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.
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.
There are things that help you directly. Then there are things that spills over positive effects on your life indirectly. Meditation falls in the second category. In this post, I want to explore this phenomenon from a student’s perspective.
Here are 7 subtle ways regular meditation can help us during our student life:
Awareness:
Often, we get lost in our feelings and in our thoughts. We go somewhere, but we’re not truly there. We see something, but we miss all the details. We stop listening to all the sounds around us. We filter out how our body is reacting to each event.
When you get out of your head, you come back to the world. For a student, this is extremely valuable. Learning the nuances of a craft, studying books properly and taking nonverbal cues from the professors demand a certain level of awareness.
Meditation, through enough practice, sparks a light of awareness inside you. It teaches you to stop and listen. To truly experience a moment instead of just barely skimming through it.
Mindfulness:
We let the chatter in our head go unexamined. This has terrible consequences. This creates a false sense of self in you that has no business inside your head. Its sole purpose is to survive and it will do that at your peril. Thus, students often get involved in activities that we know are bad for us.
When you start being more mindful about your thoughts, you start seeing unhelpful patterns. You start to understand yourself. You learn why you procrastinate and how to beat it. You understand why you like or hate the things you do.
Clarity
Most of us waste time doing the trivial. We watch TV, we binge on Netflix and we wage twitter wars. These are counter productive habits that do us way more harm than good.
As discussed in the first two points, meditation increases introspection. Thus, you get to know what is important to you and what is trivial. This knowledge is immensely helpful for young people at the start of their adult lives.
Focus
Lack of focus makes you unproductive. For peak productivity a student needs to incorporate intense focus in their studies and personal projects.
When you know what matters to you, you have the freedom to eliminate everything else. You can let go of the things that robs you of your precious time. Meditation aids in that process.
On top of that, meditation helps you to practice detachment. Thus, it becomes easier to let go the things you need to. Therefore, you become laser focused on the things you truly care about.
Integrity
When what you think matches what you do, you develop integrity. Without that you can never be truly yourself.
Meditation lets you observe your thoughts and thus facilitates integrity. Therefore, you start to embody what you stand for. You build character. You attract the right people in your life. You get opportunities that wouldn’t have come to you otherwise.
Patience
Patience is key for people who want to be a self-made success. Unless you inherited a fortune, your life is going to suck for quite a while. Getting through these times of hardship without quitting is crucial for success.
Sitting down and doing nothing for an extended period can be extremely boring. Yet, that is exactly what we do when we meditate. What better way is there to learn patience!
Self- Control
He who can not control his inner demon, is bound to suffer in the long run. Self-control is necessary to keep yourself from unwanted troubles.
The main theme of this whole article has been ‘choice’. Meditation, through building awareness into your internal world, replaces your ego from the driving sit and puts you in charge.
Thus, you develop the art of self-control which is crucial for your success as a student.
Warren Buffet once famously urged a class full of graduate students to read 500 pages a day. He himself claims that 80% of his day consists of reading. The investing guru was caught saying that knowledge is just like compound interest, it grows exponentially the more you add to it.
I’ve read my fair share of self-improvement literature. There are some who hate the idea of reading too much. They call it ‘motivation porn’. Some call it ‘analysis paralysis’. I myself stand on the idea that if you act upon what you’re learning, while constantly updating your knowledge bank through fresh reading, it’s advisable to read a lot. Everyday. As much as you can.
Whatever problem/ challenge you’re facing right now, someone may have already solved it and put his experience in a book. All you have to do is to read.
There are people that have dedicated their whole life learning and teaching, you can get inside their brains and explore their minds through reading.
Having said all of that, I do recognize that some of you are in a time crunch. Then there are people who are tired of searching for answers. If so, don’t worry. This post is for you.
This is Conor Neill. Conor has been teaching Leadership Communications courses at IESE for over 16 years on MBA, Executive MBA and Senior Executive Programs. On June 10, 2013, the TEDx Talks uploaded his speech on YouTube. The video has been by almost 2 million people by now. He starts his video like this:
If you had €1000 and you could invest that money in someone’s future, who would you bet on?
