It’s a beautiful summer evening, the breeze is soothing and sultry. I’m parking my car on the way back from dinner, and there’s an abnormally abundant number of parking spots available in my neighborhood.
Instant thought – people are out having a good time in this summer evening and I should be out there too.
This FOMO anxiety is the real deal. I feel like everyone is living a better life than me. Having more fun. I feel guilty for not finding something to do to enjoy that summer evening, even though I had just had a lovely dinner with my partner.
It’s a whole new angle on my anxiety that I’m just now starting to be aware of. It’s connected to why I over-plan weekends. Or why during the current thing (dinner, stroll, dancing), I’m planning the next one. I’m always thinking about the optimal way to get everything in.
Really really detracts from my ability to be present.
And I think that if I were able to be present with my current activity, serendipity would happen and I would find myself enjoying that evening in a healthy and organic way. For sometimes if you over-plan, you’re underwhelmed, and disappointed.
I’m thrilled to be observing these thought patterns. Awareness is always the first step.
As I get older, and my job and my personal life seem to get more serious, I feel like I’m constantly behind.
Throw in some hobbies, a side-hustle or two, and a writing practice, and I feel like I’m constantly coming up short.
I’ve often heard that life is about sacrifices. To do anything well requires focus.
I think I have a form of anxiety related to FOMO – Fear of Missing Out.
There’s so much I want to do and be good at – salsa dancing, jiujitsu, chess, building a game-changing deep technology startup that helps clean up the planet, Spanish.
Travel the world, father some children, spend time with the friends and family that I love being around. Go to concerts and dance parties. Oh and I still need to do errands, go to the doctor, clear up that issue with customer service, make food and coffee and clean up and shower and laundry.
What can I cut out? What is #1? Some of the most successful people seem to have made their business their one and only – everything else is secondary. Seems miserable.
Warren Buffet says to pick something like 25 things you’d like to do and then circle the top 5 and forget everything else. Let’s try:
My partner
Friends/Family
Health? Seems important
Work
Spending time in nature?
Pretty hard to do.
I guess there is no answer here. It’s just one of those things that’s frustrating and beautiful about life. There is so much good shit out there.
Makes me think of Steve Jobs’ messy desk. It just kept piling on and I’m quite sure he had a lot going on. But he made some pretty cool shit. And he did believe in focus and saying no to the 100 other good ideas that are out there.
I just need to be okay with the proverbial messy desk. And keep a few good priorities. The rest will happen or it won’t.
Writing a plan for the day the night before. Learned this from Jocko Willink.
It gets things out of your head and onto paper.
There’s nothing like the feeling of getting started in the morning, seated at your computer, and being completely unsure of what to work on.
I feel like my life is chaos.
So many things I need to work on. So many more things I want to work on. Then there’s all the shit that I don’t want to work on but I have to do/deal with and this list only seems to grow as I get older.
The plan the night before will help identify what is most important so that I can start there in the morning and focus on those key items throughout the day, particularly as new issues pop up, requests from colleagues, fires to put out, etc.
But another thing to try to hone for which I don’t have an answer quite yet is the skill of triaging. There may be things on my To Do list that I’ll simply never get to. Definitely things on my ‘To Read’ list.
It’s an art trying to see a whole pile of stuff that you want to do and figuring out how to do the most important / impactful stuff.
Our brains want us to do the easiest things. These are usually not the most impactful.
I guess I could use a little more Eisenhower’s urgent/important principal matrix in my life. I’ll add it to the To Do list.
I recently saw the movie “Past Lives” on a plane. What an incredibly beautiful film. It made me think about past loves that I have, and how different my life could have turned out.
It follows a multi-decade story of a woman who leaves Korea and her childhood sweetheart, only to be reunited and separated with him a couple more times. The woman gets married to an American man, but the story chronicles this feeling of ‘what if’ with her childhood sweetheart.
It’s a feeling I think we’re all familiar with. Wondering how different our lives could be. Especially when it comes to love it can be quite powerful and painful. I try to describe it as feelings of nostalgia dripping with longing.
Spoiler (sorry): At the end, the woman’s current partner, who is not her past love, comforted her as she cried about the pain of longing and wondering ‘what if’ she had instead gone with her childhood sweetheart.
