Books

Be Here Now

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Table of Contents

Introduction
India
Life
Breathing
Desire
Progress
Observe and witness
Non-duality
Psychedelics
Enlightenment
Death

Introduction

Theory vs experiential

I theorized this or that. I espoused these ideas, these intellectual concepts, quite apart from my own experiential base. Although I could bring all kinds of emotional zeal to bear on my presentation, there was a lack of validity in my guts about what I was doing.

The experiential awareness “I”

When I could finally focus on the question, I realized that although everything by which I knew myself, even my body and this life itself, was gone, still I was fully aware! Not only that, but this aware “I” was watching the entire drama, including the panic, with calm compassion. Instantly, with this recognition, I felt a new kind of calmness—one of a profundity never experienced before.

Experiences were indescribable to others

But these experiences quickly became indescribable. I’d get to a point with my colleagues when I couldn’t explain any further, because it came down to “To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible.”

Psychedelics vs Meditation

An old Buddhist Lama said, “It gave me a headache.” Somebody else said, “It’s good, but not as good as meditation.”

India

No past or the future

“Did I ever tell you about the time that Tim and I . . .” And he’d say, “Don’t think about the past. Just be here now.” Silence. And I’d say, “How long do you think we’re going to be on this trip?” And he’d say, “Don’t think about the future. Just be here now.”

Watching emotions rise and dissapear

“Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean.”

Find who you are right here and now

I think the message is that you don’t need to go to anywhere else to find what you are seeking.

Quieten the mind

When you have quieted your mind enough and transcended your ego enough you can hear how it really is.

Life

Wanting stuff and power

The most exquisite paradox as soon as you give it all up you can have it all How about that one? As long as you want power You can’t have it. The minute you don’t want power you’ll have more than you ever dreamed possible

Our individual trivial trip

You’re on a trivial trip that’s going to last? Maybe what? 60 ___ say 70 _ maybe 80 years and full with fear

Impermanence

Anything that is in time is going to pass away. Anything in time it’s going to pass because Time passes

Cause of suffering

Buddha says: The cause of suffering is attachment or desire They all say the same thing! Third noble truth Give up attachment Give up desire You end the births You end the deaths You end the suffering You end the whole thing that

Karma Yoga - daily life

This (chopping wood and carrying water) is karma yoga . . . the yoga of daily life. The way to do it is: “do what you do but dedicate the fruits of the work to me” That’s the most esoteric way of saying it. Another way of saying it is: Do it without attachment. Another way of saying it is: Total Renunciation! … Now that doesn’t mean you go up to a mountain and live in a cave. It means that you renounce attachment even to your own desires.

Mind

My thinking mind is a perfect servant and a lousy master

Begin here and now

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”—Lao Tzu BUT WHERE DO WE BEGIN? The answer is simple: you begin just where you are.

Everyone’s path is different

This manual contains a wide variety of techniques. Everyone’s needs are different and everyone is at a different stage along the path. But, as with any recipe book, you choose what suits you. If you listen to your own inner voice, it will tell you where you are now, and which method will work best for you

The learning will come at the right moment

If you go looking for a guru and you are not ready to find one, you will not find what you are looking for. On the other hand, when you are ready the guru will be exactly where you are at the appropriate moment.

Relax for the next smallest step

Relax. You are being guided. In fact, the next message you need in the treasure hunt is exactly where you are when you need it. The message may be in the form of a teacher or a lover or an enemy or a pet or a rock or a chemical or a book or a feeling of great despair or a physical illness or the eyes of a person you pass on the street.

Many experiences and learnings on the way

A teacher points the way. A guru is the Way. In the course of your awakening you will have thousands of teachers.

Listen and wait

So, if in doubt about the next step, just listen. And if still in doubt, wait. When it’s time to move, you’ll know.

The way will be clearer when we are not attached and become quiet

And as you extricate yourself from your attachments and become quiet, you will be able to know more and more clearly how it all is . . . The Way. And the more clearly you hear, the more your actions will be in harmony with the Way

Reflecting on what you read

Read and re-read and re-re-read it. Then let your thoughts work around it. Paraphrase it. See how it applies to others and to yourself.

Ananlogy of a quiet mind

What are the steps of the process of calming the mind? Think of a lake in whose depths lies hidden what you seek. You try to see down into the lake, but you can’t because the surface is covered with waves going in all directions . . . choppy water . . . thoughts coming from all directions . . . from

What was the original purpose of repeated mantras?

The use of such special mantras is to help you see the act you are performing or about to perform in such a way as to prevent your identifying with the doer of the act.

Rationalization is seductive, but not useful

it is such a seductive route that most Westerners prefer it and wrap their subsequent failure in layers of rationalization.

Breathing

Breathing and thought

Furthermore, there is an intimate relationship between thought and breath. When you calm your breath, there is simultaneous calming of the mind.

When to do pranayam

Most people will find that doing pranayam as part of the early morning purification is ideal. A second suitable time is at sunset before the evening meal.

Desire

Strengthening the desire makes you slower

The problem of course is that everytime you direct your attention to the gratification of a specific desire, you create more thoughts about that desire and thus strengthen its hold over you. Thus, you slow down your own journey into the light. Since you already realize that the gratification of that desire is going to be finite and ultimately not enough, the new power has in fact sucked you into another cul-de-sac. And so it goes for most people until they truly see each new power as one more seductive enticement of maya.

Cosmic humor

The cosmic humor is that if you desire to move mountains and you continue to purify yourself, ultimately you will arrive at the place where you are able to move mountains. But in order to arrive at this position of power you will have had to give up being he-who-wanted-to-move-mountains so that you can be he-who-put-the-mountain-there-in-the-first-place. The humor is that finally when you have the power to move the mountain, you are the person who placed it there—so there the mountain stays.

Progress

Set your current affairs in order

What is important is that you get your house in order at each stage of the journey so that you can proceed.

Set your relationships in order

For example, if you never got on well with one of your parents and you have left that parent behind on your journey in such a way that the thought of that parent arouses anger or frustration or self-pity or any emotion . . . you are still attached. You are still stuck. And you must get that relationship straight before you can finish your work.

Set your stuff in order

This getting straight not only applies to people but to things as well, such as favorite music, disliked foods, special treats, avoided places, all your toys, etc. Everything must be rerun through your compassion machine.

Unattached, not uninvolved

To be “not caught” means to be unattached. To be unattached does not mean to be uninvolved, it means to be involved “without attachment.”

Are you really helping?

To be attached means that you identify with your role as the GIVER of help. This in turn casts the other person in the role of the RECEIVER of help. Such identification with roles may fill bellies, but it increases human distance.

Dropping out internally, not externally

To think that working on oneself requires “dropping-out” of society is to miss the point. Certainly you must drop out . . . but the drop-out is internal, not external. One drops out of one’s attachments; one drops out of one’s identification with the illusion of separateness.

Observe and witness

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle

The Martians seem to know instinctively what we learned painfully from modern physics, that observer interacts with observed through the process of observation.

No evaluation, no judgement. Just noting.

The witness is not evaluative. It does not judge your actions. It merely notes them. Thus, if you perform an act because of desire, such as eating something that is not sattvic (helpful to your sadhana), and then you put yourself down for having eaten it . . . the witness—when it finally appears—would merely note.

This point is important. Most of the time the inner voices of most people are continually evaluative. “I’m good for doing this,” or “I’m bad for doing that.” You must make that evaluative role an object of contemplation as well. Keep in mind that the witness does not care whether you become enlightened or not. It merely notes how it all is.

Trigger and the witness within you

This time—as you are about to get angry—the witness says “Ah, about to get angry, I see.” This often short-circuits the energy the “angry you” was fueling up with, and it falls away. So now the lapse between being awake and being asleep is getting much smaller.

Centered

Throughout the day you are remaining centered in the witness watching the drama of life unfold.

Dissociation

On the surface, this method looks like what psychologists call the “defense mechanism of dissociation.”

Death and giving up

It all seems so dispassionate. And truly it is. Here it is well to remember the oft-quoted stipulation that you must “die to be reborn” or “give it all up to have it all.”

Note

At first let your mind wander and just watch it. Just note how your mind works. Don’t think about the thoughts. Just note them. Do this for about thirty minutes a day for a week.

Non-duality

For all of the finite knowledge does not add up to the infinite. In order to take the final step, the knower must go. That is, you can only BE it all, but you can’t know it all. The goal is non-dualistic—as long as there is a “knower” and “known” you are in dualism.

Who am I?

by Ramana Maharshi and is called Vichara Atma (Who Am I?). It is a method for turning the mind in upon itself to first know its true nature and then to be its true nature. The method is technically simple, though extremely difficult to execute. (1) You ask yourself, “Who am I?” Then step by step, in a systematic fashion, you proceed to dissociate yourself from all the elements you previously identified as “I.” (2) You answer, “I am not my torso or body.” Then you attempt to experience yourself as separate from your body.

Momentary

“Our existence as embodied beings is purely momentary; what are a hundred years in eternity? But if we shatter the chains of egotism, and melt into the ocean of humanity, we share its dignity. To feel that we are something is to set up a barrier between God and ourselves; to cease feeling that we are something is to become one with God.”—Gandhi

Here and now

Each time you do this, try to feel the immediacy of the Here and Now. Begin to notice that wherever you go or whatever time it is by the clock . . . it is ALWAYS HERE AND NOW. In fact you will begin to see that you can’t get away from the HERE and NOW.

Psychedelics

The “pros” of psychedelics are as follows:

For a person deeply attached to any finite reality which he takes to be absolute, the psychedelics can, under proper conditions, help him to break out of the imprisoning model created by his own mind.

Short term usage

The use of psychedelics can provide experiences which in the short term strengthen your faith in the possibility of enlightenment sufficiently to pursue systematic purification

Carefully guided sessions

Carefully programmed psychedelic sessions can have significant therapeutic value in providing new perspectives for areas of strong attachment.

The deepest psychedelic experiences

The deepest psychedelic experiences allow one to transcend polarities and thus get beyond fears of death, or entrapments in the guilt created by attachment to the polarity of good and evil.

The “cons” of psychedelics are as follows:

You still come down. The experience is not permanent. Coming down brings despair.

Attachment to getting “high”

The intensity with which the psychedelics show you “more” makes you greedy to be done before you are ready. This attaches you to the experience of “getting high” which, after a period of time, becomes a cul-de-sac.

Enlightenment

Purification of the mind

As you further purify yourself, your impurities will seem grosser and larger. Understand that it’s not that you are getting more caught in the illusion, it’s just that you are seeing it more clearly. The lions guarding the gates of the temples get fiercer as you proceed towards each inner temple. But of course the light is brighter also.

There is no shortcut

Early in the journey you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW . . . so you stop asking.

Stimulation

Previously you sought continuous stimulation but now you gravitate towards situations in which there is less and less stimulation.

Slow and gradual change

It would seem wiser to start your sadhana from exactly where you are, and then let any changes occur in your style of life and environment in a slow and natural fashion.

Practise

In this corner establish a regular ritual for purification, for reflection, for calming the mind. Just as water wears away stone, so daily sadhana will thin the

Daily schedule

The discipline of a daily schedule is a drag at first, after a while you will feel the results. It all runs on automatic. Don’t think. Fill your whole mind with the spirit. BE!

How does living with others help you in the journey?

Although you may have more chance to work on your sadhana when you live alone, you have less chance to practice that most difficult of all paths, karma yoga. In solitude you don’t have many demands made upon you, nor do you develop the elasticity which comes with the give-and-take of living with others.

Death

Ritual death has been practiced throughout the world for centuries. Many Buddhist meditation exercises are designed to take you through your own death.

We are all dying and being born in each moment

We all die in each moment . . . and we are all born in each moment . . . in truth, whether this death/rebirth is called physical or psychological.

Maya

It may be helpful to see these planes as a series of veils or illusions (maya) that keep us separate from the –atman, or universal soul.

On Grief and Grieving

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Table of Contents

Different types of grief
1: Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
After the loss
Children and grief
Secrets and grief
Dealing with grief
Grief and possessions
Grief and age
Teaching children about death
Dieing well

Different types of grief

The need to the strong

But we come from a culture where we think people have to be strong. I’m a big believer in being vulnerable, open to grief. That is strength. You can’t know joy unless you know profound sadness. They don’t exist without each other.

