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TLDR: This is a long post about how we can suck less at life. This is a bunch of stuff I’m working through myself, so to be honest, I’m mostly writing it for me. I needed to get this stuff organized and out of my head. Maybe it can be useful to some of you as well.
First Things First:
Don’t Die.
Ok, so that’s probably tough to do in the long run, but if you accept that we have some control over our general health and, consequently, the number of healthy, vital years we have left in us, shouldn't we be working on that?
Maybe you’re close enough to optimal health that it’s not worth worrying about, but I’m not. I’m fat, and a decent percentage of you are as well. Even if you’re not fat, you may still be eating unhealthy food, drinking/smoking too much, living under chronic stress, sitting in front of a computer 12+ hours per day with little exercise, etc. etc. We all have areas where we could improve, so why don’t we improve them?
Diworsifying your life?
A while back, I was talking over Snowbank’s Diworsification post with one of my friends, and I realized that the same idea applies to your entire life, not just your business. If multiple areas of your life are off-track, trying to fix them all at the same time just makes it less likely that you’ll succeed at fixing any of them. Of course, how far off track they are makes a difference. Once you have one business running smoothly, maybe you can start on a second one, and once you have one of your life’s problems mostly sorted out, maybe you can work on the next one.
I’ve been making this mistake my entire life. Every time I feel like I’m really ready make changes for real this time, I try to change everything at once, and obviously nothing ends up changing. It’s just like trying to start 10 businesses at once. So I finally realized that my health was the most important thing and everything has to take a backseat to getting it back on track.
Whatever it takes, sort out your health!
I’ve seen a lot of my friends say things like “who cares, the last 20 years are terrible anyway!†F*ck that, if you were going to die today, what would you do to get 20 more years? How much is that feeling going to change once you’re a bit older? Ironically, if we were actually dying tomorrow, most of us would move mountains to be able to hold on to a few more years of life, but how many of us won’t bother to get out of our desk chair for a few minutes per day for the same deal once the payoff is moved into the future?
Quality of Life doesn't only matter once you’re old…
It’s not only about the future… How many flights of stairs can you jog up right now without being winded? This shit affects our quality of life and our effectiveness in the here and now. Lots of us here seem to like the idea of traveling, and I agree! I want to live a life where extended travel plays a big part. I want to go out and experience all the world has to offer! However, that’s actually a lot of work. If you really want to go and see the world, you can’t just drive up, take a few pics, and hop back in the car. Your ability to walk/hike around for hours (sometimes carrying a bunch of shit) will directly affect how much you can get out of your traveling. I may be fat, but in the last decade, I've spent more time living without a car than with one. I’m used to walking pretty much everywhere I go, but even so, going out and trying to be active in a new place, taking advantage of the opportunities… It’s F*cking exhausting.
And don’t forget about business!
In one of positively affect practically every other aspect of your life.
We know what to do, so why don’t we do it?
But you know all of this, right? I hope that the idea that we should take care of ourselves isn't a ground-breaking revelation to any of you. But we still don’t do the things we know we should do… I’m sure you've seen the graph before, but really, it’s always at the root of our avoidance of the really important things:
We spend our lives in working in the wrong quadrants. We do just enough in quadrant 1 to fend off disasters. We spend our most productive hours in quadrant 3 and feel like we’ve gotten lots of shit done! Then we fill up the rest of our time with quadrant 4 activities that are worthless other than as a way to disengage our brains (which is useful, but there are better ways).
The things that really matter, that really make a difference in our lives, are almost all in quadrant 2. But sadly, most of us will do anything and everything to stay out of it. The entire concept of procrastination exists almost entirely to keep us out of quadrant 2! The only way that some of us ever get anything worthwhile accomplished is to create a situation where the important becomes urgent. We engineer crisis after crisis for ourselves so that we actually get things done! Because we know that otherwise, it will never happen…
Why do our brains hate us?
It’s really the lizard brain at work. It’s not that it hates us. It’s just that its goals are very different than ours. Basically, as long as the status quo is relatively safe (not starving, not running from a tiger), our bodies want things to stay the way they are. We’re pretty fantastic at maintaining the status quo, both internally and externally, and not just in subconscious lizard-brain land. If you’ve ever been a part of an organization of practically any size, you can see this manifest itself in every meeting/discussion.
Most of us on this forum probably like to think of ourselves as considerably smarter than the average person, and I’ll agree that we’re probably right. If you’re here, you’ve likely come here because you have, at some point, realized a couple of things which almost guarantee that you’re smarter and more capable than the average person: First, that there are people who know more than you about some things, and second, that you can improve yourself by learning from them.
