The Daily Practice of Accepting Death

Of all the thoughts that bounce around our skulls each day, death is rarely one of them. There has never been a safer time to be alive.

And still, it's right there, always. 

In his new book, Show Your Work!, Austin Kleon recommends the daily practice of reading obituaries. Kleon explains:

“Obituaries are like near-death experiences for cowards.”

You don't have to go looking for trouble to practice realizing the terrifying truth that this will end. Meditate on it enough and it should be your guide.

“Samurais trained relentlessly. They strongly believed you should always “be prepared” (they were like the deadliest Boy Scouts imaginable.)”

— Eric Barker

This is the strategy of the samurai. Business Insider blogger Eric Barker recently questioned what made ancient samurais so cool with death being in their job description. The answer: control. Meditating on the ultimate possibility of being stabbed in battle gave them clarity and purpose. They didn't need to distract or busy themselves with thoughts about all the dangers. They just fought. 

It wasn't a matter of life or death when Michael Phelps hit the water, but the same idea applies when he swam in the 2008 Summer Olympics. Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, wrote that Phelps was so ingrained in his process that he was prepared for any scenario. And when water filled Phelps' goggles halfway through the 200-meter butterfly race, he was able to keep calm and carry on, blindly swimming to victory, another gold medal and a world record.

You need to quiet your mind from the destructiveness of your own thoughts. If you can calmly comprehend the worst case scenario and prepare for it, there is no reason to panic. Yes, you will fail and, yes, you will die. If you can remind yourself of that, you'll have the inspiration to live without fear stalling or freezing you. 

Of course, it's all in how you accept it. I wrote an obituary for myself in an undergraduate journalism class and it was crushing. I was too young to feel like I accomplished anything and death would have meant ultimate failure. Life felt reduced to a paragraph.

With death as the backdrop, the all-important questions of life can be answered every day when you take action. Waking up to know it could end means you can cherish every breath, e-mail, hug, or beer. You have a plan of action when shit goes down. You're always ready to spring into sword-wielding, blind-swimming action.

If you get one life to live and one obituary to sum up your days, what do you want it to say? 

The Truth Behind Cruel Intentions

Francis "Two Gun" Crowley had killed before and there was no doubt he would again. (Hell, look at that nickname.) He was known as a career criminal and a cop killer. And when he found himself surrounded by a hundred and fifty policemen firing machine-guns into his sweetheart's West End apartment, he managed to scribble this down:

“to whom it may concern,
under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one - one that would do nobody any harm.”

Dale Carnegie tells this amazing story at the beginning of his book How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Although to err is to be human, we're really good at justifying our actions, good or evil. When Crowley was captured and sentenced to the electric chair, he lamented, "This is what I get for defending myself." There is a phrase for thoughts like this and it's only made better by Aldous Huxley when he said, "Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too." 

Our brains are fantastic computers. Punch in a question and your grey matter will give you an answer. It doesn't have to make sense to everyone. Of course, there are over six billion people on this planet and we're bound to step on each other's toes quite a bit. (Understatement much?) But social media mogul Gary Vaynerchuk brought up an interesting point on Chase Jarvis LIVE when he said, "The reason I'm not fearful about anything is that I know that intent matters." 

Vaynerchuk was speaking to business matters. When it comes to business, the intention is clear - the bottom line. Most companies scramble to make us happy only to have us purchase more. But if a company does good for its customers for the sake of providing value before asking for a dime, the intention is clear too. Puff Daddy was wrong, it's not all about the Benjamins.

Forget business. Intent matters everywhere and it requires the brutal honesty of awareness. You have to sit down with yourself and ask the right questions to really break through what's going on. If Crowley would have stepped back early enough to ask the right questions, he would have possibly noticed that a life of crime was not the only way he could enjoy his time here.

It'll always be more complex, all you can do is continue to ask yourself what's up. What is it that you really want to do? Is it all about you? What's important in your life? Why is that?

Lately, questioning myself brought up some weird intentions. I was hoping for a free ride. The fantasy was to find instant fame and fortune writing at my own comfortable pace. And it was a selfish mirage. I wasn't giving my audience enough - credit or otherwise. Anyone can write a blog post. Literally, anyone. What's makes me different if that's my fantasy?

We know that if we put in value, you get value right back. And I think sometimes life beats that lesson out of us. We feel neglected or unappreciated, and we start to think it's not worth it. And when we start to think that, it's true.

It's always possible to fall back. We can be selfish or greedy or mean. But we can also take a breath. Recognize our intentions. Plan out the course. Because under each of our coats is a weary heart,  but a kind one.

