Brainjour

Justin Kerby

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Every year on my birthday I sit down and write a letter to myself. It’s basically a, “Here’s what we learned last year, don’t fuck it up again this year” type of post. You can see past years here.

Without further ado. Here are the things I learned and the things that stuck with me last year.

1. The worst moments in our lives make us who we are

Health isn’t guaranteed. I spoke about this last year, but it really hit home this year as my family faced some scary times. As a result of the experience, I did a lot of soul searching during the end of the year, and one of the best resources I found was Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree. Here are a few things Solomon taught me:

-You must find seedlings of joy in what looks like sorrows.

-We could have been ourselves without our delights, but not without the misfortunes that drive our search for meaning.

-If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes.

In what is the first ever Bible verse I’ve shared on my blog (I think), I found a lot of power in 2 Corinthians 12. It really drove home these ideas I’ve listed above. Here’s the passage:

“Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

2. Comfort is limiting

This year, I left my old company and started a new one. I’d been meaning to do it for a long time, and finally pulled the trigger. I was nervous about the move – leaving a steady paycheck and fear of the unknown kept me tied to what was comfortable, even though I knew it was wrong for me. Some thoughts on comfort and taking chances:

–“Comfort is the enemy of progress.” -PT Barnum

–“Embrace suffering and avoid comfort – when you welcome suffering, nothing can take away your peace of mind.” -Darius Foroux

–“Own the story. If you do, you write the ending.” –Brene Brown

-(paraphrasing) “Some people will be miserable for seven years to avoid seven days of discomfort. Sometimes the mountain you think you need to climb is just a curb.” -Bill Burr

And finally, on the subject of leaving comfort and writing your own story, I read the Chronicles of Narnia this year so quoting CS Lewis feels like to good place to end:

–“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” -CS Lewis

3. Patience is a virtue

I learned this the moment I left my job. It was scary, but with hard work and persistent effort, the clients came.

This year I learned from James Clear that a good choice may go unrewarded for a while. The best choices tend to provide exponential returns and a hallmark of any compounding process is that the greatest rewards are delayed. I felt that this year. I had bad luck month one and it took some time for our tree to bear fruit.

Patience prevailed. I’ve set myself up for future success and have enormous pride in what we’ve built in a short period of time. This has turned out to be the best career decision I’ve ever made. Zero regrets.

As one of my favorite copywriters, Cole Schaefer said once: “Be patient. Being in a hurry is a race to the grave.”

4. Go all in

Part of the reason patience paid off for us is because we gave it our all. Here’s what Charles Bukowski says about giving things your all:

“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery — isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”

5. Be present

Some form of this will probably show up in my birthday posts every year, and it’s that important. Every year I seem to view it from a new lens.

These year, that lens was through a couple of my favorite movies. I won’t go into how much they mean to me right now, I’ll save that for a later date. But quotes from these two films reminded me to stay in the moment this year.

Groundhog Day

-Where’ve you been? You’re missing all the fun.

-Ned: Where are we going? Rita: Let’s not spoil it.

-No matter what happens tomorrow – or the rest of my life – I’m happy now.

-Today is tomorrow.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

-Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around every once and a while you could miss it.

-You’re not dying, you just can’t think of anything good to do.

-Be a man! Take some Pepto-Bismol.

The quotes above, out of context, might not make any sense. But each of them comes at an important point of the film – when Ferris’s friend Cameron is letting his anxiety keep him from living his life, or when Phil Connors finally figures out what it means to live. So much of life is showing up and being present. If you can’t be happy today, you can’t be happy tomorrow. Or, as one of my favorite comedians Pete Holmes would put it:

“If you can’t enjoy the plane ride, the beach won’t save you.”

6. Figure out what’s essential to you

I got married this year. It was an amazing day. Seeing all of our friends and family in one place, supporting us, driving from across the province, flying from around the world…being with them was what mattered, not the flowers or the view.

Family and friends are an essential part of my life. Spending one-on-one time with my amazing wife on our honeymoon was probably the best part of my year, and it’s become very clear to me that quality time with her is completely essential to me as well.

I made a personal list of other things that I think are essential, and I’m doing my best to make them a priority and cut away the rest. I got this idea from Greg McKeown and Seth Godin.

-“Your goal should not be more, your goal should be better.” -Seth Godin

–“If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.” -Greg McKeown

My wife, my family, my friends, writing, reading, exercising – these are my priorities. Everything else takes a back seat.

7. Monitor your thoughts

Mindfulness has been huge for me throughout my late 20s and early 30s, and I continue to invest a lot of time into meditation. This year I really worked on recognizing negative thought patterns. If you can catch them right away, you can save yourself a ton of wasted energy.

