The only way to stay young is to keep learning. That’s not last-chapter hyperbole—that’s science. In the book Ten Steps Ahead, Erik Calonius wrote, “Even though the number of neurons in the human brain decreases as we age (as has been said time and again), the number of synaptic connections can grow as long as we live. If we keep using our noodle, in other words, we can make our brain better every day.” Neuroscientists Steven Quartz and Terrance Sejnowski report, “Being born some way doesn’t amount to forever remaining that way. . . . Your experiences with the world alter your brain’s structure, chemistry, and genetic expression, often profoundly throughout your life.” And most encouraging—given that the first land on the road to awesome is Learning—is what New York University neurologist Joseph LeDoux has to say on the matter: “Learning allows us to transcend our genes.”
Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters “If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t,” asserts Steven Pressfield, “you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself; you hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet. Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”
The only way to stay young is to keep learning. That’s not last-chapter hyperbole—that’s science. In the book Ten Steps Ahead, Erik Calonius wrote, “Even though the number of neurons in the human brain decreases as we age (as has been said time and again), the number of synaptic connections can grow as long as we live. If we keep using our noodle, in other words, we can make our brain better every day.” Neuroscientists Steven Quartz and Terrance Sejnowski report, “Being born some way doesn’t amount to forever remaining that way. . . . Your experiences with the world alter your brain’s structure, chemistry, and genetic expression, often profoundly throughout your life.” And most encouraging—given that the first land on the road to awesome is Learning—is what New York University neurologist Joseph LeDoux has to say on the matter: “Learning allows us to transcend our genes.” Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters Art is a process and a journey. All artists have to find ways to lie to themselves, find ways to fool themselves into believing that what they’re doing is good enough, the best they can do at that moment, and that’s okay. Every work of art falls short of what the artist envisioned. It is precisely that gap between their intention and their execution that opens up the door for the next work.
Almost without realizing it, I’d discovered the community of like-minded truth seekers I’d hungered for in the Haight. Art was our godhead. It was our calling and our discipline. It summoned and focused our energies, structured our time. Art humbled us. Everyone agreed they didn’t know the answers, or even the questions. Everyone was open to the new, struggling to make his or her stuff important, vying for attention. It was intensely competitive. Much later I realized I’d not only set aside logic—I’d gone beyond language. Even though I was using words as images, I wasn’t thinking in words. I wasn’t thinking, period. I was using a part of my imagination connected to image making. I was painting. Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas For decades, psychologists have been studying this phenomenon, called the “mere exposure” principle, which says that people develop a preference for things that are more familiar (i.e., merely being exposed to something makes us view it more positively).
One of the pioneers in the field was Robert Zajonc (whose name now feels strangely likable …). When Zajonc exposed people to various stimuli—nonsense words, Chinese-type characters, photographs of faces—he found that the more they saw the stimuli, the more positive they felt about them. In a fascinating application of this principle, psychologists studied people’s reactions to their own faces. To introduce the study, let’s talk about you for a moment. This may sound odd, but you’re actually not very familiar with your own face. The face you know well is the one you see in the mirror, which of course is the reverse image from what your loved ones see. Knowing this, some clever researchers developed two different photographs of their subjects’ faces: One photo corresponded to their images as seen by everyone else in the world, and the other to their mirror images as seen by them. As predicted by the mere-exposure principle, the subjects preferred the mirror-image photo, and their loved ones preferred the real-image photo. We like our mirror face better than our real face, because it’s more familiar! The face-flipping finding is harmless enough, though weird and surprising. But what’s more troubling is that the mere-exposure principle also extends to our perception of truth. When the participants were exposed to a particular statement three times during the experiment, rather than once, they rated it as more truthful. Repetition sparked trust. Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work If there’s a definition of freedom, I think it’s this: living life on your terms. And Werner was the freest man I’ve known. I miss him terribly. Outside the cottage, rain. I close my eyes, listen to it, and imagine him sitting across from me. “I’m sorry, man,” I say.
“Ah,” he waves his hand at me. Smiling. “Let it go.” We’re both quiet for a little bit. “Reach out to Siv once in a while,” he says, “and Ice.” Siv, his wife. Ice, his dog. Rain picks up, drums on the roof. He smiles, slow. “But they’ll be gone too.” Long pause. “And you. Life, it is quick.” Life is long, a chain of intertwining moments, looping round and round. But life is short. Blinks. Memories. Connections. Then you’re gone. The truth: I live my days as if I will live forever. Putting off so much, expecting there to be more time, another chance. If I accepted my mortality to my core, never knowing when the chain snaps, then how would I live? More on my terms. A free man. I’d write more, I’d love more, I’d laugh more. Can I succeed at it, this way of living? I don’t know. But I will remind myself daily: I am mortal. I will feel gratitude for it. For another opportunity to be here, to live and love and hurt and play and create and make good and bad decisions. Life. I have a hunch that my journey, however long it plays out, shall be better for it. Thank you, Werner Live Your Truth Minimalism is a tool used to rid yourself of life’s excess in favor of focusing on what’s important so you can find happiness, fulfillment, and freedom.
Minimalists search for happiness not through things, but through life itself. If we simply stopped to question our continuous consumption, we’d find that most of the stuff we think we need isn’t even close to necessary. In fact, life would be much simpler, and perhaps even easier and certainly more rewarding, without many of the possessions we think we need. Minimalism itself is far more concerned with living intentionally, living elegantly through simplicity, living purposefully while enjoying the material possessions you own without giving those possessions too much significance. 20/20 Theory Anything we get rid of that we need later, we can replace for less than $20 and in less than 20 minutes from our current location. Thus far, this theory has held true 100% of the time. Although we’ve rarely had to replace a just in case item (less than five times this year for the two of us combined), we’ve never had to pay more than $20 or go more than 20 minutes out of our way to replace the item. This theory likely works 99% of the time for 99% of all items and 99% of all people. Including you. Simplicity: Essays Your best chance of bouncing back, sorting it out, and getting things rocking again lies in the practice of social contracting, a discipline that management thinker Peter Block introduced in his terrific book Flawless Consulting.
But to make it easier, here are five fundamental questions to ask and answer. You don’t need to ask them all. I’m sure you’ll find your own best combination for the person and the situation. Just make sure you ask some of them before things get rolling. You’ll want to remember that any good contract is a mutual exchange. So don’t be fooled into thinking that your job is just to ask the questions. You need to be willing to answer them as well, so you and your collaborator both know where you each might stumble. What do you want? (Here’s what I want.) This is a question that almost always stops people in their tracks. It’s deceptively difficult to answer and incredibly powerful when you can define clearly what exactly it is you want from this relationship. Of course you’ll want to articulate the transactional nature of things: I want you to get this done and get that completed. But see if you can go beyond that. What else do you want? (“I want this to position me for my next promotion.”) What else would make this relationship one to truly value? (“I want this to lay the foundations of future work together. Where might you need help? (Here’s where I’ll need help.) This turns the “What do you want?” question over and comes at it from a different angle. You might want to specify where you’ll trip yourself up (bold), how you might fall short in the relationship (bolder), or even how you might get in the way (boldest). When you had a really good working relationship in the past, what happened? (Here’s what happened for me.) Tell a story of a time when you were in a working relationship similar to this one, and it was good, really good. What did they do? What did you do? What else happened? What were the key moments when the path divided and you took one road and not the other? What else contributed to its success? When things go wrong, what does that look like on your end? How do you behave? (Here’s how I behave.) Tell another story, this time of when a working relationship like this one failed to soar. It might be when it all went hellishly wrong or it might be when it disintegrated into mediocrity. What did you do and what did they do? Where were the missed opportunities? Where were the moments when things got broken? When things go wrong—as they inevitably will—how shall we manage that? The power in this is twofold. First, you’re acknowledging reality: Things will go wrong. Honeymoons end. Promises get broken. Expectations don’t get met. By putting that on the table, you’re able now to discuss what the plan will be when it does go wrong. I’ve done everything from creating a code phrase (“I need to have an ‘off my chest’ conversation with you…”) to inventing a process (“I’m hitting the Mission Pause button”), to simply agreeing that we have permission to talk about things when we feel we must. Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career (The 99U Book Series) Timidity is the mind-set that says you’re too weak, too small, and too unimportant to be deserving of real power. Who are you to live a meaningful life? You’re just one insignificant person among billions. This belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In reality, you’re so powerful that you’re actually turning your own strength against your-self, temporarily rendering yourself weak. You’re like a god who declares, “Let me be powerless.” And that’s exactly what happens. Timidity causes you to settle for puny, empty goals that don’t in-spire you—assuming you even set goals at all. You perform meaningless work that doesn’t matter to you, live in a place you don’t care for, and settle for disempowering relationships with other weak-minded people who regard you as another warm body for their pity parties. Mean-while, your true self is practically screaming at you, but you drown its voice with idle entertainment, junk food, and other distractions.
You weren’t meant to live hiding under a rock. That isn’t you. You’re selling yourself short, grossly underestimating your true capabilities. This is your reality, and you’re responsible for it. Stop trying to live in denial of that fact, and face up to it. You didn’t come here to spend your life obsessing over trivialities. Wake up and take a good look at yourself and admit, “This is garbage. I can do better than this!” Start listening to that powerful being inside you for once. It won’t steer you wrong. Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth Here’s the truth: You will work harder at something you love than at something you like. You will work harder than you have ever worked when you start chasing a dream. You will hustle and grind and sweat and push and pull. You will get up earlier and go to bed later. But that’s okay. Know why? Joy is an incredible alarm clock. It will wake you up and keep you up and pick you up and gently pull you through a thousand rejections along the way. If your goal is to work less, stay on the road to average. Do something you just kind of like. Settle into life like a long winter’s nap and coast on through to your 80s. But if you want to dream—if you want to live out some unique talent you’ve been given to steward during your time on this planet—get used to 4 a.m. alarms. Get going. Get up.
Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters Success and failure come and go but don’t let them define you. It’s who you are that matters. And if the outcome doesn’t match your desire, you won’t crash in the process. Instead, you’ll walk away with the lessons learned and go on to create far greater things. Each time, giving your effort. Each time, being your true self.
The secret is this: pick something that is important to you. One thing. Look at your belief on it, what you know to be true. Then, as if diving off a board, your feet already in the air, you commit. The commitment is the most important part. Not a promise, but deep and from the heart, there is no going back. You have burned the bridges, sunk the ships behind you. This is the only true thing that matters. Do the work. Do the work. Do the work. Do the work. Do the work. Do. The. Work. This will transform your life. Do this for fitness, for example, going all in, working out and eating healthy daily and a month later, you’ll be amazed at the person in the mirror. Do this for your truth, and you will be so amazing that the world will open doors to you that you never knew existed. This is the simple secret. Pick something you truly want. Commit. Commit on paper. To yourself. Dive in, do the work. You’ll leave the board, falling and falling…until you notice gravity lessen, your rate of descent slowing until it reverses and then…and then, you’re flying Live Your Truth by Kamal Ravikant |
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