Life design

Chapter 60

I had five actual text conversations going at the same time yesterday, and the phone was ringing off the hook at the same time. I arguably “talked” to more people yesterday than I normally do in a whole month! We are trying to buy a house in Pennsylvania and it is scheduled to close in four days, and the details are driving everyone to the phone, to calling and texting me, to cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s before their internal deadlines run out. Not only banking and real estate people, but water, electric, gas, and insurance guys and gals, plus my regular clients - real work.

It was exhausting. I don’t do much texting and talking on the phone by design.  I have reduced the number of people that I have in my world on purpose, so that I can have the highest quality people near me, and affect the largest changes possible, with my limited time remaining on the earth. So not only does this make me much more effective, it also gives me a great deal of peace in my life. This soothes my introverted tendencies. There are few things I like less than the hurry up and wait processes in western life - airports, banking, and real estate settlements, etc etc.

A number of interesting things surfaced yesterday as I was talking to all these people. 1. My insurance company is insuring my personal belongings to the tune of $187,000.00, but I have been living out of a suitcase for the last six months. 2. Every utility tried to sell me extra stuff. 3. Bank people don’t read my emails nearly as carefully as I read theirs. 4. I am glad I have designed this kind if life so that I don’t have to talk to these people every day. 

The difference is huge

Chapter 59

Most people in this country are living the dream, and they don’t even know it. Having lived in the Former USSR and the former Yugoslavia and visiting the surrounding countries, and hearing their stories of what life was like under communism, it makes me shudder. But can gross injustice happen in the land of democracy? For sure. Heck our police shot and killed a lady who was sleeping in bed recently and no charges were filed! This is so wrong in so many ways, and my heart breaks. Yet there is a difference here.

Instead of this lady being shot and killed in her sleep being the normative actions of the police or state, it is in all honesty the exception rather than the rule. It was rooted in mistakes and poor performance, not intentional terrorism from the State or the police. As my dad and I sit here and argue this case, it becomes clear that we too would shoot back if people were breaking into our house police or not. It becomes clear that while guns don’t kill people, but people kill people, the gun changes the equation so emphatically that this argument becomes, if not mute, at least very convoluted.

But I digressed into my conversation with my dad, so that I don’t have to sit hear and listen to mule stories. The point here, is that no one is systematically shooting us at night while we are trying to sleep. No one is terrorizing us, spying on us, bullying us, forcing us or pressuring us. We have the freedom to live and thrive - its living the dream.

Tools?

Chapter 58

Allow for astonishing work. There are almost no limitations to the work that I can accomplish with these tools. Writing and thinking and figuring and planning and mapping and processing and communicating and convincing. There are so many many things that I could accomplish with these tools. The tools available today are really incredible. I have been writing regularly for over 26 years and I can tell you, today’s tools are far far superior to the tools I had back then. But the tools I had back then were far superior to the tools Shakespeare had. Tools we have in abundance and they are great.

What is most often lacking is focus. The second most lacking piece is motivation. But I could not ask for better tools. Obviously great tools aren't enough to focus me nor motivate me. Neither do these great tools make me grateful nor thankful. Oh they amaze me, but they don't provide those very necessary human elements to what it takes to get the jobs completed. I am so blessed with great friends surrounding me and supporting me, and helping me, and it still doesn't seem to be enough some days. I really want someone I can whine and complain to. Someone who will at least truly hear what is going on inside of me. But few ask. Few really want to know.

But even if everyone wanted to know, that would still not be enough for focus nor motivation. Those have to come from within me. Writing, and most other things in life, are about what is inside of you, not the tools available to do the job.

Amateurs and experts

Chapter 57

Everyone starts out as incompetent and an amateur. It flabbergasts me that this young generation thinks that they are already at the top of their skill set, that their work or professional game has no growth left in it at all. My 20 something year old son-in-law is a case in point. He feels like he should running * Corporation, not working for them as an engineer. While he is amazing, nobody is that amazing. Everyone starts out as incompetent and an amateur. It takes a lifetime of practice for most of us to reach our expertise.

The exception to this rule is you are in the field of sports or physical expertise, then the advantages of youth and strength mean that your peak has to occur earlier, because there are few professional athletes beyond the age of 35, (unless you are playing golf or some such non-contact sport). But professional athletes are the tiniest fraction of the general population. Most of us are weekend warriors at best, and purely spectators at worse when it comes to sports. 

For the vast majority of us, it takes decades to polish our skills and abilities and move out of the incompetent and amateur categories. I am 58 years old and am learning more than ever, year after year. There is no ceiling on learning and progress. Having stated all of this, I still would prefer to take the enthusiasm and energy of youth along with it’s incompetence, and tackle a huge world-changing project, than to take on 10 experts my age. There would far more production and far less posturing from the non-experts.

