My brain is a great forgetter.
To help me remember better, I’ve been writing advice for myself (on index cards, and also below).
Sources include podcasts, the writings of others, my own writing and thinking, song lyrics, conversations, bumper stickers. I simplify ideas and put them into my own words to make them stick.
These are all “fingers pointing at the moon.” The true test of their usefulness is whether my life improves. I hope some of them will be useful to you, too.
We know very little. Pay attention to the present. Notice new things.
We get better at what we practice. A short list of things to practice:
- Juggling
- Body scan meditation
- Medicine
- Letters from love
- Mindfulness in daily life (washing dishes, drinking tea, eating)
- Noticing new things
- Opening the shades and letting my love shine. Saying “may you be happy” to people I encounter.
- Seeing people who helped me, who I helped, and who are helping others.
- Using my gifts: play, listening, curiosity, medicine, wisdom.
- Noticing the gifts of others and telling them
My spirituality:
- The observer consciousness is the same in all of us. “I honor the place within you where, if you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us,” Ram Dass.
- Interbeing: individuality is an illusion. All living beings have the sun and clouds inside them.
- Ripples: After we die, our ripples continue. We are bathing in the ripples of our ancestors.
The Dalai Lama’s rules for living:
- Turn off the light
- Plant trees you won’t sit under
- Break bread with the stranger
- Accept that 2+2 = 4
- Make a home inside yourself
- Pray to a footstep
- See the middle of the Venn diagram
- Be a perspective doctor
Strive to make actions motivated by a desire to serve.
You might not be able to change the world, but you can change the world or day for one person.
All humans are longing for belonging. Give the gift of belonging to others.
Love, health, money. Three things everyone wants.
Everyone is a cracked teacup. Pain is a universal feature of life. Everyone gets old, sick, dies.
Personal achievement is limited. Cultivate generosity, service, care.
Take refuge in the 5 precepts, and a real-life community of practice.
“Tell me more.” Three words that unlock worlds.
Create from a white page.
Love = loving thoughts, words, actions, and understanding.
Love is the light in which you see someone.
10 weeks, months, years, decades. Will this matter then?
If you don’t deal with it, no one else will.
Three filters for speech: is it true, kind and helpful?
To replace judgement with understanding, see that behind every behavior is a need.
Guilt, fear, anger, hurt. Underneath them is often sadness. Seeing the sadness is the key to compassion.
The bare bones of existence are wondrous: we are on a ball in space, related to all of life, existing only in the present.
Awe gives you a break from thinking you are so big and important. Sense your smallness in space (by communing with ocean, mountains, the sky) and time (by communing with canyons, redwoods, old cemeteries, history). Our lives are an inch in the canyon or redwood. We’re a speck of dust inside a giant’s eye.
Agency first thing in the morning: drink a glass of water.
If you don’t know what to do, make your bed. At least you’ll have accomplished one useful thing today.
If someone is emotionally unavailable to you, don’t invest emotionally in them. The flipside: don’t take people for granted.
Mistakes are doorways to learning. Juggling is dropping balls. Surfing is falling down.
Morning mantra: Waking up this morning, I smile. 24 brand new hours before me. I vow to live fully in each moment, and look at all beings with eyes of compassion. –Thich Naht Hanh
To overcome insomnia, stop caring about it so much. You can do valuable things tired.
Build that imperfect table. You’ll learn from it.
“Exceptional” is about comparing your work to that of others. “Quality” is about your work’s intrinsic value. Seek quality, not exceptionalism.
When you have a child in you crying, angry, or overwhelmed, hold them. Don’t shame them.
Say oops easily. And make a plan to do better.
Consistency over intensity.
To feel like you are not wasting time:
- Grieve and learn from the past.
- Build a compelling vision for tomorrow.
Share judiciously to avoid getting hooked on the social feedback.
Three kinds of fears: 1. present dangers, 2. fears of a future you can act upon, 3. fears of a future you have no control over. For the first two categories, act! For the third, accept.
To get out of despair about the state of the world, do something with others.
Everything is just one tool in the toolbox. Every teacher has potentially useful teachings. None are sufficient for all life scenarios.
Save money on Tony Robbins: positive change is gradual, it’s about small daily choices.
Whatever makes us feel good (a pet, a job, a house, a partner) is also what makes us feel bad. A good life has meaningful stress.
If you choose something, you also choose its downside.
