Quarter Three - 2023
The newness of a place always wears out. As I write this, I have now lived in Rio de Janeiro for a total of 16 months. Besides moving to Virginia for my undergraduate studies, this is the longest I have lived away from the place where I grew up, and it’s the longest time I’ve lived outside of my home country. This experience has taught me the same lesson as the one I learned while traveling on my own through various countries in Europe and South America: prioritize community because the zeal of a place itself will wear off over time. Rio de Janeiro is a great test of this, as it is a city with immense beauty and culture to explore. As I explored and experienced more and more of the city, my reflections continuously led me to the revelation of the fraught nature of pursuing novelty. There will always be something new, even after you explore everything you set out to see in the first place. Instead of playing this game that doesn’t lead to deeper satisfaction, we can step back and ask ourselves what is more sustainable to pursue and cultivate. Meaningful work, meaningful relationships, pursuing truth, learning about yourself and the world, self-development… these are a few good answers which I have put into practice and had success with to date.
You need conviction to make and take advantage of opportunities. Confidence is activation power. When you believe in what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and your ability to do it, you’re more likely to make life happen than to have life happen to you. A key part of that stems from self-respect. When an opportunity opens, people with self-respect and conviction do not question themselves into paralysis. Instead, they open themselves to the opportunity to see where it will take them. A crucial factor in not being paralyzed by opportunity is the belief that, even if they fail and it doesn’t work out for some reason, they will learn something from it, pick themselves up, and be better off when the next door opens. Without this belief, it’s much harder to seize an opportunity and make the most of it when it presents itself. Opportunities are temporary, so the time for doubt is limited. Conviction is the catalyst. Instead of holding people back, it propels them forward into action.
The best athletes are not the best coaches by default. There is no denying that the best athletes, by definition, reach the pinnacle of performance which goes beyond the limits of their competitors. They attain the highest successes and receive great plaudits for it. And of course, their successes required hard work, discipline, dedication, and the finest execution to reach the top. Nevertheless, it’s easy to forget just how good the fourth place, ninth place, and 16th place finishers are. They too are hard working, disciplined, and dedicated, along with possessing an equally fantastic know-how regarding their specific sports. So when we think about what it means to be a great coach, does it just mean the person who executed the best as a performer? Or does it mean something more complete, such as someone with great skills in communication and individual collaboration with others, a great work ethic with discipline and dedication, the technical skills that go into great execution, and tremendous awareness to understand what it looks and feels like to perform at an elite level which they can then put into words? Many of the best athletes struggle to explain exactly how they achieved their successes because they do not know how to put words to the experiences. Many of the best athletes try to explain how to reach their level and are convinced by those explanations, despite them being false or misleading. For these reasons, I see coaching ability as a skillset which goes well beyond performance experience.
Protein and creatine intake can make a big difference in how we feel physically on a day-to-day basis if we are putting even medium-sized loads on our bodies. During this period of three months, I had two sets of weeks when my consistency of protein and creatine intake dropped. First was traveling to Paris for a conference in July and second was receiving my family and friends here in Rio for our second wedding. Both of these periods left me feeling more sluggish and weak. My energy levels and ability to recover were significantly worse without a disciplined intake of high protein at each meal and a daily dose of creatine. Although I was not strenuously lifting heavy weights multiple times per week during those periods, I felt more fatigued than usual. I am well aware that many other factors go into this, such as sleep, increased walking, adjusting to different types of mental stimulation, and the strain of travel. Nevertheless, I remain convinced by the role of protein and creatine intake, which is also supported by lots of scientific research.
Tow the line between transparency and situational awareness of timing in your relationships. The more time I spend on this earth, the more I come to understand how omnipresent the importance of nuance is. Earlier in my twenties, I was a hardliner on transparency in relationships, without much regard to the way that transparency was communicated and when. This principle was extremely useful for me, as it gave me a guiding principle for how to interact with others and how to show up as a person in social situations. This was even quite helpful early on in my romantic relationship, as it supported my ability to clearly communicate who I was, what I wanted, what my expectations were, and how I was interpreting the world with my partner, which gave her more clarity than any other approach. I continued to be transparent, ever further into the small details of life, without regard for the situation and what that way of being was building in my partner. This led to some key divisions and pain points between us in which we had some major misunderstandings and conflicts. In retrospect, I realized that I was capable of adding social nuance to my transparency so we could better understand each other. It’s vital to take the past and the current state of the person with whom you’re communicating into account when deciding what to say and how to say it. My family used to always say “time and place” at home, referring to how there’s a certain time and place for certain words and behaviors. It took this adventure to really understand the meaning of that phrase and how to apply it. It takes time to develop better intuitions on this specific topic, but we’re all able to improve over time as we reflect on each of our experiences.
Exercise snacks can be close to an antidote to major recessions in muscle / strength which we may undergo when away from our exercise routine for an extended period (e.g., 2 weeks). While we’re traveling or in different phases of life that inhibit us from being in the gym, it often feels like there is nothing we can do to stay fit and strong. Sure, there are some things you can always do, like walking and running, but what about maintaining strength? And what if we’re a bit crunched for time? I recently learned about the concept of exercise snacks from the Huberman Lab podcast, which is a brief physical strength activity we can engage in at any time of the day. Some examples are doing a wall-sit for as long as you can, doing as many push-ups as you can, holding a plank or side plank for as long as you can, or doing air squats continuously for 2 minutes. In very small amounts of time, we can physically test our bodies and remind it of what it needs to remain capable of doing. If we do an exercise snack or two per day for key muscle groups, we can hold off significant losses in strength that we would otherwise incur over that period. Additionally, it appears that these exercise snacks can be enhancing of performance amidst our normal strength training routines in the gym. Whether it be to supplement to your current routine, to maintain strength while unable to carry out your current routine for a short period, or even to get started with physical activity, it’s a promising concept to consider.
