Month: September 2020

If you listen to the weather you’ll hear them describe days as either rainy, or sunny. As if the Sun takes rainy days off. Which is of course ridiculous, the Sun shines every day, whether or not clouds show up. Because the Sun is so incredibly consistent, most people don’t think about it. When you know that something is going to happen every day, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to mention it when you are communicating. Entirely sunny with heavy thunderstorms is shortened to just heavy thunderstorms. So this incandescent star somehow fades into the background.

Much like with the weather, people focus on the changes in their life and ignore consistent circumstances. But the steady, boring circumstances of life are far more important than the occasional changes. When things take a turn for the worse, people laser in on what’s changing. On what things are becoming worse right now.

It’s worthwhile to take a step back. See what things have not changed, and take a moment to appreciate them. Secondly, it’s worthwhile to understand the long term effects of current challenges. Without rain, you wouldn’t see any flowers.

How have my current problems benefitted me? If this seems like an odd question, it’s worth considering why you are working on them. If you don’t gain something important for your efforts, why are you working on them?

I recently read a book that touched on the idea of value driven decisions, and it stuck with me. It seemed so obvious. Everyone has values, so of course they should act according to those values. But that naturally led to a storm of questions. Was I acting according to my values? What exactly are my values? What does acting according to them even look like?

What is a value?

A value is a quality or objective that is an end in itself. In other words, a value is something that is worth pursuing for its own sake. It does not need to have any supporting reasons or secondary effects. In other words, any action that needs to produce something else to be worth pursuing is not a value. If a secondary effect is not a value, it will need to affect one of your values to be worth the effort. Taking this one step further, all actions need the justification of one or more values (however tentative their connection).

How to identify your values

Focus on the things that irritate you. Especially the things that bother you more than other people. And then dig into why it affects you. Did you start yelling at that person who cut you off? Why are you mad about it? Is it because that person is disregarding the safety of others? Or disrespecting their fellow drivers? Do you get frustrated when you spend all day watching TV? Is it because you don’t feel in control of yourself? Or are you upset because you are setting a bad example for those closest to you? Continue asking why until you struggle to come up with an answer. That’s when you’ve hit a value. Once you get a list of these things that bother you, you can flip them around to see what things you value.

Alternatively, you can directly list the things that are important to you, or try to understand events that made you happy. While this can be used to collect a list of values, people generally remember negative events more clearly, so I’d recommend starting that way.

Connect your actions to your values

Now that you have your list of values, take a look at your previous actions over the last week or so. For each action, you should be able to point to at least one value that justifies it. If you can’t find a value behind a given action, don’t start beating yourself up just yet. It’s more likely that you missed one of your values (joy and self care tend to be criminally underrated). Take a few minutes to consider what values someone (not necessarily you) might use to justify that action. Once you have ten or so, think back to how you felt taking that action and see if any of them stick.

Now that you’ve connected your actions to your values, you’ll be able to judge your actions more easily. Some of your values will be missing (oops!). And some of your actions won’t be very helpful for the values that stand behind them. This has a rather unfortunate tendency to be painful, especially if you haven’t done it before. You’ll see values that are barren of actions, and values where your actions are laughably ineffectual. That’s good. If you have big, obvious, and painful problems, then you’ll likely have big, obvious, and effective ways to improve.

What about you?

Do you have any values that surprised you? Did you notice any values that were missing from your actions? What did you do to more closely align your actions with your values?

Lately, I’ve been trying to improve my productivity. Specifically, I’ve been trying to spend more time working on advancing my goals, instead of playing games or reading fiction. And it went pretty well for several months. But then it stopped improving. Not only that, I started doing worse than the previous week. That trend continued for several weeks until I finally took a step back to assess what happened.

After hitting my goals out of the park for a while,

I stopped making progress. After each week, I’d review what I did recently, and think about how to change things. As I continued to struggle, I started to make everything about my character instead of my actions. The problem was that I was lazy, or unmotivated. It wasn’t that I had stayed up too late the night before, or that ate an unhealthy meal. I stopped thinking about ways to change my actions. Why would I? They weren’t the problem. The problem was my character.

This is of course crazy. I needed to change my actions, and as I stopped thinking about ways to do that I faltered and then crashed. How could I continue working when I was constantly calling myself lazy and pathetic? Who would work under those conditions? Not me. I started feeling disgust at my failures. That led to me pushing my past self away, instead of trying to understand what about that situation had contributed to my failings. 

Once I stepped back,

 I started to walk through the actions around my mistakes. I tried to feel the things I felt in the past as I repeated my past actions in my mind. I had felt harried, and stressed, and afraid. I just wanted to avoid thinking about my goals because that brought on more feelings of inferiority and helplessness. I realized that I had a great deal of emotional baggage weighing me down. And that there was no reason to continue holding onto it.

I started to look at the past in a new light. I assumed that I was not the problem. Because that required me to really look at my failures. I could no longer push them away and be done with it. Once I started looking, I found a few ways to improve my actions.

Each week had become an evaluation where my soul sat on trial. Any failures were devastating, and led to me becoming disheartened. I needed each week to become an experiment, where I tried various methods to see how well they helped me accomplish my goals. I needed to judge my actions and processes because these are things that I can change.

What about you?

Are you stuck on anything? If so, do you look for ways to improve after you fall short? Do you make everything about your character or your actions?

But I keep struggling to do it. And that feels utterly miserable. I have my clearly laid out plan, ready for action. Only I fail to act. That’s ok. I don’t expect perfection, so sometimes I’ll mess up. Only it isn’t sometimes. I keep making the same mistakes, in the same situations. It’s infuriating. Why can’t I just do that one simple thing? I’d broken my plan into simple steps with clear benefits.

I kept trying, and I kept failing.

And I grew more frustrated and then more dejected. And then I asked myself, if I keep failing, do I really know how to do this? If I kept doing the same thing, and failing despite my efforts, why did I keep trying? I never blamed my plan. It was always the fault of my actions.

And so I asked myself, why did you fail?

Subconsciously, I’d asked myself this many times before. And my answer had always been some flavor of ‘you are a failure.’ Once I realized this, I also realized that I had been just accepting it as truth, and I felt the need to challenge it. So, I held the question ‘why did you fail?’ in my mind for a few seconds, and started to peel back the underlying questions.

Why was it difficult (not for others, but for me)?

The action I was trying to take was not physically challenging, or mentally taxing. But emotionally, it was hard. I had to wrestle with my emotions every time I did it. And what was making it emotionally difficult? I had convinced myself that I needed it. That I must do this specific thing to relax or stress would overwhelm me. But this didn’t help me to relax. In fact I felt more stressed after doing it because I would always fall behind. That my life was dull and lifeless without it. But that wasn’t true either. It was entertaining, but I had enjoyed years of my life without it. After questioning the assumptions that I held around this, I felt my need to do it subside.

What did I learn?

If you are struggling to do something that you think should be easy, you are ignoring what makes it difficult. Something is tripping you up, and when you say that it’s easy, you aren’t giving yourself permission to look for it. And if you don’t look for something, you won’t find it. We can generally recognize physically or mentally difficult problems, but rarely account for  emotionally difficult ones.

Your emotions don’t rise out of the ether. They are built out of beliefs based on your interpretation of past events. Although we can see that the beliefs of others may be inaccurate, it’s very difficult to apply this to ourselves. If you are struggling with your emotions, ask what you must believe to feel this way? What assumptions do your emotions require?

Unhelpful emotions often rest on a mistaken understanding of the world, because if your understanding of the world were accurate, it would help you interact with it more beneficial.

P.S. If anyone is curious, the action I’m trying to change is reading webnovels less often.