Batfort

Style reveals substance

Category: Growing the Future (page 4 of 8)

Permission

It’s interesting that during my 365-day mission, when I did not have permission to cheat, my mindset was usually “How can I get this done?”

Now that I’m “allowed” to not post every day, the mindset has immediately shifted to “I guess I don’t have to.”

Nope. Not the mindset I want.

Permission, or lack thereof, is an insidious thing. I find that I constantly wait for permission (from whom?) before doing something. Permission that will never come, because life doesn’t grant permission.

In life, you go and do.

 

Why travel as an employee sucks

Okay, first of all we need to discuss my current setup. Obviously, I’m traveling, and I decided that this trip I only wanted to bring one bag–my backpack. Because the work laptop was needed, I jettisoned my personal laptop and brought along an iPad mini and borrowed a Bluetooth keyboard for it. So I’m typing this with a keyboard on my lap, with my mini propped up on a pillow so far down the couch that I can barely read the words I write. This is entirely unnecessary, but gratifying in an “IT’S MY LIFE DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO” kind of way.

Secondly, the surroundings. For whatever reason, this conference I’m at was planned at a fancier-than-usual venue, so I’m the sole occupant of a king room with a legit sitting room, a dressing room, and then a bathroom. It is a ridiculous amount of room for a hotel for one person (pretty sure it’s bigger than at least 3 of my past rentals) but I’m going to enjoy every minute of it. There’s a proper desk, and a wingback chair, and black and white photos on the walls.

This level of semi-luxury is above my pay grade at the moment But since I’m here, I’m going to take the time to try on this life for size. Despite having to be at the conference for most of the workday (which I already spend mostly at work, so whatever) I’m going to live my life this week as if I”m already making money online and working from wherever I want. Writing here, there, and everywhere, setting my own schedule, being my weird carnivore self.

I’m at the point in life where I know how much endurance it takes to level up, so I appreciate having this little taste while I’m still on the front end.

However, that brings me to my main beef with this whole setup. When I say it’s above my pay grade, it’s literally above my pay grade. I would never pay for this amount of room in my real life. Fortunately for me, I have enough in savings to supplement myself while I subsidize my employer paying for this hotel room, because otherwise I would bounce my rent payment that’s due to go through tomorrow.

Of all the things that are semi-degrading that we’re asked to do as employees, getting reimbursed for mandatory travel is one of the worst. I understand it risk-wise and financially (this is my first work trip but Ive done travel reimbursements a bunch of times in various jobs). Like, I get it. The employee needs some skin in the game to not spend too much on a company trip.

But to me, this reveals a fundamental disrespect. I’m basically fronting my own employer the cash for this trip. If they wat this to, they can decide to not reimburse anything for the trip. And then what? I’m completely SOL.

Add this to the growing pile of sticks of reasons why I don’t want to be an employee anymore. Pretty soon something will set the match on fire and then we’ll have a bonfire. By that time, I hope to have a system of making money in places that is not dependent on my employer at all.

Basically, part of me wants to Don Draper away from this conference and not look back. Maybe I won’t ed up in California, but it’ll still be pretty cool.

The person you talk about the most

Yesterday I wrote about psychic headspace, and why it’s important to get some breathing space inside your own head.

Today, I realized that the person I talk most about is my boss.

How do we demonstrate that something (or someone) is important to us?

We talk about them.

Yikes.

 

Let’s back up a little.

Many moons ago, when Twilight was cool and hating Twilight was even cooler, I was what you could call a Twilight anti-fan. I LOVED hating on it. The storyline was bad. The characters weren’t well drawn. The writing was awkward. The author had clearly done only a cursory bit of research into life in the Pacific Northwest. The fans were obnoxious and/or horrifying. The list goes on.

In fact, I loved hating on it so much that I made bingo cards to make fun of the overly zealous fans on opening night. Once I packed a vampire-themed picnic to smuggle into a Twilight triple showing, including a champagne cocktail called the “Vampire’s Kiss” (talk about obnoxious!). I used the bingo cards that I made…at a midnight showing.

Basically: I paid money to watch all the movies (in my defense I only bought the first novel). I knew all the books and characters. I had long drawn-out fantheories on obscure parts of the books.

It didn’t matter what my motivations were–out of love for the franchise or love-to-hate of the franchise–I still supported the moves, talked to people about it, and spent my free time thinking about those dang sparkly vampires.

The brutal truth: I was a Twilight fan.

Like it or not, what we do is what matters in life. What we do reflects our hearts.

