Category: How To Live

Gratitude and Giving Back

Have you ever heard this idiom?

Like a turtle on a fence post – you didn’t get there by yourself.

Does anyone really get where they’re at by themselves? I’m not sure.

What I do know is that I’ve had a long line of benefactors whose investment in my life of their time, knowledge, and resources have helped put me on my path.

It’s definitely a dopamine hit to acknowledge gratitude for my own selfish benefit. But I’ve found it’s even better to give back.

Sure, there’s a sort of self-interested-ness in helping others in need. I’m not sure it’s possible to voluntarily help someone without benefiting yourself. (Queue your best SBF Effective Altruism joke.)

But the benefit can go both ways.

Recently I reached out to a few major influences on me in high school to let them know how much I appreciated their impact on my life. The small act provided a sense of conviction that I can – and therefore should – do more to give back.

Which is something I’ve struggled with in recent years.

I’ve always aspired to [be able to] give back in a meaningful way. In a way that makes a monumental positive impact. Not to be showy. But to improve the world we inhabit.

Except I’ve struggled with the idea because I’m not at a point in my life or financial journey where I can donate libraries or schools or hospital wings. Maybe I never will be.

But it begs to question – what’s the threshold for generosity in order to make an impact?

I doubt it’s as high it sometimes seems to me. Maybe you can make a meaningful difference giving only a few bucks or a few hours of your time.

As I’ve been pondering this a memory resurfaced from high school.

We had a big convention out of state for a school organization. The school had a budget for only a fixed amount of students. So not everyone could go, unless they could raise the extra money to cover their way.

Somehow a few alumni caught wind of a couple of students who were going to miss out. So they cut checks to cover the costs.

No questions asked. No grand gestures. Just a clearly identified need within their capability, and a desire to fill it.

It probably didn’t require more than a few hundred bucks. But their generosity was timely and maximally impactful for the couple students it directly benefitted.

Indirectly, the story stuck with me. So that small gesture is still paying dividends.

Perhaps it’s easier to have a big impact than it often feels. Identify a need within your capabilities and fill it.

Attitude As the Linchpin of Life

I woke up this morning to trash scattered across my yard. Before I could become annoyed, I decided to pick it up.

“Today is going to be a good day,” I told myself.

I rarely set the bins out early, but last week the garbage trucks came by so early in the morning I missed them. Now I had two weeks of trash piled up, so I could not miss them again.

The trash bins spent the night on the curb. The wind blew open the lids. With the lids up, the winds scattered the trash.

It was too poetic to be anything but amused.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” I thought to myself with a smile as I picked up the trash.

With the trash problem solved, I returned to cooking breakfast.

Cooking breakfast is near the top of the list of things that bring me joy in the morning. It offers a creative outlet – a moment alone with my thoughts, my creative capacities, and my appetite.

This morning I cooked an egg scramble (which is my way of admitting I have not yet mastered the art of an omelet). I scrambled the eggs with with ham, spinach, green bell peppers, Roma tomatoes. Then devoured it.

Breakfast complete, I cleaned the kitchen. Washing dishes is not among my favorite pastimes, but cleaning up after making a meal with my own hands does offer a special kind of energy. It’s like the natural last step of a spiritual cycle.

While cleaning, I noticed a strange contour in the sole of my shoe. Perhaps I’d finally worn this set of Nikes into the ground.

Instead, I found a fresh mountain of dog poop affixed to the soles of both shoes. Shoes I’d been wearing inside the house while I marched around the kitchen cooking breakfast.

I’d picked the poop up while fetching the trash.

This time, I laughed. “Today is going to be a good day.”

I’d set this entire situation into motion a week ago when I missed the trash can. Then I doubled down on it the night before when I carelessly wheeled the bins to the curb. They were stuffed so full from two weeks of garbage the lids were simply waiting for a small gust to burst wide open.

Life is funny like that, sometimes. Almost like present day exists at the end of a continuum of past situations and decisions, stretching back to the beginning of your life.

After washing dishes, I marched around the house like I was investigating a crime scene, stopping only every so often to place another small sample of evidence into a plastic bag.

If you ever want to know how much exercise cooking requires, just step in dog poop some day before you cook breakfast.

With what felt like an endless breadcrumb trail of dog poop handled, I returned to my normal morning ritual.

I grabbed a book. Smiled. Then thought to myself.

“Today is going to be a good day.”

How to Cope with Career Uncertainty, Boredom, and Professional Angst

Several years ago I reached all the goals I’d been aiming for professionally (at the time).

I’d climbed to the highest possible rank in the company for my respective skillset – a company whose mission I believed in. I had autonomy to choose which big problems to work on in the business. I was making great money. I’d gained respect and confidence and a robust skillset.

In other words, I had achieved everything I thought I’d been working to accomplish. 

Still, something felt off.