I read The Daily Stoic every day in 2019, and one of the main principles that stuck with me is that worrying is like praying for something you don’t want. I’m working hard on noticing worry and have made gratitude a daily practice.

8. Learn to let go

One of the most important things I learned this year came from reading The Courage to Be Disliked. It’s a great book.

(Side note: I rated every book mentioned in this post 5-stars on Goodreads)

One of the key points in the book is that you should not accept other people’s tasks as your own, and on the flip side, you must not let one person intervene in your tasks. You must be true to yourself, and leave others to make their own decisions. It sounds easy, but in reality it’s quite hard. I’m definitely working on this.

It’s not, and never has been your job to fix people as you best see fit (unless they’re harming themselves or someone else). That’s their task. Taking on that responsibility is in a way, selfish. Letting go of that weight can be extremely liberating.

9. Time blocking works

The biggest victories often come from consistency. Like I mentioned above, showing up is a superpower. Whether it’s to your desk in the morning, to the gym in the afternoon, or to a side project every weekend. I’ve seen it in my own life, and I’m trying to use it to my advantage.

Time blocking has been very successful for me. I’ve used it to make things stick – working on certain projects at certain times. I’m also trying to use it to get my hardest task completed first thing in the morning. “Worst first” is a new mantra of mine.

“If the first thing you do in the morning is eat a live frog, you can go through the rest of the day knowing the worst is behind you.” -Mark Twain

While I’m quoting Twain, this is another quote of his that resonated for me this year. It has nothing to do with time blocking, but it’s worth sharing:

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled.”

10. Remember to recharge

Going slow and going all in are related.

When you sleep, go all in on sleep. Sleep at home like you do on vacation. Rest is critical to reducing stress, and you need to make it a priority if you want to go all in on the things that are essential to you.

Speaking of vacations, when you take them, don’t stress about money or minor inconveniences like car rental line ups or overbooked flights. You’ll laugh about it and miss it when you get home.

Get a massage. Take time to meditate. Turn off the TV and read a book. Stroll without listening to anything. The “Instructions for Living a Life” by Mary Oliver are one of my favorite things I came across this year (I found them in Keep Going by Austin Kleon). It’s seven words and reads as follows:

Pay attention.

Be amazed.

Tell about it.

11. Follow your bliss

More great instructions for living a good life, and maybe the best career advice anyone could get. Joseph Campbell coined this phrase, and I try to follow my bliss as much as possible.

As you can tell by the amount of notes I took, The Hero’s Journey was definitely one of the best things I read this year.

12. Eat more plants

It turns out, they’re pretty good for you. I read The Longevity Diet by Dr. Valter Longo this year after hearing him on Dr. Rhonda Patrick’s podcast, and it’s led to significant changes in my diet. Ones that I’m happy to adopt, like more vegetables and less processed food.

13. Keep good company

Keeping bad company bites you in the ass. If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

14. Emotions cloud judgement

It’s one of the reasons I love to write. I can separate my emotions from my self and let it all spill out.

“Memory believes before knowing remembers.” –William Faulkner

15. Doing good makes doing more good easier

I’m going to close on this one.

Near the year’s end, I realized that doing good – whether it be acts of kindness, acts of self-improvement, or giving to others – inspires you to do more good. It’s like a snowball, it just needs a push.

The Dream

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kobe's dream

Kobe Bryant’s name is known around the world. He was an incredible father, an Oscar winner, an investor, an advocate, and yes, a basketball player.

To anyone who followed his career, there was one thing that separated Kobe from his peers: His work ethic. It was legendary. Tales were often told about him wrapping up a training session before anyone even arrived at practice. He took just two weeks off after winning a championship before heading back to the office. He had a drive like no other.

It’s what made him one of the greatest of all time.

The truth is, though, Kobe didn’t see the accomplishing of his goals as the dream. The dream, to Kobe, was the journey.

Here are his words on the subject during his retirement ceremony at the Staples Center, speaking to his family:

“If you do the work, you work hard enough, dreams come true. You know that, we all know that. But hopefully what you get from tonight is that those times when you get up early and you work hard; those times when you stay up late and you work hard; those times when you don’t feel like working – you’re too tired, you don’t want to push yourself, but you do it anyway…That is actually the dream. That’s the dream. It’s not the destination, it’s the journey. And if you guys can understand that what you’ll see happen is that, you won’t accomplish your dreams, your dreams won’t come true, something greater will.”

