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Unthinkable Fear, Unparalleled Freedom 3 Jul 2021 8:41 AM (3 years ago)

A while ago, I got this email from someone who decided to schedule a consultation with me after reading A Minute To Unlimit You. As I was writing a response, I realized that a lot of other people are likely experiencing similar things, and would benefit from my reply as well, so I decided to share both their email (edited to remove identifying details) and my reply:

I would like to stop being paralyzed by fear. The biggest thing that scares me right now is applying for jobs. I haven’t been able to do it for years. What will I say when an interviewer asks me why I have such little work history at my age? That’s if I even get an interview.

But this paralysis has been spreading through more parts of my life. I used to love doing creative things. Writing, digital art, working on a person programming project. Now, when I think of doing them, usually (not always, but most of the time) I just feel a sinking despair. It has even started happening when I think about playing video games. I think of how I’ll have to apply my mental energy to the game, how I’ll have to plan out my goals and steps, and I just dread it. It feels like I’m contemplating walking up 20 flights of stairs, when it’s actually something I would have previously done for fun.

I also can’t contact my doctor to refill my meds for my depression and ADHD. I’m too scared. Maybe the doctor will tell me there’s some reason I can’t get them, and it’ll either be my fault, or it’ll be the medical system screwing me over, or both.

I read the free book from your website. It sound promising, so I decided to schedule this session.

– Paralyzed By Fear

Hey Paralyzed.  It sounds like you’re close to answering the first quick question from A Minute To Unlimit You. That is, “what bad thing do you expect is going to happen?”

I notice, though, that what your thought process actually is right now is more like, “here are various thoughts that create anxiety in me.”  In order to unlimit yourself from fear, you have to actually describe the bad thing you expect to happen.

Most of what you’re thinking right now could be called “bad”, but they are not bad things you expect to happen.  Rather, they are concerns your brain is raising to avoid even the possibility of thinking about the actual problem.

For example, the question “what will I say when an interviewer asks me why I have so little work history” is not the thing you’re afraid of.  That’s just something your brain is thinking about to avoid thinking about the thing you’re afraid of!

Consider what I wrote in the book about how I kept thinking “there’s no time and I don’t know what to do”.  On the surface this sounds like it’s what I’m afraid of.  But really, it’s my brain’s complaint about not being able to prevent the problem I was really afraid of: bombing on stage and being embarrassed.

So the real fear is always…

The thing we avoid thinking about!

In your case, for example, you might be afraid that in the job interview, you’ll be embarrassed or rejected or be seen as (and therefore feel like) a fool or a failure.

But since your brain is trying to prevent this fear from even being mentally experienced right now, the “what will I say” question is actually your brain proposing that, as a solution, you must either:

1. figure out the perfect thing to say to prevent it, or
2. avoid the situation altogether!

In a very real sense, our brain worries in order to try to pre-emptively solve problems that could lead to some sort of perceived disaster.  But this blocks our creativity and motivation, if the disaster is not one that can be perfectly and 100% avoided (as few problems can be).

So the real first step to addressing our fears is to separate the real fear from our brain’s panicked attempts at preventing that fear from happening or even being thought about. (Even if those attempts also prevent us from pursuing our goals and dreams!)

Once we understand the true fear, we often find that it is something that can’t ever truly be avoided.  For example, when dealing with other people there is always some possibility of rejection or hurt, no matter how small, and no absolutely perfect strategy to prevent it.  (You can’t prevent it even 99% of the time, let alone 100%!)

So the secret to coping with our fears is not to figure out how to stop them from happening, but to make sure that we can handle it if – and when – they do.

Handling The Fear

When it comes to fears of rejection and criticism, the true source (and solution) of the problem generally lies with the third major motivational module of the brain: the Prosecutor.  In a way, you can call it the subsystem that issues judgments of what people “deserve”.

When we’re growing up, the Prosecutor learns by example what “they” or “society” believe are the “proper” standards of behavior: what people should be proud or ashamed of, as well as what punishments or rewards they deserve.  It then applies these standards to generate our feelings towards ourselves and others, as the generator of both praise and criticism.

When we think of a potentially embarrassing situation, the Prosecutor is the set of brain subsystems that decides whether we “deserve” to be ashamed or embarrassed, according to the standards we’ve been taught.

Without this judgment taking place, it would be impossible to fear criticism in this way.  Imagine for a moment that somebody on the street criticizes you for having a “bloopy walk”, with you having no idea what that means.  Unless being criticized for strange and incomprehensible things is already an emotional trigger for you, your initial reaction to this idea is likely to be confusion or amusement at the crazy person saying weird things.

That means that the saying “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent” is almost true.  Really, they can’t make you feel inferior…

Without your Prosecutor’s consent!

Luckily, the Prosecutor isn’t a real person who needs to be persuaded.  It’s a machine, one that works very similarly to modern AIs’ blind pattern-matching and extrapolation.  It has a database of experiences it draws on to automatically infer rules and standards from.  And the contents of this database can be changed.

Which means you can “withdraw your consent” to feeling inferior about certain things.

(Provided, that is, that you’re willing to give up the right to feel superior to other people about the same things!)

This catch is because the Prosecutor is mechanical and uniform in its judgments, applying the same rules and standards to both yourself and others.

So if you think that, say, “people who lack the proper work experience deserve to be ashamed”, and you want to stop being afraid of that, then you have to also give up thinking badly (or even pitying) other people in that situation.  (Because pity is another way of thinking you are superior or that the shame is what they should expect.)

However, if you can:

1. Identify the thing you fear that you don’t even want to think about, and
2. Let go of the relevant judgment (of yourself and others)…

Then you can go from having an unthinkable fear, to having unparalleled freedom.

The freedom of having things you were previously bothered by, becoming just “no big deal.”

So Just How Do You Do That?

Well, that’s what we’ll get into on our call. 

Looking forward to speaking with you then, and if you can give any thought ahead of time to what the actual “bad things you expect” are, it’ll help us hit the ground running.  Talk to you soon, and feel free to write back if you have any questions or feedback.

– PJ

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Greatest Desire, Greatest Fear 30 Dec 2020 6:01 PM (4 years ago)

When I first started computer programming, I wanted it so bad I could taste it. I was 13 or 14 years old, living on the island of Montserrat in the eastern Caribbean. It was the early 1980’s, and personal computers just barely existed. I heard about them from amateur radio magazines in the local library, and a few computer science textbooks.

For months I wrote assembly code in a notebook, trying to write my own computer language without a computer. When I think back on it, it’s embarrassing how bad my code was, how incredibly stupid and wrong some of my first ideas were about how computers worked and what different programming language constructs did.

But if I had taken this to mean that I was unworthy to become a programmer, I never would have become one. Desire gave me the perseverance to continue in the face of my mistakes. It was the seed that gave me my skill.

Desire got me connections with the people who had the few TRS-80’s and other computers that existed on the island, helped me convince their owners to let me have time on them. It helped me talk my father into helping me finance my first purchase of a computer, and then it kept me up late into the night, programming. It got me my first, and indeed all my programming jobs since then.

In the same way, your desire to be – whatever it is you want to be – is the thing that makes you worthy of it. When, as Socrates is supposed to have said, you want it like you want another breath of air when your head is being held under water, then that’s how you get it.

But that’s only how it works when the desire doesn’t get twisted and fucked up!

Desire Turning Against Itself

For most of my life, at the same time as I was pursuing this desire to program, I was also operating under the belief that I was a horribly selfish person, cold and unloving and not somebody that anybody would really like.

I didn’t know, you see, that anybody who was actually that cold and unloving, couldn’t possibly notice, or be worried about such a thing.

When we are stuck, it is nearly always because our desire has been turned against itself. Tricked into thinking that we don’t want something that we actually do. And then we tie ourselves in knots trying to prove a negative that can’t ever be proven… except by the very fact that we’re trying!

Stuck is the point where we reach a conclusion, a judgment that we are “not good”.

