Category: Stoic

“Maybe we’re at war with Norway?” – The Thing

The Norwegians have the best parties – Fjord Fiestas, you could call them.

You’ve been there.

There’s a state where you experience full awareness.  But it’s full awareness of a very specific kind.  There is no past.  There is no future.  There is only now – the immediate now.  You cease to be aware of anything but what you are doing.

You have become a verb.  You are lost in the moment.  You are the moment.

This state transcends time.  Minutes, hours can pass.  It seems like an instant.

This state has a name.  It’s not tequila.

It’s focus.  But tequila is a close second.

When I was in athletics in high school, coaches would tell me to “focus.”  That was it.  I think they told me that because they knew focus was important, and or maybe because that was what they were told when they were in high school.  But they could see the impact that focus had on an athlete in a game, or a wrestler in a match.  The difference between a focused player and one that isn’t focused is . . . sorry, what was I saying?

Anyway.

Well, the string certainly looks alive when it’s on a bikini.

What advice did we get with the command to focus?  Well, in my case, none.  I was expected to figure it out.  I drilled takedowns in wrestling hundreds of times.  Tackling drills for football?  Again, at least hundreds of repetitions.  Sprints?  I think I did thousands of those, or at least it felt like thousands after practice was over.

How much time did they my coaches spend on teaching us focus and mental preparation?

Umm, I just told you.  They told us to be focused.  That’s it.

And I’m not complaining, some of the coaches were outstanding by any definition, and in one case objectively the best coach in the history of the state where I grew up in his sport.  I don’t know, maybe they all thought that focus was second nature to some people.  And maybe it is.  But not to me.  I get distracted by something as small as a bikini.  Heck, if I had a dollar for every time I got distracted, I wish I had a beer.

Gradually, I figured it out, or at least figured it out as best as I could.  Fast forward to this weekend:  I caught myself telling Pugsley to focus before a wrestling match.  I had a moment of epiphany.  What does focus even mean to a kid whose entire life has been distorted by the distraction of technology?  How do you even describe it?  Maybe, perhaps, I could help him figure it out after his batteries died.

How many Aztecs does it take to change a lightbulb?  None.  The Aztec Empire dissolved hundreds of years before the lightbulb was invented.  For some reason my kids don’t like my lightbulb jokes.

It’s true that in our lives, physical preparation in athletics or training for work often takes precedence for the mental preparation for what we do.  The physical preparation is easy to see.  It’s easy to objectively measure.  How many pushups can you do in one minute?  At work, the training for the job can be measured in certificates and completed coursework and compiled grades.  And don’t ask candidates to prove how many pushups they can do in one minute no matter how amusing you think that might be.  Have them do something like wax your car instead.

But mental preparation is tougher.  You can’t directly see it.  But yet it’s crucial to performance in nearly everything we do.

In athletics, the mind must be ready for the task at hand.  If you’re wrestling, you’re going to war.  You’re preparing to try to spend the next six minutes making the other guy regret he ever stepped on the mat with you.  A bad place to be is to focus on what can go wrong before a match.  A better place is to focus on the moment – to understand that no matter what happens, there is a way.

If I focus on what happens if I lose, I will wrestle not to lose.  If I live life focused on what could go wrong, I will live life not to lose.  My entire life would be spent in damage control, defending against failures that may not even exist.

Whoa!  This is most excellent and triumphant!

The solution is focus.  I wasn’t born with it.  But focus can be taught.  There’s even John Wilder’s Patented Focus List®, presented below with only limited commercial interruption thanks to a generous sponsorship by the MacArthur Foundation™ (hint, hint, I’m still waiting for my #GeniusGrant).

• Know what you want. This is basic, but yet there are hundreds of people walking around who don’t know what they want out of life.  In sports, it’s easier – people want to win.  Some more than ever.  But we’ll talk more about that next Wednesday.
• Believe that it’s possible. I had a boss that was exceptional at this.  He often had more belief in me than I had in myself.  But if you don’t believe that what you’re doing can be done, you’ll find ways to make sure that you’re right.  Plus believing it’s not possible is one way of making an excuse for failure before you start.  Heck, most things are impossible, right up until someone does them.  But enough about me losing my virginity.
• Know every second counts. Clocks are unrelenting.  0:00 is coming.  Every second that passes without you taking action is a second that can never come back.
• Give everything, right from the start. Closely tied to using every second, is using every bit of you for every second.  It’s your force multiplied by your time that is your momentum.

