Mass Productivity to Mass Consciousness: Understanding Narcissism, Shame, and the Prevalent Desire to Self-Actualize

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

photo: BetterWorks

There is a undoubtedly a change in our culture, a revolution at large.

More students (and people in general) are embracing the risky and uncertain path of the entrepreneur/artist. The education system is being challenged more than ever. Online platforms—whether it be your own blog, Facebook or Twitter—is a part of who we are, what we do, why and how we do things. A business no longer requires a storefront but a forefront, whether it be a website or an app on your phone. Access to education and information? Right at your fingertips. How to do anything? YouTube. Some of the greatest books cost more to ship to your home than it is to purchase.

As Steven Pressfield eloquently observes in his Writing Wednesday series, he calls it The Free-Agent Mindset:

We—meaning anybody now living in the globalized/digital/satellite-linked/worldwide-web world—are faced with the challenge and obligation to make a primal shift in consciousness. This shift is as cosmic, I believe, as the transition from illiteracy to literacy in the Gutenberg era, from farm to factory in the days of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and all the post-Industrial Age changeovers since.

I’m not talking about external changes. Those are obvious. What’s perilous and critical and what we all need to become conscious of is the stuff inside. How have we had to change our minds and our ways of thinking about the world and about ourselves?

The poster child of this cultural and world change are the Millennials—or what Time has called, The Me Me Me Generation; also known as Generation-Y. This encompasses a group of individuals born from the years of 1980 to 2000.

The article goes on to express how my generation is lazy, entitled, narcissistic, and suffer from phantom pocket-vibration syndrome, but equally important, why we are capable of changing the world. Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation says:

At 80 million strong, they are the biggest age grouping in American history. Each country’s millennials are different, but because of globalization, social media, the exporting of Western culture and the speed of change, millennials worldwide are more similar to one another than to older generations within their nations. Even in China, where family history is more important than any individual, the Internet, urbanization and the one-child policy have created a generation as overconfident and self-involved as the Western one.

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They are the most threatening and exciting generation since the baby boomers brought about social revolution, not because they’re trying to take over the Establishment but because they’re growing up without one. The Industrial Revolution made individuals far more powerful—they could move to a city, start a business, read and form organizations. The information revolution further empowered individuals by handing them the technology to compete against huge organizations: hackers vs. corporations, bloggers vs. newspapers, terrorists vs. nation-states, YouTube directors vs. studios, app-makers vs. entire industries. Millennials don’t need us. That’s why we’re scared of them.

Productivity has reached its true potential and now it’s time to reach ours. The focus nowadays seems to be going from external systems to internal systems (our self-talk, perception, worldview, etc.). Mastering our internal system—like the way the Industrial Age mastered productivity and created a safe, solid, and fruitful foundation for society to flourish—is imperative to innovation, growth, creativity, and learning.

But most importantly, it is essential for us to understand the cause of this narcissistic tendency in Millennials, and the most recent book that I read by Brené Brown, Daring Greatly, says it with utter brilliance. She defines shame as, “Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” Now let’s tie this to the topic of narcissism; she goes on to say:

The topic of narcissism has penetrated the social consciousness enough that most people correctly associate it with a pattern of behaviors that include grandiosity, a pervasive need for admiration, and a lack of empathy. What almost no one understands is how every level of severity in this diagnosis is underpinned by shame. Which means we don’t “fix it” by cutting people down to size and reminding folks of their inadequacies and smallness. Shame is more likely to be the cause of these behaviors, not the cure.

For example, when I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose. Sometimes the simple act of humanizing problems sheds an important light on them, a light that often goes out the minute a stigmatizing label is applied. This new definition of narcissism offers clarity and it illuminates both the source of the problem and the possible solutions.

When MySpace first came out—and after years of reflecting on my own behavior and lust for attention and acknowledgement—I briefly understood the power and function of an online profile. I saw—at the time of thinking this way—losers being somebody. Now, I realize the “shame-based fear of being ordinary.” Maybe that’s why I put up pictures of Johnny Depp or Colin Farrell smoking a cigarette or looking cool because I wanted to express that I felt or behaved this way. Maybe it was in hope to connect with others who were intrigued by these people. At the core of it, we yearn and would do anything for connection, to be acknowledged and accepted by the community—sometimes at the sacrifice of our own values, beliefs, and well-being.

