27 Lessons from 27 Years of living
Video version above (timestamps should be in description on YouTube for ease of viewing)
What follows are some lessons that I’ve learned, which seemed worth writing down.
These are things that I’ve been slow to grasp or implement, things that were revelations to me, or things I just wished I’d realised sooner. This isn’t meant to be a ‘complete list of things you need to know’ or a ‘guide to life’. It’s more just some personal reflections.
For god’s sake don’t read all of it.
Oh, and some of it is almost certainly bad advice.
The full list
1. Don’t add suffering
2. What great lovers and friends have in common
3. For everyone’s sake, look after your health
4. Much of health is simple, and is therefore, boring
5. Everyone is messed up and is deeply, deeply flawed
6. Talk to someone, talk to yourself
7. We’re built for stories
8. Want to change? Have a theme!
9. Cynicism is easy and useless
10. Say I Love You
11. Gratitude is a process, not a switch
12. This window will close
13. Get bored every day
14. Shoot all your shots
15. Mary Poppins was right
16. Try all the things
17. Few things in life are linear, be patient
18. Problems are inevitable, problems are soluble"
19. Mistakes and setbacks are inevitable too, make peace with that
20. You’ve got to have faith in something
21. “When you look at someone through rose coloured glasses, all the red flags just look like flags”
22. Be loud about the things you like, be generous with praise
23. Cheerfulness in the face of adversity is the highest form of toughness
24. Change either yourself or the environment - whichever is easier
25. You’re still uncool
26. Learn to love the Paradox
27. Do the right thing
1. Don’t add suffering
My life, in many ways, has been absurdly cushy. I’ve grown up in a nice city, I have nice friends, a loving family, and have generally been spared many of the tragedies life has to offer so far.
As I became aware of this, it often brought with it a guilt - the feeling that this lack of suffering or hardship made me less worthy as a person. I believed that in some way suffering legitimises a person to exist - almost like there’s a certain amount of suffering in the world and if I’m happy I must not be taking my fair share of that suffering, therefore making me a bad person.
I bought into the idea that extra suffering was good - that there was a romance or glorification of self destructive tendencies, that punishing myself in how I worked or pushing myself to the point of injury when I trained was somehow spiritually cleansing.
Further, I believed that for something to be good for you it had to be unpleasant. That all medicine is bitter, that life is a constant choice between suffer now or suffer later.
This is bullshit.
Life will inevitably throw tragedy your way. It’s just a matter of time. And to anyone actually going through a tragic time, self-immolation for no cause at all is an insult. If you’re not in pain this is wonderful and to be savoured. And it’s not the case that everything that’s good for you will feel bad in the moment. Vegetables can taste good, medicine can be sweet.
Enjoy life, savour it, and better yet look after those that are going through a rough time. If you’ve got an abundance of happiness don’t destroy it, share it with people. Don’t drown with your friends if you can instead throw them a lifeline.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t challenge yourself - you absolutely should, but do it always with a constructive purpose, whether it be to actually improve at something, or for fun. Life isn’t always a no pain no gain situation. It’s OK to enjoy it. Dare I say, much of it can be.
Seneca once said that “We suffer more in imagination than we do in reality”
Often this quote is used in the context of not worrying about things you can’t control.
The way I’ve learned to read it now though, is not to impose my imagination of bad expectations or assumptions about things I need to do. With my imagination, in my life, I have added a hell of a lot more suffering to my experience that just didn’t need to be there.
Don’t make things harder than they need to be.
Don’t add suffering.
2. What great lovers and friends have in common
This finally clicked for me when reading David Foster Wallace’s Interviews with Hideous Men (a surprising source of life advice).
What do you think makes for a great lover?
Presumably you might think of the qualities such as being skilled, passionate, enthusiastic, generous etc - qualities which will enable a person to make an experience pleasurable.
Sure these qualities are good, certainly desirable, but the best lovers? The secret is this:
That they both give and receive pleasure equally
Why? Because when you spend time with these people, it means that not only do you have a pleasurable experience, but you yourself also feel like a great lover. You get the double afterglow of damn, that was pretty fucking great but also damn, I’m pretty fucking great. And perhaps eventually we’re pretty fucking great.
This principle applies to other kinds of relationships too. I have this wonderful friend - they’re loving, caring, loyal and I love them to bits - but they are absolutely terrible at telling me what’s going on with their life if it’s anything negative.
If you have a problem, they’ll be there for you in a heartbeat. But if they have a problem, they’re slow to talk about it. They’re uncomfortable opening up about themselves as they hate feeling like a burden. They worry that by talking about their problems they’re basically being no fun to hang out with and people won’t like them.
Repeatedly I tell them that I want to be there for them - I want to be their friend in the same way that they are to me, so please let me.
Sure, we’ve all been in situations where there’s a gross imbalance - e.g. if there’s a friend who only complains about their problems and never listens to your problems, or someone who only takes but never gives. There are people like that sure, who don’t care to be any different, and they’re idiots.
But most people aren’t. So ask yourself - if you’re the person who usually listens to your friends, or someone who usually errs on the side of giving rather than receiving - why do you do this? Maybe you’re just a generous person, or maybe you too feel like you need to keep the hypothetical relationship deck stacked in your favour by having more ‘points’.
The thing is, this is the wrong way to view things. Not every conversation has to be an even 50/50 split talking about each person. Oftentimes the most generous thing to do is to ‘be selfish’ - to share your problems, or let yourself receive - as you allow the other person to fulfil the role of good friend or otherwise. If you never do this, you my friend, might be the source of an imbalance yourself.
Perhaps, you feel like you can’t open up to your friends, but have you ever tried? By doing so you might allow that friend of yours to really be there for you, which lets them feel like a great friend, and brings you two closer together - and then when they have a problem, they feel like they can open up to you now, meaning that now you have the opportunity to be an awesome friend and be there for them! It’s a win win!
So allow yourself to receive as much as you give.
That’s the secret of being a great friend and lover.
3. For everyone’s sake, look after your health.
Look, you and I already know this.
