Artificial Artist https://wemaxedout.com Because We Are Conscious, We Must Learn How to Live Tue, 14 Nov 2023 17:28:42 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://wemaxedout.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/cropped-wemaxedout_logo-32x32.webp Artificial Artist https://wemaxedout.com 32 32 193535261 Creating the Most Efficient Language – Optimal Communication https://wemaxedout.com/blog/creating-the-most-efficient-language-optimal-communication/ https://wemaxedout.com/blog/creating-the-most-efficient-language-optimal-communication/#respond Thu, 25 May 2023 18:46:29 +0000 https://wemaxedout.com/?p=2612 I got curious recently and started researching what would make for an Efficient Language.

Here’s what I found!

Creating an efficient language would require balancing many factors.

Here are some key points:

  1. Simplicity: The grammar rules should be simple, regular, and consistent, making the language easy to learn and understand. There should be no exceptions, like the irregular verbs in English.
  2. Phonetic writing: The language should be written as it is spoken, so every sound has its own symbol and every symbol corresponds to only one sound. This would greatly reduce confusion and improve reading speed and learning time.
  3. Compounding words: Instead of creating new words, the language could make use of compounding existing words to express new concepts, similar to German or Dutch. This would make the language more flexible and easier to expand as new concepts arise.
  4. Tone and context independence: The meaning of words should not change based on tone or context, reducing ambiguity.
  5. Efficient word order: The basic word order (subject, verb, object) could be designed to typically match the order in which we think about actions.
  6. Eliminate unnecessary words: Articles, prepositions, and other function words could be eliminated if they can be inferred from context, making sentences more concise.
  7. Verb tenses and aspects: Instead of conjugating verbs to indicate tense, aspect, mood, and voice, it would be more efficient to use separate words or particles that can be attached to any verb.
  8. Consistent plurals and genders: Instead of having multiple ways to create plurals or assign genders to nouns (like in many Indo-European languages), have a single, regular way to do this.
  9. Non-phonemic stress: Word stress shouldn’t change the meaning of words, making pronunciation easier and more predictable.
  10. Morpheme-to-meaning correspondence: Each morpheme (the smallest meaningful unit of language) should consistently correspond to a specific meaning.

Keep in mind, however, that the definition of “efficiency” may vary widely depending on one’s goals and perspectives. A perfectly efficient language for one purpose may be highly inefficient for another. Additionally, a language is more than just a tool for efficient communication—it’s also an expression of a culture and a way of thinking, which is why natural languages often have irregularities and inefficiencies.

Creating an efficient language would involve a balance between simplicity, expressiveness, and adaptability. One approach to this is to have each word represent a basic concept, and combine words to express complex ideas. Let’s imagine a language called “Optima.”

Here are a few example sentences in Optima:

  1. “Sunal Komo.” – The sun shines.
    • “Sunal” = sun, “Komo” = to shine. In Optima, verbs are always in the infinitive form to avoid conjugation complexity.
  2. “Menok Relpa.” – I eat an apple.
    • “Menok” = I eat, “Relpa” = apple. Personal pronouns are fused with verbs for simplicity.
  3. “Lenos Miku Tranar.” – The cat sits on the tree.
    • “Lenos” = cat, “Miku” = tree, “Tranar” = on. Prepositions are postpositions instead, coming after the noun, as it is easier to process the information once the objects are known.

The choices in Optima are designed for simplicity and ease of learning:

  • Words are short and easily pronounceable.
  • Sentence structure follows a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order, which is common in many languages and is often considered intuitive.
  • There’s no gender or number agreement between subjects and verbs, reducing complexity.
  • Word stress is consistent, falling always on the first syllable, eliminating the need to memorize different stress patterns.

However, it’s important to note that linguistic efficiency isn’t just about speed or brevity. It’s also about being able to express a wide range of ideas and nuances effectively, and about being able to be understood by others. Therefore, an efficient language should also take into account factors like cultural nuances, pragmatics, and the need for creative expression.

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How Carbon Built Civilization https://wemaxedout.com/blog/how-carbon-built-civilization/ https://wemaxedout.com/blog/how-carbon-built-civilization/#respond Tue, 09 May 2023 18:22:56 +0000 https://wemaxedout.com/?p=2604 When work is done, energy is extracted, Carbon is released.
This can be through digesting food, where digestive enzymes break apart Carbon molecules. Or it can be from burning wood or “Fossil Fuels”.

When the Carbon bond is broke, and Carbon is separated, a LOT of energy is released. For digestion, we call this “Calories” that our body uses. When this Carbon is from Fossil Fuels (which is a very cheap fuel source), it is released into the atmosphere.

When Carbon is released, floating around, it looks for a new mate.
Oxygen. Carbon is very attracted to Oxygen, but primarily Oxygen in pairs. Carbon wants to bind to two Oxygen molecules.

So, Carbon binds to Oxygen in the atmosphere, forming Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This is happening at an alarming rate due to the industrialization of the modern world. Fossil Fuels are very cheap to transform to energy (cheaper than Wind, Solar, Nuclear, etc. is, at least in recent times).

The biggest hope to eating up these extra Carbon molecules are TREES.

Trees eat Carbon Dioxide.
But, we are tearing down more and more trees, and not planting enough. This is causing a large imbalance in the amount of Carbon in the atmosphere. All of which contributes to Climate concerns.

INTERESTING SIDE POINTS:

Interesting, while humans breathe in Oxygen, and exhale Carbon Dioxide, tree “breathe” in Carbon Dioxide and “exhale” Oxygen. In this way, oxygen-breathing creatures get a symbiotic relationship with trees. Even more interesting, the Lungs of these oxygen-breathing creatures take on the shape of an upside tree (when look beneath the brownish-pink fleshy outsides of the Lungs).

The Lungs Lesson for Kids: Definition & Facts | Study.com
Lungs are like Upside Down Trees !

Carbon tends to trap heat inside the atmosphere, leading to Global Warming concerns. Related to this, Methane is about 25 times more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere, hence the Climate concerns that have arisen.

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From Here on Out – To Start Again https://wemaxedout.com/blog/from-here-on-out-to-start-again/ https://wemaxedout.com/blog/from-here-on-out-to-start-again/#respond Fri, 07 Apr 2023 16:08:03 +0000 https://wemaxedout.com/?p=2549 What we all wanted to do. From the beginning. But, now it’s later and the desire is born again.

Something of hope. From a state of focus. A state of clarity. A still mind.

Begin with internal stillness. Take action from here. But bias to action. Calibrate.

Think. Bring yourself to a state of awareness. Calm awareness. That blissful presence…

Find it within. Feel it bubble to the surface. The pressure, temperature, texture…

You are present. A conscious being. Called to action. But the voices are mute when in haste.

There it is again… A feeling of stillness. Peace. A glimpse…

Act from here. Respond instead of react.

Do something you’ll thank yourself later for.

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A Long Ways Coming https://wemaxedout.com/blog/a-long-ways-coming/ https://wemaxedout.com/blog/a-long-ways-coming/#respond Mon, 03 Apr 2023 18:57:14 +0000 https://wemaxedout.com/?p=2545 Self,

There’s something out there.
Or is that what my ego wants me to believe?

What’s these feelings I feel?
Time has passed. Life has moved in unpredictable ways…

But, should I be surprised?
To think I had it all figured out at such a young age.

I find myself searching, searching for that feeling.
A feeling from the past. A feeling I fantasized about when it became lost. This feeling made me feel alive. It had me open and soul-searching. It had me discovering insight after insight.

But, it was never gone.
The first problem was external searching.
That feeling I had, came only from internal investigation.

I detached from a sense of self.
I wrote as a means to explore my thoughts.
What came was from my fingers themselves, a mind of their own.

I write with tears.
My vision isn’t clear.
It has to come from the mind… the heart.
Because I can’t see beyond this haze.
A haze that feels at home…
One I been in for a while.

But, much as tears dry up…
Much as you can refill a cup…
The door is never fully shut.
Get up, recapture that love.

The haze comes and goes.
I should know, I wrote about it…
If you want 6 more feet of visibility in fog…
You have to take 6 more steps. You can’t stand still.

I know this…
I know enough…
But knowing isn’t enough.

A Journey is only as good as the unexpected turns that demanded you to evolve. Take those turns with strides for clarity, and you will find your way.

Where to?
You can’t know.
You wouldn’t want to know.
It’s a part of the Journey you’re on.

Recapture that feeling of surrender to what comes.

Rebuilt that trust. That relationship with yourself.

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Why Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness https://wemaxedout.com/blog/why-money-doesnt-buy-happiness/ https://wemaxedout.com/blog/why-money-doesnt-buy-happiness/#comments Mon, 17 May 2021 13:14:42 +0000 https://wemaxedout.wpcomstaging.com/?p=2103 The reason money can’t buy happiness is because happiness is an emotion, and emotions change the world you see. Allow me to explain.

Hunger, rage, sexual arousal, all can change your hierarchy of priorities in an instant. It’s all a mind game, and emotions can shape the playing field.

Emotions are non-tangible. They can’t be turned away from as easily as physical objects. They are with you wherever you go, wherever you look. As long as you have the conscious awareness to experience them, they’re there.

The reason money can’t buy happiness is because happiness is an emotion, and emotions are things money can’t touch.

What money can do, is buy physical objects that distract from emotion.

This is the perfect illustration.

The reason people feel money can solve their problems and gives them happiness, is because the money they accumulate early on is spent on novel objects that keep them distracted. These objects are often physical manifestations of fantasies they’ve built. But through the test of time, the novelty will wear off and they’ll be left with the emotions that haven’t been processed for years.