As Brené Brown further explains on how we protect ourselves from shame and the outcome of being relentlessly pummeled by shame, I can’t help but agree with all the points that she makes:

The part of this definition that is critical to understanding shame is the sentence “People will do almost anything to escape this combination of condemned isolation and powerlessness.” Shame often leads to desperation. And reactions to this desperate need to escape from isolation and fear can run the gamut from numbing to addiction, depression, self-injury, eating disorders, bullying, violence, and suicide.

Shame breeds fear. It crushes our tolerance for vulnerability, thereby killing engagement, innovation, creativity, productivity, and trust. And worst of all, if we don’t know what we’re looking for, shame can ravage our organizations before we see one outward sign of a problem. Shame works like termites in a house. It’s hidden in the dark behind the walls and constantly eating away at our infrastructure, until one day the stairs suddenly crumble. Only then do we realize that it’s only a matter of time before the walls come tumbling down.

We humans are resilient, and when our brains encounter a first-time experience, it figures out a way to deal with it. Like the first time someone cut you off on the road, your initial reaction may have been to flip them the finger or lay your palm on the horn. Why, exactly, do many of us do this?

We humans have demands—like being treated fairly—and when those demands aren’t met, there are usually cognitive or behavioral errors. Every time I see someone Facebooking or tweeting a status about their misery, a person who is trying to be something they aren’t, bullying, addiction, etc., I see shame and fear. It’s inescapable. When I hear a guy ranting at the bar saying, “Don’t ever get married!!” I smell shame and fear.

Shame kills innovation, creativity, connection, and learning. How many of us were bullies or considered ourselves losers throughout school? How many of us tie our self-worth to the letter grade at the end of a semester or a sales quota at the end of the quarter? How many of us have tried so hard to fit in, only to be expunged from those who we seek their admiration and attention? How many of us have changed our wardrobes not because we genuinely like the style and that it accentuate our features, but because it accentuates the opinions of others about us?

Allow me to connect another dot here, one stated in The War of Art by Steven Pressfield [emphasis in the passage by me]:
Most of us define ourselves hierarchically and don’t even know it. It’s hard not to. School, advertising, the entire materialist culture drills us from birth to define ourselves by others’ opinions. Drink this beer, get this job, look this way and everyone will love you. What is a hierarchy, anyway?   Hollywood is a hierarchy. So are Washington, Wall Street, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. High school is the ultimate hierarchy. And it works; in a pond that small, the hierarchical orientation succeeds. The cheerleader knows where she fits, as does the dweeb in the Chess Club. Each has found a niche. The system works. There’s a problem with the hierarchical orientation, though. When the numbers get too big, the thing breaks down. A pecking order can hold only so many chickens. In Massapequa High, you can find your place. Move to Manhattan and the trick no longer works. New York City is too big to function as a hierarchy. So is IBM. So is Michigan State. The individual in multitudes this vast feels overwhelmed, anonymous. He is submerged in the mass. He’s lost. We humans seem to have been wired by our evolutionary past to function most comfortably in a tribe of twenty to, say, eight hundred. We can push it maybe to a few thousand, even to five figures. But at some point it maxes out. Our brains can’t file that many faces. We thrash around, flashing our badges of status (Hey, how do you like my Lincoln Navigator?) and wondering why nobody gives a shit. We have entered Mass Society. The hierarchy is too big. It doesn’t work anymore.
I believe the reason why so many people are frustrated today is because they have an innate desire to self-actualize, to find their purpose, to do something meaningful—and knowing what I know about the current workplace and the education system (the environments that nurture us) these systems are not facilitating it but rather obstructing it. Hence, why I think a lot of the Millennials are always searching for a new hit of dopamine through their screens, hoping to find connection and acknowledgement that they yearn to achieve.
But there is a shift.

The Time article further explains:

Companies are starting to adjust not to just millennials’ habits but also to their atmospheric expectations. Nearly a quarter of DreamWorks’ 2,200 employees are under 30, and the studio has a 96% retention rate. Dan Satterthwaite, who runs the studio’s human-relations department and has been in the field for about 23 years, says Maslow’s hierarchy of needs makes it clear that a company can’t just provide money anymore but also has to deliver self-actualization.

It goes on to say that employees are able to take classes like photography, sculpting, painting, and karate. That’s pretty amazing and a core example of how the workplace can shift from rudimentary tasks to finding fulfillment, attaining mastery, creating value, and embracing purpose.

So what matters now?

