Author noticed that more of his clients are feeling burned out and are always looking for the next thing
If they are not looking/planning for the next thing, they feel restless and lost. They don’t have happiness
Some even have serious mental health issues due to this bottomless-appetite-for-acheivement syndrome
Heroic individualism: one-upmanship paired with limiting belief that acheivments is the arbitrer of success
This is one of the myriad of reasons why we are seeing a mental health epidemic today, as people cannot stop weaning ambition and comparing to others
Signs you are suffering from heroic individualism:
Low-level anxiety and sensation of feeling rushed
A sense that your life is swirling with energy, as if you’re being pushed and pulled
A recurring intuition that something is not quite right, but you are unsure what that is
Not wanting to be always on but struggling to turn off and feeling bad when you do
Feeling too busy but restless when you have open time and space
Being easily distractablile and unable to focus and sit in silence
Wanting to do better, be better and feel better, but no idea where to start
Becoming overwhlemed by info & products on what leads to well-being & self-improvement
Feeling lonely/empty
Struggling to be content
Being successful by conventional standards, but feeling never enough
Groundedness: unwavering internal strength & self-confidence that sustains you through ups & downs
When you become too focused on productivity, optimization & growth, we neglect our ground → end up suffering
However, the converse is not true! Focusing on groundedness stabilizes ambition to become more sustainable
Success can become more enduring and robust
Happiness is reality - expectations. Most other factors (including money) don’t have a huge effect
Major issue that humans face is hedonic treadmill, which makes heroic individualism extremely toxic for ourselves
Most successful psychological treatments focus on groundedness to generate happiness
Drive should come from within in order to generate sustainable and long-lasting happiness
Religious traditions and modern-day masters are all saying the same
Accept where you are to get where you want to go
Since the truth is often out of our control, we try to make up lies and excuses and we are not true to ourselves (known as motivated reasoning) or even ignore the truth
This is counter-productive and may save short-term pain, but create long-term agony. You aren’t truly grounded because you cannot except reality
The only way to truly change is to accept your reality, rather than thinking about where you should be
Acceptance is not passive resignation. It is taking stock of your situation and then devising a strategem to move forward
You can’t work on something if you’re actively fighting it. That’s why acceptance is important
Happiness studies found that happiness is a function of reality minus expectations. Some of the most happiest citizens in the world (eg. Danes) are happy because their expectations are ultra low
This isn’t to say that we need to set low expectations. We can set manageable or high expectations if we can also be present and accepting of what is needed to get to that stage
Desperately trying to be happy or successful and then failing to do because of self-delusions leads to depression, not happiness
Steven Hayes pioneered acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) after he realized that much of his own mental health issues were a result of him running away from the problem and refusing to accept reality
The crux: resisting an unpleasant situation makes the situation worse
The important part about ACT is that practitioners should allow themselves to not have everything together. If you cannot accept your inherent faults and darkness, then creating joy will be tough
Once you accept, you choose how you respond by thinking about your innermost values and then execute
Stoics and Buddhists came to the same realization many thousands of years ago and were huge proponents of accepting the ills of life rather than fighting it. If anything, it makes us more human
There’s a difference between performing from freedom, which comes out of freedom, acceptance and groundedness, and performing out of constriction, which comes out of denying reality
This is the difference between a performance mindset (seeking to win) and performance-avoidance mindset (seeking to avoid loss)
Develop the lens of a wise observer to create a degree of separation that you can use to build acceptance when faced with a challenging experience
Self-compassion is important. If you are constantly in shame and guilty about your actions, then you will be stuck
”What progress have I made? I am beginning to be my own friend. This is progress indeed. Such a person will never be alone and you can be sure he is a friend to all” - Seneca
Internal dialogoue should change from “I should have done X” to something that doesn’t use the word should. Changing the internal dialogue in your head works wonders
Treat yourself like a crying baby: either give yourself love or give yourself space. Berating never works
Tell yourself “This is what is happening now, I am trying my best”
People often think that action follows motivation, but its more that mood follows action, especially if the action relates to your core values