It is those people who then preach that money can’t buy happiness, as the newcomers to wealth chuckle at the silly idea and think the experienced person is full of it because the novelty has done fine keeping their emotions at bay.

The evolution will happen sooner or later for them… Or not, because nowadays there’s so much novelty that they can remain distracted for a lifetime. But if they live long enough, it’ll surely happen. At which point, the cycle continues.

The experience of one person’s life can’t be so easily transferred to a new human being. That new human will be subject to the same emotional fallacies and temptations. This is where the power of communication and proper parenting/mentoring comes in. We… YOU have the power to communicate your experience clearly and effectively enough to guide the steps of a young one to “trip over the truth” in a safe and non-destructive manner to gain the insight for themselves and be provided clear language to conceptualize their experience. This is everyone’s responsibility for those you care about in your life. Words alone can’t get the point across, they must experience it for themselves, but the words can help them make sense of it.

The reason intellectuals or highly self-aware people tend to intuitively understand that money doesn’t buy happiness or at least have this realization younger, is because they’re more in touch with their emotions. It takes far greater and persistent distraction to numb the sensations.

Those who tend to go the longest blinded by physical possessions are those with the shortest attention spans and are also usually extroverted and haven’t spent much time introspecting.

The above article contains tools that may help you judge character and make sense of the seemingly senseless aspects of life.

It’s all understandable, sometimes you just need a heart break to gain the perspective necessary.

Pain is a looking glass with a very unique and powerful vantage point.
Explore it instead of running away from it. This is how the wise gain wisdom. The many distractions nowadays is why wisdom is becoming a rare trait.

Know thyself. Soul search. Explore.
And most importantly, give yourself permission to feel what’s there and forgive yourself for the knee-jerk response society has conditioned you with to feel shameful or weak at having the emotion in the first place.

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High Performance When You’re on the Hook – Personal Reflections and Takeaways https://wemaxedout.com/blog/high-performance-when-youre-on-the-hook-personal-reflections-and-takeaways/ https://wemaxedout.com/blog/high-performance-when-youre-on-the-hook-personal-reflections-and-takeaways/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2021 13:48:33 +0000 https://wemaxedout.wpcomstaging.com/?p=1865 Congratulations! We’ve made it through the tunnel. Now I’ll share some of my personal reflections as the finale for the the Tunneling series.

This is meant more of as a reflection exercise for myself. It can serve as an illustration for how I relate new experiences to old. This means that what follows is very personal and individualized to me. But perhaps my experience may be useful to others.

Integrating This All With My Past Experience

Here are some higher-level lessons I’ve learned when integrating my time in the tunnel with my past experience.

1. The Power of Creative Freedom

One of the more familiar lessons I’ve learned from my experience in the tunnel as a Developer Lead was my drive for freedom.

Coming into the role of taking care of deploying code, communicating with other teams, and organizing developer activities from the role of a Developer provided me a lot of power. I felt like I had the power to solve problems, implement code, and deploy it between environments at will. I had the knowledge of the system and code-base enough to solve bugs and deploy the fixes to Production myself.

Normally in the Software Development Cycle, there’s a lot of checks and balances. From code reviews to testing, each involving many people. These dependencies can greatly slow down the process. However, they are very useful.

The experience I had in all areas of this Development Cycle gave me a very strong sense of freedom. I felt like “I can do it all”. I could stay late, address all outstanding tasks, and deploy/test them myself. This is a terrible practice in the software world, but the point is that this feeling of freedom is intoxicating.

I’m a very independent individual who exercises every option of solving a problem myself before asking for help. Even when I do ask for help, I lay out a detailed, long list of items that I’ve tried and the results in a message. This is like a last attempt to stumble across the answer as I explain it “out loud” before sending the question to a coworker. I want to be able to solve problems and build things from scratch, with as little external help as possible. This transfers into my everyday life through being “resourceful”, such as limiting my use of utilities (e.g. water, paper towels,) or always having self-supplied water or food available. I like to be self-sufficient.

So, the first big reflection point for me was positioning myself in a state of control. This pattern can be seen in my efforts to migrate to a self-hosted site to be able to manage my site at all levels, from the operating system to the style and functionality of the site. I’ll use this insight in my new job to learn as many of the individual responsibilities that go into my work as possible. I perform my best when I have a strong understanding at all relevant levels for the task.

2. What You Get Is That Which You Want Most

I have a wide range of interests. The side effect is conflicting aspects of my life. I want to optimize my performance through sleep and nutrition, but I also want to make necessary sacrifices to have a meaningful impact on the world through solving hard problems. Getting lost in the moment and being fully present is tough when I’ve conditioned my mind to always analyze my state objectively to look for areas I can improve. I call this “meta-thinking”.

For example, I want to fast for long periods of time for health and clarity of mind (I think better without food). But I also want to eat enough calories to gain weight and build muscle. This leads me to eating a LOT of food in a short period of time, which leaves me in a sub-optimal state for mental performance. I want to avoid eating before bed to optimize my sleep but also work out in the morning so I can ensure I tie my exercise habits to a consistent morning routine. So now I need to eat all this food in the morning, which consist of what should be my most productive hours of the day. Additionally, I want to wake up early, so I go to bed early. I also want to improve my social habits and connect with people. But I work during the day and want time for passion projects. Most people go out at night, at which time I’m already asleep and would want to limit bright light exposure.

As you can see, the conflicts are real. I’ve wrestled to find balance between these for the past 5 years. There has been considerable progress. Nevertheless, while in the tunnel as Developer Lead, I realized my willingness to put off my eating habits, posture, and proximity to computer screen (for eye health). The way I’ve rationalized this was that due to the necessity the tunnel brought, I wanted to solve the project-specific problem so bad, that I was willing to put everything else on the back burner.

I found similar experiences while tubing on a lake. I am very good at remaining on the tube, even when the driver of the boat actively tries to throw me off. This stems from a very strong desire to not go into the water, motivated a bit by fear and a bit my the challenge.

In other words… What you get is that which you want most.

If I want to eat more than i want to work, then I’ll constantly be distracted while working and perform in my work poorly. This is about commitment and aligning what you value most with what you do in life. Decide what you value and then construct a life that aligns with it.

The key is aligning desire to what you do. Even exercise. If I want health or even to not be unhealthy, as long as the desire is MORE intense than the desire for any conscious distraction then the performance can be optimal. I emphasize “conscious” distraction because if something is out of sight, it is out of mind. It’s sufficient to not know better or the distraction is just relatively less exciting. This is powerful because now you can manipulate experiences to your will.

Consider the common weight loss advice of “not having junk food in the house”. It’s easier to say no when it’s out of sight. Want to improve focus and thus performance on writing? Do the work in an environment ONLY for writing with your phone out of sight. Manipulate the environment to make what needs done relatively easier to recognize and that which is distracting harder to recall.

What you get is that which you want most.
What you get is that which you want most.

3. Everything is Relative

What follows will help illustrate my point that neurochemistry is fundamental to Effective Living and that you can 100% influence it. It is a bit cringey as I talk a lot about myself, but I feel it is valuable for the point I am trying to make. Which is the subtle variation in how we view reality when emotionally intoxicated vs emotionally sober. Because we only have one instance of consciousness, which is also under the emotional experience, we have a lot of biases and blind spots. Not recognizing this variation can make our past successes seem distant and the excuse of “getting old” too easy to lean on.

Have you ever been genuinely surprised by a past phase in your life when you pushed hard and made incredible progress in what seemed like rapid times? Ever wonder why you have a hard time repeating that? You may even chop that previous success up to “I was younger”.

Well, maybe it isn’t anything about age of the body and more about the age of your habits. Maybe the same neurochemistry could be reproduced and yield similar performance.

Consider what I’ll lay out here. See if you had these principles at play during that period of your life. Notice how age is left out entirely!

I’ve repeatedly experienced this realization of a past peak performance that feels impossible to reproduce. Despite the doubt, I pushed on in a stubborn, lean-in, manner. This is what brought me to the realization that emotions and all sensations follow a wave-like pattern.

One example, is this past December. I used up a lot of saved vacation, working only 7 days during the entire month and about 20 days between November and December. During this time I remember feeling “how could I ever have worked full time, for so long, and so hard?” But once I returned to normal-hours in January, the pace picked back up and it felt fine/neutral and even a bit enjoyable. This is similar to Parkinson’s Law, which states that time is like a gas, it inflates to fill it’s container. Similarly, things that seem impossible to complete on time can suddenly be accomplished once placed in the tunnel’s scope of necessity.

It’s vital to build experiences that prove this to yourself. Moments when you felt like you can’t go any further or repeat a past performance but stubbornly stuck it out until you did. Whether it is pushing through waves of exhaustion while running a marathon or the weight of inertia when focusing intensely while sleep deprived. There are always additional winds you will catch. The more of these you experience, the more you’ll get caught in an upward spiral of being able to struggle well. You’ll believe in yourself more.

Another example is during my marathon training. I would run 4 miles worth of sprint intervals to near knee-collapse exhaustion followed by 5-10 seconds of jogging in an almost walking-like manner (falling forward, really…) I did this every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (after my 9-5, in 80-90 degree weather), for 2 months. During this time I also did 2 10-20 mile runs over the weekend, totaling between 30-50 miles a week for 2 months. Yes, my knees were entirely jacked up for months after. I got big into yoga, stretching, and self-love after this, and strangely, breath work.

On top of this, I continued lifting weights (within 10 minutes of waking at 4:45 AM, before my full time job, 5 days a week) in a highly intense manner (every set, beyond failure, stubbornly punishing myself often until the weights literally slip out of my hands).

This can serve as a qualifier for my article on Struggling Well and Discipline. I wrote this to capture my findings of how to struggle effectively and get through the pain.

