mindsets

Sometimes it's so obvious

Two years into writing my latest book, Discipline is Destiny, I hit a wall. There is no word other than “despair” for what I was feeling. Doubt? One always has that. This was deeper. No, this was a fear that the book would not come together. That I had chosen the wrong topic. That I had used up all my material. That I did not have what I needed, that my momentum had run out. At my lowest moment, before I had really even begun, I was facing the necessity of calling my publisher and asking for a delay. I was also tired. Just so tired. Coming up with the idea for a book is a creative pursuit, actually creating the book is effectively a work of manual labor, sitting in a chair, grinding out each consecutive sentence—a process not measured in hours or days, but months and years. It’s a marathon of endurance, cognitive and physical. For me, in the last decade, I have run not just a couple of these marathons, but 12 of them, back to back to back. That’s roughly 2.5 million words across titles I’ve published, articles I’ve written, and the daily emails that I produced in the same period. To say I was burned out was an understatement…at a moment I could not afford it. This tends to be exactly how it goes. Which is why the best organizations and entrepreneurs and athletes solve for that problem before it happens. In 2012 the San Antonio Spurs were coming off a six game road trip. It was their fourth game in five nights and this game was just 24 hours after their victory over the Magic and 72 hours after a double-overtime victory against the Raptors. More than that, two of their stars Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker had come off long summers playing internationally, while Tim Duncan was in his 16th season in the league. Collectively, the four players had played upwards of 3,000 professional games between them, consistently going deep into the playoffs, nearly every year. So their coach Gregg Popovich decided to rest them, to not play his stars in a nationally televised game against their most hated rivals. “We’ve done this before in hopes of making a wiser decision, rather than a popular decision,” he told a reporter. “It’s pretty logical.” Logical, yes. Easy? No. And definitely not popular. In fact, the NBA would fine them $250,000 for daring to do it. But the concept of ‘load management’ was there to stay. As someone who is disciplined and driven, I have struggled with this myself. When we are committed, when we are driven, self-discipline isn’t always about getting up and getting to work. It’s easier to workout than to skip a workout, easier to write than relax. The problem with that is that if you want to last, you have to be able to rest. I remember I had Olympic mountain biker Kate Courtney on the podcast while I was working on Discipline is Destiny and she told me a piece of advice she had gotten from her coach when she was pushing herself too hard in practice. “Do you want to be fast now,” they asked, “or later?” Meaning, do you want to win this workout or win the race? “The indiscipline of overwork,” the writer John Steinbeck wrote, “the falsest of economies.” When I say that self-discipline saves us, part of what it saves us from is ourselves. Sometimes that’s from our laziness or our weakness. Just as often, it’s from our addictions, from our excesses, from our impulse to be too hard on others and ourselves. It makes us not just great at what we do, but best, in that fuller sense of the word. Aristotle, who wrote so much on virtue, reminded us that the point of virtue wasn’t power or fame or money or success. It was human flourishing. What is more important than that? As I struggled to write Discipline is Destiny, I tried my best to improve in another area of my life—how my work and self-discipline manifested itself at home. Several years ago, after I sold a project, my editor called my wife, in part to congratulate us but also to apologize. She knew what this meant for my wife—what it would do to me, who I became in the dark depths of a book. However this book does, even if it makes a difference for a lot of people, what I am proudest of is who I was while I wrote it. There weren’t any apologies necessary, even when it felt like it might not come together. Did my kids even notice? I’m not sure they did. Even that moment where I felt like I might need to delay the book, I remember thinking: And? So what? Sometimes things have to be delayed. If that’s what it takes to do things right, so be it. A less disciplined me, a younger me? I would have been wrecked by all this. I would have acted out. I would have been consumed. There was no ‘calm and mild light’ for me when it came to my work. There was little balance. I was all ambition and drive…and when something got in the way, I was indomitable and aggressive. It helped me accomplish things. It also made me unhappy. It would not have served me well on this project. Worse than that, it would have made me a hypocrite. So yes, as I finished the book, I was still tired. Every writer is tired when they get to the end of a book. Yet, I also felt wonderful. Life is for the living. We are meant to be up and doing. If books came naturally, without effort? Everyone would write them. And for [books], you can plug in whatever it is that you do. It’s good that it’s hard. It’s good that it can be discouraging. It’s good that it breaks your heart, kicks [...]

Lion optional

I realized—many years ago—that when I behave generously, I feel rich. I like to feel rich. So I choose to be generous. Behaving generously doesn’t necessarily mean “donating money” or “giving away your last cookie.” Those are two options, sure, but there are plenty of other ways to be generous. You can share knowledge freely, instead of hoarding it. You can send a handwritten note, instead of a text message. You can make eye contact, instead of checking out and staring down at your phone. You ca

by Ashutosh Jogalekar I shamelessly borrow the title of this essay from my mentor and friend Freeman Dyson’s marvelous talk on birds and frogs in mathematics. Birds are thinkers who look at the big picture and survey the landscape from a great height. Frogs are thinkers who love playing around in the mud of specific…

A new way to think about brainpower.