Kobe’s story isn’t about how to be a great basketball player. It’s about how to live a great life. It’s about pushing yourself for a cause that’s worthwhile, working hard, focusing, and giving everything you have. The journey is the dream. Here and now.

RIP Mamba.

A Year of TED Talks

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a year of ted talks

Last year, I decided to watch one TED Talk every Thursday for the entire year. Here’s are eight of my favorites and my notes on each talk.

1. A Powerful Way to Unleash Your Creativity – Tim Harford

In this talk, Tim Harford addresses multitasking, which he feels has gotten a bad name. He believes that while it is typically a bad idea, that’s only because we’re doing it wrong. We’re multitasking when we’re in a rush.

Harford believes that “slow-motion multitasking”, the act of having multiple projects going during the same time period, is a common habit of master creatives. A study of the top scientists in the world found that in their first 100 research papers, on average they changed the subject 43 times – and Harford believes this shifting of topics is key to creative breakthrough.

Why do creative people have multiple projects on the go?

  1. Creativity often comes when you take an idea from its original context and move it somewhere else – think of Archimedes struggling with displacement, and finally had his eureka moment while taking a bath.
  2. Learning to do one thing well can often help you to do something else well. Think of athletes who practice cross-training.
  3. It can provide assistance when we’re stuck.

So, how do we stop all of these projects from becoming overwhelming? Harford suggests we manage our ideas by keeping them all in a box. It doesn’t matter whether the box is physical or digital, what matters is that we don’t lose our ideas so that we can build on them.

Examples of slow-motion multitaskers: Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Twyla Tharp, Michael Crichton.

2. Inside The Mind of a Procrastinator – Tim Urban

Tim Urban is the founder of Wait But Why, one of the best blogs on the web. When you’ve got some free time (maybe when you’re procrastinating), give it a read. It’s sure to spark a lot of thought.

He gave this TED Talk in 2016, to highlight what goes on in the mind of a procrastinator.

He discusses three parts of the procrastinator’s brain:

  1. The Rational Brain: The part of our brain that tells us to do what makes sense.
  2. The Monkey Brain: The part of the procrastinator’s brain that tells them to do what’s easy and fun. It distracts the rational brain from doing what makes sense.
  3. The Panic Monster: The part of the procrastinator’s brain that wakes up when a deadline is coming, signaling to the procrastinator that the work that makes sense needs to be done, now.

Urban states that when the Panic Monster is the only mechanism for doing hard things, we run into problems. It leads to long term procrastination – the ignoring of health, fitness, and other important aspects of our lives. This, in turn, leads to unhappiness and regret.

He concludes the talk by stressing that we need to stay away from the instant gratification monkey part of our brain. We don’t have that much time, and we need to do what makes sense if we want to be fulfilled.

3. How to Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals – Stephen Duneier

From TEDxTucson, Stephen Duneier discusses marginal adjustments, and how they can help you reach your biggest goals. 

Duneier believes that what stands between us and our goals isn’t a magical skill or talent you’re born with, the gap is in how we approach decision making. Marginal improvements often have a huge impact on our lives. 

In this talk, Duneier breaks down how he went from being a C student to an A+ student by making his workload manageable. Instead of pressing himself to read a book, he’d tell himself to read a couple of paragraphs at the most. Starting things, it turns out, is the quickest way to finishing them – and keeping our tasks simple is the quickest way to starting. 

He highlights other examples, including how he learned to speak German, and how he used marginal adjustments to set a world record for knitting granny squares. He credits these achievements to the same process. Duneier takes ambitious projects and breaks them down into their simplest form while making marginal improvements along the way to improve his odds of success. 

4. The Power of Believing That You Can Improve – Carol Dweck

This talk is all about how we educate our children. Carol Dweck (the author of Mindset) speaks about a high school in Chicago where students who didn’t receive passing grades were assigned the grade of “not yet”.

This lets students understand they’re on a learning curve, a path to a better future.

She believes that to inspire kids to believe that they can improve, we need to build a bridge to yet. We do this by praising wisely.

Praising wisely is not praising intelligence or talent, but praising the process that kids engage in. Their focus, strategies, effort, perseverance, and improvement. This process creates resilient kids. To change children’s mindsets, we need to teach them that pushing beyond their comfort zone to learn something difficult is a good thing. Students taught this process showed a significant improvement in grades in many studies.

When you implement praise wisely, it changes how people view things. This leads to growth and improvement.

5. The Magic of Not Giving a F*** – Sarah Knight

Sarah Knight had a great job as a book publisher, but she was still unhappy. So she quit. She cleared out her mind, and left room for focusing on the things that brought her joy.

