I like challenges. It’s fun to be in a tough spot and struggle. There’s beauty and meaning in struggle. Work is admirable. Growth is honorable. Yet the other side of the coin is also cool. Being-indulging-relaxing-experiencing. That’s exciting, beautiful and meaningful too.
The challenge here is that you can’t have both at the same time. They are on the opposite end of the spectrum and either one or the other needs to be chosen at a certain moment. Being-indulging-relaxing should not come at the expense of challenge, struggle and growth. At the other hand, challenge, struggle and growth must not be welcomed at the expense of being-enjoying and relaxing. So there needs to be a synergy. The interesting thing here is, people that embrace struggle, fight for growth and overcome challenges are the ones who get the most opportunities for being, indulging and relaxing. These people enjoy the journey through all the struggle, grow throughout the journey, bring necessary solutions to existing problems and at the same time get the most amount of rewards lavishly bestowed upon them. It’s like the saying- winner takes it all. It’s super meaningful and the best of the both worlds.
So I want to be one of those people. I don’t necessarily know the perfect way to get the synergy right, but I have an idea. How about I only indulge when either it’s a direct reward of a certain struggle or it’s an aid towards facing a challenge.
Like meditation is an aid. Coffee is a potential aid. Keto diet, good mattress, watching a movie to relax etc are potential aids. Whereas, cheat dish after a month of strict diet is a reward. Buying something cool after winning prize money is a reward
Of course, dominant thoughts manifest. If you think red, you start seeing red everywhere. If you’re deep into geometry, you start noticing shapes of things. A businessperson sees products and services where others fail to notice.
There are other things working here too. We have unconscious believes that the future will be similar to the past. We have inhibitions towards the new. Setting intentions and visualization fights that.
We have a tendency to change direction often. Our mind wanders like a vagabond. That is not the efficient way to reach a destination. So, reminding yourself of your destination regularly and sticking firmly to your vision helps.
I say I value freedom above all, but keep setting instructions for me to follow. To be effective and efficient, I’ve found that, I should build good habits, avoid bad habits and follow a good routine. That requires discipline to follow pre-planned ideas. That kinda goes opposite of freedom. So I think I need to rethink the model of freedom I want if I want to reconcile with the twin ideas of freedom and responsibilities. Firstly freedom without responsibilities is neither possible nor desirable. Why is it not possible? Because, in a world of form where everything falls apart all the time, someone needs to take responsibility for my existence. If that someone is not me, then I can’t be totally free, I am bound by the wishes of some other to ensure proper existence. So that someone should be me. I need to be capable enough to shoulder my own burden. Why is it not desirable? Well firstly because it’s not true freedom as discussed above and also because it denies dignity.
We must impose order inside and outside of us to exist. The more I give freedom to my whims and impulses the less control I have on the direction of my life. So what is freedom really? Is it freedom to not work? Freedom to sing whenever I want to? Freedom to harm others? What is the freedom that I am after? Is it freedom of choice? Freedom from relying on other people? I would guess I just don’t want to have to answer to someone else. I want to be the supreme authority of my life. Now to some extent that’s impossible. There’s the government and seniors and religious or other leaders who will often have authority over me. But if I can shoulder my own burden, by either decreasing my wishes or increasing my capabilities, then some above average freedom sounds possible. Maybe the best kind of freedom is inner freedom. Freedom from being attached to thoughts and feelings. That requires constant upkeep though. I have to meditate and listen to spiritual stuff everyday. Also I might like the freedom of designing my own life. But that would require being capable enough to shoulder all that responsibilities myself. And for that, I must let go of the freedom of being impulsive and rather be disciplined, like an AI.
The problem with doing the right things is that, it’s risky. Sometimes, it’s just sheer responsibility. Problem with risk and responsibility is that nobody likes them. It’s human nature to be risk averse. And responsibility is just not sexy. You can live a very comfortable life, with most of its necessities, without taking much risk and responsibility. Human progress and the structural stability of our current society has enabled us to goof off all day, keep a menial job and still have a home, a spouse, children, friends and of course, food, clothes and medicine. You can easily numb any feeling of boredom or meaninglessness with drugs, alcohol, TV and smartphones. So why take risks and responsibility?
When you go out of your way to do something properly, it’s a risk. When you go out of your way to do something different, or put a little extra effort or stand up for something you believe in, it’s a risk. Maybe your efforts are a waste. Nobody may show up to your comedy gig. No one may ever buy your book. The people responsible for your promotion might not notice your efforts. The new voice modulation technique you learned might make people laugh at you if you implement it. At least in a conforming life, you get expected results. Your business may fail, but your menial job will deposit a certain amount every month. The new career switch you planned could turn out disastrously wrong. All the trouble for nothing. Whereas, your smoking habit at least gives you pleasure right now, and you might even get lucky and not get cancer!
But, there’s a caveat. Proper, calculated risks, increase the probability of a more desired outcome. Yes, there’s some uncertainty. But, even a casino loses 40% of the times. It’s the 60% probability of success, that makes money for a casino (and that’s why it’s bad to gamble for the individual gambler, as he’ll lose 60% of the times). Thus, each risk you take, starts an invisible slot machine, which randomly rewards you. Calculated risks, make you lose less than you gain. Thus, overtime, the profits accrue. The compounding of your day-to-day rewards, take your life to a better place than it was tomorrow.
What about responsibility? Why tell the truth when lies get you better results at the moment? Why do nice things for people if there’s nothing to get from it? Isn’t it just smarter to lie, cheat, steal at every opportunity you get? Why not vent all my anger on someone innocent if I feel like it? Why care about the proper education of the future generations? You know for a fact that people prosper even without taking much responsibility. There are examples of unearned success everywhere. There are corrupt rich people everywhere. It’s even the easier route to take. Why bother doing something different?
A cancer cell is prosperous, but it’s not good. Good triumphs prosperity, even in your individual experience. Prosperous people soon realize, what really matters is a sense of fulfillment. Meaning is non-negotiable. We are after all some microorganisms waiting for death on a small planet. Our certain death, our lack of perfection and all our vulnerability is what makes life challenging. And facing up to this challenge using all your abilities, gives it meaning. The meaning is in the fight. The rules of the fight matter. Taking shortcuts wins you some individual battles, but you lose the fight. Simultaneously, you make yourself shallow. Instead of being useful to others, you start becoming harmful. And when enough people adopt this way, the world faces the horrors alike the ones in the 20th century. On the other hand, you’ll be amazed if you think how much of a better place the world would be, if everyone took their fair share of responsibilities. That reality will never come until you are one of the good guys. An irresponsible person lives burdened by the knowledge that the world would have been a better place if he did not exist. Can any of the things you achieve in life be an antidote to that?
Life is not here to entertain you or amuse you or please you or give you something. It’s only function is to challenge you. The metric it challenges you on is consciousness.
There’s nothing to get. Nothing to keep. You’re not judged by how much you’ve won, got, made… Or how talented you are. You are judged by how conscious you are at each adversity.
How do you know if you are doing well? By the amount of peace you feel. If you lose your calm, become irritated or vicious or suffer unnecessary by angry or punishing thoughts, you fail. If you are conscious and at peace, feeling joy and sense of aliveness, you pass.
That’s the primary metric that you are judged on. There are secondary ones too if you want to take it up a notch.
Be courageous. Don’t let fear stop you. Explore what you are afraid of. Slay the dragon.
You have to be conscientious. By conscientious I mean industrious and orderly. Be consistent. Let your potential be realized for the good of humankind.
You have to take responsibility for what happens to you. Accept the incompleteness, the emptiness, the suffering of life voluntarily and do your best.
If you still believe life is here for your pleasure, you’ve lost touch with your mortality. You’ve lost touch with how ugly and unforgiving life can be. You’ve failed to realize that, accomplishments, pleasures and everything that you think will make you complete, are like layers of an onion. They feel good for a second but then you need more. Soon You seek something different. And soon you suffer because of what you cling to/ want/ don’t want/can’t get. Why is that? Because we are incomplete mortals. We are not all powerful. We are vulnerable. Life can’t help but be a challenge for us. It’s fundamentally designed that way.
Some mystics say that you can’t find yourself in the world, that whatever you think is you, is not you.
Whereas, some others might say (often the same ones) that, you are one with everything. Everything is you. There is no divide.
Well both of those viewpoints are right.
It all depends on the lens you use to see everything.
You see, we often see the world with an objective lens, while using a subjective one to experience the inner realm. That is where the ‘illusion of division’ starts. See the world with an objective lens, and there is no difference betweens things that happen inside your body, and the things that happen outside of your body. It’s all objects, atoms, particles, reactions and energy.
