- Concrete Life Upgrades
- Brené Brown
- Marie Kondo
- Finances
- Figure out what you're trying to do
- Plans and Blindspots
- Facing the Truth
- Finding Things & Solving Problems
- Learning
- Connecting with People
- Choose Your Peer Group with Intention (and creativity!)
- Language affects how you (and others) think about things
- Accept that your beliefs are not something you can change at will, and act accordingly
- Find a balance, given what you care about â and maybe look to other cultures for proof that thereâs more than one ârightâ way
- Figure out what changes your quality of thinking
- Know How to Interact with the Police
- Things to consider:
- Human civilization is unbelievably new:
- Life is quite short, and you should pay attention to what you care about and make time for it.
- Tim Urban's three takeaways:
- When trying to do something thatâs truly novel, be prepared for surprising challenges
- See also: Hobbies
Concrete Life Upgrades
Brené Brown
I'm not sure what will best entice you here... That her nerdy talk on vulnerability in 2010 struck such a chord that she instantly acquired a cult following of millions (it's still the 4th most viewed TED talk of all time with 50million+ views)? That she's a Type A qualitative researcher who discovered so many things in the data that conflicted with her life plans that she had to pause and work through her stuff with a therapist before being able to continue? That she has spent the last 10 years working with special forces in the US military, Fortune 50 companies (including Pixar)? Or maybe just that she's been a guiding light for me in the darkest times?
Listen to all her stuff on hoopla if you can, starting with The Power of Vulnerability lecture series (or just go read her books, but know that sheâs a talker, not a writer); if you can't absorb it all on the first pass, go through it again in 6 months.
The bonus is that sheâs constantly citing the work of others, which will leave a trail of breadcrumbs for you to follow. I've linked to most of her materials on her page:
Marie Kondo
Your life is probably full of things that you don't have an intentional positive relationship with.
This is probably getting in the way of valuing the things that do bring you joy, and also weighing you down/confusing you. The
Finances
Essentially: Get to a point where you spend less than you earn (this is basically what being able to retire means, but it doesnât have to happen in your 60s). Remember that you can get there by spending less, as well as earning more. Try to have your money work for you; understand compound interest (and the way it can apply to other investments)â10% per year doubles your money every 7.2 years so start as early as you can (though inflation can eat into that value), and other ways of getting passive income. Pay off your high-interest debt for the same reason. Max out your ROTH each year if you can (and try to put things in it that might 100x and then do it again â in the meantime, try a low-fee target date retirement fund like one from Vanguard and automate a deposit/purchase every month for dollar cost averaging). Take full advantage of employer matching. If you know how much you spend a year, you can maybe get some comfort from how much time you could live on your savings + passive income if you werenât working (6-months is a good initial target).
Consider risk and what you can do about it: diversify your assets and investments, get at least catastrophic insurance coverage for your health and your home, if you can, avoid significant financial obligations that will require payments even if you donât have a job, etc.
Don't neglect your future self, but find a way of understanding and making tradeoffs between money and things or experiences that actually reflect the things that bring you joy. E.g. âI could buy this thing, or go to the movies 5 times.â or âI could buy this thing or spend a summer living in Europe learning a new language.â or "I could buy this thing or stop being stressed about my credit card debt." Another important consideration is how much use you'll get out of a thing e.g. "These pants may seem expensive, but I'll probably wear them a few times a week for the next 3 years." â I spend a lot of money on my laptop & workstation & phone because I typically spend 10 hours a day interfacing with them. Also, if youâre going to eventually get a high-quality thing, consider whether you can just do that upfront (itâs always sad to see someone upgrade their kitchen before selling their house when they couldâve enjoyed that kitchen for years themselves).
I worry that investment advice is dicey because the markets currently don't make sense/are just glorified (state-supported) gambling, but there are still valuable pieces of advice in books, e.g. prioritizing paying off your credit cards or choosing a target date retirement mutual fund with low fees and dollar cost averaging rather than trying to beat the market or time the market. Two books have come to me highly recommended: I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi and The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need by Andrew Tobias.
Charitable giving
GiveWell is a good place to start in trying to find efficient/effective organizations and causes to fund. When in doubt, Iâd recommend their âTop Charities Fundâ (formerly called the Maximum Impact Fund) which seems to be the place where their staff tend to make their annual gifts.