How to Deal With Fucking Up

I started writing at just about the time I wanted to smash my keyboard. Inside my cubicle inside an office inside a warehouse, I had six hours a day to burn at a family-owned camera business. There was windows, no escape. No one could hear me scream. 

It wasn't that writing was keeping me sane, it was just that everything else was driving me nuts. I was so frustrated I daydreamed cursing out my best friends because they couldn't make simple dinner plans. Something was wrong.

Before that I was just devouring YouTube videos to no end. I found stand-up comedians and slam poets, psychedelic lectures and storytellers good enough to pass the hours before and after lunch. Every one of them had an amazing vision of the world.

And suddenly it made sense for me what I should write about - ideas.

Former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins was a regular in the rotation. He has a poetic passion for pushing his limits. He enjoys books most people can't even lift and he performs with the fury of a dragon. And it all bled over into his bite-size YouTube stories. And most recently I found this quote to be most apt to where I am now: 

"Half of life is fucking up. The other half is dealing with it."

Although writing can be a meditation or practice, there is always room for growth. It took me a long time to get where I could publish regularly. It was way after I quit the job where I started putting my time into my words. 

And so looking back over a hundred weeks of blogging, I wanted to see how I've dealt with fucking up as I went along building an audience. What were people absorbing when they sat down to my blog?

Of all of them, the following are the Top 11 most viewed and commented on:

Walking Through Existence with Some Fly Kicks - #8
Beyond the Bored Zombies and Dreaming Too Little - #19
Collecting So Easy a Caveman Could Do It - #25
Connect the Dots, See the Picture - #27
We're Not Superheroes, We're Hitters Up to Bat - #28
How to Die Working - #78
Why Not Rethink Technology? - #84
Puzzles of Interest in Brooklyn - #90
How to Experience the Dreams of the Waking World - #92
Embracing Unpredictable Change - Explode #95
Moving On, Untitled - #97

Nothing really jumped out at me linking the titles, themes, or reasons for commenting on any of them, much less all of them. I was glad to see some of my favorites resounded with some readers, but when it got down to data, there wasn't much to go on. 

What it came down to was what the actual audience took from it. When I couldn't stare at the titles anymore, I turned and asked my friend Alejandro. He didn't miss a beat. He said something like I often wrote about a problem that initially frustrated me beyond words until I found myself relaxed enough to come to terms with it. It seemed to me like some kind of public therapy. Or cautionary tale. Or self-help book in the most actual sense.

And it's true. 

Walking Through Existence with Some Fly Kicks was about my frustration hauling junk when a customer questioned if I was strong enough to lift a metal desk. Writing it out gave me the ego check that it wasn't about my abilities, it was about putting myself in her shoes, understanding she was more worried about her home being damaged.

Collecting So Easy a Caveman Could Do It was a retrospective on the amount of crap I collected from my days junk-hauling and the realization I needed to make that I was hoarding too tightly things I didn't have any passion to fight to keep.

How to Experience the Dream of the Waking World was one of my best. I enjoyed writing it. It was about coming to terms with my emotions, whether I was feeling down or ecstatic, and understanding it was all ok in this dream of a life.

Writing is just as it is when I found Henry Rollins on YouTube. It is always a struggle, it is always a challenge. It is putting my world down into words. When it comes to content, though, I have to like what I do. I couldn't write it if I didn't. I would start smashing keyboards again. 

It couldn't have been good to just sit and devour clip after clip either. Experimenting with life and not just words has to inform my writing. It is the reason the posts where I observe and experience my cross-country roadtrip, coping with the deaths of loved ones, or moving to Brooklyn have been the most appetizing for me and my audience. It makes me more of a real person having something going on than to simply be a brain on a stick. Anyone with some patience to put words down can do that. It has to be a search for me.

In the words of Rollins, I'm only fucking up because I'm human. Writing helps me sort it out and move on. And in that way there is always material and always an audience.

The New Glass Half Perspective

There is no denying a good overnight success story. It is the simple reminder that being human means we have fewer and fewer limits. Technology only continues to make it possible for anyone to warp their life, business, or movement in an instant. It is Tim Ferriss. It is Kickstarter. It is the human brain.

We want change and we want it fast. Why not? If you start to believe that there is a single answer to your happiness out there, wouldn't you sprint to it if you could? Of course, it's never been that simple. Happiness is not a destination, and there are pitfalls and dangers at every level. We're distracted by our habits - our hobbies, diets, enemies and upbringing. 

Charles Duhigg gives some hope with what he calls "keystone habits" in his best-selling book The Power of Habit. Of these powerful, select habits, Duhigg wrote that they "say that success doesn't depend on getting every single thing right but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers".  

