How To Know What You Want

How To Know What You Want

   January 30, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

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When it’s really hard to figure that out

What do you want?

“I don’t know.”

We do, of course. Somewhere, deep down inside. Somewhere, we have preferences, thoughts, wants and needs. Somewhere, we have an opinion on literally anything.

Because we are human beings, with agency and authority on our self.

The problem, however, is that sometimes we misplace this as easily as we misplace our keys.

And here’s how we backtrack and retrace our steps.

We must stop shouting at ourselves (please)

Stop demanding an answer to “what you want” — right now!

And definitely don’t let anyone else do the shouting for you.

I think about that scene from The Notebook, where Noah is berating Allie by shouting “what do you want?!” Many people thought this was hilarious and adorable and true love, but, guys, that’s not love — not for each other, and definitely not ourselves. That’s now how this works.

So when Allie cried back, “it’s not that simple!” she was speaking her truth.

Which is kind of ironic.

It’s NOT that simple

I feel very irritated and impatient when articles on “how to figure out what you want” effectively include, as step one: “figure out what you want.” (Like “list all the things you enjoy!” or “what makes you happy?!”, as though recognizing “want” is somehow easier if reframed in other ways...)

It’s not. Our issue isn’t the grammar or the specific thing in question. If we knew how to identify “wants,” we wouldn’t struggle with small things like where to eat. So of course we’re going to struggle with whether we want to marry shouting-match Noah or old-money James Marsden, let alone anything else in our lives.

This is why advice like “brainstorm ideas!” doesn’t work

It’s like dragging an anorexic to a buffet thinking that’ll solve the problem. Allie, for example, didn’t need to make a list of everyone she could marry.

It’s also why “just do it!” doesn’t work

This just makes us feel panicked and forced. We’re liable to jump blindly at the next thing or anything, and Allie might’ve run off with the milkman.

The problem isn’t context, but rather skill set. We aren’t always equipped with the answer because we aren’t always equipped with the instinct.

The reason we don’t know

We make decisions in one of two ways and, to Noah’s credit, he got them right: either what we want, or what others wants. (Sometimes we resist both and make no decision.)

If we don’t know what we want, it’s because we silenced ourselves.

Empathy and learning to “play well with others” is fine — to an extent. The issue is when it comes time to live self-actualized lives, and we can’t choose between external influences and ourselves.

That, or more commonly: we realize we’re unhappy.

We’re ignoring the signs

Anxiety is a sign we’re ignoring our own needs. So is insecurity, loneliness, helplessness, feeling inferior.

So is withdrawal. And apathy, boredom, sarcasm.

Attachment, preoccupation, codependence. The chase of “simple pleasures,” good or bad.

Any of these are subconscious sirens that we’re silencing ourselves and shutting needs down.

But absorb the language here: we are ignoring our needs. (They are not being ignored by others. And others are not making us feel our reactions.) We are failing to serve ourselves.

It’s here that the gig is up. We can no longer turn to “others” for guidance — or blame. Not on these feelings, and not the originating want or need.

All of it — the anxiety or avoidance, and the underlying problem — is first ours to resolve. And if we have any hope of ever being able to answer “what do you want,” we have to do this for ourselves first.

We’re cashing checks we can’t cover

We’re rushing to the bank demanding answers and our account is just staring back at us, like “uh, who are you?”

We ignore the signs for years and then expect our subconscious to deliver magical solutions when we want them.

We have to do the grunt work first. We have to make $2 deposits. And it’s us — not anyone else — who has to do it.

How? We must first give ourselves everything we need from others. Attention, understanding, validation, support, acceptance… love.

We think we’re doing this, but we’re not. As evidenced by the above.

We’re so out of touch we don’t even realize we’re out of touch. And if we aren’t in touch with our emotions, we have to get in touch with ourselves other ways.

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I wrestled with meditation for years, trying apps, in-person guided practice, even monk-led retreats but was, at best, only reasonably good at “making an attempt,” distracting myself with directives or only finding a few fragile seconds of focus. I sat with meditation in the way we visit relatives we don’t like: out of obligation, smiling to hide our discomfort — as much from ourselves as them — each moment dragging on (and us along with it.)

But, like a switch was flipped, meditation suddenly “worked” for me the instant I did it because I wanted to do, not because I felt like I should.

But I didn’t force or demand myself to want it.

What happened was I wanted to fix the “what I want” problem. I wanted to be able to answer it, and I wanted to know why I “couldn’t.”

I asked myself “what makes you happy,” and when I had no confident answer (instead distracting myself with side questions like, “what is happiness, even?”), I then asked “how do you feel?” My only answer, always, was “fine.” So then I thought, “just for fun, pick the closest feeling — or one you sometimes feel! You can’t always be fine!” Still unsure, on a whim I Googled “feelings chart” — and not only do they exist, but they totally blew my mind.

