Now, let’s pretend that we’re having one
of those intimate heart-to-heart conversations that we all ideally
imagine having with our fathers. Maybe we’re sipping beers on the back
patio, listening to the crickets and watching the moon slowly find the
horizon. Maybe we’re laughing about some movie we just saw or
reminiscing about that time you threw the cat in the toilet when you
were five.
And in that photo-perfect patio moment,
let’s pretend that I’m suddenly inspired by the gods (i.e., three beers)
to impart some of that uber-cliched fatherly wisdom to you that’s
supposed to completely rearrange the interior decoration of your mind.
Let’s pretend that I turn to you, my lovely
son/daughter/ambiguously-gendered-person-that-I-don’t-fully-understand-but-still-love-and-accept-unconditionally,
and share with you, in all my fatherly wisdom, the three most important
life skills that no one has ever told you before.
And then you turn to me and say, “What the fuck, dad? You sound like an infomercial all of a sudden.”
And I’m like, “Uh, yeah…” and then
awkwardly launch into the conversation anyway, because, fuck it, I’m
your father and you have to listen to me, whether you want to or not.
So yeah, pretend all that stuff is happening. And then imagine this is more or less what I would say.
First Important Life Skill: How to Stop Taking Things Personally
An unfortunate side effect of our consciousness residing in our brains is that everything we experience in our lives involves us somehow. The car in traffic today cut you off. The cable news show you saw last night pissed you off. Your company’s massive growth this year gave you more money.
As a result, we tend to have an inherent bias towards assuming that pretty much everything that happens to us is actually about us.
But here’s a newsflash: Just because you
experience something, just because something causes you to feel a
certain way, just because you care about something, doesn’t mean it’s
about you.
This is hard to remember. And not just
because we’re so embedded in our brains and our own bodies. But because
making everything about us, in certain ways, feels good for short
periods of time.
It feels good to think that everything
that’s good that happens in your life happens to you because you’re this
good, amazing person. But the price you pay for making those good
experiences about you is that you must also make the bad experiences
about you — you must interpret all of the bad things in your life to be
about you as well.
And as a result, you place yourself onto a
self-esteem roller coaster, where your self-worth bobs up and down,
experiencing dizzying highs and crashing lows with the merciless tides
of whatever bullshit happens to be going on at the time.
When things are good, you are the gods’ gift to the earth,
who deserves to be recognized and applauded at every turn. When things
are bad, you are the self-righteous victim, who has been wronged and
deserves better.
What is constant is this sense of deserving. And it’s this constant sense of deserving that turns you into an emotional vampire,
an anti-social black hole that only consumes the energy and love of
those around you without ever offering anything in return.
OK, maybe that was a bit dramatic. But you get the point.
When people criticize you or reject you,
it likely has way more to do with them — their values, their priorities,
their life situation — than it does with you. I hate to break it to
you, but other people simply don’t think about you that much (after all,
they’re too busy trying to believe everything is about them).
When something you do fails, it doesn’t mean you are a failure as a person, it simply means you are a person who happens to fail sometimes.
When something tragic happens and you become horribly hurt, as much as your pain has you absolutely convinced that this must be about you, remember that hardship is part of choosing to live, that the tragedy of death is what gives meaning to life, and that pain has no prejudice — it afflicts us all. Deserving or not deserving isn’t part of the equation.
Second Important life Skill: How to Be Persuaded and Change Your Mind
Most people, when their beliefs are challenged, hold onto them as though they are a life vest on a sinking ship.
The problem is that often times their beliefs are the sinking ship.
For most of us, most of the time, our beliefs are not simply ideas that we hold to be true, but they make up key components of our identity.
And to question those beliefs means to fundamentally question who we
are as a person… which, in case you didn’t know, is really fucking
painful.
So we’d rather put our fingers in our
ears, scream “La la la la la la,” over and over and hope that that
unfortunate evidence that we’re wrong will magically go away.
Take a person who doesn’t believe in
climate change. A lot of them are not stupid. They understand what the
science says. They understand the arguments. The problem is that
somewhere along the way, they decided that not only was climate change
something they believed was fake, but climate change denial also represented who they were as a person.
And once they enter that territory, you’re almost never going to fish them out.
But this attachment to our beliefs doesn’t
just afflict science and politics. I’ve seen it affect most people’s
daily lives as well.
Take dating. I’ve seen men who still held
onto beliefs about themselves that they formed in high school — that
women aren’t interested in nerds; that they need to have a bunch of
money or a sweet ass car to be loved. Maybe these beliefs served them
and explained their lives when they were 16. But at 32, these same
beliefs and assumptions were wrecking their dating life.