He goes on to illustrate how Warren Buffet would make this decision. Apparently, the billionaire investor will consider 3 criteria. In the rest of the video, Conor goes on to talk about these criteria.
Here’s the talk-
Most Ted speaker would stop there. But, not Conor. He went on that stage not to sell something but to genuinely help people. So, he talks about tools to harness these qualities into your psyche.
The Tools He Talks About
I won’t tell you what the criteria are. I want you to watch the video and find out for yourself. Trust me, it’s worth the 23 minutes it will take you to watch it.
But I’ll talk about the tools he suggests that you use.
First, he talks about writing your thoughts. It’s similar to the morning pages that Julia Cameron suggests in her best selling book ‘The Artists Way’.
He is not the first psychologist whom I have heard being an ardent supportedr of these morning pages. Bill Williams, the famous psychologist turned stock trader is another person who pushes morning pages as a crucial factor for success.
Then Conor talks about, the power of little steps. I wrote intensively about this idea here.
Next conor speaks of Delaying gratification. The best way to do this is not an amazing display of willpower. Rather what you need to do is to remove the object of your desire from your sight. In short-
When you want something done- make it visible. i.e. If you want to run, keep your running shoes near the door.
What you want to avoid- make it invisible/ impossible. i.e. If you want to avoid social media- uninstall apps
This is as far as I will go talking about this talk. Now go watch it for yourself. You can thank me later 😉
I have been thinking a lot about the idea of sacrifice lately (not the kind of sacrifice we make for others, rather the ones we think we make when we go for a workout and ignore our desire for fast foods). I think I’ve come to some interesting conclusions that I’d like to share.
First, I was pissed for being required to sacrifice my pleasure and comfort in this moment for gains in the future. What gives the future such an authority over the present moment? After all, the ‘I’ that exists in the present should have just as importance as the ‘I’ that lives in the distant future. Why does his well being trump my whims?
When looking for the answers to these questions, I realized some things.
First, there is no me in the past, present or future. There is just ‘me’, spread throughout the space time continuum. And there is no sacrifices either. There are just tradeoffs. When I sacrifice getting lost in the dopamine rich, continuous hits of pleasure that comes from shuffling the home page of Facebook or Instagram, just like a gambler playing the slot machine, I gain some thing else. I gain mental clarity, peace and TIME. Yah, time, the most precious resource in the whole omni-verse. Time, the resource that even Jeff Bezos- with all of his billions of dollars, can not buy. Time, whose productive limits are only bound by your own imagination.
So long story short, if there were a sacrifice made in such a situation, it would have to be when you do the wrong thing. When you chose to stay longer in that dopamine rich artificial-social-environment created by those apps, and let go of your overall well being and time. This is the real sacrifice.
You sacrifice each time you take a cigarette puff. You sacrifice your health and your integrity. You sacrifice the same things each time you consume sugar.
Would you ever pay 20 bucks to get something that costs only 5? I don’t think so. But we make similar mistake when instead of money we deal with other types of resources. We take 5 minutes of sweet sensation in our tongue and pay for that with a life time of diabetes. Genius!
Physics, music, finance, cricket, teaching what do all of them have in common? At different points of my life, I thought each of them to be my Passion. Well safe to say I was wrong about all of them, as right now all I want to do is to make films for YouTube.
But I’d never have arrived at this point, if I hadn’t tried each one of the things I mentioned at the start.
When I was just starting my teen years, I loved science, specially physics. I’d read physics books, do science fairs and dream about becoming a scientist someday… but then I one day I borrowed an Mp3 player from a cousin. I instantly fell in love with music listen to music 24/7. I started to pay attention to how different composers made their songs. Soon I learned to mix songs and then to make my own music. But I was fat and got ridiculed often. So, I decided to shed some weight and started going to the school playing field more often. There I fell in love with cricket. I got admitted into a cricket coaching school and dreamt of being a cricketer someday. That didn’t last either, I fell out of love form cricket. At this time in my life, I’ve had many amazing teachers at my school. Also, people often tell me that I can explain concepts well. So, I started to think I’d be a teacher someday. But the life I wanted wouldn’t allow me that, teachers don’t make much money, at least they didn’t in those days, SO I got interested in the stock market. And eventually in finance. I got took finance and banking as my major a year later. I studied hard and won a national level championship on finance with 3 other teammates. But, something in me wanted freedom of expression. I was tired of thinking about money and profits all the time. I wanted creativity in my life. And I fell in love with films and Arts. This started with watching YouTubers like nerdwriter1 and full fat videos… then it transitioned into loving what Casey Neistat, Peter McKinnon, matt D’avella and many others like them do.