Anticipatory grief

A deeper anticipatory grief occurs years later when someone we love—or we ourselves—have a terminal illness. Anticipatory grief is the “beginning of the end” in our minds.

Silent grief

Anticipatory grief is generally more silent than grief after a loss. We are often not as verbal. It’s a grief we keep to ourselves. We want little active intervention.

Experiencing loss

We may also experience the limbo of loss in anticipatory grief, those times when our loved one is not getting better and not dying yet, but in a state of poor health with little quality of life.

5 stages

The five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost.

1: Denial

This first stage of grieving helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. We are in a state of shock and denial. We go numb. We wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on.

Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle.

2. Anger

This stage presents itself in many ways: anger at your loved one that he didn’t take better care of himself or anger that you didn’t take better care of him. Anger does not have to be logical or valid. You may be angry that you didn’t see this coming and when you did, nothing could stop it.

All assumptions are crushed

You did all the things you were told. You believed you would be rewarded if you did. Well, this loss is no reward. We also assume that if we care for our bodies, eat right, get medical checkups, and exercise, we will be granted good health. These assumptions come crashing down around us when the good, the just, the loving, the healthy, the young, and even the needed and most wanted die on us.

Non-judgemental anger

It is important to feel the anger without judging it, without attempting to find meaning in it. It may take many forms: anger at the health-care system, at life, at your loved one for leaving. Life is unfair. Death is unfair. Anger is a natural reaction to the unfairness of loss.

3. Bargaining

We want to go back in time: find the tumor sooner, recognize the illness more quickly, stop the accident from . . . if only, if only, if only. Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. The “if onlys” cause us to find fault with ourselves and what we “think” we could have done differently.

4. Depression

But in grief, depression is a way for nature to keep us protected by shutting down the nervous system so that we can adapt to something we feel we cannot handle.

As tough as it is, depression can be dealt with in a paradoxical way. See it as a visitor, perhaps an unwelcome one, but one who is visiting whether you like it or not. Make a place for your guest. Invite your depression to pull up a chair with you in front of the fire, and sit with it, without looking for a way to escape.

This stage is about accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognizing that this new reality is the permanent reality.

5. Acceptance

Acceptance is not about liking a situation. It is about acknowledging all that has been lost and learning to live with that loss.

Comparing loss

Brian, in his late fifties, had to have his leg amputated. It was a terrible loss. During rehabilitation sessions he saw another man who had had both legs amputated, and now he thought less of his loss and felt unjustified in feeling bad. He said he suddenly realized there were people worse off than he was… Brian, still comparing losses, said, “Well, at least you have two legs.” The man with the cane said, “Yes I do, but I lost my wife in the accident.” When you compare losses, someone else’s may seem greater or lesser than your own, but all losses are painful.

Losses are personal

If you lost a husband at seventy, there will be someone who lost a husband at forty-eight. If you lost a parent at twelve, there will be someone who lost their parent at five years old—or at fifteen years. Losses are very personal and comparisons never apply. No loss counts more than another. It is your loss that counts for you. It is your loss that affects you. Your loss is deep and deserves your personal attention without comparison.

After the loss

Relief and sadness

It is her endless suffering you wanted to end, which is why you feel somewhat relieved that she is dead. Hence the confusion: the relief and sadness mix together in a situation that has no resolve. When this occurs, your relief is the recognition that the suffering has ended, the pain is over, the disease no longer lives.

Guilty pleasure

The day you go back to work may feel like a guilty pleasure, as you feel the relief of returning to your work life as you knew it before the tragedy. But then 4:30 P.M. hits and you realize you will be going home to an empty house.

Postpone decisions

Your emotions, just like your body, need to repair. If you can postpone complex or important decisions, do so. If you can’t, ask for help. Invite trustworthy friends and family members to give you guidance.

Death is inevitable

But there is a difference between curable and incurable diseases, and it can provide an antidote for regrets. The truth is that in most cases, doing things differently may have changed the process but would not have prevented the death.

You did the best

It would also be just as unrealistic to have been perfect and have no regrets. Forgive yourself. Isn’t it true that if you could have made better choices, you would have? You did the best you could at that time of your life.

Cry it all out - from a hospice nurse

Marion took Shelley’s hand and said, “The only way I’ve learned to survive this work over the last twenty years is to cry every tear I have for anyone I care about. I walked away from that funeral with no residue, just some fond memories.

911 crying and men

He looked at all the men crying and thought, “I would have cried if I’d known I could.” He then asked himself a rhetorical question: “So what if I had cried?” And cry he did.

Telling the story

Telling the story is part of the healing of a traumatic event, no different from the trauma of large-scale disaster. In your world it was a large-scale disaster, most likely the biggest you have ever experienced.

My fault

It feels as if it were somehow your fault. You were there. You saw it all happening. In your perfect hindsight so many things stand out that could have been done differently. But all events require many converging factors in order for them to happen.

Death is inevitable either ways - a little earlier than usual

He could have eaten better, exercised more. You could have encouraged him, helped, even forced him. Maybe you think he should have seen it coming. Maybe it’s not your fault as much as it was his. The sad reality is that, despite our best or worst efforts, we all will die someday, usually sooner than we would like.

Nobody escapes death

We do things hopefully because they add life to our living, but not with the illusion they will help us escape death when our time comes.

Life is risky and dangerous

Bad things happen, illness happens, accidents happen, crimes happen, and we want to prevent them. But the truth is that life is risky and dangerous, and we are the only species on earth who knows that as much as we fear it, death will come to each of us one day.

Survivor’s guilt

We have to understand that more often than not, the most tragic of events happens and it’s no one’s fault. None of us knows why one person dies and another survives; such questions lead to a condition of self-blame mixed with guilt, often called survivor’s guilt.

Blameless illness

We are responsible for our health, but we are not the ones to blame for our illnesses.

Acceptance of what life actually is

Life was never supposed to be perfect but was always supposed to be long. Disease, earthquakes, accidents, and planes flying into buildings are not supposed to happen. When these things do happen, we not only must grieve the loss, we also must grieve the loss of the belief that it shouldn’t have happened at all.

Children and grief

We don’t teach false assumption to children

we need to update their views on life and death. If we don’t, we perpetuate the beliefs and assumptions that nothing ever goes wrong. If that is the belief a child takes with her into adulthood, she will have little sense of reality and a hard time coping with life.

Death in children has been normal

Even the belief that a child is not supposed to get sick and die, that a child’s death is unnatural, is not a reality. If you look back a hundred years, infant mortality rates were very high and were considered a part of life. If you had seven children, you knew that only a few would survive. That was reality.

Good people die. Healthy people die.

In essence, they were struggling with their crushed belief system that if they did the right things, they would have a good result. It is easy to understand this assumption until we remember that athletes die too.

Healthy living can give us a longer healthspan, but not escape death

It leaves us to wonder, why bother trying to be healthy? The answer is that healthy living can prevent some conditions from developing or being exacerbated. But the belief that healthy living will stop us from dying is a hard belief system to hold together when we are deep in grief. In the grieving process, we also need to take time to mourn the life we were supposed to have.

Kids grieve too

This wise woman understood that grief in children feels different than it does in adults. Kids don’t have the words or permission to voice their grief, while adults have trouble expressing the emotions.

Secrets and grief

After a loved one has died it is not unusual to uncover a secret or two here or there. The hardest part is that the secret represents something we perceive as them withholding from us personally.

Secret addictions

It may be very painful to find out a loved one had a gambling habit or strayed from a marriage. Secrets can leave behind more than just a bit of information. They often leave many questions in their wake.

Secret family members

A funeral director spoke about how every once in a while he would have what he called “after hours.” He was referring to the times he got a call from the ex-wife, the mistress, the illegitimate son, the black sheep of the family, the one who would not be welcomed to grieve at the funeral.

We are all humans with imperfections even after death

What you knew was real. What you found out was most likely real also. If it was negative, do your best to realize they were merely mortal just as you are. Forgive them if you need to, and try to accept the parts of them you didn’t know. Death can invade our privacy and deprive us of the chance to explain our actions.

Dealing with grief

And falling ill does not mean that you are doing something wrong. True spirituality is not about blaming or finding fault. It’s about reaching into the purest part of yourself, the part that is connected to love, the part that is (if you believe it to be) connected to God, the part that is beyond the body and health and disease.

Fantasizing the life after death

After she died, in his grief, he began to reconstruct their life together as one in which Sophie could do no wrong. He saw her as never having been anything less than perfect and loving, and in his mind he created a powerful fantasy about who she was. He, like so many others before him, idealized her in death with a marriage they never had in life. People often change reality to fantasy after death. Some of this is cultural. We are taught never to speak ill of the dead, and we feel guilty for even remembering the mistakes they made.

The only way to deal with death is to go through it

Most of us would do just about anything rather than sit with someone in grief. But grief must be fully experienced to provide the healing on the other side. The only way out is through it, so you can put it off but you can’t skip it. To delay it is to live with grief sitting mildly in the background, or for some, not so mildly.

Don’t distract yourself

Peace lies at the center of the pain, and although it will hurt, you will move through it a lot faster than if you distracted yourself with external outings.

Don’t define strength with not dieing

We are sure that strong people can beat it. She will make it. Cancer is no match for a strong husband or a fiercely determined wife. The message is that strength is life and death is weakness. So what are we left with when our loved one dies — weakness?

Grief and possessions

While there is so much going on inside of you, a myriad of tasks await outside. One of these tasks is to pack up your loved one’s clothing. Another is to decide what to do with it. This often feels like the most difficult job of all, because to deal with a person’s possessions is to clearly face the fact they are gone.

Start with the sorting when you feel the grieving is done

Start this task when you feel strong enough. Ask a friend or family member to do it with you if you feel that a loving presence will help.

Writing

Write to them even after they are gone. Tell them how you are doing and how much you miss them. A letter can be a substitute trip to a distant grave when frequent travel is not possible.

Grief and age

Dieing when you are old

“Years ago,” she told her daughter, “I might have been afraid, but now, I know so many more people who have died than I do people alive. Most of my friends are now dead. I figure if death is nothingness, I won’t be dealing with anything.

Dieing when you are young

Old age in many ways cushions us in grief, prepares us, and helps us deal with loss. Young age complicates our grieving by increasing our sense of unfairness. We all believe we should die old, not young.

Help children deal with grief

How children experience early loss will be replayed at many different junctions of their lives. It may determine how safe the world feels, what their friendships are like, and how their romantic relationships play out.

Teaching children about death

Explaining what happens to the body

Say, “The body is heated until it turns to ash” rather than “burned.” Some children can be traumatized to learn that their favorite aunt is about to be burned. The child may think, “Wasn’t dying bad enough—now we have to burn her too?”

School and grades

When a child’s grades fall, adults may consider that the child is not doing so well. But a lack of attention in school after a death, or any reaction at all, is a normal sign.

Teach them about death

We spend a great deal of time teaching our children about life, and when someone is dying, we have a profound opportunity to teach them how to care for loved ones in their last days.

Teaching them about life and death

We spend so much time teaching our children about life, why not do the same with death?

Dieing well

we don’t die well and we don’t grieve well anymore. Illness moved into the hospital in the 1940s and death moved into the funeral home. We now, all too often, die among strangers. Only a few visitors at a time are allowed in the hospital room. Hospice and palliative care are wonderful and yet still underutilized resources. We rarely gather as a family as our loved one dies.

When dying is prolonged

The process of dying when it is prolonged like mine is a nightmare. I have struggled with the constant pain and paralysis.

Why grieve well?

Why grieve? For two reasons. First, those who grieve well, live well. Second, and most important, grief is the healing process of the heart, soul, and mind; it is the path that returns us to wholeness.

Radical Acceptance

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This cultivation of mindfulness and compassion is what I call Radical Acceptance.

Self criticism

Inner critic

I was the furthest thing from my own best friend. I was continually harassed by an inner judge who was merciless, relentless, nit-picking, driving, often invisible but always on the job. I knew I would never treat a friend the way I treated myself, without mercy or kindness.

Unable to see our true strenths

When we experience our lives through this lens of personal insufficiency, we are imprisoned in what I call the trance of unworthiness. Trapped in this trance, we are unable to perceive the truth of who we really are.