Seth Godin, in his latest book, The Icarus Deception, is one that ought to be read by anyone who wants to understand the vast changes in our culture, workplace, and ultimately ourselves:

It’s easy to become a self-paraody, whining about the imperfections in an almost perfect world that gets more perfect all the time. We finally got the industrial world working the way it was supposed to; we found our safe spot, our mortgage and our houses and our dream in the suburbs. The connection revolution has made it easier to find what we want, get what we want, and complain about what we didn’t get.

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Can we really produce more shiny objects to delight an ever-growing population? Can we give the people who already have endless stuff even more pleasure by giving them more stuff? The economy we live in today is very different from the one our parents grew up in. We have a surplus of choices, a surplus of quality, a surplus of entertainments to choose from. We have big-box stores and big-box storage units and big-box debt. But we’re still lonely. And we’re still bored. The connection economy works because it focuses on the lonely and the bored. It works because it embraces the individual, not the mob; the weird, not the normal.

This shift from “how can we make the world more awesome” to “how can we make ourselves more awesome so the world becomes more awesome” is a spark that has caught the attention of many and will soon spread like wildfire. We are leaving (or already left) the Industrial mindset and now starting to embrace a new one—one that is focused on championing our innate, human desires. The machine is oiled and running well, but the operator is sick and tired. Time for a change.

Like Steven Pressfield said, “How have we had to change our minds and our ways of thinking about the world and about ourselves?”

There are certain underlying patterns and themes that reflect what I’m talking about—mastery, autonomy, and purpose. Dan Pink offers empirical evidence in his insightful book, Drive, on what motivates us and what we should be focusing on:

Humans, by their nature, seek purpose—a cause greater and more enduring than themselves. But traditional businesses have long considered purpose ornamental—a perfectly nice accessory, so long as it didn’t get in the way of the important things. But that’s changing—thanks in part to the rising tide of aging baby boomers reckoning with their own mortality. In Motivation 3.0, purpose maximization is taking its place alongside profit maximization as an aspiration and a guiding principle. Within organizations, this new “purpose motive” is expressing itself in three ways: in goals that use profit to reach purpose; in words that emphasize more than self-interest; and in policies that allow people to pursue purpose on their own terms. This move to accompany profit maximization with purpose maximization has the potential to rejuvenate our businesses and remake our world.

Indeed, there is no escaping the wonder and changes going on in our world.

However, it’s important to make a distinction. Seeking purpose such as how to make more money isn’t effective in the long run—how can I make money quicker to buy this Gucci bag sooner so that others can accept me ASAP?

Pink shows a study on students graduating from the University of Rochester entering the real world. The study focuses on two groups with two separate goals—money versus purpose:

Some of the U of R students had what Deci, Ryan, and Niemiec label “extrinsic aspirations”—for instance, to become wealthy or to achieve fame—what we might call “profit goals.” Others had “intrinsic aspirations”—to help others improve their lives, to learn, and to grow—or what we might think of as “purpose goals.” After these students had been out in the real world for between one and two years, the researchers tracked them down to see how they were feeling. The people who’d had purpose goals and felt they were attaining them reported higher levels of satisfaction and subjective well-being than when they were in college, and quite low levels of anxiety and depression. That’s probably no surprise. They’d set a personally meaningful goal and felt they were reaching it. In that situation, most of us would likely feel pretty good, too. But the results for people with profit goals were more complicated. Those who said they were attaining their goals—accumulating wealth, winning acclaim—reported levels of satisfaction, self-esteem, and positive affect no higher than when they were students. In other words, they’d reached their goals, but it didn’t make them any happier. What’s more, graduates with profit goals showed increases in anxiety, depression, and other negative indicators—again, even though they were attaining their goals.

The shift from mass productivity to mass consciousness is a movement, a revolution. We can pinpoint our behaviors that spawned from shame and make new decisions and adopt new beliefs tomorrow. It is clear that money doesn’t buy happiness, but rather the pursuit of mastery, autonomy, and purpose creates it. Many Gen-Ys may be narcissistic and entitled, but nevertheless, the establishment they’re growing up in, the tools that are available and that are being created can facilitate self-actualization, pursuing meaningful work, creating revolutionary ideas and products, and leaving a dent in the universe.

There is always an ominous smell before it storms. It would be wise for us to start planting some new seeds now.

Mastery: A Possible Panacea for The Pursuit of Meaningful Work and a Vibrant Life

Leonardo da Vinci self portrait, Chambord Castle, Loire Valley, France - The metallic stone effect is generated by computer

photo: MAMJODH

Whenever I hear of someone not knowing what they want to do with their life, I empathize and wholeheartedly understand their frustrations. After years of studying this common dilemma and overcoming it in my own life, I believe the fulfillment that we seek is found in the pursuit of mastery.