You’re going to be wrong a lot in life. In fact, you’re going to be wrong pretty much all of the time.
And in many ways, your ability to succeed and learn over the long-term
is directly proportional to your ability to change what you believe in
response to your ignorance and mistakes.
You may be asking, “How do I do this?”
There is no “how.” It’s all in your head.
There is literally nothing to do here other than mentally try on new
perspectives and ask yourself, “What if [thing that is opposite of my
assumption] were true about me? What would that mean?” And then
psychically traverse the answer.
This will be scary, at first. Your brain will resist it. But, of course, that’s where the practice of the skill comes in.
Try this: Write down 20 things in your life today
that you could potentially be wrong about. And again, I don’t just mean
material stuff. I’m sure my understanding of physics is sorely lacking
in many ways. But that’s not the most important thing I need to change
my mind about.
What we’re going for here is questioning
some of those deep assumptions about your identity — I am not an
attractive person; I am lazy; I don’t know how to talk to people; I
won’t ever be happy because I feel stuck in my life; I think the world is going to end next Tuesday.
The more emotionally charged the assumption, the more important it is to write it down and challenge it.
Then, after you’ve gotten 20, go through and write down what it would mean in your life if it were wrong.
This will feel scary at first. A lot of
your assumptions you won’t want to question. But think of it this way:
how confident can you be in your own beliefs if you’ve never challenged
them, if you’ve never seen the other side? What we want to develop is
that ability to see that “other side.” And those few occasions when it
does appear more likely and more valid, hop on over.
Third Important Life Skill: How to Act Without Knowing the Result
Throughout most of our lives, almost
everything has a clear result attached to it. In school, you write your
term paper because that’s what your teacher told you to do. At home, you
clean your room because that’s what your parents reward you for. At
work, you do what your boss says because that gets you paid.
There’s no uncertainty. You just act.
Teacher wants a paper. So you write it. Mom wants a clean room. So you clean it.
But most of life — that is, real life —
doesn’t work this way. When you decide to change careers, there’s no one
there telling you which career is right for you. When you decide to commit to someone, there’s no one telling you this relationship is going to make you happy.
When you decide to start a business or move to a new country or eat
waffles instead of pancakes for breakfast, there’s no way of knowing —
for certain — if what you’re doing is “right” or not.
And so we avoid it. We avoid making these
decisions. We avoid moving and acting without knowing. And because we
cannot act on what we don’t know, our lives become incredibly repetitive
and safe.
I get a lot of emails from people asking me how to find their life’s purpose. Or how to know if they’re in the right relationship or not. Or how to know if they’re making the right change.
And I don’t reply to those people because I have no fucking idea.
For one, no one else can decide what’s
right for your life but you. But secondly, the fact that you’re asking
some guy on the internet (or looking for it in a book or something) is
itself part of the problem — you are looking to know the result before
acting.
There’s a great scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker shares his life’s philosophy:
“I just do things.”
Now, for all of Joker’s flaws (terrorist,
mass murderer, armed robber, political assassin — but we’ll overlook
that for now), he does have a point here.
“Schemers trying to control their little worlds…”
The fact is: sometimes you just have to do things
for no other reason than to do them. Do them because you can. Because
they exist. As George Mallory said when asked why he wanted to climb Mt.
Everest: “Because it’s there.”
Add some chaos to your life. A certain amount is healthy. It stimulates growth and change and passion and excitement.
Developing the ability to simply do things
for no other reason than curiosity or interest or hell, even boredom —
the ability to do things with no expectation for result or accolade or
productivity or fanfare — will train you to better make these big
ambiguous life decisions. It will train you to simply start on something
without knowing where in the hell it’s going.
And while this will result in a thousand tiny failures, it will also likely result in your life’s biggest successes.
You can start small. Open up meetup.com and attend something for no other reason than it looks interesting or is there. Go to Udemy or Khan Academy
and sign up for a course for no other reason than it looks cool. Call
up a friend or family member and tell them, “Show me something new that
you think is amazing,” and go from there.
But there’s a subtle trap here, of course.
Many of you will go out and think, “Well,
Dad [that’s me, remember?] said I need to start spontaneously doing
stuff so that I can be able to make those big decisions in my life
despite uncertainty. So let’s see, what spontaneous thing can I plan and
engineer today?”
You fail.
Before you even started, you already failed. There is nothing productive about this. There is no progress here. Stop making everything you do about accomplishing some fucking goal.
Or to put it another way: Get good at wasting time in unexpected ways.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a poker game with a group of random friends and strangers to organize.
0 comments: