I am a writer.

That’s a dangerous phrase if your goal is to be one.

Being does not demand action. If you are something, you get the credit and the feeling associated with that thing, whether or not it’s warranted.

This is why going to college can end up for many an unproductive time not gaining skills or progressing towards professional goals. You reach the age where pressure mounts to do something with your life. But once you get to tell people that you already are something – a college student – they give you a pass.

People treat statements of being as if they are the result of doing. They can be, but ontological labels aren’t the same as proof of progress.

Aspirational language can be useful, but it can lull you to sleep. I am a writer may at first challenge you to level up to the label, but once you’re comfortable using it, it quickly dulls you to the necessary task at hand – writing and publishing what you write.

Ontological status is a shield. Telling people you are a writer gives you a free pass. You and they get to assume you’re spending your time in a writing cave, working through plots or revising. Lack of visible product is excused. Labels that let you get away with no progress are a trap.

When you replace being statements with doing statements, it’s harder to cheat yourself.

You are not a writer. You wrote some stories yesterday.

You are not a writer. You are writing two pages today.

You are not a writer. You have a goal to publish something tomorrow.

If you don’t get to say I am, you are forced to say, I did, am doing, will do. Those demand proof. Those demand accountability.

Those will make you a writer.

Writer isn’t a state of being.

Writer should be a description others give you, earned by what they read that you produced.

Same goes for any other label.

Some of the best thinkers are self-justifiers.

A smart person who struggles with self-honesty can come up with some of the most elaborate and interesting theories of how things work in effort to create a world that eliminates the truth they’re running from.

A good thinker will be tortured by incongruence in what they logically deduce and the thing they want to be true to avoid a still small voice. They must either yield to the inner truth and accept the inconvenient aspects of the world it brings, decide everything is a cruel joke and become nihilists, or spend a lifetime concocting as-true-as-possible ideas that manage to maneuver around and protect the little self-deception they cling to.

The final category produces some really good ideas. People with profound understanding of the way the world works, and innovative language for communicating it. They produce a more robust almost true but fatally flawed picture of the world than those who have a true picture because their relentless run from full self-honesty forces them to get really detailed and thorough.

It’s a lot harder to maintain a healthy-looking and functioning body while refusing to remove a splinter that’s slowly causing infection. If you try, you’ll probably get a lot better than most at all the other ways to be healthy, to compensate for the constant drain the splinter puts on your body.

Some of the most interesting and useful mostly truths are created by those running from full truth.

Everybody likes doing things they’re passionate about.

Everyone likes succeeding.

When these seem in tension, how do you proceed?

Do you ‘follow your passion’ no matter what? Do you go for what you are most likely to succeed at and hope you become passionate about it, or that the success will be enough?

No one else can provide the answer. (Though I have found it very helpful to run away from stuff you hate, rather than towards what you think you’d love). But there are some interesting and unexpected outcomes I’ve observed in terms of the feelings produced by these choices.

I’m going to call it “joy” (not the same as happiness). It’s a feeling beyond surface level satisfaction. Both success and passion for what you do contribute to it.

Tell me if the following holds true for you:

When I thought about this in my own life, it surprised me to realize that failing at something I’m passionate about is a lot more painful than failing at something I’m not.

I have no conclusions or recommendations to draw from this, so take the observation for what you will.

Most problems and mysteries and big happenings in the world don’t have a clear answer.

Or if they do, nobody really knows what it is.

Test this. Ask around the next time some big hard to explain or understand thing happens. Lots of people will give you their take, but it becomes clear immediately none of them really know.

At first, you assume you’re asking the wrong people, or the wrong questions, or in the wrong way, or at the wrong time. If you wait until more info comes out, you get the right person, they will explain exactly what’s happening, why, and how.

After many iterations of never getting a clear explanation that holds up to scrutiny, you begin to discover the truth: no one knows.

This can be disconcerting. If you allow, it can drive you mad or into the arms of delusional monocausal explanations.

But if you get comfortable with the fact that almost nobody knows what the hell is going on almost all of the time, you can adjust how you approach things and it’s useful and even fun.

Still ask around. Still make and compare theories. But hold all of them more loosely, and know that you’ll likely never face a final judge to tell you if you’re right or wrong.

It’s not like school. There isn’t one authority at the head of the class who has the correct answer and can tell you if you passed or failed.

Everyone’s guessing.

Think in probabilities and possibilities. Explore and test. See which explanations carry the most water. Enjoy the process.

Music is more than something to consume.

Music is more than something to create.

Music is a weapon to stamp out the darkness.

The spirit of God lives in music.

Self-narratization is useful for staying inspired, connected, and focused.

It’s a skill that doesn’t get talked about much, but the most successful and happiest people I know are good at it.

