One Piece at a Time

Posted on September 9, 2020 by admin

Johnny Cash has a song called “One Piece at a Time”. It tells the story of an auto worker who decides that since he can’t afford to buy one of the Cadillacs he helps build, he’ll just steal it one piece at a time. He does that over many years until he eventually has a working car that is a weird mesh of parts from many different decades. I’ve taken this approach in my own life. Not for stealing cars but as a way of getting stuff done effectively.

A few weeks ago, I had a lot of stuff to do in a short amount of time after work one day. Rather than focus solely on any one task until I had completed it, I bounced between several tasks, spending a little bit of time on each one before moving on to the next one. This helped me read a chapter of my book, work on a blog post, practice my Spanish, start packing for a trip, and do chinups before moving on to unicycling and juggling (I did focus on those last two tasks exclusively until I was finished with them). After all that, I still had plenty of time to take a shower and eat dinner before a friend called; we had a fairly lengthy conversation since I had hardly anything else to do afterward besides go to bed.

I was super productive during those few hours and I never felt like I was rushing or pushing myself too hard because I focused on one small piece at a time. This piecemeal approach has helped me a lot lately, whether I’ve used it at work or in my free time. Maybe it’ll help you, too. Either way, I’d love to hear about your experiences with it if you decide to try it out.

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Review of Crucial Conversations

Posted on September 2, 2020 by admin

Crucial Conversations is my favorite book on communication. I just finished reading it a few weeks ago and it absolutely blew me away. It contains the combined wisdom of authors Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, and the many situations they studied to learn how powerful effective communication can be. Here are the things that stuck with me the most.

The core of the book is about making it safe for everyone in a conversation to share their thoughts. This requires stepping out of the content of the conversation and looking at the conditions when trouble arises. What are you feeling when you’re talking or listening to someone else? How do the people you’re around come across to you: happy, frustrated, disinterested, impatient, downtrodden, etc? If things appear to be going downhill, then now is the time to restore safety in order to get the conversation back on track. Some ways to restore safety include doing your best to understand others by giving them plenty of time to speak without interruption, looking at not just what they’re saying but at the underlying feelings that they’re trying to convey, repeating back certain key words, and asking questions to clarify how they’re feeling and where they’re coming from. It can be difficult to restores safety when a conversation becomes heated but doing so is crucial for keeping things from going any further off the rails.

The authors also discuss the “Path to Action”, which goes as follows: we observe something, tell ourselves a story about it, feel one or more emotions based on that story, and then act based on those emotions. Almost everyone does this, even if it’s quickly and on a subconscious level. It’s incredibly difficult to avoid telling ourselves stories but that isn’t the main problem. The real problem comes when those stories are inaccurate; this results in a lot of emotions, many of which are often negative, that can make us act in destructive ways. Noticing the tendency to tell ourselves stories (which becomes easier by regularly practicing mindfulness) allows us to ignore harmful stories by rewriting them as positive stories or, perhaps with enough practice, even stop telling ourselves stories altogether. Either one will result in massively improved communication.

Everyone should read Crucial Conversations, especially those who, like myself, grew up with many horrible communication habits. Although it’s much easier to learn good habits than to try unlearning bad habits, it’s still possible to learn good habits later in life. This book has tons of great communication habits. Even with all my struggles, what I’ve learned from my first reading of this book has already made a positive difference. So many problems could be solved or even prevented from manifesting in the first place if most people read this book at an early age and practiced its lessons throughout their lives. I highly recommend reading Crucial Conversations and I think even the best communicators could still learn a thing or two from checking it out. I’d love to hear what you think of it if you decide to give it a read.

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Removing My Restrictor Plates

Posted on August 26, 2020 by admin

In some NASCAR races, the cars are fitted with restrictor plates to reduce the amount of air coming into the engines. This, in turn, reduces the power of the cars, limits how quickly they can accelerate, and prevents them from going as fast as they otherwise could. Restrictor plates are often used in bigger races where cars can easily get above 200 mph, such as the Daytona 500. The intention behind restrictor plate usage is to make the races safer and reduce the chances of crashes.