My original “Ultimate Guide” articles on Meaning, Clarity, Intensity of Stimulus, etc. in the Effective Living series, go into the EXACT psychological thought patterns and habits I developed to cope with this level of stress, so I will leave that aside for now.

The point here, is that looking back at that period of my life, I still sometimes wonder how I could do all this WHILE working 40 hours a week as a Software Engineer. This was just a year ago that I was doing this! So certainly not age. In a few words, I’d say it comes down to Purpose and Identity. These are developed through rewarding the effort process. Setting milestones. Rewarding effort and progress. Avoid focusing on the final destination.

The punch line here, is absorption. During this period of my life, I structured my daily routine to live and breathe my training. After a few weeks, it was my new norm. I didn’t have video games, pleasure foods, or TV to cause the struggle to feel far worse, relatively.

Excellence demands all of oneself.

Similar experiences can be seen when sexually aroused, hungry, angry, in pain (e.g. stomach ache), comedy, being happy, etc. In each of these states, it feels all consuming, as if they are all that exists and matters. The whole world is filtered now through the neurochemicals these states brings. When angry, even kind gestures are easily seen with negative intent. When sexually aroused, crude activities seem justifiable. It is as if once in this mental state, the brain biases pulling on relevant current-situation-supporting past experiences to justify the biological survival mechanism at play.

So much about high performance and Effective Living comes down to leveraging the right neurochemicals. So the point I’m making is to beware of the extremist/absolute thoughts and doubts that come during any of these mindsets. It is just an emotional state, taking captive your biology, while your conscious, logical mind is forced to observe.

A part of being a conscious human being is knowing when to think and when NOT to think, and what to think about and what NOT to think about. I call this “Discipline in Thought“.

For example, when I am engaging in a brutal workout, doubts or thoughts of “this isn’t worth it” would come up. To counter this, I would just begin lifting the weight in a “mindless” (or barbaric) manner, as if in a state of anger. I’d leverage adrenaline and induce a neurological state. This is what self-motivation is about. I channel my energy.

Alternatively, I would have a feeling (i.e. not an explicit thought, but more of an awareness) that I would interpret as “I can think about that later, now’s not the time”. This kept doubts away that once take hold can drain you of energy instantly, causing you to quit amidst the struggle. This drain of energy is literal, I’ve experienced it as the weight literally feeling heavier. It’s as if adrenaline was just flushed out of my system. Moments like these prove to me it’s all a mind game about neurochemistry, which we have direct influence over.

“I’ll think about it later”, “I’m in it for the long haul”, “this can’t hurt me” are THE EXACT thoughts (feelings, really) I find bubbling up while engaging in struggle. I’ve repeatedly engaged in hardship, voluntarily, enough times to have wired my brain to operate this way. And so can you!

Note that these to me are experienced as feelings more than explicit thoughts. The words are just how I’ve come to interpret that feeling. I’ve found it difficult to “fight mind with mind”. Trying to think logically during high-stress situations is a fools-errand. The thoughts are too slippery and once any thought comes up, the pain and struggle makes it too easy for high-momentum negative thoughts to follow. There is merit in developing your mental ability to do this, but most the time it is best to avoid trying to control behavior with thoughts. Taking the tough action before a thought can surface will, in turn, influence the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. The brain will rationalize the action. Hesitation causes diminishing intent.

This is SUCH A BIG IDEA THAT I’M STRUGGLING TO FIND THE WORDS TO EXPRESS IT.

For example, the “I’m in it for the long haul” was the exact awareness I frequently had during long runs. During my first marathon, this thought found its way into my awareness. Again, not in an explicit form, just as a feeling or sensation, as if I just “looked at the words”. This helped me relax into the moment or at least kept me pushing on through the current wave of struggle/discomfort/pain. The survival of that burst of peak discomfort and hardship reinforced my identity that “I can do hard things” and deepened my resolve in stubbornly persevering. I was building up PROOF that I CAN.

Thoughts like these, and their associated (very subtle) one-second decisions, repeated over and over is what creates the identity and habits that shape a “hardened” individual that can go the distance (in anything). This is the FOUNDATION of grit. The best way I can summarize how it feels and the cue to use is “Lean-In”.

Sharing this is just illustrate and support the importance of leveraging neurochemistry. The tunneling I’ve described previously is one way to stimulate a mental state that is optimal for certain actions.

To wrap this thought up: The answer to “how did I do all that” when reflecting on past phases of my life where you endured continual hardship (including periods of social isolation, relationship stress, early abuse, etc.) is to not think, just do. In other words, “Discipline in Thought”. As David Goggins would put it, “Callus Your Mind”. To be tougher, you have to do the tough things.

I’d suspect each of those times when you were left surprised by your past performance that you were in some way tossed into the situation. There was necessity. You didn’t have time to second guess. This is often why when we are in training, we achieve and push ourselves far more than we would outside of training. Whether it is for a sports team you’re on, pushing for good grades in school, or training for a big event.

By the principle of relativity, when you’re in that hardship, repeatedly, day in and day out, you get used to it. When I was on vacation, I got used to a new routine of not going to work but staying home and doing other things. When I came back to work, I had some initial inertia because of the nature of change, but an old familiar routine quickly took over. This is fundamental to behavior change. Leveraging it is key to “hacking success” in any objectively hard endeavor.

If you frequently dabble in pleasure on the stimulus spectrum, you’ll always have a recent experience in your mind of how wonderful things can be. So when engaging in struggle, it’s too easy for that recent experience to take over and thus you quit. But if you lean-in and go all in, all you know is the struggle, then you will find yourself achieving a LOT more than you thought was possible. The first few times is the hardest, but once you acquire experience, engaging in the hard becomes the norm.

Upon the initial urge to quit, stick with it, this is the MOST IMPORTANT TIME to push through. It is the most identity reinforcing and confidence boosting. Do this the first time, then the second time, and no matter how unsustainable it seems, if you keep at it, you’ll surprise yourself with how far you’ve gone before you know it. Avoid dwelling on technique or other “meta” thoughts, just engage and do. Be absorbed.

Now are you beginning to see why meaning and purpose are important? Why those who achieve great things REALLY wanted it? Excellence demands all of oneself. Find a meaningful mission and pursue it. The struggle is guaranteed, success is not. So that mission better be something worth pursuing. Those who enjoy the effort process are those who succeed the most. That is what it means to have a growth mindset. To enjoy the struggle for its own sake. Enjoying the feeling of wonder that comes with being puzzled or challenged.

When at this level of engagement, you have no time for meta or to even think. There isn’t room for self doubt. In the tunnel you have HIGH necessity.

In many ways, all that brutal training I engaged in when preparing for my second marathon was because I didn’t want the marathon to be painful. I signed up for it (even before my first marathon!), and my identity includes the integrity of doing what I say I’ll do. So now it was up to me to find a way to be as prepared for the experience as possible. I wasn’t going to walk at all, I wasn’t going to breathe through my mouth at all (and I didn’t). To me, this is what it meant to have “run a marathon”; I had the standard that it meant to run the entire thing. I engaged in this training to ensure I could do so with minimal struggle. This meant I had to get used to the struggle so that, relatively, it felt as if it wasn’t a struggle.

The marathon was a fixed date in the future, I couldn’t change that, and I have a thing about not trusting my future self. So I wanted to do my future self a favor by making the decision to continue running, despite the discomfort, an easy one. I wanted to even be able to relax back knowing I engaged in hell the past few months and this was the last I had to do and I’d have lived up to my expectations I’ve put on my self. It was a relaxing experience as a result.

Now are you beginning to understand the importance of visualizing what you want at some future date and realizing what you have to do to obtain that? It’s like David Goggins and his visualization of graduating as a Navy Seal for the few seconds on stage. He wanted that feeling of accomplishment so bad that he endured Navy Seal training 3 times in a row (the first 2 he was medically discharged). Greatness has a pattern.

Wanting the main performance to be relatively easier is like studying hard for an exam in college so that come game-day, it feels second nature. Furthermore, I know that I could forget about everything on the subject after this point. Sure, I kept pushing after and aimed to retain the information I was studying, but this perspective helped alleviate the anxiety and stress and thus improved my performance. I was more present. I enjoyed the experience more.

If I wanted the marathon to be enjoyable and not hurt as much, then I better work my butt off now. I needed to live and breath the struggle. like David Goggins and his realization of needing to lose 110 pounds in 3 months to qualify for Navy Seals training. His thought was “oh ****, I can’t stop moving!”, he was already committed to being in the seals, it was now just a question of what he had to do to qualify.

The key is “get used to it”, hence the importance of starting SOONER rather than later. Beware “Diminishing Intent”. LEAN IN instead.

THE BIG IDEA: These points are vital experiences to emphasize and bring intensity to. Don’t just let the thought or realization come and go. Really pay it attention. This has a very profound impact on the subconscious and helps shape an identity and a world-view filter. These psychological changes of how you view the world is mostly unconscious, so much so that no one tends to talk about it and thus it flies under the radar for entire lifetimes. We only have one instance of consciousness, and a sample size of one leads to very inaccurate assumptions. Everyone is experiencing the world in vastly different ways and each of us are oblivious to how deep these impacts go.

My objective with my writing is to shine light on how useful going the extra mile, digging deeper into seemingly obvious ideas, can be. So much in life is deceptively simple such that we easily overlook the subtleties.

Summary

Tunneling effectively is an art. If done right, you often won’t know you’re even “tunneling”. You’re just moving with the flow and challenging yourself. This is can trap people in for years on end until they are burnt out. Apply the warning signs mentioned above to build the awareness of when you’re in this state. Over time you can begin minimizing how much baggage you bring with you into the tunnel and how much residue is brought out.