But were all my experiences prior to this wasted. No! not at all! My experience in music lets me edit better videos. I still play the guitar and keyboard for time passing, my experiences in finance gives me confidence that no matter what I do, I will find a way to monetize my work, my experiences in the playing field taught me how to work hard, my love for science has shaped who I am till this day and my passion for teaching has let me define my voice. The films I make, I try to explain something I think will help others.
And most of all, If I didn’t pursue all of them, I wouldn’t even know what I truly want to do.
People say that they find it hard to find their passion. This baffles me. How can you not know your own likes and dislikes? I mean you know what your favorite color is, what your favorite food is, who your favorite people are. etc. etc… you also know which people you don’t like, what food you’ll never eat and what tv show bores you to death. We are very good at knowing what we like and what we hate. But let’s say you still don’t know what you want to do with most of your time, that you don’t know your passion… then maybe the next set of thoughts will be helpful to you.
Let’s think about scenario 1, 2 and 3. In scenario 1 you fail miserably at life. Nothing you tried ever worked. You lost everything. Your friends, money, health etc. This is the worst you can do.
No think of scenario two. This is the life where everything is normal. Nothing extraordinary happened to make you an instant millionaire. on the other hand, nothing so disastrous happened that it destroyed your life. In scenario two, everything is good enough. Enough is the keyword here. Things still bugs you; you must still sacrifice and compromise when you don’t want to, but at the end of the day, you are comfortable enough. Scenario two is where most people live.
You probably have an idea what scenario 3 is going to be like. It’s where your dreams come true. You’ve got the house you wanted, the place you wanted to live in, the type of life partner you wanted, the amount of freedom you wanted etc.
Now think of What needs to be done, for you to move from scenario 2 to scenario 3? What professions, what ways of making money is compatible with your dream life? Make a list of such works. And now select the ones that you wouldn’t mind to do. Select the ones that sounds enticing, exiting, that sounds fun, that you could do, and you would do!
There you go! Those are a very short list of your potential passions! All you have to do is just to pick one.
For example, if your dream life, your scenario 3, consists of you staying at different countries to learn their culture and language and spend your time like a vagabond, then a 9-5 job, where you must show up to a specific place (office) every day is not compatible. you have to find ways to monetize your work through the internet.
You can leverage platforms like Upwork, YouTube etc. or make your own website to sell products or build a following there. You still have the flexibility to do what you like to do, I have seen Carpenters make money from YouTube, doctors to have millions following them online, filmmakers, gamers and musicians are abundant. There is no limit to what you can and cannot do if you are providing a lot of value to a lot of people. You will be compensated for your efforts.
So, there you go. Finding your passion doesn’t have to take more than 5 minutes. If it is taking more than 5 minutes then maybe you didn’t get my message properly. Now stop watching this video, take 5 mutes to think about what your passion is. Another thing, if you are young, like under 30, then don’t worry too much and just give one field of work your hundred percent. It’s probably the rule number two in Jordan Petersons next book, which I can’t wait to read! The rule urges readers to give one thing hundred percent and see what happens. I would say the same. Do that, and if after 3 months down the line you feel like you are not enjoying this, then choose something else to do. But never sit idle and just daydream. Daydreaming is good only if you work 4-5 times as much as you daydream. work is gold. Work is the only thing that is between you and where you want to be. That’s all I wanted to say here.
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like nails. There are some shocking truth to this quote.
To comprehend this complex world, we use selective perception. Now you might ask, who decides what we see? Well the answer is, what you aim at decides what you see.
Vision is selective. The world is too complicated to take it all in and process everything every second.