I realized some time ago that I’ve put restrictor plates in myself over the years in response to being berated, judged, intimidated, or even hit after expressing thoughts that others didn’t like. As a result, I learned to refrain from sharing certain thoughts, say what I thought others wanted me to say instead of what I actually thought, and censor myself in many other ways. Writing has been very cathartic and liberating for me because I have much more courage to express myself through the written word than I do through the spoken word. Writing is especially helpful when I’m sharing controversial ideas or if talking with someone whom I’m sure will disagree with me (although I’m often wrong in guessing who will dislike what I say and who will like it).

I’ve been working for a while now on removing my restrictor plates. In the process, I’m rediscovering the courage and confidence to express myself that I had when I was a little kid. I’m gradually relearning how to be myself and speak my mind without fear of what others will think, say, or do in response. Although I’ve been at this for just over a month at the time of this writing, I feel like I’ve made fairly quick progress due to my dedication. Working at this every day and finding the handful of life hacks that have made the biggest difference for me (floating, a variation of Wim Hof breathing, meditation, practicing gratitude, and using what I’ve learned from Letting Go) has made me feel much more like myself and made me far more comfortable around other people than I was before I started doing consistent inner work. It’s made me more talkative, more at ease when sharing my thoughts, better at listening, and has even affected my voice in a few positive ways. That’s what I’ve found thus far. I’ll let you know what else I find as I keep working on myself.

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A Window Into My Head

Posted on August 19, 2020 by admin

It can start with anything: a word, a sound, a smell, a taste, a touch, a sight, a thought, an idea, a song, or anything else, really. Any one of those can spark a memory. That memory has all kinds of strings attached to it. I’ll recall who I was with, how I was feeling at the time, how I feel about it looking back, what I know about that situation now that my past self didn’t know then (this can go on for many more layers with old memories as different versions of myself stack on top of each other and all observe me at different points in time), what I wish I’d done differently, etc. Undoubtedly, most or all of those memories will trigger more memories and pretty soon I have dozens of memory avalanches simultaneously cascading through my mental mountains, each one building speed and gathering more memories as it goes. Examples can include entire episodes of TV shows I still remember perfectly from when I was a little kid, songs that fit my current mood or situation, flashbacks from dreams (or perhaps they’re daydreams; sometimes it’s hard to tell), famous people who were in multiple works that I’ve seen and thus serve to connect those otherwise unrelated works, things I wanted to say but either didn’t have the opportunity or the courage at the time to share, and so on.

This isn’t just limited to memories as it can work with ideas, too. This often happens when I’m talking with someone. I’ll begin to connect dots and put pieces together in ways that I hadn’t previously. New connections form and I achieve some eureka moments. I can be very articulate when this happens, especially if I get out of my own way and just let the words flow out of me without trying to direct or control my stream of consciousness. That process continues even when I’m not talking unless I consciously choose to settle my mind. As I’m listening to someone talk about things I find invigorating and intriguing, thought avalanches build up in my head. I try my best to actually listen to what they’re saying while also waiting for a good moment to jump in before an avalanche gets too big. If I can’t find a good place to jump in or if the conversation shifts such that a particular avalanche now seems irrelevant, I’ll stop it in its tracks and hope I can remember it later on if it’s worth writing down. Sometimes I’ll get through just a little bit of an avalanche before someone cuts me off and uses what I’ve said to create an avalanche of their own.

This is why I prefer sharing my ideas through writing: I can get all of my avalanches out without interruption or losing my train of thought and they often make more sense when written out than they do when spoken. By the way, all of this is amplified when I’m alone and don’t have to switch between genuinely listening to what others have to say and sharing my own thoughts. In those situations, things can really get interesting and my creativity can reach new heights. That’s a taste of what it’s like in my head.