She decided to make a manifesto of sorts out of this, called The Magic of Not Giving a Fuck. In this talk, she defines giving a fuck as caring, and not giving a fuck as not caring. If you don’t care about something, she believes you should stop giving your time, thoughts, and money to it. This gives you more time and energy to things you actually do care about.

Part of her method is called “Not Sorry”. She suggests being honest and polite, but not being sorry about the things you’ve decided not to care about. These things can be tasks, events, and even people. Decide what annoys you, make a list, and carefully cross out the things you don’t want to care about anymore. Then stop giving a fuck about those things and cross them off your list.

6. Quit Social Media – Dr. Cal Newport

Cal Newport is a computer scientist and the author of Deep Work. He’s never had a social media account.

When he tells people this, he hear three common objections:

  1. You’re rejecting a fundamental technology innovation
  2. It’s vital to my success
  3. It’s harmless

In this TED Talk, he walks through reasons why (in his opinion) those objections aren’t valid. He believes social media is purely an entertainment product, that using it is not rare or valuable, and that it leads to many negative consequences like feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, and anxiety.

Newport says that life without social media is peaceful and productive. If you treat your attention with respect, you can work with intensity and trade that for time. He finishes the talk by asserting that you’ll be surprised by what you can get done in 8 hours with intense concentration. He covers this at length in Deep Work.

7. How the worst moments in our lives make us who we are – Andrew Solomon

I had a really rough week and found this TED Talk to be extremely helpful. Andrew Solomon reminds us that ease makes less an impression on us than struggle. While we cannot bear a pointless torment, we can endure great pain if we believe that it’s purposeful – so we need to forge meaning, build identity, and invite the world to share in our joy.

“If you banish the dragons you banish the heroes”

One other note: while I’m not too familiar with Bible passages, 2 Corinthians 12 was mentioned in this talk, and it resonated.

8. The danger of hiding who you are – Morgana Bailey

Morgana Bailey is a Human Resources Professional who hid her true self for over 16 years. In this talk, she explains why that’s dangerous, and how our biggest obstacles are our own insecurities.

“There are more scary things inside than outside”

-Toni Morrison

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Joseph Campbell and Following Your Bliss

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Joseph Campbell was a man of many interests.

He was most famous for his work on mythology, but he also loved to study dreams, art, psychology, literature, and anthropology.

He didn’t follow the path that society laid out for him. When the Great Depression hit, he retreated to a cabin and read for over 9 hours a day. He went from studying aboriginal peoples to James Joyce to the symbology behind Tarot cards. There was no telling where he was headed next at any given point.

Through his writings, in particular, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Campbell inspired a generation of filmmakers. George Miller, Stephen Spielberg, and George Lucas all give him a great deal of credit for their success.

“It’s possible that if I had not run across him I would still be writing Star Wars today.”

-George Lucas

After his books helped inspire Luke Skywalker’s journey, many people turned to Campbell to seek words of encouragement for their own journeys.

Whenever he was asked about career advice or finding one’s own way in life, he offered the same words wisdom:

Follow your bliss.

It’s pretty simple advice but can at times be hard to follow. Since I read The Hero’s Journey I’ve been trying to remind myself to lean into the things I enjoy and step away from the things I don’t. Sometimes the latter is even more important. If you let go of things holding you down, you free up space for things that you love.

In my case, that means more time for sitting and coffee.

“I’ve followed my bliss. And it’s been a good way.”

-Joseph Campbell

Waking Up and Sitting Down

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how to wake up

I have this theory about my day.

From a productivity standpoint, I win or lose it in an instant. I wake up immediately, or I don’t.

It’s binary. There is no “hit snooze once and see what happens” option.

The earlier I get started, the better. In the morning there are no distractions and I get my best work done. Mark Twain says you should eat a frog first thing in the morning so that nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day. For me, that frog is waking up itself. Once that’s done, the magic starts to happen.

It’s all downhill from there. But I have to control my first decision of the day (wake up or sleep on) to get to that point. So it’s on me.

“Space I can recover. Time, never.”

-Napoleon Bonaparte

Mel Robbins’ The 5 Second Rule was a nice refresher for me on the subject of waking up. I’ve heard most of the ideas in the book before, but it was good to review. The main thing I took from it is you can’t control how you feel, but you can always control how you act. If I start moving the moment the clock rings in the morning I’ll find myself in good shape.

Here’s Robbins basic concept in another form:

“You are only entitled to the action, never to its fruits.”

-Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 47

So much of success for creatives can be attributed to waking up and sitting down at a desk. That’s an action we can all control.

Coffee helps.