Alexandersmap

    Tag: James Clear

    • Creating Irreplaceable

      “Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.“ — André Gide

      [Quick aside: I’ve used the two quotes in this blog before, but feel there’s more to be said about them. Perhaps more still, even after this post. Forgive the repetition. We are what we repeatedly do?]

      It’s fair to ask ourselves, as we begin each day enabled or encumbered in our routines, just what it is we’re up to. Where exactly is this day bringing us on our journey? For that matter, what is the destination anyway? Big questions, to be sure, but life is full of big questions deftly dodged. When we avoid answering our deepest questions how can we possibly expect to reach our potential? We can’t succumb to distraction when we’re creating irreplaceable.

      A few weeks ago a friend planted a seed in my brain about finally hiking the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim. I’ve contemplated doing this for years, and deep down I knew it was going to slip away like so many other dreams. Until I decided to realize that particular dream. Now don’t get me wrong: it’s still unrealized, but it aligns with my identity, lends itself to other life goals, and is attainable with applied focus, time and effort. For better or worse, I’ve also just announced that intent to everyone who reads this blog, breaking a rule about announcing what I intend to do instead of informing about what I’ve just done. But sometimes you need to add peer pressure to reach your goals in life.

      A year or ten ago, I began hinting at a novel I was writing. I had no business writing a novel when I first started talking about writing one, because I didn’t believe I had any business writing it. Naturally the novel never was written, but the desire to write it remained. So I started blogging every day as a step towards writing better, applied daily through my commitment to post something every day. My blog posts are written the day they’re posted, which is why the time is variable, because I finish it when I finish it. You might add that the quality of the post is also highly variable, but the point is to ship the work, ready or not.

      “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
      No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your identity.
      This is why habits are crucial. They cast repeated votes for being a type of person.”
      — James Clear

      We all wonder what the future will bring, but don’t always see we’re building it with each action. We have more agency in our lives than we give ourselves credit for, and often overthink things instead of just taking another step. That which is irreplaceable cannot be realized without consistent effort. We must choose our direction and do the work to realize it. Fate decides the rest.

    • An Active Event

      “We think of inertia as the state of being inert or motionless—one of our purer displays of passivity and disengagement. It’s not. Inertia is an active event in which we are persisting in the state we’re already in rather than switching to something else… The most reliable predictor of what you’ll be doing five minutes from now is what you’re doing now… The most reliable predictor of who you’ll be five years from now is who you are now.”
      — Marshall Goldsmith, The Earned Life

      Yes, you might detect a pattern in the writing recently. I keep returning to the Tom Peters statement that excellence is the next five minutes. Habits are hard to break, routine is either a prison or a path to a brighter future. And inertia now can predict who we are in five years if we don’t take that next step to change right now.

      Does that sound unnecessarily urgent? Perhaps, but aren’t the stakes just that high? We are what we repeatedly do, and more often than not we repeat the same damned thing this five minutes as we did last. So we ought to take this next five minutes and demand something more of ourselves than the previous five. We ought to make it an active event that transcends our previous place.

      The easiest way to determine the truth in that is to look at what we did last week and compare it to what we did last year. Sure, there are highlight moments of trips and events that break up the sameness, and a pandemic mixed in to skew the data, but on the whole things are roughly the same. If our habit loop is positive this can be a very good thing, but if we keep repeating bad habits we might be living in a rut that runs straight to the grave.

      “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big. That’s the paradox of making small improvements.” ― James Clear, Atomic Habits

      It’s easy to spot inertia when we look at intentions. If we intend to write the book or run the marathon or summit the mountain but find ourselves dancing with the same excuses we had yesterday and five years ago, well, let me introduce you to our friends inertia and low agency. On the flip side, if you’ll allow me to use a few of my own examples, inertia is publishing this blog every day for the last four years, reading early every morning and most nights and maintaining a streak on Duolingo that’s approaching 1000 days. Maybe each is small in the big scheme of things, but each is a +1 on the path to becoming.

      @jackbutcher

      Moment-to-moment we make decisions that pull us forward or set us back. We default to the familiar, which both reinforces our identity now and reinforces it in our future. That past moment isn’t this moment unless we choose the same thing. Will it be a plus or a minus? Our vote ought to be for an active event, our action should be a plus.