In spite of reaching what felt like the pinnacle of my career, I encountered a surprising feeling. 

It was not happiness. It was not excitement. Nor pride. Nor contentment. But boredom.

The feeling surprised me. I thought once I achieved my goals everything would sort itself out. Like the attainment of my goals warranted some kind of enlightenment.

But instead I found myself questioning everything about my station in life.

Should I leave my “dream job” to venture out on my own?

Should I find a new job?

Is it possible to reignite the fire I felt while I was working toward my goals?

Am I in the right place?

Does this make me ungrateful?

Am I missing something?

And on and on the second-guessing and uncertainty was overwhelming.

Because I needed to have certainty. I craved it. Still, I found myself staring down a path obscured by fog.

In the months and years that followed I would learn several big lessons about facing down uncertainty, boredom, ambition and professional angst.

I’ll spare you all the gory details of that journey and instead just get to the hard-earned advice.

If you’ve ever felt uncertainty about what to do next in your career, or uncertainty as a byproduct of boredom, or professional angst springing from impatience…then these tips might hit home with you.

How to Stare Down Uncertainty, Boredom, and Professional Angst

1. Don’t look to your job to satisfy every dimension of your curiosity. 

If you’re relying on your job to provide all of your personal and professional development, then you’re doing it wrong.

We’re all multi-dimensional individuals with ranges of curiosities that would be impossible to satisfy through a single job. Find a way to prioritize your own interests beyond your day-job. Lean into those interests. Cultivate your creatives capacities outside the office.

Reserve a part of you just for yourself and your own passions. This will recharge you; offer you a cathartic outlet; and make you an overall more interesting, well-rounded person.

2. Aim for clarity, then challenge.

Before you know what you want to do, it’s okay to go into information-gathering mode. I called this  “Your Quest for Clarity.”

Try stuff. Eliminate options that don’t seem interesting. Then double-down on the skills / career path / interests that really light your fire. Mainly, don’t do stuff you hate.

If you iterate enough, worst case you’ll find something tolerable and best case you’ll find something that excites the hell out of you – anywhere in between those two poles is still a win. But a word of caution – not long after you “find your thing” you’ll eventually get good enough that the job becomes easy. This is a danger zone.

Continue to seek out challenges that will force you to grow and develop (even if they are outside your job). When things get too easy, it’s an early warning sign of impending stagnation. 

3. Don’t burn down everything you’ve built on an impulse.

It can feel exciting to think about exiting a situation in the name of adventure. You could leave it all behind today to go chasing some other big hairy audacious goal. Maybe you’ll start your own thing. Or land an awesome new job at another cool company, and then everything will be great!

Sadly, the new adventure will probably lead you to the same spot you’re in eventually. Because the truth is, sometimes you will feel bored in your career. We live in a world of in-your-face instant gratification. There’s always a new shiny object that seems like a better path.

Patience and focus can be superpowers in your life and career. If you can find a way to trudge through the boredom, and still do your best work in the meantime, you’ll unlock the true power of uninterrupted compound interest in your career. Which means more options, not fewer. Don’t leave a job you don’t hate just because you think there may be some hypothetical better option out there. The situation you’re in may offer you more upside than you realize. 

4. Give yourself permission to daydream about your options

When you find yourself unsure about what to do next, or bored in your current situation, allow your imagination to go to work. Keep a journal of ideas. Daydream. Allow your creative capacities to run wild.

It’s okay to explore those options mentally. It can offer a release. But the brainstorming time can also lead to actual tangible developments – which can take time, energy, and focus. It’s rarely immediately obvious what steps you should take next. Give yourself some room to visualize the multiple future possibilities.

5. Target universally good actions.

While you’re in the “ugly in-between” of boredom or uncertainty, there are still positive steps you can take to build momentum.

First, you can take universally-good actions. Like saving money, paying off or paying down debt. Expanding your network. Building an audience. Creating content around your areas of interest. Writing regularly and publishing your work. Etc. The list goes on and on.

But these kinds of positive actions will expand your option set as you gain clarity; and ultimately make it easier for you to say yes once you figure out your next step. 

These are just a few suggestions from my own lived experience dealing with uncertainty, professional angst, and boredom.

You owe it to yourself to take your personal and professional development into your own hands. Don’t settle for a life that bores you. Channel your energy into your own interests and creative capacities.

Keep iterating and working hard. Even when you may not know where it’s leading.

Eventually, those positive behaviors will lead you to a place of more clarity than you have today.

Goals as Sustenance

I remember this group of girls at my high school who seemed to want nothing more from life than to date a good-looking guy and win homecoming queen.

At least one of them got everything she ever wanted (only one person can win homecoming queen per year, yanno?).

But it never made much sense to me to shoot so low.

If goals are already within your reach, then what’s the point? Where is the meaning to be found from life?