Death regret of wasting time on self criticism

“You know,” she whispered softly, “all my life I thought something was wrong with me.” Shaking her head slightly, as if to say, “What a waste,” she closed her eyes and drifted back into a coma. Several hours later she passed away.

Addiction

Our feelings of unworthiness and alienation from others give rise to various forms of suffering. For some, the most glaring expression is addiction. It may be to alcohol, food or drugs. Others feel addicted to a relationship, dependent on a particular person or people in order to feel they are complete and that life is worth living.

Wrong assumptions

We may assume that our physical sickness or emotional depression is our own fault — the result of our bad genes or our lack of discipline and willpower.

Nowhere to go with all the occupation of the mind

Convinced that we are not good enough, we can never relax. We stay on guard, monitoring ourselves for shortcomings. When we inevitably find them, we feel even more insecure and undeserving. We have to try even harder. The irony of all of this is … where do we think we are going anyway?

Message of the original sin

The message of “original sin” is unequivocal: Because of our basically flawed nature, we do not deserve to be happy, loved by others, at ease with life. We are outcasts, and if we are to reenter the garden, we must redeem our sinful selves.

Family

Only child

Being an only child, she felt as if she was on the planet to be the person her parents wanted her to be. Her value rested solely on how well she represented them, and whether or not she made them proud. She was their object to manage and control, to show off or reprimand. Her opinions and feelings didn’t matter because, as she said, they didn’t see her as “her own person.”

Parents to parents

Our imperfect parents had imperfect parents of their own. Fears, insecurities and desires get passed along for generations. Parents want to see their offspring make it in ways that are important to them.

Unworthy from the viewpoint of parents

As we internalize this view of our nature, we become ensnared in the trance of unworthiness. We can spend years and decades of our life trying to be who they wanted us to be, trying to be good enough to reenter the garden.

Pick up where our parents left us off

The running commentary in our mind reminds us over and over that we always screw up, that others are managing their lives so much more efficiently and successfully. Often we take over where our parents left off, pointedly reminding ourselves of our flaws.

Young children and abusive experiences

Young children make sense of abusive experiences by thinking that they caused them to happen, that they were in some way to blame. Barbara grew up assuming that she brought on her father’s unpredictable outbreaks.

Illusion of control

Internal dialogue about problems and people

We keep certain key themes going: what we have to do, what has not worked out, what trouble might lie ahead, how others are viewing us, how others are (or are not) meeting our needs, how others are interfering or letting us down.

Future thinking is an illusion

Living in the future creates the illusion that we are managing our life and steels us against personal failure.

Illusion of control by always thinking about what is wrong

Staying on top of what is wrong with us gives us the sense that we are controlling our impulses, disguising our weaknesses and possibly improving our character.

Temporary relief with an enemy

Whether it is a family schism or a generations-long war between ethnic groups, creating an enemy imparts a sense of control—we feel superior, we feel right, we believe we are doing something about the problem. Directing anger at an enemy temporarily reduces our feelings of fear and vulnerability.

Seperate and unique problems

His amazing insight was that all suffering or dissatisfaction arises from a mistaken understanding that we are a separate and distinct self.

Stories of the past and the future

When we get lost in our stories, we lose touch with our actual experience. Leaning into the future, or rehashing the past, we leave the living experience of the immediate moment.

Realising our goodness

How could they feel that way about themselves, he wondered, when “everybody has Buddha nature.”

Recognising our goodness

Spiritual awakening is the process of recognizing our essential goodness, our natural wisdom and compassion.

Accepting that suffering is universal

This was his first noble truth: Suffering or discontent is universal, and fully recognizing its existence is the first step on the path of awakening.

How to deal with the trance of unworthiness

Start with awareness

Without judging yourself, simply become aware of how you are relating to your body, emotions, thoughts and behaviors. As the trance of unworthiness becomes conscious, it begins to lose its power over our lives.

Acceptance

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change… The way out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience.

Honesty

We can’t honestly accept an experience unless we see clearly what we are accepting.

Non-judgemental

The two wings of clear seeing and compassion are inseparable; both are essential in liberating us from the trance. They work together, mutually reinforcing each other.

Not denuying or suppressing

Radical Acceptance is not self-indulgence. It does not say, “I accept that I have this lust or craving, and therefore I’ll act on it.” While it’s important not to deny or suppress our desires, it’s also important to be aware of what motivates us and the effects of our behavior.

Going to the root of the problem

I like to remind students that radical is derived from the Latin word radix, meaning “going to the root or origin.” Radical Acceptance enables us to return to the root or origin of who we are, to the source of our being.

Meditation

Thinking

When you become aware of thinking, you might use a soft and friendly mental note: “Thinking, thinking.” Then, without any judgment, gently return to the immediacy of the breath.

Pause

Learning to pause is the first step in the practice of Radical Acceptance. A pause is a suspension of activity, a time of temporary disengagement when we are no longer moving toward any goal.

Disrupting habitual behaviours

When we pause, we don’t know what will happen next. But by disrupting our habitual behaviors, we open to the possibility of new and creative ways of responding to our wants and fears.

Pausing is difficult

Often the moment when we most need to pause is exactly when it feels most intolerable to do so. Pausing in a fit of anger, or when overwhelmed by sorrow or filled with desire, may be the last thing we want to do.

Neither pleasure nor suffering

This attitude of neither grasping nor pushing away any experience has come to be known as the Middle Way, and it characterizes the engaged presence we awaken in pausing.

Pausing our mental chatter

Until we stop our mental busyness, stop our endless activities, we have no way of knowing our actual experience. Like Laura, we primarily know how to avoid it.

Naming the feelings without judgement

He didn’t know where he was or why he was there. All he knew was that his heart was pounding furiously and his mind was spinning in confusion. Putting his palms together at his heart, Jacob started naming out loud what was happening: “Afraid, embarrassed, confused, feeling like I’m failing, powerless, shaking, sense of dying, sinking, lost.” For several more minutes he sat, head slightly bowed, continuing to name his experience.

Non-judgemental naming and awareness of feelings right now

Rather than pushing away his experience and deepening his agitation, Jacob had the courage and training simply to name what he was aware of, and, most significantly, to bow to his experience. In some fundamental way he didn’t create an adversary out of feelings of fear and confusion. He didn’t make anything wrong.

I see you feelings

Instead of ignoring Mara or driving him away, the Buddha would calmly acknowledge his presence, saying, “I see you, Mara.”

Recognising itself will lessen the feeling

As I sit with it, I become aware that I’m afraid of not having the energy to get everything done, afraid of failing. This fear that has hardened my heart is what now needs my attention. The moment I recognize Mara, some of the power of that fear lessens, and with it, the self-judgment. I am not so caught in my assumed identity as a stressed, striving and potentially deficient person.

Lost in thoughts and realising it

You may get lost for a time in thoughts. When you realize this, gently note, “planning, obsessing, fantasizing,” and return your attention to your body. Again sense and name any strong emotions or sensations that you become aware of.

Quietness

When we are quiet, we can more readily notice our changing stream of experience: of vibration, pulsing, pressure, heat, light, tastes, images and sounds.

Waterfall effect

The Buddha called our persistent emotional and mental reactivity the “waterfall” because we so easily are carried away from the experience of the present moment by its compelling force. Both Buddhist and Western psychology tell us how this happens: The mind instantly and unconsciously assesses whatever we experience as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.

Direct experience

The Buddha makes clear that being mindful of sensations does not mean standing apart and observing like a distant witness. Rather we’re directly experiencing what is happening in our body.

Let go of the story

Each time we let go of our story, we realize there is no ground to stand on, no position that orients us, no way to hide or avoid what is arising.

Feelings are the messengers

In the old days, if a king didn’t like the message he was given, he would sometimes have the messenger killed. This is tantamount to suppressing your symptoms or your feelings because they are unwanted. Killing the messenger and denying the message or raging against it are not intelligent ways of approaching healing.

Desire

When desire is a problem

Desire becomes a problem only when it takes over our sense of who we are. In teaching the Middle Way, the Buddha guided us to relate to desire without getting possessed by it and without resisting it. He was talking about every level of desire—for food and sex, for love and freedom.

Immediate gratification

We often try to satisfy our emotional needs with the more immediate pleasures of food, alcohol and drugs. When they “work,” these strategies provide immediate gratification through a temporary surge of pleasant sensations.

Defining part of self

Our most regularly used strategies to get what we want also become a defining part of our sense of self. The overeating, the competing, the people pleasing, feel like me. As we immerse ourselves in the life-consuming pursuit of substitutes, we become increasingly alienated from our authentic desires, our deepest longings for love and belonging.

Craving for substitutes

Our fundamental longing to belong and feel loved becomes an insistent craving for substitutes.

The practise

Eliminating desire is not the goal

Equating spiritual purity with elimination of desire is a common misunderstanding I also see in students on the Buddhist path. This is not just a contemporary issue.

This too

When emotions surged up that felt too painful or consuming to be with, I reminded her to silently say to herself, “This too,” and with a gentle attention, focus on the sensations in her body.

Sitting still and naming

Sarah had begun seeing how even the most acute cravings eventually subsided if she just sat still, named what was happening and, instead of wishing they’d go away, just said, “This too.” “Suddenly it became clear that all my desires and thoughts and feelings are an endless, changing parade,” she told me.

After the pause

While we might still pursue what we want after the pause, at least we do so aware of some of the tension and suffering that lie under our desires.

Observe the desire

the wisdom of seeing that everything passes is liberating. Observing desire without acting on it enlarges our freedom to choose how we live.

Refuge: In ourself, our work and our community

In Buddhism, the three fundamental refuges are the Buddha (our awakened nature), the dharma (the path or the way) and the sangha (the community of spiritual aspirants).

Say hello and sit with me for a while

After a pause she added, “A voice is telling me, ‘You’ll blow it … you’re hopeless.’” I reminded her, “Just say hello to that too, and invite it to sit down.”

Does not help with the actual healing

What was I doing? My ongoing ritual of aching and praying and crying and hating my suffering was not really moving me toward healing.

Everyone feels some kind of pain

The anger no longer feels like a personal flaw or an oppressive burden. We begin to see its universal nature—it’s not our anger, it is notour pain. Everyone lives with anger, with fear, with grief.

Compassion

When we look at our own lives and at the history of humanity, we realize that hatred, anger and all forms of dislike are a pervasive and natural part of being alive. Aversion arises because we are so deeply conditioned to feel separate and different from others.

Just human

She gave me a smile that was both sad and sweet and said, “When I remember that other people feel the same kind of insecurity that I do, then it’s not like I’m bad—I’m just human.” She paused and then added, “I can feel how we’re all in it together.”

Others

Assumption

Sometimes the very people we are closest to become unreal to us. We might easily assume we know what life is like for them and forget that, like us, they are always changing, their experience is always new.

Resentment

When we have been betrayed, one of our first reactions is to lash out in blame. We create a story of good and bad and aim our anger at the one who has caused us pain. With deep resentment, we build a case against them, often with enough evidence to prove we should eliminate them from our life altogether. The word resentment means “to feel again.”

Forgiveness

We can’t punish ourselves into being a good person.

Forgiveness

forgiving is a product not of effort but of openness. This is why the intention to forgive is such a key element in the process.

Intention to forgive

Your intention to forgive is the seed of forgiveness—this willingness will gradually relax and open your heart.

Quote

I sought my god, my god I could not see. I sought my soul, my soul eluded me. I sought my brother, and found all three. - Anonymous

Not passiveness

When others accept us exactly as we are, it does not mean they like everything we do. It does not mean that they will passively stand by if we are injuring ourselves or others.

Not taking pain personally

Pain does not belong to one individual. Not taking pain personally is essential to Radical Acceptance. As the Buddha taught, life’s difficulties are not owned or caused by an individual—our changing states of body and mind are influenced by myriad variables.

Awareness

Attention

We may spend our lives seeking something that is actually right inside us, and could be found if we would only stop and deepen our attention. But distracted, we spend our life on our way to somewhere else.

Awareness

The very nature of awareness is cognizance, a continuous knowing of the stream of experience. In this moment that you are reading, sounds are heard, vibration is felt, form and color are seen. This knowing happens instantaneously, spontaneously.

