personal touch – Page 10

Do Courage to Gain Confidence

On David DeAngelo’s ‘On Being A Man’ program, he has a guest, Dr. Paul Dobransky, M.D., where he asks this very question. His very answer is:

Life is irritable.

This response is biological (bad pun alert) in nature (sorry), in that lifeforms will purposefully interact with the environment. The environment does something to the life form, and the life form makes a decision to do something else, versus a rock, in his example, which does anything a rock does, passively. Come to think of it, rocks don’t really do; things are done unto rocks. (How embarrassing: rocks can’t even decide to rock out!) Thus, this answer evolves to:

Life makes decisions.

From here, one could say if one stops making decisions, one is dead. One could also say if one makes lots of decisions, one is more alive. And oh man, are some of those decisions not easy to make, usually because of fear. In these cases, to do what is right, even if you are afraid, requires courage. Leaning into this a little more, if you muster courage to do that thing of which you are afraid, you will gain confidence, regardless of the result. For example, if you hate public speaking, yet you speak publicly and flub epically, you just publicly spoke, and your next public speech will be much easier than the first, as would any other kind of speech, especially private speeches.

Onto the blog post title. First of all, you can’t do courage – that makes no sense. You can do courageous acts, but that just doesn’t sound as cool. So, as per Dr. Paul, to gain confidence, y’gotta do courage, which means you’re making decisions, and truly living, by definition. Let’s massage these ideas a little more.

(Explanatory side note: Once upon a time, there was a final exam for Thermodynamics, the class that gives you practical knowledge like the ability to figure out how much energy is necessary to cook a Thanksgiving turkey. I stayed up all night, studying, which was the wrong thing to do. I should’ve checked my email at 8:30 the night before, like the other kids, to read an email from the TA who felt sorry for us, which shared the focus of the test, which were the areas I studied the least, which I found out 30 minutes before the test. Wonderful. I sat with the exam and went to war, the sheet of equations given to us as weapons, and in my tired stupor, I stared at both sets of dead tree. I proclaimed that there was no choice but for everything to make sense, since it’s just cherry picking the appropriate formulas and mathematically mushing ’em together. That was my most memorable private speech and is my default blogging manner, weaving concepts into evolving themes as I validate ScrumOfOne.)

If you are proactive, then you are making decisions, truly living.
If you are courageous, then you are making hard decisions, truly living and gaining confidence.

In my last post, I commented on how doing something, anything, makes you a better person. I like the much simpler thought track in today’s post: doing something, anything, means you are alive, where the more you do, the more alive you are.

A few months back, I commented on a New York Times interview piece, where “the very act of deciding takes courage, since every action has an opportunity cost“. This expands the association of courage to not just decisions that are difficult due to fear, but to decisions in light of context: you are simultaneously deciding what NOT to do. Now, I don’t think you’d really grow your trove of confidence via decisions that are courageous in this broader sense, but the point of that post was the value of prioritization.

Back-tracking to the better accepted connotation of courage, let’s wrap this puppy up with the following:

Do you want to gain confidence?
Make those hard decisions.
Do courage.

That is life.

To Be A Better Person, Do Anything

A little birdie sent me the following link, thinking this is the type of thing I’d write about:

David Wong‘s End Times Report: 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person, for Cracked.com

Challenge accepted.

This message of tough love was viewed over 8 million times and I’ll talk about it as a whole. Before I do, here are those 6 harsh truths:

#6: The World Only Cares About What It Can Get from You
#5: The Hippies Were Wrong
#4: What You Produce Does Not Have to Make Money, But It Does Have to Benefit People
#3: You Hate Yourself Because You Don’t Do Anything
#2: What You Are Inside Only Matters Because of What It Makes You Do
#1: Everything Inside You Will Fight Improvement

He starts it off by talking about markets, covering a point by Chris Guillebeau in ‘The $100 Startup’, where you can follow your inner compass and do what you love, but unless it is of value to somebody, and Chris G. refines this to lessening somebody’s pain or growing somebody’s happiness (he further refines this to not selling what you do, but teaching what you do), you’re only pursuing a hobby. The example given is enjoying pizza. Is somebody going to pay you for eating pizza?

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think I might subscribe to the blog of a pizza afficionado – a one-man Yelp of all things pizza. Heck, think of the detail you could go into…

The secret to the unique texture of the Cooney Island pizza lies in, yes, the water. Its signature flavor peaked in 1954, with hints of cranberry making an appearance if allowed to rest on the tongue, a good year which reflects optimal summer rains, minimal sewage treatment runoffs, and maximal body disposals.

Such gastronomically intriguing critique aside, the point is that there has to be somebody who cares enough for what you’re doing to perceive it as valuable, and valuable enough to trade ya for it, usually with money.

Since stuff like money does help out with living, we acquire this currency via doing things of value for others, usually at a job. Since it’s natural to define ourselves by how we benefit society (how we give value to others), we are defined by our job, and this Wong guy says that actually, you are your job. You can be a nice person, but nobody is paying you to be nice, or at least not as much as they’re paying you to do your job. (And if being nice is your job, then man, I’d love to read your blog; you must be really really REALLY nice…)

So, now that we’ve gotten driven into our heads how humans need things, and how we are defined by our ability to supply a demanded product or service, he approaches our value from an angle I haven’t really seen. The second half of the article talks about inertia and how it relates to our value. See, the only way to be a part of this market of human supply and demand, besides demanding, is supplying: y’gotta do something. I like how he puts it:

Don’t like the prospect of pouring all of that time into a skill? Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the sheer act of practicing will help you come out of your shell — I got through years of tedious office work because I knew that I was learning a unique skill on the side. People quit because it takes too long to see results, because they can’t figure out that the process is the result.

