Philosophy

Quit your job. Today.

If you are standing on the ledge looking over and need a little push I’m here to kick you square in the ass and push you the hell off the roof. You’ll learn to fly or you die at the bottom, but you know that I’m right when I tell you that either of those options are better than just standing on that ledge forever. At least they are action.

Here’s the thing, you only get one life. And in the big scope of things it’s pretty short. So why would you waste a single moment of it doing something that isn’t awesome? If you love your job and can barely tell the difference between when you are working or not then I’m not talking to you. But if you dread going to work every day and count the seconds until you are finished for the day I might as well have put your name in the title of this post.

Yes you.

What are you waiting for?

There’s never going to be a right time. There will never be a safety net. It will never be comfortable. It will never be easy. But change and growth isn’t supposed to be. It’s scary. It’s nerve wracking. It’s terrifying. It’s also the only option you have if you don’t want to look back and think you wasted your life. It’s the only option you have if you want to be happy. It’s the only option you have if you want to do anything besides just sit still being depressed. And it’s the most rewarding thing you will ever do. Really, what are you waiting for?

You know full well you don’t like what you are doing. So do something else. The worst thing that can happen is that you won’t like it. In which case you are exactly where you are right now. Every other potential out come puts you in a better position. I know this, because the people who can’t do something else, the people with no vision to do something else, the people with no dreams to do something else don’t ever consider it. They don’t even know there is a ledge they could be looking off of. They are clueless to the better options laid out before them. But you know about the ledge, you know about the options, you are just scared to reach for them.

Don’t be scared. Be excited.

If you don’t try you are assured to fail. 100% guarantee that you won’t pull it off if you don’t go for it.

So go for it. Stop fucking around and talking yourself out of it. The next thing you do will be awesome. You just have to believe that, and then do it. What are you waiting for?

Acceptance

Given how quick I am to judge everyone else around me you might think I’m more comfortable being judged myself. So might I, but as I’ve gotten older I have to admit that isn’t entire accurate. Or rather, I realize there is some grey area between what judgements I care about and those I don’t. I spent a large portion of my child hood being worried that everyone was judging me all the time, and then I realized that was a waste of time and the pendulum swung hard the other direction and I spent the rest of my formative years not giving a shit. Middle age has landed me somewhere in the middle.

It turns out that I walk a razor thin line between fear of rejection and not giving a crap. The truth is I’m still pretty indifferent about most people’s feelings about me. I’m fairly comfortable with the person I am and the choices I’ve made with regards to how I live my life. Because of that I generally feel that if a person doesn’t like something about me they are welcome to fuck right off. Seriously. Right off. And this is true for almost everyone I encounter on a daily basis. But not everyone.

There’s another group of people – a very small one mind you – who I’m constantly nervous that I’m going to offend. Or maybe offend is the wrong word, I know I’m going to offend everyone at some time so I’ve given up worrying about that. I’m constantly nervous that they will think less of me. This small group of people, these are the people I genuinely care about. These are the people that I love. The ones I’d be heart broken if they weren’t in my life anymore – so to some extent I guess I’m worried I’ll do something to push them away.

The result of all this is I think I’m much more guarded around people I know than those I don’t. I don’t care what people I don’t know think about me, but I totally care about the ones I do.

In thinking about that, I don’t think that’s unusual. To care about the opinions of people you care about. But when you step back a little bit it’s actually kind of weird. Look at this math: People I don’t know or causally know + don’t care what they think of me = confident // vs // People I care about + do care what they think about me = less confident

Do I tell some guy about to back into me that he has no idea how to drive a car? Sure. Do I tell my friend that her band is unoriginal and kinda sucks? Probably not. Do I tell my wife my every dirty, sexy and freaky desire? Of course not, like a normal person I keep that shit locked up and just hope she magically reads my mind.

Doesn’t it seem like maybe that should be reversed? Am I alone on this one? What causes this? Fear? Trust, or lack of it? If the situation was reversed wouldn’t I want the guy I was about to hit with my car to keep his damn mouth shut? Wouldn’t I want to trust that my friends would give me honest opinions about my band? Wouldn’t I be excited to learn I was married to some kind of dirty, sexy freak?

Like usual I don’t have the answers here, but it’s something I’m thinking about. I should more often put on a smiley face for strangers and be more honest and forthcoming with friends? The most honest and forth coming friends I have are generally considered dicks by most everyone else, because most people don’t want honesty. Yet I very much appreciate their candidness and openness. Hrm..

Aaron

I woke an hour ago to the news that Aaron Swartz killed himself. From my vantage point it seems like the entire internet is mourning him. It only takes reading a a few posts by people who loved him to understand why. Not why he did it, but why there are Alderaan levels of horror and sadness being felt that he did. An entire world crying out in pain.