    • Dancing with the Gloriously Possible

      “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.” — Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

      Every now and then you read a book that becomes an instant frame of reference for how you see the world and your place in it for the rest of your days. Walden, Awareness, Meditations, and Atomic Habits are some of the books that changed me profoundly. I can comfortably place Four Thousand Weeks on that short list. This is a mesmerizingly insightful look at the fragile dance we’re all in the middle of, and how we think and react to our realization that life is impossibly short. It reinforces many of the things I’ve written about in this blog, and turned a few working theories upside down and dumped them on the scrapheap. It’s a book I’ll be processing for awhile.

      “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. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life... 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.“

      Confronting our limitation, and how we process that by either living in the moment or distracting ourselves with ritual, busyness, by deferring to the future (all the way to “afterlife”) or skimming along in the shallow pond of the unimportant are all very human reactions to figuring out what the hell to do with this short time before we rejoin infinity. Heady stuff, stuff that demands contemplation. But it can be overwhelming to think about such things. Who wants to be the Debbie Downer in their own life party?

      Burkeman points to the possibility of accepting life for the brief dance it is so you can focus on what you can and cannot achieve. Decide what you’ll focus on, and importantly, what you’ll let fall away. We can’t excel in everything, so why burden ourselves with those things on our to-do list? We know what’s most important already. Be honest with yourself about what is going to fall off and celebrate the unburdening of releasing it for our essential contribution.

      All those books listed above, in one way or another all come down to the idea of making the most of our short time. Since we all know the ship is sinking from the moment we reach awareness, shouldn’t we be conscious about how we react to it? Isn’t it liberating, in a way, to release the burden of the shortness of time and seize this moment? Think about the Titanic in her last moments —would you rather be in the band playing tunes to the end or the fool who jumps into the icy water screaming in denial to the last? Even the people who made it to the life boats gained but a short time more. I’d like to think they used it well.

      And so should we! Since we all meet our fate in the end, shouldn’t we make the most of our brief lives? What will you do with this focused time?

    • Get After It, Again and Again

      Lingering in the good soreness from a couple of days of long beach walks, I can’t help but wonder how fit I’d be if I walked the beach every morning before the sun rose. Then again, I think the same thing after a great hike, after consistently rowing anaerobic pieces, or doing intense weight circuits or swimming laps in salt water. Active is active, and the point of active is to do what you can where you are with what you have. Otherwise you’re inactive.

      So get after it. Carve out the time and do the work. This naturally goes for anything we pursue in life. Plodding along half-assed is a form of wasting space, and we aren’t here to waste space, are we? Sliding into comfortable complacency is just so… easy. But it doesn’t get us where we really want to go.

      “You can usually accomplish more by giving something your full effort for a few years rather than giving it a lukewarm effort for fifty years. Pick a priority for this season of your life and do it to the best of your ability.” – James Clear

      Beginning in early July I challenged myself to 20 days of rigid eating and exercise. It turned out I wasn’t so rigid with either, but still managed to lose 6 pounds and noted significant progress in kettle bell repetitions (my focus during this time period). It was just enough to make me want a little more. Really, a lot more. And so I begin again.

      Normally I’m an Olympics junkie, and love to watch athletes who put everything into their sport come together to compete. If I were broadcasting the Olympics, I’d be following athletes from different sports and different countries for years documenting the blood, sweat and tears as they grind away at it all. Then put together a montage of each, no matter how they finish in their events, through the closing ceremonies and then back home. Where they look around, smile and begin again. But broadcasters (and most people) celebrate the big moment, not the process that gets them there and beyond.

      The more trips around the sun I take, the more I see that life is about becoming, and it’s never fully realized. It’s celebrated in small moments of lingering soreness and beginning again the next day. We’re here to get after it to the best of our ability, to work towards that person we want to become. Beginning again and again.

    • Maintaining Streaks

      “Build streaks. Do the work every single day. Blog daily. Write daily. Ship daily. Show up daily. Find your streak and maintain it.” – Seth Godin, The Practice

      I made a relatively big deal (by my standards) of blog number 900. Well, this is 914 and I just keep quietly going. I have some exciting plans for blog posts in 2021, which rely on good health and the freedom of mobility that comes with a world getting back on its feet again – dare I say – after the pandemic. But I’ll write either way. I like this particular streak I’m on too much to stop just because I’m not out there seeing the world. And so the streak continues for as long as I’m blessed with another day and the acuity to do something with it.