Stressed

Chapter 56

Stress out the wazzu and up the creek. This week I have hit all my stress limits and ambiguity limits and inner structure limits. And I mean I hit the limits, the outer possibilities of what I can handle, my overload safety mechanism went into play for the first time in over a decade. I couldn’t talk, and I couldn’t think, I could only rage and fight, so I either had to explode or sleep. I took a two hour nap. Exploding is too costly at my age. Literally I laid back in the easy chair and pretty much passed out from stress. All system overloaded and they just shut down to protect me. 

I rarely rarely nap because it screws up my nightly rest so badly. But your body knows what you need more than you know what you need sometimes, and you just can’t resist, nor should you. A nap was precisely what I needed at that moment yesterday. Well ok, what I really needed was the problems to be resolved, but since that wasn’t going to happen yesterday, it was either nap or check myself into the psych ward at the mental hospital. So napping was perfect for the situation I was in, and fine it shortened my overnight sleep up by a couple of hours, but it also saved my bacon.

Today is another day and hopefully no naps are in my future for today. Decisions are made and we are moving forward, no matter how unfair the situation may be. Is there really any other choice?

Wrestling the beast

Chapter 54

Wrestling with banks and financial institutions is a lot like wrestling with alligators. Or at least what I imagine wrestling with alligators would be like, since I have never wrestled an alligator, but I have watched others do it. The alligator has all the advantages in the fight. All the teeth, all the strength, all the claws, all the terrain, all the power.

I have been wrestling with banks for the last two months to get a loan to buy a house. We are nearing the end of the contract limits, and just this morning, they are once again asking me the most minuscule questions about the most unimportant financial nuances on the most minor parts of my entire financial picture . . . one would think that they did not want to loan me the money! But the bank, like the alligator, has all the advantages, all the teeth, all the strength, all the claws, all the terrain, all the power. They can just keep asking for paperwork right up until the contract expires, and then force me to go through the whole damn process again!

The only power I have here, or in an alligator wrestling match, is the choice about whether I want to wrestle or not. When you find yourself in an unequal power situation, you may want to guard this choice ferociously.

Rain stoppers

Chapter 53

The first day of Autumn, or Fall, but for me its just the first day of the coming cold weather. More and more I don’t like cold weather. Been trying to get my wife to move to a warmer place on the planet, and what does she do, decide that we will be living in Pennsylvania for the next year. Snow belt! Brrrrrr.

But trying to stop the cold is like trying to stop the rain . . . and now that I mention that, it is precisely what I spent a beautiful Fall day doing yesterday at my dad’s insistence. At least it was a pretty day, even if it will prove to be a futile effort. The way we ended up trying to stop the rain was like this; this is high erosion country. Which means that this Georgia red mud here, washes away pretty easily and you are always building terraces in your fields in order to thwart erosion. It rains hard, and the water has to go somewhere, and it cuts deep into the earth when it does.

We should have built a terrace yesterday, but instead I spent the afternoon mixing 1000 pounds of cement with a wheel barrel and hoe, and shovels and more shovels. The worse injury was that I had to pay for the cement! At least my dad got sunburnt out of the whole process, that was some comfort. Pouring cement into an erosion hole, is like stopping the rain, and it ain’t gonna happen. 

Better to come to terms with where you built the road and own up to the fact that all that water is gonna cut into your red clay, and be happy with it. Now its just going to wash away my 1000 pounds of cement.

Definitely time to move to SE Asia!

The extroverted introvert

Chapter 52

Labels that you put on yourself are very confining. And it seems that everyone puts lots of labels on their present self. “I am an extrovert” or “I hate asparagus” or “I can never lose this weight” and other such labels. This small mental room, known as a label, locks you down and almost always locks the door and throws away the key. It truly keeps you from entertaining other alternatives, other possibilities.

I honestly thought I was an extrovert from the time I was about eight years old, until I was 54 years old!  I was locked in that room for decades. How exhausting. Then through a series of connected compacted events, I was able to escape from that room and realize that I am much more introverted than I am extroverted. Notice that I did not say I am an introvert. Why would I exchange one locked room for another? Stop defining yourself in such absolutes. It is confining your current version of yourself, your present self, from growth and change, which is critical to your survival and thriving. It is critical to your future self.

You are not currently your past self, and your present self is transitioning to your future self. These labels you put on yourself prevent the blooming of your future self. And worse yet, they prevent the exploration and creativity of your present self. They constrain the growth of your current self. Structure is fine, labels are not. Give yourself some wiggle (growth) room in your descriptors.

