how-to

It’s a New Year: Be the Ant

December 31, 2015 by Geoff Leave a Comment

Pro 6:6-8 Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. (7) Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, (8) she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest.

This is a short passage. In context, the author is talking about settling accounts and avoiding poverty.

There are four ant-traits in the text that are relevant for settling accounts (Proverbs 6:1-5) and avoiding poverty:

The ant is a self-starter.
The ant prepares for the future.
The ant prepares little by little (because she’s tiny), every day.
The ant prepares for a long time (until winter).

A lot of people don’t like New Year’s resolutions.

I typically make pretty hard ones even though I see the practice as cheesy (pizza is also cheesy and it’s wonderful), but this year I already have too many goals to work on, so I’m simply trying to improve my efficiency at reaching them.

But if you don’t like resolutions for the New Year, but still want to reflect on bettering yourself here are two questions:

What do I want more of?
What do I want less of?

Think hard about these. The answers should be optimistic, but not impossible. They should also be based on your actual values, not simply social ideals that other people think you should live up to. Think about things like, “I want more knowledge, more time with my church, more time with my family, more good feelings, more Bible memorized, more risk taking, more money, more power, more humility, etc.” For question two think about things like this: “I want less wasted time on the internet, less television, less clutter, less whining, less fighting, less time spent feeling depressed, less sugar in my diet, less debt, less sinful habits (porn, explosive anger, greedy spending, intentional antagonizing, etcetera), etc.”

If you’re in a bad mood, listen to some music to get more pumped up, go for a walk, have a coffee and come back to them. Or, if you’re more contemplative, think about a time when you felt really successful and confidence. Think about it until you have the same emotional reaction you did at that time in your life. Do it until the hair stands up on your neck or arms or you feel embarrassed for being pumped up about something that happened five years ago.

After you’ve spent time reflecting on these two questions then reflect pair down your wants to a reasonable number for you. One might be all you can muster, but like a snow ball starting with a single handful, that one thing is better than nothing. I recommend no more than six. You can work on building up habits for two months at a time to solidify them before adding a new one. Of course, you could redo this exercise every month.

Now ask these two questions:

What small, self-starting, regular action can I take to get the more that I want?
What small, self-starting, regular action can I take to have the less that I want?

These actions should be small, designed to get the results you want from the first two questions, and be things you’re willing to change if they do not work. They should be easy enough to do that they make almost no difference in your life when you do them and make almost no difference when you don’t. But, if you do them for several days, weeks, months, and years they’ll add up. Think about the ant. She probably gathers enough food for each day and a little bit more.

As a final exercise, to motivate yourself to do these small little actions I recommend:

Imagine yourself enjoying the more/less you plan to have and how pleasant that will be compared to how your life is now. Capitalize on your motivation out of your current frustrations and the motivation toward who you want to be. This sort of visualization seems kooky until you read old poetry, sermons, and speeches and see how often visualization and imagery were used to motivated people. Television may have stolen our imagination in this regard.
When the small habit seems like a burden one day or several weeks simply say, “I’ll be better and happier for doing this than I will be for not.” Don’t let the false “be authentic to yourself by being a wreck or admitting your weakness” keep you from shoring up your weaknesses. You can admit that you have weak arms, but you still better do some bicep curls to fix it. Imagine if your doctor decided not to study your illness because he was being “true to himself” when he felt too tired to read ten pages from a desk reference.

Fake it Till You Make It

November 19, 2015 by Geoff Leave a Comment

One of the weirdest struggles I have is periodic long stretches of depressive/depressing thoughts.

I’ve never been diagnosed with depression, but I sometimes struggle with debilitating self-doubt, lack of confidence, and even feelings of meaninglessness. And when I said debilitating, I meant that on a vacation I’ve been able to literally sit and do nothing unless somebody asked me to for days in a row. I’m sure that I don’t have clinical depression, because I manage to snap myself out of it. The point of this post is that tremendous self-doubts can be overcome, but not always by debating yourself.

One of the ways the feelings I described above manifest themselves is at my various jobs. I work as a software developer and I teach in various contexts.