Maybe some of you are familiar with the basketball and gorilla test. For those of you who don’t have a clue here’s a summary: So, some researchers arranged a basketball match and asked the research participants to count how many times the white team threw the ball at each other. Everyone starts counting. Meanwhile, a giant gorilla comes along and dances around in the middle of the screen. The gorilla avoids any area where the ball is.
Most of the participants counted the number of times the ball was thrown correctly. They completed the task with success. But wait, , most of them did not see the giant gorilla! Now this is a study done by credible scientists. Many other studies have been done like this with similar and shocking results.
This illustrates the point I made earlier. You see what you look at. So, if you are dreaming of your ‘six figure passive income at the Malibu beach’ lifestyle all the time, but at the same time worry about why you won’t sit down to study or do your bed or workout and etc other problems, remember this discussion. You are blinded by your own aim. Yes your ambition blinds you to all the goodness around you.
If all you see is violence and crime, maybe all you are looking for is violence and crime. You can replace this with anything else and its still true. It can be lack of opportunities, or maybe a plethora of opportunities. Maybe you see danger , or maybe you see safety. You could see betrayals everywhere, or rather trust and camaraderie. Whatever, I guess my point comes across.
A better approach to life
So what’s the way out? How to see the greater truth? How to notice more of reality and see the opportunities around you?
Odin sacrificed one of his eyes to see the greater truth. He could no longer aim well. But this made him see more! (spoiler for Thor: Ragnarok ahead) Thor lost one of his eyes in Thor: Ragnarok. But it gave him wisdom.
You see the metaphorical connection here?
Sacrifice. Sacrifice your aim. This seems to be the answer.
But really? Isn’t it stupid not to have an aim? After all, the school system has asked us to write about our aim since we were children. There is also this saying that: a man without an aim is like a ship without a rudder. Well this is wisdom too! We can’t just leave this advice and start living an aimless life right?
Well, this is actually where my own understanding remains insufficient. I cant really argue against this. But I can see how obsessive coalition with an aim is bad. It can make life shallow. Specially, when human tendency is to ignore everything that is beyond your aim.
Your own well being could be beyond your aim and you would ignore it! Your family’s well being could be beyond your aim and you would ignore it too! Same goes to your tribe, your country and the whole world! It pains me to think how many CEO s have been blinded to the fact that they are harming the planet and ruining our future, because they cant even see it! They are blinded by their goal: more wealth for the shareholders!
I had been blinded by my aim too. I failed to see that doing the right things in the present moment, like, building good habits, doing positive and productive things that I also enjoy doing and taking the opportunities already in front of me is what would make me better, not blinded hankering after a single aim.
So do we aim at nothing? Do we become like ships without a rudder and wander around aimlessly all our life?
To answer that, let us can break the problem into three sub-components first-
We see only what we aim at
We want our life to be well and possibly get better every moment
As a result, we want to look at-a) the good things already existing in our life.b) The existing possibilities to improve our life
I have a solution here. Well, It’s not an original idea. I got it from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s book: ‘12 rules for life: an antidote to chaos’
The idea is:
First, sacrifice your aim. Then aim again. This time, aim at good. Your aim now is to do whatever good you can do to make your life better than it has been.
This puts you in an upward trajectory. Now you may see all the good and more conveniently, all the evil around you.
I’ve been following it since 2 or 3 weeks now. And it has made me realize things in my life that I didn’t before.
There can be a plethora of ways to see the world. The more we experiment and see the world through different lenses, the closer to the lens we are that may lessen sufferings.
So, give up on your aim for maybe a week and act accordingly. See what greater truth you discover!
Here’s how a story can help you memorize a big list:
Yesterday I was studying about fire insurances. I came across a big list containing 8 lines of instructions. I was already bored to death. I had no energy left to cram this list.
The Method of Loci
I have known about The Method of Loci for some time now. But I never took the time to master it. I took out my phone, opened YouTube and searched for the method. Then, I started watching the first video. It was really good. I got super excited . So I tried it out myself. The result was pure gold. The method works like a charm. Here is the link to that video- The method of loci
Make sure that you skip to 4:25 minutes of the video. The first 4 minutes are unnecessary chatter.
