Would you be proud of what you were doing?
How you were doing it?
Who you were doing it for?
Mindfulness in each task leads to mindfulness in all things.
Category / mindfulness
Paradigms, maps, and philosphy
In his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen R. Covey discusses the concept of paradigms—ways of looking at the world or a field of study.
His argument is that these paradigms are like maps of places in the real world. If we have the wrong map, then we are looking at the “place” incorrectly.
An example:
If you’re trying to navigate Chicago but have a map of New York City, nothing you do with that map will help you achieve your goal of navigating Chicago.
Another example:
In Ancient Greece, physicians believed that all medical issues stem from an imbalance of the four humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm). If this is your “map” of the world of medicine, you’ll end up with a lot of dead people on your conscience.
You’d be working from an incorrect map—an incorrect set of assumptions and paradigms of how the human body and medicine work.
We are dealing with a lot of this today in numerous fields. And that’s why the study of philosophy—the activity of working out the right way of thinking about things—is vital.
Pain is an opinion
At some point in my childhood, I found myself having a self-talk conversation about pain. I can’t remember exactly what was happening, but I know whatever it was was difficult and physically painful.
I had this realization that pain wasn’t some physical, tangible thing in or on my body. It was an electrical signal being sent from one area of my body to my brain, which was interpreting this event as pain. It wasn’t “real.” At least, that’s what my childhood brain decided.
I proceeded to test this idea after my realization by seeing how hard I could pinch myself before giving in to that ephemeral signal sent to my brain. The next few minutes (and days) were experiments in whether the realization that pain was only a chemical reaction in my brain could inoculate against physical pain.
Shocker – it doesn’t work like that. I still felt pain. There was always a point where I thought, “Okay, stop. This hurts.”
But I did learn something from that experiment: realizing what pain is allowed me to tolerate more of it. Telling myself that it wasn’t a “thing” in the world I could touch allowed me to feel that pain and continue hurting myself anyway.
Now, the health and sanity of this experiment can definitely be questioned. But I later learned I wasn’t the first person to come up with this idea.
It’s actually more than 2,000 years old and described quite well by the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius.
“Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
He goes on to argue that most of the things that happen to us in life we think of as “bad” are actually neutral. It’s our opinions of those events that determine whether they are good or bad, whether we’re hurt or not.
By teaching myself that this pain signal from my brain was a real thing, I removed (or at least delayed) the opinion that I was hurt and needed to stop pinching myself. It allowed me to push beyond my normal pain tolerance and endure more of it.
Let me give you another, less childish example.
People who go into special operations selection (think Navy SEALs or Green Berets) don’t do it believing they’ll breeze through. No matter how hard they train and prepare, they know it will suck. It’ll hurt, and that’s by design.
The goal in that environment isn’t to breeze through without feeling pain; it’s to endure the pain and keep going anyway. The cadre screen for people who can do that, because it’s often necessary in a real-world operation.
If you’ve been shot and you’re stuck in the middle of enemy territory, you don’t get a sick day. You must accept the pain, the injury, even the very real damage you’ve incurred… And you have to get your ass out of Dodge anyway, probably while carrying one of your injured teammates out, too.
They can do this, not because they are superhuman, but because they’ve trained themselves to feel the very real pain and keep going anyway.
So, yes, pain and injury are real. But how it affects us and our ability to perform—how it affects what we’re capable of—is often overblown by our opinion of that pain.
What if you couldn’t charge for it?
That dream job you think about.
That perfect business you think of starting.
What if you couldn’t charge for it? What if you had to make your living doing something else?
Would you still want to do it?
If so, that’s a good definition of a calling in life.
Fractals, recursions, and setbacks in life
In Jurassic Park (pp. 189-190), Ian Malcolm discusses the idea of fractals and recursion.
In short, a small part of something will look the same as a bigger part of that something. For example, the peak of a mountain will look similar in shape to a small piece of that mountain if you were to put it under a microscope.
He claims that this is also true of events.
Think of a graph in the stock market. A line graph mapping a single day in the stock market will look similar to a week in the stock market if you zoom out. Zoom out again; that week will look the same as a year in the stock market if you zoom out. The ups and downs of each frame will look quite similar.
The same is true for each of our lives. The line mapping the “good things” in our lives will go up, and then something akin to a stock market crash will drive it back down.
You’ll see this in your day: perhaps you’re incredibly productive in the morning, but a bad meeting can send your day’s plan careening off in another direction.
Your week will have a series of good days, followed by awful days where someone cuts you off in traffic and sends you flying into a tree. Or perhaps your child comes down with the flu, and you’re cleaning up vomit for the next three days.
You’ll have a series of great months, thinking everything is about to turn around this year, then your father dies, devastating your family and all the plans you had imagined.
Like the stock market, your life will go up, then fall. And if you survive it, you can rest assured it will happen again. It is inevitable.
“We have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational, change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is.” —Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park
The joyful life
No original thought today… Just sharing some wisdom on how to live a joyful life.
“Many people view their habits and routines as obstacles or, at the very least, obligations to get through. Making the morning coffee, driving your kids to the next activity, preparing the next meal—we often see our routines as chores to be completed.
But these are not moments to be dismissed. They are life. Making coffee can be a peaceful ritual—perhaps even a fulfilling one—if done with care rather than rushed to completion. It’s about the amount of attention you devote to these simple moments, and whether you choose to appreciate them or bulldoze through them on the way to the next task.
Find the beauty and joy in your daily rituals and you will find beauty and joy in your daily life. To love your habits is to love your days, and to love your days is to love your life.”
—James Clear
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The mindset of the truly unbiased
“This is what I think in this moment… but I could be completely wrong.”
Being unbiased doesn’t only mean willing to hear another side of an argument.
A more complete version of it is:
Being willing to change your mind in the face of new evidence.
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How will you measure your life?
Is it by the number in your bank account?
The amount of influence you have over people and events?
What about your job title and the status it brings?
All valid options. But is that what you’ll want to think about as you take your last breath?
Or maybe you’ll use a different measuring stick.
The amount of art you created.
The number of people you changed for the better.
How well you raised your children… And what tremendous people they became.
You get to choose.
*This post was inspired by the book How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen et al.
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Never be in a hurry
I’ve been on a Cal Newport Deep Work/Digital Minimalism kick for the last few weeks.
Here’s a quote from Saint Francis de Sales that seems particularly apt to my current way of thinking:
“Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.”
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If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing slowly
Rapid results rarely last. Everything worthwhile takes time and patience.
- Parenting
- Marriage
- Reading a difficult book
- Getting a degree
- Learning a new skill
- Building a business
Rapid weight loss is dangerous and usually leads to a reversal.
Speed reading might let you get through more books… But more books isn’t the goal.
The goal is mastery, not rapidity. Deep understanding, not casual interest.
In a world obsessed with speed, be a tortoise.
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