I often feel completely out of place around people who are significantly better trained than I am. On top of that, I can attribute my lack of capability largely to decisions I made in the past that distracted me and kept me from all sorts of success.

One of the tactics I’ve used to help me overcome such feelings has been “fake it till you make it.” Here’s a great quote on the subject from an unusually helpful article at Psychology Today:

Likewise, the most effective way to move toward change is to act like you’ve already achieved it. Don’t worry about playing mind-games with yourself. Don’t worry about affirmations. The way to become a fit person is to act like one. I’ve always found that the hardest part of exercising—the only hard part, really—is putting on my sneakers. Once they’re on, there’s pretty much a 100 percent chance of getting some form of workout done. Why else would I have these shoes on?

Now, I do think that affirmations have their place as does debating your inner-monologue, but sometimes just acting like somebody who knows what’s going on helps you learn. Similarly, acting like somebody who isn’t feeling depressed is a good way to help yourself snap out of it.

So, if you want to get out of a funk, start pretending to be a person who isn’t in a funk. This isn’t insincere, this is defense against the dark arts. You’re using built in features of your brain to get out of feelings that hurt you, end of story.

Concluding Thought

Don’t fake it till you make it without actually doing the things that a competent person does (working, thinking things through, asking questions, etc).

Postscript:

Here is an important comment from a good friend named Kieran:

This is good advice if you get in a bit of a funk. There can come a point though where all you’re doing is faking it and not making it. That’s a sign of something dangerous and it’s both hard to spot from the outside and hard to admit to oneself. Real depression is an illness and should be treated as such, with medication and therapy.

The Fourth ‘C’

November 16, 2015 by Geoff Leave a Comment

Over at the Bold and Determined blog there is a post about the Three Cs of a morning routine (their post is great, read it).

They are:

Coffee
Cardio
Cold Shower

These are all good ideas. I’m not a fan of aerobics or cardio as a form of fat loss or as a way to “get in shape” for that you need sprints and weight training (which exercise your heart, btw). But caffeine has tremendous neuro-protective capacity, it improves working memory, focus, alertness, etc. It’s great stuff. I would switch the coffee and cardio order though. I prefer to be fully awake before consuming my coffee. But these guys are more successful in life than I am, so their advice might be better.

Not only would I change the order, I would add a fourth.

The Fourth C

The fourth C is calling, which is not the same as career.

Career is what you do to make money. Calling is what leaves a legacy that is unique to you, your circumstance, and your abilities. I wrote about the difference here: Career vs Calling.

In the mornings you get up, get your body and brain moving and while the rest of the world sleeps you work on your calling.

If you’re a teacher, you write lectures to put online in order to build a legacy for the future.

If you’re a home school parent you plan the day’s lessons.

If you’re going back to school to learn a new skill, you perfect if before you hit your 9-5.

If you’re a pastor you practice your Greek and Hebrew.

If you’re a student, you work on your blog to practice writing.

What will you do with your extra time in the morning?

If you don’t wake up early enough for a 4-C morning, what’s stopping you? Here’s how I wake up: How to become a morning person

Applying the Advanced Thought Kata: Evaluate Your Actions

November 12, 2015 by Geoff Leave a Comment

Previously, I’ve written about two thought katas:

The advanced kata has applications beyond mere thoughts. If we change the words, this kata becomes a useful tool for evaluating your habits:

All habits have a purpose with a point of view based on assumptions which have consequences and form our identities. With facts, data, and our experiences, we use inferences and judgments in order to determine if our habits are worthwhile.

The subtle shift to habits is very important because many of us mindlessly perform the same habits for decades without ever thinking about them.

Application of the first move

I think that the first part, “All habits have a purpose with a point of view,” is especially important. Many of us have habits that, since we did not adopt them on purpose, have a purpose determined by somebody else! Mindlessly watching television instead of using it as an intentional rest period can work this way.

