on; it’s what you’re intentionally and unintentionally broadcasting about yourself, and how others perceive your Signal has a huge impact on how you get treated and what you’re able to do in the world.

1. Artifacts of what you’ve built and done: One of the highest credibility aspects of Signal. Use liberally. If you have claims to make, put them into action and get artifacts out of it.

2. Claims of what you can do: One of the lower credibility aspects of Signal. Better done with another method when possible. If needing to use claims, look to make them accurate and process-oriented rather than state-oriented.

3. Opinions of third parties on you: The most surprisingly credible and impactful aspect of Signal. Often underestimated by smart people, references and testimonials go incredibly far to build your Signal. Learn how to get these; it’s not that hard to learn and very useful.

4. Observations people make when seeing you: Hard to control, but given an extremely high weighting by most people. This can be obsessed over to your detriment — once it’s “Above the bar,” switch to building Character, Capacity, etc. Revisit and tweak occasionally, but this has the least bearing on your actual ability and is the least useful in isolation (and it’s the most over-invested in societally).

5. Context in which you first come across each other: Surprisingly confusingly important. Not entirely controllable, but look to get into contexts that the people who you want on your side are receptive, trusting, and open to connecting with people. Introductions rule here; so do organizations and events that just being there means being valuable.

6. Biases the other person brings to the table: Study which ones might apply to you. It’s hard to get people to be honest about these, because no one wants to admit they’re prejudiced. Get feedback, listen to stories from people with a similar background who found a way to thrive, and experiment to learn what works. Figure out how you can deal with what you’re up against in a way that harmonizes with your values. It can be uncomfortable, but try not to bury your head in the sand on this stuff. You should win at life, and there’s many ways to get there — you can find one that works for you.

The Elements of Signal

Artifacts

Let’s say you speak Russian and English and you want to get a job as a translator.

What’s more impressive? Claiming “Eight years of Russian speaking… almost native speaker fluency” without proof, or delivering a copy of something you translated from Russian into English?

“I speak English with almost native speaker fluency” is a Claim you’re making.

“Here is a copy of a journal I translated from Russian into English, both the original and my version. Have it reviewed by any of your staff to evaluate my work” is handing the person an Artifact.

People in the visual fields instinctively know the value of Artifacts. Portfolio, work samples, and the design of their own websites show off their aesthetics, taste, and judgments.

Excellent case studies turn Claims into Artifacts. If a marketer sketches out precisely the cost, tools, and revenue growth from a campaign, it’s massively more powerful than just claiming to be a skilled marketer.

Likewise, claiming excellent leadership goes less far than pointing to a club or organization you started. Even better is showing samples of what the organization accomplished together, pictures of its meetings, and so on. Artifacts.

Awards? Artifact.

Before and after photos? Artifact.

Sketches, blueprints, schematics? Artifacts.

Something that shows your writing and editing process along with the finished product? Artifact.

A copy of an operating manual you wrote? Artifact.

Build and accumulate artifacts.

Claims

Let’s not disparage Claims. You’re going to talk to a lot of people, and make a lot of statements, and many of those will just be things you’re Claiming.

When someone tells you one of their dreams, they’re making a Claim. “I’m going to be a writer” is a Claim.

It affects your Signal. But the “writer” who doesn’t write is…

This is common. This is nothing to feel bad about. We all have unlived parts of our lives.

But there’s something funny about making empty Claims — they fool the people that aren’t worth fooling. Claiming to be a writer impresses people who don’t know better. People actually involved in writing, for real, are not so impressed by an empty Claim.

What impresses them more?

Making it accurate.

“I’ve been daydreaming about being a writer, but not getting started yet” actually goes a much further way to winning over good allies. “I’m an entrepreneur” — by someone who is just halfway dabbling — goes over less well with people doing business than “I’ve been fascinated by entrepreneurship, I’m learning right now, experimenting a little bit, and looking for an opportunity I want to commit to.”

Of course, you’ll get less impressed “oohs” and “ahhs” in general — but when someone claims they’re going to work on something, and then are good at it six months or a year or two later, that’s very impressive. That’s how you win allies over.

In addition to being accurate, go for “process” more than “state.” “I am a writer” is likely to prompt, “What have you written?” That’s the other person saying, “Ok, show me the artifacts.”

Don’t have any? Pfft.

Saying “I’ve started writing 500 words per day minimum, and done it for 40 days straight now” potentially works better.

“I am a writer” claims to be a writer, the state. “I am writing 500 words per day” is making a Claim about the process you’re following.

Finally, don’t make Claims if you can just show what you can do. An easy way to win business as a consultant or freelancer is to occasionally hold 1 hour to 3 hour little mini-workshops or jam sessions with people who are potential clients. Get to know them, and deliver some real value to them in a few hours. If you can do good work with them right there, you have no need to make Claims. They did it with you, which is much better than hearing you can do it.

3rd Party Claims

The opinions of third parties goes a long way towards affecting your Signal. If you say “I’m an excellent salesman”… that’s not very convincing. If you give your former manager as a reference and he says “He’s the most excellent salesman I ever had” — that goes a lot further.

Having a large number of former coworkers write down in testimonials, “He’s a pleasure to work with. He works hard but also brings everybody else up, he helped teach me a lot of things and my sales went up, and he’s a great guy” — this goes a long way to showing you as a contributing teammate, gracious coworker, and good person.

The opinions of credible third parties is one of the most valuable things in the world.

A key skill to learn — and it’s simple and quick, but does need practice — is asking to get testimonials and feedback after work. This is possibly the single-most critically underused tool among people that have intangible work like management or back-end programming.

It’s critically underused because it’s not hard to learn, and the dividends from it are enormous.

Why don’t people do it?

For many people, the idea of asking someone for a reference feels awkward. “Can you, umm, write me a testimonial?”

Fortunately, there’s an easier approach that will work for all but the most formal situations:

First, verbally solicit feedback. Most people don’t like to write, and writing a testimonial or feedback feels both important (so it should be gotten right with lots of attention) and it feels like paperwork (because, well, it sort of is). So ask for verbal feedback first — “How did the project go? How did work go? What’s it like working together?” Et cetera.

Once you get feedback, then simply say, “Can I quote you on that?” Most people will say yes (a few people will say no for confidentiality or privacy reasons). Then you write down what they said, and send it to them via email so they can double-check the quote.

If you’re doing a good job, most people are happy to help, but it won’t occur to them unless you ask.

The absolute best time to ask is after you do an above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty job with a client, employer, or partner. Take something that isn’t in your scope or job description, block out time to do it clearly an extra, and do it collaboratively. Really deliver. It’s a good practice anyways, but in the ebbs and flows of a working relationship, you’ll of course get better quotes if you ask during a flow of great and powerful work.

Finally, if you have someone who is a massive advocate for you, a client you delivered the best work ever for, etc — they might be willing to help by sitting down with you and writing 10 or 20 variants of a testimonial that address every aspect of your work separately.

For instance, getting something in both formal language and informal language goes a long way, as do aspects emphasizing personality or emphasizing work quality. Let’s say your name is Sam and you did excellent work on a job as an events coordinator, and your old manager thought you were the greatest ever and is happy to be a huge advocate. You might get the following quotes by talking about the subject:

“Sam throws amazing events where everyone bonds and has a great time, and things just come together smoothly. Highly recommended.”

“Sam is easy to work with. Events management is often chaotic, things are always going wrong, but Sam keeps a cool head and is a pleasure to work with even when all hell is breaking loose… and it always comes together well.”

“I’d like to recommend Sam’s services and ability in throwing events. We threw a variety of different events for corporate clients, and they were always the height of professionalism. Sam wasn’t just an ‘events thrower’; he really understood each client’s specific business and social goals for each event, including goals the client didn’t realize they had. Then each event was well-tailored in subtle ways to get results, and every client we had was thrilled with the outcome.”

You can see how the variants would be used on different proposals, in different settings, with people of different needs and goals.

You absolutely must work to harness third party opinions. Do good work, solicit Opinions, and get them written down or permission to use them as a reference. This is not optional; it’s the single most under-invested thing for people whose work is hard to show off visually in Artifact form.

(Find Artifacts anyways; create them even if people in your field usually don’t. But get testimonials, reviews, references, and other Opinions lined up too. Learning how to ask elegantly and getting past any discomfort in asking will result in very large gains.)

Observations

There’s a hierarchy of what people tend to trust: they trust a biased party (your own opinions of you) the least, they trust a third party who seems objective more than that, and they trust their own intuitions and judgments the most.

When you make a Claim, people think, “Hmm, is that really true?” But most people don’t scrutinize or question their own thoughts much. If their first impression is that “you look professional” — they’re likely to stick with that unless something drastic changes. Likewise, if “you look sloppy” then that’s also hard to break out of.

People form many snap judgments based on their observations. You can’t control their snap judgments, but you can control what they observe.

This is where clothing, grooming, and finishing touches come in.

One of the top independent consultants in the United States, Alan Weiss, described one of his criteria for what to spend money on —

“What is the effect on your good name? Brochures, collateral, stationery, attire, etc. create invaluable first impressions. You're much better off with a very expensive pen and business card-which people are prone to see-than car or office desk-which no one is likely to see. Any marketing investment which enhances your image to buyers is usually worth it.”

You’re much better off, Weiss is saying, under-investing in furniture, apartment, and car, and over-investing relatively to get best-in-class materials that affect others’ observations of you.

This doesn’t mean give in to vanity; if anything, vanity will lead to poor spending and investing patterns. Rather, you look at things objectively and get feedback from others on how you appear, and adjust accordingly.

Grooming, haircut, all the materials you use, your tools — all of these make a huge impression on Signal. Grammar and dialect also matter. Are you being formal or casual? Etc.

To a large extent, improving your Character helps more than tweaking these details. If you can generate results and don’t obviously “not look the part” of the role you want to be in the world, then you don’t need to obsess over the details. But it does make sense to solicit opinions from trusted neutral third parties at least once a year as to how you seem to them, and adjusting if something isn’t serving you.

Obsessing over little details can be valuable, especially once you’ve “broken through.” But if you’re just starting, don’t let it drive you crazy. Make a distinction between “Over the bar” and not; get things over the bar first. Take the low-hanging fruit.

When people go to Observe you, things like your Google results, if you’ve published any audio or video of yourself, all the photography of you prominently displayed (on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Image Search, or elsewhere) all matter.

In all cases, getting over the bar first matters. Once there, move on for a while, and take low-hanging fruit when you see it. It’s much more important to develop your Capacity to generate results, and specifically all aspects of your Character. If you do that, you’ll gradually start to get the right Signal. You should review occasionally to see how you’re being perceived, because it matters, but it matters a lot less than having the right stuff — with the right stuff, it becomes easy to nail down the right Signal, but having a great Signal but minimal actual Capacity and Character is not a recipe for success.

Context

If you’ve ever been a speaker at an event, you know how this works. It becomes easy to meet anyone at an event when you’re a speaker.

If the event is of significant size, almost all speakers get mobbed by people afterwards. They quite literally don’t have time for everyone there. But if you’re also a speaker, it becomes incredibly easy to interact with other speakers. Likewise, the people staffing and organizing the event are also probably busy, but have time for the speakers, and it becomes easy to meet a lot of people who attended if you’re a speaker.

The Context you meet someone has huge ramifications for your first impression, and consequently, everything else about you.

The same person that would be incredibly warm and welcoming from an introduction might be cold and too busy if you called them cold with no introduction.

If you publish or share anything about yourself or your work online, the community it first gets shared in will have a huge affect on your Signal. If someone’s mentor sends them an article or piece you did, you come in automatically with more credibility and authority than if someone’s friend that’s always chasing down conspiracy theories and dumb ideas. Same content on your part; very different Signal due to where they got it.

You don’t have total control over this, but a couple good guidelines — first, when possible, try to align your interests in a way that you’ll be able to make friends, acquaintances, and meet important future colleagues and partners.

This sounds obvious, but most people don’t do it. If you’re new to a city and don’t know anything about the social clubs and organizations there, you’d do well to choose one that you gain standing with fellow members simply by being a member. Some strict requirements to participate or annual fees might be worth paying if it demonstrates that everyone onboard is serious and the members start with higher regard for each other.

After that, you can’t entirely control where your work is shared and discussed, but you can choose to water some plants more than others. If you find your work was shared or forwarded by someone, reach out and thank them. If it shows up at an online community you like, go join in commenting there. If it shows up somewhere that you don’t really want to nurture, don’t spend any time. You have finite time and an infinite amount of worthy things you could be doing, so you have to choose anyways where you direct your attention — it’s best done to Contexts where there will be mutual regard, trust, and respect just by virtue of that context.

Prejudices

This is perhaps a controversial point and a controversial decision. The authors choose to include this section because we’re more concerned about the success of our readers than we are worried about the risks of being mis-quoted or being “not politically correct.”

It would be easy enough to not mention that the biases and prejudices of other people are a huge part of your Signal. This part could simply be omitted, or tucked in elsewhere.

But it would do you a great injustice.

The fact is, certain aspects of people that should have no bearing on their performance are still weighted heavily by people. This isn’t even talking about political hot-issues like race and gender. Characteristics like being tall or “looking like a winner” will help a person get hired as a senior executive.

This sort of bias is unfair, unjust, and ignorant. But it’s also, quite often, predictable. And that means you can plan and evaluate for biases like these.

It’s important to know the general stereotypes — potentially favorable and unfavorable — that you’re working with, to choose how to operate based on them.

Here is the experience of Jessica Lord, who was working as a merchant mariner, transporting and protecting goods aboard cargo ships —

“I work in an industry that is at the least, very harsh. I am a merchant mariner, female, working with some pretty harsh guys. I'm one of 4 women who work for this company, and the only one under 30 and on a boat. I hold a position of some authority so I gain a bit of "respect" from the title. However, its not enough. The hierarchy on vessels is clear, but gaining the support and trust of your fellow crew members is paramount in a dangerous work environment. My personality clashes often with the harshness of the culture here. There is no room for weakness, real or perceived. However, I am empathetic and nurturing by nature. Helping people is just something I gain great pleasure from, despite the criticism others have for it in my line of work.”

Here is how Jessica chooses to operate —

"Helping people is a great way to create happiness for yourself, and I do so often in small ways. Many people out here can't read or write, or use a computer. Those simple skills I take for granted each day, are unobtainable to some. Men don't want to ask for help, especially from the tiny 100lb girl who outranks them, or works under them. Either way! I make it a point to connect with these people, in small ways like assisting them in writing an email, or typing out a sign they want to post for "Wet Paint", or even asking them how they think a supply locker should be organized when they are the primary users. I read aloud during safety meetings, instead of asking people to read for themselves. I try to consider what others might need, so they don't have to ask. Most others in my position think that I am coddling them, letting them slacking off, or say they need to learn a lesson and read or speak english- any number of negative thoughts surround my simple actions (if they are even noticed that is). Often people accuse me of sleeping with these guys. But at the end of the day, I have a loyal backing of 10 men who would do any work I ask, and give me their best efforts at all times. I ask them to get a job done, I get results. And thats the key for me, I ASK. I never direct, or demand. I say thank you every day, and make a point of commenting on exceptional work or efforts. I bake cookies or make special dinners on long days of work (we all live on the boat for months at a time), because when you're out here you become family whether you like it or not. These guys make me look good, I'm held accountable for their work and I can trust them to perform it. When the other guys in my position demand work be done, its usually half-assed or bullshitted entirely. They yell more, complain more, its a bad cycle. My leadership style, if you can call it that, doesn't work everywhere for sure. But it works for me here, and its infinitely more rewarding to be myself and be kind than to pretend otherwise."

Note Jessica’s handling of the situation. She —

(1) Notices and is aware of the situation she’s in where it’s male-dominated,

(2) Notes the general biases and potential conflicts she could have between her operating style, how she’s perceived, and general effectiveness in the environment,

(3) Builds an operating style and strategy that works with her characteristics, personality, and goals, and yet,

(4) Also realizes that her style wouldn’t work for everyone.

She’s able to be effective in her leadership role as a merchant mariner and true to her nature by explicitly looking for opportunities to make characteristics that could go either way (“Is she too soft? Should we respect her?”) into virtues (“She organizes the supplies well, the guys follow her lead and get a good job done, she helps the crew, and they’re loyal.”)

If you’re an anomaly in your field — an expat in another country, someone in a field dominated by the other gender, younger or older than the norm, or if there’s biases against you based on race — you’re best off aware of them, and acting on them to achieve your goals.

Hailing from the country of Nigeria comes with a lot of potential stigma. Despite the fact that “over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of white [Americans],” the usual association with Nigeria is that of internet scams.

The San Francisco Gate newspaper explained: “Federal officials call the scheme the Nigerian 419 scam because it originated in that West African country, where Section 419 of the Nigerian criminal code deals with fraud” and although “most scam e-mails now originate elsewhere in Africa or in Eastern Europe […] the name has stuck even as the scammers have moved elsewhere.”

This, quite simply, affects the Signal of a Nigerian technologist. Fair or unfair, just or unjust, a Nigerian-descended person in technology should be aware of this and consider all options.

If you were Nigerian and working on an e-commerce site, you might want to make light or make a joke of it, might want to explicitly explain that it hurts that this happened and what you do to work against it, it might make sense to write something explicitly explaining the good sides of the technology culture, or it might make sense to describe yourself as from “Western Africa” or register your corporation or address elsewhere nearby just to avoid the Signal.

These options are rarely discussed in polite company, because it can become a matter of intense pride, and it’s not politically correct to point that people do have distinctive biased views against countries, cultures, and races; yes, those views are affecting everything you do; and if you were to think through your values, you can find a way of operating that you find both fits your ethics and fits your goals.

If you think you’re “pretty normal” for your field and don’t have to think about it, you might think again. People have assumptions of you, and by directly looking to understand them and either enhance or mitigate those assumptions, you make gains to Signal.

When Ronald Reagan ran for re-election as President in 1984, he was already 73 years old and the oldest President in American history. Winning would put him in office until age 77, and it came up repeatedly during his campaign.

During a debate, the moderator asked Reagan, “You already are the oldest President in history. […] Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in [a crisis on low sleep]?”

Reagan replied, “Not at all, Mr. Trewhitt. And I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience.”

That’s the joking approach.

James Chartrand runs a popular web design and copywriting consultancy called “Men With Pens.”

Already popular for writing guest columns on the site Copywriter and having a wide following in December 2009, James wrote a piece titled:

“Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants”

James wrote: “You know me as James Chartrand of Men with Pens, a regular Copyblogger contributor for just shy of two years. And yet, I’m a woman. This is not a joke or an angle or an analogy — I’m literally a woman. This is my story.”

The story follows Chartrand leaving the corporate world to start freelancing, and having an incredibly difficult time finding work —

“I had high-quality skills and a good education. I was fast on turnaround and very professional. I hustled and I delivered on my promises, every single time. I worked hard and built the business, putting in long hours and reinvesting a lot of the money I made. […] But I was still having a hard time landing jobs. I was being turned down for gigs I should’ve gotten, for reasons I couldn’t put a finger on. My pay rate had hit a plateau, too. I knew I should be earning more. Others were, and I soaked up everything they could teach me, but still, there was something strange about it . . . It wasn’t my skills, it wasn’t my work. So what were those others doing that I wasn’t?”

