Alexandersmap

    Category: Habits

    • Building Upon the Dream

      “Qué lindo es soñar despierto, he says. How lovely it is to dream while you are awake. Dream while you’re awake Andre. Anybody can dream while they’re asleep, but you need to dream all the time, and say your dreams out loud, and believe in them.” — Andre Agassi, quoting Gil Reyes, Open: An Autobiography

      I detected movement in the pool, a light ripple that telegraphed swimming. Walking over to see what was generating the ripple, I saw a mouse treading water while desperately trying to find a way out of the pool. Isn’t it funny that the very thing I might attempt to kill if it were in my home is something I immediately set about rescuing when I found it floundering in deep water? We can’t possibly kill something that so desperately wants to be alive, and go to great lengths to save it.

      But what of our dreams?

      Qué lindo es soñar despierto… How nice it is to daydream. For in dreams we find ourselves. And begin to believe you might just reach them. Which is exactly what Thoreau pointed out to us:

      “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      Dreaming is the necessary first step, but too many forget to build upon the dream. The foundation is the required next step in the process of getting there. We’ve all neglected this next step a few times in our own lives—for the dreaming is easy, while the building is hard. But build we must to get where we dream of going.

      Have you seen The Secret Life of Walter Mitty? It’s a frustrating, tedious movie when Walter is daydreaming all the time. It becomes compelling when he finally acts. The message is clear: We must wake up from our daydream and act upon it to reach excellence.

      We can’t let our dreams flounder and drown. Act! While there’s still time! For we can’t tread forever.

    • Clearing the Hurdles

      “Life will throw everything but the kitchen sink in your path, and then it will throw the kitchen sink. It’s your job to avoid the obstacles. If you let them stop you or distract you, you’re not doing your job, and failing to do your job will cause regrets that paralyze you more than a bad back.” — Andre Agassi, Open

      When you witness excellence in action, it’s hard to comprehend the work that went into the performance. Seeing Sydney McLaughlin destroy her own 400 meter hurdles record is awe-inspiring because she does the incomprehensible. But the work that brought about the moment isn’t ours to see, or feel. The hurdles aren’t the only obstacle she had to clear on her way to a record-breaking performance—she had to clear every other distraction along the way to get to it. People like McLaughlin or Agassi or Tom Brady are anomalies to the rest of us. They’re obsessively focused and a bit quirky in their habits. Most of us balk at the price of greatness, for them it’s simply the act of doing your job.

      Disciplined routine is the answer. Doing your job is the moment-to-moment bias towards productive action and good decisions. Anyone in New England will hear Bill Belichick’s own words ring in that Agassi quote. Do your job… and do it well. It’s a simple thing to grasp, must harder to execute with an undisciplined mind. We must get up daily and do the work that calls to us. No excuses needed, you either do or do not, there is no try (thanks Yoda). This is a tough mindset to acquire, but it’s required for reaching excellence.

      “Excellence is the next five minutes”, as Tom Peters put it, “or nothing at all”. We get too caught up in excuses that lie beyond the immediate. Surely we must know where we’re going, but we must then get beyond long term thinking, for it’s a form of procrastination. We often kick things down the curb that we ought to be doing right now. Planning isn’t doing, so we mustn’t tell ourselves what we’re going to do, we mustn’t tell ourselves anything at all, really. We must friggin’ do it.

      There are so many obstacles to navigate in life that it can be overwhelming. But most of it is BS playing on a loop between our ears. The only way to break that loop is with a viable habit loop that forces us to execute in the now. Excellence is the next five minutes, or maybe the next 50.68 seconds, or maybe just this very instant. What we do with this moment determines so much of who we’ll be at the finish line. Don’t regret the moment.

    • Meaning Abides

      “Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.” — Henry David Thoreau

      “If you want to be happy, be.” – Leo Tolstoy

      “Happiness is transient, but meaning abides.” — James Hollis

      We are all in the process of becoming whatever it is we’ll evolve into next. Blogging documents much of my own becoming, along with a few reckless photos of myself that others insist on releasing into the wild. When you document everything, the documenter captures while seemingly avoiding capture. This is a fools game, everything documented speaks, if we listen and observe closely enough. The trick is to listen closely enough to ourselves.