What’s beautiful about this moment is that the current partner, Arthur, loves her and supports her in her pain and longing. How incredibly mature. It’s what we do as adults – we choose and decide on our partnerships and companions. It isn’t something necessarily dictated by circumstance and hormones.
The loves we had when we were young were so hormone-heavy and intense. Of course when we miss them and think about them it digs deep into our soul. We felt alive. Romantic. Raw.
This movie was incredible because it dug those feelings up for me. It painted a perfect picture of what those feelings are like.
And I was just left in awe of the story teller and filmmaker’s art – how they can tell a story so perfectly that it evokes such a nuanced feeling from me. That’s what art in all forms is all about. The feelings it evokes. Again I’m just in awe how talented someone can be to do that to some stranger watching their art.
The theme of the movie is about In-Yun. A concept in Korea, akin to divine providence that connects people across multiple lives, usually related to love. I’ve been fortunate to benefit from In-Yun. And my mind explodes thinking about how many wonderful people and experiences I’m connected to that have brought me exactly here to this little cafe somewhere, writing this.
It’s a dopamine addiction that needs to be managed.
The hard part is in today’s society, going cold turkey on quitting phone has too many implications. I’m not sure I could continue to hold the job that I have without a phone, let alone a smart phone.
But damn are the consequences really starting to be apparent, both in my personal life and in society.
When I wake up, my instant and overwhelming urge is to check my phone. I wanna see what messages came in over night. I want to check the news to see what happened in the world, especially in these turbulent times.
Coupled with coffee and a cozy blanket and this first-thing-in-the-AM phone use fills up my dopamine cup so damn well. And then correspondingly derails my gratitude practice, my journaling and meditation practice, and my path to a full exercise workout.
That workout really needs to be non-negotiable so I end up skipping things, doing 5 mins of pushups, and telling myself ‘at least I kept the habit alive‘.
Bottom line – I think it boils down to the phone. Smoking cigarettes used to be a cornerstone habit for me that would inform all other habits – good and bad.
Since quitting smoking, I think the phone is the new cigarette for me.
It’s not just on the weekday mornings. I can find myself spending all weekend buried in my phone. Feels like it’s okay because it’s a rest day and that’s what I want. But I wake up at the end of the weekend not feeling rested. I have the anxiety of what was in my phone that I’ve been steeped in all weekend. And I’ve simultaneously neglected all other forms of relaxation and presence like nature, sports, listening to music and much more.
I’m not quite sure the answer here. If I can’t get rid of my phone, how do I improve my relationship to it? I think my first step is to hide it somewhere at night, so that it requires effort to retrieve in the morning. It should take enough time to uncover that my brain can derail that addictive action and refocus to one of my desired pursuits.
I also need to think about playing with the ‘digital wellbeing’ settings a little better to make sure I can’t really access news / twitter / crap before the day starts, while I’m supposed to be working, and then close to bedtime.
How to get myself to a stage in my career where I can forgo at least the smartphone for the bulk of my existence? No clue, but I’ll keep the world posted if I figure it out.
Looking at the world like Monet yields unbelievable levels of presence and ‘being in the now’.
Think about Monet’s paintings – half of the painting is often the reflection that he sees. I think people mostly don’t notice reflections in glass or mirrors or water. People often don’t pay attention to the way light is dappled or areas of light vs shade.
I’m no artist – but just noticing these things makes me feel completely present. I’m aware of where I am, what’s in the world around me. There’s actually a ton of beauty in those angles on the world, and they’re almost hidden in plain sight.
Keep an eye out for those things and you’ll know you’re in the here and the now.
What would the guy I want to be do in this situation?
I’m trying to use this as a guiding thought process any time I’m going to make a decision that I’m unsure about, or any time I’m feeling stress.
Would the guy I want to be have that drink?
Would the guy I want to be let that little thing irritate him, stick out in his mind, and ruin the entire day?
Would the guy I want to be give up on that project, miss that workout, or be too tired/lazy to go out and get that experience? Does that guy I want to be prefer to scroll instead of read/grow/learn?