After adopting the pseudonym “James Chartrand,” the author wrote that the experience changed dramatically:

“Instantly, jobs became easier to get. There was no haggling. There were compliments, there was respect. Clients hired me quickly, and when they received their work, they liked it just as quickly. There were fewer requests for revisions — often none at all. Customer satisfaction shot through the roof. So did my pay rate.”

A final strategy that might work could be called the “We Try Harder” strategy. Stuck at #2 in the car rental market behind a dominant player, Avis was looking for options. There’s almost always a preference for the market leader, who you assume is doing something right to be in first place, most likely has a larger selection and more locations, and otherwise offers advantages.

Avis turned it on its head with its 1962 campaign, “We Try Harder”.

Avis started advertising on television, print, and branding everywhere that they tried harder — giving more service and more attention to detail, because they have to. It was a phenomenal success.

So if you’re in a position where you lack a degree from an elite university or a prestigious credential, or are lower in age than most people of the type of role you’re competing for, or aren’t from the normal background, you could emphasize, “I’m probably younger than anyone else who applied here. I understand that the burden is on me to demonstrate I can perform, not just equally, but even greater as a result of that. Commit more, win respect, and deliver real results. I don’t intend to make age an issue past this, but I do intend to win everyone’s respect with my work, service, and results.”

Your Signal is greatly affected by biases and prejudices. Look to identify the ones you’ll face, and think about how (if at all) you’ll make tweaks to your presentation and operating style to compensation. Making a joke of it, taking it seriously, working harder, acknowledging it, ignoring it and letting the work stand for yourself, or trying to make it a non-issue and avoiding it — all of these are options, but it makes infinite sense to acknowledge the realities and build an operating style that’s effective for you and in line with your values.

Tuning Your Signal

Be Deliberate

As in most things, most people aren’t deliberate about their Signal; things just sort of seem to happen to them. This leads to less effectiveness, and quite likely, less meaning in life than could be had.

Anti-deliberateness often gets romanticized as spontaneity, but you can be deliberate about pursuing spontaneity… but most people who aren’t deliberate don’t wind up on the beach surfing all the time; they wind up in relative poverty, high stress, and with things just not going the way they want. You can build a life of relaxation, or experimentation, or leisure, or immense meaning — but it’s unlikely to just happen by accident.

The questions to ask to get deliberate about Signal are, “What am I broadcasting about myself right now, intentionally and unintentionally? How are others perceiving me? How are the people I most want in my life responding to my Signal? How can I change what I’m broadcasting (and still in line with my values) so that the type of people I want in my life come into my life?”

That’s a good starting point. If you want professional people in your life, a more professional Signal usually will help.

But the connection isn’t always obvious. If you want publishing houses and acquiring editors interested in you, the Signal of “expert at marketing and connecting with an audience and has a big platform” goes further than “truly dedicated pure artist.”

If you don’t have a type of people in your life that you want in your life, it makes sense to study what characteristics they look for.

You also want to ask, “Am I getting any kind of people I dislike in my life, and if so, why is that happening?” Some people seem to keep having bad things and bad people happen to them. This is almost always due to some aspect of character or Signal. As a general rule, any signaling of victimhood invites criminals and exploitive people.

People who broadcast victimhood announce two things, both harmful: First, that they don’t feel personal responsibility for their own lives, and thus are able to be led astray by someone who says “I’ll save you, I have the answers”, etc — busy and successful people with fantastic personal responsibility don’t, as a rule, talk like that or have time to save people who don’t take responsibility. Second, any talk or representation of victimhood shows that you accept bad conditions in your life and/or have allowed bad things into your life in the past.

It’s a bad combination. So if you’ve got unreliable people in your life and dislike it, analyze what Contexts you meet people in, what the Artifacts of things you’ve done that people see, what Observations people are making of you, and so on. Sometimes, just rooting out counterproductive things in your Signal and eliminating them goes a long way to a better life.

And then keep analyzing what you want. Skilled designers will periodically redesign their portfolios to get a different type of client; ideally more interesting, nuanced, more meaningful, higher-paying, or with people they like and respect more. Just like that, by tweaking the portfolio, their Signal changes.

You can do that too — your Signal might be hard-working student with a serious interest in X for a while, rising star overachiever for a while, and then move into being highly involved civically in the local community — or whatever. You’ll wear many hats in your life, and changing your Signal is part of that.

Constantly be deliberate in the Signal you’re putting out. Analyze it and get feedback. Change what you’re broadcasting if it makes your life better. Obviously, change what you’re intentionally broadcasting… and don’t forget to work especially hard to understand what you were unintentionally broadcasting.

Character First

"Perhaps a man's character is like a tree, and his reputation like its shadow; the shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing."

— Abraham Lincoln

A cautionary note — it’s useless to try to build a Signal that doesn’t rest firmly on solid character. Crowds are notoriously fickle, and all but your closest friends will gain and lose appreciation for you due to the tides of life rising and falling.

If your have character flaws, they will almost certainly eventually get you.

The exceptions to this rule almost certainly prove it — take Joseph Stalin, one of the people of worst character to rule a superpower as dictator and die in his own bed. His general ruthlessness and disloyalty were detected, and Vladimir Lenin wrote a document in 1923 recommending removing Stalin from power. Note the emphasis on character —

“Stalin is too coarse and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.”

Lenin goes on to give specific examples, and then recommends Stalin’s removal.

Changing the course of history, Lenin had a stroke that paralyzed him and the letter was first marginalized and later suppressed entirely. Lenin died before being able to oust Stalin from power, but by a mere few months. Stalin’s viciousness should have and would have unmade him.

The vast majority of the time, character flaws eventually break a person. The French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s treachery in Spain tied down his veteran troops, and set the stage for the disaster in Russia. Napoleon’s genius and celerity took him far, but he was unable to be patient, steadfast, and consolidate. The British stayed steadfast and waited until he blundered and over-extended, and then ended revolutionary France.

The Japanese Kampaku Hideyoshi Toyotomi rose from the lowest caste as a sandal-bearing servant into a great officer, then general, then feudal lord, and then ruler of all Japan. But he was unable to stop. He commenced a Japanese invasion of Joseon Korea and Ming China, which left room for his chief rival to usurp power from the Toyotomi family. Toyotomi wanted to rule the world; instead, his bloodlines were removed entirely because of greed and his inability to moderate his desires.

You can control all the resources in the world, but if you don’t control your character, it will unmake you. And if you build strong character, you have at least a chance to weather nearly any storm. Don’t try to look good; be good. Work on yourself constantly.

Better Reality

“In the popular view, marketing means taking what you have and shoving it down buyers' throats. "We need better marketing" invariably means "We need to get our name out" — with ads, publicity, and maybe some direct mail. Unfortunately, this focus on getting the word outside distracts companies from the inside, and from the first rule of service marketing: The core of service marketing is the service itself.”

— Harry Beckwith, Selling the Invisible

In the landmark book on service marketing, Harry Beckwith advocates “Get better reality.”

He advocated: “Before you write an ad, rent a list, dash off a press release — fix your service.”

Beckwith again: “We think we’re better than we are. When researchers asked students to rate their ability to get along with others, 60 percent rated themselves in the top 10 percent. Ninety-four percent of university professors say they are doing a better job than their average colleague. Most men think they are good-looking.” Beckwith continues: “Service is so bad in this country that you can offer above average service and still stink. By definition, the odds are you’re average. Assume your service is bad. It can’t hurt and will force you to improve.”

Entrepreneurs and executives certainly fall in love with their own services, and overrate them. But you know what we overrate far more than products and services?

Ourselves.

You should operate with the assumption that you’re going to need to dramatically improve to get the kind of quality of life you want, and that the improvement will sometimes be painful, but always satisfying and worth it.

You’re going to need to stop saying “Yeah, I’m a pretty good person” and patting yourself on the back, and start saying, “Okay, how can I be a better friend? How can I be more thoughtful? How can I deliver better results? How can I be more useful? Do I waste people’s time ever? How can I do less of that? How can I think more clearly, make decisions more effective, and use good judgment and goodwill towards other people more often. How do I do more and produce more?”

Don’t console yourself with the idea that “I’d get better if I had more time.” It doesn’t take more time to do better. There’s only a limited number of activities you can pile up on your plate. You’ll instead have to examine the stuff you do with a critical eye.

Get the people who are the best at what you do to review your work and make suggestions. Get that friend of yours that’s blunt and will always say what he thinks with minimal tact (we all have one friend like that, right?) and ask what’s the most aggravating thing about you.

Those criticisms that you normally shout down and feel like the person who said them is a jerk? Well, they’re still a jerk. Screw those people.

But besides them, start assuming that you’re not currently the best possible friend, most effective at your work, a maximally calming influence when people are losing their heads, the best possible leader when that’s called for, and so on. The ways to improve are endless, and looking to improve how your Signal looks without improving the underlying aspects of who you are is a fool’s errand. Start improving, not from a perspective of not being good enough, but from the perspective that there’s a lot more room to go, and getting there can help make you happier, calmer, more effective, more useful, and overall more alive.

It is possible to radically improve. Keep radically improving.

Get better reality.

Deliver the Goods

You want your Signal to match the results you can deliver. One of the hardest things for young people who strike off on their own is they don’t know exactly what’s possible. Thus, it’s easy to wind up in a position where you’re trying to sell yourself on a role that you can’t perform.

A veteran salesperson who has sold a similar product in a similar industry can probably make some realistic assessments of likely future production. A new salesperson… just doesn’t know. Some things that looked like they would be very difficult turn out to be easy. Other things that looked like they’d take a few hours actually take a few weeks.

You want your Signal to match your ability to deliver. If you don’t know if you can do something, don’t market or advertise or brand or represent yourself as excellent at it. Instead, show people the Artifacts of what you’ve done in the past, and generalize from there.

For instance, explaining that you ran two clubs in university and showing the photos of them and the charter you wrote are good artifacts. Saying “it was a really close group” is a claim — far better to show testimonials by people who participated.

Artifacts of work done and testimonials that show third-party opinions are always going to be more trusted.

Make sure you can deliver the goods. Let the Artifacts of work you’ve done speak for you primarily, and the Opinions of others second after that. Those are true; those happened.

If you don’t have any skills you can deliver and don’t have interesting Artifacts under your belt, don’t worry. Billions of people — literally billions — have started from that position and overcome it. There’s many ways, but the gist of it is to start doing projects or work of any sort, and documenting the results into Artifacts of it and testimonials, with only the occasional process-oriented and modest claim. You can promote yourself more aggressively as you achieve more things.

Delivering the goods guarantees your reputation and Signal. This might feel slow at first if you feel like you’re in a hurry at 18 years old, and that’s a normal way to feel. But it’s much better to start as a snowball that rapidly turns into an avalanche than to be a slightly larger block of ice melting in the sun.

Deliver the goods and win the reputation of someone who delivers. It makes everything else easier.

Think Active and Passive

Your Signal is on even when you’re asleep. If you know anyone on the planet that’s talking about you ever, or if you have any online presence that’s being accessed, people are learning about you and you’re influencing their opinions.

One important way to analyze your Signal is to ask, “How am I coming across actively?” When you’re in a meeting, when you’re pitching something, when you’re selling, when you’re demonstrating, when you’re teaching or instructing, when you’re collaborating, when you’re at a party, when you’re speaking, when you’re attending an event — how are you coming across?

This is obviously important, and it’s the thing most people focus on.

But also consider how you’re coming across when you’re not there, when you’re not doing anything, how you’re being talked about, how the word about you is spreading.

This is harder to see, because obviously, you’re not around when it happens.

Worse yet, you don’t even realize the stuff that’s not happening that could possibly be happening.

If you’re not getting referrals in a type of business or work that would benefit from them, that’s a problem… the kind of invisible problem that you need to reason through to understand it isn’t happening. If that’s the case, then study the business literature on how to generate them and make sure others can refer you easily.

Not enough companies follow up repeatedly after the sale, but the ones who do win extra business. Do you have a process in place to reach out to anyone who has bought from you or worked with you a while later?

Likewise, do you make it easily for people who want to support you to tell others about what you’re doing? If you’ve got the collateral in place, it makes it easy for the word to spread about cool things you’re doing.

This can be hard to get your mind around. There’s quite literally millions of good things that could be happening to you right now but aren’t.

If you set them up, they’ll start happening.

If you can get your mind around that statement, it’s shocking. Your might even reel. It can be painful when you realize it for the first time.

There’s quite literally millions of good things that could be happening to you right now but aren’t… because you never set them up to happen.

After it fully sinks in, it hurts. If you’ve never realized that before and it doesn’t hurt, you don’t get it yet.

Oh, and after you get it, and then it hurts? It becomes incredibly exciting and liberating. There’s millions — millions! — of outcomes you could set up to happen that would be a huge blessing in your life. It’s fun to start rooting them out and setting them up.

You must study this thoroughly. And discuss with friends. And look for inspiration. Set up your life and Signal so good things passively happen to you without active effort.

Audit Occasionally

Inevitably, you change and your opinions change. At least once a year, go through and look at everything people are seeing when they check you out. This covers all the details and Building Blocks of Signal.

You’ve been you a long time; you might forget that your old driver’s license or passport has a silly photo of you from six years ago. Does it matter? Maybe not. You get to decide that, of course. But maybe so, and maybe you want to swap that out.

If you’re evolving quickly, audit more often. Look for what you’ve done in the world; identify Artifacts that you can lead with instead of claims. Discard aspects of Signal and communication that no longer serve you and your goals. Add things that do. It helps to do this with a friend, going through literally everything you can think of. Your away message on your Instant Messenger is the kind of thing no one thinks about, but has a hint of a shadow of an influence on your Signal. Update it accordingly, and everything else.

Mistakes to Avoid

Worrying About "Looking Good"

“People who worry about looking good typically hide what they don’t know and hide their weaknesses, so they never learn how to properly deal with them and these weaknesses remain impediments in the future.”

— Ray Dalio, Founder of Bridgewater Associates, “Principles”

The founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, might be remembered more in 100 years for his philosophy and economics than for his skill in finance.

And that’s saying something, given he started from scratch in a middle class household, and now has 120 billion dollars under management, has built one of the most extraordinary runs of returns in finance history, and became a billionaire in the process.

Dalio achieved this through measures that would seem radical to most companies. At Bridgewater, they have explicit norms and rules that encourage people of any pay grade or seniority to challenge anyone else’s ideas. They have a culture of radical disclosure and radical honesty, blunt discussion, and place the highest regard on truth and good outcomes.

They film every non-confidential discussion that happens in the company, and the tapes of these are available to anyone in the company at any time. If they make a bad decision on a financial investment, they can open up the video archives and find out exactly why. Dalio himself is no exception to the rule, and his own performance is questioned and scrutinized.

Dalio: “People often worry more about appearing to not have problems than about achieving their desired results, and therefore avoid recognizing that their own mistakes and/or weaknesses are causing the problems. This aversion to seeing one’s own mistakes and weaknesses typically occurs because they’re viewed as deficiencies you’re stuck with rather than as essential parts of the personal evolution process.”

It’s painful to want to see yourself as you really are, and present yourself to trusted confidants accurately. But you must do this to get the pinnacle of results. Worry less about “looking good” and more about “getting better reality ASAP.”

Not High Concept

An excellent reputation and narrative make resources come to you easier and, at some points, effortlessly. Signal is a powerful tool.

But it’s not all roses.

The most dangerous is when you get defined by some aspects of yourself that are good, but which make you feel like you’re unable to grow and make mistakes.

We could call this the “high concept trap” or “high concept cage” — if you gain a high level of authority or renown, but can’t perform the fundamental ground-level functions of your role, it can make you afraid to try and look bad. It becomes a cage.

The company A.L. Williams started in 1977, and by 1984, was the #1 producer of individual life insurance in the world, unseating major established players and writing tens and hundreds of billions of dollars of insurance.

The founder, Art Williams, did it on a philosophy of action and broke all the taboos and norms in the insurance industry.

Williams built his structure around starting almost all of the sales force part-time. Recognizing that most “traditional salespeople” and especially “insurance salesmen” had bad reputations, he recruited teachers, coaches, civil servants, and people with regular non-sales jobs to come in and be trained in the company’s way. If people did really well, they could go full-time when they wanted.

His sales force grew exponentially year after year. He wrote this guidance to managers and team leaders:

“The greatest thing you can ever do for your people is prove:

That they can win because you did

That the nasty price is worth it because the rewards are so great

That you (the leader) are the hardest worker, and HARD WORK OVERCOMES mistakes and "lack of talent," etc.

Remember: You always do first what you want your people to do”

Williams always encouraged people to build their identity and reputation on (1) their work ethic and persistence, and (2) their track record of achieving results. He wouldn’t promote anyone in management who was not regularly producing and working. They never got stuck in the high concept trap.

If you really do genuinely start to feel stuck in a way where your skill is too low to do something, it’s painful not being able to do it, but genuinely would hurt to be seen by people who look up to you as bad at it — then you need to create some time and space for yourself to get trained and practice.

Never, ever accept the high concept trap passively. It’s dangerous to be in a cage. It might take time to navigate out gradually if it’s particularly tricky and dangerous, but always worth doing. Don’t let your Signal limit your ability to grow (and its requisite, failing at times as you learn).

Over promising

There is a certain dynamic that often haunts freelancers, contractors, and consultants who are not confident and established in their business.

Feeling desperate to win business, they “over promise” — telling the client that they’ll do things that take far more labor or calendar time than is realistically possible, guaranteeing immense results, and “throwing in the kitchen sink.”

This does two things: first, it does not actually win the respect of veteran people who want someone who is focused, realistic, and delivers well. It doesn’t help to win the best business.

Second, it sets the person up to fail. When you’ve promised the moon and stars, an adequate “entire continent of Earth” type delivery still feels like falling flat.

These engagements rarely end well.

So of course, don’t over promise explicitly. But be careful, especially as you get praised and lauded for achievements, that you don’t implicitly promise things you can’t deliver. If people are making “Halo Effect” assumptions that you’re good at everything, set them straight and let them know what you can and can’t do well. If you’re doing particularly incredibly well, consider showing some behind the scenes footage that shows your work in progress or things going poorly.

When you can ground expectations of you firmly in the possible, you can deliver those and then some. If your promise is of something impossible, you can deliver something good and still run into people being disappointed. Ground yourself firmly in the possible.

Too Much Weight in Praise

The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.

— Norman Vincent Peale, minister and author of “The Power of Positive Thinking”

It’s very difficult to see yourself clearly. If you give a speech about how money is evil or how most people work too hard, you’ll inevitably alienate some people — not even people who are fanatically interested in earning or working, but probably a host of regular people… and yet, if you gave a speech on that topic to 100 people, you’d almost certainly get amazing praise and compliments afterwards. You might even think “that speech went over amazingly well.”

But, it’s almost never possible to see people who are excellent and started getting interested in you, but then were turned off by something. These invisible losses hurt, but you never know you missed them.

Stand by your strong ethical positions, of course. But when you’re getting praised, be skeptical. Any polarizing message will win some supporters, but perhaps at the extent of exceptional people you’d like. Non-polarizing messages too — being risk averse, for instance — turn off another mix of people. And yet, maybe some of them would have been good to have in your circle for a balance.

Don’t obsess over this. But give it some thought occasionally. Are amazing people coming into your life regularly? If not, could some aspect that’s constantly praised about you by some people actually be getting in the way?

