Category: Uncategorized

We often set goals without exploring why they are our goals in the first place. “My goal is to buy a huge house” is a common one, though one can desire this huge house because of some other, deeper desire, having nothing to do with the house itself. You may want a huge house because it’s a clear sign to an insecure younger self that they’ve become successful, and thereby they matter to people that paid them no attention. “I want to run a marathon” may be a goal that results from only feeling like your true self when you strain what you believe you’re capable of. A fear of sitting still. A fear of death.

To distill the true nature of goal setting, ask yourself why. Why is this my goal? When you answer that question, ask why again, and finally a third time. Get as deep as you can. Understand the reasoning behind the goal, and understand yourself much more in the process.

Using the external to fill the internal never works because you cannot feed feelings. “More” silences the ego for a moment, but it quickly returns to ask why you don’t have more, and why you’re not good enough to get it. Comparing yourself to others fills you with shame, instead of gleeful abundance.

Instead, we must ask ourselves what it is we’re seeking with more. What we’re missing now with “enough” and what makes us think that once we cross the bridge to “enough”, we wont find ourselves in the same place we are now. “More” is a symptom. Enough is a balm.

Reboot, by Jerry Colonna, asks a marvelous question: “How am I complicit in creating the conditions I wish to avoid?” It’s a very stealthily difficult, probing question to think about. One of the things it may bring to the forefront is how many of us try and not disappoint others, and thereby we very much disappoint ourselves in the process. We live lives other people, we think, would want us to live. We do things we think others wish us to do. We put our emotions on auto pilot to be this “other” for someone else, while never taking the time to decipher if we, ourselves, wish to be the “other.” Another way: we never think about who we may be or what we may want inside. Disappointment has a way of taking up space in your head. It’s an automatic door closer to possibilities in the world that our true selves would be open to. It takes time to de-clutter the mind and understand our expectations for ourselves, rather than other’s expectations of us, but it’s a job well worth the effort.

The idea is this: You use something that has the capacity to do multiples of what you can do on your own, for your benefit. Leverage is selling a product where you make money while you sleep. Leverage is writing timeless content that does not expire. It’s allowing the thing to compound on it’s own with little to no input from you. Leverage usually does not require your presence and many times it’s better that you not be present, for fear of making an emotional mistake.

Your relationships-the relationships that mean the world to you, do not work on leverage. They work in a linear fashion. They compound slowly, but you have to constantly feed it, over and over. You must invest your own sweat, time, blood, tears, presence in these relationships. The payoffs are enormous. Lifechanging.

The trick is to use leverage in your work and financial sphere, to provide you the opportunities to use linearity in you personal one.

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.