It’s a hard time right now, and I’ve been doomscrolling for weeks thinking about Israel, Gaza and hatred in the West.
I’ve been affected by my good habits suffering, and excused return of some bad habits.
Fortunately, I haven’t become an asshole, or so I think.
But someone in my life has – and I’ve been resentful about it for the last few weeks. They have always been kind of a nice asshole, but this person has a lot going on in their life. Family stress and job stress for them were already pretty strong, plus a heavy layer of PTSD. This person is equally pained by the events in Israel, so they’re quite stressed.
While I’ve been resenting this person for a few weeks now, I realized today that they must be really overwhelmed and feeling quite helpless. And I decided to have compassion for them and what they’re going through.
Compassion is such a powerful tool for peace. If everyone exercised it, the world would be a much better place.
I learned about compassion as my father was dying. We had a complicated relationship and missed the opportunity to deeply connect around that. I was forced to have compassion for him, largely after his death, if I wanted to have any meaningful evolution and closure in our relationship. I certainly wasn’t going to get anything from him!
Compassion takes away most of the power that other people’s words and actions have on us. It is the ultimate ego surrender. To have compassion for people who are harming you, or people that are being assholes to you, illuminates the humanity in that person. It connects your humanity with theirs, improving the world one understanding relationship at a time.
Back to the writing practice. I don’t even want to look at how long it’s been.
It really is true – it’s not about how many times you fall down, it’s about how many times you get back up.
I’ve already abruptly stopped this a few times. Personal chaos, bad habit creep, and now war.
All of these things have been excuses to stop doing the core things that I want to be doing.
I could have used the fact that I’ve already slipped to say ‘fuck it’ and entirely give up. That’s when the massively negative self talk comes in:
“you’re no good”
“you can’t stick with anything”
“your writing is bad anyway”
But today I didn’t let that win. Today I got back up, got out of bed early, journaled, did my gratitude practice, and exercised. And I avoided milk in my coffee which gives me brain fog.
Those simple things that are sometimes so hard to do, when it feels like all I want to be doing is doomscrolling about Israel-Palestine. Or using the fact that I slept poorly as an excuse to sleep in and not exercise.
All of these things compound in either direction – good or bad. It can be tough to break the cycle and turn the tide back to good.
But as long as we keep trying to break the cycle. As long as we keep getting back up….
This post feels kinda shitty. I guess I better practice again tomorrow 😉
I recently joined ROTEC – Reverse Osmosis Technologies full time to help build a U.S.-dedicated business for the company. But ROTEC’s roots are in Israel. It was founded as a spinoff from Ben Gurion University in the Negev desert. Much of the desalination and water treatment technology in the world today has emerged from Israel, born out of necessity, the mother of invention.
ROTEC’s mission is to bring its technology to the rest of the world to improve water treatment systems. I firmly believe that commerce, and as a subsector of that, water infrastructure and innovation, are tools for peace.
Human beings are one family, and we all need water. It is incredibly painful for me to see water and water infrastructure used as weapons of war.
As a human, I abhor violence, violence against innocent civilians in particular, and I expect anyone that I interact with to feel the same.
As a Jew, I am fearful of the hate that I see in the words and chants expressed towards my people, and as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors I take this hatred extremely seriously.
As an Israeli, I am pained to be so far away from loved ones and friends in a country that I have called home for nearly the last 10 years.
Loved ones are under rocket fire, friends and colleagues have been called into the reserves, and friends of friends have been senselessly murdered.
And despite all of this pain, Israel continues to push forward. ROTEC staff members are working from home and close to bomb shelters, but they are working. ROTEC employees that have been called into reserves are still somehow sending emails. ROTEC and WFI Group have used their resources to deliver badly needed goods and equipment to displaced families from the South of Israel, and to soldiers that were forced to hurry to assignments in the North of the country.
My hope is that one day soon we can live in a world where I can help design and install advanced water treatment technology in Gaza, in collaboration with Israel, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. But it can only happen in a world where our governments care more about water, commerce and peace than they do war.
I started saying this in my head recently and it really works.
This technique is kind of like a gratitude technique but it’s much more interesting. Gratitude is almost passive. Thinking that you’re fucking cool is a much more active approach to being present and interested in everything going on in your day to day life.