The gap between thoughts

When thoughts arise, where do they come from, where do they go to? As you explore looking into the space between thoughts, through the holes in the net, you are looking into awareness itself.

Self

What do you notice? Is there any “thing” or “self” you perceive that is static, solid or enduring? Is there an entity that exists apart from the changing stream of feelings, sensations or thoughts? What actually do you see when you look into awareness? Is there any boundary or center to your experience? Are you aware of being aware?

Dzogchen

It is important that we practice dzogchen in an easy and effortless way, not contracting the mind by striving to do it right. To avoid creating stress, it is best to limit practice to five- to ten-minute intervals.

Save the Cat

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Start with a logline

Summary

And concentrate on writing one sentence. One line. Because if you can learn how to tell me “What is it?” better, faster, and with more creativity, you’ll keep me interested. And incidentally, by doing so before you start writing your script, you’ll make the story better, too.

Summary or logline

In Hollywood parlance it’s called a logline or a one-line. And the difference between a good one and a bad one is simple.

Logline with irony or hook

ISN’T IT IRONIC? The number one thing a good logline must have, the single most important element, is: irony… And irony gets my attention. It’s what we who struggle with loglines like to call the hook, because that’s what it does. It hooks your interest.

Curiosity

What Colby identified is the fact that a good logline must be emotionally intriguing, like an itch you have to scratch. A logline is like the cover of a book; a good one makes you want to open it, right now, to find out what’s inside.

Encompassing the whole movie

A COMPELLING MENTAL PICTURE The second most important element that a good logline has is that you must be able to see a whole movie in it.

Who and how much?

AUDIENCE AND COST Another thing a good logline has, that is important in attracting studio buyers, is a built-in sense of who it’s for and what it’s going to cost.

Title

A KILLER TITLE Lastly, what is intriguing about a good logline must include the title. Title and logline are, in fact, the one-two punch, and a good combo never fails to knock me out.

Similar for YouTube: Summary, Title and Thumbnail

I’m proposing that before you head off into your FADE IN: you think long and hard about the logline, the title, and the poster.

The 10 types of movies

Even the experts know hundreds of movies

Listen to Spielberg or Scorsese talk about movies. They know and can quote from hundreds.

10 types of movies I have categorized here are:

Monster in the House – Of which Jaws, Tremors, Alien,
Golden Fleece – This is the category of movie best exemplified by Star Wars; The Wizard of Oz;
Out of the Bottle – This incorporates films like Liar, Liar; Bruce Almighty;
Dude with a Problem – This is a genre that ranges in style, tone, and emotional substance
Rites Of Passage – Every change-of-life story from 10 to Ordinary People to Days of Wine and Roses makes this category.
Buddy Love – This genre is about more than the buddy movie dynamic
Whydunit – Who cares who, it’s why that counts.
The Fool Triumphant – One of the oldest story types, this category includes Being There, Forrest Gump, Dave,
Institutionalized – Just like it sounds, this is about groups: Animal House,
Superhero – This isn’t just about the obvious tales you’d think of, like Superman and Batman,

Monster in the House

The “house” must be a confined space: a beach town, a spaceship, a futuristic Disneyland with dinosaurs, a family unit. There must be sin committed — usually greed

Golden Fleece

“The Golden Fleece.” The name comes from the myth of Jason and the Argonauts and yet it’s always about the same thing: A hero goes “on the road” in search of one thing and winds up discovering something else — himself.

Out of the Bottle

In many ways what these adventures are is irrelevant. Whatever fun set pieces our hero encounters must be shaded to deliver milestones of growth for our kid lead.

Dude with a Problem

And eventually, the hero must learn that magic isn’t everything, it’s better to be just like us — us members of the audience — because in the end we know this will never happen to us.

Rites Of Passage

These painful examples of life transition resonate with us because we have all, to a greater or lesser degree, gone through them. And growing-pain stories register because they are the most sensitive times in our lives.

Buddy Love

The end point is acceptance of our humanity and the moral of the story is always the same: That’s Life!

Whydunit

We all know that evil lurks in the hearts of men. Greed happens. Murder happens. And unseen evildoers are responsible for it all. But the “who” is never as interesting as the “why.” Unlike the Golden Fleece, a good Whydunit isn’t about the hero changing, it’s about the audience discovering something about human nature they did not think was possible before the “crime” was committed and the “case” began.

The Fool Triumphant

The working parts of a Fool Triumphant movie are simple: an underdog — who is seemingly so inept and so unequipped for life that everyone around him discounts his odds for success

Superhero

The “Superhero” genre is the exact opposite of Dude with a Problem and can best be defined by its opposite definition: An extraordinary person finds himself in an ordinary world.

What to do with the patterns

Your job is to learn why it works and how these story cogs fit together. When it seems like you’re stealing — don’t. When it feels like a cliché — give it a twist. When you think it’s familiar — it probably is, so you’ve got to find a new way.

Originality can only begin after knowing the rules

The rules are there for a reason. Once you get over feeling confined by these rules, you’ll be amazed at how freeing they are. True originality can’t begin until you know what you’re breaking away from.

Other elements

Main characters

So let’s add a few things to our list of what the “perfect” logline must include to be truly compelling: > An adjective to describe the hero > An adjective to describe the bad guy, and… > A compelling goal we identify with as human beings

Storyline

The point is that amping up a great logline with the hero who makes the idea work best is how the idea comes to life. And let’s be clear, the trick is to create heroes who: > Offer the most conflict in that situation > Have the longest way to go emotionally and… > Are the most demographically pleasing!

Character developement

The best ideas and the best characters in the lead roles must have basic needs, wants, and desires. Basic, basic!

The 15 beats

OPENING IMAGE (1)
THEME STATED (5)
SET-UP (1-10)
CATALYST (12)
DEBATE (12-25)
B STORY (30)
FUN AND GAMES (30-55)
MIDPOINT (55)
BAD GUYS CLOSE IN (55-75)
ALL IS LOST (75)
DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL (75-85)
BREAK INTO THREE (85)
FINALE (85-110)
FINAL IMAGE (110)

The Board

The Board is a way for you to “see” your movie before you start writing. It is a way to easily test different scenes, story arcs, ideas, bits of dialogue and story rhythms, and decide whether they work — or if they just plain suck.

Four rows of the board

Row #1 is Act One (pages 1-25)
Row #2 represents the first half of Act Two up to the midpoint (25-55)
Row #3 is the midpoint to the Break into Act Three (55-85)
Row #4 is Act Three to the movie’s final image (85-110).

Index cards

Although you can write anything you want on these index cards, they are primarily used to denote scenes. By the time we’re done, you’ll have 40 of these — count ’em, 40 — and no more.

What do the cards have?

Where does the scene take place? Is it an INTERIOR or an EXTERIOR?
Color-coding characters
”+/-“ sign represents the emotional change you must execute in each scene
”><” denotes conflict

Checklist

Title
Logline
Genre
Hero
The Board
The 15 Beats
The 40 Scenes

The lead character

Is your hero’s goal clearly stated in the set-up?
Do clues of what to do next just come to your hero or does he seek them out?
Your hero cannot be handed his destiny, he must work for it at every step.
Is your hero active or passive?
Everything your hero does has to spring from his burning desire and his deeply held need to achieve his goal.
Do other characters tell your hero what to do or does he tell them?
The hero knows and others around him look to him for answers, not the other way around.
Does your hero have a flaw?

Four Thousand Weeks

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Table of Contents

The current state of affairs
Modern life
Solutions
Focus and attention
Planning and scheduling
The present moment
Doing nothing

The irony

we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.

The current state of affairs

Busyness with hustle

Recently, as the gig economy has grown, busyness has been rebranded as “hustle”—relentless work not as a burden to be endured but as an exhilarating lifestyle choice, worth boasting about on social media.

Short attention span

Take the daily battle against online distraction, and the alarming sense that our attention spans have shriveled to such a degree

Time is running out within these 80 years

It’s hard to imagine a crueler arrangement: not only are our four thousand weeks constantly running out, but the fewer of them we have left, the faster we seem to lose them.

Struggle and control

This is the maddening truth about time, which most advice on managing it seems to miss. It’s like an obstreperous toddler: the more you struggle to control it, to make it conform to your agenda, the further it slips from your control.

Human nature

We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day.

Living in the future vs now

Our days are spent trying to “get through” tasks, in order to get them “out of the way,” with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get around to what really matters—and worrying, in the meantime, that we don’t measure up, that we might lack the drive or stamina to keep pace with the speed at which life now seems to move.

Time is a man-made concept

our modern way of thinking about time is so deeply entrenched that we forget it even is a way of thinking; we’re like the proverbial fish who have no idea what water is, because it surrounds them completely

Busy vs bored easily

When there are too many activities to fit comfortably into the containers, we feel unpleasantly busy; when there are too few, we feel bored.

Organic vs abstract timeline

Historians call this way of living “task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline, the approach that has become second nature for us today.

Time ticking away vs timelessness

Untroubled by any notion of time “ticking away,” he might have experienced a heightened awareness of the vividness of things, the feeling of timelessness that Richard Rohr, a contemporary Franciscan priest and author, calls “living in deep time.”

Modern life

As soon as you want to coordinate the actions of more than a handful of people, you need a reliable, agreed-upon method of measuring time.

Time is a resource

Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it.

Robes us of the present moment

It wrenches us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning into the future, worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing everything in terms of some later, hoped-for benefit, so that peace of mind never quite arrives.

The illusion of control

We recoil from the notion that this is it—that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at.

Avoid and push harder

And so, rather than face our limitations, we engage in avoidance strategies, in an effort to carry on feeling limitless. We push ourselves harder, chasing fantasies of the perfect work-life balance;

Haste and no leisure

We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life,” wrote Nietzsche, “because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”

Fulfillment == doing more

But it remains the case that their fulfillment still seems to depend on their managing to do more than they can do. This helps explain why stuffing your life with pleasurable activities so often proves less satisfying than you’d expect.

Convenience

Convenience, in other words, makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what’s most valuable in any given context.

Solutions

Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default—or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all.

FOMO is there all around

And it means standing firm in the face of FOMO, the “fear of missing out,” because you come to realize that missing out on something—indeed, on almost everything—is basically guaranteed

Not as an opportunity, but a response

There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.

Face the reality

But my point here is that however privileged or unfortunate your specific situation, fully facing the reality of it can only help.

Accept the impossible

Whereas once you deeply grasp that they are impossible, you’ll be newly empowered to resist them, and to focus instead on building the most meaningful life you can, in whatever situation you’re in.

If everything is important, then nothing is

the problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important—or just for enough of what feels important—is that you definitely never will.

Embrace the limits of life

I still think it’s the single best antidote to the feeling of time pressure, a splendidly liberating first step on the path of embracing your limits: the problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important—or just for enough of what feels important—is that you definitely never will.

Goalposts will shift

But the other exasperating issue is that if you succeed in fitting more in, you’ll find the goalposts start to shift: more things will begin to seem important, meaningful, or obligatory.

Input and output

The “input” side of this arrangement—the number of emails that you could, in principle, receive—is essentially infinite. But the “output” side—the number of messages you’ll have time to read properly, reply to, or just make a considered decision to delete—is strictly finite.

Why there will never be enough time

The general principle in operation is one you might call the “efficiency trap.” Rendering yourself more efficient—either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder—won’t generally result in the feeling of having “enough time,” because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits.

Focus on less

the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.

In the past, it was easier

felt like a known quantity: you were content to play your role in the human drama—a role that countless thousands had played before you, and thousands more would play after your death—without any sense that you were missing out on the exciting new possibilities of your particular moment in history.

Forever progress into the future

And when people start believing in progress—in the idea that history is headed toward an ever more perfect future—they feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan, which condemns them to missing out on almost all of that future.

Resist the urge to do more

anti-skill: not the counterproductive strategy of trying to make yourself more efficient, but rather a willingness to resist such urges—to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in.

Focus on the small number of experiences

Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for—and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.

Dealing with the convience culture

Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.

Must choose

You might make a very different choice, of course. But the undodgeable reality of a finite human life is that you are going to have to choose.

Realise that there is anything at all

The most fundamental thing we fail to appreciate about the world, Heidegger asserts in his magnum opus, Being and Time, is how bafflingly astonishing it is that it’s there at all—the fact that there is anything rather than nothing.