See, it’s so simple a fifth grader could derive it.

• Prepare relentlessly. That means working through every detail you can, and as close to the real thing as possible.  I guarantee your opponent is.  Well, one of them is.  When his iPhone® battery is dead.
• Focus on winning, not losing. Reasons eloquently established above.

Too soon?

• Lock out distractions. Everyday life tends to intrude in your brain.  Push it back.  Like an ex-wife it will be there after you’re done.
• Avoid feeding your ego. Your ego, that part of you that holds all of your self-importance?  The ego that thinks that people remember silly mistakes you made?  It will fight with everything it has to be protected – it will sabotage you to prevent you doing your best.  Sure, in rare circumstances people will remember your silly mistake (putting hydrogen in that dirigible, for instance), but that’s not the norm.
• Have confidence in yourself.
• Have faith. I’ve been lucky time and time again.  I know the old saying that “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” – but that was the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca who said that.  And where is Seneca, hmm?
• Remember why you’re here – not a specific way to win, but to win.
• Focus on now, not the next game. Nor the next match.  Nor the ride home.
• Use your tension to build focus. Being nervous is okay, and can, if used properly help your preparation.

• Use music. There is nothing that so impacts emotion and sets mood than music.  Good rock music helps a workout.  Appropriately aggressive music helps focus – Come Out And Play by the Offspring, or Electric Worry by Clutch or even Shoot to Thrill by AC/DC come to mind.  Please feel free to suggest your favorite music that psyches you up below.  I promise not to make too much fun of your choice, unless you pick something like Madonna or Justin Bieber.  Yes, that includes that odious little man, Phil Collins.  He knows what he did.

• Have a routine, once you get it right. Play the same songs every time.  Play them in the same order.  Spend the same amount of time warming up each time.
• Be ready physically. We’ve spent all this time getting your mind ready.  It would be a shame if your body weren’t ready, too.
• Have a strategy. Execute it.  Having a strategy is important.  Having the courage to execute it is important, too.  Will it have to be sufficiently broad to account for surprises?    But why do you have to bring broads into it?
• Don’t deviate from the strategy too soon. There may be a time to give up on your plan, but it’s not immediately.  Unless it is.  This is more of an art – there is absolutely a time when Plan A will fail, and you’re stuck with Plan B.  Or Plan C.

Okay, I never said it was a short list.

One other piece of advice:  Be as outcome independent as you can be.  The poem If by Rudyard Kipling makes this point well (The Chinese Farmer, Kipling, Marcus Aurelius, and You). Winning everything you try, every time you do it is impossible for everyone.  But after the victory or the loss, you will remain.  Yes, losing sucks.  But the outcome of any specific event in your life is much less important than the input that got you there, which is (more or less) something Seneca also said.

I swear, I got lost for 20 minutes looking at Bill and Ted related information while writing this post.  The Internet is the devil.

Yes, you read that right.  You can’t control every outcome.  But you can control your attitude.  You can control your effort.  You can control a large part of your preparations.  You can control the virtue of your actions.  If you do all that and still lose?

Winning is still better than losing.  Winning is always better than losing.  Losing sucks, and you should never really be proud of it – it will become a habit.  But look for the lessons you can pick up for next time.

More next Wednesday when we look at how this impacts the rest of your life.

(And don’t forget to leave your psyche up to be aggressive music suggestions in the comments.)

“Now it was serious:  a double-dog-dare.  What else was there but a triple dare you?  And then, the coup de grace of all dares, the sinister triple-dog-dare.” – A Christmas Story

Which is more daring, a pebble or a stick?  The pebble:  it’s a little boulder.

Almost 2,500 years ago, Thucydides said, “luck favors the daring.”  Thucydides is dead, so, really, what did he know anyway?  But part of being young is being daring – it’s on the label.  There are so many things that you know, especially things that aren’t so.  Life hasn’t yet given you curve balls and unexpected experiences

The lessons that you can learn from unexpected experiences can be helpful ones.  The first lesson I was ever taught in high school chemistry lab was:  “cold glass looks exactly like hot glass.”  The second lesson was “never trust a naked man selling slightly used sulfuric acid, you can never tell where the acid has been.”

