Everyone else is thinking about themselves

Reform must come from within, not from without. Nobody can convince you to be better or to want to be better. That must come from within you. A sort of spiritual change must take place.

Just as other people can’t convince you to change, so you should realize that you can’t change others or make them better.

It’s a strange dilemma because when you have a genuine desire for good toward others, it is impossible to let them destroy themselves without trying to interject. Even when you know those interjections will be fruitless, there is a deep inward force that practically compels you to try to do something, anything.

When a close friend, child, or sibling picks up a bad drug habit, or stops caring for their children, or any other number of things that are openly and apparently destructive to themselves and those around them, do you have a right to speak out? Or should each of us stand by quietly and wait for the destructive phase to pass and help clean up the mess?

Rightly or wrongly, you will often be labeled "controlling" or "nosey" (or any number of colorful epithets) by those whom you care for. The assumption is that you don’t really care about them. The assumption is that you simply want to control what they should or shouldn’t do. But the reality is that everyone else is thinking about themselves as much as you are thinking about yourself and therefore no one has any time to think about you and worry about controlling you as much as you think.

To watch a loved one fall into a destructive phase of life is sad and painful, but it’s impossible to help a person who doesn’t want to help themselves.

Believe first and figure it out later

We fail more in our imagination than we fail for real. When we do that, we stop ourselves from trying at all.

I am convinced that is the mindset that each of us must overcome if we even want to give ourselves a chance at being successful at anything we do. Whether it’s your sports game, your job search, your dream of owning your own business, or taking on a challenging new hobby.

The first step is to believe you can do it. Without self-belief, you doom yourself to almost certain failure.

Writing to get excited about

I spend five or ten minutes each day writing these blog posts. The exercise has a few goals, none of which are to get this blog popular. They are:

  1. Write a tiny bit every day. (Create something every day!)

  2. Process ideas I am reading about and retain more info by writing about them.

  3. Improve my writing style.

I want to improve my writing because I like writing, but I want to be more of a wordsmith and use words and sounds to shape more compelling stories. I get envious when I open emails, blogs, and books of good writers. They have such a firm command of the language and a creative ability when it comes to word choice.

The solution is to spend more time writing each day. At least, I think that is the solution. More targeted practice usually means you improve your skills.

There is a 30-minute writing exercise called 10-10-10.

  • Choose a topic or idea.

  • Spend 10 minutes writing 500 words.

  • Spend 10 minutes distilling that into 100 words.

  • Spend 10 minutes distilling that into 10 words.

Now that’s a writing exercise I can get excited about.

Yesterday or tomorrow

Don’t be obsessed with what you didn’t do yesterday. And don’t be obsessed with what you will do tomorrow. Do good work today. Right now. While you can.

Your life shouldn't revolve around yesterday or tomorrow. Now is what matters most. Use it well.

Working, Overworking, and Impact

When we don’t work, we don’t generate impact, or change, or value. We also don’t make a living. Most of us understand this simple concept.

This idea of work = generation of value can lead us into a trap. The trap is overworking.

When we overwork, we lose all the leisure time that allows us to recover from our efforts. In this way overworking does not generate value, but rather it generates a deleterious effect that causes us to create more stuff, but less valuable stuff.

If we could find a way to balance our work with rest and prioritize the important things when we do work, we would find a better balance which would lead us to better results in the work we do.

Working is good and gives success. Then we fall into overworking which leads to burnout and diminishing returns. Then our artwork loses the impact that made it special.

Engaged detachment

Detach from the moment and stop treating yourself like you’re so important. If everybody hates the art you create, so what? They stand to lose nothing, they stand to gain nothing. You lose by not creating and you might gain by creating. So why not create?

When you have detached from the moment, your own importance, your own entitlement, and worrying about whether people like you or not, you are able to engage in what you need to do to get better.

Stop worrying about people’s reactions to your work, but use the feedback to make yourself better every day.

How to make things more difficult today

Yesterday doesn’t matter when you consider what you could do today. It doesn’t matter if you’ve lost the game 100x in a row. That was yesterday and today is a clean slate.

You can take your clean slate each morning and fill it with regret from what you didn’t do. If you do that, you are filling your potential for the day or even the hour with bad stuff that only sets you behind.

You put yourself into a sort of social debt that only makes work right this moment more difficult. Forget the failures and shortcomings of yesterday, they make everything more difficult today.

Reason and emotion

People get very frustrated trying to convince others that they are right. I’ve seen the Facebook threads.

But I believe that much of what people believe in and hold deeply, they have not come to those conclusions–or feelings–by any rational or well-thought-out process. Usually, there is an emotional event that causes us to change how we feel about different things in life. As life goes on, we have more moments that change us.

Thus, trying to use reason and logic and facts and whatever evidence you think you have to convince somebody else that you’re right is usually a fruitless endeavor.

You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themself into.

Hoping rather than working

The less we deserve good fortune, the more we find ourselves hoping for it.

Work to put yourself in a place where you don’t need a miracle and you don’t rely on so-called “luck” to bail you out.

The flexible routine

I am a creature of habit in many ways, but the creative side of me enjoys spontaneous change and adjustments on the fly.

When I start new things and dedicate portions of time to new projects, my routine tends to suffer while I sort out how to make it all work together again.

