Alexandersmap

    Category: Personal Growth

    • To Hell With Comparison

      “We have so far to go” sighed the boy
      “Yes, but look at how far we’ve come.” said the horse
      – Charlie Mackesy      , The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse

      I listened to an associate talk of stocks purchased and his regret that he only made $300K on his Moderna but would have made a million if he’d stuck with it. He’d already made millions selling his business, and talked of starting another business to build and sell. He’s a hustler, a builder, a big shark in a red ocean always hungry for more. And a charming guy who quickly wins people over with his personality and work ethic.

      Another friend who worked for this friend learned all he could from the big shark and started his own company. He’s built it up to be substantial. There’s no doubt that he’s a big shark himself now, and he talks exactly like the first guy. Rattles off accomplishments in every conversation, big wins, and a trophy house on a famous lake. Also a hustler, he’s built something special but isn’t slowing down. No, he’s got an empire to build and the climb isn’t over.

      You can quickly feel inadequate when you talk to someone who leapfrogs the average. These two make me dizzy when I talk to them, and there’s plenty more just like them who will rattle off wins like entrees on a Cheesecake Factory menu. I can’t help but admire them, and compliment each accomplishment for what it is. And there’s a little bit of comparison that slips in right about then where I think about what I’ve done in the industry versus what they’ve done, and… I silently curse myself for not being a bigger shark.

      “Comparison is the primary sin of modern life.” – Michael Ray“

      When you try to keep up with the Joneses you willingly enter into an arms race you can’t win. But the tendency to compare runs deep. And I thought about my two friends. They talk often, and I wonder about their conversations. I did this! Well, I did this! And so on until their next client calls with a billion dollar deal just in time for the holidays. And I shake my head. I don’t want to swim in that ocean.

      “Comparison is the death of joy.” – Mark Twain

      When you live your life based on how you perceive yourself to be in relation to someone else you can never measure up. And you set yourself up for a life of frustration and exhaustive one-upmanship. And yet most of us do it anyway. Worse, we start looking at what our children have accomplished compared to the neighbors kids and seed our issues right in to the next generation.

      “The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.” – Lily Tomlin

      You can’t help but think about how far you have to go when you start comparing yourself to others. But it helps to look back and recognize just how far you’ve come. Often the best views are well before we reach the summit. We’re all on our own path, and it might just look pretty good to someone else. Shouldn’t we recognize that ourselves and appreciate where we are?

      And still comparison persists. Comparison can be a spur or a cancer. It serves to fuel progress, inspire action, alter our course and generally goad us out of complacency. Comparison isn’t all bad. Until you use it to degrade yourself or those you love, or to win at any cost. In those moments, to hell with comparison. Isn’t it better to be George Bailey than Mr. Potter?

    • Towards Remarkable

      “What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there’s another force from inside battling to make us something else.” – Nadine Gordimer

      I don’t know much about Nadine Gordimer that you can’t find in her obituary or on Wikipedia. She was a South African writer who helped expose the darkness of apartheid for the world to see. She won a Nobel Prize for her writing and was on the short list of people that Nelson Mandela wanted to see first when he was released from prison. By all accounts she was a pretty remarkable woman.

      “…with an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion.”

      You know remarkable when you see it. There’s a life force exuding out of certain people that pulses. It’s not celebrity, though some celebrities, athletes and leaders have it (certainly not all). You learn to spot the authentic energy from the great shopkeepers and cons. It’s an intangible force from inside that is magnetic but genuine. People are drawn to them, because they see something in them that they haven’t quite let out of themselves.

      “If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.” 

      I understand Nadine Gordimer better through her words. And in her words she shows us the way. Learn from the great observers of the past. Write it down (Rolf Potts recommends a “commonplace book” where you can record the best ideas you find – blogging certainly helps achieve this too). Keep improving over time. With patience but earnest effort.

      “Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place – a single book written from different stages of your ability.” 

      I’ve come to focus on remarkable recently. Having come across a few people with that extraordinary life force exuding out of every pore, you begin to think about how you might reach some level of that yourself. Gordimer hints at the journey we’re all on with this last quote. We’re all climbing at different paces, at different stages of our ability, towards our own peak. Towards remarkable.