It’s the ability to see in the events and decisions of your life a few threads that create a unified story. This is not always easy. Especially when you’re in the moment. Even looking at your past it can be hard, especially if you treat your life like a resume full of sequential bullet-points.

A bullet point list of your activities has no connective tissue. Some of those activities are so different that on their face, there seems to be no connection at all.

But there always is. You are the connective tissue. And your job is to figure out what it is about you that makes these disparate items make perfect sense as steps in the story. What underlying motivations, beliefs, and desires caused your path to unfold in this way?

The process of self-narratization is never-ending. On a micro level, every day requires a story that connects it to yesterday and tomorrow. On the macro level, you’ve got to constantly re-integrate your past selves with the present, and re-position your role in the world at large as it shifts.

Every time I go through this mental exercise, I come out re-invigorated and reconnected to my daily tasks and goals.

I look back at phases of life where I thought differently, pursued different things, believed different strategies, in a world that looked different. What does that have to do with who I am, what I’m doing, and the world I inhabit today?

It’s my job to figure it out. The connections are there.

If I just leave it alone and treat it as if I’ve had many separate versions of myself living in many different worlds, I feel rudderless and start to have existential angst.

But when I zoom far enough out and contemplate the threads that were consistent, I can begin to build a coherent story that connects my life thus far into a coherent arc, one that terminates somewhere in the foggy future, with enough unknown ahead to keep it exciting.

This isn’t about lying to yourself. In fact, it’s about a much deeper level of honesty than just a list of facts. It’s about really digging down to discover the true why and how of your actions. It’s about self-knowledge.

It’s also about self-respect. Treat your past selves not as saints, but as people who knew what they were doing given the information and incentives they had. Unite them into a single you, resolving any tension between past decisions and present priorities.

You have one story. You’ve got to find it and tell it to yourself. Over and over.

Self-seriousness is exhausting.

You play better when you play loose. Self-seriousness makes you play tight.

One of the best things about kids is that they are weird and random. When confronted with a weird kid doing something random, it tends to shatter self-seriousness (unless you’re in a really bad way that calls for time alone to get your shit together).

Being around my kids in the morning before I start working is a great way to loosen me up for the day. Their random requests, jokes, and antics are just too delightful to keep me tight. (They can be annoying too. I’m not trying to over-romanticize this.)

Comedy can do this too, but adult comedy tends to be cynical and can cause you to dig into the self-seriousness. There’s something about the non sequiturs from kids that prevent any pretention or cynicism.

Almost every morning, I listen to very mellow, meditative, almost sad music while I get started on work.

I’m a pretty upbeat, energetic guy, so this is kind of odd. I’m not sure when it started, but slowly over the last decade, when I want music to work to, I’m always drawn to playlists like, “Peaceful Meditation Music”.

I often switch it up later in the day to some hip hop or classic rock or New Wave or any number of other genres, but the proportion of my listening that fits the yoga vibe is startlingly high.

It’s not particularly great music, and it doesn’t put me in a particularly great mood, but I think the reason I’m drawn to it in the mornings is because it sort of slows everything down. This allows me to go step by step through my morning rituals and not get too hyped or ahead of myself.

I’m not really sure what the reason, but here I am bumping new age music.

Everything’s easier when you have a clear vision.

Laying bricks is great work when you know you’re building a cathedral, and drudgery when you don’t know what you’re building.

But sometimes you don’t yet have a clear vision. You don’t know exactly where your near term actions are taking you long term. You’re responding and adjusting in real-time.

It’s easy to overthink everything when this happens. To strain and stress and try to find your next vision, or torture yourself over why you don’t have one yet.

In my experience, it’s best to stop all the analysis. Sometimes the vision isn’t clear. That’s OK.

What to do instead?

The right thing.

That’s it. Each day, just do the right thing. Act with integrity. Wherever the unknown path winds, take it, and do the right thing along the way.

Acting with integrity in every facet of life is usually a sufficient goal to get you through when the vision isn’t there.

I am endlessly fascinated by causal chains.

The opening lines to Carl Menger’s treatise on economics, “Everything is subject to the law of cause and effect” gives me chills.

It’s easy to get lost in mystery and complexity and turn every search into a competition between ideologies and emotions, prophecies and predictions, wishes and delusions, optimism and pessimism.

The perpetual presence of cause and effect underneath it all is reassuring. It gives solidity to an otherwise topsy turvy world.

This doesn’t mean they’re easy to discover, but the more you can identify causal relationships, the better you get at planning and navigating the world.

Much easier than discovering causal relationships is activating them in your life.

You can never know all the variables that will enter the picture. But you can become the kind of person who better deals with any kind of variable.