This judgment can’t go anywhere: it’s a dead end. It’s a conviction – in both the legal and “belief” senses of the word “conviction”. There is no appeal, and we go straight to the jail of being stuck.

And yet, this jail can only hold us because we believe in it. It is as though, after hearing the prosecution’s claims, we say, “You’re right, I’m a bad person. I’d better stay here so I don’t hurt anyone.”

As if a bad person would care!

You think you can’t.

You think you don’t know what to do, or how to do it.

You think you will fail, or be rejected.

And yet, it is not these things themselves that hurt. The real hurt, the one we feel but do not speak aloud, is in our belief that these things are proof.

Proof that we are bad, unworthy, or incapable of love.

Problems Are Not Proof

But good, worthy, and loving people also “can’t”, sometimes. They also don’t know what to do or how to do it. They often fail, and get rejected.

And then, it doesn’t stop them.

Because it doesn’t prove anything.

Not about them as a person, and not even about what they can do next.

They can say, “I can’t… yet.”

“I don’t know what I should do.. but I can think about it. And I can choose.”

“I don’t know how to do this… but I can try, and figure out what works. Ask for help. Practice.”

And so many other things.

“I failed… and now I know one more thing that doesn’t work. What else can I try? How can I use what I learned to do better?”

“I was rejected… and now I know there’s not a good fit there for what I have to offer. Where can I find a better fit?”

And maybe these words all sound hopelessly naive, stupidly optimistic, or even like complete bullshit…

But only when we feel in our heart that we can’t say them!

Because, deep inside, we know something’s wrong with us.

Fear Is Proof of Love

I fear that in the act of writing, I will discover that I am not a writer, that I have nothing to say and no good way to say it. I fear that in trying to work on things, I will discover that I am not good at working on them.

And yet, there is no truer definition of who you are than what you love. If I did not value the writing, I would not be a writer. The fear itself is proof: not the fear you won’t like what I wrote, but the fear that I will fail to express what is in me. That I will not have done justice to the ideas.

But nobody could find that so important and not be a writer!

They say that a person who wonders if they’re crazy is more likely to be sane, because crazy people are more self-assured. In the same way, the person who wonders if they are working hard enough, offers proof in that self-same breath that their worry is unnecessary.

When we people-please to prove that we are loving, it’s because we fear we are not loving, not pleasing enough in ourselves. We doubt the quality of our love, not realizing that only a truly powerful love could so distort our sense of self-worth.

We are not broken because we have failed to love. We have rather loved so much, that we broke ourselves in the service of that love.

It is as though we said, when our parents called us selfish and uncaring, “Yes, mother. Yes, father. If that is what you say, it must be true. And for the rest of my life, I will strive with all my might to be worthy of you… no matter what it costs me.”

Feeling lazy and worthless, we work hard to prove we’re not lazy. And yet, what truly lazy person would put forth so much effort?

Feeling foolish and weak, we strive to be capable and strong. And yet, what truly foolish or incompetent person have we met, who actually believes they’re foolish or incompetent? They all think they’re God’s gift to the rest of us!

You Already Have The Power

So the truth is this: whatever quality you are certain you lack, whatever quality you seek and envy in others…

You can only perceive that quality because you already possess some form of it. And only through the having – and using – of that same quality could you make yourself so stuck!

If I couldn’t persistently work hard, I couldn’t have made myself so stuck at trying to achieve… I’d have given up on improving!

If I didn’t love deeply, I couldn’t have hurt myself so badly, trying to please others.

And if I didn’t care about details and quality, I couldn’t have beat myself up so badly and so often over my failures to achieve perfection.

But the mistake I made, in each case, was thinking “first I have to do this thing, and then I will have the power”.

When in fact, merely wanting that thing meant I already had the power!

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the desire for skill means you already have skill, any more than a desire for food means you’re not hungry!

What I mean is that the thing we think we’ll get from doing something, is something that already exists inside of us. It’s a seed, that – with proper care – will only grow.

How Growth Works

Despite what Marianne Williamson might say, our greatest fear is not that we are powerful beyond measure. In my opinion, that’s nearly complete nonsense: a fantasy we use to protect our egos.

But there is a tiny, tiny, tiny grain of truth in it.

We aren’t afraid of being powerful. We’re afraid that the process of growing will remind us of our current inadequacy.

If I try to get better at writing, I will have to be able to notice my flaws.

If I try to become more confident, I will notice my fear.

(And my clients who are trying to improve their businesses, will notice what they’re doing wrong, or not doing at all!)

So, if we are trying to get better at these things because we fear inadequacy, then we will also fear the process of growth.

And we’ll be stuck between a rock and a hard place: afraid to go forward, yet also unable to stay put.

So there’s a grain of truth here to that other old self-help saw: sometimes, to change, you really do need to be able to accept yourself as you are.

(But of course, our fears of inadequacy don’t like that idea one tiny bit.)

The Secret of Becoming Unstoppable

The truth is that neither pushing forward with trying to improve, nor sitting around trying to accept yourself as you are, will accomplish much of anything.

That’s because both routes lead to a kind of mental “flinch” that happens, each time we are reminded of our perceived inadequacy.

We flinch from self-acceptance, because deep down, we don’t believe we can be acceptable, unless we can do or be “enough”.

And we flinch from self-improvement – grinding our gears and constantly stopping and starting – because it reminds us of precisely how “not enough” we currently are.

And so the only thing that can change our situation is to face the flinch.

Now, this doesn’t mean forcing yourself past the flinch! (You and I both already know that doesn’t work.)

What I mean is facing the flinch, so you can see it. Confront it. Come to terms with it.

The reason these fears make us flinch, is because deep down, we don’t want to see them. We don’t want to know about our not-enoughness. We don’t want the fear to be real.

We don’t believe we could bear it being real, if it meant that we were unlovable, incapable, unacceptable, unworthy…

Unwanted.

So the flinch is our mind’s way of hiding the fear away. Our mind disguises the fear as much as possible, even going so far as to fake up some positive ideas to think about instead: goals, plans, and aspirations. (Or it makes up rubbish about how our deepest fear is being powerful beyond measure!)

But if you actually face that fear instead, if you actually admit to yourself what you’re truly afraid of…

Then the flinch ceases to have any power.

Think of it as a kind of blackmail: your mind will do anything to keep its awful secret from being exposed… until the secret is actually exposed, at which point, there’s no longer anything to hide!

And while this won’t always make the fear disappear altogether, it will definitely cut down on the flinching: the constant grinding sense that “this isn’t working,” “I can’t do this,” and “I’m just not good enough”, whenever you try to self-improve or self-accept.

So find that flinch.

Face that fear.

And you can finally be free.

–PJ

P.S. Finding your flinches and facing your fears is a key part of the first step in The Nine Steps To An Unstoppable You.

After nearly a decade and a half of research, experimentation and practice on myself and dozens of other people in the Mindhackers’ Guild, I’ve created a simple, nine-step process for slashing the time you spend in P.A.I.N. – Procrastinating, Anxious, Indecisive, and Not getting results! – so you can become the person who can achieve your goals.

A person who can’t be stopped by anything for long.

Not even your own mind!

In the months to come, I’ll be sharing a whole lot more about the nine steps, the root causes of P.A.I.N., the “brain bugs” each step solves, and the “stoppers and symptoms” that keep us from making persistent progress towards the goals we most deeply desire.

And, I’ll also be offering a chance for a select group to participate in the 2021 edition of Unstoppable U.: a virtual bootcamp that uses the Nine Steps to change people on a deep level…

So they can hurt less.

Do more.

And live free.

Hope to see you there soon!

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How To Cope With The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Things 13 Mar 2020 12:06 PM (5 years ago)

In 1972, Judith Viorst wrote a book called “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”. In it, a boy keeps having lots of problems, and decides to move to Australia. (Of course, in the Australian and New Zealand versions of the book, he decides to move somewhere else!)