For example, I went through a “Growth Challenge” at my previous employer that consisted of several, self-motivated, challenges to improve our development and deployment process. This lasted 3 months and I worked with my supervisor to provide weekly updates to hold me accountable. This was a tunneling experience. I made sacrifices to hit my targets, I had doubts at times, and I found myself restructuring my schedule to optimize time spent on those tasks.

I didn’t put all the pieces together until afterwards. After the 3 months, I remember reflecting and having a feeling of surprise for how far I went and how much I did. I covered a lot of ground and didn’t really think much about it until after emerging from the tunnel. This reflection helps to add meaning. And suffering ceases to be suffering once meaning is applied.

Note that I wouldn’t of been able to go as far as I did if I kept stopping every few moments during the performance to reflect. I had to set the course beforehand, engage, trust, then during moments of breaks, reflect. This is why the reflection after the performance caused so much surprise, because I was simply less (self-)conscious or self-aware. There wasn’t time to ruminate.

That’s a wrap! I’ve shared insights during my recent experience with high-demand situations. We’ve now explored the Tunnel in depth (;


Featured image by mathias_elle_photography on Pixabay.

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High Performance When You’re on the Hook – Effective Tunneling https://wemaxedout.com/blog/high-performance-when-youre-on-the-hook-effective-tunneling/ https://wemaxedout.com/blog/high-performance-when-youre-on-the-hook-effective-tunneling/#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2021 18:58:36 +0000 https://wemaxedout.wpcomstaging.com/?p=1859 Welcome back to the tunnel! Last time, we got familiar with the “tunnel” metaphor. I introduced how learning can be amplified while in the tunnel. Now we will explore effective tunneling and how you can get the most out of this powerful psychological state.

The Basics of Effective Tunneling

So we’ve seen that being in the tunnel is not necessarily a bad thing. It can promote the focus and neurochemicals necessary for high performance. Let’s now consider how to tunnel effectively to maximize the benefits and minimize the consequences.

Here are the concepts we will explore:

  • Speed of Triage
  • Limiting Overhead in the Tunnel
  • Remaining Level Headed
  • Lean-In Mentality
  • Trust
  • Honor Your Hat
  • Commit

Before we begin, keep the following in mind.

Moderation is key. Just like how acute inflammation is vital after a workout or injury to signal the body to send nutrients via the blood to aid in recovery but yet chronic inflammation is debilitating. Effective tunneling is about getting in and getting out. Hit the workout hard, and then hit the recovery just as intently. Exhaustion and struggle is a given. Beware of the tendency to avoid it. Honor the struggle.

The best workout for you right now is the one you’re not doing. In other words, novelty is the most effective stimulus you can give yourself. If you’re someone who lives in the tunnel already by the nature of unpaid bills, medical problems, or broken relationship, then the overhead in your tunnel is too great to try and leverage this psychological state. You need to first get your life in order.

What you need most in order to continue to grow is that which you are least accustomed to. Hence the importance of exploration.

Just as what is trash to one may be treasure to another, what is needed for effective tunneling to one may be completely different than another. The key is to explore and learn your triggers.

With that, let’s begin exploring my experience. May it serve as a starting point.

Speed of Triage

Triage is a word common in the medical field. In a medical context, it means to quickly assess a patient for urgency of care. If they can be saved but need acte don quickly, they get flagged as high prioirty. This concept applies nicely to addressing problems in the tunnel.

The product I was responsible for as a Developer Lead had bugs that came up during testing. My ability to ensure a high quality product makes it to Production in a timely manner was strongly dependent on how effectively I could determine what needed immediate focus and what didn’t. Bugs usually pop up in quick succession. These are like mini fires. I had to apply organization to make the system of many appear fewer.

That’s a big idea. The more organized you are, the quicker you can determine what “buckets” to put the fires in as they emerge. As soon as you can categorize the problem, your brain will feel enough satisfaction to not dwell on the problem. Just writing it down or placing a reminder in an appropriate location to trigger the necessary thoughts later is enough. This feeling of satisfaction is important to put to rest a worry and clear your mind to think on more immediate items. Those with OCD tend to lack this “satisfaction” feeling, which is closely related to a signal of completion for a task to the brain. OCD patients don’t get this signal until they complete a task perfectly or after some repetition.

Organization is about pattern matching. You build this skill with experience and familiarity. As you progress, you’ll be able to quickly break a problem up into its basic properties. At this time, the appropriate category becomes obvious. This requires high concentration and no “meta-thoughts”.

So, fires can come up and you can quickly filter the noise. You build this skill through experience and high commitment/focus.

While the speed at which you can filter the noise is vital, you also need to know when slowing down is appropriate. For example, I may need to do some research into a technical detail about the application I am responsible for so a developer can get unblocked. If I were to scan the results of an online search, I need to quickly determine what link is worth my time pursuing. Then, once I find something that has potential, I need to slow down and apply patience to ensure I take the time to understand the information.

Alternatively, I may be sifting through new emails for what’s relevant to me. Once I come across something important to the project I am on (e.g. a question from a stake holder or another team), I need to remove clutter and distraction from my environment so I can give the information the attention it deserves. Build the skill of speeding up and then slowing down on demand, with minimal residue.

While I was in the tunnel, I noticed that once I found something worth my time reading, it was easier to limit overhead (anxieties and meta-thoughts). There was less “should I do this”. I was able to commit and trust the process more easily. There was no time to second guess. I had to trust the thin-slice I made when deciding to read further into this information was accurate.

While engaging, I felt timeless. Nothing else mattered; there was a subtle feeling of “this is my life now”. From this, I learned that effective reading or “learning” doesn’t have anything special to it. There’s no magic. Learning often happens without you knowing, such as a path taken during a walk. Just have interest and a strong need or desire to understand. This taught me that I can stop searching for “perfect”, because such a conquest only distracts.

Personally, I’ve found rushing amplifies psychologically added pain. I am more tense and fragile to distraction, always on edge, irritable. When I take a breath and relax into the moment, the struggles are still there, but they hold a weaker grip over me.

Limiting Overhead in the Tunnel

The key to effective tunneling is controlling what fires are in the tunnel with you at any one time. This does not work well if you have too many unrelated things in the tunnel at once. The tunnel should only contain that which is important. For example, if you have a stomach ache, relationship problems, or your basement just flooded, you will have a much harder time being productive at work. There are too many unrelated things in the tunnel demanding attention. This is anxiety.

Hence, it’s important for your life to be in order as much as possible before taking on a high-stakes challenge. Poverty, a broken home, and other unfortunate life-circumstances hinder one’s ability to learn and effectively problem solve. However, there is a lot that can be said about having such a strong purpose for your work that it can withstand even the loudest noise. You can compensate for unfortunate life-circumstances by having a powerful purpose and a strong ability to “forget” unrelated hardships while working on something else. In other words: focus.

Remaining Level Headed

On a similar note to limiting overhead in the tunnel is the importance of staying level headed.

When in the tunnel, I found that I tried new things less and stayed in my comfort zone more. I had to take shortcuts where I could. There was a strong demand for remaining high level. I couldn’t afford to second guess or doubt myself. This helped to simplify the information coming in.

During my experience, I also learned the importance of NOT reacting and staying level headed. Meaning to remain calm when fires come up, such as a new bug. I did this by giving the situation a “blank stare”, this comes with a a “sitting back”, relaxed feeling. This gives me the space to then respond with awareness first before reacting.

I had less meta-thoughts when in the tunnel, less “checks” (reflecting on my mental processes in real time to see if I’m out of line). Thus I found, for example, me sitting far closer to the computer screen than usual (I normally sit several feet back to avoid strain on my eyes). I was making long-term sacrifices for the short-term.

This illustrates the level of focus that is available when in the tunnel. The stakes are so high that you can’t afford to think long-term. This is no place to be at chronically, but if visit periodically, you will reap a big boost in concentration. I found myself being less distracted, less in my head, and less checking “am I doing this right?” (i.e. self doubt).

Lean-In Mentality

I found having a “Lean-In” mentality to be one of most effective ways to stimulate the benefits of tunneling on demand.

This means to lean in to the discomfort, as opposed to trying to avoid the struggle. The first few times will feel like a trust fall, as if there’s an empty void beneath you. But, with experience, you’ll learn that you can stimulate a second wind during fatigue and go far further than you though. This is the power of a simple shift in perspective. The Lean-In mindset removes unnecessary psychological pain and resistance.

When I bias towards action and lean-in to the struggle, I find I can go much further than I would otherwise. I can stimulate a second-wind. The phenomenon of a runner pushing through a “wall” in their running that leads to a renewed sense of energy is exactly an illustration the lean-in mentality.

A helpful cue I use is to lean-in is to approach the discomfort or pain with a sense of curiosity. This feels like a non-judgement, thoughtless, blank-stare. My mind is clear of thoughts, I am in a state of awareness. The best daily practice I’ve found to train this muscle is to take 5 minute cold-showers, while aiming to be as “mindless” as possible, no thoughts in past or future, no concerns, only a deep trust in “this can’t hurt me” (not even those words explicitly, just an intuitive understanding in the form of relaxation). I simply stand there and take it. This trained, over and over, is what builds toughness. Everyone wants to be tough, but you can’t get tough without doing tough things.

Trust

Related to the Lean-In mentality is trusting your intuition. When you doubt yourself you experience a mental halt. This clogs up the thinking process and is a short step away from anxious looping thought patterns. It’s as if the software running our consciousness ran in to an infinite loop once awareness passed a tipping point.