Looking at them, I thought “these are feelings?!” I didn’t realize half these even existed, and didn’t realize things I was feeling were the feelings they said on this chart (like I was surprised at how little “fear” I felt, that what registered as “happiness” for me was actually “peace” or “power,” that most everything under “happy” I only experienced in fleeting blibs, and that sarcasm and distance are “anger.”) That’s how out of tune I was.

After that, I read that negative feelings (anything besides happy, joy, power, peace, love) means we’re “neglecting our needs.” I read that and was like “wait, what ‘needs?’ where?” and went hunting for a “needs chart.” And that’s where things got dicey, because I stared at the list and felt dumbfounded, like: “but… I have all this.”

Except clearly I didn’t.

And that is how we get lost.

I searched on and found some compassionate souls who offered:“if you can’t get in touch with your feelings, get in touch with your breath.”

Great, I thought. Meditation.

But as a last resort, I gave it a try. I wanted to resolve this.

And in this mindset — of self-interest and self-love and intrinsic want — I sat down by myself — no apps or monks — closed my eyes, and ended up meditating for over 30 minutes. In absolute comfort, awareness; both light and heavy-sweet, like a hug.

I was overcome with a feeling of care. Other things caught my attention, but I also realized that every time I gave my attention to anything besides myself, I was actually telling myself “this random thought is more important than you are.” And with this state of mind, I’d gently come back. Because every time I brought my attention back to myself, I was also saying, “you are most important right now.” Like, this is everything. I felt like I could have sat there all afternoon.

As I withdrew from the meditation, there was a quick surge of emotion. I didn’t understand what it was, and actually had to reference the “feelings wheel” to identify it. Sadness.

Now I meditate most mornings. For how long? “As long as it takes.” As long as I need to feel: I am here. Some mornings, 10 minutes. Others, I indulge and stay 45.

And after this experience, I am left wondering if meditation shouldn’t always be self-guided. Because I’m not sure we’ll ever fully sit with and see ourselves if we keep part of our attention on some omnipotent authority figure barking in our ear, no matter how “reassuring” their voice.

Go as far back as you need to go to “know”

Sometimes I didn’t know what I wanted to eat for dinner. But not only that, sometimes I didn’t even know if I was hungry — which seems insane.

Because it means that I not only didn’t know how to meet my own physiological need — but I didn’t even know whether or not I had it.

It’s hard for me to discern wants and needs sometimes. It’s hard for me to discern feelings — physical sensations? Hm, couldn’t say. Emotions and feelings? Psh, clearly beyond me.

Which is why I had to keep going all the way back until I did know something about myself with absolute certainty: breath.

“I am breathing.”

I am breathing out. And I am breathing in. I am aware of my own breath. And, the unspoken implied: yes I want to breathe.

And, beyond this, the overarching want: “I want you;” “I want to know what you want;” “I want to be here.”

This is how I finally came to meditation, and got back in touch. And it is with blind faith that I sit there, patient and faithful but mostly patient, believing: everything else will build from there.

We have to stop fighting ourselves and shutting ourselves down. When we feel we don’t “want” to do something we know we “should” do, it’s a siren in our ear. The solution isn’t to force ourselves, crying or kicking and screaming or terrified, but to pause, give attention, resolve.

If we don’t know what we want, it’s because we lost touch on much simpler questions. And the solution isn’t to force, or brainstorm, or “just take action,” or look to others. It’s also not avoiding our feelings— anxiety or sadness, withdrawal or attachment — or dumping them on other people, but rather to address our needs. And if we don’t “know” what our needs are, our job is to sit quietly with ourselves, be present and aware, and rebuild from bottom, with whatever is handed to us. Only in this way will we eventually (I trust) understand “what we want” in all things.

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How To Build Your Self Esteem

How To Build Your Self Esteem

   January 28, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

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step away from the affirmations

mural: Andrew Burke

“To be healthy, functioning individuals, we need to feel good about ourselves. To feel good about ourselves, we need to feel that our time and energy is spent meaningfully. Meaning is the fuel of our minds. When you run out of it, everything else stops working.”

Most of us struggle with self esteem. Many of us are fortunate enough to realize this, and some of us care enough to try to fix it.

The problem, however, is with the majority of the resources available to us — especially online. I am pretty sure these articles are 100% written by people who have serious self esteem issues, regurgitated from everyone else who has self esteem issues, on down the cycle to readers with self esteem issues, who think it’s just their fault for not being able to apply them and successfully boost their self esteem.

But of course not. Because none of this is how self esteem works.

First, let’s talk about what self esteem ISN’T:

Self esteem is not selfishness or narcissism

Having to say this makes me impatient, because if people don’t innately “get it,” they fight it blindly, emotionally, tooth and nail. And I understand, because there are a lot of emotions on the line here (see: entire post) so I’m just going to tread lightly and quickly when I say:

Self love and self esteem are not selfishness.

On the contrary, selfish people have desperately low self esteem and self love, which is why they overcompensate, demand, and have nothing left to give others.

Self esteem is not a series of “dont’s”

Most self esteem articles cheerily suggest things like, “Don’t have negative self talk. Don’t compare yourself to others. Don’t put yourself down. Don’t doubt yourself,” like “just don’t have low self esteem!”