Figure out your core values and act on things depending on what a person with those core values would do
The above strategies need practice
Be present so you can own your attention and energy
’Busy idleness’ (doing multiple things at once or attempting to be busy without actually performing good work) is becoming a cultural norm, especially when everything is now measured and digital products are competing for attention
Being distracted by the phone is causing multiple issues, especially for mental health. Our brain is not optimized for looking at a glass screen every 10 minutes
We have come to associate phone notifications with validation. It is a social slot machine
We are optimizing for the wrong things: busyness, social relavance and non-stop information. Unrelenting distraction leaves us unfulfilled
Optimization shouldn’t be to do more for the sake of doing more. It should be about being more present for the tasks and people around us
One reason this is the current way is because we often add things to our plate without actually evaluating the costs
Reseachers suggest designing your surroundings to minimize distractions (eg. put your phone in another room) and laying firm boundaries
Seneca wrote that our lives are actually quite long. We feel that it is short because we are not present and squander away our time
We have always known that ‘flow’ and presence is extremely important for happiness (Stoics, Buddhists and Taoists have mentioned this often in their writings)
Erich Fromm wrote about the concept of ‘productive activity’ which we know as flow in our current parlance
To him, productive activity is a function of concentration and prescence and depends on a thoughtful choice on where we should be spending the most amount of our prescence
Remove as much distractions from around you
Block off periods on calendar for full prescence where you know precisely what you want to do. The intentionality is important to beat distraction
Make a plan to keep your devices out of sight and out of mind when you want to go into flow mode
Institute exposure and response prevention by exposing yourself to small doses of focused time periods and preventing the usual repsonse of checking your devices. Gradually increase to train yourself (this is apparently the standard method of overcoming anxieties)
Note that brain might feel bad as it readjusts to a life with more focus and less distraction
Take some time to get into the groove of getting focused
This isn’t to say to book as much prescence time as possible, because it is inevitable that your brain will fall prey to distractions and then you would be harsh on yourself. Instead, accept the reality and really treasure distraction free moments
Most things don’t need instant response!
Practice surfing waves of distraction
Distractions come in waves. If you don’t give in, you will become stronger at resisting distractions
Even if you do give in, pay special attention to how you feel; you tend to feel lousy. Understanding this feeling will help your brain try harder to avoid it next time
For presence blocks, make sure to put in a few minutes before you go back into the world of distraction to understand your feelings. This will help your brain incentivize focus blocks
Practice mindfulness
Mindfulness is actually just closing and focusing on your breath. As thoughts come in, you see and leave them
You will see distractions for what they are and dismiss them
All you need to do is sit quietly for a few minutes and focus on your breath despite all the thoughts that come into your head
You want to come to a state where you can be informally mindful and keep yourself in check with distractions
Create a not to-do list
Regularly reflect on your core values and whether you are moving forward. If not, list the activities that do nyot align with your values and eliminate it
Be patient and you’ll get there faster
Patience neutralizes the inclination to hurry and rush in order to play for the long game
Humans want things quickly, preferably in some sort of magic bullet
There was an experiment done where college students were given 15 minutes of no distractions. They could shock themselves at any moment to stop. Most of them would rather run electricity through their bodies than wait for 15 minutes
We also start to adapt to things, so if something starts arriving faster, we expect it to arrive even faster
Patience helps us to slow down, which actually helps us to move faster because we become consistent in our actions and compounding occurs
It also helps remove the stresses associated with perceived immediacy
Progress is often slow and you will come across plateaus. These plateaus will be an opportunity for you to determine why you are doing the things you are doing and whether you are being driven by external validation rather than internal drive
These plateus are often the harbringers of supercompensation (eg. running time suddenly dips from 8mins → 7:45)
So many examples of people who spent years in plateaus and suddenly supercompensated (eg. Darwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates)
Although we do have to be wary of match fit (whether what we are doing truly fits us), we humans usually quit too soon than wait too long
