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Much of my life has been spent reading and ruminating on things and then, quite quickly, forgetting those things. I’ve made a mental note (the irony does not escape me) to act more. You can, if you so choose, read endless articles, books and listen to endless podcasts that discuss the meaning of life and what you should be doing with your time. You can, if you so choose, define success for yourself (though society typically has a way of defining this for you.) You can ponder all of these things and convince yourself that you’re making progress to some goal-some North Star in the distance, on the horizon.

Action is different. You cannot lie about action. It is binary. Either you acted, or you didn’t. Either you moved closer to the thing you said you’d move closer to, or you stood still. You cannot say you will pick up your children from school and then not pick them up (without some pretty interesting conversations happening with your spouse afterwards.) For all my years pondering and thinking about things, outside of regurgitating ideas from some other authors, I am no closer to a capital T truth about life, or meaning or consciousness, or money, or any of the other things that fascinate me. I will, instead, focus on action, to see where I go when one foot lands in front of the other. To which direction I move and then, after I’ve moved, take a moment and thank about what’s next, knowing that the thought itself is almost irrelevant without taking the next step, and then the one after that, and then the one after that.

You have to be ok with leaking ships, and knowing that, throughout your life, and throughout your everyday existence, you will want to fix more things than you actually can. Sometimes, by a large factor. If you push aggressively against this, if you try and have 4 arms instead of 2, or brrrrrr yourself into working harder, you’ll generally fall deeper into the efficiency and productivity hole, and become ever more frustrated. If you, instead, accept that this is a natural part of life, it may help clarify the important things, so that the other permanently fall off. They become so unimportant, that they are no longer leaks.

Quite often, without you even knowing most of the time, you’ll present yourself with a problem. And then your mind will immediately race to solutions. The mind will then internally debate which one makes the most sense, and take into account factors like speed, cost, affect/effect on others, and a million other tiny things, and, after a period of time, the mind will come up with an imperfect solution. You’ll then find a myriad number of reasons that you never thought of before that confirm that the decision your are about to, or have made, is the right one. This is all about control. Controlling variables you can’t possibly control. Finding solutions to problems that allow you to move onto the next problem and try and solve that one. There is no end to this. It’s one wave leading you to the other.

The other possibility is to imagine a world where you control very little, if anything. A world where a decision leads to an incalculable number of other things that come into existence that you would have never dreamed of. This possibility, in this world, allows you to simply view these things. View them as they pass and view them as they turn into the next thing. And instead of solving or controlling anything, you let go of one thing, and then another, until you ultimately realize there’s not much you can control at all. And once you do that, you can let go of more and more things, and just view them as they pass by.

People generally use the term “agency” in some manufactured way. Its use complicates the simplicity of the term. Agency is freedom. Agency is choice. When someone says that they have given up agency, what they’re saying in a roundabout way is that they, themselves, have given up the ability to choose something for themselves. The discomfort surrounding this is a direct result of just how fundamental agency is for our growth as individuals.

People typically say they want to feel in control of their decision making and time. That’s not entirely right. People do not wish to give up control of their decision making and time. They’re perfectly happy not making a decision or not choosing wisely how their time, so long as they are the author.

As you age, agency, more than money or power or fame or anything else, becomes more prominent, more cherished. The sandglass keeps pouring out, and you grasp for whatever specks are left.

People always tend to comment about the innocence of children. They say children’s innocence has been “ripped away” or that “innocence has been taken” by some tragic event. That’s very true and incredibly unfortunate.

Perhaps the more interesting part of a child’s (or a pet’s) innocence, is that the innocence is the default position. There are no zero sum games. Everything is new and wondrous and available and present. It’s pure consciousness. As a parent, when you observe this, yes, you find it heartwarming, but also eye opening. We are, all of us, born into a positive relationship with everything and everyone. We are, all of us, at one time early on, transfixed by the wonder of the mundane and the seemingly unending joy of play. We are unlimited and infinite.

We say we lose these things because of “life” but that may be false. Life doesn’t take away innocence inasmuch as the guardians of innocence mandate you abandon it. Imagine if we were never required to.

Between the endless business books on strategy and messaging and the 5 things to do to generate revenue, lies a really clear lesson from all of the old stories and all of the old books and all of the old fables. This lesson (and these lessons) have always been there because there is nothing new under the sun, but people have to package these lessons in different ways to sell different things, each time they do that, they bring a particular opacity to the thing, so that it seems much harder to see when it really isn’t.