In the last few years or so I’ve been dealing with a myriad of health problems, most of which have been the result of my own behaviour.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that today I’m about the happiest I can recall being while also simultaneously being the healthiest.
Without health, nothing else really matters; not the money you make, the achievements you’ve accomplished, or the plans you’ve made. It is the foundation of everything.
So many problems shrink, or are even solved entirely by, a good night’s sleep or a long walk. It can even solve philosophical problems. Tim Minchin in his famous UWA address speech said “You think therefore you are, but you jog, therefore you sleep, therefore you’re not overwhelmed by existential angst”.
I know this is not news to anyone. But so often we act as though we were ignorant of this. So clearly there’s a disconnect here.
Even writing something this obvious I feel this internal bubbling sense of oh god, really? Like this whole topic is a mind-numbing chore. But that’s just a poor way of viewing things. Looking after yourself is the best kind of selfishness, as it better allows you to be selfless.
Look after your health while you still can - some people just can’t fix certain aspects of their health - it’s out of their power and perhaps always was. And in the rare cases where a chronic condition or pain is fixed, the palpable relief that people experience in these situations is evidence enough that you don’t want to put yourself in a situation whereby you have something that could have been avoided to cure.
Ultimately, the healthy person desires many things, the unhealthy person but one.
For everyone’s sake, look after your health.
4. Much of health is simple, and is therefore boring.
Following on nicely from the previous point -
Obviously, I’m not a doctor, this is not medical advice, just my take. I speak to you as someone who has clicked on every goddamned ‘secret trick’ ‘special spice’ ‘superfood list’ ‘secret exercises’ ‘sleep hacks’ post out there. I’ve read so much on health, exercise, well being, nutrition, and so on. I have tried extreme diets - keto, low carb, high carb, fasting (I actually overdid fasting majorly and got an eating disorder). I have tried cutting out caffeine, doing lots of caffeine and so on. I have tried all sorts of weird supplements, sleep schedules and so on to bizarrely try and ‘optimise’ my health.
The truth is health is mostly a boring, simple thing. The stuff you’d expect. This is not a sexy message, and it’s hard to advertise, and indeed profit from.
I’ll concede - there are some tricks. There are some special spices, there are some very nutritious foods, there are some particularly great exercises, and there are some things that help with sleep. These are all worth investigating.
However, these things are about 1% of the picture - small optimisations. Like a last squeeze of lemon juice in a paella.
If you’re thinking of buying some special supplement, or are freaking out over whether your broccoli is organic or not, but you haven’t sorted (and can sort):
Regular exercise
Time outdoors
Good sleep
Eating enough fruit and vegetables
Cutting out toxic people as far as possible
Managing stress as far as possible
Not overconsuming shitty internet content
Not shredding your system with too much caffeine
Not smoking/drinking too much
Then perhaps your efforts are best placed elsewhere.
And I know the urge, the feeling, the craving for some special secret or item of knowledge that will change everything.
The sense that the one thing that will fix you is that one right supplement or purchase or one little bit of knowledge that will unlock this perfect you, and it might just be in the next book or web page or post.
You’ve got to let that feeling go.
Yes, some people do need - and are better off with - some practices which may seem extreme. Things like restrictive diets for health reasons and so on. If you’re someone with a condition that alters what ‘the basics’ mean for you, you probably know already. And if you think you might be one of these people, go to an actual doctor, rather than following some fitfluencers advice on Instagram and trying to self-diagnose.
The basics are simple. They are boring. And just getting them right certainly doesn’t mean that all physical and mental health problems vanish. But with me, they’ve certainly seemed to have helped more than anything else.
Don’t get sucked into any extreme narratives of optimising your health.
Much of health is simple, and is therefore boring.
5. Everyone is messed up and deeply, deeply flawed.
One thing I really like about my generation is the fact that there’s basically zero stigma around having any sort of mental health issue. This is wonderful.
Perhaps because of this lack of stigma, throughout my teens and 20s, there’s hardly ever been a time where I haven’t been aware of someone close to me dealing with a mild-to-severe mental illness.
I’ve asked a few historian friends on this - whether mental illness is more prevalent in our society today or whether it’s always existed and no one really had the language for it or talked about it - and they’ve all unequivocally said it’s the latter - mental illness, anguish in all its forms, has always been around.
The way I think about mental health now is almost exactly the same as physical health. What’s the chances that someone is going to reach their 20s, or even their teens, and not have some sort of physical injury that’s fairly serious at some point?
For instance, most people have broken a bone - you probably know a few people just off the top of your head who have been in some car accident, or who tripped and broke their leg and so on. At the very least, we’ve all had our scrapes, bruises, sprains and so on, however minor or serious.
Physical damage is part and parcel of life. Mental health, and damages to it, feel to me to be roughly the same. Everyone experiences tragedy, melancholy, or some issue they need to face on a daily basis every time they get out of bed. Once you truly truly understand this, then I think it helps you become a kinder person - as you really don’t know the context of what someone is dealing with.
To add to this, we’re also all just deeply flawed in the more general character sense. All the weirdness, foibles, poor inclinations and intricate parts of your character you don’t like - almost everyone is exactly as dislikeable and abhorrent as you are (some more than others yes, but hardly anyone is a saint).
I think this side of the realisation helps you become more loving generally. Humans are inherently flawed - that’s just life. Once you accept that, I think you’re actually in a position to better connect with others and better relate to yourself.
And who would want to be perfect anyway? A clean, unblemished canvas is boring - art and beauty come from destroying that perfection.
It’s a bit weird at the moment as I think as a culture we’re so accepting of certain things, that there’s almost sometimes a glamorisation of certain issues people face, whereas still a huge stigma around others. I don’t think we’ll ever truly get to a place where all issues are equally loved by everyone. But that might just be life too.
Everyone’s messed up and deeply, deeply flawed.
6. Talk to someone, talk to yourself
I have been in therapy a couple of times and it was incredibly useful.
