(Thinking from the heart, not the head)
Humans don’t think with their head, for the most part. Even the most rational, analytically minded people don’t make the important decisions using cold logic. We fundamentally think with our hearts, based on what intuitively feels right.
The heart incorporates the emotions, which tell us so much about what really matters to us and what we truly want. The heart incorporates the body and its needs. The heart takes us out of the intellect that often limits our view, and into connection with ourselves and others.
Mastering the mundane tasks of everyday life seems to be a gateway to living an extraordinary life.
And then we forget that we were the ones that created those interpretations, and we live as if they are real. These stories become the lenses through which we see, hear, and feel.
What we miss because of our blindspots, we were taught, makes us suffer, holds us back from what we want in life, and suppresses our freedom, power, self-expression, and peace of mind (the four benefits that graduates of the program have reported are the most impactful on their lives).
(Stories we defend more than freedom)
We live our lives looking for evidence that our stories are true. We want them to be right more than we want to be free. More than we want close and intimate relationships. If the story is “I’m not good enough,” then we’ll either try a bunch of things, all the while looking for evidence that the story is true; or we’ll try nothing, assuming it’s true. In either case, the story is confirmed.
began to sink slowly into depression, using work to forget and to distract myself. I withdrew from my communities, from my friends, and even from my family, racing faster and faster toward goals I was sure would provide the satisfaction I was seeking. My health deteriorated, but I couldn’t find the motivation to change my lifestyle. I withdrew further, telling myself that I would return to my social life once things got better.
As you can probably tell, this was all a big story. Not the lived experience, which was as real as anything. But the drama, the stark tradeoffs, the black-and-white thinking. When life becomes dull, restrictive, and threatening you know you’re living in a story, not reality.
And slowly, as we talked and shared, the layers peeled back. I had a story that I was uniquely messed up, because of how my father had raised me. He had been too harsh, too judgmental, had failed to listen and to support me growing up. Because of that, my story went, I couldn’t have the self-confidence, self-acceptance, and happiness I craved.
woman blames her lack of decisiveness for her business troubles, but it’s a pretense to protect her from ever having to take a real risk, to put something on the line (yes, you can have a racket against yourself).
By selectively inflating the wrongdoing of others, our own responsibility is diminished in comparison.
The way out of the racket, with its sweet, juicy payoff, is to clearly see the cost. There is always a cost — love or affinity, vitality or wellbeing, satisfaction or self-expression. The cost ultimately boils down to the experience of aliveness.
Eventually we become like drug addicts, giving away much of what makes life worth living to buy even the tiniest amounts of self-justification.
“Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” You don’t stop resenting for their sake. You stop it for your own sake.
(Seeing the perfectionism story and writing a new one)
I could see now the limiting story that had kept me from getting started on it: that my success depended on me doing everything perfectly. This story had me endlessly revising and polishing my writing and my products, never convinced that they were quite good enough. It had me doing every last little thing myself, not asking for and sometimes even refusing offers of help (“They won’t do it right”). I had the experience of working harder and harder to try and “catch up” to an impossible standard I’d set for myself, but feeling like I was falling further and further behind. The piling debt and unpaid taxes weren’t the worst consequence of my unyielding perfectionism — it was the experience of myself as constantly stressed, anxious, self-critical, and resigned that it would never change. I decided to write a new story for myself: that I could work closely with others, with all the vulnerability, risk, and messiness that entails. I decided that people would no longer be threats to me, but rather the most precious opportunities in my business and my life.
I’d discovered a new “way of being” — connected, vulnerable, fearless, generous. And that is far more valuable than any habit, tactic, or framework.
I’ve become a passionate advocate of the work that Landmark is doing. I know of nothing that comes remotely close in its ability to change lives in so short a time. About a dozen of my friends and family have taken it since then. Everyone has come back to thank me for sharing with them one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives (especially the skeptical ones).
I’ve had to question everything I thought I knew about humans, and how much they can change in how short a timeframe. That questioning has been challenging at times, but it has left me with a vastly expanded sense of what is possible.
The ability to see past your own interpretations and take full responsibility for your experience are absolutely fundamental to changing how you work, but go far beyond productivity. The work that Landmark does enables so many kinds of learning, growth, and change, my own work included.
(Post-scarcity economics and the future of value)
I recently finished listening to the audiobook of Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek (Amazon Affiliate Link), by Manu Saadia. It was probably the most fun I’ve ever had thinking about economics, due to the outstanding premise:
And scarcity is the fundamental fact of capitalism: it’s impossible to charge money (much less, a lot of money) for something that anyone can fabricate for free at home. Without scarcity, we no longer need the invisible hand optimizing the allocation of scarce goods. Supply and demand lose all relevance.
Already today, estimates by economists indicate that the value of human capital in the economy– the knowledge and know-how stored in human brains – dwarfs all other forms of capital. In the United States, the value of human capital is five to ten times larger than the value of all physical capital combined.
We are already seeing the beginnings of this today: the sharing economy makes it easier to access cars, bikes, houses, tools, and equipment than to own them. And this is revealing just how much of a burden it is to own, manage, store, and maintain these things if you don’t have to.
The central defining question of a post-scarcity economy is: why work? When work is decoupled from bio-physical necessity, what’s the point? The goal of work in the Star Trek universe is to fulfill the deepest needs of human nature: belonging, love, recognition, purpose, and self-expression.
(Reputation as the currency of the attention economy)
that the overabundance of information produced by the Information Age is ushering in the “Reputation Age.” We rely on the opinions and judgments of people we respect to tell us what to think and believe on topics too numerous to research ourselves. The main filter for which opinions to listen to is one’s reputation, which acquires a tremendous power that money can’t buy.
What’s so enticing about this scenario is that reputation preserves the upsides of money — the ability to exchange value and show appreciation — while eliminating its downsides. Reputation is inexhaustible, non-rival, non-excludable, incorruptible, freely given, and freely taken.
Human design and scalability are not at odds, after all. Anything that involves even a small touch from a human acquires tremendous worth, even if reproduced endlessly. Like a Beatles song produced from a stroke of genius, and today residing on millions of devices around the world.
The determinants of value for a product will no longer be scarcity or utility. They will be affect, sentimental taste, personal idiosyncrasies, and craftsmanship. We will need to figure out how to preserve these qualities even as our products become digital, streamable, and copyable.
In a winner-take-all economy, even having a shot at winning increasingly requires relying on systems of all kinds to absolutely minimize the burden of general knowledge work. That includes systems of habits and routines, heuristics and frameworks, physical affordances and digital tools, mental models and framings, and techniques and strategies.
before it gets rationalized for them. To help them automate and systematize the simplistic tasks, so they can dedicate increasingly greater amounts of time and attention to the frontier of creativity.