 

Which brings me back to today, when I found myself talking about my boss. Again. To people with whom I could talk about nearly anything in the world.

Yet I chose to talk about my boss.

My boss was on my mind. My boss was what I wanted to spend my time and energy on. The way I’m acting sure does make it look like my boss is the most important person in my life.

If I rank-ordered the people in my life who I find most important emotionally, would my boss be on the top of that list? Of course not. So I don’t want to spend any more of my life emotionally processing boss-related things than I have to, clearly.

 

To change this, I need to fill my life with people that I give more emotional weight than my boss. For me, in my present circumstances, that means meeting more new people and deepening my relationship with God.

Yet if I rank-order my life in terms of people who have power over me, my boss suddenly rockets toward the top of the list. Which suggests to me that there is, automatically, some amount of attention that I’ll need to pay this power relationship in my life.

The trick is not letting the emotional bit overpower the work-related necessities.

To change this particular situation, I’ll eventually have to quit my job. Until that happens, my boss will always have power over me (even if I don’t let it get to me emotionally).

Fortunately for me, this is just more fuel to the fire of working for myself.

Onward and upward, my friends.

 

Psychic Headspace

We joke a lot about people like Donald Trump “taking up real estate in someone else’s head.”

It’s funny because it’s true–we’ve all experienced someone else’s voice in our head. Maybe it’s our father, or our internet dad, or that girl from high school, but there’s someone, who has somehow sprung into being–fully formed–in our psychic headspace.

One of the truths about introverts is that we need alone time to recharge. But I’ve found that it’s not enough to be physically alone–you need to also mentally alone.

All those voices of other people, they need to shut up.

All those feelers you send out to people in your living space (even if they’re not in the same room), they need to shut down.

For me, at least, I need the psychic equivalent of a “no fly zone” in order to recharge. Superman’s fortress of solitude. Scott’s trek across antarctica. A faraday cage against psychic energy.

This can be difficult to achieve, especially when you live in a household with other people, or you live in a city, or you spend a lot of time on Twitter. It’s easy these days, with social media, to build up a reasonable facsimile of someone to carry with you always in your head.

You have to shake it off, and reconnect with your own soul.

That’s why walks in nature are so beneficial, and things like yoga, where everyone is too busy focusing within to really bother sending out much psychic energy.

I live alone, so it’s easy for me to get the physical space to be alone, but it can still be tough to escape other people’s thoughts.

I’ve written before about morning journalling, and it’s by far been the best thing I’ve done for my mental health lately. By giving myself space and time to write and think and breathe, before encountering anybody else’s psychic energy for the day, I feel like I start the day from a calmer place, and from a more coherent place.

In our modern world, steeped with mechanistic explanations of how things work, we focus less on “spirit” than we should. But spirit is an essential part of our beings, and deserves as much care as our bodies and our souls.

The Boomer approach to Indefinite Optimism

I like this passage so much I want to post it so it might reach a few more eyeballs than it would trapped inside Zero to One.

Recent graduates’ parents often cheer them on the established path. The strange history o the Baby Boom produced a generation of indefinite optimists so used to effortless progress that they feel entitled to it. Whether you were born in 1945 or 1950 or 1955, things got better every year for the first 18 years of your life, and it had nothing to do with you. Technological advance seemed to accelerate automatically, so the Boomers grew up with great expectations but few specific plans for how to fulfill them. Then, when technological progress stalled in the 1970s, increasing income inequality came to the rescue of the most elite Boomers. Every year of adulthood continued to get automatically better and better for the rich and successful. The rest of their generation was left behind, but the wealthy Boomers who shape public opinion today see little reason to question their naive optimism. Since tracked careers worked for them, they can’t imagine that they won’t work for their kids, too.

Malcolm Gladwell says you can’t understand Bill Gates’s success without understanding his fortunate personal context: he grew up in a good family, went to a private school equipped with a computer lab, and counted Paul Allen as a childhood friend. But perhaps you can’t understand Malcolm Gladwell without understanding *his* historical context as a Boomer (born in 1963). When Baby Boomers grow up and write books to explain why one or another individual is successful, they point to the power of a particular individual’s context as determined by chance. But they miss the even bigger social context for their own preferred explanations: a whole generation learned from childhood to overrate the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning. Gladwell at first appears to be making a contrarian critique of the myth of the self-made businessman, but actually his own account encapsulates the conventional view of a generation.

Consequently, those of us who were raised by the Boomer generation were given indefinite tools for a definite world.