Humans suffer from commission bias, where we rather be in action than inaction. This often leads to disastorous results because we quit our consistency
If you don’t rush the process and let time and consistency compound, you can actually do much better than if you were to rush and burnout
You don’t want to overshoot the ability to do a task, you want to slowly increase the challenge so the habit that you are developing compounds on itself
It’s not totally exponential compounding because progress isn’t linear
There is a distinction between ease and excitement. Ease is expansive and you are truly in the moment. Excitement is when you are focused on the expectation of reward in the next few moments
We often mistake excitement for happiness, even though excitement only lasts for a few moments
Ease is expansive and peaceful. Ex: Kipchoge never trained himself too hard for marathons, which enabled him to put in enormous consistentcy in his practice and marathon running became easy for him
Excitement comes at the expense of happiness, because it ultimately requires a little bit of control for the expected reward. Happiness shouldn’t require this; this should happen naturally and you should simply be aware
Practice ease over excitement
Don’t try to hop into everything and try to push it forward. Sometimes, letting things go is the best thing you can do
Recognize that many of the most important things take time, so rushing doesn’t help
Cultivate a process mindset
Big, measurable goals often get us really stressed and we try to take shortcuts to acheive it
Instead, break down the big projects in life into smaller components and focus on doing the best in those rather than the final outcome, which should be a result of the focus you put on the process
Stop one rep short
What you are able to accomplish tomorrow is dependent on the restraint that you show today
Find areas where your lack of patience has caused issues in the past and stop the equivalent of one rep short
By doing this, you improve your compounding abilities since you won’t get burned out so easily
Leave your phone behind
Leave it behind in situations so you can decondition yourself from distraction and can practice patience
This will spillover in other parts of your life
Practice three-by-five breathing
Take five, deep, focused breaths three times a day. Helps develop patience
Embrace vulnerability to develop genuine strength and confidence
Due to social media, we feel that something is wrong when things are not going OK because we don’t see the bad things on social media
It is normal to behave differently in a social setting, but if the acting is so extreme, then we develop cognitive dissonance
We should be honest with ourselves and others about the challenges that we are facing. We are fooling no one but ourselves
It allows ourselves to confront and fix these issues. Ex:// Kevin Love and DeMar DeRozan had mental health issues, but opening up and confronting it helped them immensely
One of the most common manifestations of a lack of vulnerability is impostor syndrome
Usually, these people have immense confidence, which actually belies their weakness
By practicing intellectual humility, you can actually avoid the anxiety that builds up due to overconfidence
Being vulnerable and humble with others not only deepens your connections with others, but also gives us more strength and confidence to tackle these challenges
We actually feel weak when sharing these vulnerabilities, but the person on the other side almost always sees courage instead
Acknowledging your vulnerablities and being comfortable sharing your challenges create psychological safety in a team
This actually improves performance because people feel safe to criticize and improve
Practice emotional flexibility
Pay attention to anything you are hesitant about or any thing you are running away from
Set some time to reflect on why you are running away and investigate
This allows you to be flexible with your emotions and lean into whatever will help you at the right moment
Ask what you really want and say it
If you catch yourself performing and maintaining an untrue appearance, ask yourself what you are really trying to say
Honestly, just say it. It leads to more vulnerability and genuiness → better connection with your audience
Remind yourself that everyone is going through something as well
Be vulnerable to allow others to be vulnerable. You are not alone
Build deep community
Rates of loneliness are skyrocketing even though we are more connected than ever
This has health impacts (comparable to smoking) and relationship impacts (one partner can provide us what a community can)
Heroic individualism and it’s tendency to put optimization and productivity on a pedestal means that we often crowd out time to nurture social connections when in fact these help us to perform better
Self-determination theory tells us that humans thrive when they are autonomous, competent and connected
Deep community: inward sense of belonging and outward sense of appropriate connections
Loneliness and community are reinforcing loops!
Digital technology proliferation has created two dillemas:
It has pressured us to optimize our time and thus squeeze time for social connections
It offers us the illusion of connection while eroding the real thing
Social media used as a substitute for offline connection is extremely problematic!