During the course of the day, many bad things happen to Alexander. Some are unfortunate, others unfair, and some he brings upon himself, but Alexander resents them all equally. Reasoning that things would be different somewhere else, Alexander states that he will move to Australia (or Timbuktu in the Australian version).

Of course, Alexander never actually went there. But if he had, he likely would have had bad days there too. After all, no matter where you go, there you are. (Which was pretty much the whole point of the book.)

Today, you may be facing some terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things. Depending on where you live, you may be facing disease, economic uncertainty, isolation, panic, or all of the above. And it is incredibly tempting to seek alternatives – even “alternative facts” – to make the terrible things go away.

I myself am reminded of my first time boarding up a house for an oncoming hurricane. There was a considerable period of time that I spent basically wishing I wouldn’t have to do anything. The hurricane would turn. It wouldn’t be too intense. Right?

When I was younger, I often sought clever ways to bring life into my control, to solve problems quickly and easily. But even though I developed many methods for solving things, I eventually came to understand that my quest to solve things was just a variation on Alexander’s desire to move to Australia (or Timbuktu), so he could be in a place where terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things wouldn’t happen.

I thought that if only I could get good enough at changing myself, if only I was productive enough, healthy enough, creative enough… then everything would be under control and I would live happily ever after.

But as much as I hated going through the many hurricanes that happened in my area over the years, they taught me a valuable lesson:

Looking for an “out” only makes things worse!

Each time hurricane season came around again, the same thing would happen. I’d tell myself the hurricane would turn. That it wasn’t time yet. And I’d agonize sometimes for days about whether to go somewhere else or ride it out.

And then, at some point, I would throw up my hands and go “screw this”, finally making a decision about what to do.

And it always felt so much better.

Just admitting to myself that something needed to be done, admitting that I could not shrug it off, it made me feel better every single time.

To the point that it finally began to sink into my thick skull outside of hurricane season.

I began to see the pattern everywhere, not just in emergencies. Heck, almost every kind of procrastination problem, confidence problem, self-esteem problem, you name it…

They’re all rooted in an attempt to wish a problem away. To find a magical place like Australia (or Timbuktu) where the problem won’t ever hurt us any more.

And the problem with this quest isn’t that the magical places we’re looking for don’t exist. (After all, Australia and Timbuktu do actually exist!)

No, the real problem is that in life, there is no certainty, no absolutes. No matter how much we may wish to avoid the terrrible, horrible, no good very bad things, we cannot with 100% certainty guarantee that they will never happen.

And so, it is not our desire to solve or avoid our problems that trip us up. Rather, it is the underlying quest for certainty and control that makes us suffer.

Luckily…

There is an antidote.

It’s just that you might not care for the taste of it.

During my first hurricane boarding up a house, our roof became damaged, and we hired a roofer to fix it. He took our money, did the first part of the job, and then promptly disappeared.

For one.

Whole.

Year!

We called him and called him, and he kept giving us excuses and stories. My wife and I worried ourselves sick, staying up late at night and not getting enough sleep, while this guy kept our money and didn’t do any more of the work.

During one late night conversation, right around the one year mark, I came to a realization:

We weren’t acting, because we were afraid that say, taking him to court would result in say, him not fixing our roof, and us being out the money.

And yet…

That was the situation we were already in!

He already had our money. He already wasn’t fixing the roof. We were already in the situation we feared would come to pass…

We were just acting as if we weren’t.

And once I understood that, I was free to act.

I called the roofer at home in the middle of the night, that very night, and when he answered I began singing “Happy Anniversary” to the tune of the William Tell Overture (aka the old “Lone Ranger” theme). When he wanted to know what the heck was going on, I cackled, telling him that it was now the one year anniversary of him being with our money, and that I hoped he and our money were very happy together.

(Long story short: he finished fixing our roof pretty quick after that. Probably thought I was crazy and it’d be best not to tick me off.)

But I digress. The real point of the story is this:

If you are paralyzed with uncertainty. If you are afraid that taking action against your fear will make it come to pass. If you believe that you need to avoid, if at all possible, any chance of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things from happening…

That is the time to admit it.

To admit that you do not know. That you cannot tell. That things are, in fact, out of your control.

And in so doing, you will realize a paradoxical thing, that can only be experienced and never truly explained.

By admitting the truth you are trying to avoid, by admitting that you are not, no, can not be certain the thing can be avoided…

Your mind returns to a place of certainty!

And there is a calm, a peace in that, that all your attempts at avoidance will never, ever match.

And sometimes, you’ll even gain a sudden insight into how your problem might be solved in some out-of-the-box way… like calling up your roofer and singing “Happy Anniversary”!

Now, I’m not saying this is easy to do.

In fact, it’s actually pretty hard.

Nearly a decade and a half later, I still freeze up at hurricanes and other natural disasters. Because I have to remember to admit to what I’m not admitting to. And I have to notice that there’s something I’m not admitting to in the first place!

The problem is that our brains think that if we don’t admit to the thing, it somehow won’t be real. Like the possible loss that’s coming at us, full steam ahead, will somehow not be real, if we don’t admit it’s real.

And we start thinking, “well, maybe it won’t be so bad”, or “maybe it won’t affect me,” or maybe “someone else will fix it”.

But what if those things aren’t true?

The truth is: you don’t know.

Maybe it will be bad. Maybe it won’t. Maybe it’ll affect you. Maybe it won’t. If you can’t be certain, then at least be certain of your uncertainty!

If you can at least admit to not-knowing, then you can make decisions based on that. You can hedge your bets, consider trade-offs, make actual value judgments.

Things you can’t do, while you’re wishing reality weren’t happening.

Please believe me: I’m not writing this to tell you what you should be doing right now. I can’t even imagine what you’re going through, let alone offer practical advice.

But there is one thing I do know, one thing I can say:

Whatever the truth is, admit it!

Because if you stop hoping the bad thing will go away, you can start actually living again.

No matter what the bad thing is.

In the last decade or so, I’ve had to stare down more than one monster of this kind. Health scares, for me and my wife. Financial challenges. Fears of age and death and meaninglessness.

These things are beyond our power to truly control or even truly be certain about, except in one thing:

We can be certain we are uncertain.

And we can hopefully come to understand that “wishing”…

Is just another word for “fear and suffering”.

Because when you’re wishing, you’re dividing your mind against itself. You’re worrying that the bad thing is coming, and at the same time trying to make it not-be-so.

And this division literally hurts your brain, every time you do it. You feel the dissonance, the “nhghrrh” of grinding mental gears, even as you look for the escape, the miracle cure, the excuse, that will make it go away.

Pro tip: it won’t go away.

Not ever.

But when you truly understand that. When you stop trying to make it go away.

Then you become free.

Free of suffering.

And free to act.

Because when your mind is undivided, you can face anything.

And the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things… turn out to not be so scary after all.

Be well!

–PJ

P.S. When I say “not so scary” I don’t mean to say that disease and death aren’t awful, or that they will somehow become awesome and amazing when you admit to your uncertainty around them. (They won’t!) But the constant oscillation of your mind about them can only make them worse… and I speak from numerous painful (terrible, horrible, no good, very bad) experiences on this. “Bad” isn’t good, but it’s better than “Bad and scary and worried and stressed and freaking out”… all of which I’ve had my own share of in the last week or so.

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What Stands In The Way, Becomes The Way 20 Oct 2019 9:14 PM (5 years ago)

I was always a stubborn child.

When my parents told me, “you can’t”, I would ask, “why not?”

They said I couldn’t have everything I wanted. That there was no fast and sure way to make money. That I needed things other than my intellect to get by in the world.

I didn’t understand. And I didn’t believe.

Despite my glasses and messy dark hair, I was less Harry Potter and more Hermione Granger: believing everything I read in books, obsessed with the right ways to do things, and always willing to tell everybody else how to do it better!

After breezing through (and testing out of) grade school and high school, then jumping straight into a startup even before going to college, the world was my oyster. Life looked easy from there.

Boy was I in for a rough time!

