Nothing better will ever come to you, or indeed ever happen if you don’t read (physical books). For each time you find yourself stuck, or at another crossroads in life, books are the solution to your problem and the way to find yourself becoming unstuck.
It’s a mental exercise that requires real effort, but engaging the mind in deliberate discipline for its own sake can’t not make one’s situation better.
It won’t happen right away, but it will happen. So if for no other reason than the fact that it’s an extremely practical, peaceful and productive exercise, force yourself into deliberate practice and make yourself read vast amounts of high-quality information for an extended period of your life, which is more intelligent than you, and continue to re-read that same material year in and year out until you are as intelligent as the material and acquire the skill of being able to study deeply.
TAKE ON READATHONS
Devote a decade to this practice of doing nothing more than setting new reading goals each and every year, alongside new physically challenging goals, all in order to not just make yourself feel better, but to be better and become more than you are. Feed the unconscious so that it will one day eventually rise up and achieve explosive bursts of creativity from all this practice.
It might never make a difference to anyone else, and at different times it may even feel a bit pointless as to the absurdity of it all. As in, why spend one’s whole life leaning over paper? What is the actual point in it all? In its simplest terms: it will change your life for the better.
SO READ. READ. READ.
Throughout life you will experience moments when feeling stuck and unsure about it all. And being a creative person, that will mean going through that process several times a day for the entirety of your existence. So first: forget about everything and focus on getting an incredible sleep behind you before making any decisions. We will come back to the subject of sleep later as it’s critical for improving everything. For example: yesterday I didn’t know what to do. I was feeling a bit stuck. Then today, this idea (the piece you are reading now) all arrived following a 10km cycle to work at 7am after getting a high-quality 8-hour sleep.
The point: I might not know what to do again tomorrow now. And so, I’ll just read. And read. And read. And workout in-between. And from following the consistency of that pattern, that ebb and flow of stress and recovery, I can trust that by continuing to follow that process, more will eventually make its way through. Then soon after when feeling stuck, Aha!
THERE IT IS
So being stuck and feeling unsure is just something that you have to learn to tolerate. Because that feeling is going to follow you almost everywhere at all times. Dance with it.
It could be that you do have the ability to do a life changing piece of work, if not for anyone else, then the least you should do it is for the purpose of yourself. You should continue striving to improve your mental muscle and do that for no other reason than the reward of achieving, and therefore experiencing, increased cognitive complexity. The more you engage with a deliberate practice as an art, as a way of living, you will be rewarded handsomely with a mind that is able to endure hardships better too.
The human mind is limitless. It has the ability to shape your life, negatively, or positively. As it is in your ability to shape it. But not just from what you choose to do, but more importantly, the way you choose to do it.
There is no greater muscle to improve than that of your physical and mental endurance capacity. Chilling is fine, and even essential at times. But only for a while. Easing up and relaxing too much will only ever lead to atrophy. And any muscle unused, gets lost. That rule applies specifically to the grey matter inside your brain. Performing repetitive daily activities that aren’t causing you to stretch, that demand active engagement will never increase the capacity of your brain’s performance.
What you must do is choose instead to engage carefully with deliberately sought out difficult activities, that force you to have to stretch and reach beyond the limits of your maximum capabilities. This in turn will actually increase the amount of grey matter in your brain. And this is why it matters what you choose to do right now. Because the resulting effect from your actions and engagement today will reflect in your mind’s health in the future. It is no different to how we treat the physical body.
Your choice today is also a decision to neglect something else too. So one of the more wiser choices you could make is to not neglect your mind. Engage yourself into a purposeful practice.
STRUGGLING IS ACTUALLY GOOD FOR YOU
Seneca once said to treat the body rigorously so that it will not be disobedient to the mind. Likewise to that thought, it is important that we also invert that idea, to engage our mind so that it won’t be disobedient to our body. And what that means is, in terms of your brain, mind and mental health: the power to make you better resides inside the choices you make. Make many bad choices and you will eventually feel bad. Make smart, wise and rational choices and you will feel smart, wise and rational.
The question is though, will you?
Are you willing to do what so many others couldn’t be bothered to?
Because it’s very easy to do what’s easy to do. Very different is it to get up and do the hard thing when you don’t feel like it.
