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On Being Light
2023.11.19
Lindy Expectancy: 40 Weeks
Meditations: 1/1
Here I am, writing about something I’m not very good at doing myself. This one’s about using your past victories and accomplishments to be light, loose, like a feather.
Impetus: Flow State
You perform better when you’re in a flow state. I’m writing this in something of a flow state, right now.
You’ve been in one before, I’m sure. Time sort of just, well, flows. It feels like it passes over you as if it were a liquid, almost like you’re swimming in a warm pool. You’re focused on one thing, and you’re all in.
I won’t bore you with the research, but here’s the wikipedia page if you’re interested in reading about flow. In short, being loose and “in the zone” is one really good way to improve your performance.
That’s hard when you take things too seriously. But, hell, it’s hard to not take things seriously. When you’re in the middle of some event that will have a tangible impact on, at the very least, your short term prospects, it’s easy to be dramatic: this will be the single most important thing I do.
When you think like that, you’re not present. You’re worried about the future: what will happen a week from now? You’re worried about the past: How did I even get to the point? Where did I mess up?
It’s important to look into the future to evaluate consequences and the past to extract lessons, but, at some point, you’re just distracting yourself from the present moment. If you’re worried and tense, you’ll have a much harder time having fun & achieving victory.
Smiling at Death
I started reading Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins. It’s really quite awesome.
Goggins has been through more than I could ever imagine. And, he may very well be the only human being to get the BUD/S instructors to give up on breaking him before BUD/S was actually over. If you’re unfamiliar with BUD/S, it’s probably the most difficult military training on the planet imaginable & is a prerequisite to becoming a Navy SEAL.
BUD/S is literally fine tuned to break as many people as possible; keep in mind that the people who are crazy enough to sign up for it also are fully aware of the fact that it’s meant to be excruciatingly difficult to complete. Take drown proofing as an example, where trainees have their legs and hands bound and have to swim back and forth across a pool.
Still, Goggins beat the training in a way that maybe no one else has:
“...they told us to kneel down and dig holes with our hands, large enough to bury ourselves up to our neck for some unspecified length of time. I was smiling my ass off and digging deep when one of the instructors came up with a new, creative way to torture me… From then on the instructors stopped including me in their beatdowns.”
That above excerpt is absolutely mind bending. Goggins was able to find enough enjoyment in pain to smile back at men who pretty much had authority to do everything but kill him—although, there have been over 10 deaths in the program.
Goggins can smile while digging his own grave, and I still get nervous and uncomfortable before I get on a phone call with a potential client or investor?
“Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back.”
You can have fun with anything, if you want.
Experience as Armour
Goggins talks about a very interesting technique that I started implementing yesterday–it’s not only about looking at a challenge as an opportunity for growth, but also looking at it as the culmination of all other challenges in your life.
Looking at a challenge as growth has made sense to me for a while: do the hard thing and you’ll become harder. Reinvest in yourself and you’ll have more of yourself to give or reinvest later.
The other part, about the cumulative growth, is something that is not quite as immediately obvious for me; even if it intuitively makes sense, it takes focused attention to implement it. The idea is that when you’re facing a challenge, you remind yourself of everything you’ve already done to harden your mind.
It’s gaping mouth with teeth of icy terror still sends shivers down my spine.
When you’re facing a challenge, think of the most intense, psychotic stuff you’ve ever done. A few examples for me are 21 days straight of ice baths in the brutal, snowy Michigan winter, stopping a few days after I had gotten myself sick. Or running through so much pain in high school that I pretty much broke my own back (true story). Or teaching myself to program after one CS class and the very real feedback loop of Adi telling me my code was breaking in prod (thanks, Adi).
I did that stuff, and it was hard. That’s something I forget to remind myself of, and, to Goggins point, reminding yourself of it when you want to quit is part of the point of doing it.
Sure, it on its own is valuable, but you’re not getting all the value out of it if you just kind of forget about it.
The Stack of Evidence
I wrote about cognitive dissonance not very long ago. What I’m talking about now is related to that, but more on the side of using the past jumps to make the next jump.
The same graph as before, but now it’s more recursive; we use gap n-1 as evidence that we can overcome gap n
For me, I am stressed when I focus more on who I want to be than who I currently am. Something I’m not very good at is looking back and realizing how far I am from who I was.
“You don’t become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are.
Outwork your self doubt.”
Hormozi talks about having a stack of proof. I think Goggins is saying effectively the same thing. When you get stuck, it’s not necessarily only about having done things that are awesome and harder than you could have in the past, it’s also about reminding yourself that you’ve done those things.
That makes the challenge you’re facing seem much more doable. It’s reminding yourself that even though you’re climbing a mountain, you’ve already climbed half of it, and you’ve climbed another one before.
Gratitude Meditation
You may have noticed a meditation counter up at the top of this post. I’m pretty good at holding myself accountable to things, but I’ve been having a hard time doing that in regards to meditation.
I get impatient and anxious and want to do the next thing. It’s not that I truly don’t have time… I’m busy, but there’s no way I can’t make 10 minutes a day to just sit. As anti-social media as I am, I still probably spend at least 10 minutes a day doom scrolling on something.
I’m committing to doing gratitude meditation every day–it’s meditating with a focus on things you’re grateful for, whether it be a challenge you’ve overcome or people in your life who you’re glad to have or anything that matters to you. I’m off to a pretty good start, 1/1, but send me an angry email or phone call if you see that ratio at the top of these posts getting low.
When I’ve done it in the past, it’s been a chance to reframe on what matters. So what if part of your life feels like your life is falling apart? You’re not dead yet.
Having Fun
Being light makes everything more fun, and, as a great Canadian poet once said:
“Moment I stop having fun with it, I’ll be done with it.”
If you think that you’re in the right place, that’s less an invitation to quit and more of a reminder to have fun.
I’m really loving the quotes today, so here’s one more:
“With life, no matter what you do, you are all in. This is going to kill you. You might as well play the most magnificent game you can.”
So, play a magnificent game, but take it lightly. Life’s going to kill you regardless of whether or not you fuck up. Don’t try to fuck up, obviously, but if you do, it’s not the end of the world. Think about everything else you’ve gotten through and use it to scale the current problem.
You’ve already done plenty of stuff to make this easier, don’t forget about that when it actually matters.
Life’s a cumulative journey that just builds on itself. Keep going and smile at death.
Live Deeply,