This video shows how to incorporate an interconnected story to remember chunks of information. I used it to remember those fire insurance clauses. I can still remember the whole thing without revision. That blows my mind, as I’ve always been very bad at memorizing stuff.
Watch this to go to the next level
There’s another video that may come handy- when you need to memorize bigger lists. Here’s the link-
I was just thinking about how much options and resources I’ll have a year from now… And it makes me jealous.
A promise
Last birthday I promised something to myself. I’d do what’s meaningful. I’d stop chasing expedient pleasures. I finally manned up enough to consider sacrificing present consumptions for future gains.
It’s been more than 4 months since then and I’ve had some successes.
I’ve got a good morning routine. I do high intensity interval trainings (cardio) daily. I have quit smoking and sugar and do eat healthy. I started studying regularly and recently started learning Python.
Last week I won a scholarship and it ensured opportunity for paid internship after graduation.
I’ve been saving frugally and have saved more than I’ve ever saved before.
The anticipated result
Right now, I am a nobody. I have so little career opportunity that it baffles me. But, my future self is drowned in choices. He has a paid internship waiting for him. He will have a lot of my hard earned money to invest from. He will own a blog with hundreds of posts. He’ll be skilled at Python and security analysis. He’ll also be really healthy and energetic.
I’m jealous of him for that. But I know for sure that, he’s super proud of me 🙂
How you can use this
I am a big fan of Dr. Jordan Peterson. It was his book, that made this shift in me. He has this suggestion that, we should really think about our ideal future self and worst future self. Then use the ideal one as a pull forward. While the worst one is gonna push you from behind. This is your heaven and hell. And they are great motivators.
Interested in finding your own ideal self after one year? Here’s how to –
Think of your ideal day. List the important activities that may really compound into huge gains later. For example: strength training, eating healthy, extra-curriculars, meditation, learning a new language, learning a new skill, blogging, saving money etc. Then think of the gains you’ll have after 365 days of continuous effort.
Use your worst/laziest day to get an idea of worse future.
Hope this post helps you gain clarity and motivation. See you in the next post 🙂
I’ve been pondering about this thing in my mind recently. It’s self image. I think there’s two types of self image.
What I think of myself &
What I think that others may think of myself.
Pursuit of an ego-less state
Since I read The Power of Now, I’ve been in a pursuit of an ego-less state. Wait, the previous statement is wrong. I’ve been in the pursuit of an ego-less state at least 2 years before that. But I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. The Power of Now let me put my thoughts in the right perspective.
I have had this book with me since I was 17 years old. Yet, I never read any of it until my 18th birthday. I don’t know why. I thought it was not something for me. I used to think that even without reading a line from the book. I thought I needed a book more like- the power of the future. Or at least something like- how to accept your past.
I intuitively knew The Power of Now was a good book though. Something inside me kept telling me that the power indeed is in the now. But I ignored that voice, up until my 18th birthday. After that, I finally read it. And I must say, It’s been the most influential book of my life.
One day I fell severely sick. This was after my 21st birthday. I had to stay on bed for almost 2 months. That is when I really started listening to Eckhart Tolle on YouTube. I also read his other book- A New Earth. Then, I watched all his interviews with Oprah. I also downloaded the audio version of his retreat called Journey into yourself.
All this made me come to terms with the first kind of self image. I started to really get transparent in this area.
But the second type kept creeping in. In my behavior, actions and decisions. I always knew it was there. But somehow I’d rationalize its existence. I’d say to myself things like- I need to know what others may think of me. Or something like, I have to keep a good image in front of others, it’s useful. This has been a burden that is too heavy to bear. But I kept bearing it anyway, in hopes of getting approval from others.
At last, I let it go
Last week, I started noticing this in me again. But this time it was different. This time I didn’t rationalize it anymore. I just let it go. And I’ve never felt lighter.
Why have I been successful to push it away now though? I don’t know the answer. But, maybe my daily meditation practice is the reason.
What I’m realizing now is, all my insecurities were based on false assumptions. Once I let go of ‘pretending’ to be someone I’m not, I’ve been better at social occasions. I’m spontaneous and genuine and I respect myself more for that.
Let me know if you ever struggled with any of this! I’d also like to know how you overcame your struggles.
RaihanRiad 