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Category Archives: Daily

Asking for help

I’m awful at it. With the near-ever-present availability of the internet, it’s easier than ever to think that you can figure everything out yourself. It’s just a google search away, after all!v

The truth is, the internet’s an ocean, and sometimes you wind up looking for a needle in a haystack, one very specific fish in a vast ocean.

You know what’s often a better “algorithm” for figuring things out? People.

People have preferences, they ask questions back, they understand the context of you as a person, and, if they don’t know, they probably know someone who does. They also have the added layer of accountability and followup. The internet will rarely ask you if the fish you found was what you were looking for.

When you get stuck on something today, try calling a friend, asking a co-worker, or poking that acquaintance you just met. They can probably help and, even if not, there’s something magical in the asking.

A Heuristic for Living in the Moment

Last year I had a discussion with a friend about that oft-used phrase, “Living in the moment.” After years of hearing and saying it, it became clear that I had no clue what it meant. Until then.

You see, I think whether or not you’re living in the moment can best be revealed by two questions:

  1. What excites you right now?
    OR
  2. What is thing you’re waiting for?

For my entire life, the answer to the first question was “I don’t know, nothing really”, and my answer to the second was months, if not years away:

Graduating high school and doing well at a good college.
Graduating college and getting a good job.
Waiting for the company you’re working for to sell for billions.

That was what excited me, what I was waiting for. Looking at those answers, it’s clear that living in the moment was not happening.

What am I excited about now?

Going home to visit my family.
My bike ride to work tomorrow morning.
Getting my close friends together at a bar next week to listen to jazz & play games.

The difference in time horizon, from 4-5 years to less than 1 month, is perhaps the most powerful indicator in a change of focus. From living in the future to the present. To being here.

Why

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about one simple question or, more accurate, one simple word: why.

Modern advice points broadly to one fact: know your why. Stated without any means to getting there, as if this is a simple task!

Getting to know your why seems like a task for a lifetime in itself. Why do you get out of bed in the morning? Why do you eat? Why do you speak? Why do you speak what you speak? Aside from simply being a conscious being programmed to survive, why do you do what you do?

Solely art and not-at-all science, the answer comes from relentless self-exploration, discovery, and creation. There is no blueprint. There is only comfort & discomfort, knowing & not-knowing, infinite presence and mindfulness and development.

Also a brutal honesty- the ability to admit you don’t know your why and to continue anyway. An utter necessity and brutally painful combination. It’s unclear to me how you come out of this in tact— to abandon meaning, to abandon hope, but to cling to the possibility that, in the end, it exists.

A beautiful something

Here’s a beautiful something, for those of you who could use it today.

I hope this finds you well =)

On Fear

“I must not Fear. 

Fear is the mind-killer. 

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. 

I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. 

Where it has gone there will be nothing. 

Only I will remain.”

The Litany against Fear, 
Dune
-Frank Herbert

Getting back to writing has been an intimidating task. There’s a saying, “sucking at something is the first step to being sort of good at something.” The fact is, this only holds true for your first go around. After that it’s more, “being worse at something is the first step to getting back to where you were at that thing, which is the first step to getting sort of good at it.”

I’ve experienced this with a number of things in my life- my recent foray into music in Nashville after a lengthy break, current attempts to get involved with music in New York City, and getting back to writing after such a length break. I see that returning to a skill is made particularly difficult due to a potent combination of:

  1. Regret for having stopped in the first place
  2. Noticing a notable decline in skills
  3. Feeling like a beginner again, after already having been one

Do you see the one thread tying all three of those reasons together? None of them actually prevent you from doing it. They’re all mental, all bullshit, all excuses. I can weave as many narratives around why the thing I want is hard and I can’t do it, but the only hard thing about the above is facing the fear. There is nothing to be lost in the writing, in the sharing, in the putting it out there. There is nothing hard in the doing. There is only difficulty in hurdling the fear, in discovering the other side to be experienced.

