CHOOSING TO BUILD YOURSELF
The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.
What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made in your life and how did you recover?
I’ve made a class of mistakes I would summarize the same way. The mistakes were obvious only in hindsight through one exercise, which is asking yourself: when you’re thirty, what advice would you give your twenty-year-old self? And when you’re forty, what advice would you give your thirty-year-old self? (Maybe if you’re younger, you can do it by every five years.) Sit down and say, “Okay, 2007, what was I doing? How was I feeling? 2008, what was I doing? How was I feeling? 2009, what was I doing? How was I feeling?”
Life is going to play out the way it’s going to play out. There will be some good and some bad. Most of it is actually just up to your interpretation. You’re born, you have a set of sensory experiences, and then you die. How you choose to interpret those experiences is up to you, and different people interpret them in different ways.
Really, I wish I had done all of the same things, but with less emotion and less anger. The most celebrated example would be when I was younger, I started a company. This company did well, but I didn’t do well, so I sued some of the people involved. It was a good outcome for me in the end, and everything worked out okay, but there was a lot of angst and a lot of anger.
Today, I wouldn’t have the angst and the anger. I would have just walked up to the people and said, “Look, this is what happened. This is what I’m going to do. This is how I’m going to do it. This is what’s fair. This is what’s not.”
I would have realized the anger and emotions are a huge, completely unnecessary consequence. Now, I’m trying to learn from that and do the same things I think are the right things to do but without anger and with a very long-term point of view. If you take a very long-term point of view and take the emotion out of it, I wouldn’t consider those things mistakes anymore. [4]
Again, habits are everything—everything we are. We are trained in habits from when we are children, including potty training, when to cry and when not to, how to smile and when not to. These things become habits—behaviors we learn and integrate into ourselves.
When we’re older, we’re a collection of thousands of habits constantly running subconsciously. We have a little bit of extra brainpower in our neocortex for solving new problems. You become your habits.
This came to light for me when my trainer gave me a routine to do every single day. I had never worked out every single day before. It’s a light workout. It’s not tough on your body, but I did this workout every single day. I realized the incredible, astonishing transformation it had on me both physically and mentally.
To have peace of mind, you have to have peace of body first.
This taught me the power of habits. I started realizing it’s all about habits. At any given time, I’m either trying to pick up a good habit or discard a previous bad habit. It takes time.
If someone says, “I want to be fit, I want to be healthy. Right now, I’m out of shape and I’m fat.” Well, nothing sustainable is going to work for you in three months. It’s going to be at least a ten-year journey. Every six months (depending on how fast you can do it), you’re going to break bad habits and pick up good habits. [6]
One of the things Krishnamurti talks about is being in an internal state of revolution. You should always be internally ready for a complete change. Whenever we say we’re going to try to do something or try to form a habit, we’re wimping out.
We’re just saying to ourselves, “I’m going to buy myself some more time.” The reality is when our emotions want us to do something, we just do it. If you want to go approach a pretty girl, if you want to have a drink, if you really desire something, you just go do it.
When you say, “I’m going to do this,” and “I’m going to be that,” you’re really putting it off. You’re giving yourself an out. At least if you’re self-aware, you can think, “‘I say I want to do this, but I don’t really because if I really wanted to do it, I would just do it.”
Commit externally to enough people. For example, if you want to quit smoking, all you have to do is go to everybody you know and say, “I quit smoking. I did it. I give you my word.”
That’s all you need to do. Go ahead, right? But most of us say we’re not quite ready. We know we don’t want to commit ourselves externally. It’s important to be honest with yourself and say, “Okay, I’m not ready to give up smoking. I like it too much, it is going to be too hard for me to give up.”
Say instead, “I’ll set a more reasonable goal for myself; I’ll cut down to the following amount. I can commit to that externally. I’m going to work on that for three or six months. When I get there, I’ll take the next step, as opposed to beating myself up over it.”
When you really want to change, you just change. But most of us don’t really want to change—we don’t want to go through the pain just yet. At least recognize it, be aware of it, and give yourself a smaller change you can actually carry out. [6]
Impatience with actions, patience with results.
Anything you have to do, just get it done. Why wait? You’re not getting any younger. Your life is slipping away. You don’t want to spend it waiting in line. You don’t want to spend it traveling back and forth. You don’t want to spend it doing things you know ultimately aren’t part of your mission.
When you do them, you want to do them as quickly as you can while doing them well with your full attention. But then, you just have to be patient with the results because you’re dealing with complex systems and many people.
It takes a long time for markets to adopt products. It takes time for people to get comfortable working with each other. It takes time for great products to emerge as you polish away, polish away, polish away. Impatience with actions, patience with results. As Nivi said, inspiration is perishable. When you have inspiration, act on it right then and there. [78]