I have a tendency to exhaustively prove everything I come across. The necessity of being in the tunnel alleviated this. I wasn’t constantly monitoring my mental processes when answering questions about our application to ensure every word I stated was factual. This led to speech that was far more abstract but I noticed it didn’t cause nearly as much mental strain as my previous approach. I also found it easier to get into a state of flow, leaving myself impressed with the explanation or solution I just threw together without applying much effort. I was far more present, because once in the tunnel, I can’t afford not to be.

Trust should also be applied to the system, processes, and standards you have in place. Trust the system and follow the system. You need this system in place before entering the tunnel. The idea is to abstract or automated as much overhead as possible. The daily tasks of opening up an application on your computer, logging in, creating tasks/bugs to assign out, knowing where to go to contact a needed resource, etc. should all be auto-pilot activities. Tunneling is far less effective when you have to constantly think about the details.

Have a system in place Understand the process, trust/honor the process. Set, trust, and follow standards. They are your best friend when it comes to filtering out the noise so you can keep the tunnel clean of overhead.

Because all feelings and emotions are experienced as waves (there are peaks and troughs), riding that wave is key to remaining in flow. Self-doubt and too much internal focus while performing causes excessive rumination, destroying presence, and thus performance.

Effective Tunneling requires trust

When studying how to improve a race car’s performance, you deck it out with gadgets that add weight and thus slow it down. This is a necessary trade off.

Like quantum physics, when you observe something, you inadvertently disrupt it. But observation is key for improvement. Once race day comes, you remove the unnecessary weight and trust in the lessons learned during training.

Consider a witty remark, the thought/action/language comes before the awareness does. Therefore, trying to impose awareness prematurely will cause you to choke and overthink. The focus is too internal and thus excessive rumination easily follows. When performing, don’t focus on the technique. Trust the training. Focus on the environment and the task at hand.

Honor Your Hat

A role is like wearing a hat. It comes with a set of properties for the character you are playing. As a Developer Lead, my responsibilities required I focus more on the business-side of things and the higher-level objectives. There is a larger emphasis on communication and knowing tools, contacts, and processes. I was a point of integration between teams and projects. As a Developer, my responsibilities were more on the implementation details of transcribing the solution into working, clean, and efficient code.

Honoring your hat is about knowing what the properties of your current role are, the responsibilities, and removing the noise or residue from other hats. You may need to switch between hats multiple times. As a Dev Lead I occasionally had to go back to writing code. Flexibility is key here. I had to get good at flushing out my tunnel so I can start with a blank slate when I switch hats. This was necessary for effective tunneling.

I bias to taking “Extreme Ownership”. My mentality is “if I am the problem, I am the solution”. Having this approach for the past 5 years has caused strange rippling effects in my life. For example, I stubbornly avoid seeking help when I am stuck on something. I beat away at it until I figure it out myself. If something breaks, I instinctively think I’m responsible.

Furthermore, I have an insatiable itch that builds when someone requests help and everyone else is silent. My urge to be “that person” that volunteers worked against me when I had a lot of other high priority items. Being a “yes man” was a poor strategy. When wearing the Dev Lead hat, I need to mobilize my discipline to keep “aces in their places”.

I value this extreme sense of independence and having it wrapped in my identity makes this bias that much harder to break. I frequently find myself genuinely surprised by how I view the world vastly different than others as a result of this. The typical interpretations or comfort with ambiguity that others show doesn’t come naturally to me. I want to exhaust an idea down to its core and make clear every step along the way. Indeed, I want to do what ACTUALLY gets results, not hand-wavy abstract talk. I think my writing is the clearest representation of this bias, I struggle to state an idea and leave it up for interpretation. I want to ensure what I aim to communicate is communicated. The consequence is being long-winded.

This mentality is great for building discipline. I’d even say it is one of the most effective approaches to life one can take. But, as a Developer Lead, there is just so much information to keep track of and so many pieces at play. Being a Dev Lead is HARD with the mentality of “everything is my fault” and “I’m responsible for it all”. Team-based hats call for TEAM WORK. This is another property of the “Developer Lead” hat. I learned that in large, complex systems, problems will arise, don’t take it personally!

The tunnel is no time Extreme Ownership. Instead, it demands a “whatever it takes” mentality. This approach minimizes meta-thinking and self-doubt, it drives attention and heightens focus. But there are nuances here that I am still learning.

Commit

Commitment is a slippery idea. It’s like a cliche or the word “God”. One can hear it and think they understand but in reality have just substituted their own meaning for the word. This causes the original intent to not be communicated, making the overall communication less effective.

Commitment is slippery because the feeling is so subtle. Furthermore, if you try to then observe it, it dissolves. To truly be committed is to be so absorbed that you forget about the concept entirely. It’s like something that can’t be accurately described, but you know it when you see it.

Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person

Albert Einstein

In other words: Excellence demands all of oneself. This illustrates what I mean by commitment. It’s an unwavering focus paired with unmistakable presence.

The most fool-proof hack I’ve found to promoting commitment is to sacrifice.

Applied to tunneling effectively, this means to sacrifice early on in the tunnel. Take initial risks early. For this to work it has to be genuine risks, you should feel on edge and a bit scared. Because of the inherent risk in sacrifice, focus is honed, the exact kind of focus that comes when in the tunnel. In this way, taking risks is a great way to promote flow and thus stimulate “tunneling” neurochemistry.

You now have skin in the game. This boosts commitment and wraps your sense of identity up in the act itself. Now you’re answering the demand of mastery. This tells your brain you are serious, the situation before you can’t be ignored and a solution must be found. This naturally builds purpose, a feeling that what you do matters.

For example, as a Dev Lead, when I came across bugs or had questions that may expose my lack of understanding, I leaned-in to the discomfort of airing this to others. Even know unrelated bugs to our current activities will mean more work for me and potential distraction, but making this sacrifice shaped my identity as being someone who is committed to the mission.

As you voluntarily sacrifice, you’ll find you can engage with less effort. I have found that I begin to form a stronger opinion about the material I am working with. When a team member posted a question that anyone else could of answered, I chose to answer it myself. This 5 minute engagement made the task under discussion easier to remember during a meeting the next day. I also found that I formed an opinion on the matter. Questions, comments, suggestions, etc. all began to flood in. Effortlessly, I made connections to other problems the team was facing. I added on to my tree of knowledge and learning was amplified. In simple terms: Get close to the problem.

Even if I didn’t understand the original question or objective fully, just typing out a response helped piece things together. I was already committed to responding, now I just didn’t want to sound silly in front of coworkers. The motivation to understand what the issue was about boosted my ability to focus and think deeply on what the actual problem was, like a second wind. Apply this in your own life by being a regular participant in forums for a subject you’re learning. As long as you have integrity and moderately high standards for posing quality questions and responses, learning will feel easier and more enjoyable.

Commitment through sacrifice is VITAL sooner rather than later. The Lean-In mindset helps combat the greatest enemy to effective action, comfort. When the urge to do something you know you should do arises, the memory or longing for comfort may come with it. This can be tempting to lean-out and seep into that familiar, reassuring feeling. After just a split second, the desire for action dwindles away. This fleeting feeling is caused from the principle of Diminishing Intent. The longer you delay in action, the less likely that action will be taken.

The concept of momentum is at play here. If I were to come across a bug while working in the application at my job and brush it under the rug pretending I didn’t see it, I’d have set the stage for future, ineffective, action. The second time brushing a bug under the rug will be easier, and the cycle continues. This is known as the One-Second Decision. They are vital to recognize and master. I talk about this in depth in my article on The Ultimate Guide to Challenge.

The point is, upon entering the tunnel and right before, look for initial sacrifices and risks you can take that reinforce the desired identity for the work at hand. This is a small investment at the optimal point in time to make which will lead to the most bang for your buck. This promotes the right neurochemistry for effective tunneling.

The commitment I gained from these initial identity builders, such as reaching out to team-members when in doubt instead of taking more time and trying to solve it myself, helped develop my connection to the business objectives. I even retained more information, despite being in a high-stakes, “fight/flight” situation. This is likely the result of the neurochemicals promoting focus and interest.

As I leaned-in to my experience of being in the tunnel, I began being able to pattern-match. I built context that allowed me to better answer developer questions during code reviews. I was able to answer high level questions about deployments, priorities, and ordering of tasks. These are all things that I would not have developed as effectively if I hesitated even for a moment.

Summary

Effective Tunneling is about knowing what to focus on and when. Once the thin-slice is made, you can simplify the problem and remove the overhead from the tunnel. Struggles will inevitably come up. You manage them by training your ability to quickly gain perspective on the silliness of the situation so you can remain level-headed and gain space between stimulus and response.

The rest comes down to putting in the work. Effort is required, leaning in without the expectation for a crutch or a helping hand primes your mind to be all in. Reward the effort process. This promotes a growth-mindset that paves the way for long-term progress. Reduce psychologically added pain and resistance by riding the waves of the sensations you feel, whether they are good or bad. See life as a journey and the sensations as not all-consuming, but an experience that will pass.

Recognize the boundaries between focus-areas within the tunnel. Be able to organize the tunnel so that as many things are independently connected as possible so you can simplify the problem and thus reduce how much is in your tunnel at once. Decide on only the next step that needs taken. Remember: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.

That’s how I’ve found to effectively navigate the tunnel! The most effective perspective may be hidden, but it can be found through exploration and curiosity. Once obtained, problems that previously seemed impossible begin to reduce in intimidation. Next time I’ll share what this all meant to me as it relates to my personal experiences.


Featured image by PhtoVision on Pixabay.