The conscious choice to fill your jar with certain things (and not others) gives life meaning.
A good life is about aligning your actions with healthy values. It’s not about feeling good all the time.
Practice voluntary simplicity: learn to be happy with rice and beans, good sleep, walking, breathing.
Thank a teacher. This lets them know their work is rippling into the future.
Zakolaysa periodically (fast, cold showers, breathwork…)
Slow building over instant gratification.
Attention pivots:
- Pinching pennies -> being generous
- Despair about the world -> Doing something (with others)
- Shoulda, woulda, coulda -> Doing better today
- “I’m inferior to others” -> “I’m inspired by others”
- Perfection -> Progress
Success = the intersection of values alignment, growth, and contribution.
With the highlighter of your attention, choose to emphasize the good in others.
To sculpt attention, use projects, not prohibitions.
Friendship and vocation are an infinite games: the goal is to keep playing.
It takes humility to realize that your ability to help is limited.
Eat with people.
Determine if people are believable before taking their advice. Ask: do I want to be like this person?
If you move away, the relationship will change. Pretending it doesn’t doesn’t do anyone any favors.
With big life changes, you’re never going to feel comfortable or ready beforehand. There will always be an element of fear. The question is: will you regret not doing it?
In a relationship, ask: do you feel my love? The answer can be no, and if so, work on this.
Every second counts. Time well-spent is the goal of life. Don’t spend time on things you don’t want to do.
To be “in” your life, realize:
- At any moment, you could be doing many other things.
- Because your time is finite, the thing you choose is precious.
Come to a complete stop before left turns.
Leash your dog if it’s possible that cars are around.
99% chance: people aren’t thinking about you. “I am inferior” is self-centered.
To find purpose, answer the question: what do you do for others? Commit to serving a marriage, a vocation, a philosophy/faith, a community, or even a dog.
If someone does something nice for you, do 2 nice things, that way, kindness spreads.
When picking fruits, leave some for others.
Give up your seat at the table, and put some food on that table.
Write to express, to see more clearly, to catalyze meaningful conversations.
Use peak experiences as kindling to inspire change in your daily life.
If love is given, accept the platter wholeheartedly or say no to it. Don’t take the platter and flick off pieces onto the floor.
Though parents aren’t perfect, they clothed and fed and loved you and got you to where you are now.
Essential life skills:
- Using death-awareness as a catalyst for meaningful living
- Enjoying solitude
- Pursuing values (see list below)
- Working within your zone of control
- Balancing deepening and novelty
- Self-compassion
- Self-respect: making and keeping agreements with yourself
- Responding to emotions in a healthy way
In every shave there lies a philosophy. How you do one thing reveals how you do many things.
Trust is the basis of all relationships, including with yourself.
Ways to see a person:
- As a cultural inheritor AND a cultural creator
- As a storyteller, telling a specific kind of story about themselves
- As someone focused on agency, relationships, or legacy (it’s possible to be in multiple stages)
- As someone with a personality, bringing a certain kind of energy to the room
Reduce choices deliberately. Spend more time with what you choose, love them more.
To open your mind, read the smartest counter-arguments to your opinions.
You are a yeast, fermenting a delicious sourdough to be eaten 200 years in the future. What kind of bread will it be? What’s your offering to the totality?
Treat yourself like a friend you are responsible for helping.
Each relationship is a crystal with unique beauty. Don’t try to change the crystal structure of a relationship by force.
Curiosity unlocks empathy and growth. Curiosity cures judgement, stuckness, and arrogance. Practice it.
It’s all activist work.
You are responsible for what you believe about yourself (thanks: Nick T).
Useful beliefs:
- Everything is a learnable skill
- Every day is an opportunity to get better at the art of living
- Meaningful social connection and high-quality people are abundant
- You can get better at empathy
- You can create positive ripples
- Everything in your life is your responsibility
- You have something to learn from everyone
- You are temporarily able-bodied
- Your painful experiences have a lesson within them
Think about your thinking. To change your life, change your thinking.
Allow yourself to cry. What comes out of your body won’t make you ill. What stays in there does.
Don’t ask “why me?” Ask: “what now?”
You must forgive yourself to move forward.
If you don’t change, you’ll never grow. RISK is the best four letter word because it leads to discovery.
You can change yourself and no one else. We’re powerful and limited.
