Category: Thoughts

How many subscriptions are you currently enrolled in? Do you have any duplicates? Amazon Prime Video AND Hulu, wow. How luxurious.

I’ve been reading Walden by Henry David Thoreau and came across a quote that made me realize the rent collection business models that have arose through the internet, Spotify, Netflix, Birchbox, Dollar Shave Club, etc., are mostly unnecessary spending that diminish our own personal autonomy and wealth. I say this knowing full well that Audible, Apple Music, Sam Harris, Headspace, the YMCA, and SimplyPiano will all charge me this month. I too am a fly in the web.

Recently, there has been a wave of minimalism that has swept the western world. With books like The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, gaining renown as a means of not letting our wealth become transmuted solely to things we own.

“A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.” – Walden

This mindset, about looking not just at the item or service, but at the whole package, the baggage that comes along with a decision, reminds me of Ryan Holiday’s exploration of The Dress Suit Bribe. The meat of his post being, “…seemingly benign decisions trigger commitments to larger ideas than we might imagine. In the case of something like a mortgage they are literal contracts that require decades of a very particular kind of lifestyle.”

Most people are looking at what they get out of a deal, they fail to see that there is more to the picture. You buy Netflix, but what do you really pay for it? Surely it is more than just the money you send them, it is the time you spend on their platform, it is the time you spend discussing with others the shows you watch, it is the time you spend daydreaming about the next episode.

These are all hidden costs associated with that one purchase that affect your lifestyle. You can expand this to just about any decision in life. Should I choose that employer? Should I follow her on Instagram? Is this the right apartment for me?

All of these decisions have hidden costs.

However, that is not something to fear. Instead it should be something you think about often. Rationally auditing the decisions you have made so that you can make better ones, change previous ones, and help others in their quest for a better life. Like The Dunbar Hierarchy, you can expand this to your relationships.

Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living. So I ask you to examine, what subscriptions do you have that no longer serve you?

“Some people die at age 25 and aren’t buried until 75.” – Benjamin Franklin

In his book “The Compound Effect,” Darren Hardy talks about the momentum that one creates in their life. The book stresses that your life is shaped by the small decisions you make on a daily basis. You create or neuter momentum based on your choices of behavior. Flossing daily, or drinking pop are both examples of daily habits

There is an element of mindfulness to habits and life decision that many people miss. Often we are too subjective when we view our own lives, thinking that, “I would never do that. I know better.” However, we are all subject to the same fallibility of human thought. You are not special because you live your life. You are just as biased and confused as Odell Beckham Jr. or Benjamin Netanyahu.

This is just how life is. The wetware of the flesh computer behind your eyes is not capable of processing modern life. We deal with it well, but most people do not thrive with modernity because our brains developed over hundreds of thousands of years to be on the prairie hunting, gathering, and living among others in small tribes.

That fact should give perspective to how you think about your decisions. Learn about cognitive biases and logical fallacies that plague humanity, then you are able to exploit your programming to improve your own life.

“Life is like a snowball. All you need is wet snow and a really long hill.” – Warren Buffett

Therefore, better habits will change your momentum. Your inertia will shift, and you will alter the course of your life. The more you improve your daily routines, the more you improve yourself. The more you play to win, the more you will win. Give yourself the chance over and over, eventually the ball will connect.

Succeeding at life in any area, is not about one peak moment, but rather the consistent accumulation of small advantages above the mean. If you can be better than you were yesterday, even by one tenth of one percent, the compound interest of that will pay large dividends two, six, and ten years down the road.

I was recently discussing with some friends of mine about the prospect of altering my career path and the risks involved with that kind of decision. It was interesting to gauge their responses to that idea. My conservative friends were very risk averse, concerned about the potential downside of a bad decision. My more liberal friends were optimistic about making a change. This contrast made me think that too many people in life are playing the game to not lose, when they should be playing to win.

It’s not their fault either, society teaches us to get a secure job so we can earn a steady salary and comfortably retire in 40-50 years. It worked for our parents, so it should also work for us. However, I am very skeptical of anything that appears to be “one size fits all.” Roads from the 1960’s wouldn’t work very well in today’s world, why should career advice be any more relevant.

