Less Deciding, More Happiness: The Skill of the Century

If you've spent more than 5 minutes alone with me, and we were wearing clothing, then you probably know that I love quotes - particularly quotes that say big ideas in few words. I have quote apps on my phone. I rattle quotes off to my family over the phone. I collect lists of quotes and post them on Facebook or write them on my inner thigh in sharpie. So when I heard Graham Hill say "Editing is the skill of the century," I immediately locked myself in my laboratory for days, refusing food and water, and sleeping only 30 minutes a night.

"Editing is the skill of the century." It's like a bodybuilder's bulk and cut cycle, with the 20th century being a hundred year long bulk. Now that the 21st is here, it's time to cut out what's useless and only keep the best parts of life. Hill's focus is on stuff. "Less stuff, more happiness," he says. While cutting useless stuff out of your life is a worthy goal, a whole lot of people, most of whom are much smarter and more eloquent than I, have written more than I'll ever have time to read on the subject of having less stuff (maybe someone should edit an essential "less stuff" collection that I would have time for). In light of that, I decided to focus on another area our skill of the century can help us - decision making.

Decision fatigue is a well documented phenomenon. There's even a Wikipedia article about it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue). Essentially, the more decisions you make, the worse your decision making ability becomes. It can be assumed that taken to an extreme, if you were forced to do nothing but make decisions all day, by the time you go to bed, you might have so little decision energy left that you decide to wear a suit of armor instead of pajamas. In order to help you avoid this, I've put together a few ways I've found to help edit my decision making down.

Pick a Brand 

When you have tuna on your list, do you buy it in a can or a pouch? In water or oil? Dolphin safe, or with bits of REAL dolphin? I personally get Starkist canned chunk light in water, but maybe you only like solid white. Either way, you should pick what you want one time, and from then on you won't have to make that decision. Do the same thing for mayonnaise, bread, lube, whatever. That way, you can save valuable decision making energy for the things that really matter, like hours of smartphone internet research while standing in the coffee aisle of your local high end grocery store, trying to narrow down your top 5 whole bean medium roast arabica blends.

The reviews said that there were distinct
blueberry notes. This just tastes like coffee!

Pick a Uniform

I'm not here to tell you how to dress. This isn't a fashion blog. But if you get out of bed in the morning and you have to decide what pants you're going to wear, what shirt you're going to wear, what belt you're going to wear, and what you're going to do with your hair, by the time you get to your socks you'll be so exhausted you might do something stupid, like wear thin little dress socks with your manly steel-toed work boots.

I'm fortunate enough to have a job where I have a uniform. 6 out of 7 days, I don't decide what I wear. I wear black work pants, a black button up shirt with my company's logo, and my non-slip black leather boots. On day 7, I trade the shirt in for a t-shirt, or a black button up WITHOUT my company's logo.

Now, I'm not saying you should dress as boring as I do. Different social situations call for different levels on the casual-formal sliding scale, and weather calls for different levels of warmth. But have a few outfits that you can just put on without having to decide what goes with which. Meeting with the leader of the free world today? Go with the suit. Lunch with a friend? The casual outfit will be fine. Girlfriend coming over? Try a simple black banana hammock and a zip-up leather mask, or nothing at all! But whatever you do, don't waste your life sitting in front of your closet wracking your brain, trying to figure out what you can wear today.

Pick a Routine

Routines are useful for all kinds of things. You can have a morning routine, a bedtime routine, a getting ready for work routine, whatever. Routines exist in a decision-free zone. Once you've made the decision to do the routine, everything within it is scripted. Probably the most pure example is a workout routine. You go out and lift a predetermined weight a predetermined number of times, or you run a predetermined distance. In between bouts of activity, you rest for a predetermined amount of time. Try adding some routines to your life. They don't have to be perfect, or even fully formed. When you wake up, maybe you start your coffee, then take a piss and brush your teeth while it's brewing, and then come back and pour yourself a cup. That's a great start to a morning routine. The more routines you drop in your day, the fewer meaningless decisions you have to make, and the more decision energy you have for the important or unexpected decisions in your life.

This site says I can meet and bang hot singles in my area for free. But will
my porn addiction REALLY allow enough time for sex with a real woman?

Pick and Commit

The recurring theme here is to make a decision once, and then not worry about it after that. That means you have to commit to your decisions. Don't be swayed by the guy on youtube trying to sell you his workout, and don't be seduced by the sexy mermaid on the Chicken of the Sea can. By all means, if what you're doing isn't working, then reopen the issue and make a better decision this time around, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Until next time, thanks for reading! If you have any other ideas for decision editing, let me know below.

Hero Collecting

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that all of our heroes will let us down. We find out that this one's an alcoholic, that one abandoned his kid, and the other one used to have a mullet. The thing that we have to learn after that, is that that's OK. We can still want the work ethic of the first without his vices, the charisma of the second without his child-abandoning tendencies, and even the physical strength of the third without his dark past of questionable stylistic choices.

This leads me to my main point - you should be a hero collector. When you have a wide range of heroes to pick from, you can really isolate the traits you want. When I'm in a tough spot at work, I ask myself what my old GM would do. When I'm struggling to get the mental energy to work out, I think, "Would Rocky just sit here when there's training to be done?" How laughable would I seem to Voltaire when I feel like playing a phone game instead of reading, when the only thing that ever stopped him was lack of access to books?