Idealists generate a better reality for humans. And thus, according to Viktor Frankl, they are the true realists. Our general conception of “realists” tends to encapsulate people who are pessimistic and jaded. They are frequently right, but not always. This perspective leads realists to see the world as a less malleable entity than it is. Idealists, however, are willing to try to change the world. If they see something that they believe is wrong in the world and needs fixing, they believe in humans’ ability to do something about it and make true progress. Sure, they may be wrong and fail in their attempts… but they also may be right. It’s impossible to be a visionary if you do not try to turn one’s visions into reality. If we look at history, it’s quite easy to see the repeated success of idealists. So many scientific and technological breakthroughs have arrived and stayed, often contrary to what the realists believed was possible. It is important to note that idealists often fail to take into account the second and third order consequences of their visions, which is where the realists are most needed. Realists can assess the present and criticize what needs to change in response to those consequences, which is where yet another idealist may step in to realize a vision of how that aspect of reality can be made better. It is a dance in which both sides need each other to play their respective parts.
What do you want to be able to do during your marginal decade? Peter Attia recently published a new book titled Outlive, in which he extensively discusses longevity and health. Instead of focusing on solely extending our lifespan, he strongly advocates us to change our focus to extending our “health span,” or how many healthy years we are able to live rather than just years in total no matter the condition. The key question he poses to readers is the one with which I started this paragraph: What do you want to be able to do during your marginal decade? First, it would be wise to define the term “marginal decade,” which means the last ten years we live before we die. It’s a much more important question than “how long do you want to live?” in my view, as it challenges us to really think through what we want to be capable of doing at the end of life. So many people spend their last years struggling to move, sitting down, or being confined to a bed because of their deteriorating bodies. It’s quite an obvious response to say that we don’t want to end up there. To avoid those situations in the future, it often requires making some significant lifestyle changes and developing strong routines to keep us healthy, mobile, strong, and energetic. We need to lift heavy weights a couple times per week, do both shorter, intense cardio and slower, longer cardio, train our mobility so we can move our bodies into good positions, and fuel our bodies well to recover properly and maintain those capabilities over time. If you want to play with your grandchildren, not be a burden on your younger family members, participate in family vacations and fun activities late in life, continue to be someone who others can count on, and, frankly, be someone who others want to spend time with through the end of your life, making these choices and following through on them will make an enormous difference.
Reason and faith together make religion work for someone. Faith is the instinct of which road to follow when the path diverges, but an excess is when you jump off the cliff you reach because you feel like you’re meant to be there after following that path. The outcome is what some might call “discernment,” or the ability to exercise good judgement and understand things that are not straightforward. To improve our ability to discern, we must actively cultivate both our abilities to reason and to engage our faith. Improving our ability to reason as adults can take multiple forms, such as exposing ourselves to multiple perspectives on issues, understanding our default intuitions that stem from our personal dispositions to become more self-aware in the moment those intuitions are activated, engaging with longer content rather than shorter content on the internet (which is the most common thing to find on most social media platforms), and reflecting on our experiences to identify key lessons to incorporate into our ways of being through writing or conversation with trusted others. Improving our ability to engage our faith can also take multiple forms, such as reading important religious texts to ground yourself in key principles, spending time with wise and esteemed people who embody great faith, and cultivating more mindfulness in difficult situations to believe that good opportunities and a better life can come from challenging moments. With reason and faith together, we are less likely to be led astray by others or by ourselves in life, and the end of our paths can come to reach a beautiful destination.
Tiago Forte’s PARA system is a fantastic place to start to organize your digital life. Tiago Forte is one of the leading productivity and digital organization voices on the internet. He has a system for organization called PARA, which stands for:
Projects - activities connected to a goal with a deadline
Areas - ongoing activities without a deadline
Resources - interests and useful documents
Archives - activities that are complete or inactive
So many of us started organizing our digital lives without a useful framework for how to start, which led us to storing information in a cluttered way that was inefficient and difficult to use. We built systems that didn’t work for us because they were not designed to work for us from the start. They were just convenient. Given how much both our work and personal lives are online, and the near 100% likelihood that it remains that way, organizing our lives online is an investment that can have a profound impact. Tiago’s PARA method is a great place to start because of how simple, intuitive, and effective it is.
A decision making framework. Abby Davisson and Myra Strober wrote a book together called Money & Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life’s Biggest Decisions, in which they detail a really concise and clear decision making framework. There are five components to the framework, which all nicely start with the letter C and you can do step-by-step:
Clarify - Before you make a decision about something, you should have clarity on whether the outcome toward which you are making that decision is something you actually want and value. Think about what that decision will give you. Will the fulfillment you get from that outcome hold over time? Will it be worth the time and deliberation that goes into it?
Communicate - Talk to the people who will be affected by the decision. Ask them how they would react in different scenarios. Share with them your inclinations and what would drive you one way or another and the clarity you gained in the previous step.
Choices - Are the choices you identified really the only ones available to you? The answer to that question is most likely no. There are so many shades of gray between the choices we often think we have. Are there intermediate solutions that lie between the choices we already identified which could be even better? What minor changes may we be able to make to bend our circumstances to change the landscape of choices available? How might we open certain choices that are out there but appear closed to us at the moment?
Check-in - Who are the people you trust the most when it comes to getting advice during hard times? Who is a good listener and has valuable life experience to give you feedback that propels you forward? Take your thinking from steps one through three to the people you came up with in the answers to those questions. See what they have to say about your thinking and what they recommend in terms of a decision.
Consequences - Ask yourself what all the consequences are for each of the choices you have identified. Don’t just think about the bad ones, which is often the connotation of the word “consequences.” Instead, think about the good, the bad, and everywhere in between. Become as familiar as you can with what life will look like on the other side of each choice. Armed with this detailed information, along with the information gathered from the previous four steps, you will be well-positoned to make great decisions.