These aren’t solutions.

1. The brain struggles with the word “don’t,” and when you focus on the negative, you’re still focusing on the thing. The brain interprets the sentence as an imperative, like: “ah, okay, negative self talk. Got it!” The brain is baby Groot.
2. The way we talk to ourself is a reflection of self esteem, not the root. It’s effect, not cause. It helps, of course, but it’s not the core. And fixing the core will fix the way we think and talk about ourselves.
3. Nature abhors a vacuum. If you don’t have something positive at the ready, the old stuff will just rush back in.

Self esteem does not come from others

It’s not anyone’s job to make you feel good about yourself. It can only come from you.

Some articles suggest that readers should “learn to accept compliments” — several even went so far as to suggest that you approach others and “ask them what they like about you.”

Trying to build self esteem through “others’ compliments” is like trying to learn how to walk by being carried.

Only you control of your self-acceptance and self-love.

Self esteem is not in “self help”

This is just an extension of the above.

Self help reinforces perceptions of inferiority and shame. It plays on insecurities and fabricates solutions that don’t serve real needs. It encourages avoidance.

It’s like how MayoClinic convinces us we’re dying more than it actually, directly remedies health problems. Engaging will eventually make us absorb all these negatives. We are not more powerful than what we give attention.

Self help just replaces one external influence for another. We’re still grasping for some authority figure, some omnipotent voice, to tell us what to do.

This of course includes this very post. Which is ironic, but at least honest and warm-hearted, because I wrote this only after doing tons of similar reading myself, and I write hoping we all resolve this.

Self help will never help

When I was getting my business off the ground, in the 3 dark months of “white noise” after quitting my job but before getting my first customer, isolated and running mostly on “faith” alone, someone asked me, “what kind of music do you listen to during the day?” I told them, “on good days, upbeat music. On bad days, chill music. And I know it’s an ugly day when I resort to motivational videos on YouTube.”

Those videos got me nowhere — except maybe through the day.

You want to know what finally kicked my self esteem back into gear? When I started making sales. Once that happened, I never watched another motivational, “self-help” video.

Self esteem is not about “pampering”

My god, if we could all stop with the “indulgences” and “little day to day pleasures;” if only we could stop thinking “self love” is about “treating ourselves,” or “scheduling time every day for fun and relaxation.”

Heidi Priebe said it best,

“Real self-love isn’t about ‘treating yourself’… because real self-love is less about babying yourself and more about parenting yourself.”

Good parents don’t indulge children with candy each time they cry. Good parents support, teach coping mechanisms, and gently encourage growth.

This is what loving ourselves means as well. It’s not about daily indulgences. It’s identifying and pursuing our longterm values.

Self esteem is not about affirmations

Fuck writing down all your best qualities.

I don’t know who came up with this terrible advice, but it’s pretty much useless. Consider, for a moment, the most genuinely confident person you know — do they sit down every day and write down their best qualities? Maybe they do, but I doubt it.

Confident people don’t do this. And people don’t magically become confident doing it. Only self-doubting people get stuck in this compulsive loop.

Self love is not about affirmations.

As Heidi Priebe wrote,

“Claiming to love yourself and actually doing the hard work of loving yourself are not the same thing… You can repeat a thousand affirmations an hour, write a limitless number of blog posts about how you’re worthy of love and stick millions of post-it notes reminding yourself how awesome you are on every mirror in your house, but that only gets you 10% of the way to self-love.”

Except it’s more like 0%.

The real solution is: agency, awareness, authenticity, and action.

What self esteem IS:

Step 1.) Self esteem is agency

Self love is taking responsibility.

So many terrible articles encourage readers to keep self esteem at the mercy of external forces, prompting them to “think about what is affecting your self-esteem,” and suggesting “your confidence may have been lowered after a difficult experience or series of negative life event, such as: being bullied or abused, losing your job or difficulty finding employment, ongoing stress
physical illness, mental health problems, a difficult relationship, separation or divorce.”

No. To this entire list: no.

I’m not saying that bad shit didn’t happen to you — it probably did. Because bad things happens to everyone. But life isn’t about playing the victim, or comparing notes on who suffered most. Life has negatives in the cards for everyone — even the most confident people you know — and the only difference between those with self esteem and those without it is that the first group chose to take responsibility for their lives, their responses, and their actions.

So when it comes to thinking about “what is affecting your self-esteem,” the answer is always “you.”

You are in control of your self esteem. That’s the entire list, beginning to end.

you are in charge. you are in charge. you. are. in. charge.

Step 2.) Self esteem is awareness

This is super important, and we don’t talk about it enough.

Get out of your damn head. Be present.

Stop slipping away. Stop shutting down. Stop freezing and falling silent any time you’re uncomfortable, or unsure, or anxious. Stop reminiscing on the past, or thinking about the future, or wandering around, mentally, anywhere that you actually aren’t.

I wrote pretty openly about struggling with this myself, and the fact that I’m currently working on it, so I speak from a place of empathy and love.