So how much pain are you willing to endure in order to achieve possessing the soundest mind and most upright body?
It takes discipline, effort, a a whole lot of never ending work. Forcing yourself to sit quietly, alone, forcing yourself to think, to stretch, to push yourself to do the harder things. And the way that gets better is to never let it get easier. Do you want a better body? A better mind? A better life? Well, shut up the fuck up, get up and go do it. Don’t whine if it’s hard. It’s supposed to be. That’s the fun thing about it. If it’s not hard enough, then you are never going to experience it.
The interesting thing about being so actively involved with so much work is that it leads you to discover more things you never knew before, and therefore what work to plan for and schedule doing next. Doing the work brings about more work. It is true that what you decide to say yes to right now you are also saying no to something else. If for instance you are weighing up working on one of either two projects, each which you estimate will last at least five years, that means making a huge sacrifice.
It all comes down then to: which would you enjoy to work on most that you will be happy with by the end if nothing other than nothing happens? This is precisely the point: if you want to do something which externals dictate its success, then you can never be happy. If you want to do something for the sake of pleasure and how much enjoyment it will bring, then you will be happy regardless. And you should do what you want to do for yourself, rather than what you think others will like or want.
Nothing may change from doing the work. But you will. And that’s enough to make it worth it. You will be your life’s work.
Prioritize your life then around a list of goals that you do not expect will do anything other than improve the quality of your own life. If you can achieve that, that’s surely more than enough. If what you are doing is fun for you and you are making the most of your existence, by pursuing meaningful goals and activities, that in itself is success. Through the active pursuit of engaging the body and mind in challenging acts you are already receiving many benefits from within that you are perhaps not even aware of.
There is a circumscribed amount of time that is available to you to do all that you can possibly do in your lifetime before you are gone and it is gone for eternity. And you will never have the chance to do any of it ever again. So, you might as well do it.
Daily Flow: your ability to be able to reverse and get yourself ‘unstuck’ becomes easier the more educated you are. Feeling stuck can sometimes be the result of uncertainty, and fear. You may always have that feeling. So get into the habit of engaging your body and mind in other activities during feeling stuck. And it won’t be long again before you notice yourself unstuck. A 70,000 word book is about 7-8 hours in audio. But make it a habit instead to read the physical book to engage both your body and mind actively, not passively. Read a few hundred pages of a book. Aim to do this at least once every 2-weeks. The best way to get more ideas is by stealing them from everyone else. For what even is a book anyway? Simply an author’s collection of their best ideas they’ve stolen from others then re-structured them to the very best of their ability.
So if you don’t know what to do, just stop. Go away. And read, read, read. Take a shit load of notes. And do intense physical exercise. And let’s say you read a 70,000 word book every fortnight for the next year. What would be the point of that if it goes nowhere after you may ask? The answer to that question is simple: it does not go nowhere. You do it for no other reason than to benefit yourself. And in doing so, you achieve strengthening your mind. Understand: your mind is a muscle and it is up to you whether you wish to grow that muscle, or not. Don’t sit around idle ever wishing or hoping that life will eventually get easier.
What if it doesn’t?
Instead, get into the habit of finding more ways to make it harder. No one, and I do mean no one, is on their way to becoming an elite mental performer by spending all their time sitting on their ass staring into a screen. Make shit happen.
For who?
For you.
Think about how much time people waste and give themselves away so freely to meaningless distractions. You will be far more ahead than those, and you will improve the quality of your life. And isn’t that the point? Is that not enough of a reason?
MAKE LEARNING A WAY OF LIFE
Books achieve far more more than simply understanding and comprehension. Books do remarkable things for your imagination and mind. Exercise the physical in order to achieve an upright body, plus a sound mind. Exercise the mental in order to achieve a sounder mind, and an even far stronger skill level of patience, discipline and endurance.
The work you wish to do gets better as you engage with multiple disciplines. Increase the skill level in all arts at all times.
You will start to notice a pattern emerge over time.
Then getting better becomes a theme.
And that’s when the process starts to become automatic.
There is nothing you cannot learn. For if it is attainable, consider yourself almost there.
So go! Why are you still here reading this? Go and run a fucking marathon already!