John Wick

Watch the movie from start to finish and pay attention to the world building. It’s masterful.

Then pay attention to how the world is unveiled throughout the film. It’s not all at once but but by bit, from the bottom up. This style uses the concept of “the half known world” to add suspense—I’d posit not only for the viewer but the writers while drafting the story.

Suspense isn’t just in what happens. Suspense is in what’s not said, the world within which the film takes place. The unknown makes the movie more exciting, enthralling, and inevitably more enjoyable.

Maybe the same is true for our half-known lives, too.

Escapism

Why do you bear so much? Why are the world’s problems yours to solve? What makes you think you could even solve them? You don’t have the experience, the tenacity, the resources, or the time to take on so much right now. You’re a kid.

Drop it. Leave your ego at the door. You are not making a difference–you are trying to tell yourself this isn’t all for nothing. You’re lying to yourself. Stop making this about you.

Just write the damn paper and teach the damn class. You’re not contributing to your field, you’re just doing an assignment. Stop making this something it’s not.

Go watch some It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and get over yourself. It’s not that serious.

Stop worrying

When successful people are asked what advice they’d give their 20 year old selves, they usually say something like, “Stop worrying so much. It all works out in the end.”

That’s nice. But how do you stop worrying?

What if worrying fundamentally changes who I am and what I do in the world? What if worrying was the only thing that made me successful? If these successful people gave their younger selves this advice, would they still have been successful?

I want it to all work out, but I don’t know how to stop worrying.

Always a player-coach

I’ve never been the best runner.

When I ran track in college, I was fueled by my teammates. They made me want to run and not give up. I made a commitment to show my gratitude in support for them. I started leading them and helping out the young guys, like a coach would.

Today was my first day coaching track at my high school. Only one athlete showed up, so I ran the workout with her.

Something tells me I’ll always be a player-coach.

My lost iPod classic

Spotify wasn’t around in high school, so I bought a $300 iPod classic. It held all my music on it, from Jesus Culture to Eminem. While my musical taste has shifted, I can still remember the weight of that iPod classic, hundreds of gigabytes for hundreds of dollars. I used to plug it into my casset-to-aux adapter in the family Honda CR-V (her name was Fern). Those were magical days.

I lost my iPod one day and couldn’t find it, so I cleaned out my car. Part of cleaning out my car meant taking out the grocery-bag trash-bag. In Fern, this was conveniently looped around the elbow rests for the driver and passenger seats. I still couldn’t find my iPod. It would show up, I thought.

The garbage men came the next day.

My $300 iPod was in my trash bag which was in the garbage.

Some times you lose things and never get them back. Acceptance is the only way out.

Acceptance, and Spotify.

What’s your personality?

Jordan B. Peterson is a former Clinical Psychologist and University of Toronto professor, among other titles. He’s most famous for his 2018 book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which sold over 4 million copies worldwide (and has been on the Amazon Bestsellers list since published). After that he did a lecture tour, inspiring individuals–especially young men–to take responsibility for their lives.

There’s a whole group of people who despise Peterson. These are generally people who don’t like taking responsibility for things.

The field of Personality is one of Dr. Peterson’s strongest areas of expertise. He developed his own personality test based on the Big 5 Model. You can find it at UnderstandMyself.com (code MP [from his daughter, Mikhaila Peterson] to pay 8 dollars instead of 9, lol).

I took the test and, not ironically, learned a lot about myself. Camille took it, too. Then we connected our results (a feature on the website) and got a report about the ways we might struggle and thrive as a couple. We both found this to be the most insightful test we’ve taken, far more telling than Myers-Briggs.

It got me thinking a lot about what personality actually is. I used to think of it as the way that you interacted with other people. “Oh, that’s just her personality,” or, “He has a dominant personality.” But now I’m starting to think of personality as something far deeper and more core to one’s being.

The way I’m beginning to understand it is this: Personality is the combination of all the psychological and physical processes which make you who you are. All your past experiences, beliefs, conceptions, genetic programming, and default patterning that have developed over your lifetime influence your personality. When you make an instinctual decision, it’s actually your personality–and all of its associated facets–making the decision. It’s far more than how you interact with others at a party.

Your personality is who you are. It’s part plastic, part fixed. Understanding it can tell you a lot about the unresolved work in your life and who (or what) is actually in control of your decsions.

What’s your personality?

Dogs are smart

Human exceptionalism is real. We think we’re special because, well, we are. No other living thing on earth can code a computer or build a business. We are smart hominids. We evolved especially large brains because that’s what helped our ancestors survive. Every member of our human species has this special form of intelligence that uses high cognitive processing to engineer solutions to complex problems.

