Category: self-help

Looking inside

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When you start looking inside, it’s possible that you won’t like what you find.

It’s a mixture of feelings, thoughts, ideas, memories, plans. Some land close to the picture of ourselves we have created culturally and relationally, some land quite far away. And that’s ok.

Looking inside, though, gives you quite a different perspective on the outside as well. When you begin to appreciate that deep down you are that insane and chaotic mixture, the good and the bad, the expected and the unexpected, the acceptable and the unacceptable, you realize that people around you are just the same. Their intentions are mixed, their feelings are mixed, their thoughts are mixed. They change trajectory within the same breath, they are insecure, scared, unprepared, variegated. Just like you are.

And so, what to do?

Most of us, spend their days fighting this, suppressing and denying what they do not recognize and cannot appreciate. Eventually, they bring the battle outside, because it’s easier to see the fault in others and pursue it relentlessly rather then acknowledging it in each one of us and make peace with it.

Few simply let go. They stop clinging, they stop holding on, they stop wanting to change, themselves and the others, they accept things for what they are, they navigate life to the best of their current possibility, making the most of each situation, realizing that it might not last (and in fact, it probably won’t).

Is this giving up, or is this the only way we have to actually change the world?

Not all the roads

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Annie Duke: We have this trade-off. We can kind of feel the pain in the moment, but the pain is going to be better in the long run, if we use it well, because we are going to be better decision makers in the long run, because we are experiencing the pain.

But the pain in the moment is pain. It doesn’t feel good. We have these competing problems: what’s best for me now, in terms of the way that I feel, versus what’s best for future me, in terms of how my life turns out. I think we can agree that the better my decisions, the more likely my life is going to turn out in a way that is good.

Shane Parris: It’s almost like the hindsight of your future-self becoming the foresight of your today-self.

Annie Duke: It’s getting the future version of you to get involved in the decisions of the present version of you.

From The Knowledge Project Podcast, ep. #37

When you make decisions in the moment, continuosly distracted by what is shinier, within reach, effortless, you often avoid negative feelings. And yet, you lose a little bit of who, deep down, you want to become.

What would your future-self say about what your today-self is doing?

Get that clear sooner rather than later, and accept the fact that not all the roads are going to take you where you aim. It will make it easier to accept defeats, say no, and be kind to yourself when some things will inevitably not pan out.

Presenting

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If you are preparing to deliver a presentation that matters (to you), consider the following.

Start with the audience and the change you’d like to see (even when you are just presenting results, you are still demanding a change). List them down somewhere and have them visible throughout the process.

Have the deck ready early, at least a week before the presentation.

Little text on a slide is always better than more. Always.

A list is a list even without a bullet.

Allow enough time to collect and implement the needed feedback. If you get feedback too close to the time you are supposed to deliver the presentation (<24hrs), be brave and disregard it.

Write a script for the key points and the transition between slides.

Rehearse the presentation multiple times, keeping the script at hand, but without reading it.

Few hours before the actual delivery, free your mind and take a break from the presentation. Do something else. The deck is ready by now, and so you are.

Good luck.

Clinging is not the answer

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Beliefs are constructs, and so two things can happen.

They can fail you. When you least expect it, when you start thinking at beliefs as reality, when you put a lot of pressure on them, the world will shift and they might not be relevant anymore.

They can change. It takes probably more time than you’d like, a lot of learning, some pain, and yet there is no reason why your beliefs should be the same for all your lifetime. When was the last time you thought Santa would deliver gifts on Christmas Eve?

As this happens, you can either cling to your failing and changing beliefs pretending they are fact (they are not), or you can challenge yourself over and over again to find uncomfortable situations, meet that person you’d never want to meet, learn something out of your field, invite somebody you don’t know very well over for dinner. Make it so this choice is deliberate.

Strategy and tactics

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While I was writing Secret Recipes the other day, I noticed I wrote another post a while back on a similar topic and yet with an apparently contrasting message. I now want to try to make better sense of my thoughts around doing.

Secret Recipes is about approaching information in a critical way. I say that 99.9% of the people seeking information online (how-to and step-by-step guides, mainly) will not do anything about it, and that the remaining 0.1%, those who plan to actually implement the recommendations, should factor in the role of context and luck. That is to say, they should not take what they read as immediately applicable to their case.

We know what to do is about the inability to act on what we know. Our hubris often makes us not follow common knowledge because we think we are different, our situation demands it, our idea is better than the millions that have come before it. And this makes us fail even when there’s a pretty consistent agreement out there about how we should have acted.

Secret Recipes suggests to be critical with information, We know what to do seems to suggest the opposite, that is to say to follow the knowledge we gather.

Both are true, and it very much depends if we are talking about strategy or tactics.

We know what to do is about strategy. It’s about the knowledge that multiple generations have gathered around how certain things are done. It’s about rules, frameworks that people have been following before and that have worked. And so other people also followed them, and again they worked.

Of course, sometimes the rules need to be broken. Yet, rather than believing this is the time, with us, here and now, we usually end up much better off if we stick to them. For example, if we start doing marketing by investigating the market and the customer, no matter if our product is so unique everybody will go nuts about it. Or if we are pitching to Guy Kawasaki with a presentation that follows his 10/20/30 rule, no matter how important it is everything we were planning to say.

Secret Recipes, on the other hand, is about tactics. That’s what most of the content nowadays is about, because tactics are usually more nuanced and dependent on the situation. For this reason I believe that being critical is necessary, and the more we act on such tactics anchoring them to the general framework (the strategy), the better.