We do this is because we’ve learned that “shutting down” offers security — it’s “easier” if we don’t engage; we think there’s less risk.

But what we give up in exchange every time we do this is moments of our own lives. Which is why, in those brief moments we pull our head out of the sand, we’re filled with panic to realize we don’t like what we’re living. But then most of us respond by seeking reassurance (see “self help,” above — “you can do it!”) or solutions we don’t take, and ultimately shut it back down.

The first step? Awareness of your breathing. Second, awareness of your body in space; what you’re physically feeling. From there, you’ll become more aware of what you’re emotionally feeling as well. Accept these emotions as they come to you.

Wake up. Be aware of what you’re doing and where you are all the time. And most importantly: be aware of what you feel and think about it…

Step 3.) Self esteem is authenticity

It’s knowing what we actually want.

This is probably the hardest part. It’s also really important.

Because “nature abhors a vacuum,” if self esteem isn’t coming from external sources, but us instead, then we have to do the work of identifying what we want and need — in that vacuum, without regard to others. (Note: just like the “selfish” section, that is not meant to read as “without regard for others.” We should still be considerate. But able to say what we want (or think or feel or need) without having to first ask, “well but what do others want?”)

Self esteem is answering “what do I think?” without first asking “what do others think?” This is harder than people realize, especially because it’s so ingrained.

I was recently thinking about what I wanted to do for Valentine’s Day, and initially could not answer this question— did I really want to go to dinner, or did I just like the way that sounded? Did I really want flowers, or did I just hope they’d serve as some security; some certainty that this was special? Did I really even want to do anything? Sometimes we do things we don’t even really want, but doing what “sounds good” saves us the risk of regretting having not done something come the morning of the 15th.

(In the end, what I wanted was a cookie from our favorite local bakery. We go together all the time and they put out these seasonal designs that are so adorable I could die. And then, like a good partner, I said in clear words that that’s what I wanted.)

We do this with everything. We pick where to travel, what to buy, and where to eat based on other people — our order at restaurants is influenced by others’, and we eat more in the presence of people we’re trying to impress. We often choose clothing, cars, houses, and hobbies couched in “what others think.” And sadly, we often even choose jobs and partners this way.

Sometimes we’re asked: “What would you do if you could not fail?”

And that’s great, but an equally great question is: “What would you do if you could not tell or be told by anyone?”

Would you get married if you had to go on telling people you weren’t? Would you drive the same car if nobody saw? Would you do the same thing on your weekends if you couldn’t frame it up as “how it retells on Monday morning?” Would you vacation in the same places if nobody knew?

Would you still be doing the same job and have the same partner if you had to tell people you had a totally different job and partner, both of which they deemed “unimpressive?”

What do you want? Not just in the moment, but in the long-run. What are your values? What is your version of long-term happiness?

If that’s too hard or scary to speculate: start with a chunk of lifestyle now. Not your leisure time, but your actual life. When, for example, are you happiest at work? If your answer has anything to do with others (i.e., “when I get recognition,” “when I get a raise,” “when I win a deal,” or “when I help others,” you need to look again, for answers that serve you.) Maybe you don’t even like your work. That’s for you to explore.

If you’re struggling here and you just want more “help” on “how to do it:” you are missing the point entirely (and probably also missing the alarm bell that should be going off in your head.) This work fundamentally cannot be done by anyone else. This work is you. Do the work.

If you are so far gone that you still feel lost knowing what you want on any level: you skipped self awareness. You’re not paying attention. See “step 2” for further instruction.

Skipping this step is why “just do it!” doesn’t help

Our struggle (and reluctance) to find answers is why “advice” like “just do it!” or “just try things and see what you like” is met with apprehension at best, and disaster at worst. (If you aren’t in touch with what you actually want, and what your happiness feels like, there’s no way of even knowing if you like what you’re trying, and without this skill set, you’ll just keep falling back on “but it sounds cool” or “it’s what people do.”)

You can’t know what you love if you don’t know what love feels like, and you’re so out of touch with your own feelings you don’t know what it is.

We have to actually know who the hell we are, and what we want. Experimenting and taking action is second-grade reading level and we’re still learning letters over here.

Step 4.) Self esteem is action

Only once you understand what you want — what really makes you happy — in the long run.

Action is about making decisions. It’s about committing. It’s about choice and assertiveness and asking for the things we want and need. It’s about taking steps, and thinking, and coming to our conclusions — and then verbalizing them.

It’s also about being aware. It’s about being alert and awake and active in our own lives — not passive, compliant, or submissive.

As Nathaniel Branden wrote in “How to Raise Your Self Esteem,”

“Living consciously means taking responsibility for the awareness appropriate to the action in which we are engaged. This, above all, is the foundation of self confidence and self-respect.”

Or, to be slightly more clear,

“The difference between low self-esteem and high self-esteem is the difference between passivity and action.”

But knowing what action to take requires knowing what we want, outside of what others want — i.e., authenticity — which requires that we take full responsibility for our lives. Which requires that we dump all of the bad assumptions and models around self love, take agency in-house, and start to build self-fueling fire of our own desire.