Big dramatic changes don't work. If you want to improve, tiny gains over an uncommonly long period turn into massive results.

The importance of memory and how it relates to learning


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Read in your browser here. 
 Hi friends, Greetings from Austin! I celebrated my birthday last weekend, so I spent...

What happens when you argue with an idiot? You become one.

By age 35, Akinola Bolaji had already spent two decades scamming people online, posing as an American fisherman to con…

The ancients were fond of an expression: Character is fate. It means that character is deterministic, that who you are determines what you will do. Self-discipline is one of those special things that is both predictive and deterministic. It both predicts that you will be great, AND it makes whatever you are doing great. It is not a means to an end. It is not just something we value until we get something we think we might really value—this job title, that amount of money, winning the biggest game, landing the best opportunity. No. Discipline is the win. When you are disciplined about your craft…you win. When you know you put your best into something…you win. When your self-worth is tied to things you can control (effort, for example)…you win. This is what I mean when I say, as I titled my latest book, Discipline is Destiny. Who we are, the standards we hold ourselves to, the things we do regularly—in the end, these are all better predictors of the trajectory of our lives than things like talent, resources, or anything else. So here, adapted from my latest book, Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control, are 25 habits that will put you on the best trajectory possible. 1. Attack the dawn. The morning hours are the most productive hours. Because in the morning, you are free. Hemingway would talk about how he’d get up early because early, there was, “no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.” Toni Morrison found she was just more confident in the morning, before the day had exacted its toll and the mind was fresh. Like most of us, she realized she was just, “not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.” Who can be? After a day of banal conversations, frustrations, mistakes, and exhaustion. 2. Quit being a slave. On an ordinary afternoon in 1949, the physicist Richard Feynman was going about his business when he felt a pull to have a drink. Not an intense craving by any means, but it was a disconcerting desire for alcohol. On the spot, Feynman gave up drinking right then and there. Nothing, he felt, should have that kind of power over him. At the core of the idea of self-mastery is an instinctive reaction against anything that masters us. We have to drop bad habits. We have to quit being a slave—to cigarettes or soda, to likes on social media, to work, or your lust for power. The body can’t be in charge. Neither can the habit. We have to be the boss. 3. Just be about the work. Before he was a big time comedian, Hasan Minhaj was asked if he thought he was going to make it big. “I don’t like that question,” he said. “I fundamentally don’t like that question.” Because the question implies that doing comedy is a means to an end—the Netflix special, selling out the stadium, doing this, getting that. “No, no, no,” he said, “I get to do comedy…I won. It being predicated on doing X or being bigger than Y—no, no, no. To me, it’s always just been about the work. I’m on house money, full time.” 4. Manage the load. “Absolute activity, of whatever kind,” Goethe said, “ultimately leads to bankruptcy.” No one is invincible. No one can carry on forever. We are all susceptible to what the American swimmer Simone Manuel has helped popularize: Overtraining Syndrome. Even iron eventually breaks, or wears out. 5. Do the hard things first. The poet and pacifist William Stafford put forth a daily rule: “Do the hard things first.” Don’t wait. Don’t tell yourself you’ll warm up to it. Don’t tell yourself you’ll get this other stuff out of the way and then…No. Do it now. Do it first. Get it over with. 6. Keep the main thing the main thing. “I wish I knew how people do good and long sustained work and still keep all kinds of other lines going–social, economic, etc,” John Steinbeck once wrote in the middle of the long grind of a novel. The truth is, they don’t! It is impossible to be committed to anything–professionally or personally–without the discipline to say no to all those other superfluous things. 7. Make little progress each day. One of the best rules I’ve heard as a writer is that the way to write a book is by producing “two crappy pages a day.” It’s by carving out a small win each and every day—getting words on the page—that a book is created. Hemingway once said that “the first draft of anything is shit,” and he’s right (I actually have that on my wall as a reminder). 8. Be kind to yourself. The Stoic philosopher Cleanthes was once walking through the streets of Athens when he came across a man berating himself for some failure. Seeing how upset he was, Cleanthes–normally one to mind his own business–could not help himself but to stop and say kindly, “Remember, you’re not talking to a bad man.” Discipline isn’t about beating yourself up. There’s a firmness involved, for sure. Ultimately, after a lifetime of study of Stoicism, this is how Seneca came to judge his own growth—“What progress have I made?” he wrote. “I have begun to be a friend to myself.” It is an act of self discipline to be kind to the self. To be a good friend. To make yourself better. To celebrate your progress, however small. That’s what friends do. 9. Bring distinction to everything you do. Plutarch tells us about a general and statesman in Greece named Epaminondas who, despite his brilliance on and off the battlefield, was appointed to an insultingly minor office in Thebes responsible for the city’s sewers. In fact, it was because of his brilliance that he was put in this role, as a number of jealous and fearful rivals [...]