So grats to us! We’re smart!
First Things First:
Don’t Die.
Ok, so that’s probably tough to do in the long run, but if you accept that we have some control over our general health and, consequently, the number of healthy, vital years we have left in us, shouldn't we be working on that?
Maybe you’re close enough to optimal health that it’s not worth worrying about, but I’m not. I’m fat, and a decent percentage of you are as well. Even if you’re not fat, you may still be eating unhealthy food, drinking/smoking too much, living under chronic stress, sitting in front of a computer 12+ hours per day with little exercise, etc. etc. We all have areas where we could improve, so why don’t we improve them?
Diworsifying your life?
A while back, I was talking over Snowbank’s Diworsification post with one of my friends, and I realized that the same idea applies to your entire life, not just your business. If multiple areas of your life are off-track, trying to fix them all at the same time just makes it less likely that you’ll succeed at fixing any of them. Of course, how far off track they are makes a difference. Once you have one business running smoothly, maybe you can start on a second one, and once you have one of your life’s problems mostly sorted out, maybe you can work on the next one.
I’ve been making this mistake my entire life. Every time I feel like I’m really ready make changes for real this time, I try to change everything at once, and obviously nothing ends up changing. It’s just like trying to start 10 businesses at once. So I finally realized that my health was the most important thing and everything has to take a backseat to getting it back on track.
Whatever it takes, sort out your health!
I’ve seen a lot of my friends say things like “who cares, the last 20 years are terrible anyway!†F*ck that, if you were going to die today, what would you do to get 20 more years? How much is that feeling going to change once you’re a bit older? Ironically, if we were actually dying tomorrow, most of us would move mountains to be able to hold on to a few more years of life, but how many of us won’t bother to get out of our desk chair for a few minutes per day for the same deal once the payoff is moved into the future?
Quality of Life doesn't only matter once you’re old…
It’s not only about the future… How many flights of stairs can you jog up right now without being winded? This shit affects our quality of life and our effectiveness in the here and now. Lots of us here seem to like the idea of traveling, and I agree! I want to live a life where extended travel plays a big part. I want to go out and experience all the world has to offer! However, that’s actually a lot of work. If you really want to go and see the world, you can’t just drive up, take a few pics, and hop back in the car. Your ability to walk/hike around for hours (sometimes carrying a bunch of shit) will directly affect how much you can get out of your traveling. I may be fat, but in the last decade, I've spent more time living without a car than with one. I’m used to walking pretty much everywhere I go, but even so, going out and trying to be active in a new place, taking advantage of the opportunities… It’s F*cking exhausting.
And don’t forget about business!
In one of positively affect practically every other aspect of your life.
We know what to do, so why don’t we do it?
But you know all of this, right? I hope that the idea that we should take care of ourselves isn't a ground-breaking revelation to any of you. But we still don’t do the things we know we should do… I’m sure you've seen the graph before, but really, it’s always at the root of our avoidance of the really important things:
We spend our lives in working in the wrong quadrants. We do just enough in quadrant 1 to fend off disasters. We spend our most productive hours in quadrant 3 and feel like we’ve gotten lots of shit done! Then we fill up the rest of our time with quadrant 4 activities that are worthless other than as a way to disengage our brains (which is useful, but there are better ways).
The things that really matter, that really make a difference in our lives, are almost all in quadrant 2. But sadly, most of us will do anything and everything to stay out of it. The entire concept of procrastination exists almost entirely to keep us out of quadrant 2! The only way that some of us ever get anything worthwhile accomplished is to create a situation where the important becomes urgent. We engineer crisis after crisis for ourselves so that we actually get things done! Because we know that otherwise, it will never happen…
Why do our brains hate us?
It’s really the lizard brain at work. It’s not that it hates us. It’s just that its goals are very different than ours. Basically, as long as the status quo is relatively safe (not starving, not running from a tiger), our bodies want things to stay the way they are. We’re pretty fantastic at maintaining the status quo, both internally and externally, and not just in subconscious lizard-brain land. If you’ve ever been a part of an organization of practically any size, you can see this manifest itself in every meeting/discussion.
Most of us on this forum probably like to think of ourselves as considerably smarter than the average person, and I’ll agree that we’re probably right. If you’re here, you’ve likely come here because you have, at some point, realized a couple of things which almost guarantee that you’re smarter and more capable than the average person: First, that there are people who know more than you about some things, and second, that you can improve yourself by learning from them.
So grats to us! We’re smart!
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