Here is an example from the weight room. If you lift weights, you might always turn the plates one way on the barbell. This makes literally no difference in how the weight sits on the bar. But many people learn this habit in high school football and never abandon it. Btw, the best direction to face the plates depends on what body position you use to remove them from the bar.

Other habits might be more insidious. Think of getting home from work with a bag of fast food and plopping down on the couch to watch television. Where does this habit come from? Did you choose to spend 2-3 hours a day passively absorbing other people’s ideas from a screen while eating food whose quality you know you could exceed with 30 minutes in the kitchen? Whose idea was it?

All habits, all habits have a purpose. The question is, what purpose? And what are the assumptions of that habit? With regard to fast food, the assumption is that speed is of more value than nutrients or the act of creating a dish. But is this assumption true? It depends on what your own goals are.

Socratic Questions for Habits using the Advanced Thought Kata

What is the purpose of this habit? Is this a good purpose (does it match my values, is it objectively good from a moral stand-point, is it objectively good for me from a health/personal goal stand point)?
What point of view is implied by this habit? Is it a despairing habit, a habit based on virtue, on lack of virtue and so-on? Does this habit assume that hope is real, that time has meaning, etc?
What are the results of this habit in my life? What will the results be if I keep it up (how much money am I losing, what is happening to my health, are there eternal consequences, is it hurting others, etc)?
What is this habit doing to my self-concept? Is it helping me to identify more and more with the good, with my family, to be at ease with myself? Is it building relationships with the tribe or community of which I am a part? Or is it creating anxiety about my purpose in life or at odds with what I believe truly matters?
With these things in mind, is this a habit I wish to pursue whole-heartedly, alter, reframe, or abandon?

Conclusion

The other pieces of the kata apply in similar ways to the example above, but I thought that it would be easier for me to give you questions to find your own applications than it would be for me to give you examples.

I’ve often told people these two things:

Never be embarrassed to do the thing that makes you the best.*
If nobody finds your habits unusual, then perhaps you haven’t thought about them enough.

Number two is especially important, because very few people have chosen their habits and so doing something precisely because you’ve thought it through will be weird. I used to get made fun of at the gym for doing one set to failure, a buddy of mine ate with a perfect diet with no cheat days to lose weight in high school, some of the people I know with the most Bible verses memorized are people who hang them up all over their house, and several of the most successful people I know make it a point to wake up and do work for several hours before the sun comes up. None of these are the habits of normal people. What will you change?

*I received one of my greatest compliments from a student whose SAT I merely supervised and I said this while we were waiting for the last group of students to arrive. Several years later she told me that that quote had completely changed her approach to life.

The Thought Kata

November 7, 2015 by Geoff Leave a Comment

In karate I found that three forms of training most prepared my mind for fighting:

Kata (MMA people hate this, but whatever)
Kata is practicing a preset pattern of attacks, blocks, and combos. They were allegedly used to encode entire fighting systems into an easy to memorize format so that the moves could be traditioned to the young. Katas must be memorized and preformed with absolute conviction and focus. I still do two katas on a regular basis.
Makiwara (heavy bag is the same thing, really)
Makiwara is hitting a post in order to strengthen your muscles and toughen your hands. The idea is to work up to full contact to work on focus and to practice hitting something with resistance similar to a rib cage or abdominal wall. I prefer hitting a heavy bag, but when I was in high school and for my first two years of college, I hit the makiwara every day before I bought a heavy bag. I’m certain that a great deal of my punching power (my instructor said I punched unusually hard for somebody my size) came from the makiwara.
Kumite/Randori
This would be free-flowing combat or sparing. We did this most often with jiu-jitsu drills on Fridays, but every couple of weeks we’d do drills with specific constraints (boxing gloves, no groin blows, w/out gloves no head shots, etc).

When I was in high school, my senior English teacher made me memorize this:

Identify and define the problem
Form tentative hypotheses
Gather data
Test hypotheses
Evaluate and decide

He called it, “the thought kata.”

In all seriousness, it has gotten me out of many a jam.

The world is a vast and confusing place and it’s machinations can even seem opaque and threatening. But if you deal with your immediate experiences in the context of problem solving, that opacity becomes less menacing because most problems are solvable.

