On Thriving & Proactivity

XXVII

2023.12.31

Meditations: 37/43

Last week we talked about one end of a continuum, surviving and reactivity. This week, we’ll talk about the other: thriving & proactivity.

The confidence to know that you’re taking the right actions, regardless of whether or not the world seems to agree with you.

New Year’s Resolutions

What would you be like if you reacted to every stimuli that you ran into in the wild world out there in the way that someone else wanted you to?

See that McDonalds ad for a BigMac? You’d buy the BigMac. See an advertisement for Gucci effectively saying if you don’t wear this you’re not good enough? Buy the Guicci, even if you can’t afford it. See the next post on Instagram, beckoning you to scroll? Scroll! 

If your actions define who you are, and everyone in the world is asking you to take actions, they’re asking you to become closer to the person who they want you to be, for better or for worse… and often, it’s for worse. 

When you switch to a proactive mindset, you ask yourself who you want to be, what kind of person you want to become.

Despite my natural distrust for doing what everyone is doing, I do believe that the New Year is a convenient time to take a step back and figure out who you want to be and how you want to get there. I think it involves aligning the short term, one year goals with your long term, life time goals, and then having the resolutions step out from that… and then, going all in.

Alignment

A great sentiment from the late and great Mr. Munger comes from instructions he gave to his business partner, Mr. Buffett: 

Who do you want to be today? 

Who do you want to be when you die? 

When you’re near death, what things will you have done that actually mattered?

If they’re big things, what can you do this calendar year to actually get there? 

What kind of enjoyments and passions will you wish you had experienced? What moments will you want more of, and which ones will you want less of?

Some things are obvious, some things are not so obvious; that being said, this is perhaps the best framework for thriving that I am aware of–it kicks your own life out so much further than to the 30 second hedonistic reactivity we all so often engage it, and even further than the typical one year or three year plan you see people making.

Once you know who you want to be, you can then ask how you can get there. What actions do you need to take to be that 100 year old wise version of yourself whose obituary reads like poetry? 

Even though it could shift every year, I think you might find that you’ve filtered out a lot of short term desires in favor of things that really matter by thinking in terms of centuries, rather than minutes; I doubt that your 100 year old self cares about getting the Model S as much as he does about the loving relationships.

Back Solving

With twilight you in mind, what does an appropriate one year goal look like? What ambitious target could you hit by the end of 2024 that 100 year old you would be proud of? And then, to find your “resolution,” the actions you’ll take to hit that goal, it’s relatively straightforward:

If you want to lose 100 pounds, walking three miles a day over the course of a year could do it. However, working out as intensely as you are able to at any given time for one hour a day and blacklisting certain foods from your diet has a much higher chance of getting you to lose that weight. 

Do you want to achieve the goal enough to go all in on it? Or do you just sort of want it? Does 100 year old you not actually care? Or is he or she laying on his or her deathbed wishing they had the results to show for trying harder in whatever field of combat we’re talking about?

Anxiety

In the past, I’ve written about cognitive dissonance; another way to word that post is simply that your anxiety is proportional to the distance between who you are and who you think you should be. 

I get anxious when I’m not doing the things that the person who I want to be would be doing. Maybe another good way to look for a New Year’s Resolution is to find where that sort of anxiety is for you and to abate it. 

What’s that part of your life that hasn’t been improving for the last x days with no obvious reason why? What’s that bad habit that you couldn’t break, or that goal that you keep missing?

I’ve spent a lot of time in 2023 trying to figure out why I keep failing at certain things. The failure makes me anxious, it makes me nervous. Even as I’m shifting into a proactive mindset, it feels like I’m missing something.

I’m still wondering “why” have I not gotten the results I wanted by doing something yet, have I taken enough of the action to get the results and they’ll just come later? I have this feedback loop in my head:

It’s wrong. It allows room for a “why” that’s beyond your control. “Why” have I not gotten results, “why” did someone else do less than me and end up better off?

That’s the issue: it’s still reactive! You are still waiting for the universe to give you the thumbs up on your actions.If the results don’t come, which they don’t always do, you get disheartened and quit. 

You’re still REACTING to the results.

Let’s try that again:

The actions should be building your confidence, not the results. You become proactive… you make a judgement about what actions you have to take to get the result, and even if it doesn’t come as soon as you think it should (it never does), you keep going. 

You’re not surviving & reacting, you’re not waiting for the universe to affirm that you were right; you’re thriving, you’re being proactive. If the universe doesn’t give you a pat on the back, you keep going. 

Hesitation

This is what it means to go all in on who you know you can be. It means proactively deciding the actions you must take, and taking them regardless of whether or not you get compensated for them immediately.

It’s that confidence, that sense of self assuredness, that even if the payoff doesn’t come today, it will come eventually.  

In my own life, I have been stopping myself from going all in in 2023. I was running a hedge fund, going to school, and trying to do a SaaS startup. Which thing should I have went all in on? Well, now I’m done with school, and am no longer involved in the hedge fund–so, what’s left is Ultima, the SaaS company.

This past month or so, I’ve been working, but I’ve been a little anxious. It feels like I’m afraid to jump, so I keep analyzing why I’m afraid to jump. I’m asking “Oh, is the parachute really packed right, is the landing zone clear, am I wearing enough clothes for how cold the fall will be?”

I’m making excuses disguised as real concerns. Maybe I’m waiting for permission, maybe I’m waiting for someone to push me out… but, no one’s going to push me out! No one’s going to give me permission!

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’m not working. I am working; the ‘problem’ is, I have no idea how far I am from my limit, and I’m trying to delicately figure it out. 

All In

My obituary hasn’t been written yet… I like Alex Hormozi’s take on the Munger obituary idea better, though. To hell with the obituary, because that can get distorted–the only judgment that matters when it comes to effort isn’t what others thought you did in comparison to what they thought you could do, it’s what you did in comparison to what you know you could do. 

To thrive, you have to go all in on yourself, whatever that looks like. Go all in on who you can be. 

Yes, I have resolutions that are optimized to reach my goals, and yes they are ambitious. What really matters, though, is whether at the end of every day, I’ve done everything I can to become the man I want to be when I’m near the end. 

I don’t know what kind of man or woman you want to be, but I’d like to think that if you’re reading this then the answer is a beautiful & noble & glorious one through and through. If that’s the case, then doing everything you can to become that person every day is a wellspring of inspiration from which your resolutions can flow.

I’ll leave you with a poem by Bukowski, one of my favorites:

I want to sincerely thank you for reading my writing every week. Nothing feels better than having the chance to communicate observations and lessons from my experience so frequently; having people read it and tell me that it has a positive impact on how they are living their lives makes me feel fulfilled. 

The chance to share my thoughts with you has been a highlight of 2023.

Looking forward to 2024.

Live Deeply,