Keep dating each other. As I approach month nine of my marriage, this message rings very true. Amidst all of the challenges and urgent matters of life, whether it be work, family, personal projects, staying healthy, planning a trip, cleaning the house, or any other part of being a couple, it’s easy to get swept up in the everyday rush. If I don’t pay attention and allow myself to get continuously swept away, day after day, I can find myself miles away from my partner in the matter of a few short weeks. Of course, these many responsibilities of life must be managed. There is no denying that. If I don’t take care of and prioritize the personal relationship while working through those responsibilities, the divide inevitably grows further and further. The best way to prevent the growth of that divide is to infinitely date. Every week, there should be at least one opportunity to sit down as people to connect and care for each other, beyond just identifying the to-do list in the relationship. Looking into each other’s eyes and really being there in that moment, holding hands as you sit next to each other at dinner, telling your partner how beautiful they are and what you love about them, telling them what they do that makes you feel loved, asking them about their internal world and how they think they are evolving as a person, really being curious about them and the depth of their inner self… That is what we do when we’re meeting our partners for the first time. The first few dates are full of discovery, openness, and curiosity. If we don’t care for it attentively, it can die out before our very eyes. But if we do care and build a life in which we consistently stoke those flames of discovery, openness, and curiosity, our love can continue to grow and our bonds can deepen.
When there is a big reaction to something in the moment, reflect on whether something similar led to a reaction that stuck two months later. During quarter three, a few events made this lesson jump out to me. One was when Twitter changed its name to X. This example was a good external example to assess. When it happened, it seemed that the internet became viscerally angry in many spaces, intensely complaining about removing such an iconic logo from a historic and impactful social media site. Today, the commotion has died down significantly. The same happened when Facebook changed its name to Meta two years ago. A big rush of complaining and commotion, which died down over time and was eventually accepted. As intense as the world may make some things seem in the moment, time is a great indicator of whether it’s truly serious. We don’t persist in our attention to things with lower levels of importance.
On a personal note, I had some minor personal conflicts in my relationship, I got caught up in the rush of trying to get everything to happen on time when my family and friends were visiting, and the air conditioning unit in our room broke. For each of these experiences, within a month, I had already forgotten about them, despite how upset and shaken I was by them in the moment. In the moment, there is a lot of uncertainty as to how the situation will be resolved, which led to negative feelings and anxiety for me in these situations. When I focused my attention on slowing down, taking a step back to gain perspective, finding a solution, and accepting that there is a limit to how much I can do to make reality go as I wished or planned, the anxiety dissipated much more easily. This is easier said than done. I was only able to do this as well I hoped when it came to managing my friends’ and family’s trip here. I am more of a maximizer by nature, so it takes a lot of effort to step out of the moment and allow things to not be as “perfect” as I had planned. I also had a humbling realization that what I imagined as a “perfect” result is likely not perfect for everyone else. My version of perfect could leave everyone fatigued and drained, whereas for me it would be highly energizing. Pivoting my focus to enjoying what comes from the preparation, even if it’s not perfectly what I imagined, can lead to even better experiences. It also helps me to be at greater ease and to accept the flow of life, which builds skills that facilitate more internal peace.
The tools that got you here are not necessarily the tools that get you there. As you build a house, there are many different phases. In each phase, certain tools are incredibly useful and help you get closer to your desired outcome. However, the same tools are not of equivalent utility at each step. In the beginning, a bulldozer makes a massive difference to level the land and prepare the foundation. Once the structure is built, the bulldozer goes from useful to a major threat of tearing the whole thing down if you try to use it to do the job, Then there are some tools, like a measuring tape and nails, which always come in handy during each phase, but aren’t the most useful tool to use for every project. This metaphor nicely applies to life. From your adolescence to your early twenties, being highly geared toward exploration and willing to take risks are extremely useful on the way to building a great life. However, when you have three kids and are over 50 years old, these characteristics can open the door to significantly negative outcomes. If you flip the script, being more committed and thoughtful about the risks you take in your fifties is often much more useful than when it is applied during your adolescence and early twenties. One key caveat here is that we all are building different kinds of houses (or lives, in the bigger picture), which means that the tools that benefit us the most at each phase are not necessarily universal. They highly depend on the ultimate goal. Just as you won’t benefit much from a crane when building a single-story home or a lawnmower in a skyrise apartment tower in a city. you likely won’t benefit from a year-long trip around the world if you want to focus on your family when your grandkids are born.
To go deeper into our human psychology, think about the price of ambition and hard work. There are immense benefits that come from an extreme work ethic and ambition, especially in the form of income, financial security, and influence. You become dependable for people who have money and power, so they invest in you and the number in your bank account grows. You get things done, often through simply being ruthless in your execution. You pivot when you hit points of tension or find ways to tear your competitors down to reach the top. You can buy anything you want, from a mansion to a yacht to the fanciest dinner in town. Now imagine applying these tools to becoming truly happy, building a great marriage, or raising children. No dollar amount in the world can get your wife to look at you and truly love you for who you are and how she feels with you. You cannot outwork others to happiness. If you spend lavishly on your partner and your kids without spending meaningful time with them as a person who is capable of really being there in the moment with them, they will only value you for the material goods you provide them. These goals require different tools, which take time to build and learn to use properly.
