Mindfulness

I love the opening line of J. M. Barrie's The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island: “We set out to be wrecked."

I think about it every time I play the card game rummy 500.

During the game, players can choose to pick up a single card from the draw pile on their turn or pick up lots of cards from the discard if they're able to use the bottom card in a meld.

There are lots of advantages to picking up more cards. It increases the number of ways you can score points, and you get to immediately receive the points for the initial meld.

The downside is that you can become overleveraged and struggle to get rid of a bunch of cards that aren't useful. Every card you don't meld counts against your score at the end of the round. But despite the risk, I always pick up as many cards as I can.

In other words, I set out to be wrecked every time.

I don't play to win, I play to fail. Because when your potential upside involves absolutely demolishing your opponents every once in a while, losing most of the time is so much more entertaining.

When we embrace the possibility — or likelihood — of failure, life becomes much more fun.

See also: This Might Not Work

When faced with a decision to make, it's tempting to pick the way we've always done something. It's safe. If it worked last time, why change it?

But this is a trap. Last year's success may no longer be possible in the same way, so even if we want to keep things the same, we have to change too.

To be clear, it's OK to decide to do something the same way we did it last time. But we should do so having first considered the alternatives and opportunity costs.

Trying to keep everything the same comes from a place of fear. Change is associated with risk, and most of us would like to limit uncertainty as much as possible.

But embracing the possiblity of change allows us to make the decisions that lead to success. And when that success lasts long enough for us to look back and say, "But we've always done it this way," we can pause to remind ourselves that nothing lasts forever.

As we get older, we’re able to find more of what make us happy: The extra minty toothpaste, soft sheets, best friends, scented candles, calming spots in nature, and much more.

I call this the snowball effect. With the right mindset, we can cultivate a life that brings us a sense of ambient joy as we roll along. It’s not constant bliss, just a persistent, subtle feeling of contentment that contributes to our overall momentum.

As we accumulate more snow, our sense of gratitude for everyday life increases too.

Here's to the things, places, and people that enrich our lives.

See also: Velcro for Wellbeing

Memorizing a poem brings the text closer to you. Once you've internalized it, you can carry it with you wherever you go. It becomes like a little, secular prayer you can hold close to your heart and return to whenever you need it.

If you're looking for one to start with, here's an excerpt of "The Call of the Wild" by Robert W. Service:

Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us;
Let us journey to a lonely land I know.
There's a whisper on the night-wind, there's a star agleam to guide us,
And the wild is calling, calling . . . . let us go.

In the caption for a video they recently produced for The New York Times, Lindsay Crouse and Kirby Ferguson write:

It’s been a brutal few years. But we’ve gritted through. We’ve spent time languishing. We’ve had one giant national burnout. And now, finally, we’re quitting.

We are quitting our jobs. Our cities. Our marriages. Even our Twitter feeds.

And as we argue in the video above, we’re not quitting because we’re weak. We’re quitting because we’re smart.

When something isn’t working, and you want to improve the situation, you have two options: Make it better, or quit.

Quitting can be painful, but sometimes making something better just isn’t worth it. Persistence is important, but so is freeing up your physical and mental energy to focus on what matters most.

In a similar spirit, this quote from The Tim Ferriss Show has stuck with me ever since I heard it:

"If you want to really challenge yourself, turn down an opportunity and take a nap."

I regret to say I can’t find which episode it’s from or who said it. But I love the way it inverts the traditional mindset of high achievers.

Want to push yourself out of your comfort zone? Quit something and go rest.

When you're teaching a kid to ride a bicycle, the best way to empower them is to skip the training wheels and give them a balance bike.

A balance bike has just two wheels, but no pedals, which requires kids to use their legs to propel themselves forward. By withholding the sense of security that comes from training wheels, balance bikes help kids develop greater confidence, strength, and independence — even long before they're physically ready for a traditional, pedal-powered bike.

It's easy to forget once you're a confident rider, but biking is a precarious exercise. The only thing keeping you upright is your forward momentum, which means that to learn how to ride, you must overcome the feeling of uncertainty. You have to train yourself to quickly accelerate past the speed at which you'll just topple over.

Since nothing in life is certain, this serves as a useful metaphor for whenever you're feeling unsteady: Lean into the uncertainty and just keep pedaling.

Your momentum will keep you upright.

See also: Stop Pedaling

Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once said, “You are under no obligation to remain the same person you were a year ago, a month ago, or even a day ago. You are here to create yourself, continuously.”

Even though our internal sense of self may feel permanent, our personalities and identities remain in flux for our entire lives.

This persistent change is even happening at the physical level: Our bodies are constantly replacing their cells, which means you are biologically a different person than you were yesterday. It only makes sense that you would be emotionally different too.

Joshua Rothman discusses this phenomenon in his New Yorker essay “The Art of Decision-Making," where he points out that discovering your personal growth is an essential part of the human experience. He paraphrases a paper by philosopher L. A. Paul: “Part of being alive is awaiting the ‘revelation’ of ‘who you’ll become.’”

Since everything around us is constantly changing, we must regularly change directions in order to grow towards the person we aspire to be.

By navigating these course corrections over time, we learn who we are and who we're becoming. And those "revelations" give meaning to our lives.

Virgina Woolf said it best in To the Lighthouse:

What is the meaning of life? That was all — a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.