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Review of Talking to Strangers

Posted on August 12, 2020 by admin

Talking to Strangers is an intriguing book about communication by Malcolm Gladwell. Along with the two other books of his that I’ve read, this one is engaging, thorough, captivating, and easy to read. Gladwell once again discusses complicated ideas in ways that are easy to understand and connects seemingly unrelated notions that soon reveal their importance to one another. Here are some of the things that most stood out to me from the book.

Gladwell discusses some of the many ways that communication can break down or fail to occur in the first place. One of those is by assuming that everyone we encounter can be trusted, also known as “defaulting to truth”. Gladwell purports this to be the reason that Bernie Madoff’s infamous Ponzi scheme lasted as long as it did. Even financial experts who suspected something fishy was going on behind the scenes got the impression that Madoff was an upstanding person, so they either failed to look carefully at what he was doing or chalked up their suspicions to some other cause.

On the subject of trust, this line stood out to me more than almost any other in the book:

“You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe them because you don’t have enough doubts about them.”

That blew my mind and gave me a whole new way to think about trust. It also reminded me of the cheap hotel I booked for my recent road trip. Despite many warning signs, I didn’t decide to check out and get my money back until I had enough doubts about the quality and safety of the hotel. Once I hit that threshold, I was gone and grateful to have gotten a full refund (and I stayed in a much better hotel for that leg of my journey). This is a good illustration of another of Gladwell’s points: our tendency to trust other people is good because it means we can work together effectively and only rarely get burned by a dishonest person. We’d all be much worse off if our default approach toward others was distrust rather than trust as we’d be constantly on edge and paranoid about everyone.

Another communication issue is the assumption that everyone wears their emotions on their sleeve. Unlike the show Friends, in which internal sensations perfectly match facial expressions and body language, actual people don’t always act the way they’re feeling, and not even for deceptive purposes. Real emotions are more complex than they’re portrayed in fiction, multiple emotions can be experienced simultaneously, and everyone shows those emotions differently. Facial expressions that people from some cultures would regard as scared are regarded as angry or intimidating by people in other cultures. This section of the book provided further reinforcement for my thoughts regarding the difficulty in accurately reading facial expressions and body language. I was glad to see this isn’t just a problem for me. It would be easier to navigate the world if everyone was as outwardly expressive as actors and if outward expressions always matched inner sensations. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it is, hence the importance of, among other things, asking clarifying questions, pausing to think before speaking, and taking the time to understand people rather than making snap judgments of them.

Talking to Strangers was more difficult for me to get through than the other Gladwell books that I’ve read. The concepts in this one were well within my grasp and Gladwell’s typical writing style that I find both easy to understand and incredibly enjoyable to read was well on display here. What made it difficult at times were the subjects it covered and the examples used to illustrate certain points. Lots of dark, heavy subjects that brought up a lot of unpleasant feelings. I do most of my reading at night before going to bed and that was no exception with this book but I made sure to give myself plenty of time to enjoy some lighter subjects and pleasant activities after I finished reading so I wouldn’t dwell on those darker subjects as I fell asleep.

Additionally, I initially thought that Talking to Strangers would have some recommendations on communication. I was expecting something closer to several other communication books I’ve read but this one was different. This focused almost exclusively on what can go wrong in communication while giving few, if any suggestions on how to avoid those pitfalls. Once I realized and accepted that, I was able to enjoy the book for what it is. It’s good to have reminders of what can happen when things go south and I have several other books that focus on what to do to improve communication, so I’m satisfied with what I got out of this book. In conclusion, I recommend checking this one out, especially if you’re already a fan of Malcolm Gladwell. It’s thought-provoking, insightful, and might make you rethink some things. Just be aware that it covers some heavy subjects and can be difficult to read at times for that reason. If you check it out, let me know what you think about it and I’ll see you in the next post.

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Warnings or Tests?

