You vs You

Change your story, change your significance; stop being good at bad habits and start being good at good habits. We all have work to do.

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@alignpodcast has a unique vocation. He has spent his life finding the tactical ways to leverage your body to help defend itself against modern life. Head to bit.ly/AMP236 for the full podcast.

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Every year around this time we get happy. We are happy because we are off from work, wrapping presents and spending time with friends and family! We are looking forward to putting our feet up and getting some well-deserved rest. As we are resting and our stress is at an all-time low, we start to think about how we want to better ourselves in the new year. Some people want to lose weight, others want to get the promotion at work or reach a new sales goal in their job, etc. Sadly, the reality is that the vast majority of us don’t last but for a few weeks with our resolutions. So, what are you going to do differently this year to change the outcome? The nice comfortable environment we are in right now makes us create lofty goals. What are you going to do when your New Year’s resolution was to run every day and when you wake up, look outside and see that it is snowing and -2 degrees? What are you going to do when your New Year’s resolution was to do better in school and you have a book report due tomorrow but all of your friends are going out to the club? When most people come against such a roadblock, that is when the commitment to the resolution is tested. What are you going to do differently this year to make it the full year? If your mindset is to do what most people do and that is to take the easy route, you have made the decision to be common in a very common world. If you make the decision to put those shoes on and run anyway or forego the night at the club, you have opted out of the choice to be a soft motherfucker and chosen to be a savage! For those of you who decide to take the easy route, Merry fucking Christmas! This decision will keep you exactly where you have always been- wishing you were better, never knowing that you have the ability but you chose not to use it!

A post shared by David Goggins (@davidgoggins) on Dec 21, 2019 at 3:28pm PST

Time as Currency

On Reading

I suppose I read for the same reasons I wear shoes and drive a car. I could live without those things, but not the same. I suppose the reasons others read vary as widely as choices of footwear and transportation. Exercise and parties may be a better analogy still.

A thought . . .

Something Valuable I Learned From "Brain It On!"

This is Brain It On!. I started playing this game on my phone recently and it has been a valuable learning experience. Similar to how chess taught me about blind spots - how you can see the whole board, how your and your opponent's pieces are laid out, yet still be surprised by an attack that you weren't focusing on, the game Brain It On! has also taught me something interesting about myself and how the mind works. Basically, you try to creatively solve puzzles by creating your own pieces and strategy for completing a short objective. What's interesting to me is that oftentimes I'll feel like a puzzle is nearly impossible and have no idea how to solve it. I'll try several different things over and over, take breaks from the game, but then eventually I figure it out - I'll come up with a new idea and quickly solve it or just try different things until I slowly get it right. There were several levels where I thought they may be the end of the game for me.

What's fascinating about this to me is that if I were to only put in an initial effort I would never have solved most of the puzzles, and I might be left with the impression that most of them are impossible or too difficult. Of course, my willingness to persist was largely based on the assumption that the game is well-designed and thus the puzzles are solveable, but that's where in real-life there may be a wisdom factor in deciding how much effort is worth putting in for something where the possibility of the outcome is unknown. What's really insightful about all of this, though, is that I can apply this realization to other areas of my life - if I only put an initial effort into my goals and endeavors, then for many of them I'll never get nearly as far as I could if I really applied myself. The valueable application of this for me is in thinking, "how many things in my life do I bring that level of persistent effort to?"

Adapting and Arranging

Do you succumb to your environment, or does your environment succumb to you?

Self-Development vs. Self-Care

I want to start exercising a distinction between self-development and self-care. Many things fall under both categories, but I think there are enough things that don't to make the distinction worth considering. It's easy to focus so much on being productive in terms of self-development that you either burn out or begin losing a sense of self. On the other hand it's also easy to be so internally focused on doing what you want and not disciplining yourself beyond what's required of you that you end up in kind of a static spot where you're not growing and developing in ways that would enrich your personal activities.