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How To Develop Mastery, Make Millions, and Be Happy

How To Develop Mastery, Make Millions, and Be Happy

   January 19, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

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Idea #1: You don’t have a preexisting passion (nor should you want one).

Idea #2: Becoming really good at something and generously using your skills to help the right people is how you quickly succeed.

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In the book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport dispels the myth of what he calls, “The Passion Hypothesis.”

The most common and cliche’ advice about seeking a happy life and prosperous career is to “follow your passion.” Millennials are notorious for seeking fulfilling and passion-filled jobs, only to be left disappointed and disappointing.

The primary problem, according to Newport, with the passion hypothesis is that all the attention is focused on the self. People who want a job they are passionate about are less concerned about what they can give to the world and are more concerned about what the world can give to them.

There Is No “Right” Job

“Everything popular is wrong.” — Oscar Wilde

Most people are unsuccessful for a reason. They operate with faulty assumptions about how the world works.

One of those assumptions is that we as people have preexisting passions we need to “discover” and then follow. Famed psychologist and author of Mindset, Carol Dweck, would call this a “fixed mindset.”

Rather than selfishly seeking a life you’re passionate about, Newport recommends becoming a “craftsman,” wherein you develop rare and valuable skills. Newport calls these rare and valuable skills, “career capital.”

Here’s how this work:

• You determine skills and abilities that would be useful to the world.
• You set clear goals for mastering those rare and valuable skills.
• You engage in deliberate practice, pushing your skills and abilities to mastery.
• As you get better, you begin to develop confidence in yourself (confidence doesn’t create high performance, it is the byproduct of high performance).
• As you develop confidence, you begin to deeply enjoy what you’re doing — and become very passionate about it. As Newport explains, “Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.”
• As your expertise, confidence, and passion grows, you begin to see your work as a “calling” or “mission” (like passion and confidence, your identity and personality are byproducts, not innate).
• Because you have developed such mastery of rare and useful skills, you have the perspective and context to discern the “cutting edge” of your field.
• You can then begin making distinct connections and projections into what has been dubbed, “The adjacent possible” which Steven Johnson described as, “a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.” In other words, this is how you become an innovator and a shaper of societal and global change.

Quick Re-Cap of Takeaways and Then A Road-Map of the “How”

Here is a quick recap of the core ideas in developing mastery:

• You don’t have an innate passion that you should “follow,” instead, your passion follows you
• Confidence isn’t what leads to success, instead, successful behavior is what leads to confidence
• As you develop “career capital” through mastering rare and valuable skills, you’ll begin to develop confidence, passion, and personality
• Thus, your personality doesn’t shape your behavior, but instead, your behavior shapes your personality
• You are the shaper of your identity, happiness, and the impact of your life’s work

If you believe the reverse of any of these things, you have a “fixed mindset,” which assumption will keep you stuck and rigid.

How To Develop Mastery, Make Millions, and Be Happy

“If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (“what can the world offer me?”) and instead adopt the craftsman mindset (“what can I offer the world?”).” — Cal Newport

This final section briefly sketches the “how-to” in developing mastery, making millions, and being happy. All three of these things are byproducts of making congruent, aligned, and consistent choices.

Develop Mastery

If you want to become successful, it’s better to follow what successful people did to get there than to follow what they do after achieving “success.”

What people do after becoming successful is often very different than what they did to get there. This is true for a few key reasons:

• “What got you here won’t get you there.” In other words, what got people successful isn’t what keeps them successful. There are levels, and your strategy must change the higher up you go. If you don’t evolve and adapt, you’ll plateau.
• Which is what most people do. They reach a certain level of success, become comfortable, and stop growing. To quote Greg McKeown, “Success becomes a catalyst for failure.”
• In order to get out of a plateau, you must embrace a learner’s mind, leverage your position, and laterally jump into new projects that force new growth and development.

If you look at any person who is honestly seeking a higher level of success, they are usually waking up early, studying and learning lots, seeking advice and feedback, and creating, testing, and failing.

This is harder to do once you’ve gained a certain level of expertise and success. Once you become comfortable, it’s hard to go back to the discomfort of learning and humility. Some of the world’s most famous chef’s continually remake their menu from scratch, even after they’ve become world-class and received global recognition, because for them, it’s about the process of growth and creativity.

According to Tucker Max, many people who become good at something immediately believe they are good at everything. They aren’t. And this is a key reason many successful people plateau. They get “fat and lazy,” and stop doing high quality work and pushing themselves to greater mastery. They stop thinking about what they can do for the world and instead focus on what the world can do for them. According to Cal Newport, if you stop developing more “career capital,” it begins to fade away. You can only use up so much of what you got until you have to get more. Career capital is a resource that you use. And if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.

Make Millions

“Life gives to the giver and takes from the taker.” — Joe Polish

Developing mastery to the point of making actual impact will not develop until you begin:

• Investing in yourself, and
• Investing in key relationships

If you invest in the stock market, you may be able to get a 10–15% return. However, when you invest in yourself and in relationships, you can often get a 1,000% or 10X return.

