Tag: Relationships

The Daily Stoic: Always Have a Mental Reverse Clause

The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman is a book meant to be read a page per day on the practical wisdoms of Stoics such as Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus. On today’s page it was mentioned that Stoics always prepared their mind with reverse clauses.

What this means is that when something occurs in our lives, our mind can view it in a number of different ways. One way will make you self-pity, and make you feel unfortunate and helpless. The other way is empowering, positive, and constructive.

One classic example in my field sales career is rainy weather. One part of the mind will say, how unlucky that it’s raining so much, and only on the days that we feel so ready to get out there and sell! The alternative, reverse clause to this would be to remind yourself that maybe business owners will have more time to hear your pitch because there will be fewer customers on the high street, or that more homeowners will be home to open the door to hear what you have to say.

I also recently lost in the semi-finals of my title defense of my town’s snooker tournament. I could view it in a defeatist attitude and say to myself that I was unlucky, or that I’m not cut out to play this game at a high level. Or I can be grateful that I even had a title to defend in the first place, or use the defeat to spur me on to improve even more. I can even tell myself that now I don’t have to play the final, which means an extra evening in a few weeks time to enjoy some different hobbies or spend time with friends and family.

We can all use these silver-lining thoughts to the seemingly difficult situations in our lives – relationship break-ups, rejections at a job interview, a bout of illness perhaps. In fact, we hear all the time how people who have gone through something difficult recount how they don’t regret it happening at all, and can take strength from it. They sometimes even describe how it was the best thing that happened to them.

This excerpt from the Daily Stoic reminded me that yes, life is difficult. But the level of difficulty and hardship really is subjective in the way that it’s perceived by our own minds. And Stoics believed that the only thing we can control in our own lives is that perception.

Live to 100: Ikaria’s Secret to Longevity

Live to 100 is a Netflix documentary series about the Earth’s Blue Zones – small geographical areas where the residents live unusually long lives. In the series, bestselling author Dan Buettner visits these Blue Zones to try to find the secrets these people hold to their longevity.

In one episode, Buettner visits a small Greek island called Ikaria to find out more about their way of life. Of course they followed a Mediterranean diet consisting of fresh ingredients, olive oil, while using meat only sparingly. Because of the lack of natural port, the island had to be self-sufficient and grow their own food on the island up until the 1980s.

The way of life there seemed less focused on the Western hustle and bustle of work and material success, and there was no indication of the strenuous workouts you would see in a Western gym. The pace of life is slower there than what most of us are used to. Everyone cooks their own meals (usually for others), and the residents stay active doing chores like gardening.

The five main secrets to longevity Buettner found from Ikaria were:

  • Herbal tea: Herbal tea is full of antioxidants and other anti-inflammatory markers. Inflammation is the biggest cause of chronic illness such as heart disease, neurodegenerative disorders or almost any other disease you can think of. So the daily drinking of this tea in Ikaria, which it seems they also pick from their local surroundings and make in a traditional way, could be a key to their longevity.
  • Raw Honey: The honey you can find in a grocery store is boiled, while the honey that is consumed in Ikaria is raw. The boiling of honey destroys the pollen grains which is reported to give health benefits. In Ikaria, raw honey is made in hives that are moved across various parts of the island so that the bees can gather nectar from different kinds of plants, along with other micronutrients.
  • Partnership: In Ikaria, there’s an emphasis on marriage and partnership. In the show, Buettner meets a couple who both remarried around the age of 70, and 25 years later they are still healthy, happy and appreciative of each other. They both describe how they gave each other a new lease of life when they met.
  • Wine: The wine in Ikaria is hand-made traditionally, and consumed sparingly. Buettner suggests that this could be a contributor of why Ikarians live so long.
  • Dancing and laughing: Ikarians are a social group of people, holding parties where you can find people aged 14 all the way through to 100+. What Buettner noticed was the emphasis on dancing, which is an easy way to burn calories and increase heart rate, but also mixed with conversation and laughter which I’m sure is restorative to the soul.

The overall lesson that we can learn from the culture of people in Ikaria? Cook and eat local produce, live life slower, create loving and deep partnerships and enjoy company with others as much as possible.

Do Today What You’ll Thank Yourself For Tomorrow

After recently listening to the English comedian Jimmy Carr on Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO podcast, and subsequently Carr’s new audiobook titled Before & Laughter, I learned a few things.

Firstly, that Carr is not just a comedian, but a deep thinker and a very wise and funny man. There’s another side to him that you don’t see on television or stage that I found more interesting than the what we usually expect from him and his strange laugh.

Carr opens the book by stating that he always thought when reading others’ autobiographies, “God, that person speaks about themselves a lot!” So what he decided to do for his book was to mix in lessons he had learned that could benefit all of us, with a few stories about his own life. It was a perfect mix: Too much self-help and it becomes preachy, too many stories of his own life would maybe lessen the impact on the reader.

One of the main things I got from listening to the book is that Carr prioritizes the long-term over the short-term. He mentions famous psychological experiments such as the marshmallow test, where young children are tested for their ability to delay gratification. Spoiler alert: the children who were able to delay gratification ended up having better social, health and academic outcomes throughout their lives.