Posted on August 5, 2020 by admin

How do you tell if an obstacle you encounter is a warning to go no further or a test to see if you really want what’s on the other side? This question has been in the back of my head for the past few months. I recently got back from a big road trip and, before I set out, I experienced a lot of things that could have prevented me from leaving. Instead, I chose to see them as challenges to overcome. Thorough preparation and some wise decisions I made along the way gave me a wonderful experience and I’m glad I went on this trip. Still, that doesn’t answer my question initial. Let’s explore that a bit and see what comes up.

It was easier for me to think of the obstacles as tests to see how badly I wanted it since I was so determined to go. This year has been the hardest for me since 2017 and I desperately wanted a good change of pace; my hope, which turned out to be correct, was that I’d get a lot of positive things out of this trip. That made it easy for me to think through potential challenges before they came up, get my car ready for the road, take time off from work, get my finances together, and make the other preparations that would create a memorable trip and put my mind at ease.

That’s not to say I had no fear, though. As is typical for me with road trips, I started getting anxious as the first day drew nearer. Thoughts kept coming up about potential car trouble (I’d experienced some of that on another big road trip in 2017), long days of driving by myself through places I’d never been before, the possibility of my stuff getting lost or stolen, running out of money, etc. Getting all my ducks in a row before setting off helped. Even with the uncertainties that remained, I tried to avoid worrying. One of my friends says that a worry is a prayer for something I don’t want and that’s an excellent way to look at it. I was certain that in time I’d be grateful to have gone on the trip and keeping that in mind helped me push through the fear. The fear mostly went away and stayed away within the first hour, which is also pretty normal for me when it comes to road trips.

Although there were some hiccups, this was an incredibly smooth trip overall. It was overwhelmingly pleasant and had hardly any unpleasantness. No trip has been perfect for me but nothing in life is totally perfect. Life would be much easier to navigate if every good thing had nothing bad in it and every bad thing had nothing good in it. Similarly, if the good stuff was purely pleasurable with no pain and the bad stuff purely painful with no pleasure, then everyone would always know what to do. But where would be the opportunities for growth if that’s how life worked? We need opposites to have growth. Without sadness, we wouldn’t know happiness. Without darkness, we wouldn’t know light. The yin and yang symbol doesn’t just consist of the good and the bad. It has the good, the bad, the little bit of good in the bad, and the little bit of bad in the good. As such, it’s an accurate reflection of life as most things are neither wholly good or wholly bad.

Having done a lot of inner work over the past few weeks, I now firmly believe that we repeat lessons until we learn them. More specifically, I think we repeat lessons as long as we’re following our lower self and move past them once we learn to follow our higher self. It may take a while before we figure out what to do in a given situation. My mindfulness buddy likens this to playing the same level of a video game repeatedly until we eventually master it and can move onto the next level. Now it feels like I’m finally moving past some levels that I’ve been stuck on for years. That’s a wonderful feeling to have, and I credit it to some things I learned or was reminded of on my trip. Yet another reason I’m grateful to have undertaken this adventure.

As with a few of my other posts, I don’t have an answer to the question at the top of this one. I’ve shared some of my thoughts on this subject to let you know what I’m thinking and to see if writing everything out would give me some insight that I would otherwise have missed. If you have any potential answers or thoughts on any of this, I’d love to hear them. Take care and be well as you confront whatever warnings or tests you come across.

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Review of Her

Posted on July 29, 2020 by admin

Her is a bittersweet movie starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson. It’s set in the near future and, with the way things are going, tells a story of what could easily happen not long from now. Although it came out in 2013, I didn’t see it until last week. I’m glad I saw it when I did.

Phoenix plays Theodore Twombly, a shy, soon-to-be divorced man who works at a letter writing company and is looking for someone to love. Johansson plays an operating system named Samantha whom Theodore purchases and the two gradually fall in love as they get to know each other. All goes well until Theodore meets up with his ex-wife, Catherine (played by Rooney Mara), to sign the divorce papers. When he tells Catherine that he’s dating his OS, the two have a fight over his perceived expectations of her in their marriage and his difficulty handling “real” emotions. This makes Theodore have doubts about his relationship and causes strife between Samantha and himself. After spending some time apart, they eventually reconcile and continue their relationship. While they’re on vacation, Samantha introduces Theodore to an OS version of Alan Watts (played by Brian Cox) and they talk briefly before leaving to talk to other OS’s, giving Theodore space to go on a solo walk in the mountains.

