Struggle, explained

First of all I want to make it clear I don’t blame anyone for what happened to me. Nobody tried to harm me.

As a kid I guess I demonstrated exceptional intelligence and talent, and I was always being commended for it. The problem is that innate talent and intelligence are not things anyone earns. It’s a roll of the dice.

 The kid who gets used to being praised for things he has not earned begins to understand that his success is a condition of “the way things are.” He will be successful because he is who he is, not because he does what he does.

Turns out the kids begin to associate success and failure with innate, unchangeable personality traits, rather than behaviors that work and don’t work. They become extremely risk averse because they don’t want to fail at something and be rebranded from “smart” to “dumb.”

They become terrified of failure and rejection because they believe that incidences of failure or rejection are direct evidence that they are failures or rejects. They avoid challenges, because challenges always present an opportunity to “become” a failure.

They can’t handle criticism, because they perceive it as a challenge to who they are, not to the way they’re currently doing something.

They feel threatened by the success of others. They can’t handle losing and so they avoid competition.

After years of these kinds of feelings surrounding accomplishment and goals, they begin to feel the world is deterministic and that extra effort is no substitute for one’s intrinsic capability.

This explained everything. It explained why I never applied for scholarships, why I quit sports, why I never attempted a career I thought I would love, why I avoided dating, why I wore drab clothing, why used to be frightened even to order pizza in case I screwed it up and embarrassed myself.

They “may plateau early and reach less than their full potential.”

I can’t blame the adults in my life for the encouragement they gave me. None of us could have known the bizarre side-effects. The point is I have an insight now that can unravel something that has been weighing on me for my whole life, and that makes me really excited for the rest of it.

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Insight is not enough

An insight by itself doesn’t change how your life goes though. It has to manifest itself as a change in behavior for life to change, and that doesn’t happen automatically. For me this amounts to reducing an insight to a mantra or aphorism that triggers you to act differently in those certain moments when you were about to make your usual mistake.

The revelation was this:

It’s not who you are, but what you do.

That’s what has been coming into my head whenever I notice I’m taking something personally. Success and failure speak only to the validity of actions, not personalities. This will make some people yawn — they’ve been reading something like it on inspirational posters and in fortune cookies forever. So have I, but I didn’t get what it meant.

Whenever I failed, I couldn’t help but interpret it as a consequence of who I was. Somehow, I believed all my successes were direct consequences of my innate qualities and not my day-to-day behavior, so my failures had to be, too. If I screwed something up, it couldn’t just be that I decided to do something that didn’t work very well, it had to be a personal fault.

I was never responsible for any of them, successes or failures, only the world at large could deliver either to me. The world at large decided to kick my ass.

If I didn’t get a job, it’s because I was inadequate, not because they just didn’t hear what they wanted to hear from me.

If I got rejected by a girl, it was because there was something wrong with me, and not because that time I chose an approach that didn’t intrigue her for whatever reason.

If I always lived in drab, boring apartments, it’s because I’m an uninteresting person, and not because I never made a point of making a home I wanted in a neighborhood I wanted to be in.

The difference between people who suffer from that kind of “personality determinism” is understanding that you can switch out your approach the next time, and that’s all the adjustment that’s ever necessary.

“Who you are” is always fine. You know you’ll get it right next time or the time after that because you can try something else. I always assumed that if I failed at something, I needed to be someone else in order to succeed.

What an unbelievably huge miscalculation! It’s what you do, not who you are! And I’d been doing wrong it my whole life. Maybe you haven’t, but if this does sound familiar to you, things could be about to change in a big way.

I had life backwards. I figured who I am determined what I was going to do, what I could do. Because of who I was, I couldn’t do X, so I always had to do Y. That’s who I was. Turns out that what I do can change at any time, and that has a direct effect in changing who I am. I never danced because I was never a “person who danced.” Now it’s obvious to me that as soon as I dance in spite of the person I think I am, I quickly become someone who dances. That’s how people who dance become people who dance. They dance.

In other words, it’s behavior that makes the personality, not the personality that makes the behavior, and that revelation is priceless to me.

This means the personality is extraordinarily malleable as long as you don’t forget than not only can you do what’s out of character, doing what’s out-of-character is the only way to grow.

Still, all of us gravitate towards that which is comfortable, which is tantamount to gravitating towards that which does not help you grow.

Anyway, things are blown wide open for me now. Long-neglected goals look fresh again. They’re going to happen. My personality can’t limit me any more, because I’m going to ignore it. I will do what’s out of character, I will surprise those who know me best. I will surprise myself.