Impermanence

So bound up, in fact, that the two are synonymous: to be, for a human, is above all to exist temporally, in the stretch between birth and death, certain that the end will come, yet unable to know when.

Time is already always running out

this is it, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out—indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month.

Realise the entitlement of planning to live forever

There you were, planning to live on forever—as the old Woody Allen line has it, not in the hearts of your countrymen, but in your apartment—but now here comes mortality, to steal away the life that was rightfully yours. Yet, on reflection, there’s something very entitled about this attitude.

The glass is half full

why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born?… So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.

If you were not born at all

“What would David have given to be caught in this traffic jam?” It was the same for queues in supermarkets and customer service lines that kept him on hold too long. Lye’s focus was no longer exclusively on what he was doing in such moments or what he’d rather be doing instead; now, he noticed also that he was doing it, with an upwelling of gratitude that took him by surprise.

From nothing to something

From this viewpoint, the situation starts to seem much less regrettable: each moment of decision becomes an opportunity to select from an enticing menu of possibilities, when you might easily never have been presented with the menu to begin with. And it stops making sense to pity yourself for having been cheated of all the other options.

JOMO not FOMO

exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the “joy of missing out,” by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the “fear of missing out.”

Reframing those mundane tasks

In this state of mind, you can embrace the fact that you’re forgoing certain pleasures, or neglecting certain obligations, because whatever you’ve decided to do instead—earn money to support your family, write your novel, bathe the toddler, pause on a hiking trail to watch a pale winter sun sink below the horizon at dusk—is how you’ve chosen to spend a portion of time that you never had any right to expect.

Accepting the limitations

the core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done—that’s never going to happen—but how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.

Procrastinating on lower priorities

So the point isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on, in order to focus on what matters most. The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.

When something matters to you

So if a certain activity really matters to you—a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or activism in the service of some cause—the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention.

There is no free time in the future

“If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week,” as she puts it, “there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.”

Choose 25 goals, and ignore the last 20

the remaining twenty, Buffett allegedly explains, aren’t the second-tier priorities to which he should turn when he gets the chance. Far from it. In fact, they’re the ones he should actively avoid at all costs — because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to him to form the core of his life yet seductive enough to distract him from the ones that matter most.

Step into the world of finitude

Stepping into the world of finitude, by actually building the mosque, would mean confronting all that he couldn’t do. Better to cherish an ideal fantasy than to resign himself to reality, with all its limitations and unpredictability.

If you are procrastinating because of worry

if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.

It’s so easy to fantasize

In other words, it’s easy for me to fantasize about, say, a life spent achieving stellar professional success, while also excelling as a parent and partner, while also dedicating myself to training for marathons or lengthy meditation retreats or volunteering in my community—because so long as I’m only fantasizing, I get to imagine all of them unfolding simultaneously and flawlessly. As soon as I start trying to live any of those lives, though, I’ll be forced to make trade-offs—to put less time than I’d like into one of those domains, so as to make space for another—and to accept that nothing I do will go perfectly anyway, with the result that my actual life will inevitably prove disappointing by comparison with the fantasy. “The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself,” Bergson wrote, “and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”

You have to settle down either ways

The received wisdom, articulated in a thousand magazine articles and inspirational Instagram memes, is that it’s always a crime to settle. But the received wisdom is wrong. You should definitely settle. Or to be more precise, you don’t have a choice. You will settle—and this fact ought to please you.

You must settle down

“You must settle, in a relatively enduring way, upon something that will be the object of your striving, in order for that striving to count as striving,” he writes: you can’t become an ultrasuccessful lawyer or artist or politician without first “settling” on law, or art, or politics, and therefore deciding to forgo the potential rewards of other careers. If you flit between them all, you’ll succeed in none of them.

The future is more appealing in imagination

The point that Bergson made about the future—that it’s more appealing than the present because you get to indulge in all your hopes for it, even if they contradict each other—is no less true of fantasy romantic partners, who can easily exhibit a range of characteristics that simply couldn’t coexist in one person in the real world.

Attention will define your reality

what you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.

Your life == sum of all your attention

Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.

Focus and attention

Meditation

The only faculty you can use to see what’s happening to your attention is your attention, the very thing that’s already been commandeered.

Boredom

This is why boredom can feel so surprisingly, aggressively unpleasant: we tend to think of it merely as a matter of not being particularly interested in whatever it is we’re doing, but in fact it’s an intense reaction to the deeply uncomfortable experience of confronting your limited control.

When boredom strikes

Boredom can strike in widely differing contexts—when you’re working on a major project; when you can’t think of anything to do on a Sunday afternoon; when it’s your job to care for a two-year-old for five hours straight—but they all have one characteristic in common: they demand that you face your finitude.

Relieving the pain of limitation

you’ll probably still find it unpleasantly constraining to focus on what matters, so you’ll find some way to relieve the pain by distracting yourself: by daydreaming, taking an unnecessary nap, or — the preferred option of the productivity geek — redesigning your to-do list and reorganizing your desk.

Distractions aren’t the cause

The overarching point is that what we think of as “distractions” aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.

Accept the limited control

The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise—to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.

Planning and scheduling

Hofstadter’s law

The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter is famous, among other reasons, for coining “Hofstadter’s law,” which states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, “even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

Future is uncertain

The obsessive planner, essentially, is demanding certain reassurances from the future—but the future isn’t the sort of thing that can ever provide the reassurance he craves, for the obvious reason that it’s still in the future.

Plans are just intentions

But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

Ponder on the last time

there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time. Harris’s point is that we should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it.

The present moment

Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now—that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order.

Doing nothing

Idleness

“Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness,” writes the philosopher John Gray. He adds: “How can there be play in a time when nothing has meaning unless it leads to something else?”

Walk

Moreover, a country walk doesn’t have a purpose, in the sense of an outcome you’re trying to achieve or somewhere you’re trying to get.

Atelic vs telic activities

As Setiya recalls in his book Midlife, he was heading toward the age of forty when he first began to feel a creeping sense of emptiness, which he would later come to understand as the result of living a project-driven life, crammed not with atelic activities but telic ones, the primary purpose of which was to have them done, and to have achieved certain outcomes

Side hustle is positively more fashionable than hobby

This also helps explain why it’s far less embarrassing (indeed, positively fashionable) to have a “side hustle,” a hobbylike activity explicitly pursued with profit in mind.

The End of Alzheimer's

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Definition

Why Alzheimer’s should be paid attention to

First, it is the only one—let me repeat that: the only one—of the nation’s ten most common causes of death for which there is no effective treatment.

No initial treatment

We don’t even have a treatment to keep people with subjective cognitive impairment or mild cognitive impairment (two conditions that often precede Alzheimer’s disease) from going on to develop full-blown Alzheimer’s.

Years and decades before death

For years and sometimes decades before it opens the door to the grim reaper, Alzheimer’s disease robs its victims of their very humanity and terrorizes their families.

Reversal of cognitive decline in early stages

I expect you to exercise that skepticism as you read about the three decades of research in my lab, which culminated in the first reversals of cognitive decline in early Alzheimer’s disease and its precursors, MCI (mild cognitive impairment) and SCI (subjective cognitive impairment).

Genetic link

ApoE4 is the strongest known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. Carrying one ApoE4 (that is, inherited from one parent) increases your lifetime risk of Alzheimer’s to 30 percent.

10% above 65 years old

Because Alzheimer’s disease strikes an estimated one in nine Americans 65 and older, or 5.2 million people as I write this, the aging of the baby boom generation threatens to bring a tsunami of Alzheimer’s

Trying to get rid of amyloid is not helpful

the amyloid that has been vilified for decades, the very amyloid that everyone has been trying to get rid of, is part of a protective response. No wonder trying to get rid of it hasn’t been very helpful to those with Alzheimer’s disease.

Protective response

Alzheimer’s disease is actually a protective response to, specifically, three different processes: inflammation, suboptimal levels of nutrients and other synapse-supporting molecules, and toxic exposures.

How Alzheimer’s is different from other diseases

the disease we call Alzheimer’s is actually the result of a protective response in the brain. This is worth repeating. Alzheimer’s disease does not arise from the brain failing to function as it evolved to. It is not like cancer, where a genetic mutation—inherited or acquired during the course of life—turns.

Stages and types

Early stages

Memory loss is often one of the earlier symptoms, which typically include difficulty with reading, writing, speaking, following a conversation, reasoning, calculating, organizing, and planning.

Types of dementia

There are many causes of dementia, including vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, Lewy body dementia, and others, but Alzheimer’s disease is the most common.

Vascular dementia: The form of dementia caused by reduced blood flow to the brain and marked by multiple small strokes.
Frontotemporal dementia: This is much less common than Alzheimer’s disease, and often features changes in behavior, memory problems, and difficulty speaking.
Lewy body dementia: This is a fairly common cause of dementia (about one patient for every five Alzheimer’s patients), and features visual hallucinations, delusions, increased sleeping, and flinging of limbs during sleep (called REM behavioral disturbance), among other features.
Alzheimer’s disease: This form of dementia is marked by amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles.

2 types of cognitive impairment:

Subjective cognitive impairment (SCI): Worsening cognition that is noticeable to the individual but, in standard neuropsychological testing, still falls in the normal range.
Mild cognitive impairment (MCI): This typically follows subjective cognitive impairment. Neuropsychological tests show that memory, organizing, speaking, calculating, planning, or other cognitive abilities are abnormal, but the person is still able to perform the so-called activities of daily living,

Early symptoms:

Facial blindness or prosopagnosia
Decreasing mental clarity
Decreasing interest in reading
Decreasing ability to recall what she read or heard
Decreasing vocabulary
Mixing up words
Decreasing processing speed
Increasing anxiety about driving and finding her way
Difficulty remembering to-do list and appointments
Sleep disruption
No longer getting a mental boost from caffeine
Trouble speaking the foreign languages
Difficulty recognizing and remembering faces

Why would so many of the very genes that distinguish us from our primate cousins—that, in other words, make us distinctly human—turn out to promote inflammation?… because few lived long enough and in part because their lifestyles actually covered many of the thirty-six holes—they led much less sedentary lives, ingested far fewer simple carbohydrates, had no processed foods, and had much less toxic exposure.

Causes

Other factors that contribute to Alzheimer’s

diet
activity
stress
cardiovascular health
general health
prediabetes
obesity
vitamin D deficiency
sedentary lifestyle
inflammation
hormonal imbalance
toxic exposure
folate deficiency

Synapses

When we are young, these two processes—synapse building/maintenance and synapse dismantling—are in dynamic equilibrium. When we learn, synapses are formed and strengthened… As we age, however, the inputs needed for synaptic growth and maintenance—hormones, nutrients, and more—grow more scarce.

Preserve life sustaining functions

To anyone suffering from Alzheimer’s, of course, it is small comfort to know that the brain made a deliberate “choice” to preserve life-sustaining functions at the expense of the abilities—remembering and thinking, understanding and imagining—that make us human.

Last hired, first fired

As in corporations that follow a “last hired, first fired” philosophy of layoffs, recent memories go first, older ones next, and the oldest ones last. Thus Alzheimer’s patients often remember their childhood of eighty years ago better than the breakfast they had an hour ago.

Prevention / Reversal

Instead of a single pill, we proposed that we combine tropisetron with the forerunner of ReCODE: a comprehensive program of nutrition, exercise, synapse-supporting supplements, hormonal optimization, specific herbs, sleep optimization, and stress reduction, all aimed at shifting the brain’s balance from synapse destruction to synapse preservation by removing the contributors

Apoe4 gene symptoms

In people who carry two copies of ApoE4, symptoms often begin in the late forties or fifties. For people who carry one copy of ApoE4, symptoms typically begin in the late fifties or sixties. For those with no copies of ApoE4, symptom onset is typically in the sixties to seventies.

Levels of homocysteine

Keeping your homocysteine optimally low requires sufficient levels of vitamins B6, B9 (folate), and B12, all in their active forms.

Folate

For folate, the “normal” range is 2–20 nanograms per milliliter, but again, you don’t want to be at the low end of normal. Aim for 10–25.

Insulin and glucose

High insulin and high glucose are two of the most important risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease.