      The three quotes above naturally clung to each other in the course of a few weeks of reading and writing and sorting out life as it comes to you. We must consider the way in which we spend our lives, for the routines and habits offer a path to meaning and, dare we say, happiness. We are what we repeatedly do, as Aristotle reminds us (For those keeping score that’s four quotes in one relatively brief blog post—just what has gotten into this writer??).

      Perspective, of course. And an inclination to write whatever damned way suits the moment, I suppose. But don’t let me stray too far off the point here. The point is, we must spend our days chipping away at the marble to reveal the secret masterpiece hidden within each of us. Like so many of those unfinished masterpieces you see in museums, we too may run out of time. No, that’s not right—we will certainly run out of time. But we must attempt to draw as much of ourselves out of that cold marble as we possible can before we reach the end of our runway and crash into the abyss.

      We must attempt that which speaks to us. Becoming means to come to a place—what will that place be? Let it be meaningful.

    • Be Merciless With Time

      “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” — Franz Kafka

      We are the authors of our own souls, yet most of us squander our agency and slide into compliance with expectations and deferment of dreams. What a shame. We ring in our celebration of adulthood with jobs, mortgages and parenthood. These are surely worthy pursuits (otherwise why would we do them?), but isn’t it fair to ask, what are we punting down the path in our quest to measure up?

      To be fair, we weren’t born ready to leap across the chasm. We’re never ready, really, but it didn’t feel right to risk everything, such that it was at the time, for the unknown. But every one of us is in the process of becoming whatever we’ll be next, not sitting still, and what we weren’t ready for yesterday might be just the ticket today or tomorrow. We aren’t what we were in all of our previous days, we’re the sum of it.

      So given that, shouldn’t we write a script that inspires, makes us well up a bit with emotion and make the hairs on the back of our neck stand up in nervous excitement just for the shear possibility of realizing what we’ve schemed up? I should think so. We’re all actors in our own play, why do we spend so much of it reading lines written by another?

      We mustn’t bend or dilute our future. We must be merciless — for it’s ours alone, and soon it will fall away like all of our days before. Isn’t it better to realize our greatest obsessions than to squander them in the swirl of trivial pursuits?

    • Memorable

      If it’s easy it’s not memorable. Sure, we remember things that just come to us, but remembering isn’t memorable. Memorable must be earned with effort and iteration over time.

      If you’re a parent you’ll never forget when your children were born, or when you figured out a car seat for the first time, or that first epically challenging diaper. Like scoring an Olympic gymnast, it was memorable because of the level of difficulty involved.

      We all have our lifetime and then its gone. What will make it memorable? Challenges accepted and overcome. Worthwhile relationships stuck with through thick and thin. Hard lessons and leaps of faith. A bias towards action and the will to see it through.

      We should never take the easy route, for it doesn’t lead to memorable.

    • Walk the Walk

      “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.” – Epictetus

      To make giant leaps forward in our careers, athletically, intellectually… whatever, is a worthy aspiration. But should it be a goal? Shouldn’t we focus on consistently taking action towards who we want to be, instead of focusing on the end game? If you want to be a great photographer or writer or 400 meter hurdler, then chip away at meaningful activity that moves you incrementally towards realizing that dream. Talk is BS, it’s only the walk that matters.

      Shane Parrish recently wrote about Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, who touched on this topic. Adams favors systems over goals because it reinforces success every time you do what you said you were going to do. A goal usually ends up frustrating and discouraging us while a system rewards us constantly:

      “Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.” — Scott Adams, as quoted by Shane Parrish in his blog

      I don’t agree with Adams on a lot of things, but I definitely see the truth in this statement. We can’t possibly feel successful if a goal is always out of reach, but we can feel good about our last workout or clicking publish one more day. We all should live by our personal credo. But it isn’t what we say that defines our lives, it’s what we do that exemplifies how delusional or on point that credo is. So walk the walk.

    • Developing Insight, Courage and Endurance

      “Jung observed that the work of being an evolved human being consists of three parts. Psychology can bring us insight, but then, he insisted, come the moral qualities of the individual: courage and endurance. So, having potentially come to consciousness, to have embraced insight as to what a dilemma is really about, one then has to find the courage to live it in the real world, with all its punitive powers, and to do so over time in the face of opposition both external and internal.” — James Hollis, Living an Examined Life

      We’re all evolving at our own pace, becoming what we will, sorting out our individual lifetime feedback loop as it becomes apparent to us. We might have a clear idea of what we are becoming, and then again we might not. There’s no doubt that a strong compass heading offers focus and purpose to an otherwise meandering life, but that doesn’t mean a bit of meandering isn’t essential as we find our way down the path.