I didn’t know Aaron personally, I knew of him of course – he was a very cherished person to many people I cherish. When I’d read his name, like many others out there in similar circles, I’d often think how weird it was that I hadn’t met him yet and wondered when I finally would. I so frequently meet people that I’ve known about for years, or who I’ve interacted with online but never met in person that it’s not even noteworthy anymore. I just expect that anytime a friend talks about someone that I’ll someday be hanging out with them. To the point that it’s almost a game. What will be the circumstances when I’ll meet them? Where in the world will it happen? Who will do the introduction?

I’ll never have the chance to meet Aaron now, and I’m saddened by that.

Knowing what I do about him and what he accomplished in his relatively short life, and reading the words my friends are writing about their friend – we all lost one of the good ones today. And regardless of if anyone knew him personally, we’re all worse off without him. It’s so terribly unfortunate that he felt this was his only escape.

I’ve written about my own experiences with depression and suicide in the past. I likely will again in the future. Today, I don’t know what to say. Except this sucks.

fuckitshipit

Sometimes you talk about something and then every other conversation you end up having that day ends up back at theme you started with. My post yesterday about getting shit done resulted in a day full of discussions about just that. You could interprete that as lack of imagination and inability to think of other thing to talk about or you could decide it’s just that important and useful that you can’t push it out of your head and you know it needs to be focused on. I’m choosing the later. Fuck it. Ship it. We say this a lot. It means quit worrying about all the details and get it out the door. Deliver something.

I’ve linked to Bre’s Cult Of Done a hundred times in the past and I’ll link to it 100 times in the future because it’s that good. Getting something done trumps not get getting something done, and if you don’t get something done because you are worrying about this or that – that’s still not getting something done. The reason Woody Allen said “Eighty percent of success is showing up” is because eighty percent of people don’t show up. They will find a reason and talk them selves out of it. So by just being there you are ahead of the game already, use that to your advantage. Just go.

Almost 3 years I wrote this motivational post to myself in regards to writing because I was doubting and talking myself out of it. If I want to write I need to write. If I convince myself that I don’t have anything to say and then don’t write then I’ve lost. If I write – if I write anything, then I win. If I write something good then even better, but just writing is already putting me ahead of the game. I need to remind myself of that all the time. I’m really good at convincing myself it’s not worth trying. I’m full of shit about that, it’s totally 100% worth trying. 2013 is the year of trying everything. Doing everything. Delivering everything. If not now, when?

Fuck it. Ship it.

Attachment

My friend Michael wrote a blog post (As an aside, I’m so excited to be writing blog posts linking to friends blog posts again) listing a few specific things you can do to improve your life. It’s a list worth reading just to consider even if you don’t put every suggestion into play. The first one is the thing that really jumped out at me.

Don’t sleep in the same room as your phone.

The oft controversial Tim Ferris suggests something similar in his 4-Hour Workweek, recommending to avoid checking email in the mornings and evenings.

While different specifics, the goal here is the same. Spend the last part of the day and the beginning of the next with the people and environment you’ve chosen to surround yourself with, rather than on the whim of whatever is happening in the rest of the world. I’d be lying if I said I’ve never laid awake at night caught in the refresh loop on my iphone checking email, twitter, tumblr, a few news sites, email, twitter.. etc. Or that I’ve never woken up in the morning and grabbed by phone to see what time it is, and upon leaning it’s 3 hours earlier that I needed to wake up notices I had some new email and some new replies on twitter and then spent the next hour awake in bed on my phone. In fact, I do that several times a week.

Now seems like as good a time as any to give this a shot.

Cloaking Device

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Given that I’m vegan, and that I travel a lot, I’m often asking people if they know where I might find some good vegan food. I used to ask people who live in these places I travel to because I figured locals know all the secrets. It was not uncommon for me to be told I would be starving because their city had no options at all for me. In fact, some of the cities where I’ve had the best vegan food in my life, have been cities where locals told me there was no vegan food to be had. The important part of this story is that the locals weren’t vegan. They didn’t think their city had any vegan food because they’d never looked for it. It might have been right in front of their faces (or on the same street as their house as it was in one occasion) but they were obvious to it. It wasn’t on their radar.

Turns out there’s a lesson here. Just because something isn’t apparent, doesn’t mean it’s not there. It could be hiding right in front of you.

I try to think about this from time to time, though honestly not often enough. It’s easy (for me) to fall into the trap of expecting things to be obvious. The solution should be obvious. The next step should be obvious. The path to take should be obvious. I have to remind myself that just because the solution seems like taking the next step down this obvious path, that maybe there are other options. Less obvious ones that might be right in front of me but I can’t see them because they aren’t on my radar. It’s like they have a cloaking device.

I would love to say that I’ve found a great way to discover these unseen paths, but I haven’t. I don’t have the answer. Sometimes I find them, sometimes I don’t. When I don’t, sometimes it’s because I didn’t look, sometimes it’s because I probably looked in the wrong place.

I almost never ask the locals where the vegan food is anymore. I ask other vegans. And now anywhere I go, within minutes I have personal recommendations from people I trust. I feel like I have a cheat sheet. It’s like my secret posse, and one of the benefits of subcultures. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently all of my life. More on that soon, but there’s a lesson here as well. It’s just not as obvious.