    • Life As You See It

      “Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music—the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.” – Henry Miller

      “The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.” – Julia Cameron

      Paying attention is a gift, and writing about it sharpens the focus. I believe that blogging has done more to wake me up to the wonders of my immediate world than anything save the birth of my children. Having children developed my habit of capturing moments in pictures, but the years my kids were growing up were also years the writing quietly lay dormant, biding time. You don’t have much quiet time when the mad dash from diapers to packing school lunches to soccer and dance recitals to driving to away games to picking colleges is happening. And yet I wish I’d written it all down anyway.

      Now, after the mad dash, the writing stirred awake from its slumber. I look around at all there is to see in this world. All there is to learn about the world. All there is to read and taste and see and most importantly, to do. Faraway places will have to wait once again, but there’s so much to see right outside.

      Read a Mary Oliver poem and you see that you’ve been blind the entire time. Chastened yet challenged, you look more deeply at the world in front of you and deeper into the soul. And you write.

    • The Other Side

      “What happens to the leaves after they turn red and golden and fall away?”
      – Mary Oliver, Roses, Late Summer

      I walked out just before bedtime for a quick look at the sky. The Northern Taurids peaked the night before, but we had overcast skies and alas, nothing to see here. A quick scan revealed another disappointing cloud cover masking the show. And still Mars shone through the passing clouds, offering hope that if I tried hard enough, maybe I’d see through to the other side. I went to bed instead.

      The Leonids offer a second chance, peaking on Tuesday night. The forecast doesn’t look favorable for the peak, but Monday night looks promising, and I promise myself I’ll stay up late to see them. We’ll see.

      Promises to ourselves have a way of falling away, like those leaves on the tree. I know where those red and golden leaves go: right over the fence into the woods by the tarp-full. I see them now; mounds of brown, damp leaves transforming back to mulch to feed their kin. And I see them gathering once again on the front lawn, mocking previous hours of work. And I wonder, where did all of these ones come from?

      The other side is that place we can’t see but we know it’s there. The other side of a fitness goal is evasive when you’re looking at the scale or your splits and don’t see much progress. The completed novel, the perfect job, the perfect marriage, and whatever it is on the other side of life all tantalize us with how close they are, yet how elusive they remain.

      All we control is what we do now. The direction we point ourselves. The consistency and honesty of our effort. Accepting this for all that it is. The rest blows in the wind, landing where it may.

    • You Do You

      “We see people and things not as they are, but as we are. That is why when two people look at something or someone, you get two different reactions.” – Anthony De Mello, Awareness

      I’ve been off of Facebook for 23 days, promising myself I wouldn’t go back on until after the election in the United States. For the most part I haven’t missed anything but birthday wishes for friends. Instead I text or call them with wishes. Seems old school to actually speak to someone on their birthday, but I like living on the edge a bit.

      So the Facebook fast has gone well, but I did cheat a couple of times and log on to see what I was missing. Two or three minutes of quick scanning to see if people are healthy and doing well. No likes or comments, in and out quickly. But then I read a post a friend made. He was wondering where all the coverage of the Hunter Biden story was and why everyone was burying “the truth”. That was almost the breaking point for me, I wanted to break my fast and reply educating him on what matters in this country and what may be merely crap that they’re slinging to see if it sticks. I took a breath, logged off and cleared the history of my browsing just to ensure I would have to physically log in again to get back on Facebook.

      I get a similar reaction when I see someone I know with a Trump sign on their car or in their yard. My perception of that person changes, even if they remain the same otherwise. And I realize that the issue isn’t them at all, but my reaction that matters. I wonder sometimes at the world, but recognize that I can’t change the world at all, only myself and the impact I have through my own actions.

      So I’ve begun using the phrase “you do you” in my head when I see or read something that annoys me. You do you, and I’ll do me. And maybe we’ll meet in the middle on a few things. Or maybe not. But offloading the stress of what other people think is liberating. My vote cancels out his vote, and I’ll rely on other cooler heads to prevail.