Context isn’t enough. You have to have content too.

Ever upward, she tangoed

It’s funny how the better I get at judging the time it takes to do something, I still sometimes let my intentions get the best of me and make a to-do list that is more like a to-do series.

The complement to developing skills is learning how to give yourself grace when you fail.

Not that it’s “failing,” per se. Tonight I set for myself a rather ambitious to-do list based on the fact that I am excited about the future. I have a business course to start working my way through. This morning I signed up for a printmaking workshop, and realized that I need a comprehensive summer calendar to make sure that I can do all the things that I want to do this summer. (Weekends don’t just plan themselves!) There are also bills to pay, and chores to do, and Batfort HQ to set up, etc etc etc.

What I didn’t take into account was the fact that I was running around hosting a workshop at my day job today, so I am le tired. Tired enough to poop out on the couch after work and really hope that someone, somewhere would take pity on me and make dinner so I didn’t have to.

Needless to say, I will only be crossing one item off the list tonight.

Am I disappointed? Yes, a little.

But I’m also heartened. Past me would sometimes get very down on myself for not doing enough. Current me has realized that not everything can be done all at once, and sometimes the wiser choice is to rest.

Even so, that means making a concerted effort to do a little bit more tomorrow.

Grace, but still expectations. High expectations, but grace for when you have to live in the gap.

Two steps forward, one step back. The point is: forward.

Indefinite pessimism

“You are not a lottery ticket,” writes Peter Thiel in Zero to One, his book on entrepreneurship. “A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.”

Chapter 6 of Zero to One is the type of writing that I need to constantly reread. I remember Thiel’s presentation of the Definite-Indefinite and Optimistic-Pessimistic conceptualization of attitudes toward the future, and it blew my mind.

Reading the same words again, same reaction. Like a sigh of relief, knowing that I don’t have to rely on the same old narratives again.

Thiel considers that America in the 50s and 60s was in a period of Definite Optimism, where the future would be awesome and it would look like life on the moon and all sorts of concrete pictures. From there, it would be relatively easy to reverse engineer all the other things that you would need to discover before getting to the moon. Kind of like visualization/goal setting on a societal level.

In contrast, America now (post 1972) is in a period of Indefinite Optimism, where the future will be awesome but we don’t know what it will look like. With this attitude, all the power flows from the visionaries and the doers to the managers and bureaucrats and stewards – the people who can keep things running smoothly until we get to that future.

With respect to Mr. Thiel, when I look back at my attitude toward the future when I graduated from high school in the early 2000s, I wonder if America (at least America’s youth) has entered a period of Indefinite Pessimism. I don’t know what the future will look like (some people claim it’s the Golden and/or Diamond Age, while others predict a civil war or some other disastrous civic upheaval) but I’m pretty sure it will be impacted by – at very least – an huge economic collapse of some sort.

I distinctly remember telling my mother once that it was very hard to set goals when you know that the economy will collapse when I’m halfway to it. I don’t think I’m the only person of my generation who thinks this way. It’s been very clear for a while that we are headed downhill as a functional society.

And people wonder why Millennials and Gen Z have such a nihilism problem.

Anyhow, if you’ve been reading this blog you know that I’m working to combat this indefiniteness by making plans and learning how to grow and be prepared for the future, whatever it may bring. The dying institutions have been good to me so far (the “accident of birth” that Thiel rejects) but I know it won’t last.

I appreciate Thiel’s perspective because he is relentlessly optimistic (but not peppy) and 100% sure that he can change the world. Obviously, in hindsight, because he DID change the world.

You have to be able to see something to reach it, so start looking.

Image of the week: it’s happening

I did it. I invested in a practical business course.

I’ve finally broken out of “I can’t,” bought this course to mitigate “I don’t know how,” and find myself often wishing I could.

That’s somewhat of a start.

The next challenge will be finding an idea and then remaining interested in that idea even after committing to it. Usually I jump ship at the first sign of concrete manifestation of that idea.

Now that I think about it, maybe it’s a good thing that I can never quite pin down what I want this blog to be.

Anyhow, I’ll probably blog about the process here, but I doubt that the result of the business that I start to grow will be related to Batfort. For this space, I have other plans.

Money mindset

I’m finally reading Rich Dad Poor Dad, and it’s surprising to find out that it’s more of a mindset book than a personal finance book.

At least so far, there’s very few details of how to live a rich life.