According to Strategic Coach founder, Dan Sullivan, growing by 10X is actually easier than growing by 2X.

When you make investments in yourself, you shatter unhealthy and limiting subconscious patterns. You upgrade your sense of what you can be, do and have.

When you invest in key relationships, you put yourself into proximity to the best and most generous mentors available. You gain immediate access to people and ideas that could never have been possible without such relationships.

Investing actual dollars in both yourself and others dramatically changes the psychology of things. When you invest in yourself, you become highly committed to what you’re doing. Investing in yourself is an act that facilitates what Charles Darwin would call, “Selective Pressure,” which is a phenomenon that alters the behavior and fitness of living organisms within a given environment. It is the driving force of evolution and natural selection.

Investing in yourself creates internal supply to match the external demand of the investment. The bigger you invest, the bigger the psychological leap — which then facilitates a radical upgrade in behavior, confidence, harmonious passion, and outcomes.

Investing in relationships creates the optimal level of synergy — where both parties can go higher and deeper than ever before — because both are invested in each other. Crazy stuff happens when you invest dollars into the causes and cares of other people. It changes the dynamics of the relationship incredibly. Those you invest in will go above and beyond to help you in all you’re doing. It becomes more than a relationship — it becomes a mission to help you and what you’re doing.

Joe Polish, founder of Genius Network, has what calls the “Magic Rapport Formula,” which leads to 10X relationships and growth, and includes the following concepts:

• Focus on how you will help them reduce their suffering
• Invest time, money, and energy on relationships
• Be the type of person they would always answer the phone for
• Be useful, grateful, and valuable
• Treat others how you would love to be treated
• Avoid formalities, be fun and memorable, not boring
• Appreciate people
• Give value on the spot
• Get as close to in-person as you can

When you engage with givers who operate by these principles, incredibly synergistic possibilities arise. I’ve engaged in such possibilities, and can honestly attest to the 10X principle. My income has gone up at least 10X the last three years in a row — from making basically nothing to making seven figures — and I anticipate 10X continuing to happen as I humbly engage these principles.

The only way this is possible is by continually honing your “career capital,” investing in the right relationships, and then generously GIVING your rare and valuable skills to the success of other people’s goals.

It is by giving that your rare skills and abilities continue to develop and grow. It is by giving and investing in other people that your network becomes world-class and your ability to make lots of money becomes easy. Your network is your net worth.

Be Happy

“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.” — Viktor E. Frankl

Happiness is a byproduct. You cannot pursue it directly. It comes from dedicating yourself to a cause you firmly believe.

In order to dedicate yourself to a cause you believe in, you must invest yourself in the development of rare skills and abilities, which then lead to confidence, passion, and purpose. That purpose is your “cause,” which you now have skills and passion to contribute to.

You love what you invest yourself in.

Happiness comes from investing yourself deeply into something and someone other than yourself.

Happiness can’t come from following a self-centered and obsessive passion aimed only at making yourself feel good. Happiness comes from self-growth and using that growth to make the world a better place.

Either you’re focused on:

• Growth or greed (“what can I give to the world” vs. “what can the world give to me”)
• Giving or taking
• Nurture or nature
• Possibility or rigidness

You’re happiest when you’re growing and giving. When you’ve become dedicated to something bigger than yourself. When you’re engaged in work you have control and autonomy over and which work is making a tangible impact in the lives of other people. You can only have this type of work by developing mastery, investing in others, and being a giver.

You ready?

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The Most Important Skill in Your Life

The Most Important Skill in Your Life

   January 18, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

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Humans have a tendency to overweight surface-level benefits.

Everybody wants to be more productive. Everybody wants to learn the hard skills that will make them more successful. Everybody wants to know how they can build smarter habits and cultivate better routines.

These skills have a visible reward that’s very apparent once they’re mastered, and as a result, they get a lot of attention and resources dedicated to them.

If you learn how to manage your time better, you’ll be more equipped to do something useful with it. If you learn to code or to write, you may have a career ahead of you that you can pursue beyond an office. If you build better habits, you can make a lot of difficult tasks easier.

These rewards are clearly valuable. That said, they’re ultimately not the highest leverage skills that you can nurture in yourself. In fact, the skill that is perhaps the most potent of all is also the most neglected.

It’s one that we all already engage with, but it’s also one that very few us of have truly mastered. It’s both easy and difficult at the same time.

The most important skill in your life is knowing how to think.

The Fundamental Meta-Skill

Much of western philosophy can be traced back to the mind of Socrates.

The only problem is that Socrates never wrote anything. The only record we have of the man comes from other writers and philosophers who knew him and engaged with him, most notably Plato.

In Plato’s work, much of the writing is presented in the form of dialogue, and a good portion of the dialogues are of Socrates engaged in conversation with others, which generally end with him out-reasoning them.

He is known to modern society for his Socratic method, which is essentially just a process of asking “Why?” over and over again until you have broken the argument down to its core. In a way, this simple method helps us get to the core promise made by philosophy.