The problem with this mindset is that security is a false hope. First off, the world is always changing. The only thing that does not change is change itself. Nothing is stationary. This inherently means that seeking security is a bad idea because you are working against a law of nature. You are hedging that the course of your life will be stable enough for you to not have to anxiously pursue additional skills after a certain age.

“Most people die at 25 but aren’t buried until they are 75.” – Ben Franklin

People stop growing and learning. They begin to contract, away from things that make them uncomfortable, away from things that challenge their beliefs. Nobody can blame them for that, but it limits life experience in a drastic way. But in today’s world, being able to learn, unlearn, and relearn new skills is probably more important than the actual skills themselves.

Inflation drives the value of the dollar down each year, assuming that you will have enough for your basic needs 20 years from now by following the normal path will push you into poverty. Coasting to the finish line is no way to complete a race.

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!'” – Hunter S. Thompson

This is where compounding comes into effect. The decisions you make over the course of your life, but especially early on, have drastic effects on how far you can go before your time expires. If you learn skills that are broadly applicable today, you will carry them for the next 50-70 years.

If you eat healthy and exercise, you might be able to squeeze out a few more years, however even the life-hacking tech billionaires of Silicon Valley will eventually die. As the Stoics said, “remember, you are mortal.”

This finite amount of time you have on the planet is for you to use. Only you can decide how best to live your life, but refusing or being too scared to make a decision is a decision in it’s own right.

“If you do what everyone else does, you will have what everyone else gets.” – Stephen Richards

How does one chart their own course in life. Undoubtedly you are, as William Ernest Henley said in his poem Invictus, “the master of your fate, the captain of your soul.”

You have the power to change everything in your life. You need to be willing to deploy that power against the pursuit of your life’s mission with the voracity of an attacking horde. You will have to grind it out as you level up in life. There will be periods where you are forced to pay a high cost so that you can achieve a great gain.

Thanos embodies this quality perfectly, though he is a genocidal villain. He is an example of what your life should become. You have to be willing to play the game no matter the hand you are dealt and sacrifice everything. Otherwise you will spend your life wondering what you could have made of it. It is better to have tried and failed, than to have never attempted.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.” – Mark Twain

Don’t stay in the the confines of a safe environment. Don’t wish it were easier. Push yourself to become who you truly are. Play the game of life. Play the game to win.

Maintenance— the process of maintaining or preserving someone or something, or the state of being maintained.

There is a large portion of life strictly dedicated to the continuity of living well. Individuals go throughout their day, pushing towards goals they have in mind. Whether that is to graduate college, to visit Hawaii, or to raise a family.

However, between the steps taken towards these goals, there is the endless stream of menial tasks that are completed solely as maintenance on the life one lives. The “changing of the oil” in your engine. Sleep, exercise, eating, washing your clothes, socializing. All of these things have to be done on a regular basis otherwise your life will suffer from an imbalance.

The definition of maintenance highlights that you are preserving someone or something. With life maintenance, you are preserving yourself, your stability, and the continued quality of life you enjoy.

Aristotle taught that there were four pillars to the good life, Health, Wealth, Love, and Happiness. The trick with this is that happiness is kind of like a cat. You can’t chase it to catch it, you have to let it come to you by getting the other three pillars correct.

In order to keep things running smoothly, you have to work on these things constantly. If one of them is out of balance, it likely means the things in your life are not prioritized properly. If you sit at a desk all day. It might be good for your bank account, but it is definitely bad for your long term health.

The key to all of this is ultimately prioritization. It is asking yourself, “how well can I organize my day so that I hit the daily goals I set for myself whilst moving steadily towards the monthly, yearly, and lifetime goals I have in mind?”

If you can ask a question like that, you can find a way to prioritize and overlap the important things in your life. Then you’ll keep your own porch swept. That makes the whole world slightly better.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the friendships and relationships I have in my life. Specifically about the concept of Dunbar’s Number, which is the assertion by the well-known anthropologist Robin Dunbar that a human can only maintain a limited amount of stable relationships. Dunbar gauged the number of relationships to be between 100 to 250.

Let’s just use the commonly quoted 150 number to make things easy.

Another way to think about this is you have at maximum 150 people in your life. Everyone else will remain a part of the gray background of strangers. The people you walk next to in a city but never know. These 150 people will be your parents, your significant other, your kids, your siblings, your neighbors, your roommates, your sorority sisters, your coworkers, and the guy who always hooks your burrito up at Chipotle.