Both are enriching, but I think both can be overdone when they're done at the expense of the other. This is similar to the need for rest when you're active, but rather than simply seeing it as a distinction between doing things that are productive for self-development and taking a break from those things, I want to broaden the concept to see self-care as a different, but in some ways just as active, form of productivity. So it may include simply resting and taking it easy, but it isn't reduced to that. I see self-development as doing or learning things that increase your capacity or skill at doing or remembering the same or similar things in the future- so it's aimed at practice, discipline, and the growth that follows those things when they're done well. I see self-care as doing things that nourish your sense of self, satisfy your healthy needs and desires, and heal and repair you. These aren't the easiest categories to exhaustively define, but for the sake of providing myself with satisfying options besides just the sometimes tiring habit of self-development type endeavors this will suffice as a start.

My point is to see the value in and need for taking care of yourself in addition to developing yourself, and how efforts in one can enrich the other. I'm not setting these up as the only categories- interpersonal relationships are really important also but I'm simply adding clarity to one area of life by adding a distinction.

One way to parse out this distinction may be to think of things pertaining to self-development as those things which may be expected of you to do- pick up after yourself, develop skills, be physically competent and fit to handle situations you may come across, learn the things you may need to know, etc. and to think of things pertaining to self-care as that which may be expected of you to be- what are your interests, what do you value, what makes you happy, what experiences have you enjoyed, what are you good at, who are you given your unique experience and make-up as a person?

I'm Going to Start Waking Up Early: my thoughts on supplementation and lifestyle changes

By the end of the month I'll be waking up at 6 a.m. every weekday. That's the goal. The plan is to maintain that habit for at least a month or two, enough time for my body and habits to adapt to it. My original goal was 7:45 a.m., but then I realized I'd miss sunrise and might as well get up a little earlier, plus for some that's sleeping in and my goal is to try being an early bird. I have a tendency to stay up late and I don't know if that's just lack of discipline or a biological propensity, but this experiment should help me see how I handle mornings. The benefit is that if I adapt then I think I'd really enjoy it- seeing the sunrise, and being up early I'll still enjoy some quiet personal time, plus I'll probably be more productive having more structure. If it doesn't work out, at least I gave it a shot and when people give me a hard time about staying up late I can honestly say I gave mornings a shot and they weren't for me. Obviously I'm talking about preferences, having an early job or a family someday will likely get me up early whether I like it or not.

Lately, my staying up has been exceptionally bad- to where I don't even like it. Staying up as late as anywhere between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. in the morning and sleeping until early evening. This is largely owing to being on the search for a job and as I'm laying in bed I start thinking of other jobs I should apply for or other e-mails I should send, so I get up and stay awake much later than I should. For about a week or so I've been trying to get to bed earlier so I can adjust to reaching my goal of being up early, but I don't get tired now until way late into the morning. I tried skipping sleep for a whole night in order to fall asleep sooner the next day but that wasn't as effective as I'd hoped. I tried working out- jogging 5 mi. a day for a bit and that helped a little but not enough. Part of it is also lifestyle- being on the computer too late and thinking about job searching too late. However, last night I got to sleep around 3 a.m. and woke up around 9 a.m.! I went to Whole Foods looking for melatonin, and discussed it with an employee there who recommended Stress-Relax Tranquil Sleep supplement, and it worked well, better than I expected! It looks like this:

Image by Wesley Grover
(Obviously, people are different- consult your healthcare provider about what's right for you, especially if you take any other supplements or medications, and I would only use it short-term. I'm not being endorsed by this product, I'm just stoked that it worked well so far. I'm also not promoting the brand per se, I don't know how its quality stacks up against other brands.)

It has 5-HTP which is a precursor to the neurotransmitter serotonin, Suntheanine which is a company's proprietary form of L-theanine- the compound in green tea that promotes a relaxing effect, and melatonin which is a naturally occurring hormone that helps regulate your sleep cycle. So, I'll be trying that temporarily as well as a few lifestyle changes such as not using the computer so late, not dealing with things that will get me excited late- such as thinking about a job or things I need to do, keeping the lights low prior to bedtime, exercising regularly, etc.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this morning schedule pans out and what effect it has. If it's even remotely remarkable then perhaps I'll give a little update on how it's been. Cheers.

