Productination

I hear a buzzing and look up.

A bee has flown into my room.

Desperate to escape, it flies into the window pane, pressing itself against the glass, checking for weaknesses. Sadly, the escape route it so desires is just two inches to the right of where it is, beyond the metal border of my window and into the open space. All the bee can see in front of it is the outside world, its goal. It can’t see this impenetrable, invisible barrier in front of it.

Over and over again it flies up and to the right.

I can tell that it is getting tired from sustained flight against this resistance.

Every so often, it zooms out down and to the left, only to slowly move back towards the upper right hand corner of the window. If only it could see the bigger picture from where I’m sitting… If only it could see that the path to freedom is just beyond where it’s comfortable going.

Weary, it stops flying and starts to crawl around. After many minutes of randomly walking to the edge of the window and back, it somehow gets the idea to keep going. It reaches the edge and instantly flies off.

I could go on for several paragraphs about how relevant this is to my life, but I won’t (for now). I leave the interpretation of this up to you as an exercise.

It was a bright Wednesday morning; the sun sliced through the slats of my track blinds and bounced off my retinas. I felt my bed shaking and I realized, my phone was going off. I had set an alarm the previous night and then stuffed my phone between my mattress and my boxspring.

It was time to get up.

I groggily dragged myself to my computer, I had six new messages waiting for me, four were spam and two were facebook notifications. Awesome. I told myself that I’d deal with those later.

I woke up early for a purpose.

I carefully measured out three scoops of beans and watched in slow motion as they tumbled into the mill. I pulsed the grinder, making sure to muffle the sound in my sweatshirt, and flipped on my percolator. Even the most mundane things I do have a cinematic quality to them.

Caffeine coursed through my arteries as I zoomed through my textbook, its numerous appendices, and some diagrams online, reading just enough to understand my homework problems and complete them. My homework was due on Monday, and I was going to turn it in late for partial credit.

Time was running out, and I skipped the longer, more involved problems.

Feeling resigned to my “good enough” attempt at the homework, I printed it out and jumped in the shower. The warm water rushed over my body and I got lost in my thoughts. Five minutes turned into ten turned into twenty, when I realized “Oh shit! I have to get to school!”

I ran out, threw on some clothes, grabbed my homework and my skateboard and bolted out the door.

My dashboard clock said 10:55. I knew that my professor collected homework during the break at 11:00. Would I make it? Would my work, as half assed as it was, be in vain?

I flew down Wilshire, took a left on Westwood, and pulled into self parking. I paid the two dollars for forty minutes of parking, and sped off towards the engineering building on my skateboard.

I pushed open the door to my classroom and saw that everyone had come back from break. The hall clock said 11:08. I had missed the deadline by a few minutes.

There went 1% of my grade.

Gahh! I crumpled my homework up and wanted to scream in frustration. Instead, I started playing with my phone, distracting myself. I played with my phone quite often. My friend B wanted to meet for lunch. Awesome, but I had other plans that day. I wanted to get my hair cut, so I told him no and then started skating towards my car.

Driving west on Wilshire, my frustration, sadness, and anger with myself finally bubbled over. I was tired and hungry, and could no longer exert the effort it required to block those feelings out. I screamed at the top of my lungs, “I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE!” as I pounded the steering wheel. I started to cry. My vision blurred and my eyes stung as crying turned into sobbing.

I was catharting, and when it was done, I felt like a great weight had been lifted.

What did I learn from this?

For the past two years (even before I started going to grad school) a question that people had for me over and over again was “Why are you going to grad school?” I had a laundry list of logical reasons, so let’s just get those out of the way:

1. It will help me make money in the future.
2. I would gain some prestige having a higher degree.
3. I would learn a lot and become more specialized.
4. It’ll be awesome to live in LA for two years.
5. Going to school is more fun than working full time.
6. I had already invested the effort in getting in, so might as well follow through.

Those all sound pretty good, and I was somewhat convincing when I told people. There were a few other reasons that I didn’t really tell people, like that it was expected of me, and that it would please my mom.

But, even so, other people kept asking me, and I was unable to keep convincing myself that all of those reasons were true. I didn’t really believe them all, and at the root of it, there was some feeling that I didn’t want to feel.

Looking back, it’s perfectly clear that the feeling I was blocking out was what came out during my catharsis, the feeling of not wanting to go to grad school. Well, guess what? Trying to deny your feelings works great, if you want those feelings to fester and grow in intensity.

This feeling was running the show subconsciously, and I had no idea. Being five minutes late is a perfect illustration of how I would sabotage myself.

Subconsciously, I wanted to fail out.

Once I finally fully owned that feeling, instead of denying it or trying to block it out, I was able to let it go and move on. That feeling will no longer fun me. When it comes up again, I can acknowledge it, get in touch with my true values, and move forward. I’ve decided that yes, I truly do want to finish my degree, that this aligns with my core values, and I am 100% OK with the fact that I may not want to be at grad school sometimes.

It’s a wonderful thing to finally wake up from sleepwalking.

So, dear reader, we are all run by our subconscious to different degrees. What have I been doing that finally allowed me to have this epiphany? Well, it’s been several practices:

1. Meditation and other practices to just gain greater awareness of my body.
2. Physical activities to cultivate greater capacity for intense feelings.
3. Purposely putting myself in uncomfortable situations so that I can practice feeling those things I don’t want to feel, and being OK with it.
4. Hanging out with supportive people who will call me out on my bullshit and give me reflections of where I’ not being true to myself.

It was fully two years that I was denying that feeling. Everyone around me could see it and could tell that something was off and I didn’t listen. It took an intense experience to break me out of my trip and show me that the cost of denying that feeling outweighed the cost of feeling it.

For the next week, I want you to practice noticing any resistance you have to feeling your emotions. Just noticing this resistance would be good in and of itself, but if you’re up for it, keep going and constantly ask yourself, “What is it I don’t want to feel?” If you follow that rabbit hole deep enough, I assure you, you will have a lot more freedom in your life.

Hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful. See you next week!

The scene was a sunny Sunday afternoon in San Francisco’s beautiful Union Square, about two years ago. I was feeling really good, just walking around marveling at all the smiling, beautiful people. I was meeting up with my friends in a few minutes, and we were going to go to the bookstore and the mall.

Then I saw her.

She was 5’1”, Asian, petite, with long black hair, wearing a simple outfit of a tank top, jeans, and flip flops. She was modestly hot, most people would not notice her, but I thought she was unusually cute. She was my “girl of the day,” and I felt myself drawn to approach… then I noticed she was on the phone.

I waited.

I looked at my phone. Five minutes had passed. She was still talking. I didn’t want to interrupt her. It looked like she was having a nice conversation. I waited some more. I started to get impatient.

She started walking away, the phone still glued to her ear. I considered going up to her and tapping her on the shoulder, just as my own phone rang.

Fuck.

“Yo, we’re here,” my friend said. “Cool.” I said, deflated, while hanging up.

I greeted my friends, using their arrival as an excuse not to approach. We continued on our day, and I dejectedly filed the experience under “M” for “Missed opportunity for connection.”

What did I learn from this?

Sometimes opportunities present themselves and, for whatever reason, the conditions are not optimal to act. But guess what? The conditions are rarely optimal, so I don’t let this stop me from acting.

We can always find excuses to not do something; just as often we can find reasons to do it.

Imagine time flowing linearly, with branches at every possible decision point in your life. Once you make a decision to take action, you’ve taken a branch in the timeline. There’s little use in playing the intellectual game of thinking “Oh but what if I did X instead?” or “what if I waited until Y?” because those branches are no longer available to you. If you do play this game, do it for education. Replay the event exactly the way you wanted it to turn out so you can get closer to the ideal in the future, and be careful not to beat yourself up in the process.

I think it’s great to be able to “pick your battles” and to act when timing is good. The problem I had, like so many others, was that I would wait and wait and wait and not take action. Acting in some direction is almost always better than just succumbing to inertia. And so, I practiced acting when I had less than 100% of the information I felt I required, and I knew that conditions were not optimal. This allowed me much more freedom to do things and try stuff out, and as a result, my timing actually improved. I naturally acted more aggressively when conditions were in my favor, and I was taking a lot more chances when conditions were not the best but were as good as they ever would be.

How do you know when it is the best time to act? How do you know if you should wait or if you should just act immediately? Here’s a simple rule: if you’re thinking about doing something do it. This is the rule I started following after I had the above realization and it definitely helped get me out of my head and start doing. If this is too radical for you, try doing something when you feel like you have 80% of the information you need to make the decision, or that the external factors are 80% of how you’d like them to be ideally.

And so, dear reader, I ask you: are there any times in your life when you let opportunities slip because you waited too long? Do you find yourself hesitating when making decisions? For the next week, I want you to notice the places in your life where you hesitate, and consciously make an effort to take action, even when you have less information than you feel like you need. If you hesitate often, start small. This may take the form of ordering food within two minutes of glancing at the menu, or even picking which album you want to listen to on your ipod. Practice taking bold, decisive action instead of surrendering to paralysis.

The other day I was on campus and saw a cute girl, talking on her phone, walking towards me. I smiled, stepped slightly in front of her and said “OMG, stop.” She was a little surprised, but she stopped and looked at me expectantly. She kept her phone to her face as I said with utmost clarity and calmness, “I noticed you walking and just wanted to say, I think you are super cute.” She smiled, wrapped up her conversation, and we had a warm and flirty conversation for a few minutes before class.

Before you make a decision, you cannot possibly know the exact details of how your choice will impact your life. You are always acting with imperfect information, even when you wait for the most opportune moment possible.

Quoting one of the worst movie trailers I’ve ever seen:

If you risk nothing, you risk everything.

[Ed: I just found out that it’s also a Geena Davis quote. Sorry to hear that your quote was used in such a bad movie, love.]

I could have the frame of mind that the timing is rarely perfect. But, I choose to flip this around.

The timing is always perfect.

Let me know how it goes.