Well, use a subjective lens and everything is now just another object in the ocean of your consciousness. Your thoughts, the walls in your room, the sensations of your breath, the sound of water dropping… Where’s the divide?
Again, only when you say that your thoughts and senses are your subjective experience whereas the walls in your room are objects, you start seeing a division. But that is like using Celsius scale to measure the temperature of one thing and then using Farenhite to measure the temperature of another thing of the same temperature, and saying that they have different temperatures because the readings in different scales don’t match. Not a very sane way of deduction, is it?
So next time you open your eyes after some meditative moments, try to keep the subjective view of things as you take in the outside world. See how similar your experience is for both your inner realm and the world outside you. Is there any difference in the way you experience the voice inside your head and the voice of someone else?
Choose a star and journey towards it. You might ask, ‘Which star?’. The answer is, ‘It doesn’t matter’. If you are moving, you are defeating entropy. Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, is always there to get you. Don’t let it get you.
Every day, ask yourself, ‘What stupid things am I doing that I should stop?’
Ask and ye shall receive an answer. Stop doing those stupid things. Do this daily and your life can be repaired beyond your imagination.
Don’t compare yourself to other people. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday. Improve upon your shortcomings. That’s how you keep getting better with each day. Soon you’ll like what you see in the mirror.
Assume responsibility. Things go wrong in life often. Assume as if you have something to do about that. Then you can work towards being better prepared when things go wrong again in the future.
Be humble. You are nowhere near as cool as you could be. Open your eyes and look for areas for improvement. Listen to other people as if they have something important to teach you.
Sacrifice. Clinging to your ideas is what makes you stale and stops you from growing. You have to die a little to be reborn as a better person.
Don’t lie. Especially to yourself. You’re easier to deceive than you think. It creates great suffering when someone fools themselves.
Do all of this poorly. Don’t aim for perfection in the first go. Even when you’re doing just an assignment, do it poorly at first. You can always improve what you’ve made. But trying to be perfect in the first go will paralyze you with fear of failure.
And last but not the least, clean your bloody room bucko!
(These thoughts are inspired by Dr. Jordan Peterson’s lectures)
Hope all of you and your loved ones are safe during this pandemic. I admit that lockdowns are very boring, yet they are an opportunity to learn and do things that you’ve always wanted to do but didn’t have enough time for.
My schedule during this lockdown can be divided into three different parts:
i. Morning rituals
ii. Work
iii. Rest
Here is my schedule:
……………..Morning Rituals………………
1. Meditation: I meditate for 15 minutes the first thing in the morning. This prepares my mind to be disciplined for the rest of the day. I know this because whenever I miss my morning meditation I struggle with my will power.
Currently I am using this guided meditation video from Eckhart Tolle as my meditation aid.
2. Listen to an Audiobook: The next thing I do is to connect my earbuds to my phone and start an audiobook. The two next items in my schedule (i.e cleaning room and working out) can be done while I am listening to an audiobook so I take this opportunity to learn about something new.
Currently I am listening to Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. It’s an amazing book that goes deep into all the cutting edge research on sleep. I highly recommend it.
3. Cleaning Room: A clean and well decorated room makes me feel good and aids in my determination to have a great, productive day. So, I take 10 minutes to make my bed, wipe some furnitures and sort scattered items.
4. Workout: While still listening to the audiobook, I get into my workout clothes and open my workout app. I am a huge fan of this app called-“Home Workout “. (They are providing free access to all premium features due to the pandemic, so definitely check it out). Each workout session takes 20 to 30 minutes.
5. Put my phone away: After completing my workout session, I stop the audiobook, disconnect my earbuds and put my phone away in a drawer. I don’t touch it untill my deep work session of the morning (which I will talk about below) is done. This aids in my deep work and keeps me from procrastinating.
5. Take a shower: Elon Musk did an AMA(ask me anything) on Reddit. Someone asked him to share what habits has the largest positive impact on his life. He answered: showering.
I live in a humid country and daily shower definitely helps me feel good for the rest of the day.
6. Wim Hof: I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the Wim Hof method. It’s a breathing exercise that has been researched extensively in the recent years . What researchers have found is, it strengthens your immune system through making your blood slightly more alkaline. I highly recommend you try it out! Here’s the link to the official YouTube channel:
Wim Hof method helps me to feel calm and focused. Have you ever kept yourself from breathing for a while when feeling sleepy? It makes you more alert right? That’s how I feel after going through each session of the Wim Hof mehod.