      Focusing on changing others by nature means we aren’t focused on changing ourselves. We have plenty of blank canvas left to paint in our own lives, and a few mistakes we’ve all made along the way that could use some painting over as well. The more we focus on our own path the further down that path we may go. There’s plenty to work on right here.

    • Striving for Prévoyance

      “C’est une prévoyance très nécessaire de sentir qu’on ne peut tout prévoir.”
      (“It is a very necessary forethought to feel that you cannot foresee everything.”)
      – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

      Prévoyance. The word tantalizes me, capturing my imagination, tauntingly just out of reach. It’s a French word, essentially translating basically to “foreseeability”. Prévoyance is powerful when applied to the markets, or business, social trends or simply whether to bring an umbrella with you on your walk. It also helps greatly when managing our own lives. I heard a richer and more profound definition from David Hackett Fischer when describing this trait in Samuel Champlain. He defined prévoyance as “the power of a prepared mind to act upon chance events in a world of deep uncertainty.” My French hasn’t reached that level of nuance just yet (and never will without immersion), so I’m grateful when people point out the magic sprinkled in such words.

      The problem with learning is in learning what you don’t know, or levels that you haven’t yet reached in life. But within that inherent underlying frustration lies growth and progression towards a higher self. And that’s where I find myself: decades into life and scrambling over jumbled bits of acquired knowledge in a climb to wisdom and higher truth. The promised land that I’ll never quite reach, but a step closer than I was yesterday or the day before. Sisyphus has nothing on me.

      “It was better to be in the right place than to be smart and work hard. It was best to be cunning and focus on results rather than inputs. Acting on a few key insights produced the goods. Being intelligent and hard working did not.” – Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle

      In this life I find myself climbing a succession of mountains, looking around with a sigh, and descending back down to climb yet another (refer to yesterday’s post). Perhaps with a bit more prévoyance I might have climbed fewer mountains, and chosen the right one much earlier in life. But such is life: we don’t know what we don’t know until we gain experience or acquire and leverage knowledge from others who have had the experience.

      “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

      That distinction between greatness and meanness lies in which mountains we climb, and how soon we turn back down the path to ascend a different mountain than the one we’re climbing. And that leads back to foreseeability, to prévoyance, and acting upon chance events in a world of deep uncertainty. And so I stuff the brain with as many bits of knowledge from as many perspectives as I can consume, for knowledge, well-used, is the key to prévoyance. This blog, in many ways, is the public-facing library of that accumulated knowledge (such that it is), and the breadcrumbs on the path of where I’ve been recently. And in the 370,000 thousand published words, perhaps it telegraphs where I’m going too.

    • Choosing the Path

      “A lot of people don’t want to pick up the new skills that are necessary, or they don’t want to, for example, physically move, or they don’t want to disappoint the people in the relationships that they already have to make room for new relationships.

      So everybody wants to start where they are. Nobody wants to go back down the mountain to find the path going to the top. Everybody wants to stay on the path that they’re on, maybe make a few tweaks and get to the top. Or like Charlie Munger jokes; ‘You know people always ask me how do I get to be rich like you except quicker. I don’t want to be the old rich guy, I want to be the young rich guy.’

      So I think these are the hard parts. The hard parts aren’t the learning it’s the unlearning. The hard part isn’t the climbing up the mountain its the going back down to the bottom of the mountain and starting over. Its the beginner’s mind that every great artist or every great business person has, which is you have to be willing to start from scratch. You have to be willing to hit reset and go back to zero. Because you have to realize is that what you already know and what you are already doing is actually an impediment to your full potential. And most people just don’t want to acknowledge that.” – Naval Ravikant, on The Tim Ferriss Show Episode #473

      That’s a long quote, but I found it compelling enough to include it in its entirety. Naval has a way of waking you up to yourself. He’s a deep thinker who demands deep thinking from you as well. And he reminds you that you ought to demand it of yourself.