Have you ever heard that saying, “What brought you here, won’t get you there?”

Real life is funny like that. We step out of our small pond and find ourselves surrounded with bigger fish. Or we find that despite all those people telling us, “you’re so good at that, you should start your own business”, not as many of them are willing to be your customers once you do… and that running a business is a lot harder than you thought it would be!

No matter your field, no matter your level of talent or ability, there always comes a point where simply trying harder is not an option, because no matter how hard you try, you find yourself going in circles, repeating the same mistakes, and spiraling down the drain.

When I started this blog in 2004, I’d just left another startup with a wad of cash burning a hole in my pocket, and an even bigger list of questions burning holes in my heart:

• Can people really change? Can I?
• Why are some people so successful, while others with more talent or better products fail so miserably?
• How could I be so successful at helping other people (or businesses, or software projects) achieve their goals, and yet so thoroughly sh**ty at achieving my own?

I set out to answer those questions by writing about my experiences, both in my personal life and my software development work. And at the time, I had absolutely no idea I was going to turn into some kind self-help guru.

But life is funny like that.

It turns out that change and motivation and success and all that jazz, have an awful lot in common with software development. Not the programming bits, mind you. But the debugging bits. The hacking.

Turns out, you can debug your mind and your life in pretty much exactly the way you do a computer program. Hack in and rewire yourself, the way you’d crack root on your phone or gaming console.

You don’t actually have to be a hacker or coder to do it, but the resemblance is uncanny.

When I started this blog, I’d barely heard of Marcus Aurelius, except for knowing that he was this cool Roman Emperor dude who wrote some important stuff. But now, after 15 years of wrestling with the big questions, I just recently found out that he’d already written down the central theme of everything I’ve been studying, experimenting with, and learning since I started:

The impediment to action advances action.
What stands in the way becomes the way.

You can’t fix a bug in a program by trying to avoid it. In fact, you do the opposite! A programmer fixing a bug tries to repeat the bug, as much as possible, until they understand it. A hacker puts bad data into the system they’re trying to crack, intentionally provoking errors to find a way “in”.

And just as with everything else in life, when it comes to debugging, trying harder is not an action plan.

You can’t “try harder” to fix a bug, solve a problem, or have a good idea. All you can do is become more curious, and ask better questions. You have to treat your obstacles as information. As clues that tell you…

How Things Really Work

And as it happened, one of the reasons I was so good at helping other people, is because I was really good at “asking better questions”.

While one of the reasons my personal life was so sh**ty, was that I never asked myself any of those questions, before I started this blog.

When things got tough, I tried harder… or I gave up.

But neither of these approaches can work for us in the long run. Sooner or later, something comes along that’s harder than you… or can’t be run away from. (Hurricanes and crooked roofers were only the beginning!)

But I started asking better questions, and started getting better results.

I learned what makes us tick, and how to change it. Got excited, started a business, got successful…

And crashed again.

Now, this is the point where I’m required by law to say something like, “it was the best thing that ever happened to me,” or else they’ll revoke my guru license.

F**k that. It was awful. My own failures to reach my goals aside, I had to deal with health issues (mine and my wife’s) and the financial difficulties that go with them.

If there was any other way to learn what I’ve learned, to achieve what I achieved… I’d sign up in a heartbeat. If I could write down everything I learned and put it in a book and mail it to my past self… well,

I’d probably still f**k it up!

For the past five years, this blog has sat idle, mocking me. The software I’d used to run it had become non-viable, and I was so depressed I felt I had nothing much of worth to actually say.

Things were so bad, I started thinking maybe my parents were right. Maybe you can’t have what you want. Maybe life was hard and full of disappointment. Or maybe Kenny Rogers was right, and “the best that you could hope for / was to die in your sleep”.

The truth was, despite my skill at helping others, despite the things I learned about how to change – even myself – my personal philosophy was still rooted in optimism. A belief that surely anything must be possible, and that – much like Hermione Granger – I could learn to do anything if I just read the right books.

But that kind of philosophy doesn’t stand up to the real pains of life.

Building a new philosophy took time, and a lot of false starts. I had to learn for myself, the hard way, the meaning of some of Marcus Aurelius’ other words:

Objective judgment, now at this very moment.
Unselfish action, now at this very moment.
Willing acceptance—now at this very moment—of all external events.
That’s all you need.

These words are kind of cryptic, and they may not mean what you think they mean.

If I had read them before, I doubt I would have understood that “unselfish action” has nothing to do with who your actions benefit, but rather, that you are focused on the outcome of your actions, rather than on how they reflect upon yourself.

And I doubt I would have understood that “objective judgment” doesn’t mean, “use an outside perspective to find better ways to criticize yourself”!

Or that “willing acceptance” wasn’t just another way to phrase my father’s constant refrain that I would “just have to learn to live with being disappointed”.

And I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that all three sentences are just different ways of saying the same thing:

All results are feedback.

All results are information. Clues. Hints. A treasure map to our goals, or at least the next level in our personal game. And we can only decipher them by being willing to follow the feedback we are given, weighing it without regard to what we might think it might say about us as a person, or that it might present us with unpleasant facts about the nature of the world around us.

But if you can find yourself curious instead of giving up…

And if you’re willing to follow where the clues lead, instead of trying harder and harder to make things go the way you want them to…

You will find yourself playing the game on a whole new level.

15 years ago, I could follow the clues in other people’s goals, because I wasn’t attached to the outcome.

And then I learned to follow the clues in my mind, to become less attached to my own goals, yet at the same time more motivated to act on them.

And then finally, I had to learn to follow the clues left by life, that told me how I needed to change in areas I didn’t really want to…

But would make me happier, more at peace, and more in love with life than I ever dared dream possible.

So here I am, starting up the blog again. With new things to say, and do, and maybe even sell.

I’ve given it a fifteenth-anniversary facelift, and a new catchphrase to boot, straight out of Marcus Aurelius’s playbook:

What Stands In The Way, Becomes The Way

Because if you want to level up your life, transcend your limitations, and maybe even stare death in the eye without blinking, you would do well to remember this:

Despite what society tells us, it is not about keeping our “eyes on the prize”. Nor is it really true that obstacles are just, “those frightful things we see when we take our eyes off the goal”. Nor can we truly say that our problems are “opportunities”… even though we can make opportunities from them.

No, the real truth about our problems – whether in business, software development, or life itself – is that they are clues. Clues that tell us what we need to change.

In our actions, in our plans, or in our minds and hearts.

Our problems are a messenger, that tell us that what we’re doing isn’t working, and that trying harder won’t help.

They tell us that our ideas of the way things ought to be, don’t match with how they really are. That the things we think we know are wrong. That the things we want to pretend we have or can get were never really real, and the things we want to believe, we may need to let go of.

And that, although we are always free to argue with reality… we will only lose (as Byron Katie puts it), “100% of the time”.

I won’t lie: letting go of our arguments, giving up on our stubborness… it’s hard nearly every single time. Sometimes it even feels like dying, or like giving up on everything you ever wanted or held dear.

And yet…

On the other side, the moment you truly act with “willing acceptance”, “objective judgment”, or “un[self-conscious] action”…

Not as a trick or a hack, but for real…

Your life is transformed.

Maybe only in one small way, some tiny area. But it’s changed.

And it’s real. And it’s different.

Because you’re different.

And then you wonder what all the fuss was about, because you can’t even remember why you were so stubbornly insistent that life had to be the way you thought, or else it just wasn’t right.

Yeah, yeah… I know: that’s all very inspiring and all, but how, exactly, do you do that?

Well… that’s why I’m writing new articles again.

So stay tuned! (And if you haven’t already, follow on Twitter or Facebook, or better yet: use the RSS feed or sign up for email notifications, so you’re not as dependent on Big Social Media to decide what you do and don’t hear about.)

–PJ

P.S. Welcome back to dirt Simple! Although the facelift is basically done, some reorganization and updates are still in progress. There may still be some broken links for a little while, and some things might take a little while to come back. But almost everything from the old site is still here, and accessible via the same URLs as before.

