Although the past year has been more or less devoid of content, it’s been an incredible period of reflection for me on art, learning and life.

On the heels of my burnout, I was spending a lot of time wondering and worrying about how to create popular content, how to create work that can be monetized and support a living, and also how to do great work, the sort that is nourishing to one’s soul. Around this time I more or less removed myself from social media and found myself reading and consuming much less. At certain times in my life, having great periods of meditation on ideas captured in books and podcasts was perhaps helpful, but at this point in my journey more information or even better information is seldom the answer. To deal with the plateaus, burnouts and occasional life crises I find these days, more often than not, the answers tend to lie inward.

Probably one of my biggest takeaways from my meditations over the past year, is that wisdom frequently comes from re-learning and internalizing lessons that one has previously learned. Put another way, in the framing of someone like Josh Waitzkin, even if events in our lives don’t repeat exactly, there are often underlying themes to our successes and blunders. Although not immediately obvious, our decisions are often made not consciously, but instead following invisible threads based on previous experiences and trauma. We are wired to change how we navigate common scenarios in the maze of life by pain points that signal to us what NOT to do much more than the inverse. What I’ve found true for myself is that many times the lessons that I most need to internalize are right next to some area of great trauma. It’s the proximity to the pain that tends to influence how willing we are to take on the lesson. Almost always the lessons that I know I should internalize and make manifest in my life, I avoid because of the great elephant next to them that I don’t want to acknowledge.

Something else that’s been affirmed and reaffirmed for me is the essential way in which all disciplines are really connected. I find the higher one goes in a discipline and the further one travels along the path of mastery generally, that the areas of concentricity (love that word) are actually much greater than the areas of difference. Almost ironically. it’s at the superficial level where we tend to look at the details of the game and think that chess and painting couldn’t be more dissimilar, but as you dive further in and learn more about the vast iceberg under the surface, the same themes and concepts pop up almost ubiquitously. I think this is the sort of point much better experienced than explained, so all I can say is I would encourage anyone to take on learning seriously across domains no matter how disparate they seem at a glance, and really see if you can find the conceptual common threads. Often you don’t have to look too hard to find yourself painting as you play chess, and playing chess as you paint.

Another change for me during this period of reflection has been with my relationship towards the idea of “trusting the process.” Although I’ve encountered and overcome wall after wall in my life and training in pursuit of multi-disciplinary mastery, or polymathism, every time I encounter a new wall, almost without fail, I find myself wondering if this will be the one I can’t overcome. I’ve come to think this is more a matter of something like short-term memory loss more so than a lack of self-confidence. With all the data points I have in my favor, if I’ve not yet figured out these things are overcome-able by now, then maybe I’m truly beyond help. On another note, I think there is an interesting entanglement between ego and the willingness to take on difficult things. You need more audacity than most of us are willing to grant ourselves to overcome the trials along the path to mastery, and yet for some reason the virtue of humility and egoless-ness (whatever that means) are the things that get passed around in culture. My sense is that in actual fact, you want to be open to the idea that you missed something, but have enough audacity and self-fortitude to try to do things others may deem ridiculous. If I’ve learned anything over the course of my life, it’s that you will never do anything interesting if you are always swimming with the current and simply copying what other people are doing. There is a saying I love from the startup world, that when you study the great entrepreneurs, you must always remember that if you’re copying them you’re not actually learning from them. The next Mark Zuckerberg will not start a social network, the next Larry Page will not be making a search engine, the next Bill Gates will not be making an operating system. These things worked because at the time they were the contrarian bets that seemed to many to be bad ideas. Think of how foolish all the people that mocked these aforementioned entrepreneurs in the early days must feel now. The truth is, it’s no different with exploring new ideas in anything, be it writing, drawing, programming, daily routine, getting a great job straight outta college. The first time you try anything it’s gonna feel out of place and weird, and if you share what you’re doing often the people that care the most about you will in not always the most subtle of ways tell you your ideas suck or might be great for someone that is distinctly not you. But how will you ever know if you don’t give it a shot?

Particularly in the last 6 months, I’ve also taken a lot of time to think about my relationship with making things in general. Before my hiatus, and even after, for some time I was working probably 80-90 hours a week, couped up in my bedroom clanking away at the computer, writing, drawing, coding etc and in that period of incredibly high stress everything got funneled towards money and simple outcomes. In my experience, and this is a semi-accurate telling of what the research shows, as you become more stressed and encumbered with things, adrenaline and a ramping up of the sympathetic nervous system causes our horizon of thought and our focus to narrow and create something like physical and creative tunnel vision. As the stakes go up and you have less time and energy it becomes a triage game to figure out what things are getting neglected and what priorities out of all will take precedence. In my case, because eventually monetizing my creativity and creating my ideal lifestyle has always been at the forefront of why I do what I do, as I become more stressed and put more things on my plate, I tend to hyperfocus on the simplified version of that which is basically money. Fundamentally, I began chasing a caricaturized version of the things I really wanted, and neglecting some of the most essential pieces of living a fulfilling and healthy life because something had to go to make this tiny motorboat go faster. Long story short, the stupid and rushed way that I was tackling creativity and business among other things, made me stop thinking about healthy diet, fresh air and sunshine, looking up at the horizon line and daydreaming, made me stop optimizing for work that I actually wanted to make and spent my free time thinking about, and replaced it with spending all my time time whenever and where ever I was thinking only about how to create content that would be popular and eventually be monetizable. I probably don’t need to lay out why this is such a poisonous and yet easy trap to fall into, but I do want to highlight a few key lessons.