This is a very cheesy but very clear multi-video series introducing a lot of important concepts in structured charitable giving which I found useful from a philanthropist perspective as well as a nonprofit fundraising perspective.
Early Retirement
I have a couple friends who took the early-retirement route (their basic plan was to prioritize work and financial stability and then switch gears to having and raising kids full-time). They had the advantage of being high-earners and of working in places like Google with special systems set up to accommodate people who are already maxing out all the traditional retirement funding avenues. These were their go-to resources:
Figure out what you're trying to do
In the unpleasant way that deciding not to make a decision is actually making a decision, whether you like it or not, you have goals and you're pursing them. But if you haven't gotten in touch with them and made your own plans, you're probably running on autopilot with the instructions that society has been inundating you with since you were just a twinkle in your father's eye. Unfortunately, those pre-packaged plans are probably not serving you very well.
Bonus hint: it turns out that a lot of your plans are in stored in your body(!), so it probably makes sense to invest in learning to understand the way your body is a partner in your pursuits.
When seeking out a therapist (which I highly encourage), it might make sense to filter for those who have realized this and practice somatic therapy (there are many types).
Eugene Gendlin's Focusing
These people might be able to help.
Pema Chödrön's idea of being "hooked"
Brené Brown's list of the 32 core emotions (apparently most people can only recognize/name 3?!)
Plans and Blindspots
If you have backup plans that you think will work, you'll be less deluded about what it is that you're doing and how likely it is that there's a major flaw in it that you're blind to (because you don't have another way that things are going to work out but you sort of need to believe that your plans are going to work).
Facing the Truth
- It's true whether or not you're facing it. Facing it at least gives you a chance to address it.
- I've been really stunned by how many wise people are trying to tell individuals and society some version of "If you own your story, you can decide how it ends, but if you deny your story, your story owns you."
Finding Things & Solving Problems
You are a zillion times more likely to find something if you believe it's there. This is true in the fridge and in your basement and in video games, but also when trying to solve problems â your intent when tackling something is totally different if you don't underlyingly believe that a solution exists.
Learning
You can't learn things that aren't neighboring things you already understand.
Don't be discouraged when you don't understand something. Everyone got where they are by building out the blocks one by one and figuring out the next proximate thing.
Here's a page in-progress with some things that I've found useful in helping me to understand the basic shape of specific things that I'm not particularly close to actually grokking â>
Connecting with People
I think it might matter a lot who you can find and whether you can make a connection with them.
Consider where to look for/find people e.g.
I think people spend most of their lives on autopilot; which puts their shields up. Take advantage of the times when people are naturally disrupted (e.g. a crisis, big or small) or havenât gotten into a groove yet (e.g. freshman orientation) or are intentionally popping out of their pattern (e.g. dance camp or a wedding) and make the most of those opportunities to connect with people.
Pay attention to what relationships actually matter to you, and invest in them.
Choose Your Peer Group with Intention (and creativity!)
The main thing here is that, consciously or subconsciously, youâre going to seek the acceptance of your tribe, and this will govern a lot of your behaviors as well as your own sense of how your life is goingâbut the world is big and itâs more possible than ever to be intentional about whose approval youâre seeking. It doesnât have to just be âthe people who happen to be aroundâ whether at school or work or even at home (though these things can be deeply ingrained and hard to ever completely shake off).
Maybe this has shifted somewhat with the advent of social media, but I think people underestimate how powerful it can be to have even your own impression of certain individuals be part of the group of people whose opinions matter to you, rather than just circumstantially available warm bodies â authors and public figures (and memories of your grandmotherâs disdain for dishonesty) can support you in navigating lifeâs many decisions.
Weâre social creatures, so by default, the people/media youâre exposed to will shape your underlying ideas of whatâs acceptable or cool or lame or whatever (I donât have a better explanation for fashion trends), so I think itâs worth putting some care into cultivating your Twitter feed and your fb feed (you can âunfollowâ without unfriending) as well as what books you read and what tv shows you watch as well as how much time you spend with various friends and family.
It can also be hard to remember the voices that you value when the voices that are nearby are so much louder. I suggest finding ways to anchor yourself, e.g. having a photo wall in your house of the people who understand you and believe in your potential (while loving you as you are) and maybe quotes that ground you (even if it might feel cheesy). I also find it useful to write letters to old friends Iâve collected but who arenât really part of my day-to-day; it shores up that relationship as a line of defense against broader society and also causes me to spend time steeped in the narrative that I have with that person.
