Some lessons

I haven't posted for a while so I was feeling a little guilty and put together a bunch of random thoughts that wouldn't fit on twitter. One problem with twitter is that deep thoughts get buried under a lot of noise. This seems like a much better forum to persist and preserve them. Here goes in no particular order.

Lessons Learned

1. You’re body is getting progressively less useful after each decade. Plan to cram as much young stuff in as you can while you can still enjoy it and defer the other stuff till you’re old.
   
   
2. You need meta-time to evolve. If you can’t break away and have a bird’s eye view of what you’re doing in any facet of your life then your big deep brain will be drowned out by the noise of your small helpless brain that’s struggling to stay afloat. You need the eagle-eye, the worm-eye will make you sad and helpless.
   
   
3. You need to have peak experiences regularly to be productive. How can you think about going through life without the occasional spurt of adrenalized joy? Buying shoes isn’t going to help.
   
   
4. You spend 15 years in school learning how to avoid risk, being penalized for taking risks and marginalized for risky behavior. Nothing awesome ever materialized without risk. A life without risk is a death sentence to die of boredom.
   
   
5. There are no shortcuts for 99.999% of us. There’s only hard work, smart planning, focus, discipline and showing up. Yep, showing up is the hardest part.
   
   
6. If you don’t have a goal, a deal that you’ve made for yourself, a destination that you’ve planned then you’re just a pawn in somebody else’s plan.
   
   
7. Forty five to ninety million heartbeats, that’s what it takes to become a world class master at something. That’s from the 10,000 hour theory. If you spend any less time trying to master something, you’ll become awesomely mediocre.
   
   
8. Practice and repetition are useless without risk. If you keep doing the same thing over and over you will plateau, stagnate and then decay. If you aren’t falling, crashing, scaring the shit out of yourself then you’re rolling backwards.
   
   
9. Persistence is underrated. Most people never realize that persistence is the iceberg under the water that you can’t see. Success is the tiny nub sticking out on top.
   
   
10. There’s no such thing as luck but without training yourself to exploit opportunity, you’ll miss them as they pass.
    
    
11. Sadly, society doesn’t really care about your pain. Only when they feast on the failure of the fortunate, then sorrow becomes a spectator sport without any trace of empathy. See Amy, Charlie, Lindsey, et al.
    
    
12. We’re all spending way too much time fucking around on computers and phones and should spend a bunch more time outside making life better.