Extra Meditations
One month, two doses, because you love these, and because I love writing them.
Before we proceed, I’ll make this request: If you’ve found my work valuable, consider upgrading to paid. This support makes it possible for me to keep providing these essays. I’m grateful to my paid subscribers, and as more of you upgrade to paid, I have big plans to bring you even more impactful work. This is the promise. So, stick around and experience the unfolding.
1.
When people come to me for advice on writing, my approach is always the same: I ask them to show me what they’ve written, or to come back when they’ve written something.
I do this for three main reasons.
First, if someone really wants to write, they probably already have something I can assess and offer specific feedback. Second, in telling them to come back when they have written something, I eliminate nearly 80% of requests because, predictably, most people aren’t serious, don’t write anything, and thus don’t come back. Last, many of those who do find the answers to many of the questions they had through the process of writing, and they are much happier to discover them on their own rather than have me tell them what to do.
From experience, I can always tell who will do what based on the very initial interactions; I can know who is seriously interested and who’s merely fascinated with the idea, not the work.
2.
Again, regarding consultations, I get requests from people who want to know how to be calmer. They read my writing and feel that I can be helpful in helping them with this.
In almost all cases, the problem is that my clients cannot sit with a thought or problem for long enough. A thought disturbs them, and they want a solution to it right there and then.
Understand: Technology is making many of us addicted to immediate solutions. This is a problem. You must learn to sit with thoughts and problems. Some just go away on their own. Others, by staying with them for long enough, we learn to understand them in a way that solves future problems.
Calmness isn’t just about the present; it’s about entering a state that makes it possible to handle future experiences.
So, how much can you sit with before indulging the impulse to lash out, escape, or doomscroll?
3.
If you love something, you give it money, and then you watch it improve, become deeper, and become even more refined as a result of your supporting it.
That is why I appreciate those who pay for my writing, because they support what it is now and what it can and will become.
There is no better demonstration of love than when someone chooses to enter the future—your future—with you.
4.
There is a crisis: many people are feeling unloved. They are realizing that all the career advancements, money, and looksmaxxing mean nothing if none sees or thinks you matter. Whatever you’re doing, spread love every day. Make your family, friends, partner, and colleagues feel that they are loved.
5.
Do everything the best way you know how to, and then live without regrets.
6.
Bitcoin is not money. One who thinks it is doesn’t understand the structure and fundamentals of money. Of course, for as long as there’s demand for something, it can pass for what it isn’t. But all illusions reach their end, eventually.
7.
There is no good or bad day. There is only a day where things are both falling apart and being beautiful at the same time. In the village where I grew up, Saturdays were for weddings, but they were also for funerals.
If you are waiting for another life for things to be beautiful, you are terribly misguided. This is the life where everything gets to be built, just as it is where it’ll fall apart.
Every day will be the best of times, and it will be the worst of times.
8.
Life is unnecessarily hard for all shallow people, because things require the level of understanding that they aren’t capable of.
There’s what will be beyond us; the world is simply more complex than it appears. But there is what should be within our grasp. The wages of refusing to become a good student are perennial hurriedness, frustration, and bitterness.
9.
Pay attention to geopolitics. Some things are bigger than your nation. You need to understand how what’s happening where affects what.
It is not enough to work hard and be a good person. You must know how macro and global factors are interacting to make your life either harder or better, and how you react as a result.
Wars, AI, oil, a new world order, etc. Stay on top of things, or your labor will mean increasingly less, and your dreams will be diluted by forces you aren’t even aware of.
10.
Write. If you don’t, one day your own children will say they don’t understand you, because they don’t know what to think of you now that you aren’t around for them to experience you.
I don’t want to be misunderstood, even in death. If anyone ever claims they don’t know what I think or ever thought, I’ll know they didn’t care to read my writing.
What I think, I write. I am my writing.
11.
If someone loses interest in you the moment they get what they want or when they realize they cannot get what they want, shed them immediately, because you are going nowhere with them.
We must at least pretend to not just be about all we can get from the people we interact with. Those who cannot don’t even care enough to appear civil. They are worse than you think.
You are the cow that gives them milk, nothing more. You should want to be more, and you can be with the right people.
12.
Write, and then the ideas will come. Think, and then you will learn to think clearly. Face turbulence, and then you will learn to be calm.
What you have and who you are is payment for what you’ve done, and all pay is after the work.
13.
Look at your life. What are the bets, and what are the hedges? Where are you all in on something, and where are you merely minimizing risks or avoiding something? Your payoffs will reflect this, without any deviation.
So good as always. I was actually thinking about one of the points from the meditations you shared this month. about how life is always unfolding and there is no end goal. So glad to have received more reflections in my inbox today!
"Do everything the best way you know how to, and then live without regrets." Such a great one, Patrick (well they all were). Thanks for giving us another boost this month!