It’s widely recommended and rightly so, and thankfully access to some form of therapy is increasing. If you can do it, you 100% should, even if you don’t have a serious issue right now. Think of it like brushing your teeth - you don’t start brushing when you get dental problems, you brush to prevent dental problems. But not everyone can access it, and even if you can it takes time, money, and it can take a while to find a therapist you really click with.
However, what has been equally useful for me - again, just prefacing here giving my own experience, this isn’t any sort of medical advice - has been learning to also talk to myself. This might seem like a weird thing to do, or to learn, but it’s straightforward in principle.
It’s basically about establishing some kind of feedback loop for your thoughts. The main way I do this personally is through journaling. The act of getting my thoughts on the page allows me to better process them and develop them. The analogy I’ve used before is doing maths - we write down maths on paper so we don’t waste valuable mental energy remembering the problem, we can put all our resources into solving it.
Though it looks weirder, saying things out loud works as well - it’s the same process. Asking yourself what you’re feeling, and then actually saying it out loud and seeing what it sounds like. Is this madness? Maybe, but who cares?
After I write down my thoughts, or say them out loud, and think about it for a bit, I’ll always end by writing or saying some nice things to myself.
It gave me a bit of joy to find out Lin Manuel basically did the same thing on his twitter for a while - basically saying good morning and goodnight with some positive message. I had been doing that for a little while, and it seems cheesy but it works.
Often I won’t really feel as positive as the words I write or say - I’ll be going through the motions. But it’s better than nothing, it’s a start. Learning to be positive is like pushing blood back into an arm you’ve slept on for a while. At first you’ll feel nothing, then some pins and needles which are fairly unpleasant as the numbness subsides, but eventually the blood flows freely, and you find you’ve cheered yourself up. .
One of the litmus tests I use when reading back over my thoughts - maybe the next day or so, is seeing how I would react or respond if I heard a close friend saying or feeling these things.
Because if you treat yourself differently, or more harshly, than you would a friend, then that’s just ego. You’re not inherently better than anyone else - you’re overly harsh on yourself often because you know literally all of your shortcomings first-hand. This is why, if anything, practicing being kind to yourself in particular is all the more important.
Obviously don’t just talk to yourself - do it in tandem with speaking to others, friends, and a therapist if you can. If you can’t talk to your friends about anything serious then they’re probably not your friends.
We’re social creatures, we need to talk.
So talk to someone, talk to yourself.
7. We’re built for stories
This one is a little more nuanced.
We’re not built for truth, we’re built for story.
Suppose it’s the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday. You slept in later than you intended to. You told yourself you’d go for an early morning run, but that moment has already passed. You have things you need to do, but you don’t feel like doing them. And so you’ve blown most of the day already watching videos, and you feel like the day is a write-off already.
What are the facts here?
The facts are you slept in, watched videos, and didn’t follow the vague plan you set out.
Everything else - the judgement of it being a ‘bad’ day, you feeling like you wasted time, or that you’re a lazy person - are all narratives we impose on the facts. It's fiction.
The truth - the objective truth - is that we’re a bunch of animals stuck on a rock hurtling through space. The truth is that the universe is meaningless - that likely, this is all there is.
Obviously though we don’t - and can’t - live this way. Most of our lives we go through not with any sort of objective view of the world, but with our highly subjective one. We’re a character in an unfolding narrative. We have a main cast of characters in our lives, who are more important simply because they have more impact on us than most other people.
Understanding this deeply - that we operate on story rather than truth, has been a really wild realisation for me.
Because once you understand that almost everything is a story we impose on something, and you observe that, you can let it start to carry less weight. You can start to question it.
Is it really true that the day was wasted if you slept in and relaxed all day? Could it be that perhaps you needed the rest? Or even if the day was ‘wasted’ - do you need to feel bad about it? Why is your self worth attached to how much you get done in a given 24 hours? Is that a true story, or a fabricated one? Did you invent it? If not, who put it there?
Stories are tools we use to navigate and understand the world. They’re mental structures we use to make sense of the absurd complexity that surrounds us. A story might be something as simple as you telling yourself that you’re a good person. Or that someone else is a bad person.
Both of these stories are fictional.
There is no real good or bad - at the end of the day is something we decided upon. But these concepts, while not grounded in any sort of ‘objective’ reality, are a shared story that have real effects on our lives.
Notice this.
Once you start to detach from the stories you impose, you’ll find that there are some objective truths about you and your experience which you can use to orient yourself by. What experiences do you crave - independent of any narrative? What are your innate likes and dislikes, and predispositions?
Experiences will have certain textures which can help inform you of these answers. After this, you can then ask, what stories would serve me?
Another example - when working out, I enjoy it. I enjoy the moment-to-moment experience of exercise and movement. However, if I’m doing something easily measurable, such as running (the time it takes me to run a certain distance) or strength training (how much force I can generate) then a narrative often pops up. A story that I know very well is one of comparison - me with athletes I follow, or even peers. The story says that being faster or stronger than others makes me a better person - and gives me a right to feel good about myself. If I’m not stronger or faster, I should therefore feel bad.
This narrative has its uses for some, but it’s not useful to me. I’m weaker and slower than the vast majority of people who seriously pursue these activities. If I fixate on this story, I’ll be discouraged to work out, and I’ll likely exercise less, which will remove me from something I enjoy.
The story isn’t true, so what might be a better one? Perhaps one where achievement and self-worth is rooted not in a favourable comparison, but one whereby the achievement is had in doing the activity itself - in showing up and practicing, and giving it my effort and attention.
Neither one of these stories is totally true. But one is more useful to me. And I’m sure eventually, I’ll change the story again - perhaps I’ll be unable to practice, or perhaps I’ll more objectively begin to enjoy exercise less.
What stories will you write?
We’re built for stories.
8. Want to change? Have a theme!
In the last ten years I’ve read a metric shittone of ‘self-help’ content. Blogs, books, videos, you name it.
Sometimes it’s referred to as the more modern phrase of ‘self development’. Sometimes it’s called pop psychology or business philosophy. But at the end of the day, many of these books promise some form of helping you make your life better.
There’s certainly a lot that could be said about these books and the ideas in them - there’s a lot of snake oil out there but many books and ideas are extremely useful.
One of the problems is however, that while we hear these ideas - these often very good ideas, about organising your day in a certain way or exercising more regularly or whatever, we don’t do them. For whatever reason, knowledge isn’t enough.
This is an idea that I heard that helped me bridge that gap a little - and the idea is to have a theme. One particular piece of advice that stands out to me though is one I heard about in a video from youtuber CGPGrey
It’s a video about how to think about new year's resolutions, but it can be applied to any sort of change, and the advice is this; Rather than have a goal or set of definitive goals, for example lose x amount of pounds by this date or make this much money by this year, have a broad theme. This might be ‘year of health’ or ‘year of career’ and so on.
The problem with goals is that it’s tempting to be overly-ambitious with them (because a small goal often doesn’t seem worth pursuing). The issue then becomes that an overly-ambitious goal is often hard to achieve, meaning you can get easily demotivated.
A theme on the other hand offers many ways to win.
Unless you’re playing a specific sport, life is a much more general game. You largely set the rules, and because it’s so complex, and so multi-varied, you should make it so that there are many ways to win. Life doesn’t care about your hyper-specific goals - all sorts of things can happen which quickly make them irrelevant or unachievable. A theme - because it’s so loose - can be applied to whatever life throws at you, meaning it’s a game you can be assured that you can play.
A year ago, I set the theme for myself of ‘A Year of Bad Art’ - namely, make things, put them online, it’s OK if they’re bad. A friend asked me around the time I started it whether I was going to commit to something a bit more definitive like posting once a week or something like that. I told them I decided not to, because I know me - had I missed a week or two, I may have just given up as what would have been the point in continuing for the rest of the year after that? I would have already failed.
Was I perfect in sticking to this theme? No. I didn’t post everything I made, I often was a complete perfectionist on some things - all the more embarrassing when they turned out to be not so great. .
But this theme got me making things. It got me posting - and now I’m making more creative things than ever, and enjoying it more than ever, so it worked.
This leans into the bigger picture of having systems over goals, focusing on the practice rather than the product and so on, but it’s sufficiently general that I think you can apply it to anything. Year of kindness, month of movie nights, whatever. In a way, I think it’s a revamped version of the idea of practicing a virtue - after all, what are virtues like courage or prudence or patience other than themes to try and apply in your life?
Having a theme is a brain hack that I think actually deserves the label of hack.
So if you want to change - have a theme.
9. Cynicism is easy and useless
Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely no shortage of reasons to be pessimistic, morose, melancholy, and down about almost everything.
I need not mention them here.
I used to think pessimism and cynicism were great because you were either constantly being proven right or happily surprised.
However, much as I sympathise with this view still, it’s just not useful - it’s no way to live. It’s corrosive. It will wear away at your ability to believe in anything, and oftentimes just viewing things in a cynical, pessimistic way creates the effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I’m not saying we can’t be negative about anything, or criticise anything, or even despair over things. That’s natural and human. But I think we need to be careful that it doesn’t become our personality, or our worldview.
You may have met some bad people, but that doesn’t mean that you need to be cynical about all of them. You may have been knocked back a couple of times by life or things, had some faith shattered etc. But eventually, you’ve got to get back in the game, and put your belief in something. It’s definitely not easy - I think if anything it might even get harder to do the older you get, as you end up with a santa-sized sack full of reasons to say no really, the world sucks.
Maybe it takes courage - to be out there, to try again despite it all, to be positive and believe in things. Despite its drawbacks, I think it's a better way to live - better we dare to believe in something. We’ll risk being disappointed, yes, but perhaps eventually we’ll be right.
Cynicism is like an extra gravity - we don’t need it - things fall on their own fast enough already.
It’s easy, and it’s useless.
10. Say I love you
I wrote a short essay about this a while ago, but essentially it boils down to I realised that it was important to me to let people I loved know I love them, from time to time. At least once, if not more often as a reminder.
This isn’t just for romantic love by the way, it’s for all the other colours and flavours of it. Friend love, family love and so on.
There’s a great concept of love languages which you may have heard of - which basically gives a structure to the many nuanced ways we can show we love someone. Sometimes it’s through acts of service or gifts or what have you - you probably do some of this already. But I think there’s a power in saying it out loud, or writing it down for someone. Just, you know, giving it its own moment, taking a second with a friend, mid conversation if you have to, to just say hey, I got your back here, I love you.
It’s made my life better. It might do the same for you.
Say I love you.
11. Gratitude is a process, not a switch
Maybe you know this feeling.
Someone gives you a bit of perspective; perhaps that historically people had a lot more difficulties than you had. Whether this be access to food, water, shelter, medicine. Or even someone will remind you that billions of people living today would kill for the life you lead.
Now often, maybe I’m a bad person I don’t know, when I’d hear these perspectives, I wouldn’t feel better, I’d feel worse. I’d feel spoiled and guilty and like my problems weren’t real problems worthy of complaint.
That being said, my problems didn’t vanish, if anything I had another one on top of the previous one - how do I reconcile with the fact that I’m ungrateful?
The key for me here was realising that gratitude is a process, maybe even a skill. It’s not something you can immediately feel all the time. I think you need to cultivate it. If we’re lucky, we can learn to be grateful through hearing stories, whether fictional or factual, historical or present.
Because at the end of the day, I think there are a lot of things to be grateful for, if we choose to be. And much of this is a choice, on what we focus on, and what we remember to be important. We can’t ignore the problems we have, but we can take some time to appreciate the good things.
But it’s a process, not a switch.
12. This window will close
Following on from talking about how gratitude is a process, here’s a process by which I cultivate it.
I’m a big fan of Stoic philosophy - and within it there’s this notion of Memento Mori - remember you, and everyone else, is going to die. We’ve all got a terminal diagnosis, it’s just a matter of when.
I think this is useful to keep in mind, but the problem is that a) it feels obviously morbid and b) while everyone knows this, it doesn’t feel immediately applicable. Rightly or wrongly, I do feel like my death isn’t on the immediate horizon.
So the mantra I try and think of as a more accessible, immediate alternative is specifically “this window will close”.
I like it for a few reasons - firstly, there’s an implied subtext that there will be other windows, so that’s nice and reassuring,
It also feels less dramatic and frightening than thinking about death all the time, and it feels realistic as a metaphor as a window closing means you can still peer through it, but you’re cut off from the other side - time passes but we still have our memories of it.
You’re at a window right now. Maybe it’s this year, maybe it’s the place you live in. The friends you meet, know and talk to. There will be a time when the window will close. Where someone may not be your friend, or you may not get to hold that particular person you cherish. And there may be other friends, and other places, and other people. But not this one. This is equal parts exciting and tragic, in some ways.
I was lucky enough to have come across this idea early enough that I have this nice little box of moments I can reach into where I really just took stock and went, yeah, this window is pretty cool, and just drank it all in.
I think it’s worth doing, now and again.
All in all, this window will close.
13. Get bored every day
I once was going for a long walk, listening to some music, where my headphones broke a few minutes in. I spent a good few minutes or so desperately trying to fix them, as for whatever reason the idea of walking without music was something I was widely averse to.
It was at that moment that it occurred to me how ridiculous that was. It was embarrassing, why was I so scared of being bored?
I had consciously known how much entertainment I consumed before this moment, but it was only after it that it fully dawned on me how weirdly dependent on it I had become. There was hardly a moment where I wasn’t hooked up to something occupying some part of my attention. Whether that’s a podcast, music, YouTube or Netflix in the background, or just glancing at my phone during a conversation. I don’t think I’m alone in this.
I think it’s important to learn to be bored. It allows you to daydream, to ponder, and to actually think for yourself for a bit. I expect it’s a necessary precursor to creativity and focus. It’s also really not that bad.
Every day when I wake up I want to check my phone. I want to stream music and watch YouTube. I don’t want to be bored.
But I have to force myself to do it. And every time I do it feels a bit like jumping into some cold water.
There’s always a momentary discomfort, but pretty soon it feels great, refreshing even.
And then my mind is my own for the rest of the day.
Get bored every day.
14. Shoot all your shots
We all know the adage You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
If we take that seriously, then the default is that you’ve missed an almost infinite number of shots. That’s rough.
The good thing is though, the only way to go is up.
There are similar quotes and phrases - another one I recall often is the biggest risk is not taking any.
Obviously, some shots, and risks, carry some genuinely dire consequences if things go south.
I’m by nature a risk-averse person, and as such, bearing this sort of thing in mind has helped me greatly. I will vastly overestimate the risk in most situations, and by pushing through this from time to time, I’ve had some wonderful times.
So far, I’ve not once regretted it.
Shoot all your shots.
15. Mary Poppins was right
“In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun.
You find the fun, and snap, the job’s a game” - Mary Poppins.
A big shift in my thinking when it came to things like self-discipline, and just the mundanity of life, was the idea that making something fun is almost the ultimate hack.
Younger me would have sneered at this idea - probably thinking that it was childish or naïve, or that I didn’t need to turn basic chores into games.
But the fact of the matter is that if you can make the simple things in life fun, you enjoy a hell of a lot more of your life while simultaneously getting more of the important things done. It’s a win-win.
We have a natural instinct to play. Like jumping on certain cracks in the pavement (or avoiding them - I learned long after my childhood ended that apparently you were meant to avoid stepping on the cracks, otherwise you’d have bad luck. Whereas I thought you were supposed to only walk on them. Best not to analyse further). Or kicking along a small stone as you walk. We do these things almost without thinking at times - we inject fun into walking!
But as we get older we seem to grow out of that habit, telling ourselves it’s childish and foolish, when in reality, it might be a genius way to live.
A lot of life seems just tiresome and repetitive - like washing the dishes. We do it begrudgingly knowing we’ll just have to do it again.
However, many games also have this structure. Once you win a game, what do you do? Play again! We’ve got to enjoy the doing as well as the rewards of our efforts.
So make the things you need to do fun. Use your imagination. A great idea I read once was about pretending to be a secret agent as you do anything (for instance, stacking the dishwasher). Play music, dance, do it slowly, do it quickly. Space out, zoom in, zoom out.
And if you think this sort of made-up game thing is silly then remember that all games are made up. When your team scores a point in a game, the point isn’t real - everyone knows this deep down, but our reaction to it is real. The fun is real.
Sisyphus’s punishment by Zeus was that he was forced to push a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll down every time it neared the top, forcing him to repeat this action endlessly. Sometimes this is seen as an accurate and depressing metaphor for life.
But then on closer inspection, you can realise that we have games that are essentially the same as this so-called ‘punishment’ - such as strongman competitions carrying boulders, or bowling - knocking down pins only for them to spring up again. Endlessly. All games repeat, but we relish in this joyfully, rather than as some form of torture.
Much of our experience of these mundane moments might truly be a matter of perspective.
So if you want to start a habit of doing something you really hate doing, find a way of not just making it tolerable, but ask yourself, how would this be incredibly fun?
I’ve found it’s a more useful way to frame things.
Ultimately, fun is often something you make. The more mundane a task is, the greater the challenge for your imagination.
Mary Poppins was right.
16. Try all the things
I have tried, and failed, at a huge amount of extra curricular things.
I have tried singing in a choir and on my own. I have tried and failed at violin and the flute. I have tried debating, making art, selling art, dancing, baking, language learning. I trained in Kung Fu for many years, I care to admit. I have done improv, stand up, and even - as you can see - some writing and some video making.
I never once discovered any sort of hidden talent. At best, I’m mediocre. Perhaps even boring. But there’s a certain insight you get from trying things that are unlike those you would expect to be able to do.
Before I ever tried Dancesport at university, I always felt awkward in any sort of dancing situation. But having done it, I realised that I could be a person who was halfway decent at dancing - I didn’t realise I could be that person.
In trying lots of new things, you realise your identity is actually pretty flexible. You sort of see this when you hang out with different sets of friends, maybe school friends one day and work friends another. Much of who you are is just you reacting to the context of your surroundings.
Once you realise that you’re all of these things - all of these different versions of you, and none of them at the same time, that’s quite freeing, and at the same time, a useful insight to remember.
You get to ask: What parts of me do I carry to these different activities or groups? Who else could I be? Who else would I like to be?
At the end of the day we’re all these squishy programmable computers, horribly moulded by our environment. Trying things, and constantly rediscovering who you could be, reminds you of that - and helps you actively choose an environment and a version of yourself, rather than having that choice made for you.
Try all the things.
17. Few things in life are linear. Be patient
Ah linearity.
Of all the concepts to exist, I’ve rarely ever seen this actually happen in real life. Almost everything that matters, that you experience, is non-linear. Yet it seems to be our default expectation for so many things.
Some things are cyclical - your energy, your mood, your appreciation for the Hamilton soundtrack (maybe just me on that last one). Some things are chaotic, things like luck or tragedy, some things just happen and there’s no emotional wrapping your head around them.
Even something as seemingly straightforward as weight loss or weight gain is non-linear. You’d think eating a certain caloric surplus or deficit every day consistently would make it linear but nope, the body does all sorts of crazy things with water and bloating.
This is all to say - don't freak out when things fluctuate day to day, or even week to week (sometimes even year to year). Most good things take time.
Happiness isn’t linear. No matter who you are, or how happy you get, you’re going to get depressed sometimes - that’s just human. Likewise your friendships will naturally drift apart and come back together again and so on.
I think we’re so used to this quantified world of numbers and statistics that linearity feels like the thing we should expect, but it almost never applies. And if it does, it might do only at a very large timescale in low resolution - in terms of years, rather than in terms of days.
So remember - few things in life are linear. Be patient.
18. Problems are inevitable, problems are soluble
I repeat this as a mantra to myself, just as a reminder. It’s simple, but it’s useful to me.
I got this one from David Deutsch - he’s a Quantum Computer Scientist in Oxford. He used it in the context of humanity’s progress generally.
To have problems is an indication that you’re alive. Problems will inevitably exist, but the whole point of problems is that they can be solved. That’s what we do, we solve problems.
I sometimes like to add a third line of my own, so that the full version is:
Problems are inevitable, problems are soluble, and some problems are desirable.
How you spend an afternoon with a friend is a good problem to have. What to write on a card for someone’s birthday, or even what movie to watch in the evening. These are all good problems, problems nonetheless, but ones that we can enjoy.
I don’t have much more to say on this, other than it just helps me simplify the world a bit, when everything gets a bit chaotic.
Ask first, what exactly are the problems?
And once that’s answered, remembering as I think that they can be solved.
Problems are inevitable. Problems are soluble.
19. Mistakes and setbacks are inevitable too, so make peace with that
You’re going to mess up, and life is going to mess you up. Badly.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t do everything in our power to not make mistakes and avoid setbacks, but both are just as inevitable as problems. If you’re in the game - and you can’t win if you’re not in the game - then you’re going to lose sometimes, sometimes directly at your own hand.
Naively when I was younger I thought of taking an optimal route - skipping through life making all the right choices. This is basically impossible.
There’s a quote from Rocky which we have up in my house - you’ve probably seen the clip:
“Life ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are, but it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it.
You, me, nobody ain’t gonna hit as hard as life.
But it ain’t about how hard you can hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forwards, how much you can take, and keep moving forwards. That’s how winning is done”
I love this quote. And eventually I realised that sometimes it’s not just life doing the punching you, it’s you as well.
I think you just need to be prepared for that fact. You’re human, you’re going to fuck up. Perhaps spectacularly. If you can make peace with this in advance, all the better.
Mistakes and setbacks are inevitable too, so make peace with that.
20. You’ve got to have faith in something
For years I resisted this F-word.
If I had trust in anything growing up it was science. I loved it. What else could you need besides truth?
I studied physics at Cambridge, and the Philosophy of Physics at Oxford. Knee-deep, total commitment to rationality.
Regrettably, one conclusion is inescapable. Rationality has limits.
It’s not a God. It’s not an all-seeing eye. Even in something as seemingly robust as Science has assumptions and leaps of faith in its very foundations, upon which everything else rests. Even Mathematics, which need not even concern itself with how the real world works, has elements of belief inherent to it (such as Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem).
So what to do?
For a while, as a means of trying to deal with my own sense of depression and nihilism I sought out books of people who had been through the absolute worst humanity has to offer. These books were written by people who were prisoners of war, survivors of the holocaust, people who had been wrongfully imprisoned, sentenced to death row for 30 years. People who had lived through war, lost friends, or maimed by weapons, living in chronic pain.
They all had their own way of dealing with these horrors which many of us can barely imagine. But I understood them all as a type of faith.
James Stockdale, living in the Vietnam POW camps, always held firm to the faith that everything was going to be OK - despite the torture, the irons, and the seven years he spent there. This didn’t mean he was unrealistic about the situation, if anything he was deeply realistic. He wrote that it was the men who hoped for freedom by a particular date - by Christmas, or new years or what have you, that didn’t make it. Their hopes were crushed, they were heartbroken, and couldn’t go on.
Edith Eger repeated the mantra to herself in the camps every day If I survive today, tomorrow I’ll be free. Eventually, that was true.
I think there’s a place, or maybe even a necessity, in an irrational Stockdale-like faith that things will be alright. Perhaps this fills a gap that was historically filled by theistic belief in an afterlife or higher divine power and purpose.
In an odd way, I almost think having faith in something irrational is its power. Sure, placing your ultimate faith in friends or family or people sounds wise and noble, but anything real is fallible.
Whereas the amorphous, intangible, irrational, perhaps stupid belief that things will be OK, is comforting and unbreakable for that very reason.
I think you’ve got to have faith in something.
21. “When you look at someone through rose-coloured glasses, all the red flags just look like flags”
This is a quote from Bojack Horseman. Oh boy does it sting.
I think most people can relate to this quote in some way or another. I’m someone who, when he likes someone else, tends to like them a lot. So for me, the question that follows from this realisation is how can I check if my glasses are rose coloured?
A few ideas:
Firstly - would you recommend this relationship to a friend? Specifically, a close friend who has a similar temperament as you do. If the answer is no then that might be something worth considering.
Secondly - what does this person actually do? Words like love mean different things to different people. What do their actions say about them? If you heard about a stranger doing these same actions, how would you feel? If you’d feel negatively, then that might also be something worth considering.
It’s worth noting to that you should use these thought experiments on yourself too. Would you date yourself? For all your noble intentions, how do you actually act? No one knows the inside of your head - how might an independent observer assess you?
And finally, what do you actually say when you talk about this person when they’re not around? Listen to how you talk about them when you’re with friends - is it defensive, filled with umms and ahhs, or are jazzed about them? Do you feel the need to be cautiously selective in your anecdotes, or can you relax?
When you look at someone through rose-coloured glasses, all the red flags just look like flags.
22. Be loud about the things you like, be generous with praise
Not to generalise an entire population of people, but I think Brits in particular are generally not too great at this. Anecdotally, I think it’s also further exacerbated by the fact that culturally men are not conditioned or disposed to giving each other compliments, for whatever reason.
Although making for good caricatures and punchlines, in day-to-day existence this is a shame. Perhaps we worry about coming across as insincere or even worse, foolish.
I think everyone can think of a random compliment that someone gave them off-handedly that really stuck with them.
A friend once complimented me on my voice - which no one had done before, describing it as a mix of whisky and honey. Before that moment, I did not like my voice one bit. Afterwards, that was no longer the case.
I’m not suggesting that you invent nice things to say to people - don’t be insincere. Rather, just pay attention to the things that you naturally like in people and places. Vocalise them.
Encouragement and positivity cost nothing but they can be worth so much.
This doesn’t have to come at the expense of shit-talking and mocking your friends either, you can have both. It’s easy to forget that some days are just grim, and even telling someone something as simple as they look great, or that what they’ve done recently is cool, can make a serious difference in someone’s day.
Be loud about things you like, be generous with praise.
23. Cheerfulness in the face of adversity is the greatest form of toughness
In 2018, over the course of 157 days, Ross Edgley swam around Great Britain. For 6 hours, he would swim with the tide, until the tides began to reverse. When they did, he would hop onto a boat that was following along with him, and they would anchor to the point where he stopped swimming. He would then rest for 6 hours until the tides changed again. Once this time was up, he would get back in the water, and swim for another 6 hours until the tides changed for the second time that day, and once again hop back on the boat which would anchor once more where he would sleep and eat for another 6 hours or so. He repeated this cycle of 6 hours on, 6 hours off for 157 days. He swam for 12 hours a day, half of these hours being done in the pitch-black night, staring into the abyss of the sea.
I followed his story closely at the time - weekly he would post a video from wherever he was in his journey, detailing whatever events he had dealt with during the week, be them jellyfish stings, freezing water, terrible weather and so on.
What was most impressive, despite the incredible task he had set himself, was how positive he remained throughout this entire venture. He was relentlessly upbeat - saying he endeavoured to “swim with a smile”. You can watch the videos on YouTube yourself. You can see him sitting in his tiny cabin, still shaking from the cold, grinning furiously despite it all.
At the same time that this was occurring, I listened to the audiobook version of another extraordinary endurance athlete - Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins. Goggins’ approach is the opposite of ‘swim with a smile’. Goggins wants to hurt:
“The only way that you’re ever going to get to the other side of this journey is by suffering. You have to suffer in order to grow. Some people get it, some people don’t.” - David Goggins
For Goggins, it’s not worthwhile if it doesn’t fundamentally suck. He talks about going through hell week as part of Navy Seal training 3 times, pushing through injuries, and the various insane endurance events he’s competed in. All throughout, there is no semblance of having fun. He is not smiling, he is gritting his teeth through it, and finding glory in that.
It struck me how different these two approaches were. While Edgeley was finding the fun in the most brutal of conditions, Goggins was revelling in the pain and embracing it.
We can learn from both.
Years later, Edgeley published a book about his swim called The Art of Resilience, whereby he revealed not only more macabre details about the conditions he had to deal with, but also that about 2/3rds of the way through his swim, a tragedy struck that forced him to consider cancelling the whole thing - I won’t detail it here, as it’s worth reading the book - however, he pushes through and continues onwards.
Both these men are tougher than I’ll ever be, however, there’s one I find more inspiring. It’s one thing to clench your teeth and say every minute sucks, it’s another thing entirely to laugh about your jellyfish stings and sleep deprivation, 100+ days into an endurance event. Edgeley admits that there are times where you can’t grin your way through everything, where you have to rely on a more primal grit. Watching him however, makes me wonder how often we really need to use that fuel.
In the choice between grit or grin, I do my best to choose the latter when I can.
Any smart person can be miserable, however there’s a genius in being joyful.
Terry Pratchett once said that the opposite of funny isn’t serious, the opposite of funny is simply not funny. We can both laugh and be determined. If anything, humour in the darkest times is perhaps one of the purest forms of courage.
Cheerfulness in the face of adversity is the greatest form of toughness.
24. Change either yourself or the environment - whichever is easier
One of the chief tenets of Stoicism is to distinguish what is and what isn’t in your control.
Your thoughts, your actions, your reactions, your attitude - these are all within your control.
Almost everything else is outside of it; what people think of you, the outcomes of your actions, what circumstances arise and so on.
This is a wonderful realisation to have and carry with you. It’s empowering, and it removes stress to a large extent if you’re able to accept it.
However, I think the result of this is to forget that you can actually change the world as an alternative.
One of the assumptions of self-help and self-development is that it’s always you that should change. But maybe you’re stressed because your job just sucks, and that there’s a housing and environmental crisis, and that your neighbours are too loud and so on.
