A Learning a Day

In the event that you wake up
and find your soul separated from source
and manifest into material form, don’t panic.
Your condition is only temporary.

You have been selected for the opportunity
of human incarnation.

This 3D simulation is designed
to break up the monotony of eternity
by giving you a fully immersive experience
as a distinct ego identity.

Your body will serve
as your physical avatar
as you navigate a dense and dramatic reality.
There will be many distractions
causing you to forget your true nature and origin.
You will experience a range of emotions
from joy to loneliness to despair.

But remember – no matter
what trials and traumas you encounter,
your soul remains perfectly safe.

At times you may feel lost or afraid.
This is totally normal.
If you ever need guidance,
simply slow down your busy mind
and bring your awareness
to the quiet place
inside yourself.

On this planet, nothing is permanent.
People and things will come and go.
You will fall in love and form sentimental attachments
only to lose everything you hold dear.

So cling to nothing too tightly, even yourself,
and when it’s time to let go, let go with grace,
for nothing is owned, only borrowed.

As you walk among
the people on the planet,
try to be a good guest.
Tread lightly. Remember
that you are only visiting.
Don’t make a mess.
Listen more than you speak.
Give more than you take.

Don’t keep your soft heart
locked inside a glass cage,
protected from wear and tear.

You’ll never make it out alive
and time passes quickly.
So come back with some battle scars
and good stories to tell.

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I belatedly discovered James Mccrae’s beautiful poem. It resonated.

“Finally, it is worth cultivating moments in life in which we feel immense satisfaction and happiness divorced from our own success or achievements.

This happens commonly when we find ourselves in a beautiful landscape—the mountains, the sea, a forest. We do not feel the prying, comparing eyes of others, the need to have more attention or to assert ourselves. We are simply in awe of what we see, and it is intensely therapeutic.

This can also occur when we contemplate the immensity of the universe, the uncanny set of circumstances that had to come together for us to be born, the vast reaches of time before us and after us. These are sublime moments, and as far removed from the pettiness and poisons of envy as possible.” | Robert Greene

This resonated.

Bill Perkins, in Die with Zero, makes an observation I keep coming back to: past a basic threshold, optimizing health matters far more to your quality of life than optimizing money.

When health is bad, money is hard to enjoy in any form. Can’t travel. Can’t move without pain. Can’t push yourself physically. When health stops, everything else stops with it.

If life is really about collecting memories, health is the first input.

I’ve heard people say they’ll sleep and rest once they get to some level of success or wealth. That might work.

That might also be a quiet tragedy in the making if all that wealth accumulated was never enjoyed because health got overlooked along the way.

One of the more important lessons you learn over time: whether a choice is good or bad depends entirely on what you’re solving for.

A colleague told me a lovely story recently. His toddler goes through fits of complaining, one thing after another. So they started a ritual: when it happens, they ask him to pause and name one good thing, one thing he’s grateful for.

What they’ve found is that once he starts, it’s easy for him to find a second thing, then a third. The complaining just stops.

It’s a good reminder that we’re all capable of spiraling down a negative path once we get moving on it. And sometimes all it takes to reverse that is interrupting the momentum.

You see the same pattern in professional sports. One team is dominating, then the other team gets a single good moment, and the entire momentum of the game swings.

Applies to our days, and to our lives.

A simple way to make the most of unpleasant experiences: train yourself to respond with “Maybe life is trying to teach me something.”

That idea alone opens the door to what the experience might actually be teaching you.

Almost every unpleasant experience has a lot to offer, if you’re willing to ask.

A friend and I were talking about organizational behavior recently, and one of her observations stuck with me. Public markets are unforgiving. When performance slips, the market notices, and that pressure, assuming reasonably mature leadership, tends to force a culture of accountability.

Take that pressure away, and the opposite tends to happen. Without real consequences for weak performance, culture drifts toward the performative. More politics. More energy spent covering yourself than doing the work.

It reminded me of Richard Parker, the tiger in Life of Pi. Pi Patel’s fear of the tiger sharing his lifeboat is constant and real. But he also shared his gratitude for that same fear because it kept him alert, focused, and alive through an impossible ordeal.

Consequences drive behavior.

I have a new favorite analogy for when people ask how work is going. It’s been six months since I moved from a large company to a very small one, and the shift feels like moving from a container ship to a leaky boat.

A large company is a container ship. You’re out on the same ocean as everyone else, but you barely feel the waves given the size of the thing. You have one specific job, the ship has a course, and it has enough telemetry and momentum that it mostly just keeps going where it’s always gone. It can turn, but slowly.

A very small company is a leaky boat. You fix the biggest leak, whether or not it’s technically your area. You hope to upgrade the boat in a year, but for now, this is the boat you have. It turns fast, moves fast for its size, and you feel every single wave. A happy customer feels like a tailwind pushing you forward. An upset one feels like it might capsize you.

And the muscle that I find myself needing the most is the one that summons equanimity.

(1) No matter how hard you try, some people will misunderstand you and misjudge you.

(2) Your good streak will come to an end. Problems and obstacles will follow.

(3) No matter how careful your approach to prevention, you will make mistakes. Best to train yourself to focus on a constructive and corrective response when it happens.

I’ve been overdue for a password audit. Both LastPass and Chrome have been nagging me about a growing pile of passwords that need updating, and looking at the full list is overwhelming.

But, if I do five a weekend, it’ll be solved in a few weeks.

Same thing with ironing. Three weeks of clothes in one pile feels like a lot. One week’s worth at a time is much simpler.

It’s a lesson I apparently need reminding of on a loop: when in doubt, break it down.

Small bits of progress add up quickly.