………………………..Work…………………………
7. Deep work: Ok now we’re onto my favorite session of the day. This is what I look forward to everyday. But let’s talk about what deep work is first:
Cal Newport, a brilliant professor and bestselling author of many books, published ‘Deep Work‘ in 2016. Here he talks about the brilliant skill of working distraction free on a cognitively demanding task.
Deep work enables you to learn complex topics and perform your best work. Barbara Oakley, the brilliant professor behind ‘Learning how to learn’, talks about how distractions hampers your ability to learn. She, being a big advocate of chunking, encourages students to minimize distractions while studying.
After three sessions of the Wim Hof method, I sit down to study. I study for 4 pomodoro sessions, each being 50 minutes long. Currently I am studying ‘Tensorflow’ which is a machine learning library. The course I am taking is called: “Introduction to Tensorflow for Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning “. (If you are interested in taking this course, I recommend you read the Keras documentation first).
8. Nap and Lunch: As I’ve learned from listening to ‘Why We Sleep’ by Matthew Walker, napping is a good habit to get into. It reinforces what I learned in my study session and refreshes my mind and body for the rest of the day. I take my lunch after waking up from my 20 minutes long nap. This is the first meal of the day for me, my latest being only 8 hours later, which makes me fast for 16 hours everyday. This is called intermittent fasting and it has been linked to many helath and cognitive benefits in numerous research .
9. Some More Work: After lunch, I work for 6 more hours. This is when I write in my blog, or make a YouTube video. If I am feeling particularly lazy that day (which sadly is most days), I work on finishing one of the courses that I’ve enrolled in Coursera. Currently, I’m doing ‘The Science of Success’ by University of Michigan. This is a great resource if you want to learn about how successful people are different form others and how to incorporate those traits in you.
………………………Rest……………………..
10. Entertainment:
Mob Psycho 100
After I am done working for the day, I pick up my phone and watch an anime or watch something on YouTube.
Currently I am re-watching Mob Psycho 100 and my absolute favourite YouTuber to watch is B-rad.
11. Sleep: I try to get 8 hours of sleep every night.
So there you go. That’s the routine I strive to live up to everyday even though it’s a struggle to maintain it perfectly, specially because my sleep cycle is all over the place at this moment.
I’d really like to know how your schedule looks like during this lockdown. Please share in the comments below.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. – Richard Feynman
Why do some people accomplish great feats like Elon Musk whereas, most others lag behind? Its true that the law of averages dictate that most people will have average lives and only some will live a truly outlier life. Yet, it remains true that almost all of us have the necessary tools to make our lives better. Then where does it go wrong?
Have you ever wanted to help someone else? To turn someone else into a proper human being? Probably your own children, or someone else you are responsible for? Well, no matter who that is, you are at most 50% responsible for how their lives turn out to be. You know who you are 100% responsible for though? That would be you, yourself. Yet why is it that we find it hard to conjure up enough motivation to do something about our own lives? It’s becuase of fear of failure. It would suck if you tried to do the right things and then failed. You’ll be 100% responsible and you will feel miserable. Fear of failure is one of the worst internal enemies that each of us battle with regularly. It lies to us and makes us work on projects where we can shift the blame on other people. For example: how many people would say they want to solve humanities biggest problems? Better yet, how many people think that they could actually do better than the people currently responsible? Yet when you look at their personal lives, maybe one of their parent is fighting with depression. Don’t you think that person should try his/her best to solve that problem first? What about your big aspirations that you gave up on when reality became unbearable? Don’t you honestly think, if a human can climb Mount Everest, walk on the moon, make a space shuttle company with only 100 million dollars (i’m thinking Elon Musk) then a human, namely you, could also break into the music industry or learn about Artificial Intelligence, or become a heart surgeon (or whatever your dream was that you gave up on)? You are a very special being with incredible powers of neuroplasticity, adaptability and resilience. Don’t sell yourself short. Fear of failure will make you shift focus to other people’s problems and justify that by saying that its nobler. But the reality is, deep down you are just afraid. Tackle the problems that would immediately make your life better. Stop cowering behind projects that would either take an eternity to complete or where you can easily shift the blame of failure to others. That’s how you beat fear of failure.
Here’s a comprehensive list compiled by Class Central. Have fun! If you don’t know where to start from I suggest that you check out the free Manning ebooks, those are great. Also check out the list of 85 free Coursera courses with certificates and 365 data science free courses with certificates. No credit cards required for any of these purchases.
RaihanRiad 