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High Performance When You’re on the Hook – Welcome to the Tunnel https://wemaxedout.com/blog/high-performance-when-youre-on-the-hook-welcome-to-the-tunnel/ https://wemaxedout.com/blog/high-performance-when-youre-on-the-hook-welcome-to-the-tunnel/#comments Sun, 17 Jan 2021 16:56:09 +0000 https://wemaxedout.wpcomstaging.com/?p=1855 A fist lands on your face. You didn’t expect this conflict to escalate to physical aggression. Now you feel a subtle weight bear down over your head as your focus narrows. There’s a somewhat peaceful silence as time slows. A tenacious ringing brings you back to the present moment. Within an instant your mental state has shifted and your priorities with it.

This is a crude example. But the change in awareness after physical danger is very acute. Whether a conflict with someone or a broken bone, in an instant, your sense of reality morphs. Nowadays, it is more common to experience this through financial, relationships, or work-related demands. Today, we will explore this dark place, and in the coming articles we will see just how to leverage this opportunity for high performance.

The Tunnel

Necessity is the single biggest driver for change. Tunneling is a metaphore I’ll use to refer to being in a state of high necessity. When you’re “in the tunnel”, there is an attention-demanding situation before you that you’re emotionally invested in. Many of us constantly live in the tunnel, overworking our adrenals and leaving us in a state of burnout. But this isn’t necessarily a bad place to be. In fact, it is a wonderful way to promote rapid learning and high performance. The trick is to be able to enter or exist the tunnel on demand by leveraging some self-awareness.

“Tunneling” is very similar to a fight or flight state. Being in the tunnel has a specific neurochemical signature as well. Norepinephrine is a noteworthy one which shows up in states of flow and high concentration.

I believe neurochemistry is the main driver of all human behavior and experience. To “hack” life then, is all about leveraging it to promote an optimal mental state appropriate for your objective. This is true whether you need the adrenaline to push through the struggles of an impeding dealine or to relax and reflect. There’s a distinct neurological state associated with the optimal performance of everything. Tunneling is just one way to stimulate a particular mental state.

In this article, we will explore the tunnel. We will see what behaviors are common while in it, what you can do to leverage it for rapid learning and high performance, and we’ll learn cues that suggest you or someone around you is currently in the tunnel.

This information can be used to provide rapid onboarding of a new employee. It can help minimize how long it takes you to learn or adapt to change or a new job. What will follow can be helpful in any situation where one must reorient quickly and effectively.

The Structure of The Article

The remainder of this topic will follow this structure. It will be broken into multiple parts.

  • Part 1 – Welcome to the Tunnel
    • What It Feels Like to Be in the Tunnel
    • Benefits of Being in the Tunnel
    • How to Leave the Tunnel
  • Part 2 – Effective Tunneling
    • The Basics of Effective Tunneling
  • Part 3 – Personal Reflections and Takeaways
    • Integrating This All With My Past Experience

The purpose behind this article is to promote an effective mindset for taking Effective Action. To realize the struggles we face are less a result of our “biological age” or “genetic limitations” and more a result of things we have FULL influence over. But recognizing this is subtle and tricky. The thoughts are slippery. they too easily fall out of focus. My writing aims to shed light on the leverage points from which we can influence.

Disclaimer: I personally find being in the tunnel thrilling. This state brings me a lot of focus. This may differ for everyone and there is an adaptation curve to getting used to it. Find what works for you. This proved to be a very fast way for me to pick up responsibilities in a new role at work.

I will present the points above by sharing my experience in taking over Developer Lead (“Dev Lead”) responsibilities on a product during the last month of my previous job. A Developer Lead is a role on a software product team that is responsible for knowing the ins and outs of the product being developed (like WordPress or Facebook, for example). They understand the vision behind new features and have detailed knowledge on a particular aspect of the product. Dev Leads are often involved in meetings with other teams who have questions regarding the aspect of the product you specialize in.

Developer Leads are responsible for a specific aspect of a software product (like the visual editor on WordPress, for example). They serve as a knowledge expert. Additionally, they provide developers with details on features to implement and help troubleshoot bugs. Dev Leads also are responsible for deploying the code behind the software from isolated development environments, to testing environments, and finally to the Production environment (which is what the end-user, like you and I on WordPress, would interact with).

I took over this role out of necessity from the previous lead going on maternity leave. The baby came early and I was thrown in during the middle of a big release with many moving parts. Such an experience inevitably has a lot of high priority tasks to be done. I was 100% in the tunnel for the first week! What follows is me sharing the lessons I’ve learned during this time.

What It Feels Like to Be in the Tunnel

Like many mental states, you won’t easily know you’re “in the tunnel”. Awareness has to be built over time, deliberately.

Below are cues I’ve found useful in recognizing that I am tunneling, for better or worse. They can also be used to recognize if someone else is in a similar high-demand state.

  • You have knee-jerk responses that “brush-off” someone asking questions. Often done because too much is on your plate already.
    • E.g. Someone asks you your thoughts on some work they did that isn’t relevant to you. Your response lacks depth and is abstract.
  • You instantly categorized tasks by their priority. Tasks with irrelevant deadlines are kicked down the road until absolutely needed.
    • E.g. Household maintenance chores such as vacuuming or maintaining cleanliness fails.
  • Quality of your work suffers. You make a lot of assumptions, look for shortcuts, and lean on others.
    • E.g. Review of someone else’s work (e.g. code review) is rushed.
  • Short-term sacrifices or trade-offs are made for the sake of time.
    • E.g. Posture, proximity to computer screen, or other health habits you tend to follow (e.g. exercise or maintenance tasks) slide off.
  • Previous habits of clarity are lost. There’s an added level of difficulty to precisely recall what you’ve said.
    • E.g. Using insider lingo and abbreviations with people you usually are more verbose to, such as technical vocab to non-technical people).
    • I am very stubborn about being verbose and over communicating. I aim to avoid misunderstandings and ensure I communicate exactly what I intended. On multiple occasions, while in the tunnel, I’ve noticed this slipping. My habitual technical terms found their way in conversing with non-technical audiences.
  • Find yourself looking for distraction or constantly checking entry points for fires (e.g. notifications of new tasks or emails).
    • E.g. Eyeing notification icons on your team’s chat application to see if you got a new message that may be higher priority.
  • You frequently find yourself overwhelmed, wondering how there’s enough time for everything. You are irritable, aggressive and “on-edge”.
    • I’ve found that tolerance for this overwhelm and ambiguity can be developed. Know what your tolerance is and at times, push it.
  • Regularly taking the comfortable, familiar, or easy route. You stop voluntarily challenging yourself or trying something new. You fear change.
  • Dodging responsibility. You avoid using decisive language that puts you in the hot seat (e.g. “I will do this … by ….”)
    • E.g. You give an answer to a question posed to you. But you quickly throw the ball back in the asker’s court, such as “<vague answer>, but if I’m wrong, please let me know”.

What Can You Do With This

You have neurochemistry that resembles being in the tunnel with the more of these that applies to you. This is a very stressful state. Exercise is a stressor as well. The key is not to avoid the stressor, but to optimally leverage it to make you better. Moderation. Life is not black and white. No single extreme should be lived in long-term.

None of this is necessarily bad. It is necessary to promote the sort of focus that blinders can bring. The issue comes when these occur chronically or for items that they shouldn’t. If you have a big deadline to meet at work, for peak performance at that work, you need to limit other overhead in the tunnel from messes at home, issues in relationships, financial problems, etc.

This illustrates the importance of getting on top of things and maintaining that organization.

If you’re already in the tunnel for finances, health, relationships, AND work. Then it’t important to consider what you’re willing to sacrifice to make structured slack-time to begin coming up with a plan.

This may mean spending that hour watching TV now listing out what items are in your tunnel, identifying them based on the cues listed above. Then listing what needs done in each of those categories (this doesn’t need be exhaustive, i.e. a simple “next step” is powerful), and to then decide which ONE thing you’ll address first. Looking for quick wins can be useful to build momentum and begin giving yourself breathing room.

The idea of “slack-time” is important. This isn’t idle time, it is structured time devoted to building an attack-plan to ensure future tunneling adventures are as productive as possible by keeping them clear of clutter. We will explore this more shortly.

Benefits of Being in the Tunnel

A tunnel with growing ivy

Tunneling puts blinders on you.

Blinders can limit creativity and cause you to be oblivious to the bigger picture (e.g. your health).

But blinders are great at improving focus.


The Tunnel has the nutrients for growth.

Here are some benefits of being in the tunnel:

  • Rapid Learning
  • Rapid Connection to Mission
  • Focus

Rapid Learning

Rapid learning results from urgency, focus, demand for rapid simplifying, purpose, and a trust in one’s intuition/decisions.

When dealing with many fires at once as a Developer Lead, I found the sense of urgency to greatly enhance my concentration. On the few things I was immersed in, I retained the details very well. The necessity for completion triggers a lot of productive psychological shifts.

The demand for simplifying was extremely high. As a result, I found myself able to filter through noise and break down complex situations. I was acting on intuition and had far less “meta thinking” (thinking about the action, e.g. “am I doing this right?”, instead of taking the action). There wasn’t time to doubt. I found myself instinctively not lingering on problems as much or as easily. My attention residue was minimal.

As a developer, I wasn’t connected to the business-vision that strongly. But once I was a Developer Lead with strong necessity for understanding the bigger picture, I rapidly learned the business objects (including the user view of our application). This taught me that in order to learn the high-level aspects of the business the strongest, being in a position that promotes them is key. Such a position may be a “Business System Analyst” who is responsible for testing the product and understanding how the user will interact with it. A Developer role is encouraged to be myopic. They just need to solve the problem for a given feature, the BSAs are responsible for formulating the problem statements and filtering out the higher-level details.

The principles I found to be at play during this process were the following.

