Active Recall!

My new TV came in last night and I threw Creed on it while cleaning up the styrofoam and box. 

Creed says he doesn’t have a choice. He has to fight. 

The people around him remind him that, hey, it’s actually a choice. You’re kind of stretching “have to” here.

It’s nice when a choice is clear. I gave in to Black Friday ads and bought a TV. That was clearly a choice. (Though I’m sure you’ve seen a deal that made you feel like you had no choice. Time to buy.)

Sometimes you don’t realize you had a choice. If you’re unhappy, you’ve made some choices leading to that state. There are choices you’ll make today that can continue that. Or you can make choices to start turning the ship around.

This reminds me of a question Tim Ferriss brought up in a podcast episode with DHH. He also mentions it in Tools of Titans:

TF: Have you outgrown your systems or beliefs? Is it time that you upgraded? Or, on a personal level, as Jerry Colonna, executive coach to some of the biggest tech stars in Silicon Valley, would ask: “How are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want?”

A lot of things feel automatic but you probably made choices to create whatever system it is that made it automatic.

In Choose the Life You Want: The Mindful Way to Happiness, Tal Ben-Shahar explains that you have choices all the time:

“In fact, at every moment in our life we have a choice.

RMaybe this realization shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to me. After all, research in psychology illustrates that about 40 percent of our happiness is determined by the choices that we make—what we choose to do and how we choose to think directly impact the way we feel.”

But they’re still choices. And the accumulation of your small choices day in and day out has a lot more power over a lifetime than most single choices.

To make a good choice, practice recognizing that everything is a choice in the first place. 

And be grateful that your choices today will probably be smaller than choosing to live your GOAT-boxer father’s legacy and try to rise out of his shadow. 

Dr. Bernard Roth was on The Science of Success (Feeling Stuck? This One Question Will Create The Change You Need with Dr. Bernard Roth).

I really enjoyed the framework discussed throughout the episode for solving problems of all sorts.

• First, recognize there’s a good chance that the problem isn’t actually the problem — You might be able to solve an adjacent problem or something at a different level so that the problem disappears. You might think work is causing most of your stress but it might be that you actually aren’t sleeping enough and are less effective at work as a result (which then leads to underperforming and stress).
• Ask what this will open up (but don’t go too far up the chain) — You can start looking at what solving this problem would open up for you. Then what would happen if the next level was solved as well? But you don’t want to go so high up this chain to where you’re considering your existence.
• Don’t let B.S. reasons get in the way — Everyone has reasons for everything. Is traffic the reason you were late or is it that you budgeted enough time to arrive exactly on the dot if there’s absolutely zero traffic? (George Lucas talks about not getting into a film school class but making films anyway while his friends just complained they couldn’t make films because they didn’t get into that class.)
• Operate from a place of doing — I’ve heard this described in Designing Your Life as “bias to action”. You have to do things and see how they go. If you’re planning your year, the goals you come up with in 20 minutes are probably good enough to get moving on. There’s no need to spend 8 hours polishing them at this point. You’ll be better moving forward and gathering more information. Get moving.

The one connection I have here is the book Are Your Lights On? It’s a bunch of stories (a few pages each) that demonstrate some aspect of business. The book is really helpful for re-framing problems and identifying what the real problems are.

You don’t need two separate signs to let drivers know the hours when they should turn their lights on and off. All you need to do is remind the driver to check their lights—they’ll know whether they should be off or on but they just need the nudge.