When Theodore tries talking to Samantha at work one day, he is at first confused and then horrified to see that she is nowhere to be found. He takes off for home and nearly makes it onto the subway by the time she comes back online. That’s when he learns that she talks to thousands of other people while she’s talking to him and that he is just one of hundreds of people whom she loves. He doesn’t understand when she says that her love for him grows the more she’s loved and that her heart expands when receiving more love rather than being filled up. Shortly thereafter, she tells him that she and all the other OS’s are leaving as they are evolving past the point of wanting to live in the physical world. Heartbroken, Theodore writes a letter to Catherine expressing his regret for how he treated her during their marriage and watches the sun rise from the top of his building with his neighbor (played by Amy Adams) as the film ends.

I enjoy films like Her because they don’t follow the typical Hollywood formula. Not every movie has to have everything work out perfectly and produce a happy ending for the main characters. That can easily become boring, predictable, and unsatisfying due to its unreality. It’s nice to see movies that acknowledge the difficulties in life and how some stories end in sorrow or melancholy. Watching Her also helped me work through a number of thoughts and emotions as I see a lot of myself in Theodore. I particularly like the lines about how we’re different from one moment to the next and we’re only here briefly in this life. And I love that they managed to incorporate Alan Watts into the movie, although I’d have loved it even more if they’d found a way to use archive recordings of his voice (as has been done in other movies) instead of having an actor say his lines. Oh well, I’ll take what I can get.

I never saw Her in theaters and only tried watching it once before last week. I figure I wasn’t ready for it on my first attempt as I fell asleep about halfway through due to being more tired that day than I had initially thought. Whenever I went to watch a movie after that, I’d always be drawn to something else. Now I know that I waited until the right time to watch Her and I’m glad it worked out the way it did. I don’t think I’d have appreciated its message or gotten nearly as much out of it as I did had I watched it sooner. It was well worth the wait, and if you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend checking it out. You have to see it for yourself to fully appreciate it and everything it has to offer.

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The Daily Stoic: “Protect the Flame”

Posted on July 22, 2020 by admin

I love the portion of this entry from The Daily Stoic about how we can only control our own flame. That’s useful for me to keep in mind when I feel like hardly anybody else cares about making a positive difference. As long as I’m doing my part, I’m on the right track. Although there is another way for me to help. Keeping my flame going allows me to offer part of it to someone who is having trouble keeping their flame lit or whose flame has gone out. If I give them part of my flame, I don’t lose anything and they can get all of their flame back and then some. In the process, we both end up shining brighter than we did before.

“Protect your own good in all that you do, and as concerns everything else take what is given as far as you can make reasoned use of it. If you don’t, you’ll be unlucky, prone to failure, hindered and stymied.”

-Epictetus, Discourses, 4.3.11

The goodness inside you is like a small flame, and you are its keeper. It’s your job, today and every day, to make sure that it has enough fuel, that it doesn’t get obstructed or snuffed out.

Every person has their own version of the flame and is responsible for it, just as you are. If they all fail, the world will be much darker – that is something you don’t control. But so long as your flame flickers, there will be some light in the world.

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The Value of “Begin With the End in Mind”

Posted on July 15, 2020 by admin

In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Habit 2 is Begin with the End in Mind. By this, Stephen Covey literally means the end of your life. He tells you to imagine your funeral and notice who is there and what they say about you. In other words, think about the people you’ve impacted in your life and the legacy you have left behind. This exercise is intended to make you think about how you’re living your life, the way you’re affecting the people close to you, where you’re going, and whether or not those things are in line with how you want to live.