      The concept of streaks is nothing new, but I’ll credit James Clear with writing the right book at the right time (for me) a couple of years ago shining a spotlight on habits and building streaks with them. It hit me in a way that Charles Duhigg’s book on the same topic didn’t. Both informative, but Clear’s book was catalytic. Since reading it I’ve tried to string together consecutive streaks for many things, but the writing is the one that’s lasted the longest. If you search for James Clear in this blog you’ll find plenty of quotes on this topic, but here are three I don’t believe I’ve used before:

      “The point is to master the habit of showing up.”

      “The identity itself becomes the reinforcer. You do it because it’s who you are and it feels good to be you.”

      “Never miss twice.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits

      So every morning begins with maintaining the streaks: Writing and reading. Fitness is saved for the middle of the day, and the evening is Duolingo to close out the day. Which may explain why I’ve had to use the streak saver several times with Duolingo (though I’ve never missed twice in a row) and the exercise streak gets broken more than it should. That exercise streak is just as critical for overall health as the writing, reading and language learning are for mental fitness. But it tends to get lost in that middle of the day time slot, so I’m debating moving it to the beginning of the day without breaking what’s working.

      As a morning person, the payoff is more obvious in the morning streaks. I publish every day, usually before I eat breakfast unless there’s an early start for a flight or a hike or whatnot. And I chip away at the reading immediately afterwards. I finished John McPhee’s Draft no. 4 (for five books in a week). That reading streak is paying off as much as the writing streak. They go hand-in-hand, of course, but it’s nice to finish things and “check the box”. For the blog checking the box means clicking Publish. For reading checking the box means reviewing the book after I’ve finished it on Goodreads. This also serves as my de facto tracker for how many books I finish in a year.

      “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

      Reading that McPhee book reminded me of what I don’t know. I spent a fair amount of time looking up the definitions of words he’d drop, or places he’d been to that I wasn’t familiar with. You could look at that in two ways: either you’re hopelessly behind on the learning curve, or you’ve reached another hurdle to clear on your sprint around the track of life. Embrace the humbling process of learning what you didn’t previously know, and look with anticipation towards the next hurdle in line.

      So that’s where you’ll find me each morning: maintaining streaks while sprinting around the track of life. We’re moving around it either way, we might as well keep a few streaks alive as we go. Now, about that fitness goal…

    • Process and Persistence

      “Process saves us from the poverty of intentions.” – Elizabeth King (via Seth Godin & Tim Ferriss)

      “You begin with a subject, gather material, and work your way to structure from there. You pile up volumes of notes and then figure out what you are going to do with them, not the other way around.” – John McPhee, On The Writing Process

      Blogging is a process that saves me from my poverty of intentions. I’ve intended to write for years, but pushed it aside in pursuit of everything both worthy and irrelevant. Sure the site needs work, the writing has typos now and then and Yoast SEO is fixed in a permanent frown, but so what? If you’re along for the journey, welcome, you’ve apparently overcome a ton of SEO blunders on my part to get here.

      If there’s a common theme throughout life, its the fact that we can never do quite enough to reach perfection. I’m nowhere near it myself. But I walk the path one step at a time, writing, editing, publishing and starting again at the beginning every day. And that’s a victory in itself. Screw perfection – give me process and persistence.

      “Mastery is the process of narrowing your focus to a tiny element of success, repeating it until you have internalized the skill, and then using this new habit as the foundation to advance to the next frontier of your development.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits

      And that’s where I am, focus narrowed and repeating daily towards a level of mastery I may never achieve. But I’ll be closer for the effort. There’s some measure of the Pareto principle in that James Clear quote. Focus on the 20% that achieves the goal. SEO doesn’t necessarily matter. Likes and follows don’t necessarily matter. The work matters. So do more than focus, do the work.

    • On Discipline

      “Look at a river as it moves toward the sea. It creates its own banks that contain it. When there’s something within you that moves in the right direction, it creates its own discipline. The moment you get bitten by the bug of awareness.” – Anthony de Mello, Awareness

      Sometimes I fight active avoidance in the work I do, and find myself pushing through tasks that I have no desire to tackle. There are plenty of things that make my mind overflow the banks and wander in the wrong direction, and the pandemic has illuminated my routine and forced me to reconcile what matters in the job, in writing and in exercise and fitness. But the days flow differently when you’re constantly working from home. Work time blends into off time and vice versa. Writing time this morning was blown up by casually reading work email and reacting to the urgency of others. Discipline is not just doing the right things, its not doing other things at the wrong time. Learning, and re-learning, to say no or not yet.