But IQ and EQ measure very different spectrums of intelligence, so why can’t there be another form? There is: it’s called extra-olfactory intelligence (“olfactory” means “smell”). Think about it–dogs sniff the urine of other dogs. Why? Because that urine holds signals, messages from one dog to another. These pheromonal messages indicate who’s ready to have puppies and who isn’t.

That’s right, dogs don’t need Tinder. They don’t swipe, they just sniff.

Other mammals do this, too. They’ve evolved to do this. Evolution is the process in which “nature” chooses traits that will help a particular population survive in a given environment. It acts by selecting genes in a population that increase reproductive fitness, that is, the ability for an individual to pass their genes on to offspring. Evolution is about selecting the traits that help that species survive continuously over thousands and millions of years.

As we learned in high school biology class, evolution is not optimization. Were you paying attention?

Homo sapiens are alive. We’ve gotten here through millions of years of evolutionary pressures, all in an effort to make the most reproductively successful species. Homo sapiens became their own species about 250,000 years ago.

But you know who else is here? Jellyfish. Jellyfish first arose 500,000,000 years ago. They’ve been on earth for 2,000 times as long as we have. And they’ve hardly changed. They are as reproductively successful, if not more, than human beings.

Evolution is not optimization. Evolutions is about survival of the reproductively fittest organisms.

Dogs and jellyfish are smart, just in a different way than we are smart. Evolutionarily speaking, they’re both tremendously successful. And they don’t worry about paying bills or saving for retirement.

75 Clichés that are true

  1. Keep it simple stupid
  2. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
  3. We’re all in this together
  4. There’s no such thing as a free lunch
  5. You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with
  6. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover
  7. Never say never
  8. Waste not, want not
  9. There’s no time like the present
  10. The early bird gets the worm
  11. Take the road less traveled
  12. Time is money
  13. Actions speak louder than words
  14. Every rose has it’s thorn
  15. Love your neighbor as yourself
  16. Don’t hold your breath
  17. Good things come to those who wait
  18. Two wrongs don’t make a right
  19. Variety is the spice of life
  20. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
  21. Where there’s a will there’s a way
  22. The grass is always greener on the other side
  23. All that glitters isn’t gold
  24. Everything is not as it seems
  25. Time flies when you’re having fun
  26. Laughter is the best medicine
  27. You can’t see the forest through the trees
  28. What goes around comes around
  29. The road to hell is paved with good intentions
  30. Time heals all wounds
  31. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step
  32. Quit while you’re ahead
  33. Eat more vegetables
  34. You can’t pour from an empty cup
  35. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all
  36. Some things are better left unsaid
  37. A penny saved is a penny earned
  38. Practice what you preach
  39. Slow but steady wins the race
  40. Loose lips sink ships
  41. Easier said than done
  42. Hope springs eternal
  43. To err is human; to forgive, divine
  44. An idle mind is the devil’s playground
  45. There’s more than one way to skin a cat
  46. When it rains, it pours
  47. Honesty is the best policy
  48. Behind every great man is a great woman
  49. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink
  50. You win some and you lose some
  51. Don’t burn your bridges
  52. March to the beat of your own drum
  53. There’s a first time for everything
  54. Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise
  55. Go the extra mile
  56. It is in giving that we receive
  57. Don’t cry over spilled milk
  58. You’re never too old to learn something new
  59. It’s what’s on the inside that counts
  60. Mind over matter
  61. Know which way the wind blows
  62. Necessity is the mother of invention
  63. There’s plenty of fish in the sea
  64. Absolute power corrupts absolutely
  65. Sleep on it
  66. Wear your heart on your sleeve
  67. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
  68. Snitches get stitches
  69. Not with that attitude
  70. The best things in life are free
  71. Night is darkest just before the dawn
  72. The sky’s the limit
  73. You only hurt the ones you love
  74. Run like the wind
  75. Love is all we need

It’s really not complicated.

Bad days

Today was one of those days where it felt like everything was crumbling before my eyes. My daily tasks and responsibilities were markedly harder and it was painful to put on a smile. I was irritable, angry, and sad.

My birthday is usually my least favorite day of the year. Today was my half birthday. I suppose these days happen now and then.

Maybe it’s a Virgo thing.

Bad advice

Stop listening to bad advice
from other people

You’d be better off listening
to your own bad advice

At least you might know
what you’re going through

You might even learn something
new, worth sharing

But then you’d be giving
bad advice to others

What’s true for them
isn’t true for you

Follow your own bad advice–
everybody else talks too loud

Including me, the poet
who gives bad advice