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A More Glorious Failure 25 Mar 2014 9:57 AM (11 years ago)

I was in a jam last Friday. The middle part of “Unproven” (the new book I’m writing) still wasn’t working. So I sat down to try to sort it out.

I wasn’t actually intending to write anything. I was just going to type out my thoughts, on what I was trying to say, to try to get it into some kind of order.

But the funny thing is, whenever I do that – let go of intending to write, that’s when the words start pouring out. Over the course of two hours, I wrote a ton of material that started looking like a new chapter, and maybe a nice blog article spin-off as well.

I quit when I got to the end of my workday, knowing I still needed an ending, but I figured I’d get to it Saturday.

It took maybe 20-30 minutes to finish it up the next day, and then I read back over it.

But my heart sunk.

This chapter/article thing, suffered from the exact same problem in miniature that I’d been having with the book. There were too many ideas trying to fit in too small a space. Two different metaphors, one at the beginning, one at the end, with awkward glue in between. On the one hand, lots of hints dropped to be picked up later, and on the other hand, various conclusions drawn without showing how they were gotten to.

It was going to need some serious work.

So I set it aside, thinking, “okay, I think I need to mindmap this or diagram it somehow, so I can untangle it, figure out what to move to other chapters. Maybe I can still turn the rest into an article or something.”

But somehow, I never got around to it. Sunday and Monday came and went, without me getting around to even looking at the piece again, let alone diagramming it. There was always something more urgent or more attractive that needed doing “first”.

It wasn’t until Monday night that I finally realized what the problem was, while doing some mindhacking on something unrelated.

(Explaining that “something unrelated” would sadly take too much space here – it’s actually a core concept within the same set of things that I’m still having trouble explaining in the middle of “Unproven”!)

Anyway, what I realized was this:

I am totally unwilling to lose.

To fail.

To make mistakes.

Like, intellectually, I know that it’s the only way to learn, builds character, blah blah blah.

But, in practice, I am totally not willing to experience it.

For example, even if it’s some silly little project like hanging a picture on the wall, I don’t want to start it unless I’m sure I have everything I will need in order to complete it, and that I will have enough time to complete it no matter what sort of problem might come up.

And if, despite all that, I still don’t complete it in time, I feel awful.

No matter how stupidly unimportant the project is!

(This, by the way, is an important sign of something that needs mindhacking: the fact that you respond with the same intensity to a certain kind of situation, regardless of how big or small the actual consequences are in that specific situation. When you respond, as it were, to “the principle of the thing”!)

To Be Vulnerable

Now, one of the big themes in the middle part of “Unproven” is vulnerability. It’s the idea that, in order to actually live our lives, we have to be willing to experience certain states of mind that we’d rather avoid. Natural struggling is in fact the result of organizing one’s life so as to avoid these states of mind. (Like, “not knowing” as I described in a previous excerpt/blog article.

And even though, while expanding on that theme in the book, I thought intellectually about how that related to mistakes and failure, I hadn’t made the specific emotional connection to what I was doing with my own mistakes, whether actual or potential.

This is a great illustration of another basic mindhacking principle: action is not an abstraction.

Merely intellectually knowing about a concept simply will not change you, until and unless you can connect that idea on a concrete, emotional level to specific situations and actions in your life.

In other words, it’s not enough to realize that “mistakes are good” in a general sense. You must realize they are good for you. Like that mistake in particular. And that other one back then. And so on.

It Has To Be About You

Without this specific connection to people, places and things in your life, your emotional brain simply doesn’t take it seriously. It’s just a random factoid, another answer on a test with no connection to the “real world” of your actual thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

And making this work is a conversation between you and your emotional brain: co-operation, not dictatorship.

You can’t browbeat yourself into believing that failure is good; that’s just starting a new argument with yourself.

However, if you ask yourself questions like, “How do I act when I think failure is bad?” and “What would it be like if I believed failure was good?”…

And if you actually give yourself time to reflect on these questions, not just spit back out a canned answer…

Then you will find that you can begin to actually think and feel differently about something, in a way that never would have changed without that reflection.

An Act of Rebellion

Now today (Tuesday), I started writing this, without being sure if I would have enough time to finish it before I have to leave the house this evening. It’s just one of a dozen small steps I’m taking now, tiny acts of rebellion against my previous patterns of protection, my firewalls against failure.

Because I reflected last night on what kind of life I want to live, and how failure-proofing has kept me from really ever living at all (entirely aside from the procrastination aspect!), I am now seriously looking to expand the number of things that I am (potentially) failing at.

The funny thing, though, is that actually failing is harder than it looked! More often than not, the “attempted failure” seems to succeed anyway.

Because I wasn’t just avoiding failure, I was trying to avoid the mere possibility of any imaginable failure.

And so there’s a big gap between how difficult things actually are, and how difficult I was making them.

(Again, a classic mindhacking principle at work: our brain makes us think our limitations are out there in reality, when in reality, most of our limitations are only in our minds!)

And so, once you are actually doing things, instead of thinking about what kinds of awful things might happen, well…

Things seem a whole lot easier!

It’s kind of a paradox: most of our limiting beliefs and feelings convince us that they are giving us something positive… when in fact the only way to get that positive thing, is to give up the belief.

Because all that time I was protecting myself from failure, it didn’t make me feel strong or safe.

It made me feel weak and scared!

Yet now, as I find myself taking these “risks” (that aren’t really risky at all)…

I instead feel strong and courageous.

And the possibility of “failure”, feels nothing less than glorious.

Fail on!

—PJ

P.S. If you want to learn more about the trick of “not intending to” do something as a way of getting into “flow” states where you can effortlessly do all kinds of stuff, check out one of my newer books, “What Happens Now: How To Enter A Timeless, Effortless Space”. It’s free for Effortless Way subscribers and Mind Hackers’ Guild members to download this month.

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The Duckling’s Dilemma 29 Jan 2014 9:31 AM (11 years ago)

All my life I’ve tried to learn discipline, focus, rigor. To have routines and stick to them, to work patiently and gradually towards well-defined goals. And I did this because I thought it would be good for me, that it would help me reach my potential.

And, up to a point, this was maybe even true.

But because I felt like I needed to be that kind of person, I never noticed when I passed that point. The point where it changed from being good for me, to being bad.

Five years ago, when I tried to write the book, Thinking Things Done, I fell into a trap of trying to drive something forward even when I didn’t believe in it any more, for the sake of focus and discipline and all those supposedly-wonderful things.

And it simply didn’t work.

Every strength is a weakness, every weakness a strength. If it doesn’t seem this way, it’s only because it’s the situation that makes the weakness or strength. If you’ve been told all your life to act one way, it may seem a strength to act that way. And yet, in someother situation, that could be the worst possible way to act.

I don’t know if I would officially be diagnosed with ADD, but I definitely have the traits of the “hunter” rather than the “farmer”: I am quick to chase an idea, I run it into the ground, and then I go after the next one. And to have motivation to do something, I have to believe in it 100%.

In the right context, used the right way, these are enormous strengths. In the parts of my life where I was working towards a big-picture goal that I believed in 100%, I was fucking awesome. I loved my work, I loved my life, and I was far more productive than I have ever been able to make myself be by “discipline”.

But while I was writing Thinking Things Done, I hit a major road bump: I stopped believing 100% in what I was doing.

At first, it was just a minor bump, maybe down to 95 or 98%. The challenge was, I was starting to realize that merely giving people information about change techniques wouldn’t change them, and that what’s more, I was mistaken about how much I had changed.

I began to have doubts, because I was starting to notice the way I chased after ideas, how I was productive while on the high of insight, but would then lose that energy once the idea lost that “new-idea glow”.

The Source of The Struggle

The mistake I made then was to judge myself for this. To believe that it meant my changes weren’t “real”, or that I wasn’t “really” a productive or successful person yet. I was looking at my “undisciplined” nature as if it were bad or wrong somehow, a flaw in my personal character.