Choosing to Not Choose

You don’t need to know the meaning of life to tune your Signal. A lot of people say, “I don’t know what I want!”

Well, to start, pick anything you know is good. You can change and evolve in a few months.

It’s very possible to do a three month cycle learning all about a particular skill, region of the world, culture, profession, or hobby. You can tune your Signal to that and expand along those lines for a while.

If it turns out that’s not what you want to do with your life, start evolving and changing. “I was very interested in biology and medicine and explored it two years ago, learned a lot, but I found myself more drawn professionally to computer science, and I’m a programmer now.”

That’s a fine Signal. If you don’t know what you want, it’s not a problem. Pick something, anything, you know is good for you, and start going for that.

Most people sit too long and let time pass. Preferences emerge from action, testing, and feedback loops. Pick anything, be deliberate, and get started.

Assets

Assets

Uncommon Sense

Water on the Sand

Why is money so tricky for so many people?

It seems like the vast majority of people, despite interacting with money in one form or another for their whole lives, don’t seem to master it to the degree that you would expect.

Is there anything else that’s used so much, that’s thought about so much, that we collectively want so much — that’s so poorly understood? Economists debate the best way to deploy it. Financial experts argue over the best ways to invest it. And individuals from all walks of life puzzle over the best ways to earn it, spend it, and save it.

It is difficult to make universal rules about money. There are universal rules, yes, but far less than in other spaces. Doing something to build your Network slightly imperfectly doesn’t hurt you — if you make connections in academia but then decide to go into research in industry, you’re not hurt by making academic connections. Whereas when you spend $100,000 to get a university degree for a credential with the expectation you’ll use it for higher earning power, but then go into a different field?

That’s a different game.

And we still can’t say conclusively that you shouldn’t get that degree. It depends on what you want in life.

The Japanese have a proverb that goes: “Getting money is like digging with a needle. Spending it is like water soaking into sand.”

Is it just that? That it takes immense work, effort, and focus to earn money, and it’s easy to see it slip away? Maybe. The Japanese certainly have a way of acknowledging difficult things and just continuing to do them.

The authors don’t claim to have all the answers to money. But if we dig deeper into this mountain of sand in front of us, perhaps we will find some gems of truth.

Fuel vs. Fountains

So far, we’ve described three key resources you can leverage in life: your Capacity to produce results, the Network of relationships you’ve established, and the Signal you put forth into the world. As a general rule, they tend to increase when you use them.

By tapping your Capacity to tackle a difficult problem, you learn new skills and increase your future Capacity. You call up an acquaintance from your Network to collaborate, and your relationship grows stronger as a result. Getting testimonials from a happy client improves your Signal, which makes it easy to secure new clients, which wins you even more testimonials.

Money, on the other hand, seem to behave fundamentally differently. It decreases through its most basic use.

You go to the store and buy some food. The money is gone. You’ve got food. You eat the food. Now the food’s gone too. You pay rent for an apartment. The money is gone. You have the apartment for a fixed amount of time. Then your lease is up. The money’s gone, the apartment’s gone.

So it’s no surprise that most people relate to Money as a sort of “fuel”; it’s consumed when we use it.

There’s another side to money, however — one that’s typically only seen by business owners, entrepreneurs, community leaders, and those commanding large quantities of resources and people. Combined with the right combinations of Capacity, Network, and Signal, Money can become a “fountain” that produces even more of everything else.

It takes tremendous effort (and usually a bit of luck) to get these fountains going. If you take a language class, your Capacity in that language will almost certainly increase. But if you try to start a hedge fund, the gains are less straightforward and (at least statistically) less likely. That’s not to say it’s not a good idea.

For now, just keep in mind that people relate to money very different ways.

The Monetary Arms Race

Companies optimize for profits. They look to increase their efficiency to cut costs, grow revenues, make their marketing more effective, break into new markets, defend current markets, etc, etc, etc.

How many companies genuinely look to maximize the Capacity of their people? Or genuinely try to increase their relationships with key stakeholders — employees, customers, and other people affected by the business? How many actually make a serious effort to have the best Signal possible, beyond just being “acceptable” in quality and doing damage control and PR during bad times?

The question is largely rhetorical, but the answer is probably “not many.”

There’s something about money and Assets that prompt different reactions than other types of resources do. It’s very easily measured, and of course, people tend to prioritize the measurable and discount the unmeasurable.

There’s also an evolutionary pressure on Assets, money and costs in particular. Let’s say two similar products compete in the market — if at any point, Product B can be produced and sold profitably cheaper than Product A can be manufactured, Company A is out of business shortly.

Companies that don’t care about profitability usually go out of business. If they have an amazing technological advantage or a natural monopoly, sometimes they don’t feel an unending pressure to optimize. But absent that, money is pushed for, counted, re-counted, and optimized more than almost anything else.

Contrast this with Capacity, Network, or Signal.

Most financial and monetarily oriented Assets are max optimized in an arms race of sorts. Whereas, just a little bit further away, there’s easy green fields of cooperative non-arms-race, less-pressurized gains to be easily made.

Getting higher pay from your job at your company involves a negotiation that they don’t want to have. But meeting other members of the company, learning about their goals, and connecting with them is easy.

This isn’t to say that the financial type of Assets can’t be optimized and gained; of course, many people do just that. Huge gains are possible, because many people are operating in a completely non-deliberate way. A little deliberateness and some best practices make a tremendous difference.

Dry Gunpowder

During the Siege of Boston, George Washington found that the nascent American Continental Army had only 9 shots per rifleman — far less than they expected.

He held back his positions and was called a coward. The more fiery of the nascent Americans called for Washington to take immediate action, and yet he held fast until he got the opportunity he needed — when in January 1776, his artillery commander, Henry Knox, brought heavy siege guns to Boston via oxen and snow sled.

In a bold nighttime repositioning, they got the heavy guns overlooking the city, forcing the British to evacuate and bringing about an early American victory in the Revolutionary War. The battle wasn’t won with gunpowder, but the mere threat that it presented.

As with any exhaustible resource, having money sitting around, ready to be deployed towards the goal of your choice is, well, good. But the real benefit of having money the bank is optionality. We like to call this measure “dry gunpowder.”

Stocking up on money means you can start turning down job and client offers you don’t want, hold a harder line in negotiations, and self-insure instead of paying a premium for insurance.

Let’s say you’ve got $2000 in the bank and your monthly expenses are $4000. This is somewhat of an anxiety-producing situation. You’re out of money in two weeks if you don’t change something quickly.

Now, let’s say you apply for a job in that situation. At the end of the interview, they ask how much you’d like to get paid. You consider the market rate for your services and the value you add, and you ask for 6000 per month.

The company comes back and says, “Well, hmm. We love you. We really want to hire you. But we’ve only got a budget of $4500.”

If you’ve got no other job offers or income on the immediate horizon, do you take it?

Yeah, probably. Maybe you counter for slightly more like $4800. You have to take it if you don’t want to drop into debt or frantically look for another job in those 14 days.

Now, imagine you had $20,000 in the bank. The company counters at $4500. You say, “Hey, I’m really sorry, I love you guys too, but I think $6000 is very fair for my services and what I can deliver for the company, and I get offers generally in that range. If you’re interested, let me know.”

How often do they call back when you “hold the line” on your price?

Often.

But you can’t “fake hold the line” if you feel desperate. Desperation can be sensed. You need better reality, and the great pool of money in your bank account gives you some strength in negotiations.

That money isn’t giving you power by spending it; it’s giving you power simply by sitting there.

How to Lose Time and Money

If a friendship gets strained and breaks, you can likely identify why. There really aren’t that many reasons friendships strain. By using common sense and thinking from the other person’s shoes, you can usually avoid most of the mistakes one can make in Network.

Whereas there are a lot of ways to lose Assets. And some of them are quite unintuitive.

In Paul Graham’s essay, “How to Lose Time and Money,” he explains a realization he had after selling his startup to Yahoo for $49 million. He writes,

“The way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments. It's hard to spend a fortune without noticing. Someone with ordinary tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of thousands of dollars without thinking ‘wow, I'm spending a lot of money.’ Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an eye. In most people's minds, spending money on luxuries sets off alarms that making investments doesn't. Luxuries seem self-indulgent… Investing bypasses those alarms. You're not spending the money; you're just moving it from one asset to another. Which is why people trying to sell you expensive things say ‘it's an investment.’”

In that short few lines, Graham covers a number of reasons that mistakes around money can be so sneaky: picking bad investments, being over-leveraged, rationalizing decisions, and the fact that people selling expensive things are not necessarily looking out for your best interests.

A lot of being good with money comes down to not making some mistakes. We need to get good strategies in place based on our most important goals and priorities. But just as importantly, avoiding bad habits and common pitfalls gets you very far.

We’ll next cover some universal rules, most of which are “Don’t do’s” — what you should spend and invest on depends heavily on your goals, strategy, and current situation. But there’s clearly some things to universally ensure you’re not doing or getting hit with.

This is important — we’ve got a number of rules here for “avoid these mistakes” — and most likely, the majority or so won’t apply to you. That’s normal and please skim those parts if they don’t hold your attention. But look closely for even a single one of the “definitely don’t do this” that applies to you. The authors searched hard for universals that anyone would benefit from a greater knowledge and practice in.

Mistakes to Avoid

Trying to Buy Stuff That Money Is Bad At

“Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good themselves. Now those who wish well to their friends for their own sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reasons of own nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good — and goodness is an enduring thing.”

So said Aristotle is his Nicomachean Ethics.

Aristotle notes that young people usually pursue friendship for pleasure and emotion — and they fall quickly into friendship and quickly out of friendship as their tastes and pleasures change. Older people, writes Aristotle, tend to pursue friendship for advantages and utility.

The problem is, both are shaky foundations on which to build. “And thus these friendships are only incidental… [and] are easily dissolved if the parties do not remain as before; if one party is no longer pleasant or useful the other ceases to love him.”

When you get your mind around this, everything changes.

If someone loves you — in friendship or romance — only for the pleasure of being around you or the advantages you bestow, then your relationship is on shaky ground.

Money can buy pleasure and advantage, but it is not so easy or efficient to buy character with. So you can buy “friendship” built on pleasure/fun or “friendship” built on mutual advantage, but woe be to you if you should lose your ability to be pleasurable or advantageous to be around.

Aristotle goes on to give guidance on friendship — develop virtue in yourself, and then “eat salt together” with your friends over time; go through situations that are difficult together, and truly get to know and love their character.

Do not try to buy friendship or love with money; it’s inefficient and puts you on dangerous ground. Money buys some things very well and others poorly — know which is which and buy the former.

Being Afraid of Money

Well, the phrasing “afraid of money” or “fear of money” is not precisely correct.

Most people that are “afraid of money” aren’t afraid of money itself. Rather, they’re afraid of the pain they’ll feel if they carefully investigate their current financial situation.

If you know you’re buried deep in debt and not getting paid well, you don’t want to look at the balances of your debt and bank account. This isn’t “fear of money”; it’s a reaction designed to try to protect from the pain of looking at it.

And it does hurt. This is not to trivialize that.

The thing is, your brain is quite smart. Some part of you knows, deep inside, actually what’s going on in your life. If you’re buried deep in debt and struggling to make ends meet, you know that, even if you’re not paying attention to it in the moment. It filters through the background constantly.

The fear of acknowledging the problem is real. It will likely hurt to look at your bank and debt balances if the bank account is low and the debt is very high.

But the only way to break through that fear is to acknowledge and move into it. You look at the balances, you feel sick to your stomach, you do some basic mental math on it…

…and you’ve started getting better. Next time won’t hurt as much. And so on.

If you’re afraid of getting your mind around your money situation, take actions where you progressively and slowly do that. The fear fades with time, and you can improve your situation.

Not Learning Money Management

It’s natural to think that we should understand things we interact with all our lives.

It’s in these areas that we “should understand” where people suffer the most.

Most people don’t really understood food very well, don’t understand money very well, and don’t understand people very well.

But you’ve been around food, money, and people your whole life.

The temptation is to say, “I should already know this. Why is it so difficult? This is terrible. I shouldn’t have to learn this; I should just be good at it.”

No one is upset with themselves that they don’t know nuclear engineering or organic chemistry. Those things naturally seem like they should take a lot of work. But “money management” seems to many people along the lines of, “Why should I have to learn that? I should just know this stuff already.”

But, many people don’t. Most people don’t. There’s no shame in that. Why would you automatically know money management well, if your parents didn’t teach you, school didn’t teach you, and you didn’t self-study on the topic? It’s not that complicated, but there are some counterintuitive and difficult points.

Study money management. Get good at it. Resist the temptation to think “I should know that” — just being around something doesn’t make you good at it without some study and practice.

Undeliberate Autopilot

Most people cease to notice their spending, and don’t realize that it was a choice.

The neighborhood you live in, the rent you pay, the way you take transportation, what types of food you eat and when, what types of clothes you wear, what you do for entertainment —

These are all choices!

What you pay for housing will very likely be one of your biggest expenses. But most people only think about it once a year or much less, and they don’t realize the rest of the year that they’re living out that choice.

Your financial situation could be radically different than it is right now. You could, quite literally, re-architect just about any aspect of your life to be more enjoyable, meaningful, and interesting for you.

But to do this, you need to start observing and noticing changes.

You need to “get off autopilot.”

Later, once you make decisions you really like, you can get back on autopilot… and live much healthier and happier. But if you’ve never sat down and consciously looked at all the places your money goes, all the choices you’re making with it, then you’re shortchanging yourself and your life greatly.

Carefully investigate your own spending and get off autopilot. Make conscious choices that lead to an excellent life. You can get back on autopilot with those good choices, not think any more day-to-day, and yet have a more amazing life.

Following the Class-Based Scripts

“I still have residual middle-class financial programming in my head, expertly misguiding me to the wrong answers. Getting it out of my head feels like getting a bad malware and virus infection off a computer. It is painful and messy, and there are really no completely reliable tools that work in all cases. And you’re never quite sure if you got the last infected file off the system, when the infection is really bad.”

— Dr. Venkat Rao, “Acting Dead, Trading Up and Leaving the Middle Class”

Venkat could be described as a “rogue academic” — following from intensive scholarly training and research, he writes high-minded but radically blunt analyses of society on his highly popular and insightful blog, Ribbonfarm.

His insights into being middle class are telling —

“The middle class financial script is simple really. It involves uniform spending habits within a large class, based on norms that are learned via imitation. If you are in the middle class, you are expected to own certain things, do certain things and do so at quality levels that exceed the quality purchased by the poor class (if they purchase that category of things at all) but don’t hit luxury levels. You are also expected to not buy certain things that are either above or beneath you, or do certain things for yourself. Vanity, humility and a sense of entitlement are all at work here. For the middle class, there are things that are beneath your station and things that are above your station. For the rich and poor, things are much more one-sided.”

He explains: “To take some simple examples, you’d be looked upon with suspicion if you bought a car that was either too luxurious or too cheap for somebody claiming middle class status.”

The key to architecting a life that gets you what you want is to discard class-based scripts. Indeed, the whole quoted piece talks about how Venkat is moving into doing just that.

The brokenness of scripts is most obvious when you leave your normal location and environment. If an American goes to Southeast Asia, they’ll likely still eat at “middle class restaurants” that cost $8 to $15 per plate without noticing, but they won’t go get a massage — “because massages are a rare indulgent luxury.”

However — it’s often possible to eat a decent meal for between 75 cents and $1.50 if you eat where the locals eat instead of in a fancy cafe or restaurant (well, fancy by SE Asia standards). Thus, eating that lunch is costing between $6 and $14 more just to be in the fancy place.

The “luxurious massage”? Often only $5 to $10.

Westerners newly in SE Asia will often still keep spending $15 to $50 on food without blinking, not realizing they’re spending luxuriously and extravagantly more than they need to for otherwise decent food. They’ll balk at getting a $5 massage more than once per week.

These are class based scripts, not any sort of logical tradeoffs.

Housing and transportation are huge expenses; so are vacations. These also tend to follow class-based scripts. Same with clothing.

It can make immense sense to go buy “luxury” clothing at a good price that is known to be durable and with timeless quality. The net cost per use of it might actually be lower than disposable mainstream brands. But it feels “luxurious” to buy a $500 pair of well-crafted durable leather boots, whereas buying a $90 pair of sneakers feels “normal” to most people. Nevermind that the boots could last 10 years and the sneakers will be lucky to last one year.

This topic could be an entire book. It is easy to grasp mentally, but hard to realize you’re doing it. Let’s not be too shy about saying this: if you’re following class scripts for your spending, you’re doing some insanely wasteful and harmful things to yourself. You’re overspending on stuff you don’t actually like and care about by a lot, and underspending on other stuff that could bring you much better results.

Don’t just go to the obvious first examples in your mind. Look at everything. It takes a while. It’s a powerful change.

Don’t spend based on class-based scripts. Work to eradicate class-based buying scripts. Become more thinking, critical, and discerning so you get what you really want.

Automatic Lifestyle Inflation

The majority of people, when they make more money, start spending more money.

This follows from all the principles right before it, but we remark on it separately because it’s an easy place to get some big wins.

You should identify what spending, saving, and investing will best serve your life, and do that.

Once you’ve done that, greater amounts of money shouldn’t just mean “slightly more of everything” — most people who start making more money just gradually upgrade everything a little bit in their lives without thinking about it.

It’s very likely that there’s one or two areas in your life that would benefit overwhelmingly more than others to have your money deployed towards. This might be letting your money pool up in the bank and in financial investments. This might be buying higher quality tools you use regularly. It might be investing in some kind of credentialing or skill development to further grow income. It might be any number of things, but it’s unlikely to be “a little of everything.”

If you know you have a pay raise coming, keep your expenses the same and buy the same of everything for six months while banking the additional money, and then evaluate carefully what would be most valuable. Don’t just “lifestyle inflate” and buy slightly more expensive everything. Everything is not equally valuable to you; you want to buy the things that do the best by you.

Be careful when you get a pay increase or income increase; most people just start randomly spending that money on slightly better stuff but don’t get additional benefit from it.

Ask yourself, “Why am I really buying this?”

Sometimes, you’ll have a good reason. Other times, you’ll catch yourself saying, “Just because I have the cash.”

Not Giving Drowning Enough Priority

“…the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting of orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t… When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! […] Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated…”

— George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

Orwell’s point was this — the poor seem to be making poor decisions on how they spend their money and what food they eat, but the “peculiar evil” of being poor is that the worse off you are, the more you desperately want a small stimulation of ice cream or a minor drug to get away from the pain.

Things are obviously, remarkably, vastly, incredibly better today than they were in 1937. But the point stands — when things are very bad, the mind’s inclination and bias is towards short-term activities.

We could call a state where your finances are in the red and your cashflow is negative “beginning to drown.” If this happens, give every effort possible to making that the biggest priority for a while.

While drowning, it’s almost impossible to think clearly. It is similar to real life drowning — many times, a potential victim of drowning grabs frantically at someone who tries to rescue them, causing even more problems.

The authors have endured some measure of “Western middle class hardship” — certainly not none, but nothing compared to people who came from the most difficult backgrounds in the West, or even common difficulties in developing countries.

The authors make no pretense to say that this is easy or straightforward. However, a good general rule would be to stabilize as quickly as possible. Certainly, the best time to do this is if you’re potentially on the verge of getting towards that drowning state. Then, if you can cut your expenses and focus on getting out of that, it would be a wise decision.

What does this look like practically? It would mean cutting all discretionary spending for a time that’s possible to cut, and looking to work part-time for any decent pay on the weekend or after work, and then taking most of that money to pay off debts and accumulate savings.

Purchasing the clear-headedness that comes from having additional runway and breathing room is worth near infinitely more than any individual pleasure. Tell your friends you’ll be away for a while, skip gatherings… hell, skip a holiday giving season if you need to. Yes, it will look bad. Yes, there are consequences. But if it’s possible to get onto dry land and be breathing clearly, it changes everything else.

The authors, again, make no pretense that it is easy in any given situation. But the normal questioning — “do I want a little more leisure or a little more money?” — should go firmly into the “more money! now!” if you’re about to drown. If you have the reflectiveness to make that decision, commit firmly to it, and be proud of yourself that you made the decision.

The negative impact on quality-of-life from “drowning” is some of the highest. Cut every expense and earn every extra dollar to get breathing room if you find yourself getting near there. It becomes the biggest priority.

The “Monied Person” Identity

On the opposite end of the spectrum, it’s easy to fall prey to being a “monied person” — this is someone who is rather impressed with the level of money they have, and wants everyone else to be impressed with it too.

The problems with publicly being a “monied person” are many. The first, of course, is jealousy. It makes other people ravenously jealous and throws resistance and roadblocks and enemies at you for no reason. Maybe some people even enjoy others being jealous? It seems only like a disadvantage, though.

Next, it closes off options for you. If you’re a “monied person,” you have a harder time negotiating for a lower price, shopping at sales, using a Student ID to get cheaper movie tickets, or whatever else. So you pay more for the same (or worse) quality. That’s a good recipe for having less money.

And third, it attracts the wrong kind of people into your life. People who are geared off character, virtue, and doing epic things tend to be more interesting than people who are geared towards wanting to be around money, no?

As you get wealthier, stay modest. Buy public luxuries when the impression it gives will be useful for what you want to achieve.

Look to get Assets and levels of wealth that suit you; in public, keep it more modest to suppress jealousy and unnecessary problems.

Ignoring the Numbers

Money is strange in that it reduces to strict numbers more easily than other resources. Ignoring those numbers makes it difficult to get your mind around it.

Understanding percentages, how compound interest works, and the general “basic math of money” is hugely important.

Here’s an example that might be entirely obvious to you already, or might be very surprising.

If you have $100 and get a 2% annual interest rate… it’ll double to $200 in… 35 years. If you started getting 2% interest in 2014 on $100, you’d have $200 at the end of 2049.

If you got a 12% annual interest rate, your money would double to $200… in just over 6 years. So starting in 2014, you’d have double your money right after the end of 2020.

Little tiny differences — the difference in something that costs 10% more or 10% less, add up to huge amounts. Most people don’t shop on their major purchases enough, and wind up getting bad values on homes and automobiles. Most people haven’t gotten their mind around how a different interest rate pays hugely different amounts.

The thing is, none of the math is hard. It just takes a gradual practice and getting-to-know it.

Figuring out savings rates, cost of living, how tax rates affect you, and so on — none of this is incredibly interesting on the surface, but it gives you almost a set of superpowers.

Most people don’t understand the math of money. But learning it makes all of life easier, given how much money interacts with life. Start slowly learning the math of money. How money “feels” and how it actually works are radically different.

Not Fighting Learned Helplessness

In 1967, the American psychologist Martin Seligman did experiments with dogs given electric shocks. Some dogs were able to turn the shocks off by stepping on an off switch. Other dogs weren’t able to stop the shocks at all, and the shocks would only stop randomly.

The second group of dogs eventually “learned helplessness” — when pain started, they would lay down and just try to suffer through it, displaying signs similar to human depression.

Later, when that second group of dogs were given the “off switch” to end their pain, they would still just lay their helplessly. They’d learned that “there was no way out of he pain,” so to speak, and stopped trying to find ways.

The only way they found to reverse the helpless dog’s behavior was to have an experimenter physically pick the dog’s foot up and touch it to the off switch. The dog was actually physically doing the behavior (with help) that would end its pain.

Money works similarly. It’s quite possible you’ll have setbacks even as you try to learn and apply the principles of money. If “the money seems to keep disappearing” even after you try really hard to manage it, it can be painful. Many people give up at this stage.

If you have a few failures or setbacks with money and settle into a funk or gloom about it, find an organization or class that actually walks you through it, and start working on the good patterns of money. There might be setbacks, but never give in to learned helplessness. There’s behaviors you can do to change your situation and learn ways to make yourself effective.

Failure is normal; don’t let it teach you to be helpless. Keep seeking out instruction and guidance and help in implementing best practices.

Fighting off Symptoms Instead of Fixing Underlying Problems

It’s very often that people get into a pattern of curing the symptom instead of the disease.

If your apartment building is constantly loud and you can’t concentrate there, and thus you need to constantly take a long trek out to the nearest cafe — which is expensive and you don’t even like it — you might consider moving apartments.

Most people don’t consider moving. They keep going to the cafe, or otherwise short-term-mitigating the problem. This winds up being expensive.

Of course, this is often easier said than done. But if you’re constantly using painkillers for headaches, you really would do well to investigate if there’s an underlying condition that’s treatable.

If you ever wind up owning something that keeps costing you in repairs and unreliability, get rid of it. Driving a poor quality car that keeps breaking down is the quintessential example of that. Or move closer to work and walk.

It’s hard to find examples that aren’t overly dramatic or too trite here. But do stop and ask yourself, “What do I keep spending on because of some underlying problem? How can I repair that problem?” If anything springs to mind, fix it.

Fix underlying problems instead of spending on alleviating symptoms.

Purchase Relativity

Let’s take Venkat’s quote about the middle class script again: “You are also expected to not buy certain things that are either above or beneath you, or do certain things for yourself. Vanity, humility and a sense of entitlement are all at work here.”

Be careful about letting your mix of vanity, humility, and entitlement trick you into making bad decisions.

When you buy something like a house, every 1% cheaper you can negotiate stands to save you thousands of dollars in immediate equity and savings in future interest payments.

Dr. Thomas Stanley is an author and researcher on the topic of building wealth — specifically, the background, attitudes, and buying and investing patterns of people who do so.

He explains in his book “The Millionaire Mind” that: “It seems logical to the man on the street that people who have accumulated less wealth would be more careful, more deliberate when purchasing a home, and those with considerable wealth would not have to be as concerned. If they make a bad home-related decision, it's not going to bankrupt them. In fact, millionaires are much more deliberate in their home-buying process than non-millionaires.”

Stanley goes on to explain that as net worths rise, bargaining on large-scale purchases like homes increases. On average, the person with a 10 million dollar net worth is more likely to “bargain shop” for their home than someone with a 1 million or 2 million dollar net worth.

Or take bestselling author and Duke University Professor Dan Ariely, quoted about money and rationality in the Ladies Home Journal: “The 'bigness bias' is incredibly common. We tend to see money as relative to something else, as a percentage of a larger whole."

People usually feel they’ve done well if they “pay 10% less than asking price.” But if you’re shopping for a home or a large-ticket purchase, getting an extra 1% off could be worth thousands of dollars. It might make sense to spend many, many extra hours to find the best possible deal that suits you and yours.

Don’t “negotiate everything a little bit” out of a sense of a middle class script. If thousands of dollars are at stake, treat it accordingly.

Pay attention to absolute dollar amounts; it’s better to save 11% on the purchase of your house and 0% off your toothpaste than 10% of each.

Not Respecting Tilt

Long before the “poker boom” of the 1990’s in the United States, Mike Caro was writing and analyzing the game. As a professional poker player and author, he’s unique for pushing poker analysis beyond just game theory and math, and into managing your own psychology and that of your opponents.

His work is worth studying for anyone for how it relates to as much to life as poker. Poker becomes a rich metaphor for understanding humanity in general.

Here’s Caro: “Going on tilt, also called “steaming” by some, means losing emotional control and playing substandard poker. It’s so common that almost all superior poker players lose considerable money because of it. The best ones end up making a profit despite this grave deficiency. But many are destroyed by it. Tilt happens because poker is frustrating. You can wait hours for the perfect cards in the right situation and get crushed by an inferior hand that shouldn’t even have been played. You can be embarrassed when you make a daring call that loses. You can be frustrated by a long drought when no playable cards come your way. It’s human nature to want to get your money back right away. So you force the issue and play inferior hands, make desperate bets and raises, call too often, whatever. You’re on tilt.”

There’s times in your life when you’re on tilt. You’ve been embarrassed, frustrated, gotten bored, or whatever.

You’ve got two choices — stabilize very quickly or get up and walk away.

If you just had a bad breakup with your boyfriend and girlfriend and you’re going to the bar to drink, leave your credit card and debit card at home. Take a small amount of cash. That means you won’t spend a ton of money drinking yourself into oblivion.

Situations like that. When your life seems to be off track, you need to re-wire yourself a bit to mentally stabilize, or back off from the table. Don’t keep playing on tilt.

Everyone loses emotional control at times for a bit. The sooner you can recognize that and re-focus or stop playing, the better off you’ll be.

When you recognize you’re not in emotional control of yourself, minimize your exposure to money and decisions you’re making with money.

Making Bad Threshold of Misery Decisions

Another Caro principle — “The threshold of misery.”

Caro talks about how, after a certain amount of loss in poker, people stop caring about how much they’ve lost.

They’ve crossed the “Threshold of Misery” where the pain doesn’t go up from losing. They’re so totally miserable that additional losses don’t hurt. Dangerous place to be.

Caro’s advice —

“I teach that you’re supposed to keep right on playing well, even after you cross that threshold. You’ve got to remind yourself that even though things don’t seem to matter now, there will come a time when they do matter. So, make good decisions. Maybe right now it doesn’t seem to matter a lick whether you lose $4,495 or $4,125, but there will come a time when that $370 matters again. Always play poker as if that time is now. That’s important and I’ll repeat it. There will come a time when that $370 matters again and you should play poker as if that time is now.”

Next time it seems like “everything” is going wrong in your life, remember this principle. It might not feel that way right now, but it’ll matter later. Continue trying to make good decisions and minimize the damage.

It matters.

If you’ve taken big losses right and feel numb to the pain, use your rational mind to note that good decisions will matter to you at some point, and treat that moment as if it’s right now. Respect and be nice to future you, who will be grateful you slowed down the bleeding and made good decisions.

Unsustainable Plans of Action

The most popular financial radio show is the Dave Ramsey Show. Dave has people call in and share their situation, and then gives advice for getting one’s finances in order.

He advises, “Personal finance is 80% behavior and only 20% head knowledge.”

Sometimes this advice gets criticized because it’s not mathematically optimal. For instance, the method he recommends for paying off debt is the “debt snowball” — ordering your debts smallest to largest, and paying off the smallest first.

The typical advice is to pay off the highest interest rate debt first, and then the next highest interest rate, etc. In theory, if you follow this advice, you’ll have paid less interest and gotten out of debt sooner than with Dave Ramsey’s method.

But in decades of covering personal finance, he found that the debt snowball generated a series of victories, motivation, and morale boosts that would lead to people making better decisions and sticking with the program.

Ramsey’s advice is geared around really thriving in a middle class American lifestyle. He talks about buying a home and paying it off, saving to pay for your children’s college, and so on. It works well because it’s so concrete, and he looks to make it easy to follow. It’s not for everyone, but it’s one of the easiest systems to understand, is fundamentally sound, and it works to get one’s personal finance much, much, much better than average.

In all of your financial plans, it’s key to do things that are sustainable with your behavior. Plenty of strategies and plans work “on paper” — but aren’t easy to follow through on. Learn and study your own behavior and evaluate how well you can adhere to plans based on how well you’ve done in the past. If possible, automate financial decisions so that you automatically do the correct things.

The “broadly correct behavior” you’ll actually stick with is superior to the “perfect behavior” you won’t.

Strategies That Only Work During Good Times

"Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."

— Warren Buffett

Everyone can look pretty smart by making big reckless bets when they’re paying off. But making big reckless bets is generally a pretty bad strategy — people who make them tend to keep making them, long after it’s been time to shift gears, and they go bust.

Whatever you’re doing in regards to cash, assets, investing, and spending, you want to make it a strategy that you can sustain when things go wrong.

An exercise to help with this is to look at historical events and ask some “What if?” questions. “What if there’s a lot of inflation and cash becomes worth a lot less? What if there’s a real estate crash? What if this line of business is regulated? What if I can’t keep a position at this pay level? What if our investments lose half their value?”

The best answer is “we would succeed there too” — if you’re an entrepreneur, it’s a huge boon to be able to do just as well in a recession. Or if you’re heavily invested in stocks, but keep enough spare cash to buy at the bottom if the market crashes.

“We could weather it and survive” is a fine answer.

“…well, that won’t happen…” is not a good answer.

Basic strategies like having an emergency fund, having cash on hand, and getting insurance on things you couldn’t afford to have happen — these are key.

Defense usually isn’t as exciting as offense, but should periodically be looked at. If you’re running a freelancing business, consultancy, or own a company, you want to ensure you’re not too reliant on a single supplier or single customer. You want to ensure you can service all your expenses and payments and pay for your current lifestyle even if your income got badly damaged. And so on.

This is a point that’s easy to understand intellectually, but hard to do. Talk to an accountant or experienced conservative mentor that has seen a lot of down economies and bad moments. Investigate what could take you out of the game, and build defenses against them.

Take measures to assume you’ll survive — and ideally thrive — when there’s reversals.

Money as Endgame

“It is natural… that our lives are not satisfied by obtaining our goals rather than by striving for them—because of the law of diminishing returns. For example, suppose making a lot of money is your goal and suppose you make enough so that making more has no marginal utility. Then it would be foolish to continue to have making money be your goal. People who acquire things beyond their usefulness not only will derive little or no marginal gains from these acquisitions, but they also will experience negative consequences, as with any form of gluttony. So, because of the law of diminishing returns, it is only natural that seeking something new, or seeking new depths of something old, is required to bring us satisfaction.”

That’s by Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater, in his “Principles” document.

Most advice along the lines of “money isn’t the meaning of life” comes prematurely and is said too often. The marginal utility of money doesn’t go to zero for quite a long time.

But, if you took Dalio’s quote at face value, it would be unwise to cultivate and gear all of your life around the acquisition of money to the detriment of everything else, because success at this goal would then render your own chief source of motivation and delight moot.

(It also seems to be the case that people who acquire truly vast sources of money and assets have different sorts of motivation than money-in-itself.)

If you’re quite motivated purely by successfully acquiring money, note that this well of motivation and enjoyment can get dry over time. Cultivate other interests and new depths of interest in familiar topics.

Not Making the Most of Your Current Situation

It’s no fun to be broke, but there’s actually profit in it. You can learn greater resilience, improvisation, and develop greater compassion and empathy for others who wind up in that spot.

It’s no fun to have a first really good year of breakout income and then realize you haven’t done any tax planning and now have a huge tax bill.

There’s a whole host of problems and disadvantages that come at different ends of the spectrum.

No one likes seeing the value of their assets drop in a crash. No one likes being laid off or fired from a job. No one likes going through a tough time in business.

Now, you could curse these areas, grit your teeth, and try to just survive them.

Or you could ask the question, “How can I make the most of it?”

This isn’t blind optimism. There are actually lessons that are difficult to learn at other points on the economic spectrum. When you’re dirt poor and want to travel, you’ll learn and do it different ways than if you’ve got more in the bank. You can make memories and get insights into the nature of life and humanity by really diving into the situation you’re in.

Many of the figures discussed in the chapters on money only reached the heights they did by utilizing lessons learned in harder times. John D. Rockefeller came up in an unsteady poor background and got a job at age 16 doing bookkeeping. The time he spent getting his mind around financial figures in great detail served him in building Standard Oil into the most successful company of its age.

Rockefeller only earned 50 cents per day. If he’d disliked his time there and spent it daydreaming about bigger things, he would have missed the ability to learn the lessons he later built his business on.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” The experience you can get now, in this particular river you’re trudging through, will quite possibly be invaluable.

And it’s not like you’ve got anything pressing to do besides being yourself. Hey, you’re here right now. Some parts are good; some parts you don’t like. But you’re you — you might as well get all the gains and enjoyment from it that you can, eh?

Make the most out of your current situation, perhaps especially the parts you dislike about it.

Spending Effectively

Examine Your Constraints

We all need to eat. We all need to sleep. We all have some basic requirements that must be met in order for us to keep living our lives. And yet the requirements of a 22-year-old junior architect in Singapore are very different than the requirements of a 45-year-old parent of 3 in St. Louis.

There’s no universal strategy on spending — context decides whether you should buy a brand new minivan, a used BMW, or no car at all. More specifically, your constraints — the bare minimum you need to keep up your lifestyle — matter greatly.

Here’s the thing — most people think they need a lot more than they do; in fact, if you ask someone who hasn’t thought carefully about it, they probably think most of their spending and buying is absolutely essential.

Which is fine. Maybe it is. But it’s worth a thorough examination.

In a teleconference, renowned business consultant and author Alan Weiss was asked what he says when he gets pushback on working out of his home without an office. His reply was classic —

“Well, there’s the polite and diplomatic reply. That’s — ‘I usually go to my clients; my clients don’t come to me. By working out of my home, I don’t have to pass on overhead costs to clients, and I can provide higher levels of service at reasonable fees, and it’s never been an issue. So it’s a benefit for me, and a benefit to clients’… but there’s also the ‘New Yorker’ reply if I don’t need to be diplomatic. That’s, ‘Hey buddy, I make seven figures per year and live in a beautiful 1.5 million dollar house. Why wouldn’t I work out of my house?’”

Most people assume that professional service firms like Weiss’ need expensive offices. It might be true, but it might not. Question all your constraints periodically. Less constraints means more options for how you run your life, and how you deploy your money.

Be Careful Turning Things Into Constraints

In a moment, we’ll talk about spending for Pleasure and Meaning. Actually, the authors draw no distinction between them. If you think that having an amazing sound system and all the latest music is part of a fantastic life for you — great. If that’s meaningful to you, it’s great.

Though… it would perhaps be a little bit… hyperbolic… to say “I must have an excellent sound system” as a constraint, would it not? If you’re not an audio technician or musician, it’s something dangerous to turn into a constraint.

The vast majority of people in developed wealthy countries think they need far more than they need. The authors aren’t even advocating that you cut back on spending on any of those things. They could all be perfectly valuable to have, and if you want them, that’s fantastic. But you gain something precious when you know exactly how much you need — you gain options and freedom.

If you need the best entertainment, and need the most fantastic sort of transportation, and need the highest quality of gourmet food, and need… a million other things… then you have less options and less flexibility.

A partner at a law firm might spend $20,000 per year on custom suits and grooming. And if that adds even a 1% advantage in closing deals and winning cases, that might be worth it. However, that attorney would be wise to say, “I need to spend on wardrobe, image, and grooming for my image as a high-impact attorney, to get the kind of work, fees, and effectiveness I want.”

Committing to constraints without carefully considering the reasoning behind them leads to inflated spending. It leads to people getting stuck in lives that they don’t enjoy, imprisoned by “must haves” that may or may not actually be required.

Fortunately, avoiding or breaking out of this trap is rather straightforward —

Experiment and Explore

You periodically want to test your constraints and experiment to see other ways of doing things.

One of the funniest blogs on the topic of personal finance is “Mr. Money Mustache” — he writes about getting rid of your car very persuasively —

“When you use a 3500-pound car to transport your 150-pound self around, 96 percent of the weight of that clump of matter is the car. You’re moving 25 times more junk around than you need to, and thus using 25 times more energy to do it. Imagine that you’re hungry for lunch, so you go to a restaurant. But you don’t just order yourself a blackened salmon salad for $15.00. You order twenty five salads for $375.00! Then, you eat one of them, and leave the other 24 blackened salmon salads, $360.00 worth of food, to get collected by the waiter and slopped unceremoniously into a big black garbage bag. All that fine wild-caught Alaskan Salmon, lovingly seasoned and grilled. All the fine crumbles of feta cheese, the mango salsa, diced green onion, shaved peppers, rich zingy dressing, and everything else the chef worked on for hours — plopped into the slimy garbage bag. This is exactly what you are doing, every time you drive!”

So, yes, you could ride a bike instead of driving a car.

Experimenting goes a long way. In Roman times, people who followed the Stoic philosophy — including very wealthy Stoics — would often go out of their way once a month to “slum it” and live incredibly inexpensively, eat the worst food, sleep outside, and so on. This served as a visceral reminder that the life we’re accustomed to is not necessarily the life we need.

If you’re a freelancer, contract worker, or someone who can go remote, then it’s very worthwhile to question whether you need an apartment. It can be disruptive to routine and productivity and needs practice to nail, but having the freedom of not paying rent lets you do a lot of interesting things. Notably, you can rather freely hop between cities. Many people live this way. The media calls it “digital nomads” — kind of a goofy and stupid term — but the theory behind it is sound enough.

On the topic of travel, it’s always worth questioning your constraints of what you need to travel. Seoul has a reputation for being an expensive city, but many people don’t know about the fact that you can stay overnight in a “jimjilbang” — a South Korean spa where families often stay.

These spas do most of their business in the daytime, and then they’ll rent a cheap overnight pass that goes from 8PM at night to 11AM in the morning for not much money, perhaps $15 to $20.

For that price, you get a place to sleep — but you also get access to a full gym to lift weights, pools of hot, cold, and mineral water to soak in, and hot rooms and cold rooms with things like salt, jade, charcoal, or higher oxygen content.

They’re marvelous places, and quite clean and safe. They’re a good place to stay as a solo traveler, as a couple, or with kids. It’s what the South Koreans do. They’re nicer than hotels in many ways, since you get access to all the spa facilities, and a cultural experience. There’s less privacy and potentially no place to store your bags in the daytime, but it’s worth trying. If this is new to you, you could always plan to spend your last night in Seoul in a jimjilbang as an experience and experiment.

Humans are incredibly resilient; we originally emerged from caves and forests and sleeping under the stars on the savannah, and it’s not fatal to occasionally test a different quality of life to know that you’ve got more options and more freedom. Experiment.

Being Honest With Yourself

Periodically, test whether the things you’re buying are actually adding value to your life.

It’s hard to test whether something is worthwhile if you never defined why you bought it. For instance, let’s say you subscribe to a bunch of magazines.

Is this to stay informed? Is it to support those magazines, because you believe they’re doing something worthwhile? Is it to impress people who come over, who see you subscribe to prestigious magazines?

Any or all of those are fine; but you have to honest to yourself about your motivations.

We live in a society that looks down on some types motivations — “I want to look smart to people” or “I need this to satisfy my own ego.” People sometimes feel that way and made-up reasons are a poor disguise. We all get proud, or jealous, or want to feel powerful, or whatever. But the second you lie to yourself, you lose the ability to build yourself the best possible life.

When you really know why you’re doing something, you can test if it’s actually working. If you buy magazines on current events to stay informed, but you’ve stopped reading them and started getting all your news online… consider unsubscribing, eh? It means more money in your pocket to spend or invest elsewhere, and less clutter.

Is it because it’s useful reading for guests? If so, would you do better with making a one-time purchase into some really timeless coffee table books with excellent art, history, inspiration, or whatever else?

Is it to impress people? Would buying a single unique hardcover coffee table book with stunning photography be more memorable?

It pays to be honest with yourself here.

Multiplicative Effects

I used to think that buying a business class ticket was crazy. Who does that? Even if you’ve got all the money in the world, why waste a few thousand bucks on a couple of inches of legroom? Of course, that was all before I flew business class.

— Dan Andrews, Host of the TropicalMBA Podcast

Multipliers are the areas where putting some money into them gives you greater impact in the world, making you more effective, and makes things easier, and more meaningful.

They’re when you put $1 out there, and get $1.10 back, or $2 back, or perhaps even $10 back with some savvy and time. They’re purchases that pay back far more than they cost; they’re assets that give you more leverage and more effectiveness; they’re one of the most enjoyable places to put money.

Much of the advice about would-be multipliers can seem contradictory and confusing. Does it really “take money to make money”? Or should you bootstrap and keep costs down? Does paying for a better work environment and more productivity make sense? How much should you be investing in a tax-deferred retirement account, vs. investing in education and skills training, vs. investing into a business you start, vs. … all of the other available options?

It’s hard and confusing to figure out. Much of the advice is said as a given — “You should be maxing out your Roth IRA every year” or “Hire an administrative assistant as quickly as possible” — these types of advice might be contradictory.

It’s very contextual. If you’re doing projects that take 20 hours each and pay $1000, and you’ve got the opportunity to safely sub-contract 10 hours away for $200, that’s practically a no-brainer. But if you’ve got zero revenue and haven’t proven the market yet for your small business, it’s certainly a lot more risky to try to buy some of your time back.

Dan Andrews, quoted above, actually came up with his own numbers on when it would be worth it spending the extra money on business class. But the same things that could be a brilliant play for someone financially established might be foolish for someone who isn’t. And there’s no shame in that — we all start from where we are.

Remember that multipliers multiply, and you have to conservatively calculate out your current impact and very conservatively calculate speculated impact to see what could make sense.

Best Practices, Ripe for the Taking

Yes, you can buy your time back — you can hire someone to cook nutritious meals for you, clean your home, do your laundry, and any other variety of errands. There’s all sorts of time-saving technology, apps, and outsourcing. You can get an assistant to help with whatever you need done, or to remove some specific part of your work/production process. Or you can buy all sorts of conveniences and high caliber environments and transportation, which should leave you with less fatigue.

You can spend/invest money to get more money, too. There’s not so much magic to it — you can buy real estate, perhaps improve it, and collect your rents. You can buy stocks. You can invest in other sorts of financial instruments or private business. If you’ve got your own company, you can optimize the processes within it and spend in ways that bring more money back. If you don’t have a business, you can start one. There’s a whole host of intangibles, including university, that might leave you with better individual career prospects or skills.

You can buy better tools, tools that let you get a higher degree of precision or complete the job faster.

Then there’s a whole host of things that let you get a larger impact on what you’re doing. There’s all sorts of ways to create print media or digital media to promote what you’re doing or promote a cause you care about. There’s all sorts of excellent professionals that will help with this. You can throw parties and events. Etc, etc.

But really, you’ve heard of all of these. Maybe you’re doing some of them. Most people hear of many of them, get intrigued, and don’t do anything with it. It’s worth investigating why.

Spending For One’s Pleasure and Meaning

You can spend money in order to do things that are pleasing and meaningful to you.

This is not surprising; this is obvious; everyone knows this.

However, at the risk of offending, dare we say that most people are not so good at converting money into pleasure?

No, really, it is perfectly good to spend money on things that make you happy. Or on bringing about the world you most want to live in, either in terms of immediately around you, or taking the whole planet into account, or whatever scope you please.

But some people — most people, perhaps — spend money that’s not being spent for any good reason except that it might amuse or entertain them… but then it fails to amuse or entertain! This seems less than optimal.

As with everything else, thinking can be difficult and challenging, but is always immensely rewarding. Let us think together.

Balance vs. Focused/Maximized

We hate to keep picking on class-based spending, but it’s worth pointing out — you really could spend almost nothing at all in almost every category of your life — and use that money to absolutely max out one single category.

Wait, isn’t that wrong? No.

Isn’t gluttony almost always unfulfilling? Perhaps not; and it’s not gluttonous besides.

This is already, in effect, what entrepreneurs do. They minimize just about everything — nice experiences, eating out, perhaps even their health and sanity at times — for the sake of pouring all their energy and efforts and resources into their nascent business.

Sometimes the payoff is gigantic; other times, they are left with nothing. The strategy is not for everyone. It’s not for most people. But it is worth at least considering in passing, if for no other reason than that it’s interesting to consider things.

The entrepreneur gets the benefit of “all their wood behind one arrow” — it is a point of reference. If the business really takes off, perhaps they never have to work again. Either way, they get to see what a maximum of attention and focus permits. Some people regret doing it; most, even if they fail, seem to regard it as an incredibly worthy experience.

But that’s just one way of doing it. There is, likewise, nothing to stop you from minimizing every expense to barely above your constraints while in a top international city, and then have the resources to wander for literally decades in developing countries, free to write, paint, train in some art or endeavor, or just travel.

Not for everyone, but a useful reference point.

What is there to be said about balance? Not much. It’s what most people do. Class-based spending still rules the developed countries. “Ok, I’ve got a good job. I’ll pay down my debt a bit. What car can I afford? I’ll get that. What kind of apartment can I afford? I’ll get that. I need to furnish the apartment, but hmm, I don’t have money. I guess I can put it on credit. Where do my friends go to eat? I’ll eat there too. Let’s go see the newest movie that I’m not even particularly excited about.”

Actually, we don’t look down on that at all. Plenty fantastic, upstanding, amazing people do just that. And for people coming out of hardship in the Great Depression or out of China’s emergence into modernity, it was a critical step to get to that “above the water mark” where you can raise your family in a way that you don’t have fear or deprivation. It was an incredible triumph. But you can always consider greatly minimizing certain categories of expected spend, down to your constraints, and pour what’s left into what matters to you.

Freedom vs. Commitments

A couple decades ago there was an American movie about men making soap. It had a great line: “The things you own wind up owning you.”

There is some truth to that. When considering where to put your spending and investing, and how to earn, it’s worth asking the question, “Does this make me more committed to what I’m currently doing, or less?’

It’s a surprisingly valuable question.

Long-term lease — more committed.

Recurring expenses on the top of your budget — more committed.

Develop skills where you can work remotely — more freedom.

Income is from labor that happens in one place — more committed.

Work full-time — more committed.

Income comes even partially from dividends (or rents managed by a good property management company) — more freedom.

Buy a full home surround system — more committed.

Lease a car — more committed.

Buy a car outright in cash at a good price that can be re-sold at a profit — more freedom than the leasing route.

Hire a virtual assistant who can take up some work for you — more freedom.

Get help putting together a useful portfolio and case studies — more freedom.

Buy physical stuff you need to store — more committed.

Have experiences that develop you as a person that you can take with you — more freedom.

The more things you own, the higher your overhead is, and the less job flexibility you have (or the more you love your work, or earn incredibly well from it but it’s the only option) — well, the more committed you are to one place.

This is not a bad thing, but it is worth considering. Being in one place means you can build a very deep social circle, probably somewhat deeper than the types of distributed social circles across cities and countries that people who travel a lot can build.

To be sure, there’s lots of advantages to both. It’s harder to move around with a great set of knives to cook with, but those make a chef’s life go oh-so-much better.

The most relevant time to be aware of the tradeoff, ironically, is when a lot of people would do best not to get committed to the location they’re at — when they first come into a bit of money.

That’s when you can finally afford nice things — yet, that’s also likely where you’ll benefit from flexibility to move for better work, or just for pleasure and enjoyment of seeing the world. At some point, the vast majority of people put down roots — though doing so explicitly, when you choose to, tends to be the smart call.

Meaning

Meaning

An Intro to Meaning

The Authors’ Position on Meaning

Well, let’s just come right out and say it —

The authors’ position is that you choose the meaning of your own life.

Even if you had a path that you knew with complete certainty was the right path — serving as a member of your religion, or taking care of particular family members, of serving your nation or culture — even then, that rarely offers a complete answer to the question of meaning.

Born in 1686, Hakuin Ekaku shook up and permanently re-defined Zen Buddhism. He had a much different conception of it as was being practiced, and railed against common priestly practices of the day in “Wild Ivy” —

“In recent times, however, the Zen schools have been engaging in the practice of "silent illumination," doing nothing but sitting lifelessly like wooden blocks. What, aside from that, do you suppose they consider their most urgent concern? Well, they witter on about being "men of nobility" who have "nothing at all to do." They proceed to live up to that self-proclaimed role. Consuming lots of good rice. Passing day after day in a state of seated sleep. The surplice and cotton robe they wear as Buddhist priests is no more than a disguise.”

He goes on to call them thieves — thieves! For having “nothing at all to do.”

Hakuin took this “do-nothing Zen” to task, and lived richly and fully in service —

A Shambhala school writer wrote,

“… Hakuin was a firm believer in bringing the wisdom of Zen to all people. Thanks to his upbringing as a commoner and his many travels around the country, he was able to relate to the rural population, and served as a sort of spiritual father to the people in the areas surrounding Shoin-ji. In fact, he turned down offers to serve in the great monasteries in Kyoto, preferring to stay at Shoin-ji. Most of his instruction to the common people focused on living a morally virtuous life. Showing a surprising broad-mindedness, his ethical teachings drew on elements from Confucianism, ancient Japanese traditions, and traditional Buddhist teachings. He also never sought to stop the rural population from observing non-Zen traditions, despite the seeming intolerance for other schools' practices in his writings. In addition to this, Hakuin was also a popular Zen lecturer, traveling all over the country, often to Kyoto, to teach and speak on Zen. He wrote frequently in the last fifteen years of his life, trying to record his lessons and experiences for posterity. Much of his writing was in the vernacular, and in popular forms of poetry that commoners would read.”

Hakuin was an incredibly accomplished calligrapher and painter, regularly worked to help people, writing poetry and sermons and philosophy, and communicating with all sorts of people of the age.

Again, the authors’ position is that you choose the meaning of your own life. There’s intelligent disagreement among devoted Buddhists about what constitutes good Buddhist practice.

Even if you were devoted to a religion with a very strong central authority like Catholicism, does it then make more sense to do carpentry, tend to the sick, or clear money-changers out of the temple?

You pick and choose the meaning of your life. Your religion, culture, family, or nation may shape this tremendously, but even then, you’ll choose what your expression of your devotion is.

All The Resources Resolve To This

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where —" said Alice.

Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"— so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

—Lewis Carrol, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

At the end of the day, all of your resource-getting and using resolves to meaning. There is some meaning itself in doing anything and doing it well, but it does behoove you to pick something meaningful to be doing.

Even if the meaning you’ve chosen is just “enjoying the journey,” it does make some sense to do this explicitly so you don’t have that gnawing sense of worry that something else ought to be happening.

What are you doing with your life?

If asked, “What are you doing with your life?” — some of the readers of this work would have a clear, sharp, and precise answer immediately. Some would have a more vague and ambiguous, but still clear answer. And some would answer — “I don’t know.

There are some useful things to consider in each of these cases.

The First Path to Meaning, An Ultra-Clear Meaning of Life

The External War For Turkish Independence

No occupying soldier’s boots had touched the streets of Constantinople since the Sultan Mehmed II had ended Byzantine Rome 465 years ago.

And then, British Admiral Calthorpe is disembarking and joined his sailors and marines in the formerly great capital of the Ottoman Empire, stretching his legs and getting down to that steady sort of British Imperial administration.

It is November 1918.

A noteworthy Brigadier General on the other side, young for his rank, is returning to the occupied capital — undefeated, but alone. Mustafa Kemal had shown amazing foresight and great command, having led the Ottoman’s best victory in World War I at Gallipoli.

But the Ottoman Empire was out-matched, out-resourced, out-numbered, and — aside from Kemal — outgeneraled. The Sultan signed the Empire over to the Entente Powers, who guaranteed he would be allowed to continue to nominally rule in a puppet-like role.

Kemal had made a name for himself as having a great mind for raw strategy, for mathematics, and for people. Now, starved of both administrators and heroes as the Ottoman possessions are divided between the victories Entente powers, Kemal is given the role of Inspector General for the disarmament of the Ottoman forces, putting him in a position of great influence across Anatalia.

Admiral Calthorpe is no fool. He receives reports of comings-and-goings, and notices the name. “Mustafa… Kemal… wasn’t that… Gallipoli…?” In June 1919, he recommends to the British Force Office that Kemal be relieved of his duties, and perhaps arrested.

Kemal was one step ahead of him — he’d already taken his best officers with him and left the occupied city in May.

It was still unclear what would happen at that point, but things did not look good for those people of the former Ottoman Empire. Negotiations had already started for the final concessions that Ottomans would make to the conquering victors, and things looked ugly. The final result the next year, The Treaty of Sevres, was to be even more hostile than the better-known Treaty of Versailles which gutted Imperial Germany and created the environment where radicalization under the Nazis was possible.

The spirit of all this was in the air. The Sultan, looking to preserve his own power, was cooperating and giving his authority over to the victorious forces — and not looking out for the welfare of his own people.

Kemal started talking with representatives from the main Turkish homeland, trying to decide if they would need a formal resistance. In July of 1919, he abruptly resigned from the Ottoman army while still continuing to tour barracks and speak with troops, as well as starting to get a sentiment of broad representation across the Turkish population.

In January of 1920, tensions heated. The Ottoman Parliament passed a motion that acknowledged the rights of every people in non-Turkish-majority areas to have references for their own future governance, said that the Turks should govern majority Turkish areas, and that “in order to develop in every field, the country should be independent and free; all restrictions on political, judicial and financial development will be removed.”

It was the last act of the Ottoman Parliament — the pot starts to boil now. On March 14th 1920, the British Foreign Office dissolves the Ottoman parliament and begins to occupy government buildings and arrest Turkish nationalists.

Mustafa Kemal’s path is sealed now. The next day he makes his famous speech —"Today the Turkish nation is called to defend its capacity for civilization, its right to life and independence — its entire future."

Kemal made it clear that nothing short of complete Turkish independence would be accepted, and "…by complete independence, we mean of course complete economic, financial, juridical, military, cultural independence and freedom in all matters. Being deprived of independence in any of these is equivalent to the nation and country being deprived of all its independence."

He looked at the situation, and saw that most of the powers wanted to get on with their lives more than hold the Turks down. With one exception — Greece.

Greek/Turk rivalry and mutual dislike went back ages. Kemal bet that the other Allied powers wouldn’t back Greece strongly —

“A national resistance movement in Anatolia will succeed in a short time. I draw my conclusion from two points: First is the determination of the Turkish nation to live a free life, second is the idea that the Allied Powers which fought four years and are victorious will not start a new world war. In this case, we will have only Greek troops to combat. If we can unify the Turkish nation in the front of resistance and can organize the Turkish Army in a short time, we can throw the Greek Army into the sea.”

Kemal worked to unify the Turks into a national identity, bringing representative democracy and solidarity as a people — a people without a sovereign. They formed a legislative assembly in Ankara, and the majority of Turkish people backed this nascent republican government instead of the old sultanate.

Kemal’s views as to the unwillingness of the British and French to keep fighting proved correct — he had a multi-front war with Greece and Armenia strongly committed, and France weakly committed to fighting the new national republic. After rapidly re-taking ex-Ottoman territory from Armenia where Kemal’s soldiers had advantages, a peace deal was brokered with Armenia by Russia, itself keen to consolidate its own security and have peace with Turkey in that time.

Kemal played both sides, courting Western powers and looking to build a secular liberal democracy while petitioning Vladimir Lenin for guns, ammunition, and money “to fight the imperialists” — it worked.

The Turkish forces under Kemal held out by fighting a defensive war and avoiding battle when undersupplied.

The Greeks thought they were in for an easy and quick subjugation — not so.

Kemal had played for time against the British and French, and judged correctly in the lack of interest — the French broke solidarity with their allies and signed a unilateral peace treaty with the Turks.

Now only facing a single-front war, and having his troops better-equipped and drilled, Kemal begins planning an all-out offensive against the occupying Greeks.

The Greeks held Turkish Smyrna as their main base in Anatolia. After having dealt with Kemal fighting a defensive action and mostly avoiding full battle, they weren’t prepared when he launched the Great Smyrna Offensive in summer 1922.

The simultaneous all-out attack cut telegraph lines and railways, and then rapidly took cities. The Greek lines were in chaos — the Turks captured the Greek Major General Nikolaos Trikoupis, and Mustafa Kemal was the first person to tell the new prisoner of war that he’d just been promoted to Commander-in-Chief of the Greek Army in Asia Minor.

Echoing his promise from two years earlier, he’d unified a Turkish nation, built a front of resistance, and organized a Turkish Army quickly.

It was time to throw the Greek Army into the sea. He orders —

"Armies, your first goal is the Mediterranean, Forward!”

The war was over less than a month later; an armistice was signed in October and all occupying troops departed.

The Internal War For Turkish Independence

Kicking the occupied forces out of Turkey wasn’t the end of the struggle — it was the beginning.

The Ottoman Empire had been around six hundred years, and hadn’t been able to successfully modernize in the later years. Major advances in technology and new approaches to governance and culture hadn’t been adopted.

It’s hard for the modern reader to truly get one’s mind around, but the idea of a “nation” and “country” as we currently understand it were not very well defined when the Ottoman Empire was founded.

The idea of having arbitrary boundaries firmly fixed on the map only came into force in 1648 at the Treaty of Westphalia. The modern style of liberal democracy with formal long-running oppositional political parties was only a few centuries old, and the idea of closed borders with passport controls was very new.

Meanwhile, the old Ottoman conception was of a Sultan ruling over his people; the idea of the people themselves as a cohesive group — a nation which controlled a state, a modern nation-state — these changes in culture had all happened long after the Ottomans had established the core of their government around the Sultan’s monarchical rule.

Kemal’s path was set for him — as the hero of the revolution and elected first President of Turkey, he set out to abolish the Sultanate, Caliphate, theocratic rule, and old system of laws. He looked to balance having a liberal democracy with political parties, without allowing them to become tools for persons interested in restoring theocracy or installing a totalitarian policy.

Meanwhile, the Turks hadn’t cohesively formed into a nation. In a throwback to the Middle Ages, the old conception was that the Ottoman royal family were “the Ottomans,” and perhaps some of their ministers and key loyalists were, but the rest of them were “subjects of the Ottomans” — without a cohesive national identity.

Kemal worked to set up a Turkish identity, modernizing the Turkish language and switching to the Latin alphabet to emphasize closer ties with Europe and the West. Under Kemal’s guidance, Turkish women were elected to parliament before women had the right to vote in most Western countries, and his adopted daughter became the first female fighter pilot in history.

Meanwhile, he worked intensely to build friendships and friendly relations — while staying immensely practical. When Turkey signed a 10-year neutrality pact with the Soviet Union in the 1920’s, Kemal predicted that they’d have friendly relations with the Soviets for 20 years — after which the Russians would have consolidated internally enough to start getting belligerent.

He was precisely right — the 10-year neutrality pact was extended for another 10 years, and then Josef Stalin starting making demands for territory. But by then, his policy of courting the Western countries aggressively had paid off, and his former enemies in the United Kingdom and United States allied with Turkey against Soviet encroachment.

Kemal built Turkey into a wealthy, peaceful country with good relations with all its neighbors in one of the most dangerous international climates of all time. Turkey stands today as one of the most successful and prosperous Islamic countries, and Kemal is looked on as a hero in Turkey, in the Western world, and in the Middle East.

In 1934, his name became Mustafa Kemal Ataturk when he was awarded the honor by the Turkish parliament. The name means literally “Father of the Turks” — and indeed, were it not for him, it’s likely that a weak Ottoman puppet monarch would have misruled the region, and it wouldn’t have become a bulwark of stability, prosperity, and modern culture.

The First Path to Meaning

There are times when a person’s “Meaning of Life” becomes crystal clear, when a path is set, and when the keys to walking that path are imminently obvious.

Shortly after Ataturk resigned from the army, an arrest warrant and then death warrant were put out for him. Meanwhile, the Sultan was not defending the Turkish people and appeared keen to simply preserve his power.

Ataturk’s path was set at that point, with the next steps usually at least somewhat clear — bring the Turks together in resistance to occupation and being conquered, organize a Turkish Army, and push the occupiers out of Turkey.

History pulled him forwards from there, the previous actions and maneuvers dictating more-or-less the next things that needed to happen. And once the Greeks evacuated and the Turks signed a more reasonable peace treaty with the Allies, the situation then likewise dictated that the Turks needed modern institutions, modern law, better education, rights for its citizens, and good international relations in the event of aggression from one of the many regional powers or great powers in Turkey’s vicinity.

Must We Found Nations?

Ataturk is a good case to speak of, because he spent the first four decades of his life just gradually becoming excellent before that sharp and crystal-clear meaning of life came into definition for him when external circumstances shifted badly for his people. And once it started, the demands of the situation made largely clear what needed to be done. He then put together nonstop work with a near-complete mastery, understanding people, institutions, culture, and time.

But this doesn’t mean you need to choose an overwhelming task like building a nation… you don’t even need to pick something working for the “greater good” per se — it’s your life and you can choose what’s meaningful to you. You can set on one path to intensely accomplish something, and then change directions afterwards.

In his early-life autobiography, “The Education of a Bodybuilder,” Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote —

“It was the summer I turned fifteen, a magical season for me because that year I'd discovered exactly what I wanted to do with my life. It was more than a young boy's mere pipe dream of a distant, hazy future—confused fantasies of being a fireman, detective, sailor, test pilot, or spy. I knew I was going to be a bodybuilder. It wasn't simply that either. I would be the best bodybuilder in the world, the greatest, the best-built man.”

He achieved it, winning the Mr. Olympia bodybuilding competition seven times before retiring to enter business, Hollywood, and politics — all of which he also succeeded greatly at.

But you don’t need to pick something grand; your Meaning doesn’t have to be set as “become the best in the world” if that doesn’t fit with your taste and options.

Those cases are worth discussing, because when you wish to push against immense adversity and challenge like Ataturk, or reach the height of a competitive endeavor like Schwarzenegger, you have to align all of your resources and make hard decisions.

The next rules will be of benefit if you’re in a situation where you already precisely know what you want, and that your goal dictates a clear path. We look at famous large-scale cases, but any sort of commitment to a goal that offers a clear path to doing it will have some similarities.

On Focus and Sacrifice

“The first, most important, and typically most difficult step [in the process of getting what you want] is setting goals, because it forces you to decide what you really want and therefore what you can possibly get out of life. This is the step where you face the fundamental limit: life is like a giant smorgasbord of more delicious alternatives than you can ever hope to taste. So you have to reject having some things you want in order to get other things you want more.” Ray Dalio, in “Principles”

This theme is repeated again, and again, and again in people who commit to achieving things and do them. If you read on Schwarzenegger’s life, you get the impression that he had some measure of fun — but only within the scope of intense commitment. He was constantly looking to get rid of anything that would get in the way of his achieving the highest level of success in bodybuilding.

While doing a mandatory one-year service in the Austrian Army, he wanted to enter his first bodybuilding competition in Germany. He went AWOL — Absent Without Leave — to compete, and won. He was arrested and jailed on returning to the base.

News of his victory came out, and eventually the commanders decided to support him in his endeavor and make it a point of pride for the base. But even had they not done so, Schwarzenegger was willing to suffer the consequences to get what he wanted. He wanted to be a successful bodybuilder more than he feared disgrace or punishment.

Noted for his variety of eccentric essays and projects, Tynan Bertuccioni’s best points might be on goals and habits. He wrote about getting serious —

"What is getting serious? It's when you pick something, you make it an overriding first priority, and you give it a long time horizon. Being an overriding first priority means that most of your time goes to this one thing, and that its importance trumps everything else. You start turning down things that you'd like to do, just because it gives you more time for your first priority. Not direct schedule conflicts, just more time.”

And he continues —

"Being serious is a way of living, not the following of a few steps. It's easy to say you'll stick with something for five years, but much harder to know that you'll actually do it. It's easy to call something your first priority, but harder to turn down fun things for the sake of work.”

If you’re walking a known path without rivalry or adversity, you might have clear guidelines as to how much you need to do. If the path that appeals to you intensely is becoming a surgeon, there are clear steps to getting there. Some of them are hellishly difficult and taxing — medical residency in the United States is usually particularly intense and brutal, and means having very little free time to socialize or pursue other engagements.

But other steps in that path, perhaps pre-med undergraduate school, might offer time to flexibly pursue other interests.

The first guideline, then, is to study the nature of what you are signing up for, and begin to cut things that don’t fit with it. For defined paths, you can usually see to some extent how much freedom and leisure you have, whereas for an inventor, artist, entrepreneur, scientist, statesman, or any role with potentially infinite challenge, it’s harder to know where the lines ought to be drawn.

Yet, just acknowledging this fact — the fact that lines must be drawn if you have some overwhelmingly important meaningful thing in your life that you must do — just acknowledging this starts the process of looking for what supports and aids you walking the path, and what does not.

Pragmatism

If you’re actually to achieve a single achievement you’ve dedicated yourself to, it would do well to be pragmatic.

In Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s service in the Turkish War of Independence and his subsequent leadership of the Republic of Turkey’s early years and establishment of its institutions and policy, he showed great deals of pragmatism.

Ataturk had to look to actively build friendship and friendly relations with different nations of radically different orientations in his life. This meant walking a fine balancing line. In the Turkish War of Independence, he petitioned Vladimir Lenin for weapons, ammunition, and gold to “fight against imperialist governments.”

But then he said, in the kind of statement that’s a masterstroke of being interpretable differently based on what you want to believe — "Friendship with Russia is not to adopt their ideology of communism for Turkey. Communism is a social issue. Social conditions, religion, and national traditions of our country confirm the opinion that Russian Communism is not applicable in Turkey."

It’s an amazing sort of statement, one that lets his Russian and Soviet supporters say “Well, he’s saying that Russian Communism isn’t applicable in Turkey” — it lets him get much-needed aid for his under-equipped forces in the fight against the Greek Occupation, but doesn’t entangle him in the Soviet bloc.

He didn’t nurse grudges. As soon as the Greeks withdrew from Turkey, he immediately set to work rebuilding friendly Greek-Turkish relations, and achieved it quite quickly.

Ataturk tried to establish multi-party democracy multiple times before succeeding — he himself encouraged people of good character to form second parties to the main single-party, but the first two attempts led to attempts to restore theocratic government or traditional Ottoman-style morality in Turkey through them. Seeing this, Ataturk had both parties dissolved.

His goal was always to build Turkey into a strong, independent, modern republic. He pledged democracy — but when democracy conflicted with an independent and modern secular state, he slowed the introduction of elements of democracy. Pragmatism and prioritization.

Pragmatism includes not assuming benevolence on the part of other people without proof, and not assuming that good intentions will always produce good results.

Ataturk is clearly a man aiming at benevolence and a strong, healthy, high quality to life for the Turkish people. In the process, he’s wary of relying too much on anyone in particular, and wary of seeing political processes co-opted by radicalism while the foundations of Turkish civil society were still being set.

In more individualistic endeavors, it’s likewise key to look at all possible advantages, and look to see how others who have succeeded in the field have done so. After coming in second place in the Mr. Universe competition, here is Schwarzenegger’s response —

“I ended up in second place. I knew I never could have beaten Yorton. He had all the qualities it took to be Mr. Universe—the muscularity, the separation, the definition, the skin color, the glow of confidence. He was finished, like a piece of sculpture ready to be put on display, complete with the patina.

“As always, once I was over the initial disappointment of losing, I began trying to understand exactly why I had lost. I tried to be honest, to analyze it fairly. Aside from my total lack of finish, I still had some serious weaknesses. I had come to the contest with something good, but not good enough to win. I had a lot of mass, a great rough cut. My weak points were calves and thighs. I needed to work on posing, on diet, and all the finer points of bodybuilding.

“For me, that was a real turning point. I decided I had to go back and spend a year on things I had never really given any time to at all. Once I'd mastered them, I knew I'd be on my way to being a winner.”

Study all the finer points, every place where an advantage can be had. Pragmatism is the way.

Ferret Out Sneaky Hidden Parameters

A corollary of being pragmatic —

You must search your own thinking and judgments to see if you’ve got any hidden parameters for your successes that could un-do you.

For instance, it’s common for people in artistic endeavors to think marketing is dirty or beneath them. But if your desire is writing nonfiction full-time, you’d be well-served by building a platform of regular readers. That means doing the hard work of learning how to either connect directly with readers or how to get distribution through existing channels.

It’s certainly easier to become a full-time writer these days than any time in the past, but if you have a hidden parameter “…and my work should just be so good that everyone likes it even if I don’t share it, distribute it, promote it, or look to connect with readers…” — this is not realistic.

Most people don’t realize they have hidden parameters. They just feel a lack of affinity or an aversion to activities that might be a required part of success in their chosen field.

It would behoove you to study what successful people in your field have done, paying very close attention to the areas you’re not doing and asking why. Is there some hidden parameter in there? “I want to write a bestseller” — doable. “I want to write a bestseller (but I’m not willing to do anything except just write; marketing and reaching out to people and promoting the work is dirty and beneath me, and scares me, and I should just be able to succeed without doing any of that, just by writing)” — perhaps not doable.

Be wary of hidden parameters. If they were logical competing thoughts that you were reasoning through, they wouldn’t be so dangerous. If you know you dislike marketing and aren’t good at it, and have a distaste for it, but recognize its importance — well, you can work with that and compensate for it. Hidden parameters are especially dangerous because you can’t easily reason through a hidden requirement that you’re not consciously aware you have.

Progress At The Task At Hand

Much has been said of this elsewhere; we won’t dwell too long on it.

But it’s worth saying at least once: if something is clearly the Meaning of your life, it ought to be worked on regularly. Probably every day, or at least weekdays.

Something you’re making active steps on every day has a chance of happening. If something is the most important thing to you, it’s worth making the time for almost every single day. Regular action is what ensures progress and wards against idle fantasizing.

Marathon Mode vs. “…Or Die Trying"

There’s generally two ways to set up and approach clear-meaning-of-life type goals.

The first is to set things up so that you can’t lose, and to dig yourself in for the long haul. These are endeavors where you can fail repeatedly, learn, adjust, and keep going.

Looking to do breakthrough work in a particular field falls into this category — if your first research doesn’t lead to anything groundbreaking, you adjust, take your lessons, and keep going.

The second category is the “…or die trying” type activities, where you’ll either succeed or fail in a given period of time, and not have another shot at success in things in that particular way.

Looking to establish yourself as the premier athlete in your sport, for instance, is usually the “…or die trying” type of activity. You have your prime years in the sport, and if you don’t reach the top in those years, you can adjust and find something else meaningful, but you can’t just keep at it. If the meaning you’d set to your life was being an ace Major League Baseball pitcher and you’re 18 years old, you can’t just chip away at it for the next 30 years and eventually get there. It’s not pleasant to say and we all love stories that glorify the exception to this rule, but that type of goal — practically speaking — will have to be realized rather quickly, or will have failed.

When viewed from that lens, it becomes easier to understand people like Lance Armstrong, who won seven Tour de France titles before having all his titles stripped from him after being caught breaking the sport’s anti-doping rules and American law.

A large part of Armstrong’s fall from grace is the fact that he counterattacked so vehemently when accused of doping for many years, filing lawsuits and calling people liars. That’s true.

But perhaps we can be informed by Armstrong’s drive to win and the measures he took — he saw that doping was common among Tour participants, and knew he was very unlikely to win and reach the top if he didn’t join those ranks.

The general public is rather unsympathetic to this. They want to believe that sheer force of will and determination should decide the best person, and the idea that someone broke the rules to become the best is anathema.

But the de facto rules and culture of cycling at that time was to use blood doping and all those other measures, and the lion’s share of top finishing teams for those years had at least some people using banned performance enhancers.

Because — of course they would. It’s a “…or die trying” type endeavor. Schwarzenegger (somewhat refreshingly) has regularly admitted his anabolic steroid usage in his drive to be the best bodybuilder.

When we say “…or die trying” we’re usually being metaphorical, but that’s precisely the situation Ataturk found himself in, with an arrest warrant and death sentence outstanding for him once he resigned from the army to lead the Turkish resistance.

There, too, you can see those brutally difficult compromises. This is where needing to choose between bad alternatives comes into action. The ability to do things graceful, slowly, and with no mess is not available if you’re actually committed to “…or die trying” type successes.

Some fields and endeavors dictate whether you can succeed by endurance and persistence — marathon mode — or whether you have to look to win before the game is up.

The first takeaway here is that it’s worth knowing what game you’re playing. If you’re in marathon mode, you’d do well to pace yourself, take good care of your health, lay an excellent foundation, and not take unnecessary catastrophic-downsides-possible type risks.

You won’t need daring maneuvers as often, and might not have to go to the brink of your conscience and sanity to win.

On the other hand, “…or die trying” type endeavors often do require that sort of action.

The second takeaway is this — sometimes, you have a choice between staying in marathon mode, or making something a desperate win-or-die-trying type sprint. If you’re committed to entrepreneurial success, for instance, some business models, markets, and types of financing mean you can go at your own pace and gradually succeed.

Other types become a desperate rush to succeed or die in the process. There are times when taking venture capital means a technology company has now changed its parameters for success, and needs to hold or increase its growth rate while running a deficit and losing money… and ensure it hits those growth numbers fast enough to get the next round of financing before the whole thing explodes.

Some companies have the option of not taking financing and looking to grow slower while controlling their own destinies. In this case, it’s an interesting question. What precisely do you want, and how do you want to play this out? Sometimes the choice is there.

Know what game you’re playing; if you have the choice to make something faster and more desperate, or to manage it steadier and march towards eventual success, choose wisely.

The Second Path to Meaning, The Unclear Path Where You Must Get Proximate

Big Things, But How So

Ataturk had a very clear path in front of him — unify the Turkish people in a resistance front to occupation, organize a Turkish Army quickly, and quickly knock the most committed and most vulnerable enemies out of the occupying coalition.

Once he was committed to that path, actions largely dictated themselves. To be sure, there were ten million ways he could have looked to free Turkey. But there was never any doubt that they involved getting Turkish people unified into a movement, equipping militarily, and defeating occupying forces.

You are in good shape if you have a goal that clear, one where the basic actions explain themselves. And again, we need not all found nations. If you’re newly married and expecting a child, maybe the only major goal you’ve got is just buying a nice house to settle down more as a family. That’s a perfectly good thing to do, and the logic of buying a home is pretty straightforward — get the down payment monies together, figure out what type of house and area you want, get approved for a mortgage, start seeing houses until you find ones you like, and make offers on suitable houses.

But not all types of path commit themselves to this.

Geoff Anders of Leverage Research is working on incredibly impactful things; he has the goal of Leverage “to make the world a much better place, using the most effective means we can. So far, our conclusion has been that the most effective way to change the world is by means of high-value projects, projects that will have extremely positive effects if they succeed and that have at least a fair probability of success.”

But that’s pretty wide-open. If your goal is to “make the world a much better place,” it doesn’t suggest at all what immediate actions you should take. Ataturk’s path was clear once he resigned from the Ottoman Army. Schwarzenegger’s path was clear when he came in second place in that Mr. Universe competition and saw the areas that the winner excelled him in.

Many people find a clear and intense drive to do something in particular — work on anti-aging medicine and technologies, help refugees of a particular country, push the state of the world in a branch of science forward, and so on.

This is a marvelous place to be. But it often isn’t clear how it translates directly to action. That’s a challenge.

The Projects of Leverage

Given a potentially infinite scope — “make the world a much better place” — Anders and his team set two criteria for selecting projects, saying Leverage would choose projects based on “their ability to have a large positive impact on the world” or “their ability to empower the efforts of those who are working for a large positive impact.”

Leverage honed in on two areas to start: Artificial General Intelligence, and intelligence augmentation for humans.

Over time, the projects they worked evolved heavily into researching, testing, and disseminating information about how people think, making connections, interact in groups, plan, discuss, and so on.

For instance, here is how they describe their work on “Thinking best practices” —

“What enables people to produce high-quality intellectual work? After considering this question at length, we came to a surprising conclusion. There appear to be a substantial number of methods and practices which are (a) simple, (b) extremely useful, and (c) overlooked by a substantial number of highly intelligent people who are doing intellectual work.”

Anders’ strategy for the early 2010’s has settled heavily on rigorous research, testing, implementing, and disseminating things that make individuals and teams more effective. It has a dual-fold benefit of increasing the state of knowledge in the world, and rapidly building best practices for his team — Leverage gets to immediately use their own technologies and findings to do even better research and development.

Setting Proximate Objectives

It seems that it’s easy and common for people to get lost and stall out if they’re intensely committed to a particular cause if that cause doesn’t dictate an exact path to walk.

A path to meaning like “see that the oceans and marine life are protected and preserved” offers 10,000 different large-scale approaches that could be taken. Oftentimes, a person committed to a path like that will bounce around, not bringing enough endurance and effort to a single initiative to make a tangible difference.

Everyone likes winners, and bringing wins to the table gets you more resources. Being broadly “interested” or “committed” — without any wins — usually doesn’t lead to an increasing accumulation of the ability to get the job done.

Wins are important. Bringing any win to the table of a cause you care about gets you momentum and new resources. Even if the win you bring isn’t the biggest, bestest, most theoretically amazing possible win, it is a win. You can build on it.

Thus, someone with a hazy path to meaning would do well to learn how to set proximate objectives.

Dr. Richard Rumelt, UCLA business professor, explains it in “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy” —

“One of a leader's most powerful tools is the creation of a good proximate objective — one that is close enough at hand to be feasible. A proximate objective names a target that the organization can reasonably be expected to hit, even overwhelm."

Rumelt goes on to pick the example of American President John F. Kennedy’s decision to announce the intention to land a man on the Moon —

“Kennedy’s 1961 speech on this issue remains a model of clarity. Look it up on the Web and read it. You will be startled how political speech has changed since then. Kennedy spoke as a decision maker talking to adults, not as a preacher addressing children.

“In his speech, Kennedy diagnosed the problem as world opinion. He said “The dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made it clear to us all, as did Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere.” He argued that the Soviet Union’s strategy of focusing its much poorer technological resources on space was leveraging, to its advantage, the world’s natural interest in these out-of-this-world accomplishments. He argued that being first to land people on the moon would be a dramatic affirmation of American leadership. The United States had, ultimately, much greater resources to draw upon; it was a matter of allocating and coordinating them.

“Importantly, the moon mission had been judged feasible. Kennedy did much more than simply point at the objectives; he laid out the steps along the way — unmanned exploration, larger booster rockets, parallel development of liquid and solid fuel rockets, and the construction of a landing vehicle.

“This objective was feasible because engineers knew how to design and build rockets and spacecraft. Much of the technology had already been developed as part of the ballistic missile program. And this objective was intensely strategic. It grew directly out of Kennedy’s question “How can we beat the Russians in space?””

If you read the American Constitution, you’ll notice that it’s actually quite brief about what the President is supposed to do. The framers of the Constitution explained some of their general opinions and reasoning in the Federalist Papers, but much of how the office works is a result of following precedent, especially George Washington’s first presidency.

But the world constantly changes dramatically. Starting in the late 1940’s, one of the biggest challenges to the United States was the Soviet Union’s policies of outright conquest when possible, and sponsoring subversion, terrorism, espionage, and revolution in countries not under their control.

Different adversaries call for different strategies. When Kennedy took office in 1961, the USSR’s style of outright belligerent conquest via combat with overwhelming amounts of troops (and no regard for their lives) under Joseph Stalin had given way to more posturing and competing via public relations and indirect displays of force under Nikita Khrushchev.

Try to be John F. Kennedy for a moment, then. The Soviet Union controls or influences a large expanse of the world and is hostile to the Western way of life under liberal democracy and capitalism.

Khrushchev decommissions a third of Soviet conventional troops, and starts pouring resources into missile launch tests. And then the Soviet space program starts making first-ever space achievements, and using it as propaganda that the Soviet Union is ahead of Western countries in technological development.

Kennedy sets out to counter this — but what should he do?

As Rumelt writes, he carefully chose a proximate objective. “Win world opinion over to the American way of life” is fundamentally unclear as to how to approach it. But when combined with a very realistic assessment of America’s technological capabilities, Kennedy was informed by top scientists that the Americans stood a very good chance of landing a man on the Moon before the USSR, and announced the project.

It was, of course, a huge success. It simultaneously captivated American and world attention, and took some wind of out of the Soviet sails on smaller technological breakthroughs.

Setting Proximate Objectives, II

Gigantic endeavors — “end aging,” “restore the oceans,” “invent quantum computing” — these don’t set actions by themselves.

In "Good and Bad Procrastination," Paul Graham writes on how difficult it can intellectually and emotionally to tackle these kinds of problems —

“… the trouble with big problems can't be just that they promise no immediate reward and might cause you to waste a lot of time. If that were all, they'd be no worse than going to visit your in-laws. There's more to it than that. Big problems are terrifying. There's an almost physical pain in facing them. It's like having a vacuum cleaner hooked up to your imagination. All your initial ideas get sucked out immediately, and you don't have any more, and yet the vacuum cleaner is still sucking.

“You can't look a big problem too directly in the eye. You have to approach it somewhat obliquely. But you have to adjust the angle just right: you have to be facing the big problem directly enough that you catch some of the excitement radiating from it, but not so much that it paralyzes you. You can tighten the angle once you get going, just as a sailboat can sail closer to the wind once it gets underway.

“If you want to work on big things, you seem to have to trick yourself into doing it. You have to work on small things that could grow into big things, or work on successively larger things, or split the moral load with collaborators. It's not a sign of weakness to depend on such tricks. The very best work has been done this way.”

Setting Proximate Objectives, III

In a tour de force of an instructional clinic at the Berklee College of Music, the multi-platinum multi-Grammy-winning singer-songwriter John Mayer explained to the young musicians in the audience his number one key to success —

“The number one thing you have to do before you set out on any other goal or course is to define your expectations. #1 thing. On the outset of any project, record, tour —

Define your expectations.

“Everyone in this room wants to ‘make it’, but I question how you would recognize ‘making it.’

“What is ‘making it’? Well, what do you want to be? … What does making it look like? Do you want to sell a million copies? Two million copies? … [if] you say ‘My expectation is I want to be an artist and I want to put records out and I want to sell millions of copies….’

“If that’s your expectation — great. Then, you sort of skip straight to another questionnaire. Okay, if you answered yes to ‘Do I want to be a pop star? Do I want to make music for as many people as possible?’ — now you need to sort of change your game to fit the expectation.

“You now have to wonder about if your song is shorter than four minutes. Do you get to your chorus fast enough? These are things you absolutely have to do. And you also have to compromise; you have to play the game.”

Mayer has sold 20 million albums; he shows his business savvy in that whole clinic and set of talks.

Here, he’s advocating for someone with an intense desired meaning to be an artist — ‘to make it’ — to set a proximate objective.

He tells you to set your expectation.

And once your expectation — your objective — is set, it starts defining the things you have to do. If you want to sell two million albums in today’s climate, you basically have to keep the song shorter than four minutes, get to your chorus fast enough, be willing to compromise artistic stylistics with current demand, and in general — play the game.

That’s the magic of setting a proximate objective. When you set a precise objective, it starts dictating its own objectives to you. What to do becomes clear. The possible options go from innumerably infinite and unfathomable into manageable. Mayer’s expectation-setting transforms the vague unclear ‘be an artist’ path into the more-manageable ‘make music that can possibly become popular and sell many copies’ — which dictates its own constraints and requirements.

Once Proximate

Once you’ve chosen and fully committed to a proximate objective, managing it becomes nearly identical to the “clear path to meaning” — because you have one.

Two Recommendations

Choose shorter rather than longer proximate objectives, if possible.

Project success of any sort can be built on; people like wins, and support people who win. Set a shorter manageable goal and achieve it. If your premises or assumptions turn out to be wildly wrong, you’ll find out sooner.

Beware the planning fallacy.

Defined, tested, and proven by decision-making psychologists Kahneman and Tversky, the planning fallacy shows that people consistently greatly underestimate the time it takes to do things.

Basically, everything almost always takes longer than expected.

This is another advantage for shorter proximate objectives. You want to choose things with impact, but you’ll almost always underestimate how long it takes to do new tasks you don’t have experience doing. You’d thus do well to start small, picking a task with high impact you could complete reasonably quickly (by the standards of your field), and building on top of it. Shorter is better than longer. Complex multi-year projects are far more likely to never happen and pay no dividends. So, pick shorter proximate objectives rather than longer in the pursuit of meaning.

The Third Path to Meaning, Resource Mode

When You’re Lost, You Need Not Be Miserable, I

If you’ve got what you’re doing with your life generally figured out, and you’ve ever spoken to a group of young ambitious people, you’ll notice something come up in the Q&A.

You’ll always get questions about, “What should I be doing with my life?”

A lot of times, the question comes with a heavy dose of frustration and anxiety, worry for the future, feeling stuck and disliking where things are at. Eyes heavy with discernment, feeling a heavy weight, desperate for meaning.

It’s even worse when your friends and acquaintances seem to have it all figured out. It can leave a person feeling isolated, alone, miserable. Both of the authors have gone through this period.

But here is the thing — it need not be this way. You don’t need to be miserable when you don’t know what you’re doing. There’s good alternatives. This is the first one.

When You’re Lost, You Need Not Be Miserable, II

There’s at least two common flavors of “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.”

One is a sort of frantic, desperate, anxious urgency. “I have no idea. I’m unsatisfied and miserable, I feel like I’m in a cage. I need to escape. NOW.”

The other is having settled into a life of quiet desperation… the days blending together into nothingness, nothing happening, feeling a vague numbness and discontent, but no urgency… things aren’t going… does it matter? … perhaps not... what should I do? … I don’t know… whatever… damn…

Both of these flavors are distasteful, and — in the authors’ opinion — counterproductive to getting that joie de vivre, getting your groove back, getting engaged, really living and doing something worthwhile.

We’ll explore searching for a cause in a moment.

But let’s take a look at it from another angle. Consider this —

It’s possible to have no idea what you’re building towards, but yet to select intelligent things to do that are clearly wins, and to do them cheerfully, and to trust that when you do eventually find a sense of meaning (almost all people do, eventually) — you’ll then be better and more well-equipped for it for the cheerful actions you’ve done now.

Serving Future You

We already covered two ways to handle meaning — some rough and loose guidelines for if you know precisely the meaning of life, and the path is automatically defined by it (Ataturk’s struggle for Turkish independence, Schwarzenegger’s goal to the best bodybuilder in the world) — and we covered the case where you have a loose area you’re deeply committed to, and need to set a proximate objective in order to keep moving forwards.

Here is a third path to meaning — Serve Future You.

Here is the thing. You are you, right now, currently. 10 minutes from now, you’ll still be you. If current you trips and hits your head or does something stupid in the next 10 minutes, 10-minutes-from-now you will be living a worse life because of it.

Likewise, if you spend these 10 minutes getting rid of something aggravating in your environment (cleaning up the dishes, doing some laundry, etc) — then 10-minutes-from-now you will be living a better life because of it.

It might even be fair to say that 10-minutes-from-now you will be grateful with current-you if you do something nice for this future-you.

We usually don’t think of it as being grateful for what we ourselves did in the past — it usually comes in the form of satisfaction or pride.

But this conception of “Future You” is incredibly useful. People often have a hard time animating themselves for goals and objectives with future benefits. Cleaning the messy kitchen sucks and you don’t want to do it. It’s perhaps easier and more enjoyable in the moment not to do it.

This is where you conceptualize future-you, looking back and being grateful that present-you got the kitchen clean.

Perhaps it sounds silly, but it’s actually quite effective.

We can generalize this beyond just 10-minutes-from-now. We can look at longer time horizons. There’s times that 2014-Marshall is very grateful for the work that 2011-Marshall spent getting his butt kicked repeatedly getting deep into learning sales. Zau reflects now how 2008-Zau worked incredibly hard to lay a foundation that he still benefits from.

Here is the thing — if you ask around, you’ll see that the vast majority of reflective and thoughtful people eventually find something to become passionately meaningful about.

It can’t be promised what day, month, or year you’ll find that. But it can be said with complete certainty that that Future-You will be very grateful if Future-You has more ability to get things done, more good people in one’s life, a sterling proven reputation, and cash and assets working for… working for you.

Resource Mode

The idea is this — there are a set of behaviors that almost always make sense to do.

We could call this “Serving Future You” — but when someone else asks, “What are you doing with your life?” — that’s a hard question to answer. That question is a very unpleasant one for people who don’t know what they’re doing.

Try this answer on for size — “I’m in Resource Mode.”

The authors both strongly believe that “I’m in Resource Mode” is going to become a far more common answer to the question of what you’re doing with your life. The 1900’s benefited from people specializing heavily and early, committing when a junior or senior in high school to a basic university path, and getting into a career chosen by their teenage-selves.

There is so much more malleability and opportunity today, a huge demand for generalized effectiveness and ability, and far lower requirements of being within mainstream institutions to be effective.

Hence, Resource Mode. You can set campaigns to train more effectiveness and skills into yourself, meet great people and form good bonds, tangibly prove that you’re trustworthy and effective, and get assets going that will serve you.

All of these things are very smart things to do with a cheerful smile on your face, even if you’re not sure what these various resources will eventually translate into. Here’s the thing — they’ll translate into something.

In two years, you’ll be two years older regardless. You could sit around in a depressed ennui because you’re not animated with a clear sense of meaning, or you could learn a lot of things, meet a lot of people, improve, prove your improvements through tangible projects, and have a fuller bank account and better tools at the end of this.

A strange sight to see is when someone who is young and confused about their path is accomplishing lots of things, but feeling generally miserable because they “don’t know what they’re doing” — and we live in a world where the question of “What are you doing with your life?” is given such undue force and weight. Parents, relatives, acquaintances — heck, people you just met at a party — they get concerned or sympathetic if you don’t have a good answer to the question.

But when an entrepreneur or other figure living an obviously cool life points out that the young person is well-suited to keep doing what they’re doing and stacking up those resources, everything shifts.

You don’t need to know what you’re doing early. Many people don’t. Even worse, many people who don’t know arbitrarily make bad decisions and commit hard to do them just so they can answer the question.

A great alternative — Resource Mode. Stack up useful resources. They will aid you greatly when you inevitably discover a great sense of precise meaning, which you don’t have to be in any hurry to do.

Break Through Thresholds

“Resource Mode — well, okay, good, this is some potential direction… wait, I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”

Fair point.

The first thing to consider are areas where there are thresholds worth breaking through. Sometimes, by getting over a threshold just once in your life, it makes the entire rest of your life better.

Consider getting introductions. There’s broadly three thresholds of introductions, as we discussed before —

People don’t want to introduce you: in this first tier, the person you’re meeting doesn’t like and trust you enough to make introductions. Since every introduction is an implied “vouch,” if you seem like you’d be risky to vouch for, it’ll be hard to get introduced.

People are willing to introduce you if there’s a good reason: This means you’ve crossed to a threshold where people will introduce you if you have a good reason. It means you come across like a decent person, trustworthy, considerate, with basic social graces, etc. Most people never get past here.

People are excited to introduce you to as many people as they can: People will want to introduce you to as many people they can if they’re 100% sure you’ll always represent them well, and the introduction will always be seen as a great favor to the person you got introduced to.

Once you hit that third threshold, you’re well on your way to having as many good people in your life as you can handle.

If you’re shy or introverted, it’s well-worth studying the basic books and getting some guidance, mentorship, and practice around people to make it to threshold #2. We offered some guidelines in both the Network and Signal sections on this topic.

And then, it’s worth constantly reflecting on how well you come across to people and how valuable you seem. Once you break that third threshold, you suddenly have effectively an infinite number of people in your life you want to meet.

Now, even if you don’t know precisely what you want to do with your life, it makes immense sense to go through getting the sets of knowledge, attitude, behaviors, and traits that’ll take you up that threshold.

Likewise, having “more than enough” very good friends you greatly admire is a very good place to be. Sometimes a person will have only a single very good friend, but that’s empirically a little bit dangerous. What if your friend is away? Loneliness ensues. And if you drift apart in values, it can be catastrophic.

Having enough good people that you can get multiple varied smart opinions on a course of action you’re thinking of taking is incredibly valuable, too. What’s the exact number? It’s hard to say. But you’ll know. Once you’ve met more people that you really like and admire than you can even stay in touch with constantly, you’ve got more than enough great people in your life. Still nurture those close one-on-one relationships and small groups, but it makes infinite sense — even if you don’t know precisely what you’re going to do with your life — to meet some high-character people that you really harmonize well with. This, by itself, is highly worth sorting out.

Many things in life have these sorts of thresholds. Taking the time to learn about how your body works and what leads to peak performance with you gives you a lifelong roadmap. Even if you don’t know precisely what you want to do with your life, learning about that is great.

Likewise, being confident in your ability to lead a project and keep it on track? Once you go from “umm… I don’t know… this is scary…” to “yeah, I’ve led projects before” — a great threshold is past.

Incidentally, you can pass these thresholds while in almost any field. Content generalizes across domains. Managing your work habits, making friends, being trustworthy, a reputation for effectiveness, a checking account with many months of living expenses — these come with you regardless of the field you originally built them in.

Stuff No One Ever Regrets Doing

Break through thresholds. Look for areas where, once you’ve improved at them, the improvements are permanent.

Then start looking at things that no one ever regrets doing.

No one ever regrets paying off debt. No one ever says, “You know, jeez, I wish I stayed in debt longer.”

A lot of times people who are a bit confused about their path oscillate in unhappiness, but feel tied down to what they’re doing because they’re stuck making payments to service debt they got earlier.

It makes immense sense, especially if you’re in a place of ennui, to eliminate debt as rapidly as possible. When you have no debt, your options open up immensely to do what you want. Income becomes less of a constraint.

Likewise, building a buffer of many months of living expenses — this is hard to regret. You’ll almost never hear someone regret doing that.

The key is to keep your eyes and ears open honestly. Anyone who learns sales effectively finds out that it changes the way they think slightly, and the generalized abilities from sales (being able to listen well, ask questions, find out what people want, etc) — these are the same skills you use to build communities, sell your ideas, and get cooperation. No one who got good at sales ever says, “I wish I hadn’t done that.”

Break through thresholds. Search actively for stuff that everyone universally is pleased that they did, and do those things. They’re nice things to do for Future You.

Capture and Harvest

A danger of being in a place you dislike is you won’t capture and harvest value from it. If you don’t like the type of job you’re doing, you’re less likely to write up a case study of when you did a highly effective project at work. You’re less likely to focus on creating artifacts that prove you can deliver results.

Ironically, this leads to being doubly trapped. Demonstrated effectiveness at anything makes it easier to get cooperation anywhere.

Likewise, people seem sometimes more likely to spend money when they’re unhappy. This would, again, be a mistake. You want to bank money and assets when you’re unhappy, for better usage and deployment when you’ve found areas that are suitable to you, and to assist in getting faster onto a track you want to be on.

There is a danger of not capturing possible resources when you feel like “it’s not your calling” — resist. Improve your Capacity, Network, Signal, and Assets. This makes it easier to get where you want to go, when you inevitably eventually discover where that is.

At 90%+, FINISH

A very important rule: do not allow yourself to quit things that are 90% complete.

A lot of people, at the finish line, realize that what they’re doing isn’t what they want to do.

This is a bad time to stop and not finish.

You must not self-destruct at the finish line.

It creates a terribly bad habit.

Even as late as 75% into completion of something, it might make sense to quit and abandon and change gears.

But anything that’s on the verge of finishing must be finished. Do not allow yourself to go into “existential questioning mode” when almost complete.

If you graduate law school and have studied for the bar, do not neglect to take it. Even if you realize you don’t want to be a lawyer, pass the bar. You do not want to get be someone nor get the reputation of being someone who does all of the work and gets none of the gains, self-destructing at the end.

Do not drop out of university with three weeks left until finals in your last semester.

Do not train for an entire sporting competition, and then decline to enter because “you realized that it’s pointless.”

Practically speaking, a very large percentage of the time the realization that “this field isn’t for me” is blended at least partially with some sense of… something. We won’t psychologize, but some sort of fear of success, guilt, shame, whatever. Something like that.

Even if that’s not true and you’re dead sure the path isn’t for you, it still makes immense sense to get repetitions in the fine art of finishing. Finishing is hard, and finishing anything is worthwhile.

If you don’t have a clear meaning right now, set it as a rule for yourself — no quitting at the finish line.

Things Need Not Be Perfect; Keep Skiing

Dr. Joshua Spodek of New York University has had a brilliant career as a physicist putting satellites into space, as an inventor of new commercial advertising technologies for usage in underground transit, as an entrepreneur building a company around that, as a professor, and a lot more.

He explains it like this — “If you’re skiing downhill and you come to a fork on the ski trail, you can go left or you can go right. What you don’t want to do is stand there, getting cold, while other people ski past you. Pick an answer and get down one of the slopes, and see how you like it… you can always go back up the hill and do another run later.”

Spodek found that his first love (physics) wasn’t where he wanted to spend the rest of his life, and went on to inventing. After spending time as an inventor getting patents, building a company, and having major installations and cooperation with transit systems and major metropolitan cities around the world, he moved into other endeavors including writing and teaching.

Too many people stand in the cold, whereas there’s many activities worthwhile to spend a month or two on. Even if they’re not “the perfectly best theoretically possible thing to do” — whatever that means — doing anything at all gives you feedback.

Doing things that break through thresholds, clearly serve Future You by providing you with more resources and good relationships and opportunity, and making your first choices things that no one ever regret doing — this is a solid formula. You’re far better off committing right now to spending a month or two training in a skill you know is worthwhile than standing in the cold trying to figure out what to do.

And if anyone gets on your case about what you’re doing, feel free to say — “I’m in Resource Mode.”

The Fourth Path to Meaning, Search Mode

Bryan Hernandez

Bryan Hernandez had the feeling that he could learn to do anything he wanted to do, so he didn’t have to keep doing what he’d already succeeded at. He felt the call on him to do something more unique; he knew he could make a bigger difference.

People thought he was crazy. His job at the Broad Institute of Cambridge doing computational genomics research was seen as one of the best possible ways to be employed. He got to work to cure cancer, it was extremely prestigious, he was well-paid, and he worked with brilliant people.

By mainstream standards, he was thriving at his position. He was published in the biology journal “Cell,” a huge honor and accomplishment. He was told by a senior researcher that “he could’ve been walked into Harvard Medical School” — if he wanted to.

But there was this gnawing sense that the path wasn’t right for him.

As a computational biologist, Hernandez wrote code to test statistical hypothesis about different biological data. His team’s code and computations measured aberrations in a genome and figure out how it aligns with phenotype — how different mixes of genes turned into effects in the world, a very computational intense task to figure out.

It was a high profile team at Broad, but Hernandez’s assessment is that his job could have been filled competently by someone else relatively quickly; while well-liked and effective, he wasn’t individually critical to the project’s success

And he had the feeling that, deep down, there was something out there that only he could do, a problem to be solved that most people don’t even recognize exists.

Hernandez — “I thought, if I leave cancer research, it’s not going to suffer. There’s enough cooks in the kitchen and others who can do what my role was. And there’s a ton of interesting problems that no one is thinking about because there’s no money in them. I knew I’d be okay, and was less worried about the pay and prestige.”

Not sure what precisely to do, but feeling vaguely like his high-visibility high-prestige clearly-meaningful-to-most-people work wasn’t what he should be doing, he took a three-week vacation and just sat in the house and read and wrote philosophy and psychology.

Gradually an answer came to him that there are really important problems that aren’t being worked on, sources of major human dissatisfaction that don’t have excellent researchers, investment, and funding.

Hernandez didn’t have a plan for what to do next, but knew he wanted to move from Cambridge to California. He finished the work he was on, resigned, and moved.

“I knew I was going to be fine no matter what, so I figured I’d take some shots.”

One year later, Hernandez is going to Johannesburg as the entrepreneurship lead for MIT’s Global Startup Labs.

Hernandez’s primarily driving focus now is highly abstract and not legible to most people who hear of it — looking for the deepest source of human problems that are being overlooked, and how to work on methods, models, and structures to tackle those.

“This question not enough people are thinking about because there’s no money in, but it’s what I’m thinking about — how will institutional innovation come to places where it should be, but isn’t yet? What institutions are necessary to have Silicon Valley levels of technological invention and wealth-building? How can we see the same kinds of results that I saw in Silicon Valley and Cambridge in entrepreneurship and medicine? What are the patterns and methods of institutions to see those magnitudes of results come to Johannesburg, Cape Town, and everywhere in the world?”

Hernandez points to universities — “We know how to build, staff, and run a university pretty well. We have universities worldwide. What other institutions don’t we have, that we need?”

A Complex Problem

“For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” — H.L. Mencken

“What should I do with my life?” is a highly complex question. There are plenty of clear, simple, and wrong answers.

Let us turn to Paul Graham again, from his essay “How To Do What You Love” for some clues into how people get misled —

“By high school, the prospect of an actual adult job was on the horizon. Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about work. It was always understood that they enjoyed what they did. In retrospect I think one might have: the private jet pilot. But I don’t think the bank manager really did.

“The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you’re supposed to. It would not merely be bad for your career to say that you despised your job, but a social faux-pas.”

Graham continues — “It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. Ideally these coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in the patent office) proved they weren’t identical.”

Going a little bit further, the authors dare venture a guess that for many people in the Western world, “making a living” isn’t even the biggest risk or worry. For many Westerners, “making my life make sense to others and fitting in” seems to be the primary driver and function of work life.

That’s part of what makes Brian Hernandez so remarkable. At the Broad Institute, he had an immensely prestigious and well-paid job that ensured he fit incredibly well into Cambridge society.

The prospect of going off on one’s own must be terrifying to people. Even though we know many people dislike the direction their life is taking, they see some measure of paycheck, social significance, and fitting in. Departing from that can be difficult.

But it’s at least worth considering from time to time. Paul Graham recommends divorcing your understanding of the “idea of work” and “what you do for a living.”

Going a step further, you might even consider divorcing your understanding of your identity and how you fit into the community from what you find deeply meaningful. Einstein didn’t work on physics simultaneously with his patent duties in order to fit in better.

Not Searching Right Now Is An Option

It can be useful at some point in your life to go on an active search for something deeply meaningful to you. As Graham says, “…the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. Ideally these coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in the patent office) proved they weren’t identical.”

But you don’t need to search right away. There is no law that says you must immediately begin a search for meaning if you don’t precisely have one. Sometimes just enjoying and doing what you want, taking care of yourself, perhaps gathering resources in the process — this might be the best thing.

There is no imperative to immediately drop everything and search for meaning. This is important.

Actively Seeking Meaningful Things

"Sometimes it seems as if there are more exercises for choosing your goals there are goals worth choosing. This is okay. Pick your favorite exercises and do them." — Nick Winter, The Motivation Hacker

Winter is on to something, there. Again, echoing Dr. Spodek, standing in the cold watching people ski past you is the least fun of all possible paths.

Winter offers a variety of his favorite goal-setting exercises. One of them is particularly novel —

"Make a list of every crazy goal you can think of. Then rate each goal on three factors: how much the goal excites you, from one to ten; your probability of success if you tried as hard as you could; and how long it would take in hours. Then sort the goals by excitement times probability of success divided by time required and pick some of the most efficient goals."

In other words, Winter is saying that if you don’t know what to do, go after the things that are most exciting that can be done the quickest.

This is not such a bad idea. It gets rapid reps into things you’re most excited about, and completes them.

Search Mode and Flow, I

A full-on search for what’s meaningful almost always includes some mix of theorizing and thinking about what could be good, and then trying it out.

Bryan Hernandez explained how the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author and pioneer of the concept “Flow” helped him figure out what he cared about.

Csikszentmihalyi explains that Flow happens when the Challenge Level and Skill Level of what you’re doing match up.

If your skill is vastly greater than the challenge of what you’re doing, you’ll likely wind up bored (or at best, relaxed).

If the challenge is considerably greater than your skill, it’s typically stressful.

Csikszentmihalyi found that Flow is most likely to occur when someone doing an action is doing a task that’s more challenging than average and has higher skills than average.

Hernandez summarized it half-jokingly like this: “Oh, so there’s only two problems in the world if I don’t like to do something. It’s either too easy or too difficult.”

Search Mode and Flow, II

There is a major takeaway from this.

It’s not that Flow isn’t worth pursuing (it is) — but far more importantly, you can’t accurately gauge how much you truly like an activity until your skill level is high enough to actually get good feedback and grip with the interesting challenges in the field.

Plenty of activities that are awful to learn the foundations of are incredibly stimulating and enjoyable once you reach higher levels of skill and take on real challenges. Likewise, many activities that are pleasurable enough to learn and participate in become drudgery once reached.

This is tricky, because if your full-on search for meaning includes wanting to like the activity you’re committing to, you need to make predictions about how much you’ll enjoy doing it once you’re more skilled.

Immense amounts of research on happiness shows people are bad at predicting what they’ll enjoy in the long term, and how much so. Many activities with brutal learning curves are joyful and meaningful once real traction can be made on them.

Then again, many activities that are drudgery to get started and learn continue to be drudgery once you’re good at them.

There are two takeaways here — first, when you’re in Search Mode for something deeply meaningful, you won’t be entirely sure if you found something you can bet on for the long-term until you’ve been doing it for a while.

Some people are lucky enough that they find something deeply meaningful to them, and it just sticks. But they’re probably the minority. If you’re searching, you’re actively placing bets that something might be meaningful, but you need to be aware that you might be wrong, and won’t know until you’ve reached some commensurate level of skill to actually see what it’s like truly being there.

The second takeaway is that you need to be courageous after you’ve gotten deeply into something.

The “Player 1” Exercise

The following is an exercise somewhat commonly written which is uncommonly effective, but rarely known outside the literature of goal-setting and personal development.

It’s the “Player 1” exercise.

“Player 1” says this — imagine you got to take over someone else’s life, take an inventory of their skills, abilities, situation in the world, things they owned, and so on — and then could start doing whatever you wanted with their life.

You woke up as them one day. You’re you, but you can do whatever you want.

In that case, if they’re doing something particularly dumb, you would just stop doing it. If you woke up as a career petty criminal always doing dumb things and getting arrested, you could just stop doing dumb petty crime. If dumb petty crime always happens when this person hangs out with Cousin Ernie, you just stop hanging out with Cousin Ernie. Duh.

Of course, you don’t actually get to wake up as someone else. But you can do this as yourself.

You imagine that it wasn’t you that made the decisions that got you here today. You’re not even you. You’re Player 1. You just took over this person’s life.

What dumb stuff are they doing that you can stop doing?

Sometimes people start overspending and going deeper into debt to impress people. They keep doing it because they’re afraid to lose the impression they set. You “Player 1” this scenario and realize that this debt thing is dumb, and should be stopped immediately. You stop doing it. Done. If you, Player 1, need new friends afterwards, you go make new friends. If you don’t have the skill, character, and life to get the kind of friends you want, you go make those friends.

It is a useful exercise. People attempt to be consistent with what they did in the past, at the expense of getting stuck doing things they dislike. “Player 1” exercises are worth exploring.

If you have an incredibly honest and thoughtful friend or mentor, you might also ask them to help you go through the Player 1 exercise. Their suggestions will probably point out the dumber things to stop doing, skills you should leverage more, weaknesses you should fix, and skills you should leverage.

Asking Oneself About One’s Ideal Day, Week, Month

Hernandez came to his conclusions about what he wanted to do by thinking about what he’s capable of, and asking himself about his ideal day, week, and month.

Nick Winter recommends the exact same exercise.

Paul Graham comes to basically the same conclusion: “As a lower bound [to how much you should love your work before you settle on this as the thing you do], you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of “spare time” seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else — even something mindless. But you don’t regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working is the pain you endure to earn it.”

In other words, Graham recommends searching until you find something you like more than unproductive pleasures (which he notes are fun, but tend to become boring if done to excess over long periods of time). He elaborates: “I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you’ll have terrible problems with procrastination. You’ll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.”

There is perhaps more to it than that — asking about the contributions one can make is seen as worthwhile by many people — but there is something about mapping out one’s ideal day.

Marshall’s Entry On An Ideal Day, I

Here’s a note from the author, Marshall’s, journal. He found that when he follows this plan his life goes well, and it includes getting done the stuff that, pragmatically speaking, has to happen as part of getting on with things. This was written as a private entry, but the tone “searching and reasoning through it” is left here as-is for example purposes —

“Theorizing, studying the world, setting up experiments, doing science, reading, synergizing thought — this brings me the highest degree of pleasure and is a high-leverage activity for me.

“Sometimes I’ve inadvertently organized my days such that I have to go full-on with reasonably mundane and linear duties that perhaps allow for incremental improvement and exploration in that regard, but do not offer the opportunity to invent, create, think in a free and clear way, etc.

“Thus,

“— I think it is necessary to set up most of my days so that I may start by doing science, planning, controlling, and theory in the mornings.

“Ideally I do this with a particular lens at that moment, a focused campaign, and translate this into direct improvements.

“Following on from this,

“— Towards the early-middle of the day, I need to shift into production mode to turn good ideas into good realities.

“I do not wish to be a theorist or a pure scientist; I wish to make Planet Earth run better, improve people’s lives, and gain for myself and others the benefits of doing so. That means it should be relatively infrequent to spend a whole day doing pure theory or pure reading, without translating it into production.

“— In the late-middle day, shift to taking care of habits and sustaining — especially if big things are happening that would make it beneficial to neglect those things!

“Physical fitness, taking a walk, taking a nap, processing administrative tasks, etc. Calls should also be around this time, perhaps a little before or a little after, but not at the start of the day usually. It’s always tempting to neglect these habits during periods of expansion, but it is a fool’s bargain — things only go well because one is healthy and able to capitalize on this state of health.

“— The late part of the day is a challenge — my judgment and assessment of my own abilities is usually flawed in the evening, and I’m prone to staying up too late doing things that are not useful nor proceeding quickly… yet, it’s also the most convenient time to get the (necessary) socializing with brilliant people like Kai. The end of days deserves some care and regular analysis to make sure I get what I need, but sleep early enough.

“It’s unfortunate that staying up too late at night compromises the morning. There is perhaps no way around that — you either wake up later and lose morning-time, or you wake up with less sleep. “

Marshall’s Entry On An Ideal Day, II

In summary, Marshall likes to spend the morning just thinking, drawing up plans, and trying to figure out what’s possible in the world.

After a few hours of that, shift to doing intense work with the sharpest of one’s mind.

Then take care of admin and habits.

Try not to screw up the end of the day too badly.

Marshall came upon this by studying his own life. He tended to make bad decisions in the evening (bad food choices, aimless web surfing, and just spinning his wheels while getting nothing done). This was never actually satisfying in the moment.

Likewise, he used to tear into his administrative work and necessary phone calls early. He doesn’t do that now — he found that he likes socializing and collaborating via telephone and meetings, but not first thing in the day, ever, if possible.

Everyone has different tastes. That’s one example. It took a lot of thinking and analyzing to figure out even that simple script for a day. It takes more effort to start living it.

Consider Doing Stuff Instead Of Doing Philosophy

Remember the difference between cognitive knowledge — intellectual thinking knowledge — and the experiential knowledge that comes from firsthand doing things.

Doing pure philosophy can let you cognitively reason yourself into what’s meaningful.

It might be valuable, but anecdotally speaking, it seems that more people find what they find deeply meaningful through action and trying things than they do through pure philosophy.

Pure philosophy can be helpful, but both Marshall and Zau remember their times deeply in philosophical thinking and training as relatively unhappy times. It’s questionable how much future value this had — quite likely some — but both Marshall and Zau eventually found more meaning by actually doing things. Pure philosophy can be good, but take it in dosages and keep healthy amounts of action up in the process.

A Parting Thought

A parting thought — people sometimes take this “meaning” stuff way too seriously.

Here is a good rule of thumb — if being stressed, anxious, or miserable is going to help you achieve what you want to achieve, then be stressed, anxious, or miserable.

But, generally speaking, these things are counterproductive to meaning. So, lighten up if you can! At least, add “lighten up” to your list of things worth trying. It’s perfectly acceptable to not know precisely what you want to do right now, and if so — going into research mode, going through the process of searching for meaning, or just ignoring the whole thing entirely and doing what you want to do — these are fine outcomes.

There’s ways to manage and reduce stress and anxiety and misery. Manage them! They’re counterproductive to finding meaning, so drop those, and safe travels and godspeed while finding meaning for yourself.