Abraham Lincoln once said: “Whatever you are, be a good one.”

I believe the solution to feeling stuck is picking something—and not limited to just one craft—and becoming so great at it that it becomes your Life’s Task, as Robert Greene calls it in his latest book, Mastery. Certain crafts come to mind such as writing, graphic design, coding, painting, music, architecture, etc. Leadership and making brave decisions and solving difficult problems are skills too. The pursuit of mastering a craft, I believe, provides a deep sense of meaning in our lives and gives us a platform to contribute.

Or, put more eloquently by James Rhodes, a concert pianist: “Find what you love and let it kill you.”

With initiative comes fear. Fear of failure, of not making ends, of uncertainty, and of greatness. Succumbing to a safe, routine job that doesn’t evoke your inclinations, passion, or skills is the norm. It sustains life, but doesn’t fulfill it. Why is it that most people hate their jobs?

Roberte Greene—known for his meticulous methodology in providing rich research by using patterns in history and its heroes, and deeply thought-out books on power, seduction, and purpose—offers a compass to those who need help finding their Life’s Task. Here’s how he defines it:

“The process of realizing your Life’s Task comes in three stages [emphasis by me]:

First, you must connect or reconnect with your inclinations, that sense of uniqueness. The first step then is always inward. You search the past for signs of that inner voice or force. You clear away the other voices that might confuse you—parents and peers. You look for an underlying pattern, a core to your character that you must understand as deeply as possible.

Second, with this connection established, you must look at the career path you are already on or are about to begin. The choice of this path—or redirection of it—is critical. To help in this stage you will need to enlarge your concept of work itself. Too often we make a separation in our lives—there is work and there is life outside work, where we find real pleasure and fulfillment. Work is often seen as a means for making money so we can enjoy that second life we lead. Even if we derive some satisfaction from our careers we still tend to compartmentalize our lives this way. This is a depressing attitude, because in the end we spend a substantial part of our waking life at work. If we experience this time as something to get through on the way to real pleasure, then our hours at work represent a tragic waste of the short time we have to live.

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Finally, you must see your career or vocational path more as a journey with twists and turns rather than a straight line. You begin by choosing a field or position that roughly corresponds to your inclinations. This initial position offers you room to maneuver and important skills to learn.

When I was in this position, I chose writing. At the time of this decision, all I did was really play video games—seriously. I always seemed to have a strong opinion. In the game, in the chatrooms or in forums, I was always able to spark a conversation. Not trolling, of course, but real debates on the functionality of the video game and what the creators ought to do to improve it.

When sitting down with my best friend/mentor, he helped me outline my strengths, weaknesses, and ultimately the kind of lifestyle I desired to live. It is then that he introduced me to blogging, having my platform, understanding the internet, etc.

Fast forward about three years, and here I am, still doing what I enjoy/love most, slowly but surely mastering the skill by exercising it daily, creating new opportunities to use my expertise, and at the same time, building a life where it sustains my desires, aspirations, and curiosity.

In The Start-Up of You, Reid Hoffman shares the story of Sheryl Sandberg, current CEO of Facebook:

Today, Sheryl is the chief operating officer of Facebook, where she is in charge of the company’s business operations. She serves on the boards of Disney and Starbucks. Fortune named her one of the most powerful women in business.

You might think someone so successful knew her goals and aspirations from day one, and followed a rigorous and ambitious career plan to achieve them. But you’d be wrong. Sheryl hasn’t stuck to a conventional career plan. In fact, as an idealistic undergraduate majoring in economics she never imagined that she would one day be working in the private sector, much less as a top executive for one of the world’s most valuable companies. Sheryl began her career in India, about as far as one could get from Silicon Valley. There she went to work on public health projects for the World Bank. It was a first job consistent with deeply embedded values: to give back to those less fortunate and to make a difference in the world.

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Yet after a couple of years with the World Bank, Sheryl shifted course and left the public sector to enroll at Harvard Business School, where she earned an MBA. From academia, her next stop was the business world. But after a one-year stint at management consulting firm McKinsey, she realized the corporate track wasn’t for her; so she shifted yet again, this time to Washington, DC, where she served as then U.S. Secretary of Treasury Larry Summers’s chief of staff from 1996 through 2001.