I really mean to actually think “my life is really fucking cool and the fact that I’m doing the thing I’m doing right this very second, or dealing with whatever problem this is right now, is really fucking cool and I’m cool and this is a cool person’s life that I’m living”.
I haven’t yet experimented with this theory at the funeral of a family member or in the hospital or during a divorce, so it has a few stress tests that need to happen before it is officially out of beta.
But for now it seems to work and I love thinking it. Even about mundane things. And it has nothing to do with what society thinks is cool, or even what I think is cool.
I’m sitting here and ‘blogging’, and typing on this computer – it’s raining outside and I just had coffee. Fuck that’s cool. I think I’m partially zooming out and looking at myself like I’m in a movie and I’m the main character. This is the ‘blogging at the desk while it’s raining outside scene’ and it’s fucking cool and so many people wish they could be doing it.
It’s a work in progress. And the fact that I’m working on thought processes that make everything I do cool, is it fact fucking cool as hell.
A straight back is a proxy for how disciplined I’ve been lately.
If my back is straight, that means I’ve been exercising. If I I’ve been exercising that means I’ve been waking up early. If I’ve been waking up early, I’ve probably been meditating. When I’m meditating I can feel how straight my back is.
I was diagnosed with kyphosis at the age of 5 and wore a back brace until middle school.
All of my stress is carried in my back. I slipped a disc a couple of years ago. I have sciatica often.
My back is the barometer for how I’m doing in my life. When it’s straight and pain-free I feel confident.
And I guess it will require more work as I age. More discipline, more attention.
1 full week since my last post! Tsk tsk, not good.
I went to a wedding out of town last weekend and I think I just finally recovered.
It’s incredible how easily thrown off I get from routine, and the difficult habits (often those with the highest reward) are the ones that get tossed first.
I learned a couple of things from this hiatus:
There’s no reason that I couldn’t have blogged while at this wedding weekend or while recovering. Even to write about those topics themselves would have been sufficient. My inspiration for this blog is in large part Seth Godin‘s blog. His posts are often quite short – just a few sentences.
I like to let loose and party, but I’m starting to reach the age where the bad feeling I have from missing workouts and blogging for a few days is worse than the good feelings of partying. And are they even that good? There was definitely a way to have fun at the wedding and stick to my commitments to myself.
This return to the page has helped me synthesize the above thoughts about this. And that is a lesson in and of itself. The page helps. It’s helping me think, and moving me forward. Long live the page.
I slipped a disc in my back a couple of years ago. I had been exercising every morning for years and was in very good shape. The disc completely fucked me up – couldn’t walk, horrible nerve pain.
In the last couple of years I’ve bounced back. I can move around normally and I’m more flexible and my core is much stronger than it ever has been. But I would still get some sciatica every time I’d work out.
I’d try to work out a couple of mornings in a row but my sciatica would flare up and then I’d take a week off. I think subconsciously I was scared and discouraged by the pain. Nerve pain is fucking brutal. Now mind you I was still doing jiujitsu and salsa dancing and bicycling to get around, so I was active – but that every morning workout regimen really fell by the wayside.
I’m proud to say that I’ve recently picked that regimen back up, and I feel incredible. There was some sciatica at the beginning but I think I’m over the hump. Movement is the way out of that kind of stuff and I was subconsciously limiting my movement. You have to lean into the pain to overcome it. I started doing 5-10 mins of stretching at night as well.
The effects of this regular exercise are more powerful than I remember. I can function on less sleep. I can wake up, do my morning gratitude and meditation routine, go to the bathroom, and exercise without having coffee. I feel much more alert and alive.
The original title of this post was “The Power of Exercise” but I think the lesson here is about leaning into pain. The only way out is through.
Not such a cheery title, but it’s true. And thinking about it can help us live a better and more present life.
It’s from Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations“, which is chock full of stoic wisdom.
He says something to the effect of, “The river is flowing. Everything is dying.”
I felt it today getting started on a morning run. Boy were my muscles sore.
I felt it today in the blustery morning, Fall whispering to us, leaves already beginning to drop, foreshadowing the turning of time.
I’m hearing it in a friend who’s stressed about having to care for her aging parent. Soon we may be the parents, and eventually the ones who need care.
We are currently in the Hebrew month of Elul, the month leading into Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur, the holiest days of the year for Jews where we take stock of our lives this past year and set intentions for the coming year.
There are poems that are read on these days in synagogues around the world, framing life as a passing shadow, a disappearing cloud, a fading flower.
It seems morbid, but every time I read something like that or think about it, it instantly makes me present and grateful. I say the ‘river is flowing’ thing every morning as part of a gratitude practice and it works.
Try it. Wake up to your life and the fact that it is ending.
Sometimes I wonder what the hell I’m doing even writing this blog.
I don’t think it furthers my ‘dreams’.
Tangent: Amazing that I put dreams in quotations. As if it’s embarassing to have dreams and I need to protect myself from people finding out that I have them.
And I hesitate to even write my dreams here. But I am going to do it. The trick to realizing your dreams is admitting that you have them. Kind of like alcoholics admitting they have a problem. Only with addiction, you admit you have a problem and have no control over your problem (although you then promptly try to take control by stopping to use the addictive thing). For dream realization, you’re in complete control. It’s all you. You just need to start chipping away at it one step at a time.
And really that first step is to be able to say what you want and what you want to do.
People’s identities are so tied up in their dreams. I feel embarassed to admit a dream I have because I have not accomplished it yet. My identity of being a person who one day could achieve this dream is threatened by the fact that I have not yet achieved it. So then who am I if not the guy who will eventually achieve this dream.
It’s even scarier to take a tiny step towards that dream. What if that step is a misstep? What if I fail at one of those steps? Now that’s really threatening my identity and scaring the shit out of me.
One of the exercises in “The Artists Way” is to write 10 times in your journal, “I am a talented and prolific ______”. The blank is whatever you want to be. For many reading that book it’s ‘writer’ or ‘filmmaker’. For me, it was ‘entrepreneur’. Which is embarassing because I’m not currently running a business that I’ve started. So technically, I’m not an entrepreneur.
But the exercise is incredible. It makes you so uncomfortable to write it. And if you pay attention to all of the little voices and doubts in your head that pop up as you write it, you can start to dialogue with those critics. You can rebut their critiques.
It’s powerful. Just as powerful as it is writing on the internet that I want to be a deeptech entrepreneur and take an important environmental technology out of a research lab and commercialize it into a startup.
So if that’s my dream why do I take precious time every morning to write these lame posts when I could be taking steps to further that dream?
I guess the practice of putting it out there, on the internet, and silencing those inner critics is/was the next necessary and important step.
This morning I REALLY didn’t want to do the workout I had planned.
My body was achey. I had planned to do suicides on the basketball court near my apartment. Suicides are where you sprint to touch each major line of the basketball court, returning to the baseline in between each line touch, until you’ve sprinted the full length of the court. They’re brutal.
I’m trying to get my VO2 Max up. VO2 Max is the maximum rate of oxygen consumption your body can use. And pushing yourself as hard as you can is how to improve it. I don’t have a fitbit or apple watch so I don’t actually measure the number, but having a high-intensity workout day is now part of my mix.
Suicides are awful, and they hurt. In general, VO2 Max day is one of the more uncomfortable workout days in my regimen. You’re working as hard as you can, out of breath, and in pain.
I really felt resistance to walking out the door to do this workout today. And that’s why I had to do it.
I’ve started to pay attention to when I feel that resistance. Saying something to my partner that I’m afraid to say. Speaking honestly about something that’s bothering me. Doing that task that’s been on my To Do List for weeks that I REALLY don’t want to do.
But the reality is – you do them, and then it’s over in a flash. Just like almost everything in life.
And our mental resistance to it is an opportunity to prove to ourselves that we can do hard things, and those things are often the best things for us.
One way to practice this is to stand under the cold water as your shower warms up. Especially in winter – it sucks. But then it’s over. It’s a small daily way to practice doing uncomfortable things that are good for you.
Overcoming that intertia is the hardest part. I haven’t quite figured out a recipe for overcoming it. It sounds trite to say, “you just gotta do it”, but that’s the truth. Just sense the impending pain and discomfort, and then put yourself on autopilot mode and get it done.
Once the ball is rolling….once you’re standing in the shower under the showerhead before you’ve turned it on, you’re already there. Once your shoes are on and you’re out the door, it’s already begun. I think it’s kind of like getting a heavy ball to roll at the top of a hill. The first couple of pushes are difficult and require strength, but as it starts to gather momentum, the ball becomes hard to slow down.
I have the hardest time with saying what’s on my mind. What’s bothering me about a person.
That behavior they do that has been going on for so long that it’s part of their codebase. How do I speak up about it and address it? How do you tell them to change?
Maybe it’ll embarass them, or make them feel insecure.
That’s the little behavior – what about the big point of view they hold on that massive topic? Or that they don’t care enough about something that’s really important to you?
How do you tell them that? How do you talk to them about it?
This stuff gives me a ton of anxiety, and I bottle it up and fall silent or behave weirdly. And that’s no good because people, your partner, your family, your friends – they can tell when you’re not yourself.
Talk to them.
Sure, that’s the best advice. But damn is it difficult to do. And it’s scary. Because what if they refuse to change. Or refuse to even acknowledge their behavior or how it makes you feel.
You’ll feel like a crazy person. But I’m sure there are things you do that drive them crazy. Or outlooks on life and other topics you hold that don’t gel with theirs. So it’s even? Everyone is their own brand of crazy? It’s compromise? It’s the acceptance and even the embrace of people’s peccadillos that help relationships forge onward.
But how do you know when something is a dealbreaker in a friendship or partnership? I find this impossible to know. Is it a feeling? Or something that other close relationships can help you see through their eyes? Or a therapist perhaps?
I do know that talking to the person, however uncomfortable and scary, is the way to go. The people you want in your life will hear you, respond lovingly and try to work towards a solution. And if you’re scared to talk to them because you think they won’t change, then it’s on you to decide how important the topic is to you. This is when it becomes difficult and perhaps is the reason you fear talking to them in the first place. You know they won’t change. Talking has confirmed it and now it’s back on you to decide how to proceed.
But you gotta do it. The only way out is through. Whether that’s with them or without them, the only way to get there is by talking to them.
Following up is a super power. Bugging people to stay at the top of their inbox is the only way to move the needle forward.
I’ve produced a lot of value for technology companies over the years simply by following up 3 or 4 times on stuff.
Weirdly, I was very protective over this ‘secret’. I kind of thought it was my edge. People knew you needed to follow up, but many don’t do it a 3rd or 4th time. I became very nervous that this was the only value I provided to any organization I’ve ever been a part of. And naturally, I fear AI replacing me.
And it has! Thank god. Email automation has been around for years. Following up is a time-consuming pain in the ass but it’s incredibly necessary to get anything done. The fact that it’s automated helps me focus on higher value stuff and realize I have a lot to add!
“Good things come to those who wait, but the only ones getting anything done are the ones who follow up”. I wrote this quote. Not Abraham Lincoln.
Here’s a 3 email recipe you can use for followups:
1st Email/Message
Hi person, this is who I am, what I want, and why I’m emailing you.
(I’ll probably write more posts on how to do this most effectively).
2nd Email/Message
Hi person, just wanted to follow up on this and see if we can chat. Let me know if you have some time to connect in the next couple of weeks.
(Or whatever your goal is – more on these goals a bit later).
3rd Email/Message
Hi Person, are you getting these messages? Just wanted to check to make sure they’re not hitting your spam folder.
This last message is key. Most people actually respond to it. What you’re intimating is that – ‘this message must’ve gone to spam because otherwise you would’ve responded to me’. It also gives the person an escape route to say “ah yes this was in my spam folder” whether it was or it wasn’t.
And there you have it. This can be changed, modified, adapated, and can get more sophisticated with other tools, platforms, workflows, sequences, etc. And all of this can be automated. I wish every email client had that automation built into it but unfortunately it’s usually only available with at least moderately expensive SaaS tools.
One of the most difficult things about life, especially as its complexity grows, is prioritizing and figuring out what is important in the moment.
Think about that task list and how to assess what’s the most important thing to work on of the thousand other things on the To Do list. Fucking difficult. There’s the Eisenhow Matrix which has been used to illustrate the difference between important, urgent, not important, and not urgent. But it’s just a mental model.
I find this to be especially difficult in balancing the To Do List of your personal life with that of work. Figuring out how to prioritize mental health, relationships, physical health, and the demands of others on your time, are really complicated and it doesn’t seem to stop. Every day this skill gets tested from the moment we awake.
With children this skill seems to become honed even further. The working parent of young children likely has very little time for frivolity. It might even be an interesting exercise to pretend you’re a parent. A lot of productivity advice would tell you to look at your To Do List each day and determine what the most impactful thing to get done that day would be.
In today’s world of instant communication, there are so many more relationships that people maintain than they did 100 years ago. Between texting, email, and social, you can quickly get lost in the unimportant, and worse, fall onto someone else’s timetable. Don’t look at your phone first thing in the morning!
Email, texts, calls are all people inserting themselves onto your To Do List. A successful friend of mine would always say to people who are putting stuff on his To Do List, “Am I on your timetable?”
I absolutely love that. It’s a constant effort to stay on your own time table, figure out what’s important, and prioritize it ruthlessly.
Today I wanted to do some pull ups. A good ol’ fashion’ pull day.
I am in a new town and don’t have a pull up bar, so I googled “workout park near me”. Calestehnics-parks.com was the first result and showed me a park that was nearby. Seems like a great tool actually.
But when I bicycled over to the park, it was a children’s playground. I can make due on a playground but the bar was really low and not at all what I was hoping for. I wanted one of those dedicated workout parks. Blast!
But I did the best workout I could do, and felt good about myself.
I think that this practice of trying to adapt and accomplish the mission, even if it’s janky and not how you pictured it, is an extremely good practice.
I suspect people with children are forced into this practice. I think all good entrepreneurs have mastered this. Sometimes it feels like the entire state of Israel is one janky attempt at getting things done however possible.
Letting a hiccup derail your plan is easy to do and probably what our brains default to. It’s a pretty “Fixed Mindset” trait. Very tempting to give up, saying “I would’ve done it, if the setup had been right”. Perfect is the enemy of the good, and all that jazz.
Life is messy, there will always be hiccups. Nothing will go according to plan.
I did the best I could, and feel happy and proud that I did.
Another late arrival to the blinking cursor! Work got in the way, and then lunch. Writing now after lunch, which means I’m in a lactose-derived brain fog.
I’m pretty sure I’m both allergic to dairy and lactose intolerant. Why do I keep eating dairy? It’s just so damn good.
My first coffee of the day is black, and I usually have a good intermittent fast cookin’ until lunch time. But at lunch, if there’s dairy involved, my afternoon coffee is replete with half-and-half cream.
I ought to get away from using the cream in that coffee, and switch to oat milk or just stick with black.
But I had cheese on my eggs for lunch.
And I used butter to cook those eggs.
This brings up for me a concept that my partner told me about, that I think she heard from some influencer on instagram – Don’t Slash All Your Tires. If you puncture a tire when driving down the road, you don’t then take out a knife and slash each one of your tires.
I like this concept and it’s so apt to describe addiction or self-reinforcing behavior or whatever more accurate psychoanalytical term there is out there.
Just because I used butter to cook the eggs, doesn’t mean I need to put cheese on the eggs. Just because I put cheese on the eggs, doesn’t mean I need to then put cream in my coffee.
But I broke the dairy seal! I cracked the threshold and now I’m on dairy. I now know that, objectively, this is just an excuse to justify behavior that I only want to partially be accountable for. It’s addiction talking. I used to do the same thing if I smoked some weed, or had a drink, or puffed a cigarette. The seal is broken, I might as well let it all loose and get totally fucked up beyond recognition.
Long story short, I failed today with dairy. I slashed all my tires.
But maybe tomorrow I’ll avoid the cream at least and drive away with one full tire. That would be an excellent little victory.
I got side-tracked with calls this morning and couldn’t pull off this post until 11am.
Not my ideal way to get this done. I didn’t even have a chance to make a coffee until just now, so my brain was mush and I definitely couldn’t ‘write’. But I did want to show up, nonetheless. “Showing up is half the battle”, apparently attributed to both Stephen Hawking and Woody Allen, says the internet.