Memento Mori.
-Justin

Megaphones & Gravitational Pull

We live in an age where, more than ever, people believe in the power of megaphones. “Get in front of the right people, yell loud enough, and it’ll happen.”

The thing about megaphones is that they’re inherently repulsive. They’re loud and obnoxious, sometimes pushing away the exact people you want to connect with.

What if, instead of screaming through our megaphones, we lower our voices? What if we speak gently, as to say “Come listen if you want. I’m not going to force anything on you. I only seek to connect meaningfully, with your permission, and oh, I also know how to listen back.”

In a world of repulsion, there’s power in the silent pull.

I think I’m going to start writing again

Don’t you love sentences which are so heavily qualified and vague that they hold no meaning at all?

“I’ll definitely come hang, man, as long as nothing else comes up!”

This essay could be acutely summarized as paragraphs of that vagueness.

From Me
I have a confession to make. I’ve been writing more than ever. I don’t consider it “cheating” per say, as I’ve only been writing to myself (is “masturbatory writing” a thing?). It’s been intensely personal; literally hours and hours of journaling. Most of these writings are best kept private, lest you know far too much about me and take me for a crazy person.

This post is coming from a simple place- I want to share some of what I’m thinking about. I can’t tell you why. It might be with the hope to connect. It might be symptomatic of my generations’ need to share something publicly in order to make it “real”. It might be to formally process, organize, and eject these thoughts to get my brain to shut the hell up. Presently, I don’t care about the “why” so much as that I want to do it.

To You
True life: I don’t expect you to keep reading these posts. Given the lag from the last time I’ve written and the non-committal nature of “I think I’m going to start writing again”, I expect you to bail. I would.

I’ve unhooked any notifications for subscribes, unsubscribes, etc, so if you want out, bounce! I’ll be none-the-wiser, and you can live your life without sporadic posts populating your inbox.

If you stay, I’ll be sharing my writing again at a yet-to/never-to-be-determined frequency (yay, ambiguity!). It feels good to share thoughts and put them out there, regardless of who’s listeni/div>

Whichever you decide, I wish you the best and hope you’re doing well, wherever you are.

-Justin

Redefining Setbacks

“Good, we’ve learned something.”

“It’s okay to feel this way.”

“Step back. Breath. Make a call.”

There are a number of ways we can choose to react to setbacks.

We can get dragged down by feelings of rejection and failure. Focus on the way we want things to be and the way they aren’t. More times than not this is our automatic reaction, subconscious and not so subtle.

Alternatively, we can step back and admire the process. Acknowledge that in a week these emotions will be nearly impossible to remember, a mere speck in our experience. What will be left is a challenge that we either tackled and learned from or let beat us down.

Oftentimes the only difference between joy and suffering is where we choose to focus- on how the situation has failed to meet our expectations or on cultivating gratitude for what we currently have. The choice is ours.

10 Things for Creativity

An exercise for nearly instantly increasing your creativity:

  1. When faced with a challenge you’d like to apply creativity to, come up with 10 ideas for it. This works for anything from creating new business ideas, ways to meet new people, how to transition in a song, new dishes to cook, anything.
  2. If you struggle to come up with 10 ideas, bump the requirement up to 20.

Creativity is, more often than not, about getting out of our own way. Creativity is allowing for the good, the bad, and the absurd until something new and authentic is generated.

Can’t come up with any solutions? Then come up with 20.

Questions to Change your Life

“What if you did the opposite?”

“What would this look like if it were easy?”

“What if everything is fine just how it is?”

The beauty of questions like these is that they demand you break from your automatic viewpoint. Our automatic reaction is often irrational, biased, and not too helpful. What would happen if we cultivated the practice of regularly asking questions that forced us into brand new perspectives?

The result isn’t just one new perspective, but the ability to see our initial perspective, a new one, and everything in between. A new world opens up.

To give credit where credit is due, the full list of questions (by the original author) is below. The above are just three of my favorites.

http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/12/07/testing-the-impossible-17-questions-that-changed-my-life/.