This is something that I’ve certainly rediscovered a few times in my life but as I’ve experimented so much with day architecture (routine) and taken on a wide variety of different disciplines, something I find time and time again are the very important concepts of less is more and the much less known dispersion. Now these are both things I found true on my own long before we had book after book and scientific paper published on these topics, but a piece of content from Rian Doris of the Flow Research Collective seriously hit the nail on the head for me in terms of a more adaptive way to think about this stuff. Basically, for the workaholic, entrepreneurial types and go-getters that take things way too seriously (like yours truly) the biggest threat to being able to execute well in many cases is actually not laziness or procrastination, but dispersion. As the word implies, dispersion is when one disperses themselves or spreads too thinly between a handful of different objectives. The real trap here is that usually each one of these objectives in and of themselves sound like things totally worth doing. These things are typically pursuits that if accomplished would be objectively awesome, not merely because of an increase in status or to keep appearances but for all the right reasons. Problem is of course, far more than time, the real constraint to getting shit done is in fact energy and commitment. The consensus from both practitioners and the research shows that for the most part, one can only do intense deep work for about 2.5 to maybe 5-6 hours a day at the extreme, the average being around 4. This doesn’t mean you simply drool on yourself for the rest of the day, but it does mean that there is a limit to the amount of hard things you can do at your peak, which you will need to create the highest level of progress and maybe most importantly keep momentum going. Activation energy counts for a lot more than people think. Long story short, the biggest lever you can pull once you get past the couch potato stage, and most all of us start there at some point, is to start saying no to things that aren’t totally aligned with your biggest priority. I’ve learned this from experience and a lot of great folks have said it, but you should spend a lot of time figuring out what your most valuable end state is or you number one goal, and accept that everything after that does in fact not also get a star next to it. If you have 15 priorities for your day it means you don’t have any. Spend a lot of time figuring out what you most want to work on and some amount of time on the lifestyle you want to have and what you’re willing to do to get there. This is the basis for goal and input alignment that so many of us fail to do because we don’t spend enough energy on the initial planning. Paraphrasing Seth Godin, it doesn’t matter all that much how fast you’re going if it’s in the wrong direction. Probably the ultimate trap of dispersion is that it can positively reinforce itself, because you are making progress and doing things that are “obviously” good. This makes it all that much harder to spot when it’s happening. Maybe I’ll talk about how to know if you’re dispersing yourself or when to say no in another essay. Main takeaways, do less to achieve more and have fewer objectives and laser focus to massively (and I mean like 10 or 100x) your rate of progression. It might not seem like a big shift, but 4 hours divided several times between different things, perforated by distractions from your phone or a list of chores and a chaotic work environment can make you orders of magnitude less effective.

Okay actually lastly but not least (you thought it was over) I increasingly think it’s so fucking important to make sure you pick interesting things to work on, things that you daydream about in the shower, during your day job, on the pot, that you really enjoy and build your life as much as you possibly can around those things. I think one major way I know that I’m an alien on this planet is I am almost ruthless when it comes to designing a life everyday, sometimes in very tiny ways, that is more and more the life that I would most want to live if I had infinite money, time and energy. It baffles me how little it seems like the average person spends thinking about or worrying about this stuff. One thing I’ve found that seems to characterize many successful or remarkable people, is a low tolerance for boring, low meaning stuff. Have you ever listened to how unwilling certain people are to clean their bathrooms, manage a calendar or take meetings? If not you need to go learn from someone like Naval Ravikant, who will if nothing else change how you think about the relationship between your energy, money, time and the amount of meaning and joy in your life. Can’t recommend it enough, but you need to have your mind shattered around things that we often take for granted. In the modern world we have so much leverage via great technological and scientific improvements even just over the last 10 or 20 years that most of us take zero advantage of. The average person in America has more actual wealth (meaning utility not money) and autonomy than Rockefeller did. Let that sink in a little bit. It sounds so obviously wrong and almost seems to warrant a 70 page critique on just how little Psy_Or understands the world, but first stop and think about all the little conveniences in your life you take for granted. You can order groceries to your home for 7 extra bucks and save yourself an hour. If you don’t enjoy shopping and your hourly rate is above 7 dollars (which I’m going to have to assume) why would you go to the grocery store if you don’t have to? I’m not saying this is always the right move, some people love wandering around and picking ripe tomatoes, I do myself at times, but not all the time. Life is about way more than money but I would encourage anyone to run the numbers and actually think about how your life could be different today if you started using the resources you already have. There are so many little things like this. How could you eat nutritious, balanced meals while investing half the time, one quarter of the time? How could you cut down on time spent cleaning the house? Could you have a cleaner come in once or twice a month and use that time to do something creative, take a day off, go on a trip etc? This might all seem a little banal but the number of people that ever think about this stuff is shockingly few, and while it may not seem relevant, think of how much drawing time you could earn back by spending an extra 50 bucks a month, or maybe not spending more at all but just by changing a few things around and setting new priorities. If you’ve ever been caught between a bunch of things you’d love to bring your A game to, you’ve probably been forced to do this kind of decision making, for everybody else, don’t wait until you’re spread ridiculously thin to stop and evaluate these things, do what is difficult when it’s easy. I can’t stress this enough. I could list out dozens of horror stories just top of mind from waiting too long, but honestly I would consider this a super low stakes experiment and just give it a shot. If you only get one thing out of this essay I’d focus on journaling and spending time actually thinking about themes and recurring situations in your life. Breakdown where you spend time, energy and happiness points and how you can reallocate them literally right now to get more of what you want and less of what you don’t. So often it’s cancelling a subscription you forgot you had or saying no to something you do every week that you’re actually lukewarm about. It’s a little work upfront that can easily save a ton of headache and buyback valuable resources you can then spend on whatever you really care about.

Anyway, trying out new styles and writing more for myself than for an imaginary audience. Currently enjoying, lemme know if this format is more interesting or working. I can always go more nerdy so it’s really just a matter of where I decide to set the limit. Thanks for reading~