Adulting up

Chapter 51

Sometimes you have to bear your responsibilities alone. I know I know, you want to have someone come along and share them with you and help you carry the load, we all have those feeling along the road of life when things are difficult. Having someone else help you is better than icing on cake. But there comes many more times in life when you have to adult-up and take care of your stuff all by yourself. Even when it sucks, and maybe especially when it sucks.

I am at one of those places now. Elder care doesn’t go away. No matter how hard you work at it, it doesn’t finish, it never concludes, it is never done, until it is permanently, and that is a different chapter for a different day. So you have to ride this responsibility out, stand tall, do what is necessary, and get it done not matter how negative it feels some days, no matter how alone you find yourself. This is life and you have to walk this, you can’t get around it and live with yourself. My dad did this on his own with my mom for a decade and my brother and I were little help at all.

Now brother and mom are gone and I am taking care of dad. There is no one to help, and that is just the way it is. Adult-up and stop your whining. All too soon someone will be taking care of you, you hope.

Squishy and difficult

Chapter 50

Continuing with the happiness theme, Allen says that people with varied interests live the longest and are the happiest. Is having varied interests a virtuous activity? I am not sure. Obviously happiness is a squishy difficult concept to nail down and define clearly. And I am not even sure we should be pursuing happiness, but we do. Why I am not sure, but people make all kinds of poor decisions is this pursuit, which ironically never makes them happy. Heck I am even sitting here considering unwise actions because I am thinking about my happiness.

Maybe happiness is a byproduct of not thinking about your happiness? I mean varied interests and virtuous activities are both busy busy actions and will keep you from thinking about yourself very much and both Aristotle and Allen argue that these will help lead you toward happiness. So I don’t know, maybe those who think least about their happiness are the happiest? Squishy and difficult.

And when does happiness arrive? Is it a feeling? An emotion? A brainfart? An idea? A place? A circumstance? A situation? A context? Relationships? Yes and maybe.

Virtuous happiness?

Chapter 49

Aristotle said that happiness is not really found in amusements or pastimes, but in virtuous activities.. Not sure I agree with the whole happiness - virtuous activity spectrum. Seems there would be less entertainment and more virtuous people if this were accurate. I mean think about it, unless Aristotle is the only happy person out there . . .. he wasn’t and he isn’t. And since he is no longer around, its rather difficult to ask him what he meant by “virtuous activities” and I am pretty sure he did not mean overweight Americans dieting or some other inane thing like that. Honestly I have no idea what he meant, and you probably don’t either.

The meanings of the words have changed so much in the eons past, that unless he listed specifically what he thought were virtuous activities, then we have no possible hope of knowing. However if the principle is correct them, our virtuous will supplant his virtuous list. Principles endure. Lists don’t. This principle is likely accurate, as it shows up in other writings, the Bible for example. The real question is what is virtuous?

And then the second real question is what is happiness? Is it a momentary passing feeling that results from watching Friends on TV, or is it the satisfaction  of seeing the seven little girls that your rescue operation freed from trafficking? As you can see its complicated and your happiness watching Friends may not be the same kind of happiness as my rescue operation and honestly are either of those feelings happiness? Is happiness a feeling?

Probably not, but at least we are talking about it now.

Best COVID-19 project ever

Chapter 48

Six months of steady consistent work came together yesterday and I got to drive my 1965 ford pickup truck about a half mile down the road and back. This is the truck that we plucked up out of a cow pasture where it had been sitting for the last 24 years, almost exactly 6 months ago. 35-36 years ago this 1965 pickup truck was the one I was driving when I was courting my wife of 34 years. Back then it was an old truck! Now it is a really really old truck. Interestingly it still had the same engine in it that my dad and I put in 36 years ago. Now that old engine is laying in the shop waiting for a rebuild project.

One year ago this month, my dad I started rebuilding a 1967 289 Ford Small block V8, and when we finished 5 months later, we realized that we had nothing to put it in! So we found the truck in the pasture and started working toward combining the two. That was six months ago. It is more than a little astonishing to experience all the work that goes into a rails-up restoration. I certainly had no idea really, how detailed and involved a complete restoration is honestly. Now I know. And its expensive!

But I am learning so much, it levels the cost factor. Few people ever get the opportunity to first hand experience this level restoration project, and probably few people really want to. But they aren’t making old any more, and you can’t capture those old days without getting your hands very dirty. Of course this could have only happened in a Coronavirus world, where we are stuck in the same spot on the planet for 6 months, isolating and social distancing. 