There was a demand that I sacrifice depth for “good enough”. I tend to go deep into a particular topic, exploring the extremes of it before backing off onto the next aspect. As a Dev Lead, I had to let go of this itch. A “depth-first” approach can be very useful in learning the details of a subject you’re already proficient in. But it can demand too much time and mental resources while in the tunnel. If you focus too heavily on one fire, the other fires will easily overtake.

The high stakes situation made me feel important. This caused a feedback loop that increased my commitment and engagement with the work. This added attention made it easier to deal with fires effectively. I retained a lot more new information with this added purpose to my work.

Caveat to This Kind of Rapid Learning

I’ve found that which is learned in the tunnel is often known only on a muscle-memory level. I may be able to repeat the action or recall the information later, but only intuitively. The more I try to consciously recall the steps, the more my performance suffers.

For example, I was studying the Deployment process for my role as a Dev Lead a few weeks before actually starting. This time it was a logical approach, I applied active thought to try to understand the information. But the information felt loose, the application wasn’t clear. It wasn’t until I started the role and had my first big deployment that rested on my shoulders that I internalized the lessons I was learning.

Muscle memory began to kick in and I learned VERY fast the steps involved. I was able to quickly engage in this behavior later under similar high demand because the tunnel required that I not overthink. But once I had the space to try and logically think of what I did, it wasn’t as easy, I found myself visualizing acting it out. This is like trying to explain to someone where the “R” key is on your keyboard. You may find that you have to visualize your hand placement on the keyboard. This is not conscious information, but intuitive or subconscious.

Reflecting on this experience and my interactions with the previous Dev Lead, I gained another insight. The previous Dev Lead struggled to articulate the process when she was onboarding me. I believe this is because she learned the process while in the tunnel during similar high-demand projects.

I believe that which is learned in the tunnel is incorporated into muscle memory more so than in actual conscious thought. The result is you’re able to “feel” your way through the actions to repeat them but lack the ability to articulate what you’re doing. Which suggests whatever brain process is involved for motor-movements more quickly encodes information than the part responsible for abstract information. I think this makes sense, being able to move through space to avoid predators or hunt is more important than “pretending”.

Some people accept this intuitive grasp on the information or skill, and in many cases that’s as far as they need to go. But to elevate to higher performance, you need to get more precise. You do this by conscious effort, which can be frustrating because you may “feel” you know it and get very uncomfortable when you realize you don’t “consciously” know it.

This may be why the best teachers are those who had struggled to learn a subject. They know where the pitfalls are and they likely had moments of frustration and a lot of conscious thought applied to the material. They therefore can apply language to their experience and articulate it in a way that a student can understand.

Those who learned a subject or a skill while in a state that resembles the tunnel (i.e. high urgency, or at least the equivalent neurochemical state) are likely those who struggle to articulate exactly what they’re doing.

So while the Rapid Learning may be welcomed, recognize that to build true understanding, you’ll likely need to reflect on the actions you took when in the tunnel. In this way, a good approach may be to try and learn the subject via conscious thought, thinking deeply about the material, then enter in tunnel-like situations that demand rapid decisions based on your understanding of the material. Then, once outside the tunnel, reflect and connect the theory to the practical.

Rapid Connection to Mission

Commitment is necessary in order to survive in the tunnel. If you’re not all in, you quickly pay for it.

This demand for commitment shapes your identity as you make sense of the time and emotional investment. After all, you wouldn’t be stressing about the fires and giving them so much attention if they weren’t important. This primes the brain to tag the work as important. You may even find it hard to stop thinking about it once you take a break. All of this attention the brain is applying to the task is doing some massive rewiring.

The result is you feel an investment into the tasks at hand. This is a GREAT way to start any major transition in your life, including a new job, school, or an important relationship. Seek out some initial sacrifice that carries with it risk. For example, arriving early and staying late at a new job, while maintaining high quality work and high challenge throughout working hours.

Focus

The necessity the tunnel brings naturlaly causes you to throw out distractions and unproductive habits.

If nothing else, the tunnel helps make obvious what these are so you could address them later. The unforgiving nature of the tunnel demands you to be objective. You’ll learn more and more about yourself and each successive journey through the tunnel will be more and more productive.

How to Leave the Tunnel

The nature of the tunnel is that high-demand tasks are begging for your attention. An untrained individual will get caught in an endless loop of trying to “whack a mole”. You have to break this pattern, which can be uncomfortable. Let’s see how.

Here are a few strategies to leave the tunnel:

  • Create Slack Time to Make a Plan
  • Define a Transition Period
  • Engage in a Post-Mortem

These can be considered an ordering as well. You begin by forming an attack plan by building breathing room. Then, you get a “definition of done” that defines when you should leave the tunnel and how you will make this a defining moment. Finally, you reflect on the experience.

Create Slack Time to Make a Plan

You must find and capitalize leverage point. Creating structured slack time (NOT idle time) is usually a good first step. Finding this time may requires sacrificing something you’re doing now (e.g. watching TV) to formulate an attack plan to get things back in order.

Once you take a step back, briefly leaving the tunnel, you gain perspective. This brief hiatus may even bring powerful insight into problems you were facing while you were heads down. You’ll have an easier time seeing leverage points from this higher-level vantage point. These leverage points may simply be small wins that help clean up the tunnel to give you more air the next time you dive in. They may include the next step or even a full path to finish line.

In short, the idea is to gain distance from the problems of the tunnel. Realize how insignificant those problems will be 10 years from now.

Define a Transition Period

It can help to have a defining moment. Something that draws a line in the sand marking the end of being in the tunnel. The more intense the fires you encountered in the tunnel (such as major health issues in your family from a pandemic), the more intense the transition period needs to be.

Some experiences have a natural transition period, such as finishing a major project at work. Others will require some work and creativity.

For example, consder if the fires you faced involved moving between houses and adapting to living on your own with unexpected house issues. A transition period could be engineered by delaying some pleasure you engage in, such as watching your favorite TV show, until after the move is complete and the leaky basement has been fixed. Then when you finally relax to bing-watch your favorite TV show, take care to relish in how enjoyable it is and then to give a subtle reflection to how far you’ve come. Have a thought of “I’ll be alright” and really buy into it. The key is in the emotional experience of this transition period. Capitalize it as much as you can.

Engage in a Post-Mortem

Post-Mortem here means to simply reflect on the experience you’ve just had. It can help to create an “After Action Report” (something used by the military) to consider what went well, what went wrong, how you could of prepared better, and how you can improve for next time. This can serve as a part of a Transition Period itself.

Another way this helps is by providing a psychological reset.

After a short time in the tunnel, unless all fires have been exhaustively put out, you will often feel inertia from leaving the tunnel. The experience from within can be slightly traumatizing. It is easy to think something will go wrong once you take your eyes off of it. This is a natural side effect of the neurochemistry necessary for tunneling. It’s the price to pay for that high-focus mental state. It’s normal. Don’t beat yourself up when your mind wants to revisit what you have just experienced.

Summary

The tunnel is a metaphor for a psychological state that one is in when under high demands.

Use the cues mentioned above to recognize early warning signs and prevent tunneling when you don’t mean to. You can also recognize when a loved-one is in a high-stress state for long periods of time and thus could use your objective vantage point to provide perspective. Leave a meaningful mark on that period of your life by creating a transition period and reflecting on lessons learned.

That’s the tunnel! It is dark by its very nature, but sometimes the lack of light helps make the important things shine. Stay tuned for next time where we will see how the healing mechanisms of the body during inflammation relates to tunneling for optimal performance.

Thanks for reading!

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Readers: One Chapter is Closing, Another is Beginning https://wemaxedout.com/blog/readers-one-chapter-is-closing-another-is-beginning/ https://wemaxedout.com/blog/readers-one-chapter-is-closing-another-is-beginning/#comments Fri, 01 Jan 2021 17:27:05 +0000 https://wemaxedout.wpcomstaging.com/?p=1725 My original plan of returning a few months ago has not panned out. A unique opportunity came up in my life that required I pivot. I’ve accepted a position at Google that I’ve been working hard towards for a long time. I am now in the works of selling my current house and buying one off in the mountains. This has been a long held objective of mine, to be able to engage intensely in problem solving, writing, or creative endeavors and have nature a few minutes away for me to reset psychologically.

During the past year I’ve learned a lot about my own conscious experience. I’ve also developed vocabulary to articulate exactly what it feels like.

The aim I have for this coming year is simple. It’s to have a platform from which I can sustainably produce meaningful, digestible, and engaging content.

My Mission

The mission I am on has evolved a lot over the past 4 years. But over the past year it has been fine-tuned to a more stable and robust vision.

You can read my latest attempt at articulating it on this page and its younger version in my post on “Throw Out the Crutches: My Mission Statement“. Here is it in brief:

I aim to empower others to explore their conscious experience and provide inspiration to articulate it. I’ll do this through exploring my own conscious experience and sharing the vocabulary and concepts I create to do this in a meaningful way. This includes the struggles and challenges that I voluntarily engage in and the philosophy or mindset I find that allows me to most effectively perform. This is done through Exploration.

Humans are story-creating machines. I believe meaning in one’s life is proportional to their ability to precisely articulate it. Those who can more clearly state their desires and what is worth-wild to them, derive far more meaning out of life. We all know what it feels like to be unable to put to words what’s on our minds or how we feel in a particular moment. It’s disempowering.

I’ve personally found that the more capable I feel in expressing myself accurately and directly, the more content I feel, regardless of the outcome. If a relationship doesn’t go my way but I stated my desires clearly and explored the experience I was having with the other person, then I feel no regret and I am able to move on with a clear conscience. The alternative is regret, longing for a changed past because you didn’t act authentically.