The promise being that it will teach you more than just how to live well. It will teach you how to think, a skill perhaps even more important.

Unfortunately, however, this skill while responsible for everything from how you make decisions to how you face challenges is becoming increasingly disconnected from the institutions that are supposed to teach it to you.

Although the internet has helped by democratizing knowledge, there are few places that provide you with processes for making sense of it.

More than ever, it’s on us to hone this ability. Fortunately, there are ways you can do that. Here are three methods to improve your mental processing.

1. De-Habituate Yourself From Instinct

Most of the responses that we give to our surroundings are habitual.

We sense a cue in our environment, this cue is associated with something in our memory, and whatever is in our memory produces an automatic response.

Although this is efficient when it comes to tasks that don’t require a thought out response, it can be detrimental when applied to other situations.

Psychologists often differentiate between fast thinking and slow thinking, and fast thinking, while convenient, isn’t always completely optimal.

Whether it’s trying to control your anger or it’s making a deliberate effort to better evaluate an important decision at work, it’s worth reminding yourself to look at things like you’re seeing them for the first time.

A beginners mind, coupled with detached experience, produces a far better result than just an instinctual reaction to an event. It forces you to slow down and ask questions before proceeding to a final solution.

This not only works as a way to second-guess an otherwise rushed reaction, but looking at things like a beginner also helps you see and think about different outcomes from a unique and, sometimes, better angle.

2. Take Time to Think About Thinking

What is the core mental representation that you have of the world? How do your thinking patterns connect and interact with each other? What’s the process you go through when you make a decision?

These are important questions, and very few people take time to actually think about them. It’s worth creating some space to do that.

The relationship between the different mental models you have in your mind and how they interact with the world shapes everything else that occurs in your life. It’s the lens through which you make sense of reality.

It’s not something that should be happening in the background of your mind.

It’s something you should actively take time to understand and connect. It’s something you should deliberately manipulate by reading things of value and learning from people who are smarter than you.

As Warren Buffett says, “I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business.”

You should know how your brain works so you can better influence it.

3. Routinely Reflect on Your Decisions

Your day to day decisions are ultimately the core product of your thinking.

You can judge the quality of someone’s mind by the track record of their decisions over an extended period of time. If the record is consistent, then their mind is likely sharp. If it’s inconsistent, they have work to do.

Naturally, context matters, and so does their perception of the world, but generally speaking, your decisions tell you a lot of about yourself.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to record every single choice you make, but you should routinely take moments to reflect on how the big things in your life turned out relative to your intention.

If things went well, you should trace back to see why they did so and how you can replicate that in the future. If they went poorly, the dissection of that decision will teach you about a blind-spot that you can avoid in the future.

It creates a feedback loop which, if approached well, self-corrects over time.

The best thing about the past is the wisdom it gives you to improve yourself for the future. That said, for it to do so, you have to actually seek it out.

Why Is It So Important?

While things like productivity and habit building can take you pretty far in life, alone by themselves, there is a limit to what they can do for you.

No matter how you spin it, everything in your life begins in your mind.

The personal outlook you have is shaped by how you think about the situations that you’re engaged with on a daily basis.

The choices you make are influenced by the thinking patterns that guide your attention when you’re deeply lost in thought.

The skills you learn are influenced at their core by what you currently understand about the world and how you reason with it.

In the words of Einstein,

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

Every idea, ambition, and possibility in your life is directly connected to your ability to adequately make sense of your interactions with reality.

There is no set place that’s going to teach you how to think, and it’s not just something that’s restricted to a particular time period in your life. It’s a skill that demands ongoing effort and commitment.

Fortunately, if mastered, it changes everything.

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What To Do When You Don’t Care

What To Do When You Don’t Care

   January 17, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

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Especially when you don’t care that you don’t care

I recently wrote about “knowing what you want” — the struggle most of us have to discern how we even feel or what we actually enjoy, and the importance of identifying and understanding true interests to pursue.

And the ugly side of this is not when we pursue things without interest, but rather when we pursue things without interest but don’t care.

What are you supposed to do with that? How alarmed should we be at the fact that we do tons of things in our daily lives that we feel moderately interested in but don’t care that we don’t care?

Should we care?

In the 1999 film Runaway Bride, we come to find out that Julia Roberts character, serial monogamist Maggie Carpenter, has spent so much time buying into her partners’ breakfasts that she doesn’t even know how she prefers eggs.

At the time, I didn’t really understand how that could happen. Now I do. Things like that slip through the cracks.

But what if Maggie Carpenter truly didn’t care how her eggs were prepared? Should it matter?

I think it depends.

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Whenever I’m confused about any of the other big things in life — work, or areas of passion (if the two are different, and they almost always are) — I come back to romantic relationships.

Partly because I’ve done a shit ton of research in that area, but mostly because things work out for me there — even when relationships have ended, I’ve come away with new learnings, new insights.

Something about partners is easier; more contained. I don’t hang too much on other people; I let them exist as their own separate beings, this single, imperfect entity who happens to be at my side — and I see them for the finite thing that they are. Things like “work” and “passion” and “interests” have no parameters; no boundaries. (That, and for me it’s the work, not the partner, where I tie my identity up. That’s the reason most of us flail at either one.) And that makes them harder — for me.

So, let’s take it back to relationships

1.) I dated people I didn’t want to marry — and I didn’t care.

Now, there are a couple of important caveats here: first of all, I was young. We are all permitted a few silly flings when we’re young. Two, they still offered me whatever I was looking for at the time (hint: they always do, whether it’s healthy or not), and in that sense still had value. And three: I’m still not sure on the whole marriage thing, so “finding a husband” still isn’t a big deal.

So, all things considered, I would never advocate that anyone “waste their time” with someone they didn’t enjoy if they truly weren’t getting any enjoyment from it. Sure, your 20s are for trial and error, but it should mindful and deliberate, not negligent or wasting your time.

But as I look back on these relationships, especially within the context of where I am now, I have zero regrets.

So, +1 for “not caring about not caring.”

2.) There’s a lot I don’t care about in relationships.

I don’t care whether my partner texts every day. I don’t care if they never buy me flowers or Christmas gifts. I don’t care how they leave the toilet seat up, or the toothpaste. I don’t care what car he drives. We could go our whole lives not saying “boyfriend” and “girlfriend.”

Because the thing is: You can tell the size of a man based on the size of the things that bother him.

We all have the same amount of finite amount of “fucks” to give, and too many of us waste them on petty things. I’m not willing to sacrifice any “fucks” on stupid shit.

I’ve written about this before and a few people were quick to accuse me of being a pushover, or spineless, or not caring enough in general. But in reality, people who respond defensively to these care too much about the wrong things, and not nearly enough about the things that matter.

I demand of a partner the same things I demand of myself: emotional health, intelligence, and friendship. When I say I don’t care about the rest, it’s not because I’m not in the game, but rather because I am simply unwilling to spare any chips on stupid bets. And I am super happy (and focused, and deliberate) with my relationship as a result.

+1 more for “not caring about not caring.” With the added caveat: so long as you care about something.

What do you do if you STOP caring — at a high level?

Especially if it does matter?

Like, what if we stop caring about our partner or relationship at all?

It does a huge disservice to both ourselves and our partners when we bite the bullet and pretend or force ourselves or “try harder” to care when we don’t. The emotional energy required of this upkeep is just obscene.

I’m not suggesting anyone should bow out of a relationship just because they “no longer care.” I’m just also not suggesting they “force it.”

On the contrary, the solution is to ask why they no longer do — and what they need.

Why don’t we care when it matters?

I don’t know. The answer varies. It can feel like fear, anxiety, uncertainty, “lack of motivation” (which isn’t real), lack of knowledge, broken morale, sadness, etc. but these are all pretty much different words for lowered self esteem, and self esteem is almost always the root issue — first causing a lack of engagement when we know it matters, and then causing us to accept a life lacking engagement (when we know it matters) as the norm.

What do we need?

Again, I don’t know. Self esteem is part of the answer, but the other part of the answer is a better understanding of ourselves. We don’t need to be interested in everything, but we should have an idea of what we’re interested in — or, in the least, an understanding of how to identify the feeling of “interest.” That, and then an honest understanding of our own values, and what actually matters to each of us as individual human beings in a vacuum.

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So, applying these back to work and passion

What should we care about? When does it matter if we don’t care? And what should we do if we don’t, but it does?

The main takeaways here are as follows:

• What matters is what you value — both long-term, and at that time. Hopefully these two are in alignment, otherwise you’re going to be doing some damage (like binging at the risk of our health), but for the most part, doing the work of understanding these upfront — and being honest and healthy about them (and understanding cause and effect) — will go a long way in discerning what matters and what doesn’t; where to care, or not.
• It’s fine to not care about what doesn’t matter — as long as you do care about what does. Dude, maybe Maggie Carpenter could go her whole life not preferring any one egg and maybe that could be totally okay. Maybe it’s okay not to have an opinion on everything, if one does have an opinion where it counts.
• When you stop caring — and it does matter —don’t just force it; ask yourself why. If you don’t love your work, why? What do you need? If you are overweight, why? What’s the core problem? If you are lonely, why? The point is that these problems aren’t what they look like, so blindly throwing ourselves at them aren’t the solution. Very often, they’re bundled and burdened with tons of emotional reasons, and it’s our job — our obligation to ourselves — to do the dirty work of unpacking it.

The solution is to fix the core problem: the broken spirit

And the good news is that a broken spirit can almost always be fixed by pursuing things that we love (just as a spirit can be hurt by dumping energy into things we don’t — and hurt even more when we withhold our spirit from things we do.)

So what to do when you don’t care — and you don’t care that you don’t care? Sometimes professional therapy is best. But short of that: find at least one (healthy) thing you do care about, dump energy into it, and build from there. The rest, for most of us, will work itself out.

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