      Hunter S Thompson, surely more evolved at 22 than I was at that age, wrote an extraordinary letter to a friend who had asked for advice, replying that one reason he might be struggling to know what to do with his life was that “he’d lived a relatively narrow life, a vertical rather than a horizontal existence.” There’s merit in expanding horizontally, for it develops in us this insight that only comes from meandering a bit off our upward climb. Insight may lead to dissatisfaction with our current path, which in turn might stir enough courage within to make the changes necessary to climb a different path.

      Some of Thompson’s sage advice in that letter to his friend was to “decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.” But the universe doesn’t just bow to our wishes, we must fight for the life we want to live. Inferred in that “see what you can do to make a living” nugget is finding the courage to push for what you want your life to be, not just externally, but especially, internally. Finding the gumption within ourselves to tell that internal voice inside of us to piss off and go for what we want is the real trick to a fulfilling life.

      I finally got around to reading Band of Brothers recently after re-watching the series for a third time. The paratroopers who made up Easy Company in the 101st Airborne Division who jumped behind enemy lines on D-Day didn’t just strap on a parachute and jump out of an airplane for the first time that day. How could anyone find that level of courage to do such a thing? They took small steps, first jumping off a small platform harnessed to a cable, then a higher platform, and progressing to a jump from a plane above their base. It took five of these jumps to earn their silver wings, which indicated to the world that they were paratroopers. Even then, it wasn’t until they parachuted into France under fire that they became combat veterans and earned that nickname “Screaming Eagles”.

      How are we to be expected to just jump into the thick of it in our own chosen life path? We must pay our dues, apprentice and stumble through the learning phase before we can gain any measure of expertise, let alone develop the courage to leap into the unknown and the street smarts to stand up again unscathed. Our lives are a work in progress, built layer upon layer, and the work never stops. And that’s where endurance comes in. We must strategically sprint now and then throughout our lives, but we can’t forget in our rush to get past the pack that most of life is steady state. If we don’t find a pace that we can sustain that pack will reign us back in and leave us far behind.

      It’s easy to write that we need to develop ourselves, but much harder to get out there and tackle it day-after-day. For me, reading, writing this blog (and other things better left unpublished) and generally sorting through life as it comes at me offers the necessary “chart time” to figure out both my current and future place. I’m by no means an expert at this business of living, but I’ve found that this routine levels off the highs and lows of daily living by offering and reinforcing perspective. This is my steady state between the mad dashes of life.

      So there are the three legs of the our evolutionary stool, according to Carl Jung: Insight, to help us understand what we want out of life. Courage, to pursue what we want most. And endurance, to sustain the long, arduous slog through a universe that always has other plans for us. Our daily rituals develop all three, and help to keep the dream alive with the proper fuel and maintenance. Those rituals then help us set our course for wherever we dare to take ourselves next.

    • Beyond What We Avoid

      “One must consciously ask each day: In what way am I so afraid that I am avoiding myself, my own journey?” — James Hollis

      My bride has a strong fear of heights, and I have a nasty habit of challenging her to try things that test that fear. Examples are rattled off in conversations with friends of times I pushed her beyond her comfort zone: helicopter on to a glacier, zip-lining through an Alaskan forest, The London Eye, driving the narrow, twisting switchbacks on the Pacific Coast Highway or the Italian roads to the Dolomites and then riding the cable car to Seceda. There is a pattern of seeking experience beyond her comfort zone, and I greatly appreciate her willingness to put fear aside just a bit to give it a go. In every case the end result was worth it.

      She asked me the other day what I’m afraid of. We’ve been married for almost 27 years, so for her not to know outright was interesting to me. But then again, I also have a hard time thinking of something I’m afraid to try. I can think of many extreme sports that I’d never do, but it’s not for fear but a healthy respect for keeping my body in one piece that keeps me from trying them. There’s a reason most people aren’t surfing 26 meter tall waves like Sebastian Steudtner or attempting Alex Honnold’s Free Solo climb of El Capitan. These are the very definition of extreme, because in the entirety of recorded human history nobody has ever survived such a feat. And yet they pushed through their own fears and did it.