To put it briefly, the more present I am with my day-to-day interactions, the more at peace I am with life. My anxieties melt away. I feel full of love and passion.

My Implementation Intention

Over this coming year I’ll develop an innovative website that allows readers to engage with the content to gain personally meaningful insights. I wish to reimagine what it means to be a “blog” and push the limits to how engaging they can be.

To do this effectively, the areas I’ll need to grow the most in is my ability to articulate an idea in a concise manner and my writing ability.

I tend to be long-winded. When an idea comes in my mind, a plethora of related ideas or caveats come up. I find myself running on a single sentence trying to capture them all. Sometimes I feel the constraints of the English language get in the way of me expressing an idea. But I understand how it makes the idea more obtainable through easy-to-read writing.

Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to AddBut When There Is Nothing Left to Take Away

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Additionally, I’ll need to challenge my perfectionist tendencies in creating “self-containing” content with everything one wants to know about a topic all shoved into a long-winded post. This is hard to sustain. It leaves me in a binary mindset, discouraged to write if I feel I can’t make it complete and perfect.

I am falling in love with the challenge that comes with making a statement that has as much obtainable meaning as possible while having the minimal amount of fluff. In this way, the formation of each sentence is becoming an art to me.

To summarize

Expect to see big changes made to this site as I migrate to a self-hosted platform and gain full customizability in its design.
Expect to see my writing continue to evolve as I explore more impactful ways to transfer an idea from my head to yours.

As these play out, please provide your feedback and criticisms in the comments of the posts or directly to my email through the Contact form.
I am serious about this mission of mine. The past year has only further deepened my resolve. Criticism is encouraged, external feedback is a must.

It has now been a year since I began my blogging journey. If you consider my original walls of text (10-15k word posts, written over once-a-week, 8-12 hour grit-heavy days), my writing has changed a lot. Thank you to everyone who has provided feedback over this time.

Postscript

There are some hosting issues with my current provider that is causing some strange behavior with the Like button. This is something that should be fixed once I move to self-hosting. Thank you to those who have provided feedback while I troubleshooted this.

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Self-Actualization vs Fulfillment: Maximizing Potential https://wemaxedout.com/blog/self-actualization/ https://wemaxedout.com/blog/self-actualization/#comments Sun, 06 Sep 2020 14:48:00 +0000 https://wemaxedout.wpcomstaging.com/?p=1443 I was recently prompted with a few questions regarding Self-Actualization. This is a concept of realizing one’s potential. It is related to Fulfillment in a few ways, which I’ll discuss below. Let’s explore these ideas!

What are some attributes of a lifelong learner? What are some ways you can be a lifelong learner?

  • Curiosity and Exploration. Selfless. Self-objective (view self nakedly). So interested in improving that willing to encourage negative feedback from others so you can gain that valuable other perspective.
  • Explore. Reflect on experiences, both positive and negative. Avoid labeling sensations or objects, be the awareness (open mind, not closed off/resisting).

Why is “realizing your potential” different for each person? What are some ways it can vary? Provide examples.

  • Because everyone perceives reality differently given their past experiences. Each experience is from a unique POV and contributes to the development of the filter through which they view the world.
  • Someone who has a mother who died slowly and painfully due to Dementia may have a strong passion for researching a cure and investing lots of money in organizations to find a cure.
  • …. Every new experience is viewed through your own filter, each new experience contributes to the development of that filter (initial conditions, i.e. childhood or earlier on in a relationship, have a much larger impact and thus influences the filter’s development far more).

What might be some barriers that prevent people from realizing their potential?

  • Incongruence. Societal pressures and a series of past experiences (likely from childhood) that leads them to think their “natural” behavior is not acceptable and thus decades upon decades of living out of alignment with themselves and nature has led to dysfunction and a disconnect from what they truly want. So many layers of problems have been added that the true unsatisfied desire is masked by eating disorders and other higher level manifestations of a much deeper void.

What are some things you can do to move closer to realizing your potential?

  • Explore and have an open mind. Seek out adversity and develop the ability to face it with a blank stare, non-judgmental, and a strong ability to remain level headed. This eliminates the barrier of “getting in one’s own way”. In a word, discipline.

To you, what does fulfillment look like?

  • Evolving the species forward. Living in alignment with nature. Understanding one’s biology and psychology to act in accordance w/ principles of nature while living a life of exploring what those principles are, challenging assumptions and never assuming.
Man ripping shirt like Superman but revealing a universe within him suggesting Self-Actualization.
What are you capable of?

Self-actualization is broader and more robust than fulfillment. What does this mean? Why is this the case?

  • Fulfillment is satisfying a craving.
  • Self-actualization is satisfying the deeper underlying void.
  • Fulfillment is chewing ice to satisfy a craving, self-actualization is realizing you may have an iron deficiency and addressing the root cause.

If you were a self-actualized person, what does it mean to

  • be more likely to deal with reality?
    • You’re in touch with your authentic self, there is no layers of disorders and dysfunctions that obscure the underlying root problem. Therefore you see reality with more clarity, there is no story to satisfy a fantasy or mask hidden fears (and no need for a story).
  • face the unknown?
    • Explore.
  • … creatively solve problems?
    • Express your authentic self, the unique perspective that your experiences have formed, to illustrate a representation of your filter when a particular object or task is given its attention. I.e. the ability to articulate the output of your unique filter.
  • … help others succeed?
    • Listen, not give advice, which is just you imposing your filter/world-view onto someone else who has a very different filter (i.e. series of past experiences) and thus unlikely for such advice to truly be what they need. Others “succeeding” is often simply the other individual realizing what it is that they want and realizing they are capable of achieving it. All that is usually needed is to listen actively and ask thought provoking questions, not to flex your ego and satisfy a dysfunctional need to “feel special”

Where do you think you are personally on the journey to self-actualization? 

  • There is no destination, just as the universe is infinite so is the journey. Any such “destination” would be a human made construct, another story, which

What steps are you taking to further yourself on that journey?

  • Exploring sensation. Voluntarily diving into discomfort with a wide-eye for exploration and a desire for adversity, which is the friction necessary for growth.
    • And then REFLECT on past experiences, integrate them into your sense of self.
  • Give yourself permission to feel the sensations that come up, no judgement or thinking “this shouldn’t’ be”. Seeing every moment of life as an opportunity to enjoy the full spectrum of experience. Exploring the extremes of sensation, knowing that that is how the principles of any system is discovered.
  • Seeing my existence as a servant to the Universe, my life isn’t my own, I am a part of something larger.
    • Whether I experience positive or negative sensations is beside the point, labeling them and judging them is silly given this bigger picture.
      • This isn’t to say I always act in accordance to this, a quick switch of a mental state and the world can reduce down to a single tunnel, a car crash away from thinking nothing is more important than getting out of the immediate danger and resolving outstanding issues.
      • But you learn this, deeply, as a result of seeking out adversity over and over and going through these experiences of doubting yourself and THEN REFLECTING. After a while you learn that all sensation is just a wave, that there is always a different perspective to view any and all situations, that you’re a gunshot away from being a fundamentally different mental state and viewing the world entirely different.
      • A deep understanding of this, through repeatedly seeking out adversity, is how you develop the ability to remain level-headed amongst tough situations. You don’t get tougher by doing what’s easy, and a level head during chaos requires mental toughness.

From follow-up discussions, I found the below to be very interesting points:

  • Self-Actualization is focus on community, whereas Fulfillment is a focus on the individual.
  • Milestones in growth involve a shift from a concentration on self to a concentration on the unity of all things.
    • The process: ME focus -> US focus (others and self) -> WE focus (we are one and the same, devotion to being of service).
    • This process follows many “Creation Stories” (e.g. Adam/Eve) and is analogous to the evolution of consciousness.
      • Awareness (i.e. higher levels of consciousness) requires a period of internal searching, a curiosity of one’s own experience.
        • The brain biases towards its own survival, so without this obvious benefit, the brain will be unlikely to devote vital resources in its exploration.
      • This awareness naturally leads to the “need to feel special”, a me-me-me approach.
    • Even more interesting, is this evolution can be seen not just on the spectrum of humanity’s existence, but also on that of an individual’s.
      • Some humans are further along this evolution than others, some may never even experience higher levels of awareness and remain on a lower frequency. Adversity and proper reflection is the key ingredient to effective evolution of consciousness.
    • More and more you realize that you’re a piece to a larger puzzle. More and more the brain realizes that for its survival it is more than just caring for the physical body, but that the body itself is connected to everything. We are all made of space dust.
  • Fulfillment is an inevitable roadblock that one must trip over regularly to realize that it’s the wrong approach/focus.
    • I.e. addressing the symptoms over and over and still getting that short-term satisfaction but realizing that it doesn’t last.
    • Fulfillment is inevitable because it is so tangible and the rewards are immediate, like chewing ice to fix a craving that represents an underlying desire for iron (i.e. such a craving for ice may be caused by an iron deficiency).
      • Chewing the ice satisfies the craving.
        • This satisfaction, regardless of addressing root-cause, is what fulfillment is about.
        • Self-Actualization is a deeper idea that is about addressing the underlying root-cause.
      • It is natural, and even smart, to go for the solution that seems to work. But real intelligence and wisdom shows in learning that this satisfaction is short-lived and that a more strategic and thoughtful approach is needed.

Closing Words

  • Contact Me HERE for collaboration on prompts. We can come up with questions and each create our own post on our answers. Then create a post for the other person that shows our reaction to the other’s responses.
  • I want to hear from YOU. What are your thoughts on Self-Actualization and Fulfillment. Are these even worth thinking about? Share in the comments section below!

Afterword

Thank you for reading!

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