I like to read and write and work out just about every day. I like to get my work in order and have a solid understanding of the goals and tasks of the day each morning. Doing that stuff each day takes time and finding the time to keep doing that stuff in a new routine isn’t always easy.

But I don’t want to be so dedicated to anything that I am not constantly learning and stretching my mind. I want to keep reading and writing each day. The same goes for my body and general health.

The trick is balancing what I believe is good for the body and mind with the work I need to get done to make a positive impact in the world.

Wasted time and making more wasted time

Wasting time is something I am good at doing. I’m even better at allowing that wasted time to bother me and affect my mood as I continue working through the day. It usually leads to me wasting even more time.

The time that has passed is time that is gone. I have been trying to use it as a reminder to take advantage of each moment I have and not worry about the context of how this hour or that hour fits into my day of work.

When I start feeling like I am falling behind, that’s when wasted time negatively affects me. But you’re only falling behind if you’re wasting time focusing on the time you’ve already wasted. Use this moment right now well, that’s all you can do.

Talking loud and being irreverent

The best performances come when the performer has skin in the game. The more you stand to lose, the greater you will elevate and sacrifice to achieve great things.

How can you raise the stakes? It’s simple. Talk a big game and set high expectations. Dream out loud and tell them what you will do and be brash, irreverent, and speak it from the chest.

Make it easy for them to hate you and mock you if you lose. The more it hurts to lose, the more you’ll learn to hate losing. When you hate losing, you find a way to win.

The problem is, you don’t want to embarrass yourself and you’re afraid that people won’t like you. So you’re quiet and boring and nobody expects you to be great.

I have a theory that the more you can intentionally make things more uncomfortable for yourself, the more you will push yourself to succeed. Those who genuinely push themselves to succeed, do.

Can you make it uncomfortable for yourself? Or is it too scary to step out and make yourself a target?

And then did I hesitate?

Interesting that my last blog post was about moving forward without hesitation and then I immediately miss two blog posts in a row. It was actually because my sister-in-law got married and I had to get my family to the far away location where they decided to have the wedding.

It’s a reminder to myself that I should probably have a few extra blog posts “in the hopper” but then I remember that I write these blog posts as a daily writing exercise and not to entertain the reader. That’s why I miss a few days here and there. Here I make the rules and I get all the excuses I want.

Let nothing cause you to hesitate

Everybody has failures. Don’t live like somebody who is immune to failure, it makes you fear failing and hesitant to try.

Successful people aren’t successful because they avoid failure. They are successful because they don’t let the fear of failing stop them. The person who hesitates is the person who fails. Let nothing cause you to hesitate.

Laughing and learning

When you make them laugh, you know you’ve connected. Laughter is an involuntary response and a genuine laugh is easy to see and feel. When you make them laugh it is one of the only true moments left when you know exactly where you stand with your counterpart.

So, make them laugh.

The razor of self-love

My generation is obsessed with self-betterment on one hand and self-love on the other. Maybe the argument can be made that some self-love is self-betterment, and I would agree that bettering yourself is loving toward yourself.

There is a popular breed of self-love that seems to consist merely for the purpose of finding excuses for underachieving and laziness. Often that excuse falls broadly under the umbrella of “self-love.”

But don’t please your current self by slapping your future self in the face.

That’s not self-love, that’s indulgence masquerading as self-love.

Proverbs for Paranoids

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers. That’s proverb number three in Thomas Pynchon’s “Proverbs for Paranoids.”

It’s an interesting list, but this proverb #3 is a reminder to remain outside of the expectations of the moment in our creative work. Ask questions about the questions, you’re presented with. Look at the “sides” of the expectations or trends. What makes them special and why must I adhere?

If you get stuck asking the wrong questions, or following the wrong trends nothing else matters in your work. You’re cutting off your potential creative brilliance before it ever has a chance to flourish.

Be open to everything, question it all, and don’t close yourself off to what appears crazy.

“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” – Steve Jobs

When a weakness is also a strength

The weakness of machine learning and computing power is that it does not consider the circumstances. This is also a strength.

The hammer does not care what you use it to build, it simply pounds the nail. If your idea is good or bad, it does not care. It does its work.

This is a weakness of machine learning and AI because it limits the help it can give us. However, our ability to understand the context of a situation weakens us as much as it helps us.

Context tells the bomb expert that he could die and makes him jittery. The bomb robot just defuses the bomb and doesn’t even know it could be destroyed.

A machine is not affected by its mistakes because it doesn’t even remember the last thing it did and it doesn’t know what it will do until the moment it does it.

For the human, the worst thing we can do after a loss is let it affect us and diminish our abilities and bring on more losses.

We enter the Kübler-Ross model of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The computer is focused on the one thing it’s doing right now. Success or failure doesn’t exist and it moves to the next thing and does it just as well.

We get demoralized, but computers do not. Computers don’t have pride, ego, or ambition and they don’t get embarrassed after a mistake. They get right back to work with no detrimental effects.

It would be interesting if we could use our humanity to become a little less human when the circumstances call for it. Some humans can do that, the greatest baseball closers don’t care about losing the game, they make the best pitch. Special Forces operators are cold and calculated under some of the most intense pressure a human can face.

What if we could do the same in business? Learn from a loss and immediately forget about it as if it never happened. Even if a position seems completely lost, we would still work as if we were guaranteed a win.

That’s a focus I would love to have, and maybe someday I will.