      Sometimes you climb to a certain rise in your career, your relationship or with some other pursuit you’re deeply invested in, you look around and realize that the path you’re on isn’t going to the top of the mountain you were meant to climb. That’s happened to me a few times in my life. It will surely again at some point in the future should I stick around long enough. The question is whether you make the decision to go back and start all over again. Can you teach an old dog a new trick?

      The obvious example of this is in my inner circle is the crew of Fayaway climbing off the mountain in their individual careers and going back to zero (income) with a three year sabbatical to see the world. And with the pandemic they’ve descended back down off of this mountain that they just started climbing and gone back to jobs to reset yet again. I admire their willingness to keep at it, and they challenge and inspire me to climb other mountains myself.

      So the question is, are you climbing, descending or stuck in place? What you’re already doing is an impediment to reaching your full potential. Staying put is the easy part. The hard part is turning back down the mountain and starting all over again. So where are you going anyway?

    • Choosing the Mindset

      “Your mindset is the filter through which you see the world. It determines how you spend your time, what decisions you make, and where you invest your resources.

      There’s an old saying in business that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

      If you want to be fit, hang out with friends who exercise.

      If you want to think big and aspire to change the world, hang out with people who have Moonshots and a massively transformative purpose (MTP)….

      As an entrepreneur, answering these questions is a critical part of your journey to be successful during this era of exponential change.

      The next step on that journey is choosing the mindset(s) that works best for you.”
      – Peter Diamandis       (from his Twitter thread)

      I found myself lost in PowerPoint for the last two days, creating a presentation well into the evening for a meeting on Monday afternoon. You might think being lost in PowerPoint is a bad thing, and we’ve all suffered through plenty of really bad PowerPoint presentations, compounded by webinars that eliminate the human-to-human interaction that makes them more engaging. But in this case, I was taking a large topic and boiling it down into concise slides. And the time flew by as I researched crime data and regulatory requirements and other such things that make a slide deck come alive. It occurred to me that I actually loved the creative aspect of creating slide decks. And then it occurred to me that it isn’t using the Microsoft product that I love, it’s finding creative ways to tell the story that I love.

      How to best leverage that creative energy remains (always) the question. And I think about Moonshots and massively transformative purpose in the way that Diamandis suggests, and find myself challenged to perform at a higher level still. Blogging every day seems to be a good direction, but I’m not seeing it as the community of writers I thought it would be. I suppose it was never going to be that. Blogging may not be a Nitya Puja, but it is a daily step on the journey that pushes aside the accumulated clutter of life for a time. Writing becomes a meditation of sorts, and brings you closer to the truth… so maybe, in a sense, it is a Nitya Puja after all.

      Jim Rohn said, and Diamandis references in the quote above, that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. In a pandemic that generally means being inside your bubble of family and a few close associates. Every other relationship and engagement with others seems to be remote: Zoom, Facebook, InstaGram, Twitter, TikTok and all the rest. Are those people raising your average or dragging you down? Increasingly it feels like the latter. Watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix and see how manipulative the world of social media is, and ask whether it should be a significant part of your life (Netflix has mastered manipulative distraction itself). And yet I pulled the Diamandis quote from Twitter, so there’s value in social media platforms. But little value in distraction.

      All that noise is clogging the mindset filter, and I find myself wanting to cut the cord once more. When you start checking how many likes your last post had or figuring out how many views you got on your last blog post it can drag you into the depths of distraction. How do you get anything meaningful done if you’re always distracted? And getting things done seems to be the real purpose. Not meaningless things, but the purposeful things that make you a better human. To contribute more. To be more. To reach your potential in this maze we call life. And it begins with your mindset.

    • The Path of Further Understanding

      “If you think it is ever warranted to stop on the path of further understanding, you are very far from the truth. The life which we received was given to us not that we might just admire it, but that we should ever look for new truth hidden from us.” – Leo Tolstoy, quoting John Milton

      I thought I was pretty clever stacking up my list of quotes and observations about the ocean, at the ready for a sailing trip northward in the Gulf of Maine. But plans change, as I wrote yesterday. And sailing will have to wait for another year and another boat. Other forces are at play now. So today I return to introspection on my own path to understanding. This year is full of moments of clarity, but also searing injustices that are difficult to understand. We do what we can to discover the truth hidden from us.