She then went on to work for Google as vice president of global online sales and operations. She grew the company’s online sales and turned a group of four individuals into a global team of thousands; she was responsible for the growth of Google Ad Sense and Google Adwords—Google’s top revenue generating engines. After six years at Google, she pivoted yet again, but this time to Facebook.

Hoffman also mentions the idea of being aware of your assets.

Assets are what you have right now. Before dreaming about the future or making plans, you need to articulate what you already have going for you—as entrepreneurs do. The most brilliant business idea is often the one that builds on the founders’ existing assets in the most brilliant way. There are reasons Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google and Donald Trump started a real estate firm. Page and Brin were in a computer science doctoral program. Trump’s father was a wealthy real estate developer, and he had apprenticed in his father’s firm for five years. Their business goals emerged from their strengths, interests, and network of contacts.

The resume is no longer a valuable currency—experiences are.

The trouble in finding work that provides fulfillment, work that relentlessly challenges you and helps you contribute, is ultimately the fear of serendipity and the fear of being an amateur. What if you started to learn how to code? How will you know if it’s the right path? This riskiness unmans us. We usually want solid, concrete plans so that we know where we’re heading. We want to know which boxes to check off and which obstacles to hurdle so that we can have what we want.

Alas, that is not how great careers are forged. It turns out that the strongest careers are non-linear.

Hoffman provides some more insight on Sandberg’s career path. This also relates to what Robert Greene said earlier in finding your Life’s Task, in that “you must see your career or vocational path more as a journey with twists and turns rather than a straight line. You begin by choosing a field or position that roughly corresponds to your inclinations. This initial position offers you room to maneuver and important skills to learn”:

Sheryl’s story contradicts the analogous assumption that massively successful people find their calling at an early age, devise a bulletproof life plan, and then follow it unwaveringly until attainment. Sheryl’s career plans wasn’t something she crafted once in her early twenties and then followed blindly. She didn’t assemble a bunch of dominos, knock over the first piece, and then sit back and watch the rest fall into place over time. Instead of locking herself in to a single career path, she evaluated new opportunities as they presented themselves, taking into consideration her (ever-growing) set of intellectual and experiential assets. She pivoted to new professional tracks without ever losing sight of what really mattered to her. “The reason why I don’t have a plan is because if I have a plan I’m limited to today’s options,” she says.

What we can focus on, like Sheryl Sandberg did, is creating value. What value are we creating for others? A graphic designer does what you can’t because not only did they develop an eye for it, but it overshadows nearly every aspect of their life. Wherever they go, they can be inspired, because the art of designing is ultimately the art of seeing. They go from “Oh, that’s interesting,” to “Oh, I can steal this and morph it into something of my own.” As Pablo Picasso once said: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.”

When I first started writing, I never admitted it to anyone. Looking back, I was ashamed. Ashamed to be viewed as a beginner. Ashamed to be viewed as a 20-something-year-old college student who decided to do, of all possible things, writing. How did I gain confidence to keep going? Practicing, shipping, and learning, i.e., signing up for online courses or asking for help—the very acts that elicit fear and self-doubt but ultimately reshape who you are.

You don’t find your purpose, you create it

My first realization was when I landed a guest post on Problogger. Then another big blog. Then another. I finally realized, Wait, I can do this writing thing. I’m actually getting pretty good. Now I write for multiple popular blogs, self-publish books, created an awesome manifesto, did a ghostwriting gig, some freelance work, etc. This may seem linear, but I would disagree, because anything could happen from here on out. There are plenty of writers just like me who won’t self-publish or write a manifesto, but instead, may start a company or become an editor for a magazine or start a podcast. Anything can happen. But the focus remains the same: creating value, practicing the craft, and adapting to opportunities.

Pursuing a path is scary. It means that tomorrow requires a newfound commitment. The pressure, anxiety, and fear of practicing your craft and exposing yourself only increases with time. But this pressure and being able to overcome your own negative self-talk forges you into something greater. We look up to our heroes in a specific niche because they overcome, everyday, the pressures and fears of creating value and doing meaningful work. This is a pattern, and it is worth understanding.

Lastly, I want to end with a passage from The War of Art, written by one of my favorite authors, Steven Pressfield. I’m hoping this scares you in a way to make you realize that inaction is far more detrimental than failing.