Like the “ugly duckling” in the fable, worrying about his long neck.

And so all of the error, all of the suffering, all of the depression that I’ve put myself through in the last five years or so… was all because of one fatal mistake:

I thought that becoming more disciplined, more organized, would make me a better person.

Because I thought that the person I was, was not good enough.

An ugly duckling.

And I have wasted years of my life, not because I was trying to improve myself, but because I was trying to prove myself.

Prove myself worthy of praise, love, attention, and respect.

Prove that I had become the right sort of person, so that I would be good enough.

What I didn’t understand yet, is that this is an impossible dream. You can’t prove you’re a different person than the person you believe you are, let alone the person you actually are!

So no matter what you accomplish, no matter what you do or how well you do it, it will never translate into a feeling that you have succeeded, and are now that “better person”.

Instead, you simply notice that being “disciplined” or “caring” or “focused” or whatever it is you succeeded at today, only means that you will have to work just as hard again, to do it tomorrow.

You will still be an ugly duckling, struggling to keep its neck down.

The Two Big Mistakes Behind False Goals

The thing is, if my goal really was to be organized or disciplined for its own sake, such a setback would never have bothered me. If it was worth achieving today, it would also be worth achieving tomorrow, and the day after that. And eventually, it would become second nature.

But because my true goal was always to feel worthy – to feel like a lovable and respectable person, deserving of praise and companionship – one day’s success still felt like failure, because it didn’t bring me those feeling of worthiness I was craving.

This is the pattern of all false goals: the things we crave, not for the thing itself, but for the feeling of being proven. The feeling of finally being a good and worthy person, accepted by the “tribe” and able to make a valued contribution. The feeling that our life has purpose, our work has meaning, and that we are a true part of some kind of family, be it literal or figurative.

The mistake we make here is two-fold:

First, we think that it is possible to prove ourselves. Teased by other children or put down by parents and teachers, our brain concludes that if we were more like they want us to be, then the pain would stop, and the love would begin.

And in a functional environment, our ancestral evolution, this may even have been true!

But in the dysfunctional environments we came from, and our modern disconnected life, it is absolutely not true. Most of the people who put us down for one thing – even our parents! – will simply switch to putting us down about something else, if we successfully change the first thing. (As anyone who’s pulled their grades up from bad to good-but-not-yet-perfect can attest!)

We think that if we are like other people, if we are the way they want us to be, then that means we will be – and feel – whole and strong. But this is not true. It just means we will feel like we barely scraped by, just narrowly avoided being worthless and unsuccessful.

Second – and this is by far, the worse error of the two – we think that we need to prove ourselves in the first place!

We think that who we are is wrong or bad. Inadequate or flawed. Defective and unlovable. Ugly.

And I can’t tell you how wrong that is.

Because inside of us, we are all great.

We are not ugly ducklings.

We are beautiful swans.

You Can’t Feel What You Don’t Believe

This isn’t some rah-rah self-esteem boosting thing. (It’s not some “we’re spiritual beings having a human experience” woo-woo thing either, though it may sound a bit like that, too.)

The simple truth is that there is nothing that someone else can give you, that you don’t already have.

If you aren’t capable of feeling love for yourself, then you won’t feel it, even when somebody else loves you.

If you aren’t capable of respecting yourself, then you won’t feel it, even when others respect you.

If you can’t see yourself as being worthy, then you won’t feel it, no matter how worthy you actually are.

Because we feel these things – if and when we do – only when we agree with others’ assessments of us!

In other words, the feeling isn’t something we get.

It’s something that we do.

And as long as we think that we’re not worthy, we won’t do it. Our brains won’t do it.

Why You Can’t Trick Yourself Into Feeling Better

What I’m saying here is not some kind of trick, to fool yourself into feeling better. Such a trick could never work, because if you’re trying to think that you’re good, trying to believe you’re worthy, then it’s only because you still think you’re not!

In your mind, there is this idea of yourself as “really” bad and unworthy, and then on top of that idea, you add the idea that you’re somehow still lovable or whatever. You try to take the bad self-esteem and build some good on top of it, using something that feels like a lie.

But it doesn’t matter: lie or truth, nothing you put on top of that weak foundation will stand.

In order to change your experience of life, it’s not enough to pile on good ideas in an effort to counter the bad ones you already have:

You have to question the bad ones.

Now, this is important: please notice that I didn’t say “get rid of”. In order to see yourself as getting rid of a bad idea about yourself, you are still doing the same thing: seeing yourself as a defective thing, a thing that needs to be fixed. Instead of proving yourself worthy by doing good deeds or becoming a different person, you are trying to prove yourself by getting rid of your “bad” beliefs.

But it’s still the same thing!

It’s still the idea that the future will be better, “if only” you can accomplish X.

And it doesn’t matter what X is: if you are clinging to the hope that X can save you, then this means you believe you need to be saved.

And you fear that you won’t be.

And that’s where all the suffering comes from:

The belief that you’re an ugly duckling.

And that “if only” you can scrunch your neck down enough to fit in with the other ducks, then you’ll finally be accepted.

When in fact the only way you’ll ever feel better, is to realize you’re a swan.

Why You MUST Give Up Hope

But you can’t do this, so long as you are hoping, praying, and striving with all your might to be a better duck!

(As I have been doing all my life.)

Unfortunately, before the famous “ugly duckling” of Hans Christian Andersen’s story realized he was a swan…

He first had to give up hope.

In fact, the only reason the “duckling” discovered he was a swan, was because he had despaired of ever being accepted – by the ducks or anyone else – and was trying to kill himself!

It was only then that, seeing his reflection, he finally realized that he was already okay. He didn’t need to “become” – he already was.

But what would have happened, had he not given up hope first?

If someone had said, “stop worrying what the ducks think, you’re a swan”, would he have listened?

If someone said, “you don’t need to change who you are, because who you are is already good enough”, could the words have had…

Any meaning at all?

Well, if anyone has ever told you that one of your personal “if only’s” was unnecessary, then you already know how this works.

Certainly, if somebody told me that I didn’t “need” to be so disciplined – and many did! – then I brushed them off, believing they “just didn’t understand me”.

It felt like they were saying, “Oh, your deepest dreams and needs, your fondest ambition? Forget about it, you don’t need it.”

Or worse, “You can’t have it.”

And I didn’t want to hear that.

That was the very last thing I wanted to hear about myself or about what I was striving for. The ugly duckling doesn’t want to hear, “you’re not a duck, you’re never going to be a duck, so just fucking give it a rest already”, because he’s spent his whole life trying to be a good duck, and what the hell else is he going to be, and what does it mean to have wasted his whole life on a fool’s errand?

The problem is, this is exactly what we ugly ducklings need to hear.

The Truth That Will Set Us Free

We have to let go of the false hope of being even a barely-acceptable duck, in order to realize our swan-nature.

And this step cannot be skipped over!

Otherwise, we will use the idea of being a swan, as a way to keep hoping we’ll be accepted as a duck.

We’ll think, “well, if I’m a beautiful swan, then the ducks should like me. If I can just properly realize my swan-nature, then I’ll finally be good enough for the ducks!”

And nothing changes. We’ve changed what we’re trying to prove, perhaps. Maybe how we intend to prove it.

But we still feel unproven.

And this will continue, until we give up hope.

As someone once said, the truth will set you free.

But first, it’s going to make you miserable.

Let’s get started!

The above is a sample chapter excerpted from a working draft of my next book, “Unproven: The Secret Source of Your Lifelong Struggle”, which will be released to Mind Hackers Guild members and Effortless Way subscribers in early 2014.

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The Experience of Not Knowing 20 Jan 2014 6:32 AM (11 years ago)

Often, I tell myself that I don’t know what to do.

And then, I feel bad about it.

In my mind, I call this experience “not knowing what to do”.

But that is wrong: that is not what this experience really is.

This experience is just me telling myself a story, so I can avoid the actual feeling of not-knowing.