      “Well the heart that hurts
      Is a heart that beats
      Can you hear the drummer slowing
      One step closer to knowing…”
      – U2, One Step Closer

      U2 writes big arena songs that lift people up out of their seats in unison. And I love rising out of my seat with the rest of the arena. But for me, their songs of quiet reflection often left off the set list stick with me long after the adrenaline of the big songs wears off. One Step Closer is one of those songs, and I found the lyrics running through my head when I woke up this morning. Losing a loved one shakes distractions away abruptly, even when expected. And serve as reminders that we’re all one step closer to knowing stir such remembered words from the cobwebs of the mind. The truth is always waiting for us to find it.

      Is there a bigger cliche than “We’re all on this journey together”? I’m guilty of using it several times in this blog. And yet it rings true. Those who came before us offer the accumulated wisdom of their lifetimes to light the path. Our own accumulated wisdom adds familiarity and confidence that we might know the way. But none of us know where the path leads us beyond the next step. We can only walk the path as countless souls have before us and be fully present on the way. It helps to remember that we don’t walk it alone.

    • Saper Vedere: Knowing How to See

      “And so she woke up
      Woke up from where she was
      Lying still
      Said I gotta do something
      About where we’re going”
      – U2, Running To Stand Still

      This song is about drug addiction.  Thankfully I’ve never been a drug addict and so I guess I don’t hear it that way.  Instead I hear the cry out for more than this that leads the couple to escape through drugs.  Seeking a more vibrant canvas than the one we’ve currently painted is a common trait among humans.  Whether we do it through positive pursuits like travel, art, or exercise or through other pursuits like drugs or porn or consuming media makes all the difference in how we grow.  The character Bono sings about could easily have gotten up and picked up a pen instead of a needle.  Perhaps they didn’t see another path out of their current situation.  Perhaps they never saw the light that glimmers around us in the dim reality of poverty.

      “The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

      To reach for “newer” demands we stretch ourselves.  To reach for “richer” infers personal growth as we expand our ideas about what our place in this world can be.  We all face the same ticking clock and react to it in our own way.  And that reaction itself changes with time and experience.  At least if we learn from our experiences as we accumulate them.  I shake my head at some of the experiences I had earlier in my life that I didn’t learn from.  But not learning from what happens in our lives is as much an experience as learning and adjusting the first time.  We all travel the winding path of life at our own pace, and some paths are much harder than others.  But having the vision to see what you want your life to be and building a foundation underneath it is the missing link for so many.

      “The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.” –  Leonardo da Vinci

      Leonardo da Vinci had a philosophy about life called “Saper Vedere” that I find particularly fascinating.  Saper Vedere means “knowing how to see” and it involves visualizing whatever it is you’re creating through a mix of “arte (skill), scientia (knowledge), and fantasia (imagination)”.  (Here’s my source of this information).  So Saper Vedere applied to our lives offers clarity and purpose to the sculptor inside of us.  We’re all inventing our lives every day, or we’re sliding sideways letting the world dictate what we do today and tomorrow and the rest of our days.  I like the former, don’t you?  Every day I try to learn a bit more, to apply that knowledge in productive ways, and to taste, and learn from, experience.  I don’t always achieve everything I visualize in a day, but believe I get closer to the ideal than I might otherwise.

      So Saper Vedere takes its place with Carpe Diem and Memento Mori as a way of living that squeezes the most out of our raw potential.  Slowly creating the life you visualize, one step at a time in our quest for Arete (another word that’s been lodged in my brain since I was a teenager).  In Greek mythology Arete means “Excellence”, or reaching one’s potential in this very human life.  I’m not sure its possible to reach our potential, but we can get a lot closer, can’t we?  The striving for excellence begins with having a vision for the life you’d like to live, and then doing the work to achieve it.  To wake up and do something about where you’re going.  To reach out without fear for newer and richer experience.  To have a vision for your life and to pursue it in earnest, beginning today.