Again, I know there are some people who never had this problem. They take on goals with confidence, knowing that who they are won’t limit them, and failure only means what they did wasn’t the thing that’s going to work.

Still, I know something has clicked here for some of you. I suspect that many, even most of us think our personalities really are pretty rigid blueprints and don’t allow for a lot of things we want. So I hope you do something out of character today and see what I mean.

Die on Purpose

I think it’s really helpful to forget you exist, and often.

It sounds impossible, but it can be done.

Here’s an exercise I do sometimes to achieve that perspective:

Wherever I am, whatever location I am in, I picture the situation exactly as it would be if I wasn’t there. I just watch it like it’s a movie, and the people still in the scene are the actors. Or maybe there’s nobody around at all, it’s just an empty corner of the world sharing a moment with itself. Whatever the scene, it feels like I’m watching it remotely from some far-off theater. It’s all still happening, but I’m not there.

I absorb myself in the details of how it looks and sounds. The characters’ tones of voice, their gestures, the room around them, the background noise. I can let it be whatever it is without any apprehension, because I’m not there, so I have no means — or reason — to stop it or control it, or to wish it was different.

And something amazing happens: all of my concerns and interests just disappear. I watch the moment unfold however it pleases. No part of me is invested in the moment, it just becomes whatever it wills to be, and it doesn’t matter what happens. The effect is exhilarating and liberating. It seems to be quite a miracle that there is even something happening at all. And it’s always, always beautiful.

Think of it as dying on purpose.

Imagine you just died, right now. All of your responsibilities, relationships, plans and worries would vanish like they were never even real, and the world would go on perfectly fine without your input, just like it did before you existed. It’s nothing personal, just the plain truth.

Your hopes and worries never mattered anyway. They only appeared to be so critical because while you were alive you had the insidious (but normal) human habit of seeing things only insofar as they relate to you and your interests.

Really, try this. Imagine you’ve died but you can still watch what happens. You can even wander around the house or the neighborhood like that. Suddenly, the spectacle of what happens is all that’s important, and how it might affect you has nothing to do with it whatsoever, because there is no you.

If you can achieve that mindset of being utterly absent — and it’s not difficult — you will experience no self-consciousness, no worries, no angst, no fear. Just stuff happening. Interesting stuff. Poetic and absurd and compelling all at the same time.

The sensation of “not being there” is one of utter clarity. It will feel as if you’ve dropped a weight you never knew you were carrying.

Once you get a feel for that state, you will realize how much of your everyday thoughts are not about what actually happens, but about what’s in it for you or not in it for you. Those thoughts are the source of all self-consciousness, fear, longing and existential pain.

There is no sufferer, so there is no suffering. Curiously, beauty survives.

You will find that what happens around you is always beautiful and painless if you can watch it without evaluating it against your personal interests. And that’s easy to do when you’re not there.

So die, often.

What Passion Will Buy You

There is an interesting discussion brewing in the blogosphere at the moment. My friend and fellow blogger Lisis Blackston of Quest for Balance wrote a controversial article last week about the feasibility of dropping your day job to pursue your passion.

We’ve all witnessed a growing culture of people who are quitting their lukewarm office careers to do what they’ve always wanted to do. There are countless success stories floating about (particularly in the online world) and it almost seems like following your passion — given an unwavering will — all but guarantees financial success. Lisis challenges this notion in her post.

Her article is here, and it is absolutely worth a read.

Several bloggers have responded with their take (a full list is at the end of Lisis’ article) and the topic is dear to me, so I’ll weigh in too.

It does seem passion generates income for some, but not for others. Therefore, ditching a steady job — under the assumption that your passion cannot fail you in the income department — is not exactly a bulletproof idea. But how do you know if your passion is the kind that would make you rich if you ran with it?

When it comes to making money, it seems to me that the starving artists and the turkey-feather craft peddlers are missing a crucial law of profiteering:

Passion has never paid bills, not for anyone.

Not for Michael Jordan, not for Bill Gates, not for the Beatles. What made all of them wealthy was that they created something large numbers of people were willing to pay for.

It just so happens that the Beatles’ passion (along with its much more rare and useful cousin, talent) resulted in the production of recorded music that has actually improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Forty years later, I can come home after a rough day, put on Abbey Road, and suddenly feel a lot better. That’s real, concrete value that their work has brought to my life — “value” as in something so useful I would pay money for it. I even bought Beatles coasters. Sixteen dollars, and worth every penny.