Getting the small things right scales exponentially. The small things that scale exponentially are quite different for all of us. It takes trying a lot of different things, observing ourselves through reflection, and repeating the process over and over again to get a good idea of what helps us to grow into the best versions of ourselves. Consistently getting these right over time leads to an immensely different life compared to the one in which you do none of them. Small things aren’t necessarily the actions themselves, but instead are often the triggers and decisions in the moment to do them and prioritize them. Here is my list of small things that scale exponentially right now:
Getting eight hours of sleep
Going to bed and waking up around the same time every day
Meditating in the morning for ten minutes
Putting my phone far away from me while I work
Consuming a high protein meal three times per day
Breathing through my nose when I’m not talking
Planning my week every Sunday
Doing one leg workout per week
Doing one upper body workout per week
Doing one shorter, intense cardio workout per week
Doing one conditioning and ab workout per week
Going for one long run per week
Stretching after every workout
Not eating within two hours of going to bed
Avoiding processed foods and added sugars
Listening to a longer podcast about things I am persistently curious about rather than shorter content about the current moment
Journaling about my day before bed
Re-opening conversations with friends once every three months
Documenting my finances in a spreadsheet
Scheduling time to have a meaningful interaction with friends at least once per week
Scheduling a one-on-one date with my wife once per week
Conducting a relationship check-in with my wife once per month
Managing a to-do list system
Doing this quarterly review process
Talking to my parents once per week
Traveling abroad at least once per year
Making progress on reading a book, even if it’s just a few pages, once per week
Memory is not built for accuracy. Our memory has helped us to manage through the challenges presented in our surroundings since the dawn of humanity. Where was that bush of berries again? At what point in the sky does the sun usually sit when the bison move across that patch of land? How did I avoid dying in that attack last time? What did I see in the sky before my son died? What did I pray for in my head the night before our last great harvest? How can I distinguish the people who attacked us from my people? Memory was built to help us survive. Sometimes, accuracy was what helped us to survive. Other times, broad generalizations of memory that were not accurate worked when it counted, and thus that function survived, too. If a lack of total accuracy saved us additional energy that wasn’t necessary to survive, then it was adaptive. Energy was the most important resource in an environment of scarcity which our ancestors occupied for millennia. Our brains were built and optimized for that very environment over tons of evolutionary cycles. When that environment suddenly changed over the last few centuries, it was clearly going to require yet another immense length of evolutionary cycles to optimize to the new environment, and that is where we find ourselves now. Our poor memories are a consequence of that very process.
What would this look like if it were easy? This is a question and mental frame Tim Ferriss has pushed for years in his content. When something is particularly challenging and you can’t seem to navigate your way through it, step back and ask yourself the question: “What would this look like if it were easy?” It’s easy for us to stay in an anxiety-ridden state if we allow our minds to wander, drown in the details, and overcomplicate. This question breaks a situation down so we can focus on the most important pieces. In my own use of the question, I have observed that some of the worst parts of our existence involve overextended deliberation, as it paralyzes us and stops us from moving forward. Drowning in the details often does us no good. It’s called overcomplication for a reason. Getting to an answer and acting upon it through this question ends this debilitating state quite effectively.
Holding onto drama, suffering, and old notions is very easy in the short term compared to the uncertainty introduced by transformation. Why do people stay with abusive partners? Why do people stay in jobs they hate? Why do people continue to abuse certain drugs and spend time in toxic environments? Why do people maintain relationships that constantly bring them down? An overlooked reason for this is uncertainty, which is often more menacing than the certainty of pain and misfortune they receive in their current circumstances. The questions of “what will happen if I leave?” and “will it be worse if I leave?” are dizzying, and even more so if one’s current circumstances are quite poor. The quest into the unknown, especially when abandoning one’s current structures of support, as bad as they may be, is a daunting task. Without a bridge or a helping hand, that quest can seem too tall of a task, and thus people stay in their bad situations, holding onto pain and suffering which could be relieved by a leap into uncertainty. One could also call it a leap of faith, which one can only take with faith. And what is faith? Believing that within that nebula of uncertainty, one is likely to find something better.
Is the greatest impact the most profound one? When we think of the most impactful things in the world, we often think about the widest reach. Government policy can influence hundreds of millions of people in many cases and worldwide technology changes can influence billions. Certain ideas and people can spread across the world through books and now social media. Fame, global renown, and universal recognition are often regarded as the pinnacle of impact. There is another side to the coin when it comes to impact, which I think often goes underrated: depth. Trying to impact everyone often leads to deeply impacting no one, which means that it wasn’t really impactful after all. Deep impacts reach down into someone to transform their existence in some meaningful way. This kind of impact requires persistence, attention, and coming to truly understand a person or group. There are ups and downs on the journey to making deep impact, but persistence through them can lead to special, enduring changes. Deep impacts can also multiply. Deeply impacted individuals then take their own personal transformations out into their own relationships and communities to make them better, often in an act of giving back, inspired by the gratitude for their own positive transformations. These deep-reaching impacts are more sustainable than more surface-level ones, which means they should be valued appropriately. One can live a great life making a few deep impacts without reaching a broad scale of impact. Going viral and getting millions of views is not the only metric. In fact, it might be a bad one if what one really cares about is making a lasting difference.
We are more similar than we think across cultures. During quarter three, I got to engage in some quality conversations with two people who grew up and live in China. I hosted one of them in my home and met another on a long run. When hearing them talk about what people strive to achieve in their lives in China, they described a general progression of getting a job and working hard in order to buy a house or apartment, buy a car, get married, have kids, have grandkids, and then die with proper medical care. The society they described was materialistic in that your status and placement in the social hierarchy depend a lot on your financial success. One of them also described their focus on wanting their children and the next generation to have a better life than theirs and to be happy, which became their focus because it feels like there isn’t much you can do to influence political change. If you asked the average American or Chinese person whether this general progression would be the same in the other’s culture, I assume that most would say no, envisioning a totally different lifestyle because of “how different” our languages, histories, and cultural practices are. When I heard this from them, I even experienced a degree of surprise as to how similar our societies have become in the present moment, despite all of the political divisions that exist. Every news station in the US seems to speak hawkishly about tensions between our countries and China, but none of them showcase just how similar we are as people in the grand scheme of things.