Best Covid-19 project ever.

the first priority of good riddance

Chapter 47

You should be fanatical about your habits. Your good habits that is. You long should have removed your bad habits from your life, but sometimes it takes decades, I get it. Some of my worst ones were the thorniest to get rid of. Now looking back I should have made those worst one’s the first priority of good riddance. They were costing me the most, giving me the least, and sabotaging all my other good habits. And that makes them twice or three times as bad! Get rid of those bad habits immediately. They are costing you more than you know!

It is ok, even admirable, to be fanatical about your habits. John Irving said something very similar, and you should listen to John Irving, even if you don’t listen to me. But if you have stuck with this chapter this far, then you are likely all in. So let me say it again, be fanatical about your good habits that produce what you value in life. Fanatical about doing them! Fanatical about protecting them. Fanatical about receiving the results! 

These are the foundations of a well crafted life. This is why you get on the scale everyday. This is why you eat what you eat. This is why you read what you read. This is why you don’t watch TV or doomscroll or surf social media - those would be in the bad habits category. You are smarter than that. You are spending your time with people, inspiring them, hearing their stories, changing the world.

Be a fanatic!

Habit designing - the foundation of living

Chapter 46

Habits are the foundation of living. You have them whether or not you believe you do. You eat largely the same stuff, from the same grocery stores, from the same restaurants, and you get up at mostly the same time and do the same things each morning, and go to work and do the same stuff that you did yesterday, come home and follow the same routine as you do most other days. This is true for all of us.

Since habits are the foundation of life, then you and I need to be super intentional about choosing the habits that are going to produce what we really value in life, the change we seek to make in the world, those that will help us become the people we aspire to be. If you don’t know your values, or the change you seek to make in the world, or what you aspire to become, then that is a different blog on a different day. You have other fish to fry. You face dilemma’s in other arenas. You have problems to solve at a more basic level. Habit shaping is a higher level function, a nuance that will endlessly give you gifts, a golden goose that regularly gives you her treasures.

So habit designing is like the coolest thing ever. Decide what you want to accomplish, start your habit to get there, stay with it, get it done eventually. It’s honestly like magic. Consistent production in my life, is exclusively due to habits. Without my carefully structured life of habits, I would merely be average, not a superstar. Without my habits, I would not produce my expected and required deliverables in my life. I would still be stuck in my high school jobs. I would have no change the world components, I would not be the man I aspire to be.

Make your choice.

refine and remodel and redo and rinse and repeat

Chapter 45

Clarity about the change we seek to make.

This may be the single most difficult and important clarity that we can search for in our lives. But just finding the space and room to think and find any clarity can be so difficult. The revolving conversations and noise around each of us make it really difficult for any clarity or any thinking to be accomplished. You have to reach deep within you to find clarity about the change we seek to make.

But this is a nuanced clarity, one where you have to refine and remodel and redo and rinse and repeat over and over again. The first part is are you gonna make a change or not? Most people think they want to, but they never ever take a single action making a change in the world. Yet there are folks who do. If you are one of those, then you can ponder the change you took action on, decide if you want to keep making that change, or make another change in the world. Soon you can settle the change you want to make, and work in that direction, but this too can morph into a different change as you get older and your possibilities alter. 

Once you know the change you seek to make, then you can get to work on clarity about what it is, what it needs, where it will lead, what it might accomplish, what it demands, what it change. Clarity about who needs to do what to make that happen and be done. Clarity is essentially the clearest possible understanding and vision about what you are doing.

Pressure

Chapter 44

Too much responsibility. That is what happens sometimes, with all the decisions in life comes responsibility and that can be overwhelming. And sometimes its when things go the way you had hoped, the way you had planned, that responsibility jumps way up and makes you feel hesitant and start to second guess yourself. But . . . 

But you have to live and take action, even if you are afraid, even if you have more on your plate than you can handle. Action is required, action is necessary. You can’t not choose to act - that in itself is an action, a choice. Don’t be lulled into thinking that no action will save you from those responsibilities, because it won’t. You can only manage your responsibilities by taking them, and doing them. Action is the path to resolving your responsibilities, not inaction, not passivity, not paralysis. 

But it can be difficult and scary and the fear of what happens if you fail at some level, can be very threatening and the antithesis is inspiration. And you really could use some inspiration at this point, couldn’t you?! But it seems to have all evaporated in the pressure-cooker you find yourself. You feel like you need some relief, but don’t know where to find any. How to let pressure off? Moving forward and succeeding are the most sure-fired ways to let the pressure off. There is a possibility that moving forward and succeeding can lead to just more pressure and more pressure, but I find that second level pressure is less than the initial responsibility that we are facing now. It actually is not, but it feels easier and more manageable.