But the biggest loss is when we let one bad experience create fear in our lives.  Let me explain:  One time when we were getting firewood back when we lived in Alaska, Five Year Old The Boy was tromping in the forest.  While jumping up and down on a little hill (five year old kids do that), The Boy managed to stir up a group of wasps that had burrowed into the ground there.  All of them, and I mean all of them, came out of the nest and swarmed The Boy like Japanese jets on Godzilla©, all while The Boy flapped his arms like Greta Thunberg™ on tweaking on meth.

I would pay money to watch Greta in Marine boot camp – I’m sure the D.I. would nicely tell her, “As soon as you’re done getting your beauty sleep, princess, GET OFF OF MY OBSTACLE COURSE!”

After The Boy yelled “How dare you!” at the wasps, they left, because that technique always works.  The Mrs. and I calmed him down, and treated the bites.  The experience, however, was enough that The Boy was pretty scared of wasps – and there were a lot of them in Fairbanks that year.

So, one day after we had moved to Texas, we were in the backyard and just like in a cartoon, a beautiful butterfly had flown right up to The Boy.

“What is it?”  There were butterflies in Alaska, but none that was as amazing as this one.

“It’s a butterfly,” I responded.  His eyes lit up as he smiled at the colorful, delicate wings.  “They bite,” I added.  I had, of course, forgotten about The Boy being surrounded by wasps like ice weasels on a cheese wheel.  The Boy had not.

The Boy ran into the house, screaming.  The Mrs., who had observed every second, was not pleased.

Yes.  This really happened.  I made my son run screaming from a butterfly, so you know I had “Father of the Year” pretty much in the bag after that back in 2007.

SJW means Social Justice Wasp?  Hmm.  Wasps have about the same temperament as Antifa©, but at least the wasps have jobs.

But there are many things in life where the first experience wasn’t great, but like The Boy’s fear of butterflies, you’ve learned the wrong lesson if you avoid butterflies because of wasps.  Mark Twain said it well:

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid.  She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well, but also she will never sit on a cold one anymore.

Twain had to work out – he was constantly on the run later on in his life after assassinating Abraham Lincoln.  He also never wore shirts – he didn’t believe in concealed weapons.

Receivers in the game of football have to have a short memory – after coming across the middle, being hit by a linebacker at a combined velocity of 40 miles per hour, you’d never run another route again if you kept that in mind.  They even have a phrase that describes receivers who are jittery – they say they are “hearing footsteps” – they’re more concerned about being hit than playing the game.

And me – I had to have a short memory as well.  I’ve heard that Samuel Johnson said that a second marriage “is the triumph of hope over experience,” and that’s right.  It is.  And if I had spent too much time overthinking it?  I’d never have married The Mrs.

Hmm.  Dr. Lechter Says.  New feature?

I think the key is optimism and a sense of confidence that the future will be okay.  I think that’s why older folks sometimes stop taking risks – they’ve had such a large number of experiences that they can see sixteen ways something that can go wrong.  A teenager learning to drive, however, sees no way to lose.  It’s only after experience that caution comes into play.

When was the last time you gave up an opportunity because you felt that it was too risky?  When was the last time you decided not to take a vacation because the last one was bad?  The minute you stop living in your life, taking risks, and knowing that the future will take care of itself, you’re dead even if you’re still breathing.

I think that most of the mistakes people make is in not being bold enough.  There is an advantage to trying, especially trying things you don’t know how to do.  Mark Twain said it well:

There are some things that can beat smartness and foresight.  Awkwardness and stupidity can.  The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world.  No, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before.  He doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him.  He does the thing he ought not to do and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot.

So, in your life, you have one shot.  Do you want to regret not doing something in twenty years?  Come on – join me.  Convince all the grade school kids that butterflies bite.  Bonus points if you convince them that butterflies produce deadly poisons*.

This may be the most Australian picture ever, but I’ll defer to Adam (LINK) and Tom (LINK).

*Not applicable in Australia, where literally everything wants to kill you, and even ladybugs can leap seven feet and have venom-tipped spikes for legs.

Bonus unrelated content – JP on Epstein: