Kindness without discipline

We will find ourselves in many places throughout our life and in each place we will have different obligations to ourselves and the people around us. As Elie Wiesel famously said, “Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

We must do good when it is in our power to do it.

In our conduct have two main bulkheads: kindness and discipline. If we use either one without consideration for the other, we abuse ourselves or others.

If we expect kindness and grace from others without ever acknowledging discipline or boundaries, this is enablement. We can do this to ourselves as well. Kindness to myself without discipline is the enablement of bad habits in the name of “compassion.”

And discipline without kindness leads to a broken spirit and self-sabotage. It dries up the fountain of inspiration and motivation in even the most spirited youth.

We must find a balance between the two in what we expect of ourselves, what we show toward others, and what we expect from others. Kindness and discipline. So powerful together, so harmful when apart.

Note: Much of my thoughts today are stolen from an email newsletter I received this week from Mark Appel. Like I often do, I am writing what resonates with me to lodge it more deeply in my psyche.

There’s a reason it’s called “Artificial” Intelligence

With the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT text-prompt application in late 2022, there has been a firestorm of excitement surrounding artificial intelligence and the future of knowledge work.

There is a response of near-apathy from some, while others have an apocalyptical view of the rise of AI. I believe that both extreme views are rooted in a misunderstanding of how AI and machine learning work on a granular level.

The idea that AI and programs like ChatGPT are versions of organic and self-conscious intelligence as we find in humans is simply not the case. At least not yet.

The human brain is unique in its ability to maintain a constant state of awareness of its surroundings and the circumstances of any data that it receives. It then can process information and formulate responses to external prompts that are useful, appropriate, wise, calculated, etc… all depending on the external circumstances and the goals toward which the human is striving.

Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, relies on its neural network. Neural networks are static infrastructures that receive training, but do not change their intelligence or output depending on the circumstances–most of the time they don’t even know there are circumstances.

These artificial intelligence tools return answers based on rules formed within them and they only change when they are re-trained.

Even the best AI programs at the moment are limited by the combinations of known topics that they can pull information from and present them in other known styles of presentation.

This makes tools such as ChatGPT useful for generating ideas and creating outlines, but the need for adding context, adjusting for the reader, adding deep and specific technical knowledge, and ensuring factual correctness is still very much needed from a human.

Rather than seeing AI as a tool that might take away our jobs or control the world, it’s more likely that AI will become the way that everyday people learn to use automation in their own homes and personal lives in the same way that Windows brought about an operating system that brought the PC into the common man’s home.

The 30-30-30 Method

No matter what business you run, it is essential to talk to your potential customers and listen to your actual customers. Learn what they’re looking for and listen to what they need help with. Use this information to make small changes to your business and you will reap long-term benefits.

I’m a big fan of Justin Welsh and his modern content-first marketing style. He has a 30-30-30 system that he often talks about:

  • Spend 30 minutes per week talking to prospective customers.

  • Spend 30 minutes per week figuring out how to solve their problems.

  • Spend 30 minutes per week creating content about those problems.

When you create content, you will attract more potential customers (if you are creating content that your customers would enjoy) and those are people whom you might now talk to and learn from. This is ultra-valuable data.

The more you talk to your people, the more you can begin to predict what they want and how you can serve those needs. Whether you’re a construction company or a content creator on YouTube you can learn more about how to serve your audience and meet them where they have needs and are willing to spend money.

Listen to your target audience, find ways to help them, create content that addresses those needs to attract more of those people who could potentially hire you or buy your product/service.

Shaking the box of rocks

The famous saying “Fortune favors the bold” is a good reminder that we must venture if we wish to gain. However, a careless venture would make you lose everything. Take, for example, Pliny the Elder, who is commonly attributed as coining the term when daring to head toward the powerful eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in search of his friend. He died in that expedition and did not save his friend.

So, not all bold actions are rewarded, I guess. However, the courage to intelligently shake the box of rocks and move the proverbial chess pieces around the board will put you in a position to succeed and take advantage of opportunities that arise only because you dared to do something–to shake that box of rocks.

Waiting for our break is hard, but we must work diligently while we wait.

Thomas Edison put it well when he said, “Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.”

Find strength in the difficult moments

All is not lost when you face a setback. Disappointment comes to all of us in various ways. Maybe we lose a loved one, maybe the car breaks down, or maybe we lose our job. But all is not lost.

It’s just the beginning when disappointment strikes.

Greatness does not arise in you when things are easy and when you have everything handed to you. Greatness comes when you endure hardship and face tests. You are strengthened by disappointment in ways that nothing else can shape you. So don’t run from hardship when it arrives. Soak it in and embrace the change.

Only if we visit the darkest recesses can we know how beautiful the climb toward the top of the mountain is.

Always give your best effort and don’t let discouragement or worry derail your energy in giving that effort.

Battles with the resistance

As I think back on the past three and a half years, I reminisce on what have been some of the more difficult months of my life. Many things have contributed to the difficult moments, but I still can’t escape the many good things that have happened as well.

Probably the greatest thing of the battle with resistance (as Steven Pressfield would describe it) is the renewed vigor I have gained for working hard and prioritizing effectively.

My highest priority is protecting my ability to prioritize. That means doing the work I need to do every day to ensure I’m not crushed by urgent work that could have been fixed before it ever became urgent. Hard work first, optimization second.

If you don’t prioritize your life (put your needs first and organize your life,) someone else will.

Life has seasons of ease and brutality. If you can learn lessons in the brutal seasons, your seasons of ease will be a little bit better.

Waiting and waiting (is the hardest and dumbest part)

Don’t wait to be invited in. Don’t wait for the job to come to you. Don’t wait for your business to miraculously “take off.”

It comes down to you kicking the door in and taking what belongs to you. Do you want success? Go take it. It belongs to you, if only you’d step up, do the work, and seize the prize. Become so great that they can’t ignore you.

Don’t sit idle while the world happens to you. Go. Do. Happen. Break barriers. Do things that people can’t believe you could ever do. Prove them all wrong and do it yourself.

Same names

Not a deep thought today, but isn’t it interesting how few people have the exact same name as you?

There are a few names that are well-used, but not many people share the same first and last name (we’ll ignore middle names for a moment.)

Maybe it’s an American or European thing. I’m not sure, but I do know that I’ve never met someone with a name that even came close to my first and last name, Nathaniel Dodson.

Maybe we are all a little more unique than we thought.

Two keys to speaking and sharing information

As a content creator and educator online, I have a great interest in the methods that are used to convey information in interesting and engaging ways. Two of the primary thoughts that I run into are:

  1. Speak and teach in an approachable way. Don’t be too technical with an audience of beginners and bore them, but don’t be overly basic with an audience of experts and offend them.

  2. How you speak and convey information is just as important as what you’re speaking about. The best story ever told, told in a dry and uninspiring way will leave the whole room bored to tears.

Whenever you’re able, learn who your audience is so you can share appropriate information in a way they can consume best. And speak in a way that is not scripted (even if your speech is written beforehand!) Speak with inspiration and passion, as though the words are coming to you in that very moment. This gives weight to your story and makes everything feel more immediate to the audience. It will also cause everything you say to have more impact and draw in those who are listening.

Wear out your shoes

Our world is obsessed with self-betterment. It’s part of why I write these blog entries every day. I’m practicing thinking about ideas I see, hear, and read about and regurgitating them into these short articles.

Self-betterment often leads young people into the trap of focusing all of their effort on optimization. The adage “Work smarter, not harder” is misapplied by practically everyone and is very dangerous to any good work ethic.

Hard work is the price of admission. You can’t get smarter unless you’re working. Like trying to steer a ship, it must be moving first.

Rather than trying to save my energy and time as if I’ll get it back later, I want to do the hard work first and figure out working smarter once I know how the work feels.

Wear out your shoes, not your sheets.

Adversity makes the man

If adversity makes men, and property makes monsters, why do we all want prosperity? Probably, because prosperity is comfortable. But what does that then say about comfort? The dichotomy of discomfort so often being so good for us is interesting.

Disappointment

Disappointment is a harsh reality that sets in and forces you to readjust your view of the world and your assessment of the situation. Adjustments are needed and disappointment is the emotion that helps you make the required changes.

We can't let difficulty and disappointment drown us. Perspective is the road that is elevated beside the ditch of disappointment. With perspective we can observe and take good from disappointment. We can also avoid the traps disappointment would have us believe.

This trap is that disappointment is certain and permanent. But it's not permanent.

Where there is no end to love, there is no end to grief, but that unbounded love is reserved for a precious few things in life. Most of what disappointments us doesn’t get our unbounded love, so we should understand that the grief of it will pass quickly.

Despair and blind optimism are opposite one another and we have to walk the road of wisdom between both. It helps to work while you walk that road. Walking and thinking, without working, seems to push us into despair or blind optimism (which only sets you up for more disappointment.)

Try not to linger and fall for the trap that disappointment is permanent.

"Courage isn't having the strength to go on. It is going on when you don't have the strength." –Napolean Bonaparte

Modern marketing

Marketing has changed so much in the past twenty years. Gone are the days of spending $10k per year on ads in the Yellow Pages and waiting for the phone calls to roll in.

No matter if you have your own business, a personal brand, or a product, marketing yourself or your business is a part of doing business or getting a job.

What you share online is important, but that is such a big issue to consider that I will set it aside for the purposes of this short blog post I am writing today.

The key is to promote yourself online every day. The market is not too saturated and people are not going to grow sick of you. Well, eventually people will get tired of you, but it takes such an incredible amount of over-sharing of useless, valueless information before people grow sick of you.

We must promote ourselves every day. Share your work, your brand, your opinions, everything.

The people that love you will become customers. The people who choose to follow you will become students. Some might hate you, but who cares? Don’t live for other people. And some will ignore you, but so what, they ignore you anyway if you don’t share.

Virtually nobody shares themselves and their projects enough. Do a little bit every day.

More talent brings more judgment

The more you learn and the more skills you acquire, the more severely people will judge you. The expectations will be higher and the disappointment deeper when you don’t live up to your talents or wisdom.

But there is an equalizer in the game of life that allows you more time to sort things out even when you bear the burden of great expectations. It is to live a good and honest life. To fear the talents or wisdom you’ve been given rather than use them to domineer over other people.

To truly appreciate your talents or wisdom, learn to be nothing and esteem yourself as low as possible. When you do this, you will think more highly of others. This is a much better practical wisdom that will act as a sort of highlighter to the talent and intelligence you have.

It is better to feel charitable than know how to define it. What good is it to know all the good things if we don’t do the good things?

A few small problems

A few small problems or a few small instances of carelessness are no problem at all. To be flawed is to be human. But when these problems or carelessness become the pattern, there is great cause for concern.

Arrogance and self-improvement (even when you win)

Success can be the enemy of future success.

We tend to make the grave mistake of giving ourselves lots of credit for success and not examining the circumstances. Our opponent may have been weak or made foolish mistakes that day. Maybe the financial markets were ripe for the taking and we stumbled into an arbitrage at just the right moment. Perhaps the huge client was having a great day when they signed on and became your biggest customer.

We cannot control the markets or our competition, but we do have a degree of control over our deficiencies and shortcomings.

To safeguard against this conceit that appears in us, we should adopt a system of rigorous self-criticism. It’s not enough to see the weakness or advantages in a situation, we must find the weaknesses in ourselves and improve them.

“Focus on improving yourself” is a valuable lesson for us all.

But few can do this because the nectar of victory is both sweet and intoxicating. You have to find a way to force yourself to believe that conceit is bad and that you could have done better–even when you win. Self-importance or vanity does not put a person in the right frame of mind to do work. If you win and don’t improve, you’re only waiting to lose.