If you develop a strong community, the emotions of one person will affect the other
This is why the adage “show me your friends and I will show you who you are” is popular
We should be wise to associate with others we aspire to be
We should recognize the contagious effects of emotion
Get involved with a meaningful group
It’s a little easier to kick things off with others in a group setting where others share similar interests
Examples: volunteering, faith-based groups, support groups, salon (mastermind club around a particular skill or profession or can do Enlightenment style)
Prioritize quality over quantity
Aristotle wrote that there are 3 types of friends: utility friends, pleasure friends and virtue friends. The first two’s motivations change over time, so friendship will go away
Friendships based on virtue are rare and require energy to maintain but very fulfilling
If your friends are not vibing with your values, simply drop off. There’s no need to continue something that is detrimental to you. “If you consort with someone covered in dirt, you hardly can’t help yourself from getting a little grimy” - Epictetus
Develop a ‘braintrust’
One of the most important factors to Pixar’s rise is the Braintrust, a group of close friends and colleagues who critiqued each other without apprehension or judgement
We ought to develop such close groups of friends who can give effective, constructive feedback on things when we are lost in the weeds
This is more important as you become a leader, as people are less willing to give you feedback
Include close, trusting individuals who are solutions-oriented and have experience, which gives them empathy
Move your body to ground your mind
Research has shown that exercise is closely linked to preventing and treating mental health
Ancients knew this mind-body connection really well. Mens sana in corpore sano - a healthy mind in a healthy body (Greek saying)
Acceptance: exercise helps us practice acceptance because our body becomes used to being uncomfortable and is forced to accept
This often spills over in other aspects of life
This doesn’t require a lot, just a modest increase in exercise and movement is usually sufficient
Patience: exercise, regardless of what plan, requires consistency and progressive overload
Like acceptance, this effect spills over into other aspects of life as you become used to the patience needed to see results from exercise
Vulnerability: exercise usually exposes where you are weak and you are forced to confont it
Deep community: there is a growing body of research that shows that exercising together greatly improves connnections with others
Exercise should be framed as an integral part of your job, i.e. not optional
It has huge benefits for your professional development, as it promotes a strong and sharp mind
In fact, there is no better predictor for cognitive decline in old age than a lack of exercise
Either set aside some protected time for exercise or continually incorporate exercise in your work
Move throughout the day
Sitting continuously for more than 5 hours is quite bad for you (research in book). Small micromovements (a 2 minute walk every hour) can usually counteract these issues
During your work, incorporate movement: walk during tough problem solving sessions, active commutes, drink more water. It doesn’t have to be too complicated
Get aerobic
Even just brisk walking is enough to counteract a lot of health issues. If you want something more strenuous, then go for it, but benefits are marginal
Schedule formal workouts where nothing can encroach on the time and make sure it is at a reasonable time for you. You can start off small and continually work your way up
Try to do it in nature, as it is usually better than a urban environment
Strength training is also highly recommended
Living a Grounded Life
From principles to action
Just like anything else, living a grounded life takes practice. You will also encounter resistance as most people are not living a grounded life
Although it is easy to internalize the above principles, actually executing these principles is a differnet story. You will feel cognitive dissonance if what you are doing does not align with your inner self that has internalized grounded principles
Getting started and being consistent with changes in your life is the most important thing of all. Make these changes simple rather than complex
Habit energy: our inner inertia
Fighting against it is the wrong thing to do. Instead, you should be minimizing the need to use willpower to fight against old habits. This usually requires environment design
Align your doing with your being
Figure out 1-3 practices for each principles that you want to start or stop. Make these as simple and specific as possible
Shift your habit energy
Use the habit loop of cue → action → reward to either start or stop habits that you listed above
The most powerful rewards are internal, so make sure to think about which feelings you are looking to develop as a reward and how you will pause to feel it deeply
Use environmental design to your advantage
Formal reflection
Take stock of how well your doing is aligning with your being on a weekly basis
Make groundedness a group endeavour
Get a friend group of 2-8 people who are committed to being more grounded and set up a weekly meeting to discuss progress and challenges
Focus on the process, let the outcomes take care of themselves
Grounded living requires ongoing practice, which inevitably means it will occasionally fall apart
Don’t worry about results, just focus on what you are doing now and the process that you have used to incorporate groundedness in life
Bring intentionality to everything and focus on what you can control
Work with like-minded people and don’t be afraid asking for help
Take a long-view and expect ocassional failures to prevent them from fazing you
Never ever compare yourself to others
You are playing an inifite game by incorporating groundedness in life. There is no destination, only practice
The reason why so many people fail to maintain lifestyle changes is because we don’t really understand how to bounce back from failure
Although strong self-discipline is vital, self-compassion is the key to getting out of failure