Goals as a forcing function

Instead, I think it’s more useful to choose goals that force you to change.

Goals, by very definition, are about manifesting a different future state. But there’s a big difference between bringing about a future state that’s already a forgone conclusion and in manifesting something you’re not yet capable of creating.

Only chasing forgone conclusions snubs your own potential – your potential to become something more than you already are.

And goals that require you to cultivate that potential – to become who you are not yet but could be – those are the best kinds of goals.

Because it is the process of metamorphosis that enables us to reach new heights.

And we’re all equally free to pursue and prioritize the cultivation of our highest potentials. Even if it’s an unequal distribution in people who actually do that.

In other words, we all have the opportunity to manifest a better future than our present circumstances. If we really desire it, we have the option to escape the life we were born into, and to turn the hand we were dealt into a winning one.

The Cycle of Goals

The process of setting and working toward a goal has restorative and regenerative properties.

It’s half therapy and half fertilization.

The therapy part requires us to examine who we are – who we were in the past – and contrast that against an ideal future state.

The fertilization aspect takes the seed of an idea (our idyllic future) and grants it what it needs to grow – motivation, inspiration, resolve, a plan of action, etc.

In that sense, the undertaking of choosing a goal then moving toward it is a form of self-transformation.

It is the process of continuous evolution. Of correcting errors in your past by improving your behavior in the present, in pursuit of an further improvement still in the future.

And without a continuously ascending target above the horizon to aim at, then we’ll probably get everything we ever wanted.

Which means we probably aimed lower than our potential could have allowed. And I can hardly imagine a fate worse than that.

What would the best version of yourself be like?

Here is a useful tip I’ve discovered whenever I encounter unknown situations:

Just ask yourself, “What would the best version of myself be like in this moment?”

(This is particularly useful for robots, like that Facebook founder, who are only pretending to be humans. Just a joke. Chill out. Don’t put me on some list.)

Anyway, it’s a useful tip because it’s an open-ended question. Which forces you to flip on the ol’ imagination. Rather than asking yourself silly, self-doubting (or self-loathing) closed- ended questions. Like, “Should I do X?”, “Should I have said Y?”

This question is not meant to encourage you to shut off in the middle of real-life scenarios, so you can brainstorm how to behave. Don’t do that, psycho. Just be authentic.

It’s really meant more for reflection. Especially if you ever find yourself putting your foot in your own mouth. Or wishing you’d have handled a situation differently.

You’re going to botch it all up quite a few times in your life. Shrug it off. Then reflect.

How could that have gone differently?

“How would the best version of myself handled that moment?”

Asking these kinds of questions creates the semblance of an ideal for you to strive for in future scenarios. That, paired with the critical self-knowledge of your own past uncomfortable failures, gives you some good guardrails for future interactions.

“What’s the worst than could happen?” and “How would the best version of myself handle this?”

Aim to end up somewhere in the middle of those. Reflect. Move on with your life. Improve in the future.

Good Destination, Bad Directions

I turn 30 today (happy birthday to me, right?). Aging tends to force reflection. It gives cause to think back on decisions – the good, the bad, and the ugly. If we’re smart, that reflection offers lessons to help us improve ourselves over time.

Here’s one big lesson I’ve been meditating on:

Having the proper destination in mind does not validate your route to it.

Life is a series of goals. We make subsequent decisions in relation to our goals. Often we do the best that we can with the information we have.

But we don’t always have the best information. Nor do we always have the best of intentions. (Thought even when we do have good intentions, sometimes we’re bad at selecting the proper means.)

Still, with our limited knowledge, we aim at the highest, best goals we can fathom (if we are wise), and we dedicate ourselves to manifesting those into reality.

Except we’re not always great at bringing our ideas to life. Not to the level of perfection we all likely aspire to.

We choose our goals. Then we choose the route that we believe is most likely to get us there. Hopefully, most efficiently.

Sometimes, though, we choose the right goal but the wrong route. Which makes it incredibly difficult to see our own errors.

It can often feel like “selecting your goal” is the most difficult part of personal development. But that’s rarely true. Choosing a target is easier than hitting it.

But when you take special care in selecting which targets to aim at with your scarce resources, and you finally determine one that’s worthwhile – it can give you a sense of absolution about the means you select for getting there.

Choosing a good destination does not let you off the hook for using bad directions, though.

Even honorable goals are overshadowed by unworthy means.

The work isn’t done once you choose your target. You must also take special care as you work toward it, to ensure that you’re not allowing a desirable “end” is to justify bad means.

Radical Generosity is Good for the Soul

If you’re looking for a quick remedy to improve your life, look no further than generosity.

Generosity changes your orientation.

It opens up your purview to think instead about how to be useful, valuable, or of service to other people.

(Which is not necessarily the opposite of selfishness, properly defined. Nor am I advocating for selfless altruism. But that’s for another blog post.)