Bruises on the soul

Chapter 43

Too much information about too many things and none of them are interesting to me even when I am awake. But within the first hour I get up, very very few things interest me, food being about the only thing. It takes me a while to get going in the mornings. I really don’t want to talk to anyone or have any conversations until after 10 even though I get up at 6. It just takes me a while to get myself going. Your mileage may differ. I know my dad does. If his eyes are open his mouth is moving. I just can’t.

There is a correlation here between investment and returns here. The more you have invested the more you can engage, because you are expecting a return. You are invested in a return. I am not invested in returns for early morning stuff period. Early mornings should be peaceful and quiet and restful and gentle. Not jarring and intense and chatty, and especially not requiring a response or thought or thinking from me. Get used to disappointment if you are going down that route. I will not be coming along willingly.

After I have been awake for an hour and have some coffee in me, then we can do all those things you want to do, talk about all those things you want to talk about, focus on all those inane things you want to focus on. I can’t multitask on a good hour or day, much less in the first hour of the day. Leave me the first hour to come into the world gently and fully, not with blaring questions and inquiries and required responses. It brutalizes my soul.

Making the invisible visible

Chapter 42

You have to set goals or you can’t see where you are aiming. Goals are like the  sights on a gun, they let you know what you are lined up on, where you are pointing, what you are likely to hit. Goals are like those huge metal posts at the end of the sports field in rugby or American football, and yes they are called goalposts, but that is the direction you are moving toward, it is the point you are striving for, it is where you are trying to move your team, it is where your focus stays, it is where your intensity is pointed and you celebrate when you get there, you dance and jump around and generally act a fool because of your happiness.

Without these markers, without these ideas of where you are going, you can’t create a visible (to you) path to see by and know that you are moving in the direction that you really want to go.  Without goals, then you are directionless and maybe even motionless. But even if you are moving, you may just be moving in circles and not actually going anywhere, or sitting on a stationary bike pedaling hard but not going anywhere. Even if you have an audiobook to mentally transport you somewhere else, you still aren’t really going anywhere. That is what it is like to be goalless.

Goals will make the invisible visible, as Tony Robbins said. Goals will light up the path you are walking. Goals will illuminate your aspirations. Goals will make you confident as a GPS does when you are on a trip. Goals will tell you whether or not you are making progress, or sitting stationary.

Write those goals down, they are gold.

Sucking all your attention

Chapter 41

There are so many great things that you can spend your time practicing and learning. Even really hard and difficult things. But you will never be able to do that if you are mainlining the news on TV. All they talk about is Covid-19 and politics, who knew what when, and generally who is worse than someone else. The attention economy is more intense than ever before. Everyone wants your attention and will do all that they can to get it, include making you angry or fearful. So there are probably several good ways to mitigate the pull of the attention economy on your life, but the only one that works great for me is limits. No TV, little social media, no doomscrolling and stay off the TV! Oh I already mentioned that.

Then you will have time and space to practice hard things, to improve your skills, to attempt to do something important and world changing and life-changing. I don’t think it is possible to overstate how much time and attention are taken up by TV and social media and doomscrolling, nor how much energy, space and possibility is freed up by removing these things from your life. You cannot change the world or change your life while doing these attention-sucking activities, which are so powerful even though they are also passive.

Take charge of your life and make a huge difference. It’s closer and more possible than you think. You are capable of far more than you think. You have far more potential than you have shown so far. You can do this. You got this.

Deciding differently

Chapter 40

What you didn’t do. What I didn’t do. Are those the things we really are going to regret 20 years from now Mark Twain?? Maybe this is true of you, but I don’t think it is true of me. Of course none of us knows what we will regret 20 years from now, but we can consider these matters and give them some thought. I am living life full bore right now, can’t imagine regretting much of anything 20 years from now, but I have been wrong before. So I will grant that I could be most wrong.

However you must also think about the word regret. Not all regrets have the same weight. Regretting the years I missed in the life of my parents, has a very different weight than the regret of a moral failure. Regretting a financial choice or mistake is very different than regret for choosing to be overweight for 25 years. Regret for your career choice could be very very different than your regret for overindulging last night. So regret is not the same from one situation to the next, from one decision to the next, each one has different consequences. And regret is a consequence of the mind.

It happens only in your head. Its a choice. Its how you decide to view an event, a decision, a history. You can decide differently too. You can perceive these events and histories and decisions as terrible, which equals some form of regret, or you can see them as neutral or marginally good, which equals a choice in the narrative you tell yourself.