It’s more useful to be aware of a single shortcoming in yourself than a thousand in someone else.
Praise or blame relates to a part of you, not the whole you.
People are neither completely good nor bad. This applies to you, too.
Character is the result of your little choices and actions. It determines the quality of your life.
You need a present focus to enjoy life and connect with people. You need a future focus to complete long-term projects and vividly see your future. You need a past focus to reflect and learn.
“Yes” is a tool for introducing freshness and change into life. “No” is a tool when you need to focus.
Pure pleasure is a doorway to addiction / compulsion. Learn to watch urges and change the channel: they will pass eventually. Your sense of agency will be stronger with every urge you don’t let control you.
Before you start something, think of the ways it could end. Sometimes the smart choice is to say no to the whole game. Feel free tonics are an example.
Guide to getting out of a bad state of mind:
- Ask “what’s wrong this second?” Usually, nothing.
- Say no to anything less than amazing.
- Do ADLs: clean, eat well, exercise.
Think long-term; don’t be a short-termite.
When making life-size decisions, ask: what brings you joy, what is in your long-term best interest, and what is useful to others?
Parenting advice: cultivate a long attention span, enter his world, broaden his inputs, use age-appropriate language, don’t demand attention (kids have their own agenda), speak to yourself well (your kid will pick up this self-talk).
Create from a blank canvas. We need empty time to think, reflect, and plan.
Karma yoga = acting from good intentions, without attachment to outcomes, realizing that you aren’t entirely the doer.
Money lowers unhappiness when it brings you out of deprivation. To use money well: buy experiences, time, give money away.
Don’t expect your job to fill all your emotional needs. Don’t expect your art to make your sole income. Your job feeds the need for stability. Your art feeds the need for expression.
To deepen a relationship, have an experience together (e.g. watch a movie, eat a meal, go on a trip).
Make sure your job is sustainable.
The paradox of choice is real: the more selection the harder it is to get satisfaction. Deliberately remove choices.
The more willing you are to be hurt, the deeper your life will be.
The right goal for romantic partnership is: best friends in 5 years.
The hallmark of co-dependence is bad boundaries. Find your NO.
To be a lenscrafter, you don’t even need to get out of bed, you just need to decide to see the world a certain way. For example:
- Is it insomnia or a sweet opportunity for writing?
- During torture, you can hate the torturers or think: what made them this way?
- Is this lighter an evil piece of single-use plastic or a miraculous tool for creating fire?
- Is Pheonix a terrible unsustainable sprawl, or a place with amazing art on the streets?
You can’t change the past AND you can change your perspective on it. Look at a story from your past, see what was challenging about it, accept that it was challenging, take your hand, walk yourself out of that space and say “I did it.”
Use better language, for example:
- A problem -> A challenge
- A crisis -> A transition
- Trauma -> cherished wound
Choose to spread friendliness. Compliment people, pet a cat, wave, give high fives, let other cars go first, say “Good morning” and “Have a great day!”
Clowning is a tool to practice play, courage and connection. Sometimes you need to overcompensate to really change.
To figure out your deepest values, ask yourself: what would I die for?
Write your own obituary, then reverse-engineer it. Think about how you want to be remembered, and act upon it.
Values are immortality projects, the ripples you leave behind in the world. They are also qualities of being; I want to be someone who is:
- Accepting
- In touch with wonder and awe
- Balanced
- Compassionate
- Connected
- Curious
- Empathetic
- Family-oriented
- In flow
- Generous
- Grateful
- Honest
- Humorous and appreciative of laughter
- Humble
- Follows his interest
- A lifelong learner
- Peaceful
- Playful
- Present
- Respectful
- Responsible
- Helpful
- Gentle with myself
- Simple
- Trusting
- Warm
- Thoughtful
To overcome anxiety, value the above more than avoiding discomfort.
Courage and discipline are needed for all of the above.
Discipline begets discipline. To make discipline easier, find a community of like-minded folks.
Minimize the secrets you keep from yourself.
If you care only about one thing, you will crash if that thing crashes. Diversify your identity by valuing many different things.
Unhealthy values: status, money, power, pleasure, fame. Guard against encroachment by these.
Blame = giving someone outside yourself power over your well-being. Don’t do it.
Growth = embodying better values. It’s painful because it involves the death of old identities.
The only way to feel better about yourself is to do things worth feeling good about. Self-respect has to be earned.