      “Discipline equals freedom.” – Jocko Willink

      This is where those handy habit loops become an essential part of your day. They allow you to keep promises you make to yourself to keep moving forward. For the most part those habit loops have kept me on track, but I see some drift in my habits over the last month, beginning with vacation when the only thing I stuck with was the writing. Deep inside you know when things are off, and when corrective action is needed. Reflect on your current course, and then decide what to be and go be it.

      “It is a simple two-step process:
      1. Decide the type of person you want to be.
      2. Prove it to yourself with small wins.“
      – James Clear, Atomic Habits

      When you’re on the right path, doing the work is relatively easy. Sure, you can drift now and then, but resetting is natural, like setting the sails when the wind shifts. Discipline, when applied to the work you love, becomes natural through repetition. And that’s the trick, doing what you love. Following your path. Sounds positively dreamy, but there’s truth in it. Hate your work? You’ll be miserable as you force yourself down the trail of tears. Love your work? The word work disappears altogether and you focus on optimization instead. Yeah, optimization. I said it. There’s a business-speak word for you, but seriously, isn’t it better love what you do and focus on making the most of your day instead of hating what you do and focus on making it through the day?

      “Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.” – Rumi

      I’m not one of those writers who pretends to have it all figured out. This blog is me figuring it out in writing. We’re all works in progress, aren’t we? Might as well enjoy the work as it progresses.

    • So Many Mornings

       

      “This is the earnest work. Each of us is given
      only so many mornings to do it—
      to look around and love
      the oily fur of our lives,
      the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.
      Days I don’t do this
      I feel the terror of idleness,
      like a red thirst.
      Death isn’t just an idea.”
      – Mary Oliver, The Deer

      Each morning I jot down one sentence that sums up the day prior in my Clear Habit Journal.  This one exercise alone has prompted me to be more creative in my days; to seek adventures worthy of writing down.  But there are plenty of days when I just go to work (which currently means walking downstairs) and maybe had a meaningful conversation with someone.  And sometimes that’s enough.  But in the back of my mind I feel that tomorrow morning I ought to write something down that was worthy of a day alive.  For as Mary Oliver says above, each of us is given only so many mornings, and death isn’t just an idea.

      Saturday morning brought tales of night swimming with my bride and hot embers warming cold skin.  Sunday morning brought soreness and a note about the magical Franconia Ridge Trail.  And this morning brings a summary of bottles of wine, grilled goodness and laughter with friends at a distance.  This was a string of worthy days and I work to compress the entirety of it all into one sentence that somehow may sum it up.  These are moments of quiet smiles and satisfaction.  Sometimes I write about adventures above tree line, but sometimes I write about installing a new toilet in my parent’s bathroom.  Both count just the same as worthy entries.

      Just as the blog forces me to reach beyond my comfortable place to explore and try new things, the daily sentence lingers as a cold-hearted judgement on the worthiness of any given 24 hours on this planet.  If that seems like a lot to live up to, well, so be it.  I believe we’ve got to live with urgency for all the reasons I’ve written about before that you already know too.  Someday I’ll have my last morning on this planet, and I hope the day that follows it is so epic that I wish I’d had one more to write down what I did.  Those single day entries will pass on to those who survive me, and I hope they’ll see the sparkle and shimmer of a life well-lived, one day at a time.

       

    • Move Out on Faith

      “Stay away from people who are world-weary and belittle your ambitions. Unfortunately, this is most of the world. But they hold on to the past, and you want to live in the future.” – Sam Altman, Idea Generation

      Sam Altman is an entrepreneur and 35 years old at the time I write this, so I understand his spin on living in the future. A creative mind must indeed live with an eye on the future, for that is where hope and possibility lie just out of reach. To get anything done in this world we must bridge that gap with work today.

      Avoiding the world-weary seems like a great idea. but there’s just so many of them. Some of my favorite people have a world-weariness about them. Its hard not to get a little worn down by 2020 and some of the maddening missteps of humanity over the last few decades, but even in these strange times there’s always something positive out there if you look for it.

      The larger point, of course, is to avoid those who would undermine your dreams in active or subtle ways because they’ve given up on their own. A voice of reason is often a disguise for a “poisonous playmate” who would kill your dream that you might not rise beyond their own lowly ambitions. Quotations are for a term borrowed from Julia Cameron, who has a few things to say about the creative spirit inside us.