Oh, and if you're already a natural early bird, as in an effortless early bird- YOU RASCAAAAAAL!! *shakes fist in a Stephen Colbert-esque manner*

Image by David Shankbone

Being and Intent

In passing, I lived my life;
until I wondered what I was doing otherwise


(just a little thought-provoking poem I came up with, basically assessing the idea that you're always living and being, and that your level of intentionality can affect and develop you, but so does your passivity; the irony being that living "in passing" doesn't make sense because everything you do is in the context of your life so you can't treat it as though being "passive" is to be unengaged- treating it passively ends up being your activity and ends up affecting your being. So once you realize you're constantly contributing to who you are and what you're doing it becomes less a question of whether to be in control and more a question of how to be in control, which can positively contribute to someone's thinking by putting their attention on the decisions they do or can make, rather than just focusing on the sometimes daunting consideration of decision-making in general. Basically if one worries about the effect of their decisions, thus becoming passive, they could just as well worry about the effect of their indecisions, which isn't to excuse either one but rather to not view decisiveness as automatically more suspect. Just a thought, take it for what it's worth; cheers.)

Environmental Factors in Information Acquisition and Use (or, the difference between how you learn something and how you use and communicate it)

Some things today have reminded me of something I thought of in the past- that how you learn something might affect the way you (or your ability to) communicate or use it. Particularly with the concern that if the extent and way in which you learn something differs dramatically from the extent and way in which people in your environment communicate, you may find yourself hindered in your ability to communicate what you've learned to others and possibly be hindered to some extent in your normal prior capacity for communication to the extent that what you learn (differently) affects the way you handle other things- including what was previous handled in a way as to be readily communicable to others. A simple example might be vocabulary- if you learn, say, literature and it has a dramatic affect on your vocabulary, and you also don't sufficiently develop the ability to communicate what you've learned outside of that developed vocabulary, then you become hindered in your ability to communicate what you've learned to others; and if that dramatic affect on your vocabulary extends beyond what you're learning in literature to other areas (including the ones that before were readily communicable) then you may lose some of your capacity which you had prior because you're using vocabulary that others aren't familiar with.

I was reminded of this because of a friend saying how someone who is successful at something isn't necessarily able to communicate the means to that achievement, except perhaps to refer them to their life circumstances and experiences which lead to it, but, of course, those are already different from another's own. The other thing that contributed to reminding me of this is what I read today in Howard Gardner's "Frames of Mind", which looked at the relationship between one's psychological development and the cultural environment in which that development takes place. For example, he talks about general cognitive capacities such as logical development which are universal (occurring across all cultures), and others which aren't universal such as reading, and how there are differences of development between those in a culture that values, and in many ways depends on, the use of reading and those in a culture that doesn't. This reminded me of a thought I had before about losing touch, to some extent, with others to the extent that aspects of your development differ from those who you then communicate with. Of course, to the extent that these differences can be translated into an understandable form of communication from one to the other, then exercising that capacity would be useful in preventing some of those communication issues.

I think communication is just one consideration of concern between the use of something in an environment significantly different than the environment in which it was learned. A simple example might be something like self defense- to the extent that the learning environmental factors are much different than the environmental factors of its use then one may be hindered by those differences; for example- if I mostly train in fighting technique but the conditions of use in a self-defense scenario are significantly different- such as, the difference of state of mind being that of strategy execution in one and being that of fear and excitement in the other, then the decision-making considerations differ to some extent. In the former one may be thinking of the best move in the moment, in the latter one may be assessing the risk factor and whether to even fight or attempt to flee, etc., not to mention the differences of perception and emotion they're experiencing. Rory Miller discusses these types of issues in "Facing Violence". To further analyze, there seems to be quite a difference, at least socially speaking, if you learn something within a social context related to its use versus learning it in a way that differs significantly from its use (and this difference goes for the communication of it as well); but this also has limitations- some things aren't advisable to learn in the context of their use such as the self-defense example, but the training environment could be modified to better address the environment of use and thus reduce aspects of the difference between the two.

