You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
But what are those few things that lead to a satisfying life?
Do we decide ourselves, or let others – or society – decide for us?
Experience can make you better at performing an activity but also blind you from what you could do differently (and better).
Sometimes, the only way to innovate, see, and be free, is to take your experience goggles off.
If you’re curious about one topic, you can stay curious, even if your interests change over time.
If you’re kind to one person, you can stay kind when talking to other people.
If you showed leadership in your last job, you can show leadership in your new job.
You can be consistent in how you do things, without having to be consistent in what you do.
When the fear is at its peak
When emotions surge
That’s when breakthroughs happen
And new insights emerge.
Here’s a useful insight from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits:
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
https://jamesclear.com/3-2-1/june-4-2020
Writing every day reaffirms my “I’m a writer” identity.
Sitting on the couch every day reaffirms my “I’m a couch potato” identity.
As a consequence: when you change your actions and your identity starts shifting to align with those actions.
And that’s how we get out of a rut.
(The opposite isn’t always true: changing your thoughts without changing your actions will rarely shift your identity. I can think of being a writer as much as I want, if I never put any words on paper, I’m not a writer. That’s one of the principle of cognitive dissonance: Actions overrule Thoughts.)
Here’s how to change your actions and your identity:
Which begs the question…
Where are you saying you want to be a certain way, but you’re voting for something else through your daily actions?
Lukas Van Vyve
Put your money (or your actions) where your mouth is.
Playing the guitar hasn’t taught me to move my hands and fingers across strings. It has taught me to persevere whenever I’m failing over and over again until suddenly, it all clicks and the words, music, or movements flow.
Yoga hasn’t taught me to put my body in awkward poses. It has taught me to be aware of – and release – the tension in my body whenever I sit, walk, stand, and run.
Taking cold showers hasn’t taught me to withstand cold water. It has taught me to know to relax whenever my body tenses up in stress and my heart starts racing.
Learning a foreign language hasn’t taught me to say the same things with different words. It has taught me that there are different ways of perceiving the wordless world around me, and expressing what I feel inside.
When we isolate insights, most of the learning is lost on us.
Learn thematically. Ask yourself, “Where else does this apply?”
In the series of self-sabotaging behavior I’ve observed in myself and others: “pre-emptively disqualifying yourself”.
Before you even start, you’re depriving yourself already of any potential benefit of the exercise because you don’t know if you’ll get the EXACT benefit promised/desired by you.
“This exercise might have cured your neck pain, but I’ve always had neck problems, it won’t chage anything.”
“You might be able to write every day, but for me, in my situation, that would never be possible.”
This shows a lack of understanding of learning principles. Because with any exercise, program, diet, methodology, you’ll never get the exact same results as someone else, because you can never replicate the exact circumstances and actions of a person.
Instead, you do the exercise/program/diet/… within the framework of your own personal context/skills/past experience. Within that context, it will guide your learning process. But the outcome resulting from it is personal.
Variance is to be expected, and this is a good thing. Because this is how innovation happens: actions in different types of circumstances lead to slightly different results. Sometime that leads to disappointment, sometimes to real breakthroughs.
Getting different results, then, is not a reason to pre-emptively disqualify yourself, or to claim something doesn’t work. Because the true value doesn’t lie in getting the exact same results as someone else, but rather, to consciously set the general direction of our lives.
Every day, we have to make so many decisions that lead us down different future paths, so modeling someone and using their actions as a guiding principle will greatly increase the probability of you going in the direction you desire, and getting results in the same ballpark.
For example, I’ve been doing Dylan Werner’s yoga classes on Alo Moves (my go-to online yoga/fitness/meditation app) consistently for almost two years now. Even if I continue to follow his exact schedule for two more years, chances are, I still might not be able to do something like this:
After all, we have a different body structure, different gene disposition, different circumstances, and I’ll have to adapt his schedule to my personal capacity.
Still, if I follow his schedule I’ll definitely become much stronger and healthier than if I chose to model a couch potato, watch TV and eat fries and burgers all day. And that’s what it’s all about.
Modeling, in that point of view, are an effective way to accelerate your progress and lead your life in the direction you want, without you having to know exactly which results you’ll get.
In other words: when you let go of the need to predict exact future outcomes, you can stop pre-emptively disqualifying yourself, and start pro-actively setting the direction of your life.
