Happy For You!
Envy can be a sneaky little devil. If someone does or gets something awesome, it’s hard not to compare and make it about you. The narrative in your head begins…
"That will never happen to me."
"I’ve never had that kind of luck."
"The ball never bounces my way."
"I wish that had happened to me."
The twinge of jealousy is natural, but it should be a warning. A warning that you are living within a frame of lack. Envy will chase you to the grave if you're busy comparing instead of creating.
When you feel the world is your oyster, it’s easy to be happy for others. If compersion eludes you, consider it a warning light.
I Was Thinkin’
Your personality is a combination of a few things:
What you Think
What you Feel
How you act based on the first two
The reason you struggle changing is because you wait for it to Feel right. In other words, you are waiting for something outside yourself to Act. If you Think this way you will stay the same. If you stay the same you will get the same results and always be a slave to your circumstances.
Be careful what you’re thinkin’.
First Bite
Why can’t that first bite be enough?
The chips come to the table and the first one tastes better than expected. The queso is the perfect temperature.Time is standing still. The mariachis are singing in your head. If the first bite was so good the second might be even better.
Dopamine ramps to the moon. But on the third bite your neurons are like “been there, done that.” The law of diminishing returns comes to spoil the fun.
Why?
Because we were built to savor and pursue lasting joy. The truth is, these spikes of euphoria are an echo of what is to come. While on earth, heaven is only available in small doses. God isn’t cruel… he is just nudging you to pursue Him because the queso will never be enough.
Ecclesiastes 3:11
Born Good?
At least half the population thinks we are born good. Self centeredness is a survival mechanism… the environment is stacked against you. Envy bubbles up only when someone or something smacks you down. Anger is the result of injustice. Laziness is caused by a lack of self care and burnout.
It’s impossible to think you were born good without an external locus of control. If you do something bad there is always a culprit to point your finger at. Surely it couldn’t be me. Something made me do it.
This worldview will trap you in the oppressed or oppressor philosophy. It requires no personal responsibility. If you are successful it means you have stepped on someone else’s neck to get where you are. If you are living paycheck to paycheck it’s because the man holds you down. Your character is out of your control. The system is to blame because you were “born good.”
Affirmation
Affirming someone for their character is a loving move. It validates the decisions they have made and feels uplifting. Loving someone doesn’t mean you affirm all their decisions.
Some choices are hard to affirm. The rub comes when affirmation is withheld. The good news is that what you choose to affirm is your business. Withheld affirmation can feel condemning and judgmental to the person who is longing to receive it.
Love and withheld affirmation are not mutually exclusive. If someone has a tantrum and demands you affirm them, holding your ground can still be loving. The tantrum is a sign… a sign their worth is misplaced in a sea of subjectivity, and they are looking for solid ground. They are drowning and calling you names for not affirming them.
Can you blame them?
Parting Thought: What you choose to affirm says a lot about who you are as a person. Confused about when or how to withhold affirmation? Read your Bible.
Plumb Line
It’s hard to navigate life without a plumb line. How do you know what is right or wrong? How can you tell what is true and what is deception? How do you know what is good and what is evil?
Everyone must make a choice, and there are only two.
I submit to God
I’m my own god
If you choose #2, your life will have no plum line. Good and evil, right and wrong, depend on feelings. Truth evades, shapeshifts, and evaporates in the projection of current emotion. When ego fuels your worldview, the downward spiral begins. If you are god, you can do no wrong. It becomes “your truth”, not “the truth”.
“The Truth” will become hate speech and be considered violent to those with no plumb line. The Truth is a direct threat to a Godless identity.
Outcomes
Overwhelm sneaks up on us and can be debilitating. It has a way of sabotaging clarity and sacking real productivity.
It turns out the culprit is your FEARFUL feelings. To be specific… fearful feelings about the outcome of a situation. When too many situations arrive, overwhelm comes marching in.
It happens to everyone but not everyone responds the same. The top performers have a bird’s eye view of their emotions and rationally navigate the present reality.
Suckers typically swim in their feelings and consequently evolve into victimhood.
Pro Tip: Productivity helps right size the fear. It’s stupid to desire an outcome and not be willing to do the work to get it.
Your Reputation
Reputation is superficial, subjective, and valuable. There is a right and wrong way to manage your reputation.
Making your reputation the first priority is for 7th graders.
To get it right, you have to look upstream. Ultimately, the sum of all your decisions makes up your character. If you make repeated bad decisions, your character is negatively affected. Your reputation is the lagging indicator of your character.
If you decide right, you don’t have to worry about your reputation. Some bad decisions have irreversible consequences. Mind your decisions and course correct when you make the wrong ones.
Pro Tip: If you’re right with God, your reputation is irrelevant.
Quick Confession: The older I get, the more I judge others... mainly their decisions. You’d think that as I grow wiser, I would judge less, but the opposite is true. I see idiots everywhere (usually in 4x with surround sound). I need to mind my own business, God help me.
Tough Guy Empathy
We all need empathy to feel connected to the world. Especially the ones who have high capacity and resilience. At first glance, it may seem like they have it all together, and for the most part, you’re not wrong.
If you offer them a bit of empathy, oftentimes they will push it away. They push it away because it feels weak to accept it. Besides, they have too many people counting on them to pause.
If you fall in this category, you are fooling yourself. You’re not giving up your drive, strength, resilience, or capacity. Tough people get even tougher when they expose their hearts a little.
It’s healthy to have a wall around your heart… as long as you have a gate to allow the right people in.
It’s Possible
Our senses are not the end-all all be-all to reality. If you are a pilot in the clouds and you trust your inner ear to determine straight and level flight, you will likely end up dead. Most of what happens around us can’t be seen.