When I was a kid, I watched Michael Jordan’s unbelievable moves on TV and I loved it so much I wanted to be him. I had all the Chicago Bulls paraphernalia: basketballs, shoes, posters, clothes and more. At ten years old, whenever I could round up exactly $1.13, I would rush off to the card shop and buy a pack of NBA cards. So often I had not a penny more, and that’s what I did with my money. Because it was so worth it to me.

The point is this: people part with money when they find something that is directly valuable to them, that is to say they pay for what they believe improves their lives. Jordan’s passion for the game really didn’t really enter into the equation from my perspective. I just bought what I really liked.

You could argue that without passion, Michael Jordan would have had difficulty putting in the thousands of hours of practice required to be so spectacularly profitable. I wouldn’t disagree. However, he needed to be part of an intelligent business model (the NBA) for his basketball passion to be worth a cent. Playing for big bucks in the NBA just a natural career path for a basketball prodigy, but if he’d been a backgammon player — even an equally masterful one — he would never have become rich.

Money doesn’t come in exchange for passion, it comes in exchange for what other people value. That’s the key: the other people. Who says I value what you are passionate about? Elite backgammon matches just don’t produce enough value for enough people for it to make anyone rich.

I spend maybe $150 a year on Gillette Mach 3 razors. I buy them because they are far and away better than any other disposable razor I’ve used. I have no idea if the people at Gillette are fanatically passionate about making the best razors. It is more likely they are fanatically passionate about making money. I don’t care either way, I pay for what is useful to me, just like everyone else. Particularly in the realm of big business, the creative motives behind a product are usually quite distant and irrelevant to the person who is shelling out the cash.

Passion is a rather private and internal thing; it’s more of an interaction between your emotions and your actions. Your customers can only guess at why your product is so awesome (or so awful) and they probably aren’t particularly concerned with how it makes you feel inside.

So who ever said passion creates cash? I suspect, rather than outright snake-oil salesmen, it was people who decided to follow their passion and found that suddenly they enjoyed working, and were able to approach work with much less resistance and much more creativity. Imagine the difference between living a life where you cringe when you wake up, to one where you rush to work with enthusiasm.

But if your passion does not help you produce something that people will pay for, it cannot be expected to make you money. If your passion is to build and sell houses, you’ll come to your work with an excited and innovative attitude, which can only improve your chances to please clients and master your trade. It’s not hard to imagine that outlook leading quite organically to increased profits.

If your passion is to balance chairs on your chin, no matter how good you are at it you may have difficulty paying your bills, simply because people generally don’t tend to spend a lot of money to see people balance furniture on their chin. This, in turn, is because watching a chair-balancer doesn’t improve people’s lives in a significant or lasting way.

The correlation between passion and income, then, is only circumstantial, not absolute.

The economics of it can’t be ignored, and I don’t think any reasonable person would say that business sense is irrelevant just because passion is in limitless supply.

Fine art is one area where the passion-for-money fallacy is most apparent. I’ve seen more incredible works of art than I can count — intricate, painstaking, eye-popping work that must have taken hundreds of hours for the artist to compete.

But who will pay for those hundreds of hours of passionate work? I can see a hundred such works of art in the same gallery, deriving a measure of joy from each, for twelve dollars. For all the untold heaps of passion that go into it, where does the equivalent in money come from?

Nowhere, because there is no equivalency between passion and money. The market for fine art is very small. Most people never buy art, and when they do they don’t spend much. How much do you spend on paintings and sculptures in a year, compared to say, gasoline? There are art collectors out there who spend fortunes, but not many.

There is a tremendous disparity between the passion and effort that goes into a work of art and the amount a person is likely to pay for it. Some areas pay better than others, and your passion may very well not create much in the way of salable value for anyone else.

In a Mexican gallery I once saw a wonderful iron sculpture that I would have loved to own. The price tag was eight thousand dollars. Even though I loved it, if I had a spare eight thousand dollars (or a spare fifty) I wouldn’t buy it. There are too many other things I would rather spend that kind of money on: travel, furniture, living expenses. Eight thousand dollars worth of any of those things add much more value to my life than eight thousand dollars worth of sculpture.

Even if I had a spare half million, I don’t think I’d drop eight grand on it. I can always get more value out of eight thousand bucks than what a sculpture or a painting could possibly bring to my life.

So you can see how unbridled passion can easily eat up time and resources that nobody will ever see fit to compensate you for. Passion is no safety net at all. It could very well be dead weight, at least as far as supporting yourself goes.

To make money, you have to understand what makes money: delivering something of value to people willing to pay for it — and you have to be able to create that something of value efficiently. It’s extremely simple, but for some reason it it doesn’t seem to be widely known.

So to follow a passion with no regard for its value to others is just plain foolish, if you’re expecting it to pay your rent.