And in fact when I did sit down to try this post, the coffee hadn’t kicked in yet and I was a sea of anxiety about a million other things. For me, anxiety doesn’t look like worry, as much as ‘monkey mind’ – my mind spinning out in a thousand directions. It’s doing things like creating problems, having future conversations, engaging in arguments for disagreements that haven’t yet occurred.
So instead of attempting this post right away, I journaled. Just a page. Honestly, I’m not sure if it helped or if the coffee finally kicked in, but I was able to sit and attempt to write what’s been produced above.
I thought in my head about that ‘showing up’ aphorism, and couldn’t imagine how much more difficult it would be to show up on less sleep, with children, with cancer…
But apparently that’s what the pros do. They write, or practice, or whatever – even when they don’t feel like it.
If you make it something that you HAVE to get done, I think it’s easier to show up even when you don’t feel like it. You don’t have a choice.
So here was my first public brush with that on this new blogging endeavor. I’m proud I got this out, and hope to extend this ‘showing up’ thing to other areas of my life and professional pursuits.
Second day in a row sitting down to write. That alone is a victory.
I also finally figured out that if you write in the wordpress app – or whatever place you’re actually publishing – you remove one more step required to publish. Remove friction / obstacles to developing your habit, says Atomic Habits. (Boom! another book referenced with potential affiliate link – I really gotta learn how to do that affiliate shit).
Publishing is also the goal, right? The amount of half-baked, unpublished crap I’ve written that’s sitting in Google docs is immense. Actually, I’m not sure why publishing is the goal. Look ma, I’m already thinking better from writing.
Why is publishing the goal? I could continue to write in Google docs and still develop this morning writing practice. Maybe it’s something specific to me. If I’m publishing, I’m more likely to do the task. Something related to external validation is lurking there I think – subject of another post.
But as I made my coffee this morning I thought, “what the hell am I going to write this morning?”. And the ideas did start flowing. My brain forced itself to start thinking about it. I owe this post to “the world”, and my brain needed to deliver.
There’s also something to publishing quickly with minimal editing. I acknowledge that people don’t want to read crap that the writer spent no time/thought creating. Maybe that’s why no one will want to read AI-generated content. But I don’t mind if anyone reads this or not. It’s for me – to think better and practice communicating clearly in longer form, non-email, media.
I’m actually really enjoying this, and I feel like I could go on. But the time is up and I’ve gotta hit publish so I can get to work.
Oh gosh, what to write here! I’ve dabbled in blogging over the years, but never sticking with it. Fred Wilson of Union Square VC blogs every day. Paul Graham says if you can’t write you can’t think – or something to that effect.
Sure this is what the world needs, another white techie guy blogging. Well, fuck all ya’ll. And I promise I’m more multi-dimensional than that. You’ll see.
I intend to write on this blog to help me. Purely for selfish reasons. It’s Aug 17, 2023, Rosh chodesh Elul – the first day of the Hebrew month of Elul. Which is exactly one month before Rosh Hashanah, the first of the new year.
Rosh chodesh, the start of a new moon, is for me a time of renewal. It’s another chance. It’s fitting that today I write my first blog post in years. It was a coincidence.
Just write. Just start. Just put words on the page.That’s the hardest thing.
I’m currently reading The Artist’s Way – some of it is brutally moronic. But on the whole I think it wakes you up to the fact that we all have creativity inside of us. And it is divine to express it.
Don’t nitpick that word divine – call it the universe’s unique expression of atoms that led to me, and only me, who could write this post. Fuck AI.
This blog is for me. It’s to help me become a better writer. A better thinker.
Should it have been a VLOG? Or whatever the fuck they call that these days? Maybe. I have an interesting, wannabe Richard Brandson-type look.
For now, I want to develop this practice and hone this skill.
I honestly thought this would be the “About Me” for the site, but it turned into a Hello World type of post. I managed to link a couple of other blogs, reference some Jewish stuff, and link a book for which I can maybe get some affiliate marketing dollars. Hooray!
Sorry if you come across this – you really don’t have to read it. But I have to write it.