Reframe instead of defend. The instinct to immediately defend ourselves can be very strong when others tell us what to do or share feedback with which we disagree. It’s easy to get angry and impulsively respond with fury after feeling like we were slighted or berated. We can’t just let ourselves be “attacked” like that without a strong response, right? It doesn’t have to be that way. Instead, we can ask the person who gave the feedback to imagine being in our shoes and share context about what it’s like, then ask for their suggestions after grounding themselves in that vantage point. We often disagree with feedback because we do not think it matches with our experience, we’ve already done something similar to what is being recommended, or it’s ignorant of important context that needs to be considered. Giving them more context and then asking them to provide feedback with that in mind helps to get through these common problems. After all, we want to receive feedback from all sorts of angles in life, so cutting off possible pathways will not serve us well. However, ignorant or inapplicable feedback will not serve us well. Arming people with better context through which they can give us feedback is powerful because it gives them a better chance at providing useful feedback to us. It’s not a guarantee, as we can still get bad feedback when someone has more context, but the odds are much better for the outcome we want. The other benefit is that we avoid burning bridges with people by reacting harshly when they are trying to help us. It’s better to open the door to learning, growing, and building a relationship rather than than tearing it apart.
Dignity and quality of a society seem linearly related. Before I begin, let’s define dignity. Dignity is the right of a person to be valued, to be treated ethically, and to participate in society simply for being a human. The enlightenment surfaced dignity as an inalienable right, which has since been a part of philosophical thinking and writings about the evolution of society. When I think about the societies in which humans are treated with the most dignity, I think of the places where most people in this world would prefer to live. On the contrary, when I think of places where the people have very little dignity under their governments, those places also show up on the list of places people tend to avoid and would prefer not to live. The quality of a society is ultimately aligned with the quality of life that various persons across the social and economic spectrum within a society can and do attain. In some societies, entire classes of people do not have the rights that fall under the definition of dignity. Life has also improved in countries where the dignity of the people improved. A great example of this on the positive side is the changes in Brazil’s economy and various other area metrics from 2002-2010. Taking people out of hunger and improving their educational opportunities made a massive difference (along with other policies, of course). A great example on the negative side of this is North Korea, where people are starving to death and even participating in cannibalism in some instances to survive in a society where they have no political nor private rights. Although these are more extreme examples to account for here, the trend is clear.
There are no artists who can sell out a stadium world tour who debuted their first hit after 2015. Over dinner, my wife and I got into a long conversation about the new age of music and how much the world of music has changed since our childhoods. We used to listen to music on the radio and CDs, then graduated to the iPod and other music players, where we had to buy individual songs to access them whenever we wished. Around 2015, Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music launched subscription models on their streaming services, which meant people no longer had to buy individual songs and could listen to anything each library of music had to offer. From there, recommendation systems and notifications of new music launched, along with the search function, creating a totally new music experience from the one we, and everyone else at the time, grew up with. All of a sudden, the way of finding new music was no longer limited to the radio and word of mouth. We started to access new music through algorithms and recommendation systems powered by machine learning. We came to the conclusion that this drastically changed the landscape of music for artists. There have been plenty of artists with number one hits and albums who debuted after 2015, but those artists seem to have much less worldwide renown than artists who debuted even shortly before 2015. The list of artists who can sell out a worldwide stadium tour is quite long. Even here in Rio, we’ve seen plenty come through and sell out a stadium. Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, Roger Waters, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Weeknd, Imagine Dragons… there are plenty of groups who can do it, but they all debuted before 2015. Sure, this could be because artists who debuted after 2015 haven’t been around for long enough to gain worldwide renown like the artists I mentioned. That could make sense, as more people need to hear music during key periods of their lives (e.g., before they turn 15) to come to love it and show up to a stadium to listen to it. They also need to graduate from school to make money and then pay to get into the stadium. As we thought through it, we didn’t think this was the case because of the existence of global stars like The Weeknd and Ed Sheeran, who debuted their first hits and albums in the early 2010s. Instead, we thought it had to do with the fundamental change in how we get music now. The radio no longer possesses a stronghold over who goes big and who does not as they used to. The subscription model has allowed artists to invest much more into developing communities and support online in a profitable way, which is by default a more distributed model, meaning global renown is much less likely or perhaps near zero. It’s no longer the main goal, it seems. Because we have access to so much music as well, both old and new, it’s more rare to listen to the entirety of an artist’s album or to follow an artist over time because of the level of access we have to new songs, top 100 lists, and catered playlists by genre with tons of other artists. It feels like tinder for music: you listen for a little bit and if you like it, you add it to your list; if you don’t like it, you just click next. Social media has a similar model. There are so many options of what and who to consume that if we don’t like something within a few seconds, we skip it and move on, without really sitting with the entirety of a person or an account and making sense of it more thoroughly. Because of this alignment, I have doubts that we’ll ever see a new era of world renowned artists, and if we do, it seems like it will be far from the scale we’ve seen previously. This saddens me to a degree. Globally renowned artists help us to connect across cultures. They’re bridges for us to come together and relate across our many differences. Because of these technological and media changes, it’s also possible that we get other types of bridges which bring us together even more. In the pessimistic scenario, there also may be more which drives us apart. With more and more political polarization and us versus them mentalities arising around the world on social media, this may be the case. Perhaps the most likely scenario is that it’s simultaneously both. We’ll have to hold on and find out.
The history we know and speak about is very limited compared to the actual history that is out there for us to use. Although we have thousands of years of recorded history to pull from as a reference, our general tendency in Western societies is to compare everything to World War II. Donald Trump? Nazi. Benjamin Netanyahu? Fascist. Putin? Stalin. israel-Hamas war? Beginning of another world war. Russian war in Ukraine? Beginning of another world war. Cooperation between China, Iran, and Russia? Axis of evil. Government exchanging emails with social media companies? Communism. It seems like the only history people in society really learned and retained was World War II. When I reflect on my own educational experience, this holds true. We spent a disproportionate amount of time learning about World War II in school compared to other conflicts and moments in history. World War II was a moment of great tension in the recent past that does sensibly stick out, but it does only encapsulate a very small slice of history. There are many more wars, conflicts, and moments in the past that we can use to make sense of the present, which likely would help us to better understand where we are instead of using the same reference over and over again.