I am berating myself for not knowing, and feeling bad because I don’t know.  “I should know”, I think.

• “If I were an organized person, I would know what to do next.”
• “If I were decisive and bold and courageous, I would just do something.”
• “If I were a leader who got things done, I would have done everything already!”

This is the experience I have labeled in my mind as “not knowing what to do”, and it is awful.  No wonder I don’t want to do anything that involves “not knowing what to do”!

But this is not the actual experience, of actually not knowing.

The Place Without Protest

The experience of not-knowing is something else.  It’s just sitting here, not knowing.  If I feel anything, perhaps it is wondering, perhaps a bit of curiosity.  “What will I do?”  That’s an interesting question.  What if I did this one thing?  What about this other?  What would happen after that?

Not pushing for the answer, not needing to know.  Not desperately trying to figure it out, not demanding a solution to some imagined awful problem of not-knowingness.

I am just not-knowing, and it is surprisingly peaceful.

The state of actually not knowing, of accepting the simple fact – the truth that I do not know – is profoundly simple and free of stress.  In order to be upset, I have to enter into an argument, a protest against the fact.

By telling myself things should be some other way, I create a tear in the fabric of my inner reality, a rift between the truth of not-knowing, and my objection to that truth.

It’s okay to not-like not-knowing.  I can dislike the facts all I want!  What doesn’t work is to fight the fact, to insist that it should be some other way than it actually is.

If I want to get to the place on my map marked “knowing”, I have to first pass through the place called “not knowing”, because that is in fact where I am!  Insisting that I am supposed to already be at “knowing” or “doing” or “done” will not move me one inch from this spot.

The Story of Suffering

I spend a ridiculous amount of time in this sort of self-caused suffering: complaining to myself about a fact, as a way to avoid experiencing that fact.

I tell myself all day long about what I haven’t done, still need to do, and don’t have time for.  Trapped in this tragic tale, I do not notice that I am not actually doing any of the things I am complaining about and berating myself for.  I am not really paying any attention to them at all!

If I were really paying attention, I would look at the undone task.  See the empty cereal bowl on my desk in front of me, and the keyboard drawer I have yet to assemble.  I would experience those things, in the present moment.  I might do something about them, or I might not, but either way, I would be seeing the truth, and be at peace.

The truth is, I have not done them.

The truth is, I may or I may not.

The truth is, I haven’t decided.

Each of these truths is simple, and peaceful.  Unhurried, and without stress.  It’s only when I lose myself in a story, in the idea that these facts mean something – about me, or about some awful future which will befall me – it’s only then that I grow angry, afraid, or depressed.

I have been lying when I say, “I don’t know what to do”.  Because I say that, and then I do nothing.  Or I find some way to distract myself.

Clearly, I do know what to do!  First, I know to make myself feel miserable, and then I know to run away from that feeling.  If I actually didn’t know, I would spend time wondering, imagining, reflecting!

This Very Moment

The experience of not knowing is profoundly simple, and profoundly free.  When I step into just that moment, take refuge in that simple truth, I feel more free than I have at any other moment.

Because if I truly don’t know what to do, then that means I could do anything.

Anything at all.

And I wonder, how many other experiences are like this?  How many things am I dreading, avoiding, trying to run or distract myself from?  How many am I telling myself are awful, when in fact they are awesome?

(And not just “awesome” as another word for “cool”, but “awesome” in its original definition: something that fills you with a sense of awe!)

Sometimes, I read books or see movies whose theme is that you should get out there and live your life.  What they usually don’t tell us is that this “living” is right here in front of us, in this very moment.

Unlike in the movies, it’s not something we have to win some championship to get, travel to exotic lands to obtain, or win true love to find.  There is nothing to win, nowhere to go, and nothing we need to prove to anyone – least of all ourselves.  The most awesome, awe-inspiring experiences of our lives are right here, where we are now, in our day-to-day existence.

Smack dab in the middle of what we’re running away from.

The above is a brief excerpt from a working draft of my next book, “Unproven: The Secret Source of Your Lifelong Struggle”, which will be released to Mind Hackers Guild members and Effortless Way subscribers in early 2014.

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How To End Your Sentence 31 Dec 2013 1:16 PM (11 years ago)

Say this with me now, “I have a lot of work to do.”

Then sigh.

Or, if that doesn’t make you feel bad, try some other statement.

Like, “I can’t lose weight.”

Or, “I don’t know what to do.”

Or anything at all, really. Just say (or think) something that makes you feel bad.

Now, change the sentence. Add, “…and that’s bad” to the end of it.

• “I have a lot of work to do, and that’s bad.”
• “I can’t lose weight, and that’s bad.”
• “I don’t know what to do, and that’s bad.”

Embellish on it. Elaborate. Get more specific about how bad it is:

• “I don’t know what to do, and that’s awful. I am so f***ing stuck!”

And get more specific about what makes it bad:

• “I have a lot of work to do, and it’s going to be exhausting and take forever and I’ll never be free to do what I want and people will be hounding me and I just can’t take it anymore, and that’s why it’s bad!”

Good! Just remember to keep some sort of “and it’s bad” (or awful or whatever) at the end of the sentence.

And now you can question that thought.

Is it true? Is it actually going to be bad? Or does it only seem that way, because you’re thinking it will be?

And if you have a list of reasons, you can question the reasons.

• Will people be hounding me? Is that true?
• I can’t take it any more: is that true?
• I’ll never be free to do what I want: is that true?

One by one, you can break the thoughts down, questioning them to discover what your real truth is. Take them through all four of Byron Katie’s questions and turnarounds, and set yourself free.

But first, you have to blurt them out. Feel them. Don’t logic your feelings away or try to hide them. Don’t dismiss or argue with the first thought that comes to mind. Don’t even try to make any of it better.

Make it worse, instead. Throw a (verbal) temper tantrum or pity party, expressing just how awful it is, and why.

Then, and only then, question the other bits. The bits at the end of the sentence. The bits after the part that sounds like a depressing statement of “fact”.

Because it may be true that you have a lot to do or can’t lose weight or don’t know what to do, after all.

But what probably isn’t true, is that it’s as bad, awful, no good, and can’t-take-it-any-more as your brain is telling you it is.

And when you take off those bits at the end of the sentence, you’ll also be taking off bits from your own sentence:

The sentence that’s keeping you in a prison of suffering.

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The Moment of Choice 14 May 2013 8:20 AM (11 years ago)

Last night I stayed up late.

Like, 5:30 in the morning, late.

I was tinkering on a little programming project, that sort of got out of hand.  I kept feeling like, “I’ve almost got it…”, only to find one more little problem.  The kind of thing that usually happens only when I’m stretching, learning something new, like I was last night.

And the next thing I knew, it was 5:30.

So of course I slept late, too.

And now, this morning – well, afternoon, really – I find myself in bed, still thinking about the programming project.  I’m so wrapped up in it, I’m about to get out of bed and go work on it.

But what about my decision to spend the first two hours of each day on what’s important to me?

This project is urgent, but it’s not important.

But I want to!

But if I start now, I’ll spend all day on it, maybe all night again too.

But I’ve got all these ideas!  It’s going to be awesome!

And so the conflict goes, back and forth for a couple minutes.  Something’s got to give.

I decide to question both sides of the debate.  Is it true that I shouldn’t work on the project instead of what I’ve decided is important?  No, not really.  Is it true that I should?

Hm.  Doesn’t feel like a “should”.  Feels like, “I want”.  I want to work on the project.  Is that true?

I’m not sure.  I want to say it’s true, but I sense a couple of reservations.

First of all, I’m not sure I know what “want” really means.  Sure, Robert Fritz says the question is, “If you could have it, would you take it?”  But for me, there’s a bunch of other stuff tangled up in it.

My parents always acted like wanting was something you chose, or committed to.  As in, “are you sure you want that?”  And there’s another sense of “want” I’m concerned about, which is that…

My wants can be pretty darn fleeting at times!