      My own fears aren’t challenged in extreme sports or public speaking, but in putting my work out there for all to see and having it measured. There’s a reason my early blogging was anonymous, for it took me some time to want to have my name tied to it. Perhaps you’ve experienced something similar in your own writing. This fear first expressed itself in college, when I chose to avoid creative writing classes where my work would be judged by my peers and chose classes where I simply analyzed other people’s writing. A few decades later I still regret the lack of courage to simply put it all out there right then and there. But regrets aren’t productive unless we burn them as fuel for becoming something more.

      My greatest fear is leaving my best work on the table before I check out of this world. To develop the talent and the habits necessary to produce something of consequence but never actually putting it out there for the world to judge for themselves nags at me. Blogging is a necessary hammer and chisel chipping away at that block, but deep down I know it isn’t enough. It is absolutely a necessary part of the journey, but it must never be the journey itself. Blogging daily can be a form of avoidance—as if I might quench my thirst for doing more simply by putting out a blog post every day.

      There’s much more to do, friends. Much more on the table that needs to be put out there. And that’s the comfort zone I need to push beyond. If life experience tells us anything, it’s that the end result will be worth it.

    • The Nerve for Excellence

      “A New Yorker essay that fall noted that mathematicians do good work while they are young because as they age they suffer “the failure of the nerve for excellence.” The phrase struck me, and I wrote it down. Nerve had never been a problem; excellence sounded novel.” — Annie Dillard, Afterword of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

      Take that New Yorker example of mathematicians and apply it to rock stars. How many Paul McCartney or Elton John or Joni Mitchell songs written in their 40’s or later resonate as much as those written in their 20’s? They may be good or even great, but they aren’t classics. Excellence requires the nerve to go for it.

      As someone who is no longer in their twenties, I remember the audacity of youth as much as I appreciate the pursuit of safer routes as we age. After all, we’ve got bills to pay and mouths to feed and a 401(k) to nurture, right? So what does that mean for those of us who aren’t kids anymore? Should we hang it up after we hit 30? Of course not. But we have to stretch beyond our comfort zone if we want to achieve anything beyond the average.

      Sure, when we’re young we have less to lose, so it becomes comparatively easy to jump in to the deep end. But there are other ways to reach the deep end. We can methodically wade in one step at a time. Or to flip analogies, when everyone around us is slowing down to savor the view, we still have the choice to power up the hill.

      Nobody reaches mastery without tenacity and drive. Surely there’s a case for perseverance. For incrementally—relentlessly—applying accumulated knowledge towards our goal. Will that lifetime work become a masterpiece? Few ever do, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have the nerve to try.

      Go deeper. Climb higher. See what we might make of our best work.

    • Breakfast of Champions

      There’s a classic Saturday Night Live sketch where John Belushi portrays a dominant track athletic at his peak. His secret? Little chocolate donuts. It spoofs every performance food ad of the time and really, since. And it raises the question—what exactly are we eating for optimal performance in our days?

      Travel opens our eyes to what constitutes breakfast from place-to-place, and forces us to examine what exactly we consume to start our day. What exactly fuels us as we begin our days? As we learn more about what is good for us and what simply fills us up, shouldn’t our expectations for what we consume is evolve?

      Eating breakfast in places around the world, you immediately pick up on the differences. Americans are heavy on portion size. We like our eggs and bacon and pancakes with a healthy pile of home fries or grits, depending on how you feel about snow. Austrians and Germans seem to favor cheese and cold cuts with a hard-boiled egg and bread. Other countries favor fish, olives, figs, dates and yogurt.

      Who’s right? We are what we eat, but the Mediterranean diet seems to be the consensus pick for healthiest. Still, it might be a tough transition from corn flakes or biscuits to smoked fish and a handful of figs. Ultimately, we have to decide what we’re going to eat. We ought to lean in on fuel and shy from fill. But who doesn’t love a chocolate donut now and then?

      I suppose the answer is to standardize on the healthy diet, and splurge occasionally on the things that taste good in the moment but aren’t especially good fuel for our bodies. It’s a pay me now or pay me later scenario, but the now is a very immediate rush of satisfaction and a fairly short window before the debt is owed. If we can resist the immediate temptation until we’re satiated on the good stuff, maybe we can avoid the bad stuff altogether.

      Part of the breakfast offering in Israel