What there are instead is a lot of lessons about how to think about money, contrasted between the rich dad capitalist mindset and the poor dad communist mindset.

There are a lot of lessons that I would have completely missed had I read the book when I first heard of it a few years ago, and I was pretty alert back then.

I’ve always been struck by this fact:

Money isn’t real 

But Rich Dad Poor Dad takes that concept to the next level.

Poor-thinking me, believing that money isn’t real, considers it therefore not worthy of time or attention. Money becomes this unknowable thing – and the unknowable is in effect not real. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Rich-thinking says that if money isn’t real, all the easier it is to bend it to your will. So what if it isn’t real, people agree that it’s real and that’s enough for now.

Instead of hiding from what you don’t know, go out and find that knowledge and fight back.

There are also sections on fear, risk-taking, and government education.

It’ll require some supplemental reading after I’m done (since RDPD does not provide many specifics on plans) to formulate what kind of financial moves are right for me, but so far this is a great book.

It shows that the mindset shift from poor to rich is not difficult, and can be done by anyone.

If that isn’t something we all need to know and apply, I don’t know what is.

Checking in: becoming my own boss

Seven months ago, pretty much to the day, I started thinking about how to show myself that I could, in fact, work for myself. There are two major difficulties that I’ve identified in switching from the 9-5 grind to a solo work enterprise:

  1. Used to having structure imposed on me, by school and then work and the expectations of the people in those systems
  2. Being so overjoyed at having “unstructured” time that I revel more in not having to do anything than I focus on doing things for myself

So I devised some things that I could do in “my own time” (how I hate having to write that) to show myself that I could make good use of time if I were to become unstructured all the time.

Even though I couldn’t remember exactly what was on this list, it feels like I wrote this a month or two ago–I was surprised to find out it was more than 6 months–so let’s check in on my progress.

  • Set up a (big) project, plan it out, and complete it within a deadline
    • Not great. I have a big project in mind, and a deadline, but have made very few concrete plans and need to get my act in gear (since the deadline is July).
  • Clean my room, Jordan B Peterson style
    • In progress. My new apartment is not 100% in order, but it’s much more in order than my past apartments and rooms have been.
  • Address my resentment of tracking time, and start using time to my advantage
    • Now that I’ve identified this as a problem, I can start tackling it. I’ve been working through some of my thoughts in my morning pages.
  • Stick to a consistent sleep time and wake time
    • I make excuses for this like some people make excuses about changing their diets. “Oh just a little bite of this….”
  • Continue to publish a blog post every day until we hit a year
    • On track!
  • Work out consistently
    • Getting there – it’s not super regimented, but I’ve been working out 2-3 times per week.
  • Get out of bed immediately upon rising, instead of languishing in the half-asleep/half-awake stage that I love so much (this will legit be a sacrifice)
    • This I’ve actually made progress on. I still lie in bed for a bit waking up, because I’m not one of those people who can just bolt upright and go, but I’ve moved my phone to outside of my bedroom and bought an analog alarm clock, which has drastically cut short the time I spend in bed in the mornings. It also helps that I’m greatly enjoying writing in the mornings, so there’s incentive to get up.
  • Design a daily schedule for myself that incorporates all the projects that I plan to complete, along with the self-care that my chronic illness demands, and stick to it
    • This one is in the planning stages still.
  • Finish the Self-Authoring suite
    • On the docket for this weekend, but I’ve been kind of out of it due to my visit to the oral surgeon yesterday.
  • Complete a plan for my future, with action steps and deadlines
    • Before a plan must come a vision, which I’ve been developing with morning pages.
  • Sell a product online that people buy on a consistent basis while still employed full time by someone else
    • TBD. I did just come up with an idea that might actually have a viable market and would be credible with my past activities, which I’m excited to explore.
  • Tackle the reading list that I’ve had in my mind for years
    • Working on incorporating dedicated time for reading into my schedule, and have already made more strides at reading more.
  • Define what success means to me
    • Working on it!

Some of these are longer-term goals, some are lifestyle changes, and others are shorter-term. It’s a pretty mixed bag — like I wouldn’t expect myself to have sold an online product at this point in time.

There’s more that I could be doing, but neither have I dropped the ball on any of it. Things are still moving in a positive direction. I consider that a win.

Now, how to improve: I need to be better at setting up intermediate steps and systems for carrying those things out, and holding myself to my internal deadlines. This is where difficulty #2 comes in.

I need to work on the whole “discipline equals freedom” concept, clearly.

Older posts Newer posts

© 2024 Batfort

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