Imagine what your Facebook would look like if you could only have 150 friends. Pretty small, right?

All of the depth of your life will be packed into this small subset of the world’s population.

This set of people is largely chosen early on in life, by the geography of where you live, what your parents value, and what you were interested in as a kid. If your dad liked football, he probably had you go out for the team, where you made friends as a result. You might still keep in contact with some of these people, even if you don’t see them very often.

A study published in Royal Society Open Science showed this pattern of friend accumulation persists until the mid-twenties, where people then start to actually lose friends. A large part of that being the birth of children, which places a heavy burden on maintaining friendships.

One of the tools I was taught to analyze relationships with is Social Penetration Theory. This communication theory basically states that people are like onions in that they have varying layers that they expose to one another, and over time, your social interactions become deeper and deeper.

Your progression through the layers of someone else’s onion is in direct proportion to the depth you have in that relationship.

After recently attending a friends wedding, I realized that I can have a significant amount of depth in a friendship that will not be maintained or even referenced for months on end.

My friend and I can pick back up from where we last left off, with large chunks of time in between the interactions. I would say that this is a normal phenomenon, surely most humans on the planet experience this with one or two people in their lifetime.

However, this is the exception, not the norm. Most relationships have to reach a certain level of depth before they can be maintained with little to no contact.

What seems important to this exploration is that the further down into the layers of the onion you go, the less maintenance you have to do on the relationship in order to keep it smoothly running.

This is made even easier with social media because you can be an incidental witness to life events of another person without actually being there. The better you know someone, the easier it is to jump back into life at the same pace as before.

These relationships are assigned spaces on the caste system of your Dunbar Hierarchy. Over time these people either move up or down the tiers based on the time and energy you choose to invest with them. The lower echelons will be replaced at a more rapid rate.

This is how you can go from being very close with someone to not recognizing them. They rolled down friendship mountain and became a snowball you do not know.

Since you can’t be friends with everyone, can you pick friends who are going to improve your life?

Can you make your Dunbar Hierarchy a tool for self-improvement?

We have all heard the platitude that you, “become the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.”

If you spend time with five broke people, you’ll be the sixth, etc. etc.

You will become the lowest common denominator of the people in your Dunbar Hierarchy. If you maintain lots of relationships with low-level drug offenders, you’ll likely catch some jail time. If you spend a lot of time with people who work out obsessively, it’s hard to be out of shape.

Humans are creatures of habit. By extension, the people you spend time with help form and create the habits you repeatedly do. Both of mind and of action. I rarely see someone who is conservative spending loads of time with a group of progressive friends.

This is not to say that you should never spend time with people who do not contribute to your life. Volunteering is a great example of that variety of time expense, and yet it is one of the most fulfilling things a person can do.

The way I look at friendships is something I learned from Tai Lopez. I have three-minute friends, three-hour friends, and three-day friends. Each level of that scale is in relation to how they affect my life. If I know they will persuade me into getting wasted at a bar, I don’t let myself spend three hours with them. Conversely, if I know we will have a good discussion about finances, I am much more willing to spend three hours with them.

Take a look at who you spend time with. Are they someone you would trade lives with? If they aren’t a person you would gladly swap bodies with, what affect is their life having on yours? You will reflect the surroundings you give yourself. Choose wisely.

I try to take some time to meditate every morning. Most mornings I don’t do this well because I rush to get to work. However, when I do get time, I like to use the app Headspace as my guide.

This particular morning I was on day nine of the app’s appreciation pack. Near the end of the exercise, the guide asks you to ask yourself the question, “Who or What do you appreciate the most in your life right now?”

You’re supposed to ask yourself the question and then just note the responses that you give to it. Normally when I go through this part of the exercise, the response is about how I appreciate my job, my dogs, my friends, and my family.

But today was different. Today the answer I received when I asked the question was me.

Now, I have written extensively about narcissism. While I believe that self-esteem is very important and useful, I often find many people have a distorted view of their own lives.

So I dove deeper. I asked, “what part of me do I appreciate most in my life right now.”

The response was autonomy.