Paul O'Neill is one of Duhigg's best examples. In 1987, O'Neill, a former successful government official, was asked to lead the transformation of Alcoa, one of the world's largest aluminum manufacturing companies. With unshakeable confidence, O'Neill took the CEO helm and demanded the entire international corporation make worker safety their number one priority. There was no talk of wages, profits, business relationships or parking spaces; O'Neill spoke only of safety and took steps at the most granular levels to make it happen. And he knew what he was doing.

Slowly and surely, O'Neill's Alcoa was invigorated and clear on their mission. The new strategy simplified everything down and employees became more productive, alert and proud. Business flourished and on top of everything else, everyone was safe.

It is the most insulting and inspiring concept to consider that we're all only a millimeter or a habit away from our dreams. It's the new glass half-full or half-empty question. 

The undeniable truth is that the glass is never full, there will always be problems. It is at the core of Buddhist spirituality and every entrepreneurial adventure. The challenge itself of our bodies is another: to keep them eating, sleeping, and breathing as long as we can. It is what Ernest Becker was saying in The Denial of Death - "The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive." 

It makes it worth it to know it can end. When it comes to the keystone habit that could change it all, to believe in one side means you have to believe in the other. If it's always possible we can die in a car crash coming home from work tonight, shouldn't it be just as possible we can turn a mental corner and simply decide to live a life forever full of blinding passion?

The world can be a cruel place, we can't deny that. And it can offer you an amazing journey. It doesn't always have to be bigger, faster, and stronger when you can find attention, connection and awareness.

And it's not that life happens to you, it's that you are ready for it. Meditate on this simple fact: you're alive and you could be dead. Be prepared for the million dollar book deal and the threat of cancer. Know there can be come-hither glances, broken legs and surprise parties. Make your life better, one decision at a time. Find the small victories that make you come alive and forget death. No rush, no pressure. We can never know what tomorrow will bring. After all, it is as Seneca wrote "not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it."

Connect the Dots, See the Picture

Should we really be trying to create jobs? My guess it that the system is probably broken if we don't have something for all these people to do. The common assumption is to discover a void and fill it. But what do we all need besides the basics? We're advanced animals in need of food, water, clothing, shelter, and air. Some don't even have that, but as it goes, progress pushes us forward.

It's easy to see a job as a prescription plan to get what you want in life, but behind the scenes a job is the primary way to contribute to society. It is the new survival guide: contribute and you're valuable enough to survive. Currency is mixed up somewhere in that. It's not quite as simple as hunting prey and living near a waterhole anymore. We need to negotiate. The irony of the situation is that the business world revolves around competition as everything is getting easier to do. If we all needs jobs to create competition in the markets, there has to be tons of bullshit out there. Do we really need hundreds of restaurants, delis, and clothing stores? Dollar stores? No. Despite what you've been told, variety is not the spice of life when it comes to products. It is the cure for seven billion people to distract themselves from their contributions. If we're focused on consumption and not valuable contribution, we're not going to all be satisfied by iPhones and the Internet. We end up craving options. Hell, there are seven billion of us running around. The beauty is in the cracks, though. Something like a smartphone is a clue to our future. With the capacity to consolidate the phone with a calculator, calendar, GPS system, high-definition camera, alarm clock, and more, jobs are headed to the grave, stared down by efficiency. All this means there is less for us all to create in a currency based system. We're seeing too many people, not enough stuff. We're getting down to the core.

There is this idea floating around that the world needs competition to motivate us all out of bed. I don't know about you but the first thought on my mind in the morning is not to battle my next-door neighbor for sales trophies. I don't believe everyone wants to kick back, day in and day out. Sure, we all want vacations, who wouldn't? The motivation doesn't come from an inherent need to be lazy though, it comes from the anticipation of achieving something larger than us. We want that island getaway or even quiet morning to sleep in because it is so often denied. It's the carrot at the end of the stick. Or it could just mean that we're not motivated to do things that suck. We're not connecting with anyone if we're sitting behind a counter or in a cubicle. We're just shuffling papers and folding clothes. There is no heart in driving business. 

Downshifting to part-time junk removal, I'm staring down the staircase at my next step and I'm torn. I feel impatient and weak and pretentious sometimes because I don't want a job. Who really wants to work hard for eight hours a day? Very few people I know. Who wants to fight for a company they really don't believe in? Not me. Most of us are too good for our silly jobs, even if we consider the product or service we're providing. Sure, I've gotten tons of praise and admiration for helping people organize and clean their spaces, but it's not enough for me. We aren't helping people realize they have too much stuff. We're all slowly hoarding and I'm just contributing a temporary service as a distraction. It's the pressure of a system that needs me to contribute. The real problem is we need to contribute more. I want to contribute more.