1.“For me, first of all, dopeness is what I like the most. Dopeness. People who want to make things as dope as possible, and, by default, make money from it.” As everyone who is dope knows, “dopene…

Three rare and powerful skills: 1. Understanding how people justify their beliefs in a way that makes you respect their delusions. A rare and useful skill is understanding that people you find to be deluded likely suffer from the same shortcomings you do. Historian Will Durant wrote in his book The Lessons of History that we should learn enough from history to respect each other’s delusions. He explained: Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice. I think this boils down to three points: Everyone is heavily influenced by what they’ve experienced firsthand, because what you’ve experienced is more persuasive than something you read about. Even our understanding of firsthand experience is sketchy, because we oversimplify what happened and self-justify our involvement. Those who didn’t experience an event firsthand have an even weaker grasp on reality because they can cherry pick the oversimplified, self-justified arguments and data from people with firsthand experience. So everyone has delusions about how the world works. You, me, everyone. We are all prisoners to our past, products of our generation, and influenced by who we’ve met and what we’ve experienced, most of which has been out of our control. Some are worse than others, and some are more aware of their blindspots. But everyone has a firmly held belief that an equally smart and informed person disagrees with. Good questions to ask to combat this reality are: What haven’t I experienced firsthand that leaves me naive to how something works? Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation? What do I desperately want to be true, so much that I think it’s true when it’s clearly not? Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different? But an even better skill is realizing that everyone else struggles with those questions and winces at the potential answers. You don’t have to agree with others’ delusions or put up with their collateral damage. Just accepting that everyone wants easy and comforting answers in a complex and painful world is a rare skill. 2. Quitting while you’re ahead, or at least before you’ve had too much. Commenting on how he lived to 97, John D. Rockefeller’s doctor said the oil tycoon “gets up from the table while still a little hungry.” It’s another rare skill, and one that applies beyond eating. The temptation to exploit every drop of opportunity leads many people to push relentlessly for more, more, more. They only discover the limits of what’s possible when they’ve gone too far, when the momentum of decline is often unstoppable. Businesses that don’t want to hold inventory push so hard for efficient supply chains and just-in-time manufacturing, stripped of all shock absorbers and room for error. Then a pandemic hits, and supply chains crumble. Young workers eager for promotion push themselves until they’ve hit burnout, when they physically can’t continue in their positions and quit, which often marks the end of compounding their skills and work relationships. People on social media push relentlessly for more likes and retweets until their audience is sick of them. In each case there’s value in saying, “I could have more and do more, but this is good enough.” But it’s such a rare skill. People don’t like leaving opportunities on the table, and it’s counterintuitive to realize that you’ll likely end up with more than those whose appetite for more is insatiable. 3. Getting to the point. Perhaps the most critical communication skill. Be brief. Use as few words as possible to say what you need, and everyone will appreciate it. Mark Twain said kids provide the most interesting information, “for they tell all they know and then they stop.” Adults lose this skill and falsely associate the number of words with the amount of insight. After writing every sentence it helps to ask “Would the reader still get my point if I deleted that line?” Not “Does that sentence make sense?” Millions of unnecessary sentences make sense. Treating words like they cost you something is the right mindset. A writer once recommended imagining someone pays you $100 for every word you remove from your draft. Another quipped: “Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.” Poor communicators ramble. Good communicators leave out unnecessary details. Great communicators treat words as the scarcest commodity.

David Foster Wallace's remarkable 2005 commencement speech, this is water, is a timeless trove of wisdom for living a meaningful life. Here is a full transcript along with audio.

Navigating the status games of today

Entrepreneur Shaan Puri’s uncommon tactics for uncommon results.

The only secret is that it’s a lot safer for people to mirror your behavior than to do something radically different.

It’s normal to feel it. It changes our careers, our dress and even the way we live our lives. The question is: is it caused by external or internal forces? More often than not, it’s sim…

Here are 10 razors, or rules of thumb, that help simplify decision-making, inspired by a list curated by the investor and thought leader Sahil Bloom.


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Read in your browser here. 
 Hi friends, Today is the last day to sign up for our upcoming Write of Passage cohor...

Years of notes on business, productivity, courage, stress, success, relationships and more.

Nostalgia for another way of working