To draw another extremely broad generalisation, I think one of the fundamental assumptions that differ between people who lean politically right and politically left is around what we should change.
On the right, more conservative end, there’s this belief that you should pull yourself up by your bootstraps, that you’re free to innovate and work hard if you choose to, that people are ultimately free, so if they commit crimes it’s a result of choice.
On the left, you have people who more often believe that you’re always a product of your circumstances, you’re less free.
There seems to be truth to both of these views.
I’ve always defaulted to the position that if there’s something wrong, it’s reflective of me, and something I need to fix internally.
This is useful in many respects as it encourages self-reflection, but we are not islands.
We exist in an environment, and it’s been easy for me to forget that your environment, and the world around you is actually an extension of you.
Sadly, you’re basically a squishy, extremely easy-to-influence computer. Your environment will affect you.
You can be as Stoic as they come, but at the end of the day, leveraging both the external environment and your internal environment I think is necessary.
If one isn’t working, try the other.
Change either yourself or the environment - whichever is easier.
25. You’re still uncool
In 2007, NME published a two-part interview with MCR’s lead singer Gerard Way, who was 30 at the time. During the interview he said something quite profound that stuck with me.
He was talking about a revelation he had just before going onstage on one of the biggest shows of his recent tour. He realised, looking up at the mirror after washing his face, that despite being in this famous band and everything, that he was still uncool. Further, he was never going to be cool, so he should stop trying.
Worth repeating:
You’re never going to be cool, so stop trying.
I watched that interview when it was published, as I was a big MCR fan. I was 13 at the time - and I have returned to it often in the years since.
It may come as no shock at all to you that I was not at all cool in school. To have someone I looked up to say something like that had a profound effect on me. To not just accept that you’re uncool, but to rejoice in it, was wonderful.
Now at the ripe old age of 27 I can confirm that I am still uncool. From loving books, comics, video games, anime, or making bad videos or writing long self-indulgent posts, or even to just my dress sense. I am uncool to my bones.
And I think it’s never been more important for me to remember and embrace that. With Instagram and social media and metrics and colossal amount of likes and all of this stuff, basing your self worth on - or even aspiring to be - cool and liked is a game I have no wish to play.
It definitely works for some, but it’s not my sport.
You’re still uncool.
26. Learn to Love the Paradox
Two of the most dominant theories in physics contradict each other at a fundamental level - Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
Relativity is deterministic, i.e. the theory will tell you exactly what will happen in a given situation.
Quantum Mechanics is probabilistic, i.e. it will tell you what might happen in a given situation.
The universe cannot be both deterministic and probabilistic - it’s one or the other.
This wonderful head scratcher of a problem forms the basis for the hunt of the Theory of Everything - the holy grail of modern Physics which so many theoretical physicists seek for fame and eternal glory.
But obviously, we don’t have that theory yet. So, we have two contradictory tools, what the heck do we do in the meantime?
Well, we use Quantum Mechanics when dealing with particles and the physics of small things, and we use Relativity for planets and the physics of very big things.
The point is, we all hold contradictory beliefs.
For instance, I believe that people are likely determined - that free will is an illusion.
But I will talk about making choices, willpower, changing your habits and so on as if I have free will. Because it’s a useful theory for living in the day-to-day, it makes sense.
When it comes to judging people, I try to imagine that free will doesn’t exist, because that allows generally for more compassion (i.e. no one would willingly choose to do something harmful, it’s a product of their upbringing and the structure of their brains - things out of their control, that they didn’t choose, and could not have chosen)
When I am alone onstage I imagine that the best version of the show is one with only me. That I alone am the star, that I am the show.
Then of course, when my co stars come on stage, I switch. I fully believe the reverse - that we as a team can produce the best show.
Both these views clearly contradict each other, but I use one in a situation more appropriate to it.
In a sense, nothing we do matters, we’ll all be dust eventually, drifting endlessly on this tiny blue speck of a planet.
But in another sense, everything we do matters. You can have a disproportionate effect on the lives of those around you. You matter.
These are clearly at odds with one another. There’s a paradox here.
Maybe, like the conundrum with relativity, one of these views will turn out to be correct. But we don’t know, we can’t sit around waiting for an answer. We might never find one.
So we have to make do in the meantime. We have to use our tools where they’re most effective, and to embrace the paradox. Perhaps we can take the calm and reassurance from nothing mattering when we’re stressed, and the motivational feeling from everything mattering when we’re demotivated.
Life is full of paradoxes, perhaps it always will be.
If you accept that, that we have theories (and stories) as tools for appropriate situations, that while we might strive for truth but we have to live in the meantime, then I think bizarrely, you can make some sense of this mad world we exist in.
Learn to love the paradox.
27. Do the right thing
I sometimes joke that my family’s motto is the following:
“When all else fails, lower your standards”.
It’s normally good for a cheap laugh, and it’s not entirely untrue.
However, the real motto of my family is “do the right thing”.
From a young age, it was drilled into me. I remember sighing in lamentation, sharing a sideways glance with my father on many occasions, whereby we both knew that the right thing to do was a pain in the ass - driving a hundred miles to do a delivery for a friend, abandoning plans, or just something that was a nuisance. But we did it.
We all love to debate at great length about what the ‘right thing’ is, thinking of grand moral dilemmas and extreme situations. This is certainly fun and necessary.
But the truth is that for most of the time we don’t really need to debate. In life we’re rarely faced with a conundrum like the trolley problem, or some dramatic life-or-death choice. Most of the time, it’s not a question of knowing where North is, it’s that we don’t follow our compass in the first place.
What’s the point of knowing what the right thing to do is if we don’t already have the habit of acting on it? Surely that must come first.
We know what we ought to do, we need to do it.
The right thing is seldom the dramatic, easy or interesting thing.
There are rarely epic quests or battles.
It is most often the boring, monotonous thing.
It is washing up, it is basic admin, it is checking in with a friend, it is doing the things you need to get done.
It’s a quiet mantra in my head that comes in quiet moments of hesitation. It’s simple.
Do the right thing.
If you’ve read this far, holy shit dude. What. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.