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Your Relationship with Time

I became very aware of my relationship with time. When we think of relationships, we think of our relationships with our mom or our dad or our kids, or this and that, but no one thinks of a relationship with time.

Now, I’m turning 50. The average American lives to be 78 years old. So, if I’m average, I hope I’m not, but that means I got 28 years of life left. If you reverse engineer that… Like, I just climbed Mount Washington. There were no 70-year-olds climbing Mount Washington. The actual years that you have left to be active and do the shit that we want to do, they shrink significantly as a percentage as you get older.

So once you get aware of your relationship with time, everything shifts. I had a fundamental shift when I came home, as it relates to my relationship with time. Who I want to spend it with and what I want to do. And I want to put more on my plate of the stuff that I love to do, with the people I love to do it with.

And I started getting a lot of clarity around that when I wasn’t getting bombarded with everything else. Like, I don’t spend any time alone. The only I spent alone is if I go for a run. Everything else is… I’m getting influenced by everybody else and everything else. So I’m losing my main superpower, my instinct.

I survive on instinct and gut, and I was losing that, because I was so distracted. So once I started to get that alone time… You don’t have to go to a monastery to do it, you just gotta, you know… Carving out a little bit of time for myself, every day. I started to think a lot clearer on how do I want to live, how do I want to reverse engineer the rest of my life.

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One Desire

Naval Ravikant:

So just don’t focus on more than one desire at a time. The universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing and you focus on that, you’ll get it. But everything else, you got to let go.

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How You Interpret Your Reality

Naval Ravikant:

At the end of the day, I do think, even despite what I said earlier: life is really a single player game. It’s all going on in your head. You know, whatever you think, you believe, will very much shape your reality, both from what risks you take and what actions you perform, but also just your everyday experience of reality.

If you’re walking down the street and you’re judging everyone, you’re like, “I don’t like that person because their skin color, I don’t like that — Oh, she’s not attractive. That guy is fat. This person is a loser. Oh, who put this in my way.” You know, the more you judge, the more you’re going to separate yourself. And you’ll feel good for an instant because you’ll feel good about yourself. “I’m better than that.” But then you’re going to feel lonely. And then you’re just going to see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you.

Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there’s no concept of right or wrong or good or bad, right? You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations and lights and colors and sounds, and then you die. And how you choose to interpret, that is up to you. You do have that choice.

So this is what I meant, that happiness is a choice. If you believe it’s a choice, then you can start working on it. And I can’t tell you how to find it, because it’s your own conditionings that are making you unhappy. So you have to uncondition yourself. It’s just like, I can’t fix your eating habits for you. I can give you some general guidelines, but you got to go through the hard habit forming of how to eat right. But you have to believe it’s possible, and it is absolutely possible.

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Never Miss Twice

James Clear and Rich Roll discuss momentum, and what to do when you break a streak:

James Clear: All habit streaks end at some point. Everybody slips up at some point. The mantra that I like to keep in mind for that is: never miss twice.

If I work out at the gym Monday-Wednesday-Friday, and I miss on Friday — because of a business trip or whatever — then I need to put all my energy into making sure I get in there on Monday. I don’t want to miss twice in a row.

It’s pretty much never the first mistake that ruins you. It’s the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. So if you can get back on track quickly… I think I had a line in the book: “Missing once is a mistake, missing twice is the start of a new habit.”

Rich Roll: Yeah, cause then it creates its own negative momentum.

James Clear: Exactly.

Source: Rich Roll podcast, episode 401

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Habits & Identity

James Clear on the effect that habits have on your self-image:

Your habits are the way that you embody a particular identity. So, every morning that you make your bed, you embody the identity of an organized person. Every time you go to the gym, you embody the identity of someone who’s fit. Every time you sit down to write, you embody the identity of someone who’s a writer.

Every action you take is kind of like a vote for the type of person that you believe that you are. As you take these actions, you build up evidence of a particular identity, and pretty soon your beliefs have something to root themselves in. It’s like, “Man, I showed up at the gym for 4 days a week for the last three months; I guess I’m the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts” — and that I think is the true reason why habits are so important.

Once I realized how beliefs and behaviors are connected, that it’s this two-way street… then I started to think that this is really something. Not only does it deliver those external results — the clean room, or the bigger bank account — but also the internal results of shaping your sense of self-image and what you believe.

Source: Rich Roll podcast, episode 401

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Software Simulation

Interesting tidbit from the Joe Rogan podcast with Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert:

Joe Rogan: Human memory is really flawed…

Scott Adams: Well, if you wanna go real deep real fast, you just gave me a good opening… I am a proponent of the “we are all a software simulation” view of reality. That would also explain why memories are so screwed up. The explanation would be that the past doesn’t exist – until you need it. In other words, the past writes itself on demand… because if we’re software, you wouldn’t have everything in the universe pre-programmed just in case you needed it – it would take up too much resources.

Source: Joe Rogan podcast, episode #874

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