The bad news is that you have no other choice. If you want to work here, close.

And by ‘close’, he means supply a human demand. Create and share. Output.

It’s easy to demand. It’s easy to want. It’s also easy to judge what others supply, what others make. It’s easy to be the critic. It’s harder to make something and suffer through the suckage which comes with the process of perfecting the craft of however you’re making value. This inertia, this… force that pushes back on you, this… laziness, is actually built in – it’s part of your biology, at least as per this Wong guy.

Happiness takes effort, but you can’t get criticized for what you make if you don’t make anything, and this fear aversion (what’s biologically built into us) is comfort. Comfort is easier than happiness, and it’s another form of doing nothing, not participating in the human market, and thus not adding value on this large, mostly blue rock.

So what does this Wong guy recommend to be a better person? Do something. Think it’s what inside that counts? Only if it gets you to do something: share what’s inside with others. Can’t think of something you can share with others? Do something that’s impressive to other people.

And that’s how he ends it. I read that last bit as do something exciting, which I’ve come to understand is happiness.

Challenge completed.

Thank you, little birdie.

Teddy And The Newb

Time for a little humility: I would like to take a moment to congratulate myself on becoming a n00b. For those curious, Urban Dictionary defines it thus:

A inexperienced and/or ignorant or unskilled person. Especially used in computer games.

If you’re a newb, you’re new to the game. Most likely, you suck at whatever game we’re suddenly talking about. (Jai Alai? How am I supposed to know? I just started working on my psychic skills! Geez…) Over time, you, most likely, get better, but meanwhile, you suck. More importantly, you’re in the game. I like how Theodore Roosevelt said it in a 1910 speech:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Thanks for the pep talk, Teddy. And your use of semicolons. (Handball?)

My newly minted newbishness came about from following a piece of my own advice and pumping out a Proof Of Concept… a Version One. Without realizing it, I realized what that blog post said would happen: I crafted a story with a definition of done where I became convinced that a seemingly lofty goal is indeed attainable. (Sepak Takraw?)

So as I sloppily newb around, I shall think of our beloved Teddy and whole-heartedly embrace a truly cringe-worthy and confidence-boosting Version One of my seemingly lofty goal: to create and share music.

What’s your game? Are you in it? What’s your Version One?

Frustration

Once upon a time, I was frustrated.

This was, like, yesterday.

I just didn’t like how things were going, to the point where I got home, plopped myself on the couch, and sat there, staring at a candelabra that had way more color than the state of my soul. Things weren’t going my way.

Ha. Now that I’ve typed that, I realize that is a very accurate phrase to describe my mood all those day ago.

Things weren’t going my way.

Thus, I ruminated on this thought, chewing through the fat of gloomy cud, regurgitating thoughts that led to:

Oh, those dang things! It’s their bloody fault! They weren’t doing what I wanted them to do! Grrr!!!

Once I realized how I was thinking about these things, I bit my tongue; I chewed through my frustration. The insight was recognizing my passivity. The solution is being a ‘Man (/Woman) of Action’.

Granted, there is some solid good that comes from working through grief and not just sweeping undeniable emotions under the rug (you’ll just trip over them later). So once I did that, by sitting and doing nothing useful because I felt like the accomplished equivalent of a gastronomical intermediate by-product, I figured I should make a plan of action, and follow through, based on a set of values I find important – y’know, taking action.

Oh, that’s right. I already did that. I have one of those. It’s called my ScrumOfOne personal Sprint backlog, built off of my larger backlog(s) of things I want to do and be, prioritized by what I find important.

Stick with the plan. Tweak every couple of weeks. My plan.

Phew. That was a lot to go through since, like, yesterday.

Keep Showing Up

Some of us have a little voice. (Hi.) You know that voice. (Hi, again.) That little voice will show up at the most inopportune of times. (You’re welcome.) You start a creative endeavour, be it cooking, drawing, writing, dancing, coding, planning, researching, wood carving, and then you hear this little voice gently nudging you regarding how your time might be better spent on other activities. (Face it. You suck.)

An alternative, but equally effective route, does not involve this little voice. (…Fine.) You get down to start whatever it is you are trying to do, and you run into a creative wall, your equivalent of writer’s block. (Wood carver’s block?)

Either way, you’re not progressing fast enough and/or happily enough. This is usually a bummer because we walk into these endeavours thinking that all the creativity lives within us, and we’re just not good enough to let it out.

That’s one way to approach it.

Another way is to think about the creative process not as something that is in us like a personal characteristic, but rather something that visits us, a muse, or the original definition of a genius, which is a spirit; a person is thus not a genius, but rather, a person can have a genius. This means the creative process becomes a co-creative process, where you’d share the successes and failures of your outputs.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, talks about how the creative process is not rational in her TED Talk ‘Your elusive creative genius‘, such that we might as well think about it this way. We did, once upon a time.

So if the creative process is a two-part system, this means both you and the genius are invited to the party. If the genius is flaky, that’s not your problem. Your job is to show up to the party and create like it’s 1999. It’s kinda like that golfer aphorism, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” I like what Ms. Gilbert said:

‘Ole!’ to you, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.