I also highly recommend adding
As a strange but concrete example of how this can work: I had a friend who was able to think really clearly about esoteric topics and Iâm pretty sure he had a big advantage because fairly early on, he added Descartes to his chosen peer group; my guess is that this helped him to stay the course when his real life peers wouldâve encouraged him to give up and gloss over those hard-to-think-about topics.
In some ways itâs like a more subtle (and more important) version of the way that you play your best tennis when the people youâre playing with are better than you.
Language affects how you (and others) think about things
Naming something can make it easier to think about or identify in a new context. But labels can also cause you to over-generalize and get stuck. Try avoiding labels if you want to hold onto nuance and retain more flexibility of thought and action â e.g. âI try not to eat meatâ vs. âIâm a vegetarianâ or âI made a mistakeâ vs. âIâm stupid/clumsy.â
Analogies and metaphor are cool because, if you pick a good one, you're able to talk to someone who started off knowing nothing about your thing and quickly import a lot of content that they'd already built out about the thing you're comparing to. In some ways, I think this is what storytelling is about, and is one reason that
Accept that your beliefs are not something you can change at will, and act accordingly
Given this, acting in the world as a whole unified person is actually a delicate dance and it requires compassion and accommodation for the parts of yourself and others that you canât change.
Certain things have been woven into the fabric of your development: âproperâ gender roles (sexism), what trustworthy people look and sound like (racism/classism), how much education you need in order to competently engage with intellectual issues (elitism), how old you have to be before you can make important decisions (ageism), etc.
You can also form your own independent views, but if they arenât strong enough to combat the beliefs that were instilled in you and that you have integrated in a densely interconnected way, there will be a natural tension in the way you live your life.
My advice: make peace with the fact that you donât underlyingly believe all the things that you intellectually endorse. Distrust of black people does not mean youâre a bad person; it probably means that you grew up in the United States. By accepting that you have these beliefs (and maybe much weirder ones that are harder to explain, like a disgust of old people or a worry that if you arenât the best at [esoteric hobby X] no one will like you), you can make plans that accommodate them better than sweeping them under the rug, and you can take that knowledge and explain your behavior to others and apologize and/or pivot when your behavior doesnât match up with your endorsed beliefs.
But be careful not to take those underlying beliefs and blanketly give them power in your life. Maybe you have a fear of bicycling because a friend was killed in a traffic accidentâit makes sense to recognize that fear and the source of the fear and communicate that to the people in your life. But if someone invites you to bike in a park without car traffic, while you can be too afraid to accept, it can be good for you and your friends to have you recognize and acknowledge that the fear is misplaced (even if it feels very real). As someone with a lot of trauma and triggers, it has been so so helpful when Iâm able to communicate in a nuanced way about whatâs happening for me â not asserting that my anxieties are justified, but still accommodating them by making efforts to find a way for me to do the activities in a way that doesnât force me to ignore my feelings and just push through.
Another problem with giving those underlying beliefs power is that when they donât actually map onto reality, you may have painted yourself into a corner. In the biking example, if you treat your feeling of fear as justified, your friends may do things to ensure itâs safe, but that may not actually address whatever is causing those feelings, which can leave your friends feeling frustrated and you feeling defensive and maybe worried that youâll need to do the âsafeâ biking to save face.
So recognizing those underlying (often unappealing) beliefs and also having an intellectual belief about whatâs real/whatâs true, and then communicating and making decisions based on both, puts you in a much better position than trying to treat your beliefs as a coherent whole.
Find a balance, given what you care about â and maybe look to other cultures for proof that thereâs more than one ârightâ way
(Where itâs possible you care about things you wish you didnât or that you donât care about things you wish you did)
This will help you to see reality more clearly: what youâre actually doing, what effects you are (or arenât) having, etc.
e.g. If eating meat/eggs/dairy in your social group is sinful, but you love it, maybe check in on what you care about and what your friends care about and find a compromise. For me, it turns out that I care about the suffering of animals and the quality of the food I put in my body and I care about the people around me also factoring that in (without that causing them to dig their heels in). So when I shop or when someone asks if they could pick something up for me at the grocery store, I optimize (and ask them to optimize) for how happy the animals mightâve been: no specific labels or restrictions, no heavy-handed judgement, just a nudge in the direction of what I value.