Have you heard this story: Woman learns she has cancer, six months to live. Within days she quits her job, resumes the dream of writing Tex-Mex songs she gave up to raise a family (or starts studying classical Greek, or moves to the inner city and devotes herself to tending babies with AIDS). Woman’s friends think she’s crazy; she herself has never been happier. There’s a postscript. Woman’s cancer goes into remission. Is that what it takes? Do we have to stare death in the face to make us stand up and confront Resistance? Does Resistance have to cripple and disfigure our lives before we wake up to its existence? How many of us have become drunks and drug addicts, developed tumors and neuroses, succumbed to painkillers, gossip, and compulsive cell-phone use, simply because we don’t do that thing that our hearts, our inner genius, is calling us to? Resistance defeats us. If tomorrow morning by some stroke of magic every dazed and benighted soul woke up with the power to take the first step toward pursuing his or her dreams, every shrink in the directory would be out of business. Prisons would stand empty. The alcohol and tobacco industries would collapse, along with the junk food, cosmetic surgery, and infotainment businesses, not to mention pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and the medical profession from top to bottom.

If you’re saying, “I don’t know what I want to do with my life,” then let me offer an option: start something, fail hard, learn from it, adapt and pivot, then try again.

Focus on mastering a skill and leveraging it to embark on other endeavors. Let the very idea of using your hands or transferring thoughts to words or communicating with design devour your day and ultimately yourself. There is no time to think, or even care, about the latest scandal—it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t help you do better work.

The first person who found buried treasure didn’t sit in their room or ship and think of possible solutions to obtain lost riches. They used the resources available and started digging.

(I’ve never really written an article like this, but I might start doing so—focusing on a topic, using my research, while tying in my own story/opinions. Did you like this article? Should I write content like this more often? I’d appreciate your feedback.)

The Habit of Failing Forward

I willed it everyday and believed in it like the Pope believes in God.

A few months ago I applied for 99U’s new feature, Workbook. It’s about providing bite-sized bits of knowledge on many topics: creativity, productivity, shipping, management, art, etc.

It was perfect.

I told all my friends about it, and most reactions were, “Dude, that has your name written all over it. Isn’t that what you do right now?”

Even while I was laying on the beaches of Cancun, Mexico, on Spring Break, with my best friends, drink in hand, all I could think about was the email. All I thought about was my semester ending, getting back into devouring books, taking the insight and posting up articles.

Of course, it didn’t happen.

I’m sitting in class and an email notification pops up. At a glance, I saw the email address and immediately knew who it was and what it was about. I clicked it, saw a short email, and pretty much knew right away.

“Unfortunately, we’ll be moving ahead with other candidates,” said one of the sentences.

Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?

said Marcus Aurelius.

The professor’s voice started to fade. I could hear the blood swooshing around my face. My hands became brick-cold. I didn’t want to believe it.

“Fuck the Universe,” I kept thinking. And then Aurelius’s quote kept counteracting and reverberating in my head.

I took a few deep breathes to calm down. I realized I was feeling this way because of what I was telling myself: An event occurred (me failing to get my dream opportunity); I then had a belief about it (I’m not worthy; I’m a terrible writer; my email submission sucked); and luckily for me, due to constant practice and awareness, my emotions didn’t dictate my behavior, i.e., flinging my laptop across the room. More deep breathes.

As Hunter S. Thompson once said: ”Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

I bought a ticket, took the ride, and arrived at a place where I didn’t want to be. What can I do?

What we all should do when this happens to us: move on.

Transmuting Failure

The next time you experience failure do the following:

1) Breathe: It’ll be okay. You missed the train, so what? Another will come. Breathe. Realize this: without breathing, without pausing, you will go back to stupid methods of dealing with your frustrations. Now is not the time. You have shit to do. Breathe.

2) Acknowledge it; what can you learn?: You failed. Great. What did you learn? What can you do different next time? How can this failure empower you to do better work? How much better off are you now that you experienced this event and survived? Is dwelling on this failure going to turn the failure into a success? Ask yourself these questions and you will find clarity.

3) The Universe: The universe, the universe, the universe. Good ol’ law of attraction. Is it real? I don’t know. Your perception is your reality. The only two things that are real are matter and energy. Sometimes you just can’t win’em all. A pattern that I noticed is the people who do meaningful work experience more failures than success, and maybe for a good reason. The habit of blaming external factors is fruitless and won’t last in the long haul; a worthy habit to invest in is how you react.

4) What’s next?: Like your To-Do list, what’s next? You arrived at a place you didn’t want to be. You learned your lesson. You accept the failure and refuse to use it as an excuse to delay or complain but rather to move forward and do something else. Reassess your situation—especially if this was a bigger-than-normal failure. What can you do next that matters? What will help you explore, learn, and grow? Focus on that.