Optimization is the enemy of innovation

Innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world. A great invention itself is not innovation, rather its use in an innovative way is what makes it an innovation.

Innovation generally requires a complete teardown and rebuilding from the ground up. Because of that, only the ones crazy enough to think they can change the world, do. Lost in there are the ones who were crazy enough to try to innovate and failed and lost.

It is riskier to innovate, but the reward is much greater.

Because of the cost and the risk, we will often spend immense time “optimizing” rather than innovating. Many so-called “innovations” are merely collections of many optimizations rather than some truly new thing.

Rather than optimizing an existing tool, what about building a new and better one? Optimize the code, or build something new from the ground up?

When we focus too much on optimizing, we stagnate. Optimization is the enemy of innovation. Look for new tools, new methods, and new ways rather than devoting so much time trying to optimize the stuff that needs to be rebuilt.

The seasons of life (and work)

When you operate at the top level you aren’t defined by your failures. You are defined by the body of work you create when viewed all together. Even the Chess World Champion loses a game here and there, but he wins matches. A chess match is a cluster of games played and the aggregate score determines the ultimate winner.

There was a 20-game match played in the 1995 chess world championship between then-world champion Garry Kasparov and Indian powerhouse Viswanathan Anand. (Notably, this match was played at the top of the World Trade Center in New York City.)

In that chess match, the two men played to a draw in each of the first eight games. In the ninth game, Anand won. Kasparov was now down one full game, however, he would go on to win four of the next five games and, ultimately retain his world championship with a final score of 10.5 to Vishy’s score of 7.5.

The loss did not matter because, in the context of the 18 games they played, Kasparov was more effective–despite having a moment of loss.

When we have a bad day, look at the whole week. One bad day in a good week isn’t that bad. One bad week, when we’ve had a great month, is easier to swallow. A slow month of work isn’t so bad when we’ve had the best year we can remember.

However, if we don’t “zoom out” and look at a larger pool of data, we tend to obsess over a bad event, bad day, bad season, etc…

Life has seasons, some up, some down. But if we stay the course and live a good and valuable life we can weather the storms and minimize the negative impact. The losses don’t define you, it’s how you recover from the losses and continue working that matters.

The Region-Beta Paradox

It is easier to live an uncomfortable life than do the work to make life better. We will choose to remain in a situation that is bad, but passable, rather than working hard enough to elevate our life to a new level.

When something is bad, but not catastrophic, we have a strange tendency to accept the difficult position rather than fight our way to a more satisfactory one.

I remember reading an author quite a while ago (I can’t remember who it was) that said we make lasting changes in our life most often when we endure some great emotional event.

This hypothesis suggested by my mystery author reminds me of a phenomenon called the “region-beta paradox.” This is the idea that people often recover faster from more difficult or traumatic experiences than from less difficult ones.

The idea is that the human body produces a stronger defense against more traumatic events, thus the person can handle major stressful events in a much more capable manner than less stressful events.

This major reaction is the agent of change and, I think, can be applied to most parts of life.

You will stick with a job that is just OK if you’re able to make ends meet. You will stick with that mediocre job when you could go out and hunt down a better job because finding a new job involves risk, stress, and hard effort.

However, if the job is horrible or doesn’t pay enough to cover your bills, you feel forced to break out and find a better situation.

The more dramatic situation forces you to trigger the systems that respond with action. Taking action results in a better situation, despite the short-term discomfort. Taking action is virtually always the correct answer to the question.

There is a reason nagging injuries nag, but the broken leg heals in eight weeks. The major trauma is effectively corrected because we reacted with major action (i.e. get to the hospital and let the professionals fix you up.)

When life is difficult and you aren’t making the change you should, it is good when things go from bad to worse. It is from the “worse” that you will summon the appropriate response to change your life, business, and conduct for the better.

It is better to suffer short-term pain than sleep-walk through comfortable but unsatisfying mediocrity for your entire life. Embrace the pain and work harder than you ever have. Learn and grow from the bad situation. It only gets better if you make it better. So work on making it better.