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Life is painful. Life is complex. Life is filled with ugly emotions and experiences that we struggle to understand.

We become so overwhelmed by these things that we do anything not to feel. We pile layers upon ourselves, we drown in distractions, we make up answers to our problems until we forget the question. Anything as long as it is not pain.

And we do this so often that we soon forget to feel anything. We become muted and grey. We wonder what extinguished the fires of our spirit. Did we ever have one to begin with?

Instead, why not lean into the knife when you feel it pierce you? Savor every moment of the pain. Feeling something, even something painful, makes us remember that there is life past the surface, past the grey noise; there is something more within us.

And once we truly remember, pain ceases to be pain, but fuel for the fires of our choosing. We can light up the world with the wreckage we have worked so long to hide.

The question then becomes: what shall we ignite within ourselves?

One of my teachers from college had a saying: “nothing is a waste of time — even a waste of time.”

He used to say it in my music lessons when I had failed to write enough music that week. This normally happened as a result of me messing around with some new piece of software, joining an opera chorus, or something similarly eccentric. I often felt guilty when I went into my lessons with less dots on the page than I thought was appropriate for a composer, but I never felt like I had “wasted” my time doing those other things. All that richness of straying into other fields of knowledge always somehow felt right to me.

Looking back, those moments where I “strayed” from my path led to the development of some of my most useful skills. My endless software and data fiddling developed into a career, and I don’t think I would be as comfortable as I am in social situations had I never stepped foot onto an opera stage. But exploring things outside of the norm went beyond just developing an amalgamation of useful life skills — these explorations combined to create my unique perspective on the world.

Thinking about what makes people unique has made me realize just how important everything we think and do really is — even things that are a “waste of time”. Everything we think, do, or experience plays its part in informing our perspective. What makes us different from one another is not only what we each consider important in life, but also what we view as a “waste of time”.

We are perpetually learning. Our minds are always on, always thinking, always making connections between the various stimuli of reality. The only thing that separates a “wise” person from to someone else is how they have consolidated their experiences.

Experiences in life are like bricks. These bricks come in different shapes, colors, and sizes, and we can do whatever we want with them. We can set them apart from one another. We can group similar ones into little piles — we can separate our “work” bricks from our “fun” bricks, and our “enjoyable” bricks from our “boring” bricks. As people, we generally build things using only a portion of the bricks we have at our disposal, and dispose of all the “useless” ones.

But what if we look at our experiences with a grander perspective? We could incorporate all of our bricks into something greater — something that combines all of our experiences into one cohesive expression. We could build something that towers above all other possible structures. The consolidation of our experiences would be infinitely greater and more unique than a few bricks viewed in isolation from one another.

Our ability to consolidate a multitude of experience into a single narrative thread is what denotes true greatness. The materials we are given do not matter nearly as much as what we do with them. Vision is the only thing that separates Babylon from a pile of bricks.

The only difference between a waste of time and a “waste of time” is the depth of our creativity.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time studying programming recently. It’s been one of the best learning experiences of my life, because it’s been one of the most frustrating. It’s been a very long time since I have felt this stupid.

I’m not at all good at programming. In fact, I’m really bad at it. It’s a way of thinking that is completely alien to me. Programming allows no flexibility in jumping from one idea to another — everything you write must be explicit and logical. Whereas my mind likes engage in flights of fancy, programming requires each line of code — every thought — to be a concrete part of a cohesive whole.

I also work with several brilliant programmers. It’s pretty humbling watching
masters at work while you struggle with the absolute basics. It reminds me of when I was starting to learn the piano and I couldn’t play a scale in the same direction with both hands. I could play them in opposite directions, but moving in parallel seemed incomprehensibly difficult. Even worse, it was easy for all my other teacher’s students, which made my failure even more humiliating. I only overcame this hurdle after sitting down for countless hours, cursing my own stupidity, playing until I didn’t even have the energy to be angry at myself. But because learning those scales was not easy, I gained more from the ordeal than the other students did. To this day, one of my primary reasons for the successes I have had has been the sheer degree of stubbornness I posses — stubbornness I gained learning those scales.

Despite the fact that programming has given my ego a beating, it’s done wonders for my mind. Taking on something that requires such discipline and logical progression from one thought to another has dramatically improved how I think. Just like when I finally learned to play scales in parallel, what I’ve learned from programming has seeped into my other skills. Now when I put words on the page, I look at each of them with extra attentiveness. I think about how each sentence modifies the ones that follow it, and I work even harder to choose the most clear and effective words to describe my thoughts. By improving a part of myself that is conspicuously lackluster, I’ve also amplified my strengths.

As people, we spend a lot of time nurturing our innate talents and ignoring whatever we don’t immediately understand. While everyone wants to feel “talented,” focusing on the things we find easy turns us into imbalanced, non-optimized human beings. What good is being gifted at math if you lack the powers to communicate your abstract thoughts into words? What good is understanding music while being completely ignorant of the physics that govern sound? Music without math is like cooking without heat, and ideas without the means of expression will forever remain silent. Limiting your attention to a small subset of knowledge impedes the possibility of greater revelation. Nothing ever occurs in a vacuum, so we must do our best to learn all we can — even the parts that are hard for us to understand.

Throughout history, all the great minds have had been Renaissance minds. To be a genius is to never be above someone else’s teaching. To the illuminated, the world is a classroom and every piece of knowledge is another step that elevates their perspective. They know a fundamental truth — that all knowledge is interconnected into a seamless whole. There is no single path towards Gnosis, only ascendancy or stagnation.

Those of us who truly want to grow must try to absorb everything, especially the things that make us feel stupid. Feeling stupid puts everything into perspective. It brings us back to beginning — back to the beginner’s mind. Beginners always know there is more to learn. And, even more important, they are always excited and willing to grow.

I have a deep seated suspicion of people who don’t read. It’s not because I think everyone should read “the classics,” or some other equally arbitrary collection of books. That sort of mentality is one of the reasons why people have a distaste for reading. No, I don’t trust people who don’t read because it means they have no interest in learning.

Let me explain.

Learning is a difficult and complex process. Crucial elements of an idea are easily lost when it is transmitted between two people. The method used to share ideas greatly determines their fidelity. And no other medium transmits ideas better than the written word.

With face to face conversation, people may think they grasp the ideas being discussed, but it’s dangerously easy to misunderstand someone when there is no way to retrace your train of thought back through time. Truly learning anything requires being able to go back and review the elements you don’t immediately comprehend. This requires a medium where nothing is lost and where the ideas are transmitted at a pace you can manage. The spoken word is fragile and quickly forgotten. And time has a way of warping people’s memories of events.

What’s worse, you can only communicate face to face with an extremely small group of individuals. You are limited to people who happen to be in the same geographic location as you. Even worse, you are stuck communicating exclusively with living people. You are cut off from all the great minds that have come before you — unless those minds took the effort to document their ideas — and only if you take the time to read their thoughts.

Once you embrace the written word to learn, an entire world of knowledge opens up to you. The greatest minds that ever existed have left guides to help navigate through life’s greatest challenges. Almost everything you feel has been felt before, and chances are that at least one genius has spent time and effort trying to understand it and describe it. The past has left you the ultimate collection of mind hacks, guides to living, and secrets you could possibly ask for, and they are waiting for you, unchanged and untarnished, to use them for your benefit.

The real beauty of the written word, however, is that the knowledge it transmits is asynchronous. You can learn at your own pace. Anything you
fail to grasp you can review, and anything you already understand you can quickly bypass. And the best part is, as you continue learning through reading, you begin to learn faster. Reading feeds a never ending cycle of accelerating revelation.

Anyone who has such an opportunity for knowledge and growth available to them and refuses to take advantage of it clearly has no interest in learning. And if a person has no interest in learning, you shouldn’t waste a moment’s time with them. It’s time better spent reading.

I said goodbye to one of my co-workers today. His leaving was a surprise to me, and I think literally everyone at the company felt the same. He parted on good terms, lured by an opportunity that was simply too good to pass up — the perfect opportunity at the perfect time in his life. But even though it was by all accounts perfect and sensible, it was strange watching him walk out the door after having said goodbye, knowing that this was the last time I would see him.

Life is interesting in the way it throws things at you. It’s strange that we get so used to things even though we know deep down that life is impermanent and unpredictable. We can never plan for all the edge cases. There are always loop holes within infinity.

Being confronted by spontaneous change underscores a fundamental truth in life: we cling to a belief in a static existence even when confronted time and time again by the truth of perpetual movement. Life consists of thin slices of experience, and we do our best to string them together in a pattern that we are capable of understanding. People are pretty good at making sense of the ridiculous and the chaotic, and even better at weaving them into personal narratives give the illusion life is consistent and continues in predictable ways.

But then moments you never planned for happen, and you remember the truth. Nothing is forever — each moment is precious in its novelty and its brevity. We are simply walking through a limited series of moments, doing our best to savor the experiences and make sense of them all.

But soon this feeling passes. Each death of an anticipated future is quickly overshadowed the genesis of another. We develop a new plan, thinking out even more moves into the future in hopes that this time the outcome will be different. And the process begins again.

But for that moment where you sit in the silence between futures, you see the world for what it is. And even though you can’t hold onto the feeling for more than a moment, you know what you feel is the absolute truth of the world.

Recently I’ve been dealing with a long string of high intensity projects. I’ve had to face down multiple challenges at the same time, challenges which have been extremely complex and required immense attention to detail. While juggling more than one of anything is hard, my biggest challenge has been that all my tasks require maintaining a high level of creativity in order to succeed. It’s been very difficult to handle so many high pressure tasks while at the same time maintaining a mental state conducive to creativity.

To handle everything being thrown at me, I’ve been spending more and more time working to optimize my thoughts. I realize I’m currently approaching mental and physical capacity with these projects, so any energy spent thinking about anything other than the tasks at hand would lead to failure. I’m cutting down on all excess thoughts and actions. Any thoughts not dedicated to solving these challenges is putting more barriers in my way.

It’s made me think back to the times I used to perform in operas. Between the clumsy costumes, the acting, and the singing, there was no time to think of the audience. You were juggling so many things that you’d fail if you ever stopped to think about how much pressure you were under. The only solution was to throw yourself so into your role that you were incapable of thinking about how the performance was actually going. All that extra energy not spent recursively thinking radiated outward and amplified everything. Not thinking about the performance lead to a more powerful musical experience.

It’s only been recently that I’ve realized how much those performances helped prepare me for the immensity of the challenges I now face. Performing taught me that pressure and stress are forces that come from within. You determine how present the “audience” is within your mind. Anything you do is as hard as you make it for yourself. And even though there is no physical stage, whatever life throws at you follows the same principles. Everything is a performance, and you control how much energy you devote to feeding your creative mind.

It’s a difficult task; it’s as hard as you want to make it for yourself.

Work is something most people don’t understand. Many think of it as a bad thing; work is anything that they don’t want to do. Work is a chore, a mindless timesink, a task to hurry through before people go off to have “fun.”

But most people’s idea of “fun” involves sitting on a couch staring at a screen, or drinking enough to forget whatever work they did earlier in the day. Their fun doesn’t do anything to move them forward as people. When the fun ends, they are the same people as they were before they started.

The only thing that drives growth and change within people is work.

Work isn’t supposed to be fun, and it’s not supposed to be easy. Work is supposed to challenge you, to push you until your only choice is to change or give up. Work carves away the soft, weak parts within you like a sculptor removing layers from a stone. No one thinks a stone is beautiful until it has been shaped into something that makes it stand out from all the other stones. And no one will ever notice you if you don’t take the same approach to yourself.

And much like a statue, work will show you who you really are. It will reveal things within you that you never knew existed until you forcefully dredged them out. Anyone can be a hero or a genius in their mind, but real heroes and geniuses only exist as a result of the challenges they have faced. Work is the catalyst of their change. Before they conquered their enemies, forged new ground in their fields, they were just simple blocks of stone. No one cared about them or paid any attention to how they thought or what they felt. They looked just like everyone else. People only started paying attention to them once they saw what they were capable of doing, when their outer layers of mediocrity were worn away by the repeated hammering of countless hours of work.

So the next time you are faced with a task that you dread doing, think of it as a chisel. There’s always going to be some pain when chiseling away everything that conceals your ideal self. Looking back, it may shock you how little you miss the parts of yourself you’ve left behind when you’ve become the person you’ve always wanted to be.

One of my goals in life is to seek out interesting people. As is the case with most things, what you are looking for is all around you. There are fascinating people everywhere; the tricky part is finding out how to get them to reveal themselves.

Cutting past someone’s inhibitions and getting to know who they really are is difficult, since most people have thrown up layers of defenses in an attempt to make themselves seem as normal as possible.

People are afraid to show their uniqueness.

Because of this, I’ve spent a lot of time finding ways to get people to step outside of their normal modes of thinking when when I talk to them. I want to know what a person really cares about. How do they perceive themselves? How does the world look from their eyes?

It’s hard getting someone, even someone you have known for a long time, to share their perspective of reality. It can take years. But we have no time, and cutting past the social foreplay saves precious time that could be spent doing meaningful things. None of us really have any time to waste on small talk.

With that in mind, I start every conversation with a new person the same way:

Tell me tales of glory

I’ve found that it’s an odd enough opening line to garner very interesting responses from the right type of people. I’ve been told stories about near death experiences, tales about traveling across the sea- hiking high in the Andes- and inner tubing in the backyard after a long absence from home. In all cases, I’ve never heard anything formulaic or boring. People who have nothing to say just don’t answer the question. We end the conversation and are both the better for it.

After many years of saying this, it’s become something of a mantra for me (hence the sub-title of this blog). Saying it to anyone I meet also helps to keep the meaning of the words top of mind for myself. It reminds me that I always need to make sure I can answer my own question. As long as I can, I know I’m headed in the right direction.

We often look at the world and see all the things that are wrong with it. We think about all the things we don’t have in our lives that we want. We fixate on every discomfort we feel.

It’s true that there are many things that are terribly wrong around us, but how much of what we see is because we’ve trained ourselves to be able to focus on it and filter out everything else?

Our minds are extraordinary learning machines, capable of nearly anything given enough time and practice. But our minds work with all the training we provide them, and spending each day contemplating all the things that make you miserable uses the same mechanisms that you use to learn how to read or make music.

What we focus on is what our minds eventually master.

Every day, I create an Evernote note to catalog my thoughts during the day. I always include a bolded section called “gratitudes” where I write down at least three things I’m grateful to have in my life. I’ve been doing it for a few weeks now and, even in that short time, I’ve noticed that it’s started to help me focus on the bright spots in my life–even when I’m mired in darkness.

So the next time you feel a sinking feeling sweeping over you, think to yourself: how much of this have I programmed myself to feel?