Better and Better, Each and Every Day
Sweet Bites for June 21, 2024
Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.
This week we explored the Stoic virtue of temperance (links below).
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Choose Your Dessert for the Week
🦉 Wisdom
“Attention is the thing that is most one's own: in the normal course of things, we choose what to pay attention to, and in a very real sense this determines what is real for us; what is actually present to our consciousness. Appropriations of our attention are then an especially intimate matter.”
Source: World Beyond Your Head
🍰 Mini Bite # 1
Get Your First Accomplishment
One of the best things one can do to build discipline is start by accomplishing a daily task first thing in the morning. For some people this is brushing their teeth, for others it is a cold plunge, and for Admiral William McRaven, it is making his bed.
McRaven learned early in his Navy career the importance of organization and clean rooms. He was responsible for keeping the beds of the sick bay, stacked four tall, in order for the USS Grayback.
“The salty old doctor who ran sick bay insisted that I make my rack every morning. He often remarked that if the beds were not made and the room was not clean, how could the sailors expect the best medical care?”
This stuck with McRaven whose “Make Your Bed” speech at University of Texas at Austin went viral in 2014 and was later turned into the book Make Your Bed.
“Throughout my life in the Navy, making my bed was the one constant that I could count on every day.”
Years later, when McRaven was recuperating from a parachute injury that nearly paralyzed him, the first thing he did when he had the strength to lift himself up was ensure the bed was as presentable as possible, pulling the sheets up and fixing his pillow. “It was my way of showing that I had conquered the injury and was moving forward with my life.”
As McRaven says, life is filled with obstacles and setbacks. Failure is around every corner and you will face it. But to have the discipline to make your bed, the discipline to accomplish something first thing in the morning, that’s what sets one up for success and to “be prepared to handle life's toughest moments.”
📚 This Week’s Monday Meditation
🛠️ Tactic
So much of our lives and the actions we take can be reverse-engineered to better understand the gaps that need filling. Entrepreneur Jesse Itzler often talks about the need of looking at our actions and reverse-engineering the results we want.
Itzler uses the example of dieting. Many people want to lose weight but they’re not focused enough on dieting. Instead, they allow themselves to go off their diet for cheat meals on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and expect to see results.
But when you breakdown the week’s meals, roughly 21 if you are eating three meals a day, you suddenly realize that those cheat meals are not one-offs here or there, they are consuming 25% of your weekly meals.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of allowing moderation to slip, to say to one’s self, “Just this once.” But often, that once turns into two, three, four times.
Instead, try looking at the whole picture of what you are trying to do and do the math. Can you afford to let moderation go? Or do you need to be more disciplined?
Success at anything comes from taking a close look, even when it hurts, to determine what is and is not working and finding a way to plug the holes.
🏋🏻 Exercise
Want discipline? Wake up early in the morning according to Jocko Willink.
“Let’s face it, when the alarm goes off, you got your head on that soft pillow, it’s all nice and cozy and warm there, you do not feel like getting up. That snooze alarm is what I call the dream killer… when you press that snooze button, you’re killing your dreams.”
Jocko’s advice is similar to what Marcus Aurelius reminded himself in Meditations.
“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?
—But it’s nicer here….
So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?
—But we have to sleep sometime….
Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota.
You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts.
Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?”
🍰 Mini Bite # 2
The Path to Success is a Brick at a Time
At an early age, long before he broke into Hollywood and became the biggest star on the planet, Will Smith learned that in order to find success, one needed to focus on a single task and do that to the best t of their ability.
“You don't try to build a wall, you don't set out to build a wall, you don't say I'm going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that's ever been built. You don't start there, you say I'm going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid… And you do that every single day and soon you have a wall.”
In today’s world, it’s easy to feel like one needs to do several things in order to find success. To start a business, one may think they need a catchy slogan, a brilliant marketing campaign, a huge social media presence, and an amazing work culture. But if your company isn’t executing on its core product, if that isn’t your main focus, then none of the other stuff matters. Yes, you may find some success, but these will likely only be one-time customers.
“It's difficult to take the first step when you look at how big the task is,” Smith said. “The task is never huge to me, it's always one brick.”
This idea of building greatness over time is exactly what the 18th century French psychologist Émile Coué meant when he said, “Everyday, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”
“Discipline,” the author Robert Green says, “has to have an element of pleasure. Consistently doing your work has to have rewards. Reward is the key word here.”
Find your pleasure in your brick building and over time, you won’t have a pile of bricks, you’ll have a wall.
✏️ This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom
📰 Article
Moderation may be the most challenging and rewarding virtue by Aurelian Craiutu
In this article, Craiutu takes a look at the virtue of moderation through the lens of politics and its historical roots from Montesquieu to Washington to the present moment.
The second favorite passage below, where Craiutu outlines what an “able politician” is resembles to me the idea of the philosopher-king that the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius so embodied.
Favorite Passages:
“Moderation sees itself as beautiful,” Friedrich Nietzsche once quipped, only because “it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober, and consequently ugly-looking.”
—
“An able politician, I believe, resembles a good funambulist: he or she needs balance in all respects, must be prudent, alert and quick to react, and should have good intuition and a sense of direction. He or she must also have the courage to swim against the current when needed, and should always demand that the other side can also be heard on any controversial topic. The opposite is the person who knows the answers even before any questions are asked, someone who is not interested in listening, and divides the world between the forces of the good and those of evil, between friends and enemies.”
🛠️ Tactic+
This week, we explore a second tactic, this one coming from the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman.
In the first clip below, Huberman describes to Chris Williamson how one can build discipline from a neurophysiological position.
In this second clip below, Huberman discusses with Lex Fridman how one can build focus into their lives.
🍰 Mini Bite # 3
Relentless Focus
Attention and focus are our most limited commodities in life. It doesn’t seem like it, but in today’s world, our attention is cash and our focus is a super power.
What made Steve Jobs so great according to Jony Ive was his ability to focus at any given time. In a world constantly pulling for our attention, those who can ignore the outside and focus win.
Ive summarized what Jobs taught him:
“The thing with focus is it’s not this thing that you aspire to, or that you decide on Monday ‘I am going to be focused.’ It is every minute, ‘why are we talking about this? This is what we’re focusing on.’”
This ability to focus, to honestly ask the question of what am I focusing on, is perhaps the greatest show of temperance in the world today.
Our phone rings, we get a Slack ping, our email comes in, our kids need to be picked up, the dog needs to go to the vet, work is calling, there’s a movie to see—We’re living in a world of constant dopamine pulls that prevent focus.
Ive said to assess his workload Jobs would often ask ‘how many things have you said no to?’
To this day, Ive considers Jobs the most focused person he’s ever met.
“Steve was the most remarkably focused person I’d ever met in my life… What focus means is saying no to something that with every bone in your body, you think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you’re focusing on something else.”
Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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