The Behavior of Change
Thoughts and download from the week.
At a minimum, there’s two things you can learn from other people. What to do and what not to do.
Sports
I like watching endurance sports like the UFC (MMA), cycling, or even motorcycle racing like MotoGP. To me these are the hardest sports because they require the athlete to remain focused on their technique over long periods of time, well after fatigue and pain have set in. And I think that dynamic adds a different level to the athlete and the sport that you don’t get from other sports.
I also like watching them because it makes you realize what the human body is capable of. When two UFC fighters go five hard rounds all bloodied and battered, it makes you realize just how far you really can push it.
When cyclists race for the finish line on day 21 of the Tour de France, or when a MotoGP rider all of a sudden finds a new best lap time as the races comes to the end, you really understand what it means to push it.
And I try to use that in my normal life to do shit I don’t want to do. Whether that’s working out or sitting down to write, I ask myself what one of those guys would do if they were me. And of course it always makes me do it.
I also love these sports because they are international. You get to see the best of the best from around the world, representing their country, their history, and their culture. That also brings a different element to the sport.
And I guess lastly, it’s that they’re individual sports, supported by a dedicated team of people, which allows you to get to know the athlete on a far more intimate level. And for me, it’s a lot easier to get behind an individual than it is a team.
We hold the answers that we seek.
You can have a bad idea without all of your ideas being bad. I think that’s the trap. Believing that because you made a mistake you’re just going to keep making mistakes, so, instead of trusting your gut, you start to distrust it. And, the result is an inability to make progress. Because you get stuck questioning everything your gut is telling you to do.
Or, you’re just too afraid. You’re too scared and can’t see how an action plays out on the other side, and you second guess yourself. You delay gratifying that urge, you get stuck in delay.
That was one of the most profound things I’d heard in a long time. I had just begun toying with the idea that being able to follow my intuition would be the key to my success. The key to living a happy and fruitful life. But I did not have anything to base it on other than my own thoughts and experiences.
I found, simply enough, that on days when I was able to lead with my gut, that my days were happier, they were more care free, and they went smoothly. It was a feeling for which I had no concrete examples, I just knew I felt better.
Jen and I went out to dinner one night with friends. There business partner who happened to be visiting from Italy joined us. Over dinner Jen and I got to know him, and we learned what a successful and intelligent man he was.
At one point in the evening we were all talking when he leaned in and said, “I’ve found that the most successful people I know, don’t spend a lot of time in delay. If they want a boat, they buy a boat. If they want to paint their house green, they paint their house green.”
It was so profound to me because in that moment I found context in what I had been feeling and unable to describe. And it was coming out of the mouth of someone who, in a short amount of time, I had gained a lot of respect for.
Delay is the word that I grapple with. Not wanting to delay, but not wanting to do something stupid. Or do something I’ll later regret. But I’ve found that the only way to ever really know is to do it. And hope for the best.
On the evening before Jen and I’s first trip together, she asked me what I was writing in my journal. I said, jokingly, “I hope it goes well.” We both laughed hard, and that’s been an inside joke for us ever since. But it’s also kind of been a motto we live by, or at least try to live by.
“I hope it goes well” kind of sums up the only expectation you can set. Because it can not go well, and sometimes it doesn’t, but, with the right intentions, most of the time it does.
Which comes back to the initial thought. You can make mistakes without everything you do becoming a mistake. Even if you’ve made a few mistakes. I think there’s always a path waiting if you’re willing to silence the noise around you and really tune into your gut.
You have to clean up the environment around you. You have to be aware of what you’re consuming. And you have to filter through the distractions, and eliminate the ones that don’t serve your purpose.
Following our intuition for life is the thing that I think we’re missing the most, and we’re more scared than ever to do it. Mainly, I think, because our environment is so littered with garbage at every turn, that we’re just not able to tune in to ourselves.
Judging
The thing I judge people the most harshly about is not doing the things they want. And it’s probably because that’s when I’m the harshest critic of myself. When I think about something I want to do and then don’t follow through on it. Or find myself a year later, two years later, three years later, still talking about that thing and never having done it. That is for sure the thing that pisses me off the most, and it’s the thing that can keep me trapped in my head the most.
Because when I’m not acting on something I want, or something I want to do or try, that’s when I feel the most stuck. So, when I see it or hear it from other people, it causes the biggest reaction from me. Because I don’t want them to sit with that stuck feeling, the way I have so many times.
I know how awful that stuck feeling is, and I also know how liberating it is, and euphoric even, when you finally do the thing you’ve been thinking about and wanting to do. In my experience, it doesn’t always mean going full fledged and making it happen right away even. Sometimes just exploring the idea more fully, and allowing it to spread its wings, going from a thought to a possibility, can be enough.
There’s been times when there’s something I want to do that’s eating away at me, and then when I go and actually explore it, I realize I didn’t want it in the first place. But I needed to do the work so I could clear my mind.
I just feel like too many people with the means to change their life never do. And they sit stuck with what ifs in their mind that were never given the chance to become possibilities. And I think a life spent that way is the ultimate waste, and the saddest.
Stop saying this is the best time to be alive.
Who’s it the best time for? Not the people in Gaza. Not the people in Syria. Not the people in Ukraine. Not the people in North Korea. Not the people in Venezuela. Not the people in much of Africa. Not the nearly 5 million innocent people who have been killed either by direct or indirect warfare in the middle east since 9/11. Not the hundred of thousands of homeless and drug addicted people living in the richest country in the world. Not the 50+ million people who don’t have enough nutritious food to be healthy, stress free, and prosperous. And not the many more who suffer on the fringe both here in America and around the world, who’s storied we don’t even know about because they aren’t dire enough to make the news.
So who is it the best time to be alive for? The people that say it. The people that have the privilege of believing that.
Perhaps it is the best time for information. The best time for resources. The best time for medicine. The best time for innovation. But despite that, there remains a significant portion of the population, the overwhelmingly majority in fact, who’s not the best time to be alive.
So again, please stop saying it is the best time to be alive because there are billions of people around the world who would argue against that, and be right.
In fact I would argue that for anyone who’s conscious, awake, aware, and paying attention, that it is actually the worst time to be alive. To be able to see so clearly the possibilities and watch how they are undermined and squandered at every turn by greedy, maniacal, and heartless people with zero morals, ethics, or integrity.
Yes, for those of us paying attention, there has never been a worse time to be alive.
Two random thoughts
If you start with the assumption that everyone is actually good, then you can start to try and figure out where they went wrong that made them not so. But if you start with the assumption that everyone is bad, then you automatically dismiss them, and there’s nothing to try and figure out.
News is actually just gossip. They’re just telling you what someone did, or what some country did, or what some group did, the same way a friend, colleague, or family member might. They’re not telling you why or even interested in knowing why, the same way a friend, colleague, or family member wouldn’t. They’re only interested in spreading the gossip and hijacking your attention and your emotions.