Failure, adversity, downfalls, bruises, pressure, fear—these are all part of life, an accommodation to taking risks and choosing yourself. This is what you get for suiting up and not sitting on the bench. If you are facing these elements, then I applaud you, keep going.

And if aren’t, then you know where you stand and probably have an idea of where you should go.

The Event or The Emotion?

Which came first?

Was it the criticism that angered you or did you make yourself angry?

Was it the article that went against your worldview that angered you or was it you that angered you?

Perception is mediated thought, not immediate. It is how you collect, organize, and think about it. Sensation—like putting your hand on a table and feeling cold, hard, smooth—is immediate. “Oh, this table feels good,” is not a sensation, but rather perception—it is what we tell ourselves about the table that creates how we feel about it. Understand?

The same goes for every aspect in your life.

The driver that cut you off this morning wasn’t the cause of your rage. It was you.

The co-worker, yoga instructor, and gym buddies that are yapping away aren’t the cause of your irritation. You are.

Sure, the waitresses at Outback Steakhouse may have been stonewall, but she wasn’t the one who made you feel that way. You created it by what you were telling yourself. You had demands, expectations, and beliefs about how you should be treated. It’s not like you’re telling yourself this as you’re opening the wooden doors and asking for a table for two, but it is embedded in your mind, in your belief system.

Because these demands and expectations aren’t being met, you tell yourself (cognition/thoughts) about the event based on your beliefs. Instead of saying, “She’s just having a bad day, poor girl”—which would suppress anger—you become angry because you’re telling yourself, “What a horrible worker. This food sucks. This experience sucks. Call the manager.” Blah blah blah. Stop doing that to yourself.

This isn’t some spiritual zen practice or something that isn’t available to everyone. This is how our mind works. This is what they teach you in Psychology of Consciousness. The way we perceive the world, the stories we tell ourselves about an event or person or thing, feels like it’s automatically happening. That’s because it is. That’s because we are aware after the fact that we were being a bit harsh … or not harsh enough. We are fierce creatures of habits, and habits are automatic behaviors, meaning we are unconscious of it.

So yes, lashing out and creating stress and being angry is a habit that you created. It is how you deal with the events in your life. And only you can change this.

The only way to change a habit is to be conscious of what you’re thinking, feeling, and doing. You have to pause and do a little introspection. You have to reflect on what you do. This helps you become self-aware.

As Marcus Aurelius once said:

Your ability to control your thoughts — treat it with respect. It’s all that protects your mind from false perceptions — false to your nature, and that of all rational beings. It’s what makes thoughtfulness possible, and affection for other people, and submission to the divine.

Practice

The assignment for today is to realize that you are responsible for how you feel.

Do you ever go a day without feeling frustrated? Think about that.

Remember:

  1. An event has to occur—someone cuts you off, hands you a cold steak, steps on your shoes, says that your book or song or piece of art is horseshit. 
  2. You have a belief about this event. This is how you perceive what has just happened; this is mediated thought. Although you are not saying it out loud, you are telling yourself in your mind, “How dare they” or “Wow, they’re right, I do suck.” In turn, you create an emotion based on what you’re telling yourself, based on what you believe.
  3. Your emotions, to a great extent, control how you behave. When you create anger, you use anger.

This kind of mindfulness, this ability to control how we think, feel, and behave, is a practice. I fail all the time. I lash out, too. But that’s what the practice is for. You get better at it with time. You become more self-aware and more mindful.

The daily practice of realizing this strength can help you regain the freedom that is rightfully yours. Freedom from self-sabotage, from excuses, from pandering, from focusing on things that do not help you grow, learn, and explore.

“Who’s in charge here?!” says the angered patron.

“You are,” the mind says.

Paying Mind to Unnecessary Provocations

Why do most people care about celebrity marriages or an athlete’s scandal?

I opened a Time magazine and one of the first things I saw was, “SCANDAL: Beyoncé and Jay-Z caught flak for vacationing in Havana despite the U.S.’s decades-old trade embargo.” Really? Can someone show me a picture of their I-care-face?

I saw a guy on twitter post a picture of Kim Kardashian’s twitter feed showing a tweet about how her heart was broken about the Boston marathon bombing. And then the next tweet was sponsoring her younger siblings show or interview or something.

The guy was furious. Here is a man expecting something from someone he doesn’t know, but only knows through media and twitter and dinner table gossip. Here is a man expecting this person to do something bigger and braver than he can … because she has more influence and power and money?