I guess what I take away from this thought is at least the awareness of one's environment in general (how it affects your capacities and experiences, as well as those of others; this is the type of stuff Howard Gardner discusses) and the diversity of individuals' personal environments that affect their experiences from which they're interacting with the broader cultural environment. With this awareness, then, one may come from a better position of understanding for the benefit of communication and social interaction (that uptight man might be an off-duty cop who has developed a sensitivity to potential risks and the value of being aware). The same way one might assess the physical environment in considering what to wear, what activities are an option, etc., one's cultural environment may have comparable implications. I'm not arguing for relativism or subjectivism, but am saying that cultural conditions are objective factors that affect decision making and experiences, which brings me to one more point, something I briefly discussed with a different friend- the dynamic between choosing one's environment and changing one's environment. I think it's a point of wisdom in deciding between the two, but it can be worth being aware of the dynamic between one's capacity to choose which environment they'll be in and one's capacity to affect the environment they're in.

To summarize, I brushed across a few aspects of this topic, which I would distinguish as: the effects of development on communication (particularly difficulties of communication that occur when communicating something learned in a context different than that within which one is attempting to communicate in; the vocabulary example was offered, and the possible solution of maintaining a translational capacity between the two), difficulties in application of something one learns in an environment different from the one in which it was learned (self-defense example), and differences of opportunity to develop, as well as differences of opportunity to apply one's development, in relation to environmental differences (mentioning of individual environmental differences and analogy of physical environment affecting activity options being related to cultural environment affecting one's options of application of their development).

Interests vs. Goals: thoughts on having interests with no goals and goals with no interests

[the following is derived from a journal entry on 08/26/12 and has been edited and expanded]

If I have the desire to do something (interests), and there is no perceived or arguable bad in my intention, the thing desired, or the outcome, but yet I still don't have a good reason or explanation for pursuing it (goals), then I should be OK with pursuing it- I have the chance to develop something naturally in me, which by virtue of self-development and growth is itself positive; and the good for which it may be useful might not be perceived prior to pursuing it, and it may not be applicable in its own right but might be used as part of, or in regard to, something else.

If I have the desire to attain something (goals)- to have done or attained something, yet I don't have much of a preceding desire itself for the action to attain it (interests), then I should seek to better understand the thing I really desire (if I have a desire for a goal but not an interest in the means of attaining it, then I should consider whether I really desire that goal or something else related to that goal)- I may find that what I actually desire is something that pertains as an effect of, or aspect to, the goal in consideration but is not perceived as being as much in or part of the thing through which it is sought (the means of the goal). That is- I may desire a goal and there may be means of attaining that goal involved, and so you'd think I'd have some interest in the means of attaining the goal since I have an interest in the goal and the means and the goal are correlated (at least through cause and effect), but if I find I don't have an interest in the means of attaining the goal, then perhaps what I really desire is something related/associated to the goal and not the goal itself- which may explain why there is an interest in the goal and not the means of attaining it. But this isn't to exclude the possibility that we have goals we're legitimately interested in attaining but which we don't have an interest in the means of attaining.

For example- say I decide I want to have a better understanding of world history (goal) but I realize I'm not interested in the means of attaining it (studying history), then perhaps I'm not actually interested in having a better understanding of world history but rather am more interested in social status associated with having a better understanding of world history- this would be one way of understanding why I have a goal I desire but am not interested in the means of attaining it. Another possibility in this example might be that one really does have a desire to have a better understanding of world history, but they don't like reading- thus they don't have an interest in those means of attaining the goal not because they don't actually have an interest in the content (world history) but because they don't have an interest in the method related to the content (reading). In such case what one desires really is the goal they have in mind but may seek a different means to that end; in the other case (where they don't actually desire the goal but something related to it, and thus they don't desire the means because they're associated with the original goal and not directly related to the actual desire which is simply related to achieving the original goal) one might clarify what it is they actually desire and see if there are means of attaining that desire (assuming it's good and worth pursuing) that are more directly associated with the desire, that way they are developing their desire in accordance with both the means and the newly clarified goal, rather than just the original goal which they only desire for its consequence/correlation and thus won't necessarily be satisfied in the pursuit of it. Of course, life is filled with experiences where we overcome something we don't in itself desire in order to attain something we do desire- such as enduring exercise in order to get fit, and so my point is just to seek clarity not just for the sake of avoiding any involvement in things that may not be what we desire but rather to understand what it is we desire and to decide either what we prefer or what we're willing to endure in order to attain it, depending on what options are available and known (and again, assuming its something good and worth pursuing). It's worth noting that in some cases- such as enduring exercise to get fit, we develop other qualities that are beneficial such as developing our will and determination, perhaps developing our resilience to resistance.