In fact, at one point this morning, I reached over beside the bed to grab my tablet and check my email and Twitter, which led to reading a linked article, and that few minutes’ distraction was enough to knock out most of the craving to continue my programming project.  It wasn’t gone entirely, but it reduced enough that I was no longer in a “Now now now! Wanna wanna!” place about it.

So, what does it even really mean to want something?  Do I count every fleeting desire or craving as wants?  Or should my long-term desires – like my choice to work the first two hours on important/not-urgent stuff – count for more?

Second, even if I do consider myself to really want to work on the less-important, but more urgent-feeling programming project, does that necessarily mean I ought to do that?

It takes a bit of soul-searching, but I soon see that the problem isn’t that I want two different things, it’s that I have a “should” about it.  It was something like, “If I want something urgently, then I should give it to myself”, but at the time I had a devil of a time putting it into words.  I did try using a “turnaround” from The Work, though, rephrasing “I want to work on the project” to “My thinking wants to work on the project.”

And I feel oddly happy at that.  Like, “Yes, that’s right, it’s not actually me that wants that.  It’s just my thinking that wants it.  I was thinking about it, so of course I wanted it.  Checking email, I thought about it less, so I want it less.  If I keep thinking about other things, I’ll want it even less.”

So, is a true desire one that you have without thinking about it?  One that comes to you consistently?

I don’t know, and I’m starting to think the question doesn’t make any sense.  It’s in the nature of wants to come and go:

Only our choices have any chance of staying true.

And the funny thing about choice is that it isn’t really about what you “want”, in the visceral sense of feeling an urge or desire.  It really is more about what Fritz says, as in, “If you could have it, would you take it?”

Only, it’s not “if you could have this one thing right now, would you do whatever it takes right now”…  It’s more like, “In the overall scope of your life, considering all the things you want, which things are more important to you?”

And in the past, I fell into the trap of defining “important” too narrowly, of only considering things that could be justified to others as being important, rather than actually considering what was important to me.

So it was only natural that I’d end up divided: one part of me pushing towards “important” things, the other expressing pent-up cravings for the important-to-me things I was leaving out of the picture.

(Like time to tinker and learn new programming stuff, for example!)

But lately, I do include those things, and it’s a lot easier to do them in a guilt-free way, if I spend those first two hours on writing, or working on my business.

Last night just got a little out of hand. 

And now, minus the belief that “If I want something urgently, then I should give it to myself”, and seeing that “I want to work on the programming” is really, “My thinking wants to work on the programming”, I can actually make a choice about what to do.

A choice that’s focused on everything I want, not just whatever I happen to be intently focused on at the moment.

And when I ask, “Who would I be, if I didn’t believe I needed to do whatever I was thinking about?”, I discover something else: that my desire to rush blindly into whatever seems interesting, is actually a kind of escape.

An addiction.

When I rush into “flow”, it’s a way of getting out of the present moment.  A way of not having to decide.  A way to avoid choice entirely.  My day gets away from me because I want it to, because I don’t want to have to be the one managing and structuring my time – a reflection of patterns learned from my parents.

It’s an issue I’ve actually just been working on a few nights earlier, in a very intense Work session that revealed those patterns, showing how my parents’ high expectations combined with lack of guidance repeatedly set me up to fail…  and how I’ve kept doing the same thing to myself, my entire life.

At the end of the session, I realized that if I wanted to succeed, I’d need to actually be clear with myself: not only about what I want, but also about how I’m going to get it – including making time commitments…

And sticking to them.

And as I remember that, I reaffirm the choice: I’m going to give myself guidance, not just expectations.

And then it’s okay.  Better than okay.

In fact, it’s a blessing.

Who I would be, without always needing to be doing something, is someone thoughtful, and capable of actually making decisions about my day, even as the day goes on.  It feels like I could actually choose and reflect, instead of quickly jumping into something so I don’t have to think about how much time I’ve already wasted, how poorly I’ve lived up to my unrealistic and guidance-free expectations.

And so now, I’m back to making a conscious choice about what I’m doing today.

Like writing all this, instead of programming.

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The Root of Perfectionism 3 May 2013 10:06 AM (11 years ago)

I’m a recovering perfectionist.

Not the wanna-be kind, that says they’re a perfectionist because they have high standards.  No, I’m the kind that always feels bad about what they’ve done, because it’s not quite as good as it could have been.

Worse, I tend to criticize what other people have done, on the same basis.  Get tangled in internet flamewars over minor things that, again, could be better than they are.  And I don’t give people nearly enough positive feedback for the things that they did do, that are in fact better than they could have done, or how improved things are over how they were before.

At one time, I used to think that my knack for seeing how things “could be better” was a gift: it offered the possibility of continuing improvement, and certainly it has been commercially useful at times.

But what I didn’t see, is that this knack was really not the root cause of my perfectionism.  Seeing how things could be better, is not perfectionism.  Aspiring to a high standard, is not perfectionism. Even wanting to be the very best you can be, is not perfectionism.

No.  Perfectionism is just:

Feeling bad when something isn’t perfect!

But where does that feeling come from?

Recently, I’ve been delving again into The Work, which I’d only played around with a bit in the past.  At the time I first learned about it, I was looking at it only as a directed mindhacking tool, aiming the questions at specific blocks or issues…  and mostly finding I could invent better tools for the purpose.  (Ah, perfectionism!)

But recently, I’ve looked at it again, and noticed that its overall philosophy of questioning “shoulds” fits quite well with the other tools in my toolkit, and that it’s actually a very quick and easy way to rapidly troubleshoot bad feelings about almost anything.  And as I’ve been getting into the habit of questioning every bad feeling, my skill at finding what it is I think I “should” do is improving.

So this morning, when I found myself mentally critiquing something my wife had done, I decided to actually do something about it.

And as I put together my weekly vitamins, I kept asking, “What was I thinking?  What do I believe that leads me to critique in that way, and feel bad about not saying anything?”

At first only a vague sense of unease came up, but it gradually refined into a general sense that, well, things were “supposed to be different”.  That if, well, things could be better, then they should be better.

Aha, I thought.  A “should”.  I can use The Work on that.  “Is that true?”

The answer comes back: no.

And it’s a wave of relief, washing over me.  It suddenly makes sense to me how other people can even see that something could be better, and yet not seem to care about it as much as I do, or feel an urge to do something about it.  I mean, just because something could be better, that doesn’t mean you have to do something about it.  It makes total sense.

But somehow, I don’t feel finished.  It’s like the urge to critique has diminished, like it’s not quite so actively evil not to denounce things as imperfect when they are, but it’s still sad.

And as I’m mulling over the phrasing of “things that could be better, should be better”, it occurs to me that there’s a part I haven’t questioned:

The part where things could be better!

And I have to ask myself, “Is that true?”

And in a flash, it comes to me: no.  No it’s not.

The thing I was critiquing, could not have been better, at the moment I was critiquing it.  How could it possibly have been?

In fact, how can anything be better than it actually is?

Taken literally enough, the very idea is absurd.  Whatever is, is.  Unless you actually have a time machine to go back and change everything that led to it being that way, it is a literal and physical impossibility for something to be better than it is!

What is left out of the idea that “things could be better”, is the dimension of time.  You can improve things so that they are better in the future than they are now.  But you cannot improve things backward in time, so that they are better now than they are now.  What would that even mean?

You can’t change what is.  You can only change what will be.  So the error in my thinking is not that I imagine how things could be better…  it’s that I’m imagining that better tomorrow, today.

Instead of in the future, where it actually belongs.

But the even bigger wave of relief that follows this realization is not really driven by all this logic of time and cause-and-effect.  It’s mainly the feeling, the visceral gut-level feeling, that imperfection is no longer a tragedy to be grieved, or an emergency to be fixed.

Because things aren’t supposed to be any more perfect than they already are.

And so, if something isn’t exactly as I imagined it, or as I could imagine it…

It doesn’t mean I’ve already failed.

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