When you have lots of heroes, life gets a lot easier. Having heroes makes you feel like Simba looking up at his ancestors in the stars. You know that you can't fail with such greatness watching over you. Emerson said to go where there is no path and leave a trail, but I say to hell with that (for now - he's right, we're just not there yet). If you were trying to build a shed, would you ignore the lumber yard and hardware store, and try fashioning your own axe to fell trees? Work with what you've got. Stand on the shoulders of giants.

So where do you find these giants? I try to find them everywhere I can. I have role models for as many aspects of my life as possible. Ross Enamait is my working out in cold-ass weather hero. My father is my hero when it comes to cooking or making smart financial moves (although I have a secondary financial hero as well). Zen heroes? I have 3 or 4. Juggling heroes, writing heroes, parenting heroes, style heroes. They're in books, on the internet, in your every day life from family time to grocery shopping (see someone at the store who's hair you like? Snap a picture and show it next time you get your hair cut). Seek them out and add them to your collection.

Once you have some heroes picked out, Bruce Lee them. Accept what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is uniquely your own.

What is useful? We're looking for behaviors here that we can emulate. So if hero A is really strong, how did he get that way? Did he do heavy barbell training, or was he out swinging a pickaxe or hammer all day for his job? How did Hero B become so successful in business? Did he have a day job at first to finance his entrepreneurial dream, or did he set out on his own all at once? It's not always best to look at what they're doing now. Look for what they did to get where they are.

What is useless? Traits other than the ones we're trying to emulate, things that they were given rather than earned, vices, negative thought patterns. You may want James Bond's skill set, charisma, sense of style, and way with women, but you probably don't want to be as miserable as he is.

I keep ending up drunk on scenic beaches with beautiful women who want to nail me.

What a bullshit life.

Which brings us to the final part of the Bruce Lee equation - adding what is uniquely your own. This is when our Emerson quote comes into play. Once you've gathered your heroes, decided what you want from them, figured out what you need to do to get what you want from them, and started doing those things, you end up with... you! Has anyone gathered all of the traits that you want in one place? Why not be the first? Go on, trailblazer. Be the first person to ever bench 300 lbs, run a successful retail store, and get a novel published all in one life. Be the first person to win a pro boxing match and read the entire Story of Civilization by Will (and Ariel) Durant. Be the first person to play Magic: The Gathering and have a girlfriend.

Of course, the most important thing to remember from all this is that this is not wishing that you were like someone else. This isn't wishing that you were as strong as Dan Green, or as good a guitar player as Tommy Emmanuel. This is about finding out how your heroes got to their own heroic status, and doing what worked for them. This is about taking action. If you sit around thinking about people that are better than you all day, you're not going anywhere. Life is about doing shit, but that's a blog post for another week. Until next time, I wish you the best of luck (which you should be making yourself).

The Reasons for Putting My Knowledge on a Blog

Hello, future subscriber. So it's past the year 2020 and you are discovering this blog for the first time. This blog has thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands of posts, and you aren't sure where to start. Allow me to help. This is the first post you should read (that is, if I haven't in subsequent years put up a post titled "read this first" or some such nonsense). If, on the other hand, you're reading this next Tuesday, and this is still the only post I've put up, you should probably also start here, although I'd imagine you won't be as confused as our future friend with the jetpack and flying car.

You may wonder what the purpose of this blog is, and why you should read it. Allow me to begin by saying that I am starting this blog for purely selfish reasons, and I don't really give a damn whether you read it or not*, but as this is a public blog, you are free to do so. The purpose of this blog is fourfold. Purpose one is to have a place to record things that I learn about how to live life better, for future review when I forget what the hell I'm doing. The second purpose is that I've recently come into possession of a very small human who looks a lot like me, only with different genitals. Since she apparently has no clue how to be a human, I thought that I would create a bit of a how-to, so that I won't have to do much real parenting, and will therefore be free to continue my life of cocaine fueled orgies solitude, undisturbed in my search for enlightenment. Purpose three is that several people, such as my brother, his wife, my mother, and other people who love me for some reason but wouldn't know good writing if it smashed them in the face with the first volume of Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, have told me that I write well. These same people have told me that they would like me to do more writing, quit my dayjob, and be forced into a life of abject poverty, subsisting on only Maruchan ramen and grocery store brand cola. Since I am a member of the 1% (not the top 1% in income, but the people who actually like their jobs), I thought that instead of being a full time writer, I could appease my family by starting a blog, and gently explaining to them that one can't make a living with only 27 pageviews (18 from my brother's wife, and 9 from me previewing my own posts). The fourth and final purpose of this blog is to practice my writing, so that one day I can trick OTHER people into thinking that I'm a good writer.

If you haven't guessed already, the blog will be one part thoughts on best practice for life (time management, efficiency, kicking bad habits), one part lessons from daily life (like a diary, but only the good parts), and one part success book motivation ("I challenge you to not only read this entire blog, but to give me all of your money as well"). In addition, it will all be written in the tone of a 14 year old boy who thinks no one understands him. I'll try to avoid religion and politics for the most part, but if I do dabble, hopefully I'll figure out how 'tags' work so no one has to read those posts against their will.

So, here goes nothing! Wish me luck.



*thank you very much