Vitamin D

Reduced vitamin D activity is associated with cognitive decline. Vitamin D travels through your blood and tissues like a Wi-Fi signal, entering your cells… GOAL: vitamin D3 (measured as 25-hydroxycholecalciferol) = 50–80 ng/ml.

Thyroid

Optimal thyroid function is crucial for optimal cognition, and suboptimal thyroid function is common in Alzheimer’s disease. OPTIMAL: TSH < 2.0 microIU/ml; free T3 = 3.2–4.2 pg/ml; reverse T3 < 20 ng/dL; free T3 x 100:reverse T3 > 20; free T4 = 1.3–1.8 ng/dL.

Copper and zinc

Too much copper and too little zinc are associated with dementia. Professor George Brewer from the University of Michigan has spent his career studying the effects of copper and zinc on cognitive function, discovering that most of us are deficient in zinc but have excess copper.

Avoid mercury fish

(The larger the fish and the longer it lives, the more mercury it typically has, so tuna, swordfish, orange roughy, and shark are of particular concern, whereas the “SMASH fish”—salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, and herring—are safer.)

Sleep

Sleep affects cognition through multiple fundamental mechanisms: It alters the cellular anatomy of your brain, allowing a cleansing… Sleep is also associated with a reduced formation of the amyloid.

Intermittent fasting

don’t eat when we’re asleep. Fasting improves our insulin sensitivity. During sleep, our brain cells activate autophagy, the process of “self-eating” that recycles cellular components

Horomones during sleep

Sleep is also a time of repair. Growth hormone increases during sleep, repairing cells, and new supportive brain cells are produced during sleep, among the many reparative processes that occur during sleep.

Link with vascular disease

many people with “high cholesterol” have no problem with vascular disease, and many with “normal cholesterol” have significant vascular disease. Vascular disease itself is a contributor to cognitive decline, because it raises the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and can cause vascular dementia, which is typically associated with many small strokes.

Cholesterol is important

When total cholesterol falls below 150, you are more likely to suffer brain atrophy—shrinking. Cholesterol is a key part of cell membranes, including those of brain cells. What you don’t want is damaged cholesterol and its related lipid particles—these

BMI

An unhealthy body mass index (BMI) raises your risk for cognitive decline. You can find simple online calculators or do it yourself.

Combination of tests

the combination of blood tests, genetic tests, simple online cognitive assessment, and MRI with an automatic computer assessment of brain volumes provides crucial clues to what is causing cognitive decline or putting you at risk for it.

Lifestyle with diet, exercise, fasting

To promote ketosis, you combine a low-carbohydrate diet (minimizing simple carbs such as sugars, bread, white potatoes, white rice, soft drinks, alcohol, candy, cakes, and processed foods), moderate exercise (at least 150 minutes per week of brisk walking or something more vigorous), and fasting for at least twelve hours between your last meal of the night and your first of the next morning (more on this in a minute).

Benifit of fasting

Another big benefit of fasting for 12 to 16 hours is that it promotes autophagy, in which cells (including those in the brain) recycle components and destroy damaged proteins and mitochondria—which is good for renewal.

Whole fruits for fiber

Avoid fruit juices in favor of whole fruits (which include the fiber). Fruit smoothies are fine, but don’t make them too sweet (that contributes to insulin resistance).

Awesome fruits

The best fruits are wild, colorful berries, lemons, limes, tomatoes, and avocados (yes, tomatoes and avocados are, strictly speaking, fruits).

Avoid tropical fruits

Ancestrally, fruits were consumed at the end of summer to fatten for the winter. Avoid tropical fruits because of their increased glycemic index.

Detoxifying plants

These detoxifying plants include cilantro, cruciferous vegetables (cauliflower, broccoli, various types of cabbage, kale, radishes, Brussels sprouts, turnips, watercress, kohlrabi, rutabaga, arugula, horseradish, maca, rapini, daikon, wasabi, bok choy), avocados, artichokes, beets, dandelions, garlic, ginger, grapefruit, lemons, olive oil, and seaweed.

Probiotics and prebiotics

After healing your gut (described below), you need to optimize the bacteria there, which includes feeding the right bacteria (probiotics) with the right bacteria food (prebiotics).

Probiotics

For the probiotics, those include fermented foods such as kimchi, sauerkraut, sour pickles, miso soup, and kombucha… It is often helpful to include in your diet a yeast called Saccharomyces boulardi, which functions as a probiotic, especially if you have diarrhea.

Prebiotics

Prebiotic foods include jicama, onions, garlic, raw leeks, raw Jerusalem artichoke, and dandelion greens.

Benefits of exercise for cognition

Exercise reduces insulin resistance
It increases ketosis, which, among other effects
It increases the size of the hippocampus
It improves vascular function, which is crucial for neuronal and synaptic health.
It reduces stress, a key trigger of Alzheimer’s-promoting inflammation.
It improves sleep, another necessity for cognitive health.
It increases the survival of newborn neurons
It improves mood.

Optimal exercise for cognition

What is the optimal exercise for cognition? You want to combine aerobic exercise, such as jogging or walking or spinning or dancing, with weight training, preferably at least four or five days per week, for 45 to 60 minutes in total each day.

Anti-inflammatory foods

There are many other anti-inflammatories, such as ginger, cinnamon, pregnenolone, cloves, thyme, as well as anti-inflammatory foods such as green leafy vegetables, beets, and broccoli.

Fasting

I drink a glass of room temperature water with lemon and/or ginger to detoxify
Sip organic Japanese green tea and one cup of bone broth (fat removed) throughout the day, but refrain from snacking.

Siddhartha

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Awakening

Once all of my self was overcome and had died, once every desire and every urge was silent in the heart, then the ultimate part of me had to awake, the innermost of my being, which is no longer my self, the great secret.

Buddha’s teachings

Gotama taught the teachings of suffering, of the origin of suffering, of the way to relieve suffering.

Suffering is everywhere

Suffering was life, full of suffering was the world, but salvation from suffering had been found: salvation was obtained by him who would walk the path of the Buddha.

Buddha’s goal

But the teachings, you’ve heard from me, are no opinion, and their goal is not to explain the world to those who seek knowledge. They have a different goal; their goal is salvation from suffering.

Find and learn yourself

one thing no longer existed in him, which had accompanied him throughout his youth and used to be a part of him: the wish to have teachers and to listen to teachings.

I know myself the best!

And there is no thing in this world I know less about than about me, about Siddhartha!”

Afraid of knowing oneself

“That I know nothing about myself, that Siddhartha has remained thus alien and unknown to me, stems from one cause, a single cause: I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself!

Learning from myself

I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha.”

3 useful things: think, wait and fast

“Yesterday, I told you I knew how to think, to wait, and to fast, but you thought this was of no use. But it is useful for many things, Kamala, you’ll see.

No possesion is not the same as a destitude

Surely, I am without possessions. But I am so voluntarily, and therefore I am not destitute.”

Thinking and being patient

Kamaswami read: “Writing is good, thinking is better. Being smart is good, being patient is better.”

How did he acquire new skills?

He soon saw that Siddhartha knew little about rice and wool, shipping and trade, but that he acted in a fortunate manner, and that Siddhartha surpassed him, the merchant, in calmness and equanimity, and in the art of listening and deeply understanding previously unknown people.

Does not attach himself to the success or the failures

He always seems to be merely playing with out business-affairs, they never fully become a part of him, they never rule over him, he is never afraid of failure, he is never upset by a loss.”

Accpeting profits and losses

When he made a profit, he accepted it with equanimity; when he made losses, he laughed and said: “Well, look at this, so this one turned out badly!”

Focussed on achieving a goal

Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf, which is blown and is turning around through the air, and wavers, and tumbles to the ground. But others, a few, are like stars, they go on a fixed course, no wind reaches them, in themselves they have their law and their course.

You gotta keep honing your skills, even for the awakened one

That high, bright state of being awake, which he had experienced that one time at the height of his youth, in those days after Gotama’s sermon, after the separation from Govinda, that tense expectation, that proud state of standing alone without teachings and without teachers, that supple willingness to listen to the divine voice in his own heart, had slowly become a memory, had been fleeting; distant and quiet, the holy source murmured, which used to be near, which used to murmur within himself.

Slowly losing his skill

Siddhartha lost his calmness when losses occurred, lost his patience when he was not payed on time, lost his kindness towards beggars, lost his disposition for giving away and loaning money to those who petitioned him.

Start again…

How wondrous is this! Now, that I’m no longer young, that my hair is already half gray, that my strength is fading, now I’m starting again at the beginning and as a child! Again, he had to smile.

Ups and downs of life

Wondrous indeed was my life, so he thought, wondrous detours it has taken.

Learning, unlearning and learning again

I had to spend many years losing my spirit, to unlearn thinking again, to forget the oneness. Isn’t it just as if I had turned slowly and on a long detour from a man into a child, from a thinker into a childlike person?

The only way out of extreme downs of life is up

I’ve had to experience despair, I’ve had to sink down to the most foolish one of all thoughts, to the thought of suicide, in order to be able to experience divine grace, to hear Om again, to be able to sleep properly and awake properly again.

No teacher can walk the path for you

Now he saw it and saw that the secret voice had been right, that no teacher would ever have been able to bring about his salvation. Therefore, he had to go out into the world, lose himself to lust and power, to woman and money, had to become a merchant, a dice-gambler, a drinker, and a greedy person, until the priest and Samana in him was dead.

Mortality

He had died, a new Siddhartha had woken up from the sleep. He would also grow old, he would also eventually have to die, mortal was Siddhartha, mortal was every physical form.

River is impermanent

He saw: this water ran and ran, incessantly it ran, and was nevertheless always there, was always at all times the same and yet new in every moment!

Listening

This was among the ferryman’s virtues one of the greatest: like only a few, he knew how to listen.

Confessing to a listener

Siddhartha felt, what a happy fortune it is, to confess to such a listener, to bury in his heart his own life, his own search, his own suffering.

River is everywhere

the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future?”

Existence

Also, Siddhartha’s previous births were no past, and his death and his return to Brahma was no future. Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has existence and is present.”

There is no teacher for someone who’s searching

For a long time he knew that there was nothing standing between Gotama and him any more, though he was still unable to accept his teachings. No, there was no teaching a truly searching person, someone who truly wanted to find, could accept.

Both mortal and eternal

Deeply he felt, more deeply than ever before, in this hour, the indestructibility of every life, the eternity of every moment.

When someone close is not willing

Water wants to join water, youth wants to join youth, your son is not in the place where he can prosper. You too should ask the river; you too should listen to it!”

Why disciplining kids do not work

You don’t force him, don’t beat him, don’t give him orders, because you know that ‘soft’ is stronger than ‘hard’, Water stronger than rocks, love stronger than force.

Patience

He sat lost in thought and waited. This he had learned by the river, this one thing: waiting, having patience, listening attentively.

We are all alike

Worthy of love and admiration were these people in their blind loyalty, their blind strength and tenacity. They lacked nothing, there was nothing the knowledgeable one, the thinker, had to put him above them except for one little thing, a single, tiny, small thing: the consciousness, the conscious thought of the oneness of all life.

Wordly people and wise people are all equal

In all other respects, the worldly people were of equal rank to the wise men, were often far superior to them, just as animals too can, after all, in some moments, seem to be superior to humans in their tough, unrelenting performance of what is necessary.

Oneness

It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness.

Everyone has different goals, sufferings

each one heading for his goal, each one obsessed by the goal, each one suffering. The river sang with a voice of suffering, longingly it sang, longingly, it flowed towards its goal, lamentingly its voice sang. “Do you hear?” Vasudeva’s

And yet, we are all the same

they all belonged together, the lamentation of yearning and the laughter of the knowledgeable one, the scream of rage and the moaning of the dying ones, everything was one, everything was intertwined and connected, entangled a thousand times.

Searching and finding

“When someone is searching,” said Siddhartha, “then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed by the goal. Searching means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.

Wisdom is your own journey

wisdom cannot be passed on. Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness.

knowledge vs wisdom

Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be performed with it, but it cannot be expressed in words and taught.

What is truth?

The opposite of every truth is just as true! That’s like this: any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided.

We are all the same age

all small children already have the old person in themselves, all infants already have death, all dying people the eternal life.