Be the partner you want to have.
Don’t wait until you have a perfect relationship to commit to a person. Commit in order to create a great relationship.
Marriage is about separation from parents and connection to a partner.
The quality of a relationship is determined, in a large part, by the way I show up.
Your partner is your co-artist on life’s tapestry.
Keep 2 lists: active investments (short), dreams (long). Saying no to some dreams is a way to give enough water to your active projects.
Because our lives are limited, most rocks have to be excluded from the jar.
You can’t change feelings, but you can change:
- your actions
- the stories you tell yourself
- your values
Flourishing has these components:
- Enjoyment (pleasure + memory/mindfulness + people).
- Getting better at something hard
- Service
- Using negative emotions productively
- Relationships
- A philosophy or spirituality that provides a sense of meaning to life
- Flourishing is not a destination, it’s a direction
If you are overwhelmed by your to-do list, pick 1-3 most important thing(s) to do today.
GLIG: Getting lost is good.
A tired dog/human is a good dog/human.
If you can jump into a body of water, do it.
Self-discipline and self-care are tools in the toolbox of life. It’s important to have both: to be able to do hard things AND slow down/enjoy yourself. If discipline is shame-driven, you’ll feel bad about yourself if you engage in self-care.
Emotional intelligence isn’t about controlling the emotions you feel. It’s about:
- knowing the emotions you feel and why you’re feeling them
- managing your responses to them constructively
3 types of travel: tourism, immersion, pilgrimage. 3 types of sabbaticals: working holiday, exploration, quest.
Culture shock = your perspective expanding.
Find helpful questions and metaphors for your life.
A relationship is a plant you water. Old friendships are like old-growth trees, not much maintenance is needed. Sapling relationships need lots of watering to take root.
The world is a hallway with many rooms. Your room determines your friends.
Code of healthy masculinity: provide, protect, procreate.
Nothing awesome happens through a screen. Flatworld can be a starting point, but life happens in 3D.
Move throughout the day.
To cut down on living in “what could have been,” think about what you’re grateful for right now.
Live not in “I am…” not “What if…”
Life is a lot about how you show up. Choose to be a tree or a clown 🙂
Two mental prisons borne out of not accepting the basic rules of life:
- Decision paralysis by analysis. Key: Accept the basic rule that we can’t know the future. So don’t stress about making the “right” decisions. Instead, focus on doing right by your decisions.
- Ruminative regret. Key: Accept the basic rule that we don’t get to travel back in time and live alternative lives. Learn from the past and make different choices in the here and now.
4 stages of life: mimicry, exploration, commitment, legacy. Active all the time, but their relative proportions change.
The sun does not stress.
Connection is about mutually being seen and appreciated.
Pursue what brings you flow, activities that make you forget to eat and poop. This invisible path leads to talent, ikigai, and the path itself is fun (and hard).
Love is the feeling of wanting to help someone. It is it’s own reward.
You can’t climb a mountain looking backwards.
Belonging = social interactions that are frequent, positive, stable, meaningful (and at least partially IRL).
In a marriage, complementarity allows for creativity and expansion. Two heads are only better than one if the heads think differently.
Wisdom is insight gained from life experience.
Meaning is generated through overcoming challenges. An easy life, one with no struggle, would have no meaning.
Slow growth is good growth.
Conceit is the impediment of learning.
Hope and purpose are risky, vulnerable. Cynicism is a defense mechanism. Don’t use it.
Positive change is not flipping a switch, it’s an incremental journey with community.
Find your ball in the ballpit — your contribution to a big world problem. There is no magic bullet. There are thousands of answers. You can be one if you choose.
Nickname the lake. Contribute to the commons.
Resentment is a sign I need help.
Happiness requires action. Focus on building the world you want to see. Hope grows with action in community. We are creating the world we want right now.
Be the person you needed as a kid but didn’t get.
Task + gift = fulfillment at work.
Identify as a living being.
Wisdom is my life experiences, accomplishments, challenges, and people I know. Use these gifts to help others.
What you or I do does not equal my or your value.
A shared goal for all the “teams” on the planet: happiness for all.
You are dependent on countless others. Write your own version of Steve Jobs’ email.
Something happens to you, good. It was meant for you by nature, woven into the pattern from the beginning. Life is short. That’s all there is to say. Get what you can from the present, thoughtfully, justly. –Marcus Aurelius
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