One of Carr’s mantras is to do things that will make tomorrow’s version of yourself thank you that you did today. For example, today I registered for self-assessment on my tax return – something that I dread and do not enjoy, but I will be grateful that I did once it is complete. Other tasks like household chores, brushing teeth, showering, skincare, and working out, would all elicit a similar response from future you.

Then you have things like cultivating relationships with friends, family and significant others. One of the most common regrets of the dying is that they didn’t keep in touch with friends or tell loved ones how they felt about them enough. If we do these things today, hopefully we can avoid a similar fate.

Choosing to do the hard things now make our lives easier down the road. Making sure your car is adequately serviced should prevent a call to a tow-truck later on. Staying on top of work and becoming great at what you do could create financial security in the future. Making sure that you have your devices charged overnight will take away potential hiccups tomorrow.

One reaction I had to Carr’s advice was: if we are always trying to help the future versions of ourselves, are we forgetting to enjoy and cherish the current versions of ourselves? When is it acceptable to have fast food, sit on the couch, binge Netflix or social media? Would we still be present in the moment if we are always thinking of the future?

After hearing Carr’s point, I made some changes to my life where I valued the future version of myself more, and began to think longer term. I stayed on top of my to-do list, went to bed earlier, used social media way less, worked out, and applied myself at work better.

But I ended up getting an unexpected side-effect from serving my future self. Instead of becoming bored of doing the ‘right’ thing all most of the time, I actually felt pretty good about myself. All these micro-decisions we encounter daily, and choosing the right option to serve the future version of yourself, ends up making you like yourself more in the now.

So taking care of yourself in the future, is indirectly serving yourself in the now.

Wherever You Go, There You Are

The lowest common denominator of your life is simply: You.

Out of all the terrible, unlucky things that have happened in your life, you were there for all of those events. Equally, all the joyous, remarkable things that have happened in your life, you were there too.

In that case, since you are the lowest common denominator in all these life events, you are the single biggest reason why all these things happened, whether good or bad. Instead of blaming our parents, our exes or the media for our troubles, understand the role you have played in allowing these factors to limit you and therefore shape your life.

Whether life is perfect or whether it’s a living nightmare, you have the responsibility and the privilege of deciding what you think about it, and how to respond to it. Stop giving people the power to ruin your day or shape your life. Ultimately, you have the power to decide what your circumstances mean.

Sometimes you read stories of the rich and privileged, who seem to have it all, stumble in life and fall prey to destructive behaviors and never-ending misery. On the other side there are people out there with much more modest means who fill their lives with love and gratitude.

This just proves that instead of always trying to change our environment to suit our temperament or our tastes, it is more important look within. We think a holiday will cheer us up, or a new job or new relationship. And it might work, in the short-term. But then we realize that we are enacting the same pattern over and over again. There is no point in running away, or hiding. You can’t escape yourself.

Because no matter where you go, there you are.

Premeditation of Evils: The Stoic’s Way of Expecting the Unexpected

The Stoic school of philosophy contains the phrase Premeditatio Malorum, literally translating to premeditation of evils. What this means is that the Stoics took time to imagine things that could go wrong in life and things taken away from us. They wanted to be as prepared as possible for things that could be unexpected so that they could behave with virtue when the time came.

In the modern day this still applies. Do you know what you would do if you suddenly lost your job? Or if your partner wanted to break up? Or if one of your loved ones received a terminal diagnosis? What if you became permanently disabled, or lost your speech, sight or hearing? What if you got sued for all of your money?

As painful as those scenarios are to imagine, the Stoics viewed this exercise as important. They believed that unlucky events fell heaviest on those who least expected them, those who were least prepared. In understanding the possibility for ill fortune, they experienced more gratitude for times of good fortune but also a readiness in the event that things changed.

The premeditation of evils can extend a little further too, for events that aren’t considered disastrous but could still be unexpected. If you are in a relationship, do you know what you would do if an attractive work colleague started seducing you? Do you know what you would do if you or your partner became pregnant? If you are single, do you know what you would do if the subject of your admiration started showing real interest? Do you know what you would do if the amount in your bank account suddenly contained a few extra zeroes in error? Do you know what you’d do if your best friend asked you to be their alibi in a criminal case?

Imagining these kind of scenarios gives us a chance to respond to these situations in line with our values, instead of being panicked or feeling reactive if and when these relatively unexpected, yet impactful events occur.

The World Owes You Nothing

The problem when we get something, is that we tend to assume that the world now owes it to us. This can apply to houses, cars, jobs, friends, partners, status and wealth. When we achieve or acquire these things, we start to get comfortable and start to take them for granted. We feel we deserve these things.

But in reality, the world owes you nothing.

Firstly, complacency can take away your job and relationships, because you stopped providing the same value as you did at the beginning. Or, causes outside your control can occur – your car could get stolen, a natural disaster could destroy your home, deaths of loved ones, someone tries to shatter your reputation, market forces turn your investments sour.