Everything comes in a cycle

“This here,” he said playing with it, “is a stone, and will, after a certain time, perhaps turn into soil, and will turn from soil into a plant or animal or human being.

All and everything and one

saw all of these figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died, each one only transformed, was always re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between the one and the other face

The Compound Effect

Tue, 02 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Table of Contents

Process of Success
Wrong beliefs
Mindset
Process of change
Why
Daily routine

There is no magic bullet, secret formula, or quick fix to success.

Process of Success

Slow and boring

earning success is hard. The process is laborious, tedious, and sometimes even boring. Becoming wealthy, influential, and world-class in your field is slow and arduous.

Sustainable consistency

I’m the world’s biggest believer in consistency. I’m living proof that it’s the ultimate key to success, yet it’s one of the biggest pitfalls for people struggling to achieve. Most people don’t know how to sustain it.

Small and smart choices

The Compound Effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices.

Small changes with no immediate results

These small changes offer little or no immediate result, no big win, no obvious I-told-you-so payoff. So why bother?

Formula

Small, Smart Choices + Consistency + Time = RADICAL DIFFERENCE

Compounding

The most challenging aspect of the Compound Effect is that we have to keep working away for a while, consistently and efficiently, before we begin to see the payoff.

Simple discipline or simple errors over days and years

reaping the bounty of positive results. This is the repeating of simple daily disciplines versus simple errors in judgment. It’s that simple. With enough time and consistency, the outcomes become visible. Better yet, they’re totally predictable.

The only path to success

I want you to know in your bones that your only path to success is through a continuum of mundane, unsexy, unexciting, and sometimes difficult daily disciplines compounded over time.

Choices: Good, Bad and None

Choose poorly and you just might find yourself back at the drawing board, forced to make new, often harder choices. Don’t choose at all and you’ve actually made the choice to be the passive receiver of whatever comes your way. In essence, you make your choices and then your choices make you.

Change something daily

Leadership expert John C. Maxwell said, “You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.” According to research, it takes three hundred instances of positive reinforcement to turn a new habit into an unconscious practice—that’s almost a year of daily practice!

Both successful and failures hate it

There is one thing that 99 percent of “failures” and “successful” folks have in common—they all hate doing the same things. The difference is, successful people do them anyway. Change is hard.

Plan for 50 years - go slow and consistent

You have to build a program that you can do for fifty years, not five weeks or five months. It’s okay if you go strong for a while, but you’ve got to see light at the end of the tunnel where you can start scaling it back.

Wrong beliefs

Showing massive efforts to the public

We’ve been conditioned by society to believe in the effectiveness of a great display of massive effort.

Complacency

Having experienced extended periods of prosperity, health, and wealth, we become complacent. We stop doing what we did to get us there.

We have to keep sharpening the skills

They failed because of their success. Or rather, because they stopped doing what made them successful to begin with. Their success clouded their perspective and they slacked off.

Consequences in the longterm for small errors today

Nobody intends to become obese, go through bankruptcy, or get a divorce, but often (if not always) those consequences are the result of a series of small, poor choices.

The need for immediate gratification

So why are we so irrationally enslaved by so many bad habits? It’s because our need for immediate gratification can turn us into the most reactive, nonthinking animals around.

Food, information and distraction

Just like high-volume, low-nutrient food makes your body fat, high-volume, low-nutrient information makes your head fat. Allow too much distraction by technology and you will end up with diabetes of the mind.

Don’t break the momentum

I’ve mentioned that if there’s one discipline that gives me a competitive advantage, it’s my ability to be consistent. Nothing kills Big Mo quicker and with more certainty than a lack of consistency. Even good, passionate, and ambitious people with good intentions can fall short when it comes to consistency.

Very hard to restart after losing the momentum

The time and energy it takes for you to repeatedly stop and start and get back to momentum would make your trip at least ten times as long. In fact, more than likely you wouldn’t even make it—you’d run out of fuel (energy, motivation, belief, will) at some point.

Don’t read the news early in the morning

So when you open up those news alerts on your phone in the morning and get bombarded with all those reports about robberies, fires, attacks, and the tanking economy, your brain lights up. Your brain will now spend all day chewing over that feast of fear, worry, negativity.

Don’t tlerate stuff you do not want in life

What you have decided to tolerate is also reflected in the situations and circumstances of your life right now. Put another way, you will get in life what you accept and expect you are worthy of. If you tolerate disrespect, you will be disrespected. If you tolerate people being late and making you wait, people will show up late for you.

We won’t have awesome moments all the time

When conditions are great, things are easy, there aren’t any distractions, no one is interrupting, temptations aren’t luring, and nothing is disturbing your stride… It’s not until situations are difficult, when problems come up and temptation is great, that you get to prove your worthiness for progress. As Jim Rohn would say, “Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.”

Mindset

I am 100% responsible

My mentor Jim Rohn said, “The day you graduate from childhood to adulthood is the day you take full responsibility for your life.”

What is luck?

Preparation (personal growth) + Attitude (belief/mindset) + Opportunity (a good thing coming your way) + Action (doing something about it) = Luck

Awareness of the choinces

The first step toward change is awareness. If you want to get from where you are to where you want to be, you have to start by becoming aware of the choices that lead you away from your desired destination.

Process of change

Track

To help you become aware of your choices, I want you to track every action that relates to the area of your life you want to improve.

Keep a log for whatever you want to improve

Keeping a money log for thirty days straight cemented a new awareness in me and created a completely new set of choices and disciplines surrounding spending.

All winners track

All winners are trackers. Right now I want you to track your life with the same intention: to bring your goals within sight. Tracking is a simple exercise. It works because it brings moment-to-moment awareness to the actions you take in the area of your life you want to improve.

Attention on small changes

Once you start tracking your life, your attention will be focused on the smallest things you’re doing right, as well as the smallest things you’re doing wrong. And when you choose to make even the smallest course corrections consistently, over time, you’ll begin to see amazing results.

Private, quiet victories

When I say “small” course corrections, I’m talking truly invisible. Chances are no one’s going to notice them anytime soon. There will be no applause. No one’s going to send you a congratulations card or a trophy for these disciplines. And yet, eventually, their compounding effect will result in an exceptional payoff.

Habits and routines help to focus

Our habits and routines allow us to use minimal conscious energy for everyday tasks. They help keep us sane and enable us to handle most situations reasonably well… And because we don’t have to think about the mundane, we can focus our mental energy on more creative and enriching thoughts.

It will take time to change a habit you had for life

If you’ve spent twenty, thirty, or forty years or more repeating the behaviors you’re now trying to change, you have to expect it’s going to take time and effort before you see lasting results.

Momentum

recall Newton’s First Law, also known as the Law of Inertia: Objects at rest tend to stay at rest unless acted on by an outside force. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless something stops their momentum. Put another way, couch potatoes tend to stay couch potatoes. Achievers—people who get into a successful rhythm—continue busting their butts and end up achieving more and more.

Surround yourself with people you can learn from

Identify people who have positive qualities in the areas of life where you want to improve—people with the financial and business success you desire, the parenting skills you want, the relationships you yearn for, the lifestyle you love. And then spend more time with them.

Notice the change in you!

When you hit the wall in your disciplines, routines, rhythms, and consistency, realize that’s when you are separating yourself from your old self, scaling that wall, and finding your more powerful, triumphant, and victorious self.

Why

Why-power

The access point to your why-power is through your core values, which define both who you are and what you stand for. Your core values are your internal compass, your guiding beacon, your personal GPS.

Decision making becomes simpler

Defining your core values also helps make life simpler and more efficient. Decision-making is also easier when you are certain of your core values.

From why to where

You can harness this relentless force and have it carry you to new heights. But you must know where you want to go. What goals, dreams, and destinations do you desire?

Who do I need to become to achieve my goals?

I have my goal; now what do I need to do to get it?” It’s not a bad question, but it’s not the first question that needs to be addressed either. The question we should be asking ourselves is: “Who do I need to become?”

Thought pattern

Science shows that patterns of thoughts and actions repeated many times create what’s called a neuro-signature or a “brain groove.” This is a series of interconnected neurons that carry the thought patterns of a particular habit.

Who you are becoming

When you’ve prepared, practiced, studied, and consistently put in the required effort, sooner or later you’ll be presented with your own moment of truth. In that moment, you will define who you are and who you are becoming. It is in those moments where growth and improvement live—when we either step forward or shrink back,

Daily routine

Calibration

Then, every morning at 7 a.m., I have what I call my calibration appointment, a recurring appointment set in my calendar, where I take fifteen minutes to calibrate my day. This is where I brush over my top three one-year and five-year goals, my key quarterly objectives, and my top goal for the week and month.

Retrospective

It’s important to cash out your day’s performance. Compared to your plan for the day, how did it go? What do you need to carry over to tomorrow’s plan? What else needs to be added, based on what showed up throughout the day? What’s no longer important and needs to be scratched out?

Envision

Envisioning your success as an unstoppable locomotive may help you stay enthusiastic about getting into your own rhythm.

Do the work

Learning without execution is useless.

Act

Motivation without action leads to self-delusion.

Meditations

Tue, 26 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

What is work?

I learned endurance of labour, and to want little, and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with other people’s affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander.

Give it your best at every task

And you will give yourself relief, if you doe every act of your life as if it were the last

Desire vs anger

the offences which are committed through desire are more blameable than those which are committed through anger.

Life is always uncertain

Since it is possible that you may depart from life this very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly.

Good things and bad things happen equally to good people and bad people

But death certainly, and life, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, all these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which make us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good nor evil.

Present moment is the only thing one has

Throwing away then all things, hold to these only which are few; and besides bear in mind that every man lives only this present time, which is an indivisible point, and that all the rest of his life is either past or it is uncertain.

We are all nearing death

We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first.

Don’t put much thought about other people’s affairs

For you lose the opportunity of doing something else when you have such thoughts as these, What is such a person doing, and why, and what is he saying, and what is he thinking of, and what is he contriving, and whatever else of the kind makes us wander away from the observation of our own ruling power.

Universe and life. Nothing is certain or permanent.

The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

There is nop point in desiring fame after death

He who has a vehement desire for posthumous fame does not consider that every one of those who remember him will himself also die very soon;

Focus on few things

Occupy yourself with few things, says the philosopher, if you want to be tranquil.

A wondrous life and the rest… all are the same

For all things soon pass away and become a mere tale, and complete oblivion soon buries them. And I say this of those who have shone in a wondrous way. For the rest, as soon as they have breathed out their breath, they are gone, and no man speaks of them.

We have little time

Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end your journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.

Infinite and eternal

Do not then consider life a thing of any value. For look to the immensity of time behind you, and to the time which is before you, another boundless space. In this infinity then what is the difference between him who lives three days and him who lives three generations?

Just do your work and exit

a horse when he has run, a dog when he has tracked the game, a bee when it has made the honey, so a man when he has done a good act, does not call out for others to come and see, but he goes on to another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in season.

Everything about me will become a part of something else

Every part of me then will be reduced by change into some part of the universe, and that again will change into another part of the universe, and so on for ever.

Everything is changing

Often think of the rapidity with which things pass by and disappear, both the things which are and the things which are produced. For substance is like a river in a continual flow, and the activities of things are in constant change, and the causes work in infinite varieties; and there is hardly anything which stands still.

We are all one

Frequently consider the connexion of all things in the universe and their relation to one another.

Fame vs pleasure

He who loves fame considers another man’s activity to be his own good; and he who loves pleasure, his own sensations; but he who has understanding, considers his own acts to be his own good.

What is the man worth?

every man is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself.

Everything disappears in time

Everything material soon disappears in the substance of the whole; and everything formal (causal) is very soon taken back into the universal reason; and the memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

Tolerable pain lasts a long time

About pain: The pain which is intolerable carries us off; but that which lasts a long time is tolerable; … Indeed in the case of most pains let this remark of Epicurus aid you, that pain is neither intolerable nor everlasting,

Do not equate fame with goodness

for it is very possible to be a divine man and to be recognised as such by no one. Always bear this in mind; and another thing too, that very little indeed is necessary for living a happy life.

An act

On the occasion of every act ask yourself, How is this with respect to me? Shall I repent of it? A little time and I am dead, and all is gone.