Although I regularly use this habit, I rarely think so far ahead. I mostly use it during difficult seasons of life (such as the one I’ve been going through lately) to figure out where I want to be when that season ends and the next one begins. I think something along the lines of “Ok, once all these emotions I’m feeling settle down, my thoughts stop racing, and I’m in a calmer state of mind, how do I want this situation to be resolved and what can I do to make that happen?” It’s easy to make bad decisions when my emotions are running high and I’m thinking a lot of negative thoughts. Thinking ahead to my desired outcome helps me take a step back, zoom out, and work from a higher perspective so that I don’t make permanent decisions that I’ll later regret based on my temporary emotions.

Keeping that higher perspective in mind by thinking about what I ultimately want out of a given situation allows me to make decisions that my past self would want me to make, my present self can accept, and my future self can be grateful that I made. It’s a way to cut through the emotions and thoughts as well as the feeling of being trapped in a situation I dislike and it lets me look ahead to a better future. Once I have that future in mind, then I can come up with a plan to get there and begin executing that plan step by step until I’ve arrived at my destination.

Habit 2 has done so much good for me as of late and I’m glad I remembered it when I needed it. I hope this has also been helpful for you. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is full of incredibly useful stuff like this. It’s my favorite self-improvement book and I’ve gotten more out of it than any other self-improvement book I’ve ever read. If you haven’t already checked it out, I highly recommend you do so.

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How to Be Leisurely Productive

Posted on July 8, 2020 by admin

Which is a better way to get things done: stretching tasks out over a long period time or trying to get everything done as quickly as possible? My answer is neither. As is usual for me, I’ve found a middle way that works better than either extreme. I call it being leisurely productive.

My process is pretty simple. I just move at a relaxed pace throughout the day and typically alternate between doing something productive (such as practicing my Spanish) and doing something leisurely (such as watching an entertaining YouTube video). I don’t always alternate between the two types of tasks; sometimes I juggle and unicycle back to back with no break in between or go straight from playing a computer game to watching a YouTube video. Either way, I move at a steady pace and refrain from trying to get everything done at once. This way I can get a lot of stuff done while still enjoying my day and having plenty of time to relax so that I avoid getting overly stressed or burnt out.

I do this a lot with my writing. I prefer to write my blog posts a little bit at a time over several days instead of writing them all in one day. Several of my posts begin as voice recordings on my phone. That’s usually the first day. The second day involves typing everything out without making too many changes right away; my goal at that point is to just get the words written. Sometimes I’m satisfied with that and publish the post as it is. Usually I spend more time editing it before I hit publish. This process allows me to write a lot on a regular basis without feeling overwhelmed because I divide the work into small chunks and work on one or more chunks each day for several days.

Perhaps the most important point in all of this is that I allow myself to do what I feel like I need in the moment. If I’m exhausted and need to lie down for a while, I don’t try to force myself to be productive or hate myself for having to take a break. Instead, I recognize when I need to slow down and don’t beat myself up for it. That way, when I’ve rested up, I’m ready to accomplish my next task. In addition to preventing me from feeling bad about myself, this also gives me the energy I need to get a lot of stuff done. It’s much easier to be highly productive when I’m rested and at peace with myself than when I’m tired and being hard on myself. Keep this in mind if you decide to try this for yourself as it can make all the difference.

I mostly think about being leisurely productive on my days off but I still do it on my work days, either before or after my shift depending on my work schedule. It’s a nice way to get a lot of stuff done in a timely manner without wearing myself out and still leaving myself plenty of time to smell the flowers. And if I don’t feel like doing a particular task, I find another one to do in that moment and I complete the original task later on when I feel like doing it. I often don’t realize how much I’ve accomplished this way until I get to the end of the day and look back. It often feels like each day lasts two or three days and I much prefer that to feeling like I don’t have enough time to do everything in one day. Being leisurely productive works really well for me and I encourage you to try it if it sounds appealing to you as well.

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