Understand that all the beautiful things you may have right at this moment will not be here forever. Do what you can to make important people feel loved. But also recognize that we can decide to loosen our attachment to things, so that if they desert us we can be grateful that we were lucky enough to have them in the first place.

The Three Biggest Decisions of Your Life

Entrepreneur and angel investor Naval Ravikant advises that young people should be spending more time making the big decisions: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.

These three things will pretty much determine the quality and trajectory of our lives. Sometimes we find ourselves going with the flow, entering relationships that we aren’t 100% sure of, spending a lot of time doing a job but spending so little time deciding which job would be best for us. And usually the place we decide to live in will determine who we meet and which jobs are mostly available too.

Once we decide these three things we can be much more intentional with our lives instead of being taken whichever way the wind is blowing.

Variety is the Spice of Life: Why Time Seems to Be Passing By Quicker As We Age

According to Chip & Dan Heath in their book The Power of Moments, most people think that time passes quicker once we get past the age of 30. If this is true, why? The Heaths claim that it’s because the ages of 15-30 contain a lot of life milestones – we finish school, learn to drive a car, study for a degree, get our first job, enter our first romantic relationship, travel the world, get married, have children etc. After the age of 30, there are far fewer big milestones, and that can make it seem like time is flying by.

So how can we try to counteract this? The Heaths suggest that we should add a little variety by creating defining moments in our lives – memories that can can create by doing something novel. This could be a combination of moments of elevation, insight, pride, or connection. A moment of elevation is one that rises above the everyday; a moment of insight rewires our understanding of ourselves or the world; a moment of pride will capture us at our best; and a moment of connection is social.

As much as routines are designed to increase productivity, it allows time to fly by unnoticed. Adding the extra spice to life through variety will allow us to remember more prominent moments through our lives. So what kind of things can you do to add variety? Going to your favorite travel destination can provide a moment of elevation; doing a 10-day meditation course may provide you with moments of insight; entering an obstacle course race with a team of friends can create pride and connection.

If you think about it, life is made up of moments. So create photo-worthy moments, try new things, and lean into uncertainty. As the authors of the book Surprise put it, “We feel most comfortable when things are certain, but we feel most alive when they’re not.”

Chasing Daylight: Eugene O’Kelly’s Three Months to Live

In May 2005, Eugene O’Kelly was diagnosed with late-stage brain cancer, and given three months to live. Within two weeks, he quit his job as CEO of accounting giant KPMG and scrapped all the plans he had made with his wife and two daughters.

One night at the dinner table, O’Kelly drew a map of his relationships, and grouped them into five circles. His aim was to “beautifully resolve” his relationships, starting with the outer circles and working his way inwards.

In his outer circle he contacted them by phone or email, highlighting favorite memories and appreciation for the other person. He decided to meet his third and fourth circles in person – he would meet them for an exquisite meal, or in a beautiful park for a walk, to share memories and gratitude for what they had done for each other. O’Kelly called these encounters “perfect moments”, and it was his mission to create as many of these as possible in the little time he had left.

By August, he was focusing on his inner circle, and spent his time with his closest friends and family. A couple of weeks later, on September 10, 2005, O’Kelly died.

O’Kelly wrote a memoir, Chasing Daylight, where he began with, “I was blessed. I was told I had three months to live.” And he took it literally – he was told he had three months to live, not to die. O’Kelly “felt like [he] was living a week in a day, a month in a week, a year in a month – meaning he condensed his life by having more perfect moments in three months than he would have done in five or ten years of living his normal life.

So what if we could have more perfect moments too, without the news of a terminal diagnosis to motivate us to do so? In fact, not all of us will be as lucky as Eugene O’Kelly – some of us might not be given any warning at all when our time is up.

The World Treats You the Way You Expect to Be Treated

When I first started off as a door-to-door salesman, I was nervous. My perception was that no-one ever bought anything at their door, and I would have people being rude and telling me to go away, slamming their door in my face.

In my first few weeks and months, this happened just as I expected. But it seemed like the other more experienced salespeople hardly ever had this happen to them. Somewhere along the way, I learned to visualize positive reactions out of the people I was meeting door-to-door. I began to expect a different, more receptive response when I knocked on people’s doors. And, slowly the responses became more positive, and it became rare that I was met with a rude homeowner.

I started to see myself as a good salesman, and then people were treating me in such a way too – they started buying from me. I started expecting them to buy from me too – and more people did.

It’s likely that simply expecting more isn’t the only factor at play here. Obviously, with time my competencies as a salesman improved, and naturally I became less negatively affected by rude remarks, so I was less likely to take things personally if and when they happened. If interactions did go sour, I would have strong boundaries and remove myself from situations I deemed unacceptable.

This concept of being treated the way you expect can translate to general life too. Some people are constantly embroiled in drama and toxic relationships, while others seem to be able to avoid it all. It’s hard to imagine that this happens by chance – it’s more likely that people who attract drama expect and are willing to accept unnecessary conflict instead of having healthy boundaries and picking the right battles to fight.

The world treats you more or less the way you expect to be treated. So start expecting more.