Help people.

Help people find a home. Help people find a car. Help people find a hammer. Help people find a nail. Help people navigate medicine. Help people reconnect to themselves.

If you can help people, and you can do it from a place of love, rather than a place of expectation, you’re 3/4 of the way there. If you can help people and you can keep your costs down, you are 4/5 of the way there. If you can help people and you can charge more later, and the people are still begging for your help, you’re all the way home. You’ve created what Warren Buffet calls a moat. A barrier around you that your competitors cannot get around or climb through.

The most important part here is not to have expectations. If you expect that people will come to you, you will be disappointed. If you expect you will make ‘x” you will be disappointed. If you expect that you will grow to “x” number of people, you will be disappointed. You will be disappointed if you don’t grow to this magical number and you will be disappointed if you do (because you thought it would feel much better.)

The first step is simply to help. The next step will come naturally after that. If you listen long enough, you’ll know what the step after that will be.

You may not have all the answers, but you will always have your truth.

The idea that you should push past your comfort zone is prescribed as if Advil for a headache. This pushing will lead to “growth” and “facing challenges.” It will lead to strength and new adventures.

No one asks themselves why they believe this is true. Who asks you to push? And why do they ask?

Sometimes you’ll find that not pushing, or not doing, makes you feel just as good, and leads to other adventures. Sometimes you’ll find that listening to your body and embracing fear, rather than pushing against it, as if in conflict, allows you to understand that leaps are only beneficial if you think they are.

In “business”, (I put quotes around business because it’s often referred to as if it’s some separate arena in life, when it’s not), perception seems to overtake many other things. So many of my colleagues in law go above and beyond to mention that they have been “mentioned” or “quoted” in publications, on websites, etc. This, in some very odd and old fashioned metric, is to somehow display authority, or knowledge. You pay people for this. Lots of money. And, theoretically, because other people will see that you have been prominently (usually, at most, a sentence) featured in one of the hundreds of articles published daily (pushed) by this site, YouTube channel,etc., they will then turn to you and hire you.

Or.

Or you could just treat your existing base extravagantly well. You can foster trust and a real relationship. You can work on issues both present and not and you make yourself so indispensable that they have no choice but to hire you.

The first option is taking an Omega 3 pill in hopes of staving off dementia and heart disease. You don’t really know if it’s working but you feel as if you’re doing something, and it’s pretty easy to just take the pill. The second option is a progressive daily workout, even on days that you don’t want to work out, that will no doubt show you it’s effectiveness over a defined period of time.

You always have a choice between these two. Between fostering real connection with those you work with or trying to create a mystique of authority. Between creating relationships where you can help others and they can help others or prominently displaying your own name in some made up zero sum game. Many, many people choose the latter. The easy. The immediate. The few that choose the former are the quiet ones. You may not hear from them, but they tend to survive for much, much longer.

A good exercise is to really think about your own mortality. Not in some distant future decades and decades away, but now. Right now. Next 2 months. Next two weeks. You don’t know what to do with it. It’s frightening and some say illuminating, but most of the exercises center around what you find “valuable” in this. To discover where you spend your time. This is fine, but, recently, I’ve begun to hone in more on the visceral aspect of it. What’s it like to not see the couch again. To not taste water. To not be stuck in traffic. I focus, more and more, on the ordinary, and how much I will miss the ordinary things. A bird call. Getting the mail. Walking into a movie. A wave crashing. All of these things things will be gone forever. They will have been extinguished for you. This needn’t result in some huge epiphany or quitting your job or some goal; you put too much pressure on yourself when you do that. Instead, just think about what you are aware of every day and how you won’t be aware of those things anymore, at some point, hopefully decades away, but maybe just a few seconds away. Be aware of what’s in front of you. The light at the intersection. Wind. The feeling of humidity. A beeping of a cash register. Smiles. All of these things are here for maybe an instant. You, again, don’t have to do a thing with any of this, but simply notice it. Your alive simply by doing so.

The aim of this blog is to share thoughts about consciousness, life, business, time, mortality, wisdom, and truth. Frankly, there is no aim. I just wanted to write my thoughts and put them somewhere.