Being radically generous is a great way to restore yourself. To freely give of the best that is within you to the loved ones in your life – and even pure strangers – without any expectation of repayment.

But it’s not a one-sided transaction. Because in order to give, someone must also receive.

Be radically generous with the people in your life, with your resources, with your gifts and talents, and your time. If for no other reason than to improve your own happiness and quality of life (and the others around you, too).

Age and Perspective

The older I get the more sentimental I become. Especially about the time I get with family.

You never really know how much time you have left. I don’t say that to be morbid. But to remind myself of the importance of prioritizing what matters.

There’s a really jarring post about this from a blog I enjoy, The Tail End from Wait But Why. Illustrating your life in dots based on the average human lifespan, it forecasts “how many times left” the average person might have based on where they are in their journey.

I think a lot of us grow up fearing our own mortality, and so naturally, we avoid thinking about it at all costs. But I’m not afraid to die. What scares me much more is getting to the end and realizing I took things for granted.

This is, in part, I think, why I get more sentimental with time. The people and things in our life that make us who we are – they matter. They’re worthy of our affection, admiration, and gratitude.

It doesn’t all have to be captured and shared on social media, either. We can savor experiences without sharing them with the world.

It makes those moments more intimate. If for no other reason than scarcity. When there are no pictures or videos or archives to reflect on later, only the catalogue of our own memories.

We never know when we’re going to do our last something. So it warrants being present. We’ve got to show up for our own lives.

I don’t know when will be the last time I’ll read Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Or when I’ll uncork my last bottle of wine shared with family and friends. Just like I don’t know the last time I’ll take a walk holding hands with my wife.

But I want to be there for every one of the times I do get. I want to savor all of those precious moments, big and small alike – and as Thoreau once said, “to suck out all the marrow of life.”

How To Change Your World

When you recognize your own power to influence your immediate surroundings, you can make a big difference in your world fast.

You can rearrange rooms to make them more beautiful.

You can speak more respectfully to others.

You can laugh more, and invite others to join in.

You can leave things — and people — better than you found them.

You can get your life in order — personally, professional, financially.

Of course, you can do the opposite of all those things, too.

The same power that creates can destroy.

But, given the choice, what would you choose?

Will you make the world uglier?

Or will you make it more beautiful?

Today, and every day, I choose to make the world a more beautiful place.

How To Reduce the Chaos of Endless Choice Realities

One big challenge of life is figuring out what targets to aim at. We live in a time and world with nearly unlimited choices as it relates to careers, location, income goals, industry, and beyond.

So how do you navigate this – to ultimately discover the “right” target to take aim at?

Here’s one suggestion to get started: Find one goal you could aim everything you’ve got at.

By picking a goal that requires you to aim above the horizon, you force yourself to imagine who you must become in order to achieve that goal. 

This is a useful strategy for several reasons.

1. It allows you to orient yourself. Where (and who) are you today, versus where you’d like to be as a result of achieving your goal (and rather, who you’d like to be).

2. It reveals disparity. Moving toward your goals necessitates progress and change. You cannot become who you must be by accepting your current circumstances. Goal-setting contrasts the future you desire against the reality of your present, which enhances your own self-awareness.

3. It gives you a roadmap for how to behave. When you set a goal, you choose a target to take aim at. Which gives you a focal point into the future that you can work backwards from. Some choices will help you make progress toward that focal point, while others will lead you astray. 

Negotiating With Your Future

Setting goals forces us to detach ourselves from our past and present circumstances. Even without taking action on them, it offers an exercise in future-orientation.

If you really want to make headway toward your goals, then you’ve got to take inventory of your life –from the choices you make to the activities you spend your time on to your current available resources.

Taking inventory reveals positive and negative stock.

If you discover things that are holding you back, then if you really want to achieve your goals, you’ll be forced to address the baggage in your life.

Sometimes, you’ve got to sacrifice those demons at the altar of your future in order to stand a shot at advancing ahead.

Changing Course

As you go throughout life’s adventure, you’ll likely discover other targets worth aiming at – goals that you’d rather pursue. And you’ll almost always have different interests pulling you in different directions.

If you can go all-in on at least one thing – even if only for a short period in your life – you’ll build discipline, you’ll gain credibility, and maybe most importantly, you’ll build momentum.

You won’t always achieve the goals you set out to. Often, your pursuit of one goal will reveal an entirely different, more exciting path – when that happens, change course. 

This variety of life, though, should not be a cause for anxiety. Instead, it’s a good cause for excitement and enthusiasm about the endless possibilities that are waiting for you.

But you’ve got to start first. 

There are opportunities out there that you don’t know about yet. And you likely won’t discover them until you take aim at something and start moving toward it.

That’s the great adventure of life. It’s an ongoing discovery process, and you can always change course as new opportunities reveal themselves.