The heart is not to be protected. Despite our fear of heartbreak and emotional pain, our “hearts,” in the symbolic sense of the word, can be incredibly resilient and durable. It’s good that they are so resilient and durable, because we need them to be on the path to finding real love. Finding real love requires us to present the fullness of ourselves to another human being, with all of our strengths, weaknesses, virtues, particularities, failures, and incompleteness. The heaviest of heartbreaks come when we accept the other person in this way and they do not accept us in return. We feel unworthy and insufficient in the face of this rejection, but without opening ourselves to that possibility, we close the door to the chance of someone accepting us in return, which is the realest love we can get. I believe we should not strive for anything less in love, as doing so would rob us of the true depth that this human experience can offer us.
And to address the worst outcome of having your heart broken, we must recognize that heartbreak can be an incredibly good experience for us in the long run. Sitting with ourselves in that pain can be so insightful to better understand who we are and what makes us tick. You can ask yourself why that specific heartbreak hurt so much. What was it about that relationship, that person, or the words said that made the end sting so much? What button did it press that you didn’t know was there? Pain is one of the best teachers in life if we allow it to be. When we allow it to be just that, we get to grow in ways that no other experience parallels.
Meditate on the death of your partner. It’s hard to truly appreciate something if you don’t have any idea of what it would be like to lose it. You also are incredibly unprepared for situations that you have never envisioned and sat with for a while. As uncomfortable and painful as envisioning the death of your partner may be, it doesn’t come close to the discomfort and pain that would come in the scenario in which you do suddenly lose them and had never thought about the possibility. I also would argue that you cannot fully appreciate and be present with someone if you are not aware of what losing them would feel like and what life would be like without them after their death. In addition to all of those heavy points, the exercise is useful to come to terms with the fact that we are not as “in control” as we may think when it comes to the timing of the our deaths and the deaths of the people we love. We can follow the normal course and live to our early 80s, we can live to 106 like my friend’s great grandmother, or there can be a sudden death along the way. These are all real possibilities with probabilities that are not negligible, even for you. “Yes, that happens, but it won’t happen to me” is a common response to this. You could be right… but you could also be wrong. So why not be more prepared either way?
Your current relationship is not necessarily the place to process all your past relationships. Your current partner likely is not there to help you process and overcome what you experienced with all of your past partners. Sometimes they are and they want to be, but those are rare cases. Instead, they’re there because they want to build something with the person you have come to be, both at the point of starting the relationship and at each point throughout its evolution. Given we are all humans at the end of the day, we are all susceptible to basic reactions such as resentment, jealousy, envy, confusion, and disappointment, even if the things we’re reacting to lie in the past and were instrumental on the path to becoming a better version. It’s better to avoid opening a door to these reactions when other solutions can get you to the same desired outcome.
The simple takeaway here is that, although the current relationship may not be where you can process past relationships, you can process them with others who are outside of the relationship. You can, and I would in fact recommend you, talk about them with close friends, family, and/or a professional in the field of psychology. Making sense of our past relationships to learn from them and let go of things to which we are still attached is an essential activity for our personal improvement within our current relationships. We become better partners in the present when we take a diligent approach to learn from the past.
Forgiveness is an incredibly powerful act. A friend recently told me a story about some serious suffering he experienced during his childhood because of physical and psychological abuse from his brother, which took him years to really understand and process. Within the last year, he finally reached a point where he could understand what happened and forgive his brother for what he did to him. He had tried to have a conversation about it a few years ago but it didn’t go anywhere, which frustrated him. He tried again this year and prepared himself extensively for the conversation, rehearsing what he wanted to say to ensure he communicated clearly. Upon doing so this time, which included an offer of unconditional forgiveness, his brother really opened up to him, weeping and apologizing for what he had done. Since that conversation, their relationship has started to improve and become more stable, something they never had before that offering of forgiveness.
Although this is just one example, it clearly showcases the basic power of forgiveness. It’s easy to hold onto resentments, especially for things others did to us which we did not cause, ask for, or inspire. When we take a step back and observe those resentments, they only negatively affect us, as they live inside of our own minds. Forgiveness completely turns situations around. Instead of holding and cultivating this negativity inside of ourselves, forgiveness rips negativity out at the root and plants a tree of positivity in its place that is resilient to the temptations of resentment. Instead of pain being something regretful that we wish never happened to us, forgiveness allows us to embrace it and understand its meaningful role in grounding us and opening the door for us to become an evolved version of ourselves. Strong character is often grounded in the challenging experiences we overcame, and one of the most potent and enduring ways to overcome is to forgive.
Be a curious observer. Or as Anthony De Mello might say, focus on “I” and not “me.” “I” is the lens through which we observe what happens in the world. “Me” is the emotional and internal reaction to what we observe. Our automatic way of being usually goes right to the “me,” reacting to the world through our unchecked internal dialogue and words to others or mindless actions. Changing our orientation to the “I” stops us from being so mindless and unchecked in our lives. It does this by centering on the lens itself, without all of the baggage the “me” brings, asking why we feel the emotions we feel and why we have the thoughts we have when we observe certain events and behaviors in the world. Instead of jumping right to the reaction, we observe the feelings and internal dialogue that precede the reaction we typically jump to, without making a positive or negative determination of them. We see it as it is first, as a child may curiously process seeing an object for the first time. I have found that the most valuable part of this process is the realization that your automatic emotional and thought responses do not have to be this way. You can actually make significant changes to them, but you first must observe them and see them as they are. It’s a long journey to make those changes, but the journey is full of worthwhile learning and evolution.