It felt like a breakthrough because I realized I was closing in on an ideal I feel is important. Namely, if you have to make a decision in life, and your response to it is anything other than “HELL YEAH!” It should be no. I got this from Derek Sivers. However, I also really like Mark Manson’s piece about it. It is a very useful lens with which to look at large decisions like accepting a job, moving across the country, etc.

Life is too short to be doing things you are not fully enthused about. You do substandard work when you’re not 100% engaged, and that is a disservice to you and anyone else involved.

It feels good to know I have the power to change my life, that the control of my own destiny is mostly in my own hands. Obviously, if we end up in WWIII, I have to play the hand I am dealt. But I can choose to move to Florida. I can choose to grow a beard. I have autonomy.

I think that is something to be very appreciative of.

Tony Robbins often says that the path to a better life comes from the quality of questions you are asking yourself.

So I’m curious to know, what questions are you asking?

I was recently talking with a friend and he told me that he wanted to make a habit into a resolution for the new year.

This got me thinking.

Why wait?

What benefit is there in not starting that new habit now?

Does it have to be January for you to be serious about a new skill?

It does not.

What you’re doing now is what you will be doing in a month, and in a year if you don’t make immediate changes. It does not matter when you decide to implement a new habit. What matters is that you implement it. What matters is the execution.

However, most people who make resolutions don’t understand this as we can see from the data about resolutions. A whopping 9% of people achieve their resolution. Additionally, the older you get, the harder it is to achieve your resolution as evidenced by the fact that 37% of people in their 20’s achieve their goal compared to just 16% of people over 50.

“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” – Warren Buffett.

Habits are hard to change or create. Thats the point of having them. However, this same stickability to old habits is what prevents you from creating new ones. That means that the moment you feel the need to redirect your attention or energy, you should do it. Do not wait until 1/1. Do it NOW. Strike while the iron is hot.

An NBC article about New Year’s Resolutions stated that the top requests people make of themselves are to:

1. Get healthy
2. Get organized
3. Live life to the fullest
4. Learn new hobbies
5. Spend less

These are all vague. What does live life to the fullest even mean? That can mean 1,000 different things to 1,000 different people. You achieve goals and create new habits by being definite. You also cannot create 6 new habits at once. So it should really be your one, single and lone, New Year’s resolution. But if you are going to start it in two weeks when the clock turns over, why not start it today? That gives you two weeks on all the people who are waiting to change their lives.

If you’re thinking about hitting the gym in January, get a membership today. Don’t wait. Get in the rhythm of working out immediately. When practices are scheduled, when they are done consistently at the same time, and in the same place daily, they become habits.

Let me give you an example. I have been trying since last December to get myself into a daily habit of mindfulness practice. I do this using the app Headspace, which I always recommend to others when they say they want to meditate.

I finally accomplished this by setting my alarm 15 minutes earlier and making this the first thing I do when I wake up. I don’t get up and let my dogs out. I don’t even go to the bathroom unless absolutely necessary. I sit up in bed, turn on the app and do 10-15 minutes of guided meditation.

I didn’t write out what I wanted. I didn’t think about all the ways I could “hack” my life to make this practice occur. I just woke up and started doing it. And that’s what you need to do in order to create a new habit. Don’t overthink it. Reverse engineer what basic events need to occur in order for this habit to exist in your life, and start doing them.

What matters is the execution.

You want to go for a run 3 times a week? Make sure you have running shoes, set out all the gear you need in the morning and when you get home from work, change into that gear and go for a run. Don’t stop to watch a YouTube video, don’t socialize with your roommate. Walk into your room, change clothes, and leave out the door.

Remember, you win by DOING the action you want as a habit. Not by planning it, not by thinking about it, not by telling your friends. There’s actually evidence that telling people will make you worse off. You win by starting now. Not by waiting. The timing will never be just right, but with a little determination you can change your habits and sculpt yourself into the person you want to be.

So don’t wait for the ball to drop and the clock to turn over. Don’t wait for a later date to appear on your phone’s home screen. Make the changes required to get what you want immediately. It might be hard now but at some point you’ll thank yourself for having the gumption to do what most cannot. In starting now, you will realize that New Year’s resolutions are just a scam to sell gym memberships and new savings accounts.

It’s a new year, every day.