From the moment strangers scoop us up outside the womb, we're thrown into a world where we zip around and bounce off one another. Sometimes we make connections, sometimes we make sparks. What we contribute to this world means nothing without other people. Whether we contribute or compete, the essence is the connection. It is the foundation for a new theory I've been mulling over. I'm starting to wonder if we're all just animals tricking ourselves that we're meant to do more than our biology tells us, more than our struggle to reproduce. But as the human race grew and boiled over the pot, we slowly saw progress. Our connections with one another made the collective smarter than the average chimp and we started pumping out cell phones and Internet and hot showers. It's not the product of one superhuman man, it's a collective effort. Dozens of lab technicians stood in white coats next to Edison, working to create the light bulb. Who knows which one of them said good morning to Edison on the right day to make something click?

Inspiration keeps coming back to me as a calling to contribute. Jason Silva probably said it best when he explained, "Inspiration can be a very lonely experience. It happens in our heads and then the goal of every artist is to somehow communicate that ecstatic vision in song or in writing or in poem or in film, to let you know how it felt to be in our heads during that moment in which we connected the dots. That experience of revelatory ecstasy is what we're trying to transmute and so inspiration tends to be ephemeral and fleeting and part of my attempt is to eternalize or immortalize or hold it in stasis. I think that's something humans beings have always done." We want other people to connect so deeply they can explore our brains themselves. We want endless, seamless connection. 

We like to think we're more than animals and we think therefore we are. The truth doesn't matter as long as we believe what we do. We make our own truth. If our minds tell us we can create everything we see then anything is possible. And if anything is possible, I'm starting to think I'd like to write full-time. I don't know how and I don't know when, but I do. After all, it's like Chuck Palahniuk said in his novel, Diary, "We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."

Beyond the Bored Zombies and Dreaming Too Little

I'm becoming a big collector of quotes. Note: I'm not a hoarder. A few days ago, I ran across these words from Hemingway, "When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead." Taking this thought with a grain of salt in the form of his long-running alcoholism and eventual suicide, Hemingway has a point. Life is nothing if you don't enjoy it. Fight Club author, Chuck Palahnuik mirrored the sentiment when he wrote in Invisible Monsters: "All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring." God or not, they are boring people among us, living and barely breathing. The boring are the zombies. They are dead inside. How can they fail to see the juice of life dripping right in front of their lips? Blind and deaf, Helen Keller would have kicked their asses. She wrote, "Life is either daring adventure or nothing at all."

Can we all sit at the table and agree that life should not be boring? OK. Good. 

Because we're more than animals and instincts, we're given the opportunity to reason and explain ourselves. Who are we? What should we do? They're not far off from the questions I'm sure we all ask ourselves when we wake up Monday morning. What animals attempt to do is survive. If that means they have to migrate or murder, they do it. What humans have is some kind of infection to move forward. We're pushed further into space, conquering the world in front of us. We've created pyramids and the Sears Tower, pocket-sized devices to communicate over masses of water instantaneously, and explanations for why orbiting masses are no good for us to live on. I'm no philosophy buff, but my thought is we're trying to see how close we can be to becoming God. We adapt and master our environments. While we cry global warming and worldwide war, we forget how we've grown to seven billion, obliterated illnesses and made food vastly easier to create. We develop and destroy, and in the meantime we each inch toward greatness. Or at least that was my thought last week.

Personal development can be corny. There is no doubt in my mind. My immediate understanding is that we're so conditioned to be mesmerized by the boredom-killing machines around us that shooting for the stars becomes relegated to high school graduation speeches and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. We see visible goal-setting as a sign of weakness because dreamers are actively trying to design a life and not allowing it to flow. In a way, it seems uncool to care about life? I could be wrong, but I know people scoff. Last summer, my interest in personal development gave me the focus and motivation to take a cross-country roadtrip and eventually propose my promotion as a recycling coordinator. That's enough for me to smile. 

We're nothing without one another. I want you to know and I want to know you. What are your big, scary dreams? What are your sexiest nightmares? Take some time, put some extra thought into it this morning or evening and hit me with some knowledge. We can start a conversation to look back on and make us happy we started this journey.When we start talking about our life, it becomes real. We are our thoughts after all. Hell, your dreams are nothing if you don't wake up and share them. Chances are you dreams involve the world anyway. 

If you're still unsure about motivational speaking or sharing some serious thoughts or just dreaming too big, I'll leave you with the brilliant words of one of my favorite writers, Mark Twain: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."