Problems versus opportunities. Things inevitably do not go as planned or turn out worse than expected between people. It’s impossible to perfectly read someone else and understand their internal world. It’s very common to define problems in these situations. Anyone can see a problem or identify one. I have come to dislike this framing of a “problem,” because it does not put the focus on how people can grow from it. Instead, it shines an exclusive light on the negative. I prefer to frame these disagreements and challenges as opportunities. The word opportunity explicitly highlights the way in which someone can grow and evolve from a given situation. We don’t want to ruminate on the negative. We want to use situations that occur as catalysts to learning. That leads to a much better life and is a more effective way to actually solve “problems” (if that’s what you want to call them).
A conversation with a 78-year-old Argentine man. As I was going to use the metro one day when my friends were here, I saw an older couple having a misunderstanding with the metro police near the gate, so I walked over and asked if they needed someone to translate. The police said yes, so I asked them if they spoke English, to which they responded and said they spoke Spanish. I then told them I also speak Spanish, and helped them through the situation. In Rio, people older than 60 can use the metro for free, so they stopped them to ask for their ID to let them use the metro for free. After helping them out, I started chatting with them about their time here in Rio and what they were doing here. They were just visiting the city, as they enjoy traveling and had been to various places together to date. I then got into a deeper conversation with one of them in the metro, who was a 78-year-old man and a retired architect. He was incredibly aware and sharp. He told me about his routine of going for walks and doing yoga multiple times per week, his career as an architect and how much the field has evolved since he first started, the houses he has designed and how much he loves water in nature, his children, his current relationship, why it’s easier to have a successful relationship now as an older man with a lower libido (which I found to be a hilarious comment at the time), and the marvel of opening his eyes and seeing clearly again after cataract surgery. The interaction was inspiring. He was so engaged with life, willing to continue participating in the world and discovering it. It was an attitude I hope to have at that age and am intentionally trying to prepare for now. Getting to that point is not something you decide to do late in life. At that point, it’s often too late. It’s something we must care for attentively over many, many years.
How I can appear to others who dislike me. Condescending, overwhelming, too much pressure, too intense, too serious, asking too much… this is how I come off to people who dislike me, whether it be people close to me when our relationship hits hard times or people who don’t have a good first impression of me. My baseline instinct is to please others, which often involved trying to change who I was to fit the needs of others in an effort to get them to like me at all times. I have come to realize that this is an impossible task. Having certain people dislike me in certain circumstances is inevitable. This does not mean that I should only pay attention to my desires and feelings when interacting with others, always putting myself at the center. It means that there is a meaningful middle ground to reconcile, where I strive to embody the values and principles that are most important to me and serve me well in life while attempting to frame that embodiment to have the best chance of it landing well with others. It also means accepting the outcome, even if it’s someone else disliking me, when I successfully embody those values and principles while doing my best to integrate them appropriately into the social context. When I hold to those values and principles, the people in my life, and the world more broadly, benefit most from how I show up. They may not benefit when it comes to the ease of the present moment and how it feels, but they will benefit in the long run. Believing in this idea and observing consistently good results from implementing it has brought me great peace of mind.
Men can benefit greatly from having female friends while in a romantic relationship with a woman, and vice versa. A friend recently told me a story about her sister, who is very religious and socially conservative. She is married and within the relationship, neither person is allowed to attend social gatherings with members of the opposite sex without their partner present. In addition to that, her husband had to stop going to CrossFit because there were other women there and it made her quite uncomfortable. When I heard this story, I was taken aback by how restrictive this approach was. I asked my friend if her sister and her husband were happy in the relationship, to which my friend said they were and that they both have similar conservative orientations. Although it may be “working” now, I immediately thought of all the obstacles this orientation can create. In essence, it trades small increases in risk in one domain now for much greater increases in risk in others.
I believe the small increase in risk of infidelity is negligible, if both parties are committed and taking care of the relationship well, and can even be seen as an opportunity with a more healthy orientation. I would like to speak about at length in another piece, but in a sentence, infidelity can be a sign of the deep problems and dissatisfaction present in the relationship, which the couple can then invest into working on to become even better than they were at their highest points before, rather than a resignation letter.
As for the greater increases, restricting one’s partner from engaging with members of the opposite sex means that when problems arise that one partner is not able to solve on their own or directly with their partner, the rule cuts them off from 50% of the people in the world who could give them a different perspective. Coincidentally, that 50% of people are of the same sex as their partner. We know that being born a male or female brings major differences in how people operate in the world and the perspectives they develop. Wouldn’t we want our partners to be able to access that different perspective so they could better understand what we’re going through and become better equipped to solve problems? Then, if we do not allow our partners to go out into the world with our trust that they will maintain their fidelity to the relationship, they will never have the opportunity to learn how to exercise and confirm that trust. It will always be a question mark. Exercising and confirming the trust of our partners can bring couples closer together, allowing them to live with less fear and to live their partners even more for the trust they share with them.
So many of us are set up to fail psychologically because we don’t learn key foundations early on. For so many unfortunate reasons, we either learn key life skills too late or we don’t learn them at all. Some friends who work in emergency services and my participation in a project in medical education have opened my eyes to this even more than they already were. Stepping into challenging situations that can provoke anxiety, identity crises, deep sadness, loss, and helplessness do not have to result in a dark ending, although that dark ending is often the easier road or perhaps the only road to take of you lack the psychological skills and resources to properly manage them. Alcoholism, smoking, drug abuse, burnout, desensitization to pain, a diminishing sense of empathy, impulsivity, suicidal ideation, emotionally abusing others, self-deprecation, reduced self-worth and clarity of self-concept, putting oneself in risky situations… these are all possible outcomes on the dark road. But how can these be avoided?