There is a reason you can’t know all of reality, and you are limited to your senses. God holds it back because you wouldn’t be able to handle it.
Don’t focus on the physical so much. One of the biggest limiting beliefs is caused by defining your present reality by what you perceive with your senses. It’s less than 1% of what is really going on.
Getting trapped by cause and effect thinking hides what’s possible.
Programs
Our brains put us on autopilot to conserve energy. When you drove to work this morning a good portion of that drive was run by a motor program in your mind. You were largely unaware yet you arrived safely like the day before. It doesn’t take long to develop programs.
If you feel stuck it’s likely self inflicted. If your body and routine are in a rut it will remain until you disrupt it. We naturally memorize so it’s important to audit the programs and make sure they are serving you. As humans we have the ability to observe ourselves but often forget the power of metacognition.
Running the emotional program that you “don’t have what it takes” works like a charm. It will look for confirmation and hardwire it.
You don’t need other people to ruin your day, you can do it yourself.
Time Horizons
There are copious amounts of data all around us. The hard part is deciding what is important and what should be discarded. Once you’ve chosen what data is vital for your next move it’s worth pausing. Pausing to evaluate the time horizon.
Being decisive is a good thing because it shortens the feedback loop to learn. It’s vital to not confuse impatience with decisiveness. Taking a deep breath and thinking about the data source and it’s timeline will help you make better decisions.
Pre-deciding the evaluation date to pull the plug or double down will keep you from reacting prematurely.
Rabbit Hole
People who know very little about a topic will sometimes grossly overestimate their knowledge, and this blinds them to what they don’t know (Dunning-Kruger Effect). The less someone knows, the less meta-cognition exists. There needs to be a baseline of knowledge to even have the ability to evaluate what you don’t know.
Rabbit holes can be pretty misleading and create low-calorie confidence. You go down one thread, and the algorithm or documentary only shows you what you think the hole is. Then the sunk cost and confirmation bias run rampant. You might be blinded by a false or incomplete hole.
If you try to explain something and you hit a wall trying to describe it… that’s your sign. Your sign you don’t have baseline knowledge.
The older I get, the less certain I feel…
Extra Mile
One of the great joys of life is the extra mile. No one is expecting it, it doesn’t take much time, you are already moving so why not go the extra mile?
Something really amazing happens in that extra mile. Other people around you love it but even if they don’t see it, the feeling you get when you do 20% more than expected is surprising.
It’s almost like satisfaction hides in the last little push.
So if you want to live in a world of malaise… do the bare minimum.
The extra mile is patiently waiting for you.
Compromise
Compromise is a key element that has kept me married for over 30 years. The problem is… it’s easy to screw it up.
Compromise can be inauthentic.
Lazy or dishonest compromise is a shortcut that can lead to contempt. If you have unmet needs and you don’t speak up you are sidestepping lasting change.
Conflict should be navigated not avoided. Over compromising is just giving in and keeping the peace. This will put you squarely in the passive aggressive zone. Surface harmony is wimpy and creates ultimate disconnection.
Artificial peace will drive a wedge into your relationship and make you miserable. Hire a therapist so you don’t make it worse. Address the issues head on and stop being dishonest.
Feelings
Feelings are important and shouldn’t be ignored. Over time, if not addressed, they can take over and blur reality… especially if the reality is perceived as negative.
It’s a mistake to base reality on your feelings and call it “your truth.” You can’t own the truth or shape it. It doesn’t need your input to exist. It’s emotionally immature to think otherwise.
If a person positions their feelings as the anchor of truth it is near impossible to have a civil debate about anything meaningful. If it doesn't align with their feelings they don’t want to hear it. They will shut you down and resort to name calling. Mainly because their identity is threatened.
Objectivity has left the chat.
We live in a free country that allows people to bend reality and call it truth. Getting confused about what is true? Pick up your Bible.
Happy 4th! 🇺🇸
Reflection =
As we navigate our lives we run into all sorts of blockades, sinkholes, friction, and gut punches. Some things are self-inflicted and others are out of our control. People live through all sorts of pain from things out of their control and then perpetuate it through rumination.
Pain + Rumination = More Pain
Rumination is a waste of mental and spiritual energy. Reflection, on the other hand, is useful.
The experience doesn’t really teach us anything until we reflect.
Pain + Reflection = Progress
The Gap
There is a gap or container between what you can do and what you choose to do. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Take wealth as an example. Wealthy people can do all sorts of things. They have options. It’s obvious they are truly wealthy because more money wouldn’t change what they chose to do. They know the secret power of the gap.
It’s worth noting that self-discipline in the gap accrues over time.
Execute the Plan
Getting overly attached to the plan is the worst enemy of the plan itself.
Rapid execution of a plan that fails is helpful because you can adjust your next move, improvise, and learn from your mistakes. The worst thing you can do is try to perfect the plan. The better strategy is to execute and adjust in lieu of playing the guessing game for weeks on end. Put it out there and see what happens, then make adjustments.
Speed is a teacher, but you have to be okay with failure or what people might think. Avoiding egg on your face is chickenshit. Quickly find all the things that won’t work instead of overthinking it. Evaluate the irreversible consequences and make a move.
Pro Tip: Things that have never happened before happen all the time.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” - M. Tyson
Comments
Commentators are everywhere. When should you listen and when should you ignore? Obviously some comments matter.
Commentators fall into two categories:
Consumers and Producers
It’s pretty simple: listen to the ones who take meaningful action, build things, and create… the producers.
Ignore the consumer comments who are often just complainers.
Never listen to those who have never been where you’re headed.