The same people who criticized others for having their tweets scheduled during the Boston bombing are the same ones who sent out their “hearts and prayers” in the morning, but by 3 in the afternoon were tweeting an article about some secret to success or magical headlines or something.

It is easy to be mad at the wrong things. Easy to have a horrible disaster happen—one that happens once a day in other countries like Iran, but with 10x the death rate—right at home turf. There’s so many misguided fools in the world that it’s easy to rally alongside with them—especially if you are unaware of what you stand for—and raise your fist.

There’s a mirror in every home, and yet, we continue to investigate into the lives of others rather than the person we see every morning.

It seems that it’s deeply embedded in human nature to hate what we can’t understand; we immediately criticize or reduce it to something that we can understand, for good or ill. ”I have no idea how that man or woman became successful doing that! … they must be gifted or lucky!”

Isn’t that strange, that most initial reactions is to not understand for what something is—to unravel it, educate ourselves about it, learn the different angles to it, and find ways to use it as an advantage—but to reduce it to a level where it fits our perfect little perception. How strange we humans are.

Why, exactly, do people respond to trolls in online articles? Will they really change Anonymous’s mind?

Humans, by nature, are very demanding. We are demanding something and because we aren’t getting it—fairness, a raise, respect, appreciation, being acknowledged—we resort to, usually, fruitless ways of dealing with the problem.

Why something bothers you

It bothers you because of what you’re telling yourself.

When I say that I don’t mean you’re actually saying it out loud (and if you are that’s great because you can be aware of it), but rather you are saying it in your mind unconsciously. It’s automatic behavior. You learned it from someone.

It also bothers you because it may not align with your values and beliefs.

“I believe that anyone who has a driver’s license should know how to drive well.”

You probably believe that. After all, you’re the best driver in the world.

And then comes reality: You hop on the highway, some 17-year-old cuts you off, and you curse him to hell and back. This frustration stems from your demandingness of fairness. Because your demands aren’t being met, because your beliefs and values are being spat on right in front of you, it bothers you. You lash out and Facebook it.

What’s the cure?

First, you need consciously acknowledge what you’re thinking, feeling, and behaving. You can’t change your methodology in dealing with an issue without being aware of what you’re actually doing.

View your attention as real estate: Shitty people can occupy your mind, punching holes in the walls and peeing on your toilet seat or … you can fill that space with something meaningful, something that adds value.

One thing that drove me nuts were people complaining on Facebook. More specifically, it was people that I went to high school with. These weren’t really my friends per se, but people just like me: seeing what everyone else was up to.

I caught myself unsubscribing from everyone’s feed. And then it hit me; I became self-aware and asked myself, Why is this bothering me? Why is this taking up my time and attention and energy? I was becoming bitter.

I had better things to do. So do you.

So ask yourself these questions when trying to understand your own frustrations:

1) Why is it bothering me?: Think demandingness. The answer might not come up in a split second. You might have to really think this one out. Why, exactly, does traffic bother you? Why, exactly, is someone else complaining bother you? Get to the core of this. Once you figure it out, it’ll be apparent that you’re better off not paying mind to it. This process of asking ourselves questions that we would never ask otherwise elicits clarity. Most people aren’t self-aware. They never take the time to see themselves for who they are or what they do. This can blind a person, having them point fingers to external factors, when in fact, the real issue is internal.

2) What do I have to do today?: Is complaining about some celebrities divorce the most important thing you can do today? Is punching your steering wheel going to make the traffic move? Why are you surprised about the everyday dilemmas? There are greater matters to attend. There are important decisions to be made, like whether or not you’ll start telling the truth about yourself or whether or not you should eat that fried food.

3) Can I change it?: Can you update the outdated education system? Can you change the way people drive? Can you remove the hatred from this world? If so, work at it. If not, stop complaining about it. Hearts and prayers through your Facebook is nice and thoughtful, but I was always taught that actions speak louder than words.

4) Is it me or them?: It’s always you. That’s all.

I think it’s strange how we partake in such fruitless behaviors. I mean, we are learning it from someone or somewhere. What’s worse is failing to take the time to analyze it, to become aware of what we’re doing. How, exactly, does caring about Kim Kardashian’s twitter feed help in anyway with the Boston bombing? And yet, the guy got like 50+ retweets. More idiots.

You don’t have to pay mind to things that don’t add value. You can sure as hell understand why something bothers you. Both exercises will save you time and energy to focus on the things that actually do matter, things that you have control over.