Here’s how the thought kata can be used in Makiwara and Randori:

Makiwara – Intentionally find difficult problems to solve that have no risk. Buy an LSAT book, a logic text book, or use khanacademy.org. Another option is to practice using the kata when reading philosophy books or reading books with which you suspect you’ll disagree. You could even write a paper or a blog post on a favorite subject and put it online to see what the critics say.
Randori – The next time you face anxiety or a sudden problem which elicits your emotions, step back from your feelings and define the problem. From that point, if you’ve memorized the kata, the other steps will be more of less automatic. But you’ll find yourself being more satisfied with your decisions because you made them. You didn’t just “go with the flow of the moment.”

This process, which has become almost automatic to me except in times of anxiety or depression has done a lot to improve my quality of life. I hope that it’s helpful to you.

Human Excellence: On the Cardinal Virtues

October 30, 2015 by Geoff Leave a Comment

One of the most unfortunate losses during the reformation was the loss of focus on the four cardinal virtues as simple excellencies that are praiseworthy in anybody, but find their truest expression in the Christian Scriptures.

I’ve written about the cardinal virtues (justice, courage, temperance, and wisdom) briefly in the past and their place in the Bible in the past. They are called cardinal because other virtues tend to hinge on them. For instance power depends upon courage because one must act to gain power, generosity depends up temperance and justice because one must first give to those who deserve and moderate his own desires in order to have extra to give to the needy. I don’t intend to say that the cardinal virtues are actually the only hinge virtues, but I see no reason to deviate from a helpful rubric for thinking about human virtue until it is proven useless or wrong. Showing it to be incomplete would be no more damning to the system than showing modern physics to need improvements would be a proof that we should abandon it.

In my mind, the learning the virtues is important because it seems that people are are praised for excellence have these traits and while they may possess others, they always have these traits to some degree. What is unusual is that in our present culture praise is often given to those who do not have these traits, but it never seems to correlate with actual success on the part of those being praise. Edward Feser observed this a few years ago:

But much more prominent than the cardinal virtues — and to a large extent coloring the conception democratic man has of the content of the cardinal virtues — are certain other character traits, such as open-mindedness, empathy, tolerance, and fairness. The list will be familiar, since the language of these “virtues” permeates contemporary pop culture and politics, and it can be said to constitute a kind of counterpoint to the traditional cardinal virtues. And in each case the counter-virtue entails a turn of just the sort one might expect given Plato’s analysis of democracy — from the objective to the subjective, from a focus on the way things actually are to a focus on the way one believes or desires them to be.

In other words, virtues concerning the dispositions that require one to interact with the world as it is, to virtues that focus on how the individual wishes the world was. Whereas wisdom is the virtue of knowing the world and acting accordingly, open-mindedness is a willingness to consider alternate points of view without settling on one. In other words, one of the components of wisdom has replaced wisdom. This is similar with respect to tolerance

There are three important things to remember about the concept of virtue, as I’m using it:

Virtues are dispositions and habits of mind and body, not mere actions.
Because they are dispositions and habits, they can increase and decrease based on actions and belief.
The cardinal virtues are natural virtues.

I want to explain each of them briefly and then in later posts give some tips, from older literature as well as from recent psychological literature on how to acquire these virtues.

Justice is the virtue of giving to others their due. Modern culture has a tendency to think of justice solely in terms of the actions of institutions and other people. Rarely is virtue a consideration, at least in any news outlets I read, for the introspective soul.
Courage is the virtue of facing fear and danger in order to perform a noble act or to suffer for the sake of some good.
Temperance is the virtue of self-control with regard to good things. Temperance is the virtue of saying yes to the good, but no to too much.
Wisdom is the virtue of understanding the world, discerning good from bad (not just morally, but consequentially as well), and acting accordingly.

These are rough summaries of what you would find in Aristotle or Aquinas.

Are there other important virtues from the ancient world that you feel make humans excellent, but are ignored or even treated as vices in our culture?

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