      “It is my experience both as an artist and as a teacher that when we move out on faith into the act of creation, the universe is able to advance.” – Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

      When I started writing this blog I did it quietly, just writing in Blogger most days, but with breaks in between. I wasn’t fully invested in myself as a writer yet, but there was a tangible shift when I switched to WordPress. Now I write every day and link to it in Twitter for anyone invested in finding my thoughts. Some people find my blog and support it, while others ignore it completely. I try not to let either dictate my writing or the directions the Muse takes me. Keeping eyes on the task at hand and casting votes in the form of daily blog posts.

      “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits

      Last night a thick fog swallowed up Buzzards Bay whole. “There will be no sunset tonight, I believe“, I announced to my daughter. And upped the ante by saying I’d give her a dollar if there was. Sure enough, the clouds parted, the fog thinned and we had an epic sunset with dancing fog glimmering in bright orange hues. I gave her a five: a dollar for being right and four for her optimism. Maybe that entire scene foreshadows a brighter future. Wouldn’t that be welcomed?

    • Resetting the Mind

      Monday morning wasn’t offering me any free rides today.  The well of creativity felt tapped out.  I looked through the 27 drafts I had going and wasn’t inspired to pursue any of them.  I tried sitting in my favorite reading chair and read Seneca’s On the Happy Life for inspiration, highlighting many passages yet finding no inspiration for today’s blog.  I put on headphones and listened to my favorite create something of substance song (Wild Theme) on repeat.  Nothing yet…  but getting closer.  Coffee cup drained.  Walked outside and sat on my favorite outdoor muse capturing device and waited.  And finally it came to me.

      “One of the most effective ways to reduce the friction associated with your habits is to practice environment design….  “resetting the room”.
      The purpose of resetting each room is not simply to clean up after the last action, but to prepare for the next action…
      How can we design a world where it’s easy to do what’s right?” Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do.”
      – James Clear, Atomic Habits

      It occurred to me that I’ve set a few spaces to optimize productivity.  Sit/stand desk, noise-cancelling headphones, proper lighting, indoor and outdoor spaces at the ready.  All of this is setting the room, as Clear writes about.  And it’s setting the mind as well.  When I hear Wild Theme I get creative.  When I sit in a specific chair my mind focuses on writing.  And eventually it clears the fog and I get to it.  These are all methods of flipping the switch.  Want to work out first thing in the morning?  Put your workout clothes out so they’re front and center when you get up.  Writing is the same way – take the necessary steps of setting the “room” to prepare for the next action.

      Ultimately resetting the room means resetting the mind for the actions you wish to prioritize.  Having a dedicated workspace is important so personal time and work time don’t bleed over into one another.  I think that particular point has been hammered home by just about every business or lifestyle writer out there.  I won’t regurgitate the key points here.  For me it’s not about the space you place yourself in but the mindset you achieve.  Monday mornings are generally difficult because you’re transitioning from weekend activities to the work week.  I don’t recall having a similar challenge with Friday nights or the first morning of a vacation.  It’s all in the mind, this calendar mentality, but the uncertainty of which hat am I wearing at the moment? is valid.  So in times of transition, to reduce the friction, the question how do we make it easy to do what’s right? is paramount to actually getting things done effectively.

      And that brings me back to Seneca, which didn’t seem at all connected to this topic when I started writing this morning.  In speaking about virtue, Seneca’s pointed out that he hadn’t quite gotten to a virtuous life just yet.  To which his critics pounced, saying why should we listen to a man who hasn’t mastered the very thing he lectures us on?  But Seneca turns this around on his critics, pointing out that:

      “I make this speech, not on my own behalf, for I am steeped in vices of every kind, but on behalf of one who has made some progress in virtue.”

      We all tend to think that everyone else has it all figured out, don’t we?  And it can be unnerving when someone who is “showing us the way” admits that they’re a work in progress themselves.  But I’ve come to a point where I view anyone that tells me they have it all figured out is a con artist – be it a fundamentalist, politician, overly aggressive business person: you know the type.  Like you I’ve learned to be skeptical of people who say they have it all figured out.  Instead, I write to show myself the way.  On behalf of one who has made progress in the things that I myself strive for.  Finding a way to flip the switch on a misty Monday morning, and sharing in the process for arriving at the desired state.  The well feels a bit less empty even as I tap from it.  Funny how that happens.