Something else that helped me was discovering that Americans spend a much smaller percentage of their budgets on food compared to other countries. So even though those foods seem expensive, itâs maybe not crazy to invest more in what Iâm consuming.
Figure out what changes your quality of thinking
Pacing? Driving? Scrunching up your face? Not dividing your mental energies?
Iâve encountered a couple of really impressive thinkers who *need* to pace in order to get through really complex topics. I have another friend who goes on long drives in order to think things through/process new thoughts.
I am completely distracted by the world if Iâm moving, so itâs hard for me to imagine whatâs causing that, (I maybe do best when Iâm lying on the floor, looking up at the ceiling, and donât need to allocate resources to handling social considerations?) but it seems worth experimenting with.
Related to social considerations, I also know someone who does much better thinking on video calls if they turn their video off, because the pattern of tension they need to hold in their face and body for thinking is different than/incompatible with the pattern of tension that will communicate the right things to colleagues via facial expression.
âShower thoughtsâ
Thereâs a different (but perhaps related) thing that is maybe more common and is often referred to as âshower thoughtsâ but that I think is a pretty important and useful phenomenon.
My guess is that certain activities end up functioning similarly to meditation â essentially something where you are trapped in a single activity, with no escape, but itâs not an activity that holds/requires your attention.
I think this makes room for different content to arise in your mind (often content that was there but was being more actively ignored or pushed aside) and you can then make some progress with it.
If you want to capitalize, you can e.g. find a way of taking notes in the shower, take showers more frequently, or find another activity that gets to this state more directly (e.g. meditation â or for me, the first attempt at meditating in a session, which brings up all of that submerged content for me to then list out and work through later). Maybe this is the real reason that my friend goes for long drives.
The best times for me include: showers, baths, hot tubs, airplane trips (without in-flight entertainment) and the time right before falling asleep and the time right after waking up.
â ïžÂ One word of caution: if you have a lot of trauma, these are actually pretty shitty circumstances that can allow the upsetting thoughts that you are generally keeping at bay to surface. I personally endorse people engaging in avoidance behaviors as much as they need to to stay sane, even if that means finding ways of showering less frequently or more quickly or finding ways of redirecting your attention in those moments, e.g. with a podcast or audio book or a more concrete and less-triggering topic that needs thinking through.
Be thoughtful
This is a tiny example, but when you close the door behind you, turn the doorknob so that the latch doesnât click into place. Withdraw the latch, gently pull the door closed, and then release the knob so that it doesnât have to loudly clunk over the strike plate. Itâs maybe an action associated with trying not to wake a sleeping baby, but you can implement it in everyday life to just decrease the loudness/disruption for people around you.
Know How to Interact with the Police
e.g. Practice saying "I don't consent to a search" when they ask to look in your bag or your car. Know that you can always say "Am I free to leave?" or "Am I being detained?" to end the interaction. Remember anything you say can/will be used against you â you have the right to remain silent.
20min podcast from NPR with accompanying transcript/article:
"BUSTED: The Citizen's Guide to Surviving Police Encounters" is a 2006 classic. 45min long but/and pretty entertaining:
This is part 1 of a 10 part updated series from 2010:
The ACLU also has specific advice for dealing with racial profiling:
And this one covers additional points like passenger rights, drug dogs, etc.
Things to consider:
Human civilization is unbelievably new:
(we haven't figured everything out, your parents didn't figure everything out, the form of government in your country is just one of dozens of options, our culture is changing crazy-fast, technology is being developed crazy-fast â all of this is just an insane experiment)
Life is quite short, and you should pay attention to what you care about and make time for it.
Tim Urban's three takeaways:
1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.
2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by youânot by unconscious inertia.
3) Quality time matters. If youâre in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when youâre with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.
When trying to do something thatâs truly novel, be prepared for surprising challenges
This is a post that I wrote about a wildly ambitious thing I tried to do with a group of really incredible humans. I wrote it in response to a lot of confusion surrounding the project (which didnât fail gracefully), so I didnât really get to choose the frame, but I think I was able to convey some useful pieces.