By seeking to better understand the actual desire and its object I can better perceive the role or correlation of the means I have in mind for it and either develop it into the desire or be more adequately disciplined in doing it by seeing its correlation to, and involvement in, seeking the thing desired. As a matter of discipline the thing which I seek to do for what I desire may still be done without fully understanding its correlation to the interest in the desired effect (when the cause and effect is understood but one's interest is in the desired effect and they don't see a relationship between the interest they have in that thing and the possible interest in the cause for attaining it)- for it may be that the correlation of interest one may have between the desire and the means is evident in the action rather than prior to it. For example, exercising- where perhaps the reason for my desire to be fit is to be able to do more things, and then through discipline I come to see that exercising is an instance of me doing more things, and so the compatibility of the interest in the goal and the means of attaining it becomes more evident, beyond just cause and effect but seeing that the desired effect is involved in the cause. This is an example of a person having a goal without interest in the means of attaining it, but then coming to have an interest in the means of attaining by seeing what it has in common with the goal. But if it's the case that what is desired, or the reason for what is desired, doesn't seem to be part of the means of attaining it then at least understanding the relationship between the cause and the effect will increase or solidify one's commitment to the cause for the sake of the effect (and I'm still speaking from the sentiment of the person having no bad intention and of the thing being good or not bad; thus, if you discover that what you really desire is something that isn't good then I don't suggest pursuing it)

But two risks are to be noted:

1) if there is no correlation between the means and goal (a person is mistaken about the connection), or the considered means are not necessary- and other more pertinent options would apply to the pursuit, or the considered means are not sufficient to bring one to the desired thing, then one risks wasting their time and not seeking their desired goal in the best way (or else seeking it in a poor way).

2) without doing this thing (the means to the desired goal) by desire one will not do it as well; partly because one will be naturally resistant to doing more than is needed- whereas if one had interest in the means then they'd be OK with doing more than what is merely sufficient since they're not interested in just the goal but in the means as well (perhaps because of what they have in common), and it will also not be done as well partly because they will always be putting more effort in for a return than if they'd done it by desire because with desire less will of effort would be required for action since the desire would move them- which favors the action more than a will of discipline since discipline is more goal/value oriented rather than a will of desire which appreciates the action itself. Another exercise example would be goal-oriented exercise vs. exercising by doing something you enjoy. But again, each has its trade-offs. And I'm speaking mostly to general experiences; there may be exceptions where one has such a strong goal in mind that they are more driven than someone who has both a desired goal and an interest in the means.

To summarize- if one has an interest (not harmful or bad, etc.) with no goal then it's worth developing the interest since it reflects a natural capacity of the person and thus develops the strengths of the person which will be beneficial when a pertinent goal is discovered, and may also lead to the discovering of that goal; or the development of the person by that interest may benefit them in a goal that isn't directly related to that action but is related to the person in an aspect that benefits the goal from the person's development from their interest. And if one has a goal without an interest in the means of attaining it then it's probably a good idea to consider what is really desired by the attaining of the goal, and if it's a good goal then to consider if there are other means of attaining it that would be of interest or to decide if the discipline to attain it is worth the goal, or to at least weigh what the cost of making a disciplined decision for that goal will be.