My answer to that question is through investing in the development of key psychological foundations and skills early in life (and encouraging adults, especially parents, to work toward developing them now if they didn’t do so earlier in life). The center of this is something I referenced earlier in this review, which is developing self-awareness and a self-aware way of being through accessing the lens of the observer (“I”) rather than the lens of the reactor (“me”). When we can observe ourselves well from a lens of curiosity rather than a lens of reaction and judgement, we can more clearly see and take note of how we currently operate in life and the things that truly drive us. Reflection is an immensely powerful tool in learning from our experiences and improving in this capacity to observe instead of react. I see these processes of reflection and becoming the observer, in tandem with sitting down and asking the big questions like “what do I want in life?”, “who do I want to be?”, “what do I value?”, and “what is my ideal self?”, as the center from which we can truly develop ourselves effectively.
From there, we can focus on foundations and skills, which often overlap with the center I just described. Some examples of key psychological foundations and skills are:
Self-regulation: Managing challenges and one’s own emotions effectively without explosions and detrimental effects on well-being and performance.
Growth mindset: Believing our abilities can change through effort, reframing challenge and failure as opportunities to learn and grow, and adopting better strategies instead of believing our abilities are fixed and there isn’t much we can do to change them.
Confidence: Belief in the self and one’s abilities to do a task.
Zooming out: Seeing things in the big picture instead of getting caught in the moment, such as accepting the flows of life and that life has an inevitable end that will come for everyone, even those you love.
Mastery Orientation: Primarily focus on self-development, growth, and mastering skills instead of results and being better than others.
Active listening: Instead of listening to find something to jump on in your response, really listen to what the other person is saying so that you can say it back to them in a way they would agree with.
Self-respect: Treat and talk to yourself like a friend who you love and want the best for.
Identify purpose: Connect the relevance of a given task to your identity, the path you’re hoping to take in life, the things that matter to you, and the things that you like doing just for the sake of doing them.
Pause: Through practices like meditation, we can start to create a space between what we feel in a moment and our reaction to those feelings, which allows us to slow down in life and become less impulsive.
Flow: The experience of flow, which Mihály Csíkszentmihályi identified as the optimal experience in life, takes place when the level of challenge matches our level of skill in a given task, leading to being deeply absorbed by the task, often losing track of time and being fully present. Meditation can help us more easily access this state of flow, along with training our attention to not crave distraction over time. Activities we do in a state of flow typically result in both greater enjoyment and performance.
This is by no means a complete list, but it gets us started. Perhaps in a future review or separate article, I will fully define my framework in writing.
Going back to “normal” never happens. Every life experience changes us. We are always updating and changing, which means that even when we return to the same environments we used to occupy within similar structures, we approach it differently, even if it is just ever so slightly, because of how we have changed. For this reason, I don’t think there is ever a way to return to “normal,” especially after a significant experience. The example that prompted this learning for me was our second wedding here in Brazil. My wife and I had very similar life structures before and after the wedding, between work, exercise, cooking, eating, our personal routines and practices, and sleeping. However, the experience of the wedding itself changed us. Receiving friends and family from around the world and showing them Rio de Janeiro over the course of two weeks was an impactful experience. We learned that we were capable of doing things that we had never done before, along with sharing experiences with each other and with people who attended the wedding that were special and profound. There was no way of coming out of those weeks and being the same afterwards. And if we were not the same, those similar structures were not going to feel the same when we returned to them. That is indeed what happened. Returning to those structures felt similar, but it was not the same. We had evolved, and because of that, we had to adjust and find new ways to accommodate for those evolved versions of ourselves, which led to an evolution of what our “normal” was. Through this experience, it’s quite obvious that this will happen again and again and again.
It takes time for your gut to catch up to your head. When it came time to say goodbye to the people who came to our wedding in Rio from abroad, especially my family and close friends from home, I rationally understood the whole time that they would indeed leave at the end. I knew their visit was temporary and that we would all go back to our day-to-day lives. I had said goodbye to Gabi many times before in that same airport. I had said goodbye to my family many times before as well. This wasn’t a particularly new situation for me, and I had prepared for those moments of goodbye. I did my best to make the most of the time with them, I knew that I would see them again in the next year or so, my life without them here was still quite good, and I had spent years changing my orientation toward death from a stoic perspective.
I even knew how it would play out and how the emotional process would work. I knew that I can’t simply think my way out of it. It was inevitable that it would hurt. It’s supposed to hurt. I love these people and I love being with them. I feel at home with them and have felt that way for a long time. I have so many beautiful shared memories with them at various points of my life. Instead of trying to reduce the emotional pain, which I knew was the wrong goal, the right goal was to just accept the pain and recognize that it only hurts because of how great my relationships with them are. Saying goodbye wasn’t supposed to be easy. Those feelings are meant to come because of that context, and that is okay.
Despite this complete understanding, I still found myself crying quite intensely in my apartment after my friends left and in the airport when my family left. I was overcome by feelings of emptiness and melancholy a few times in the hours and days after their departure. It was in those moments that I realized just how distinct my mental and emotional worlds are. It appears that the principal way to really progress emotionally in circumstances like this is to go through these experiences over and over again with meaningful reflection while or shortly after feeling the sadness and negative emotions of the moment. I talked to my wife openly about these emotions as they happened, which facilitated a lot of this processing. Managing these emotions more effectively is a long game. Trying to make it a short game can lead us to some significantly negative consequences, such as closing your heart to others to avoid pain when it comes time to say goodbye. Sharing a genuine goodbye with the people closest to us is something we don’t want to give up. A great recipe for regret and bitterness is to avoid genuinely opening our hearts when we say our final goodbye to someone. Given we rarely know when the final goodbye will be, it’s better to adopt this attitude with each goodbye, even if it brings additional emotional challenges along with it. Those challenges are worth it.