“People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.” — F.M. Alexander

You can’t plan every step in your causal chain. But you can build causes that lead to desired effects. You can’t control from the present the end-state in the future. But you can control the seeds and water that will grow into that end-state.

When you plant apple seeds and water them, you don’t know the exact size and shape the tree will become, let alone its fruit. But you do know that apple seeds, if given decent soil, nutrients, and protection from pests, grow into apple trees.

If you create a store of good habits – good causes – you will see good effects, even if the details remain a surprise.

People have become a lot more conscious of what they put into their bodies.

It’s popular to research and experiment and figure out what types of food and what specific ingredients, and even what source and process of manufacture are best aligned with health outcomes.

You don’t see this level of interest when it comes to what goes in the mind. But what you consume with your ears and eyes affects your mind as much as what you consume with your mouth affects your stomach.

Just as with food, it’s not so much about things being absolutely bad for you. With the exception of poison or spoiled food, most things that produce bad results in the body aren’t inherently bad, but are consumed too much and without a good balance of other nutrients.

I often find myself engaging in an activity that’s good for my mind – say browsing some interesting Tweets – and then suddenly realize I’ve consumed well beyond the point of benefit. Drinking a glass of wine or a cup of coffee is great. Downing several bottles or pots in one setting is not.

I’m trying to get more deliberate about what I feed my mind. I used to be able to pretty much rely on my curiosity to do that for me. But I find as I get older and more worn out by the duties of the day, I’m more prone to turn on autopilot and just keep consuming the easy stuff. I’m tired! I’ve earned it!

Another point for daily blogging: it forces me to tease something out of me brain every day, which makes me more aware of my brain’s health and what I’ve been feeding it.

The solid is weak

To the wispy etheric

Land is beholden

My son was listening to vapor wave and trying to explain the genre to my wife.

He said it’s like a nostalgia for a version of the past that never quite was built around a future that never came to be.

It’s interesting how compelling the future of the past aesthetic is these days. We can’t seem to get enough of an amalgamation of previous eras – mostly ’80s and ’90s technophile niches – versions of the future.

Is it because it’s quaint and funny? Is it because it’s cool and fun? A combo of nerdy outsider and hip cutting edge insider? Or is it because we’re unhappy with the present, and lament that it didn’t turn out they way we imagine we imagined back then?

Combining all the fun parts of the future-oriented past into a new version and living in it today is a weird contradiction. Or irony. Or something. I’m not quite sure.

When the trend runs out of steam, I wonder whether it will be followed by a rise in popularity of an even more removed past, or a new vision of the future.

The hardest part about being an entrepreneur is that you’re constantly forced to tease out of yourself stuff you know that you don’t know you know and don’t know why.

You have to make decisions. Many of them have pretty big stakes. Big changes to upside and downside probabilities. You can think through and analyze them easy enough. But that’s not enough.

Some things just feel right. Some things just don’t sit right. Some things are stuck in flux between the two.

Your job is to decide. But to do that well, you’ve first got to figure out what the hell you know and feel about the decision and why.

Plumbing the depths of your own gut, or subconscious, or spirit, or whatever you want to call it is no easy task. It’s hard to get down there and access the source of your inclinations. And you never know what you’ll find. You may not like it. You may try to pretend it’s not true, because your head tells you you’d have to be an idiot to feel that way about that decision.

So you have to develop rigorous self-knowledge (hard), then rigorous self-honesty about what you find (harder).

Once you go through the brutal process of figuring out what you actually want and accepting it, the decision part gets easy and fun.

But if you avoid the interior exploration and confirmation, the deciding part is torturous and only gets worse over time. Second guessing and sleeplessness are signs you haven’t yet figured out what you really want or accepted it.

This is true in all parts of life, but business forces you to confront it more quickly and frequently than most areas.

Someday, you will look back fondly on these days.

That thought just hit me this morning.

I was going through my mental rolodex of all the things I have to do, deadlines, pressures, unsolved problems, and promises. I was annoyed at the weather, annoyed at things around my house and property I have to repair, annoyed at a lot of the inescapable elements of this phase of life.

Staring out the window processing my tasks for the day I fixated on a small tree whose branches changed to stunning red in the last week or so. It was beautiful. I heard my kids through the door bickering and chattering.

Then the thought hit me out of nowhere.

Someday, you will look back fondly on these days.

And it’s true. I know it’s true because I look back fondly on the other phases in life I’ve completed, even though in the midst I was usually focused only on what needed doing and improving.

I don’t think it’s a bad pattern. Discontentment and a drive to do and accomplish is inherent in humans. As long as it’s paired with optimism, it can be good.

But taking a minute to recognize that I will likely look back fondly someday on this phase – the ages of my kids, the place I live and work, the early chaotic stage of the company – suddenly made me feel a lot happier and more relaxed.