There is no point blaming anyone

you must blame nobody. For if you can, correct that which is the cause; but if you can not do this, correct at least the thing itself; but if you can not do even this, of what use is it to you to find fault? For nothing should be done without a purpose. That which has died falls not out of the universe.

Be ready to live with little an let go of everything

Receive wealth or prosperity without arrogance; and be ready to let it go.

Only the present moment pains you. The past and the future have no control.

In the next place remember that neither the future nor the past pains you, but only the present.

An external thing is only your judgement

If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgement about it.

Why are everything the same?

All things are the same, familiar in experience, and ephemeral in time, and worthless in the matter. Everything now is just as it was in the time of those whom we have buried.

Everything is changing

All things are changing: and you yourself are in continuous mutation and in a manner in continuous destruction, and the whole universe too.

Everyone will die early or late

All that you see will quickly perish, and those who have been spectators of its dissolution will very soon perish too. And he who dies at the extremest old age will be brought into the same condition with him who died prematurely.

Rational, Equanimity, Magnanimity

the term Rational was intended to signify a discriminating attention to every several thing and freedom from negligence; and that Equanimity is the voluntary acceptance of the things which are assigned to you by the common nature; and that Magnanimity is the elevation of the intelligent part above the pleasurable or painful sensations of the flesh, and above that poor thing called fame, and death, and all such things.

Why are you avoiding work?

But you, in what a brief space of time is your existence? And why are you not content to pass through this short time in an orderly way? What matter and opportunity for your activity are you avoiding?

Consider impermanence when angry

consider when you are much vexed or grieved, that man’s life is only a moment, and after a short time we are all laid out dead.

Opinion and judgements disturb us more than people themselves

it is not men’s acts which disturb us, for those acts have their foundation in men’s ruling principles, but it is our own opinions which disturb us.

If man loves himself the most, why is he concerned about the opinion of others?

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.

Shortness of life

consider the shortness of life, the boundless abyss of time past and future, the feebleness of all matter.

Compalined, or secret… is the same

Constantly bring to your recollection those who have complained greatly about anything, those who have been most conspicuous by the greatest fame or misfortunes or enmities or fortunes of any kind: then think where are they all now?

How small we are in time and size

How small a part of the boundless and unfathomable time is assigned to every man? for it is very soon swallowed up in the eternal.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Things to learn and do

Making money is a skill!

Making money is not a thing you do — it’s a skill you learn.

Hard work must have a direction

Yes, hard work matters, and you can’t skimp on it. But it has to be directed in the right way.

Figure out where your hard work should be directed at

If you don’t know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out. You should not grind at a lot of hard work until you figure out what you should be working on.

Make wealth and assets with passive income

Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.

Ownership, not renting out time

You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity — a piece of a business — to gain your financial freedom.

Giving society great value at scale

You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.

Play the longterm game

Pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people.

Iteration with compounding

Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

Sell and build

Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

Your curiosity, not fashion

Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now

Work that cannot be easily outsourced or automated

Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated

Use leverage

Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).

Permissioned vs permissionless leverage

Capital and labor are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you. Everyone is trying to lead, but someone has to follow you…Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.

How to scale?

Am I productizing it? Am I scaling it? Am I scaling with labor or with capital or with code or with media?” So it’s a very handy, simple mnemonic.

Persuasion while speaking

Knowing how to be persuasive when speaking is far more important than being an expert digital marketer or click optimizer. Foundations are key.

Your specific knowledge

You do need to be deep in something because otherwise you’ll be a mile wide and an inch deep and you won’t get what you want out of life. You can only achieve mastery in one or two things. It’s usually things you’re obsessed about.

Many small steps

Even then, it has been a slow and steady struggle. I haven’t made money in my life in one giant payout. It has always been a whole bunch of small things piling up. It’s more about consistently creating wealth by creating businesses, creating opportunities, and creating investments.

Three big decisions

Spend more time making the big decisions. There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do… If you’re going to live in a city for ten years, if you’re going to be in a job for five years, if you’re in a relationship for a decade, you should be spending one to two years deciding these things. These are highly dominating decisions. Those three decisions really matter.

Don’t count. Be patient

It takes time—even once you have all of these pieces in place, there is an indeterminate amount of time you have to put in. If you’re counting, you’ll run out of patience before success actually arrives.

Things to avoid

Avoid luxury labels

There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes.

Empty calendar

You should be too busy to “do coffee” while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.

Productise vs yourself

“Productize” and “yourself.” “Yourself” has uniqueness. “Productize” has leverage. “Yourself” has accountability. “Productize” has specific knowledge. “Yourself” also has specific knowledge in there

Relative mindset

If you get into a relative mindset, you’re always going to hate people who do better than you, you’re always going to be jealous or envious of them.

Status games are zero-sum

The problem is, to win at a status game, you have to put somebody else down. That’s why you should avoid status games in your life—they make you into an angry, combative person.

Don’t upgrade lifestyle

I think the best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money. It’s very easy to keep upgrading your lifestyle as you make money.

Technology

The impact of technology

Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production. The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.

Technology is the cutting-edge of that era

Almost everything in your house, in your workplace, and on the street used to be technology at one point in time. There was a time when oil was a technology that made J.D. Rockefeller rich.

How technology changes through time

So, technology is the set of things, as Alan Kay said, that don’t quite work yet [correction: Danny Hillis]. Once something works, it’s no longer technology

You

And if you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want and providing it is natural to you, within your skill set, and within your capabilities. Then, you have to figure out how to scale it because if you only build one, that’s not enough. You’ve got to build thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, or billions of them so everybody can have one.

Use your uniqueness

The specific knowledge is sort of this weird combination of unique traits from your DNA, your unique upbringing, and your response to it. It’s almost baked into your personality and your identity.

Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.

Specific knowledge

Very often, specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge. It’s also stuff that’s only now being figured out or is really hard to figure out. If you’re not 100 percent into it, somebody else who is 100 percent into it will outperform you.

Find your audience

You can go on the internet, and you can find your audience. And you can build a business, and create a product, and build wealth, and make people happy just uniquely expressing yourself through the internet

Authenticity

Escape competition through authenticity… If you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is an extension of who you are, no one can compete with you on that. Who’s going to compete with Joe Rogan or Scott Adams? It’s impossible.

How to create wealth

The old model of making money is going to school for four years, getting your degree, and working as a professional for thirty years. But things change fast now. Now, you have to come up to speed on a new profession within nine months, and it’s obsolete four years later.

Accountability, incentives, credibility

Clear accountability is important. Without accountability, you don’t have incentives. Without accountability, you can’t build credibility.

Ownership is good or bad times

Owning equity in a company basically means you own the upside. When you own debt, you own guaranteed revenue streams and you own the downside. You want to own equity.

Owner takes on the risk, IP, brand

Essentially, you’re working for somebody else, and that person is taking on the risk and has the accountability, the intellectual property, and the brand. They’re not going to pay you enough.

Real wealth = companies or investing

But usually, the real wealth is created by starting your own companies or even by investing. In an investment firm, they’re buying equity. These are the routes to wealth. It doesn’t come through the hours.

Foundation for leverage

We live in an age of infinite leverage, and the economic rewards for genuine intellectual curiosity have never been higher. Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.

Three broad classes of leverage:

labor — other humans working for you
money - every time you make a decision, you multiply it with money
products with no marginal cost of replication E.g. books, media, movies, code

Permissionless leverage

Probably the most interesting thing to keep in mind about new forms of leverage is they are permissionless. They don’t require somebody else’s permission for you to use them or succeed. For labor leverage, somebody has to decide to follow you. For capital leverage, somebody has to give you money to invest or to turn into a product.

Egality of permissionless leverage

Coding, writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, YouTubing—these kinds of things are permissionless. You don’t need anyone’s permission to do them, and that’s why they are very egalitarian. They’re great equalizers of leverage.

Passive income that covers your burn rate

How do you get there? Well, one way is to have so much money saved that your passive income (without you lifting a finger) covers your burn rate. A second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero—you become a monk. A third is you’re doing something you love. You enjoy it so much, it’s not about the money. So there are multiple ways to retirement.

4 kinds of luck:

Blind luck
Luck through persistence, hard work, hustle, and motion
Spotting luck. If you are very skilled in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in your field, and other people who aren’t attuned to it won’t notice.
Building a unique character, a unique brand, a unique mindset, which causes luck to find you

Positive sum long-term vs zero sum short-term

In a long-term game, it’s positive sum. We’re all baking the pie together. We’re trying to make it as big as possible. And in a short-term game, we’re cutting up the pie.

Making maximum wealth

If you want to make the maximum amount of money possible, if you want to get rich over your life in a deterministically predictable way, stay on the bleeding edge of trends and study technology, design, and art — become really good at something.

Some topics of interest:

Compound interest
Economics
Complexity Theory
Inversion
Evolution
Black Swans
Calculus
Falsifiability

Dealing with indecision

If you can’t decide, the answer is no. … When you choose something, you get locked in for a long time. Starting a business may take ten years. You start a relationship that will be five years or maybe more. You move to a city for ten to twenty years. These are very, very long-lived decisions. It’s very, very important we only say yes when we are pretty certain.

Take the more difficult path

If you have two choices to make, and they’re relatively equal choices, take the path more difficult and more painful in the short term.

Read anything

Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years… It almost doesn’t matter what you read. Eventually, you will read enough things (and your interests will lead you there) that it will dramatically improve your life

Happiness

People mistakenly believe happiness is just about positive thoughts and positive actions. The more I’ve read, the more I’ve learned, and the more I’ve experienced (because I verify this for myself), every positive thought essentially holds within it a negative thought.

Suffering is essential and inevitable

which is why a lot of greatness in life comes out of suffering. You have to view the negative before you can aspire to and appreciate the positive

The absence of desire

It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things. The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving, because the mind really exists in motion toward the future or the past

External changes

The idea you’re going to change something in the outside world, and that is going to bring you the peace, everlasting joy, and happiness you deserve, is a fundamental delusion we all suffer from

Life is a single-player game

The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations, and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single player.

News is pessimistic. Concepts are optimistic.

It’s the news’ job to make you anxious and angry. But its underlying scientific, economic, education, and conflict trends are positive. Stay optimistic.

There is nothing to leave behind

Here’s a hot tip: There is no legacy. There’s nothing to leave. We’re all going to be gone. Our children will be gone. Our works will be dust. Our civilizations will be dust. Our planet will be dust. Our solar system will be dust. In the grand scheme of things, the Universe has been around for ten billion years. It’ll be around for another ten billion years.

Take responsibility

Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Gurus won’t make you calm. Mentors won’t make you rich. Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility.

Pros and cons of relationships

partially grew up in India, and in India, everybody is in your business. There’s a cousin, an aunt, an uncle who is in your face, which makes it hard to be depressed, because you are never alone… But on the other hand, you have no privacy, so you can’t be free. There are trade-offs.

Spend time alone

Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit.

Meditation

What happens in meditation is you’re sitting there and not resisting your mind. These things will start bubbling up. It’s like a giant inbox of unanswered emails, going back to your childhood. They will come out one by one, and you will be forced to deal with them… Over time, you will resolve a lot of these deep-seated unresolved things you have in your mind. Once they’re resolved, there will come a day when you sit down to meditate, and you’ll hit a mental “inbox zero”.

Patience

Impatience with actions, patience with results.

What happens to you after death?

I think after this life, it’s very much like before you were born. Remember that? It’s going to be just like that.

Reading recommendations

The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg
The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant
Thinking Physics: Understandable Practical Reality by Lewis Carroll Epstein
Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe
Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher by Richard Feynman
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Taleb
Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger by Charlie Munger (edited by Peter Kaufman)
Theory of Everything (The Enlightened Perspective) - Dreamstate Trilogy Jed McKenna’s Notebook
Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti by Jiddu Krishnamurti
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
The Book of Secrets: 112 Meditations to Discover the Mystery Within by Osho
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
The Tao of Seneca: Practical Letters from a Stoic Master
How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living by Bruce Lee
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
“The Last Question,” a short story by Isaac Asimov
The Day You Became a Better Writer” by Scott Adams
Aggregation Theory. Or learn it from the master himself, @benthompson, the best analyst in technology.
Must-read. (Twitter thread on “intellectual compounding” by @zaoyang).
“You and Your Research” by Richard Hamming