helpful or hurtful

I've probably only said that fifteen hundred times, I started saying it to my daughter when she was two or three.  I've recently started saying it a lot to myself.

When you start on a task, is it helpful or hurtful?
How about how you are thinking about that thing?
What you are eating?
The people you are surrounding yourself with?

Twice in the last week people told me they were being helpful why they were actively hurting what I was working on.  It is a simple question, because sometimes it's not as big of a deal as whether it is right or wrong, but it's still a pretty big deal.

A Little Bit Better

A little bit better comes in three phases.

Phase one is when you have just started something, you are a beginner and every time you spend time in practice you get a little bit better.  The exciting part is that sometimes you get a lot better in a very short amount of time, but you never get worse.  If you are practicing you are getting better.

Then you are in the middle.  You have done something for a while and there are good days and bad days but you know what you are doing.  Getting a little bit better in the middle is harder because it does not happen automatically.  If you show up and do bad reps, you may actually get worse.  And during the middle you almost never see huge leaps, giant gains.  Most people stay in the middle because it is hard to get better, and nobody criticizes the person in the middle.

But mastery, that stage is the hardest.  Mastery says that you need to work exceptionally hard to get a little bit better, but when you do get a little bit better you are adding that one or two percent onto a giant base and it feels great.  The amazing marathon runner that runs for over two hours and gets a personal best by only forty seconds: that forty seconds means the world.

The difference between the middle and mastery is seeking out the weak points, finding the faults and then working inside of those uncomfortable spots.  The beginner and the person in the middle hate those spots, and their ideal of mastery is that they no longer find those pain points.  But the master loves those pain points, because only when they find those can they get better.

The Bible has a line "where your heart is, their will your treasure be also". Everybody wants the treasure now, and when they get the treasure then they will commit their love, desire and work. The guts that it takes to aim your heart at finding weakness, and then truthfully analyzing yourself, that is where the masters heart is and that is why she gets the treasure.

Gravity and Choosing

It won a bunch of Oscars years ago, so I decided to keep on the cutting edge of culture and watched the film Gravity two years after it came out.

I may have more thoughts on this later but my major thoughts are tied around doing.  The beautiful idea that we so often live our lives right on the outskirts of all of humanity and yet totally alone.  Nobody can hear us, see us or help us but we are most certainly here.  It hurts exist sometimes, it's hard and we all just want to go to sleep, and on the outskirts of humanity it is so easy to just drift off.

Sandra is both born is space and baptized on her re-entry to earth.  The process is painful and difficult and many times we just want to drift off but we have to choose.  Choose to live life.  Choose to fight and survive and get up.

I've spent year after year getting rid of things.  I got rid of a gripping addiction, I got rid of so much guilt and pain, I got rid of many of my earthly desires surrounding success, I got rid of my debt, I got rid of my business's, and I got rid of most of my earthly possessions.

But at some point you have to choose life.  Not just to fill it up with shit, not just to pile on work for work sake or drive for prides sake.  No, you have to choose something after the emptying, then you have to fight like hell to do that thing.  And in the process you will go through so much pain, lose things you don't think you can live without and keep driving forward.  Just keep driving.  You are Abraham in the desert, going to a place you will know only when you get there.  Keep going.

I took a couple of weeks off and stopped going.  Nothing more dramatic then I just stopped caring, starting drinking and sleeping, stopped looking my family in the eyes.  When you turn off the oxygen and drift off to sleep you fade really, really fast.  Don't do it.  Burn up in the atmosphere.  Freeze to death in space.  But for God's sake, do not turn off the oxygen and fade away.

I don't know if I'm back yet, if the oxygen has saturated my brain yet, but I know for one thing that I want to live.

Good luck wherever you are on the journey, thanks for reading this post.