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The Art of Showing Up

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Raptitude Experiment No. 8

I’m finally settled from my return to Canada, with a permanent apartment and a permanent job, so I feel ready to dig in and make some strides in the self-improvement department.

Self-improvement is about habit change, I know that now. But I have a poor track record for habit change. I have been ping-ponging between two different strategies, and neither has worked too well.

My old strategy was to summon all my enthusiasm, pick a day and try to change everything at once: begin exercising, meditating, staying organized, and practicing guitar every day. Usually I start this on a Monday and it lasts till about Tuesday.

It’s too much. There is too much of a sudden schedule adjustment, and the habits have a tendency to get in each other’s way. Any new habit makes ripples in your life that you can’t really predict until you’re doing it.

For example, if you’re in the new habit of working out with kettlebells after work, when you sit down to play guitar you may notice your hands are sore and tense, your mind is a bit dull, and it’s just not conducive to playing guitar. Your practice is an uninspiring one, and it’s getting late anyway, so you don’t do the next thing right either, if you get to it at all. Getting even the first day right is hard when you take on multiple new habits.

Many people suggest never trying to change more than one habit at a time. My problem with this is always the same: I have some initial success and then I can’t help but think about other habits I could be forming. I want to ride the momentum. If there are five or six habits I want to form, and I’m not allowing myself to begin on the second until I’m 30 days into the first, that means I can’t even touch some of those habits until I’m five or six months down the road, and that assumes that I’m successful in my first attempts.

I don’t know about you, but when I want to make a change, I don’t want to put my inspiration on hold for six months. In my life it seems I am either comfortable and complacent, or I want to make a dramatic change (a revolution!) in how I spend my time. Right now I want to make several changes at once, and I’m determined to find a way.

The Plan

I have a suspicion, and I’m going to test it out.   Read More

by David Cain on September 13, 2010
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The Decapitation of Douglas Harding

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Douglas Harding was a modern-day English philosopher who made a remarkable discovery about human nature, and developed a simple and ingenious method for guiding others to see it for themselves. This post is the third post in a series about his method. [Post one] [Post two]

Though an architect by trade, Douglas Harding was strongly drawn to philosophy, and his primary interest was answering the simple question of who he really was.

Was he a really only a six-foot bag of meat, animated by some mysterious biological energy? Or was he what the religious and spiritual masters said he was: pure, empty consciousness, undivided from the rest of the universe?

He wasn’t about to take anyone’s word for it.

While thinking about the principle of relativity, he realized that his identity depended on his distance from the observer. Looked at from a distance of a few meters, he appeared to be what could only be described as a man. But from a distance of an inch or so, “patch of skin” would be a more honest descriptor of his appearance. Zoom in further, and he became cells. At closer ranges still he became molecules, atoms, and particles.

He recognized that it worked the other way too. Observe from far enough away, and his close-range appearance as a man gives way to that of a city, then a continent, a planet, and so on.

Careful to avoid assumptions and going only off of objective observations, it was clear that what he was at three meters was nothing like what he was at three nanometers, or three billion meters.

He couldn’t deny that he had many layers of appearances, quite inseparable from one another, and all of them dependent on the distance from which he was observed.

It was also undeniable that he needed all of those layers to survive. Clearly he needed the surrounding planet to breathe and sustain himself, which in turn needed the surrounding solar system to keep it in its life-sustaining position, which in turn needed the surrounding universe to put it where it was, and so on. Looking in the other direction, he knew he also needed his constituent body parts and cells, which in turn needed their constituent molecules and atoms.

This led him to the idea of nondualism, as fabled in religious and spiritual teachings. There was no perceivable separation between the six-foot human he always figured himself to be, and the universe that surrounded it and comprised it. The only separation between Douglas the person and the remainder of the universe was an arbitrary, imagined one: the common, generally unquestioned thought that a human being ends strictly at the limits of its skin. Read More

by David Cain on August 19, 2010
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First Things First

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Ever since I declared my Big Goal — complete self-employment by my 31st birthday — I’ve been flip-flopping about where specifically to start. Because I’m working with such a long timeline, it doesn’t make sense to chart out every action along the way, because I just don’t know how it’s all going to play out. It’s almost all new territory for me so I’ll need to be making constant adjustments the whole way.

So the “middle game” and “end game” of this goal are going to stay undefined until I get closer to them, but the opening sequence is to be decided now.

I am still abroad at the moment, so my workspace is constantly changing and never predictable. I have no desk and no filing cabinet, not much privacy, and often internet access is expensive or unavailable. There is also an uncomfortable internal conflict between my desire to make the most of my time abroad by sightseeing and socializing, and my desire to get this project underway.

Most of the sub-projects involved in my goal will have to wait until I return home, where I’ll have the stability and privacy to work, with fewer distractions. But I can still make one or two big strides between now and then.

I’ll be living out of my backpack for another six weeks yet. I’ve left New Zealand to explore Australia until I go home. Not that six weeks is a long time — I can’t believe I’m so close to the end of my trip — but I do want to get closer to my goal during this time, rather than defer it all until I get home. Enjoying my trip is the number one priority, but I don’t need sixteen waking hours a day to enjoy myself.

My goal’s general plan is clear to me, and I know that the first stage is going to surround establishing certain fundamental habits: writing habits, workflow habits, networking habits, and blog marketing habits. These habits will put me in a better position to complete everything between now and D-Day (October 8, 2011.) Any good habit established now will pay great dividends over the next eighteen months, and will facilitate the development of other habits.

In my research on habit change, one point keeps coming up again and again: the likelihood of your habit sticking decreases dramatically for every additional habit you’re attempting to change at the same time. If you only focus on one habit, a successful take is almost guaranteed, but trying to change five habits concurrently almost guarantees failure for all of them. Read More

by David Cain on May 18, 2010
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How I Spent My Life Last Week — Experiment No. 6 Results

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clock on a red wall

Two weeks ago David decided to log every single thing he spent time on, from sleeping to waking up, in an effort to identify unproductive, time-wasting habits. The experiment lasted one week, and this is what he discovered.

Well it’s over, and I have been properly schooled. I’ll never look at my time the same way again.

The logs themselves are not that interesting or surprising. I didn’t uncover any insidious habits that have been stealing hours from me every day (though email-checking is definitely taking more than its fair share.)

What I did with my time didn’t really shock me, but I gained some sobering insight into why I do the things I do, and how to make much better use of time. These experiments never deliver exactly what I’m expecting, but that’s good — I get lessons I didn’t even know I needed.

So where does the time go?

Recording everything you do has an interesting effect on the psyche. You realize that by merely doing things with your day, you are spending your life. So it stands to reason that you’d become more concerned with what you’re getting in exchange.

Some interesting discoveries:

It doesn’t really take a long time to make a decision, unless you are avoiding it. Time logging spurs prompt decision-making, because each time you stop doing something you have to decide what to do next. I quickly realized that normally I gravitate towards some gratifying or distracting activity like reading a magazine or checking email rather than just make a decision about what to do. There were a few entries where I spent 8 or 9 minutes “Sitting on bed, thinking about what to do” but for the most part I was able to decide how to spend my time within one minute.

This was a major revelation. I have avoided decisions in the past because I don’t want to take responsibility for the consequences of that decision. Of course, to avoid a making a decision is a decision too, but it isn’t necessarily a conscious one — it’s an unconscious habit.

I didn’t realize I had this habit. From the first day of my experiment log:

I’m already getting an idea of how this going to be. The first thing I notice is that I have to stop to think all the time. Each time I finish doing something, I have to stop and actually decide what to do! I didn’t realize that this is not the normal way I function.

I suspect this is somewhat normal. Does everything you do start with a conscious decision?

I had some completely incorrect conceptions about how much time some things take, and you might too. For example, doing laundry always felt like something that took a good hour and a half: 10 minutes gathering the laundry, 30 minutes in the washer, 40 minutes in the dryer, and 15 minutes folding. In reality, laundry only took 12 minutes: 4 to gather the clothes, take them downstairs, and put them in the washer; 2 minutes to go downstairs and move them over to the dryer; 6 minutes to go get the clothes, fold them and put them away. The rest of it is completely free time. That’s just a simple psychological misperception, but it has a big effect on whether I decide to tackle a certain task on a certain day. Suddenly laundry is a cinch. Read More

by David Cain on May 4, 2010
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Where Does The Time Go? — Experiment No. 6

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hourglass

You are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun

~Pink Floyd, “Time”

Something big is brewing. Life has been telegraphing this particular development for a while now, but last week I was smacked with a stroke of clarity about it, and now it is happening.

I am undertaking a massive goal. It’s the biggest goal I’ve ever had. I have no doubts I will complete it, on time, and that it will change my life dramatically. I’ll save the details of it for an upcoming post, because the whole thing hinges on my ability to overcome one of my lifelong weaknesses. This experiment is the first step towards my huge goal.

You may have noticed a conspicuous absence of posts about personal productivity here on Raptitude. I do write about how to improve your quality of life in all sorts of ways, but I am no authority on getting things done in a timely manner. There are 14 posts in the archives tagged with the topic “Productivity” but they are only peripherally related.

When it comes to personal productivity, I blow. I have had so much spare time this last three weeks that I could have written twenty articles and a book of limericks, but I was able to squander nearly all that time, and just get my bare-bones tasks done. This latest mismanaged stretch of free time is typical.

I am not lazy. That isn’t the problem. I never sleep in, I don’t watch TV, I don’t play video games, I don’t get horizontal on couches. I love doing. I have loads of exciting projects ready to go, and I want to work on them. But I am highly conditioned to get very little purposeful work done. The fact that this website even exists is a small miracle. My inefficiency is so consistent it’s almost comical. Read More

by David Cain on April 19, 2010
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Complaining is Only a Symptom — Experiment No. 5 Results

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complain

Done. My campaign to go 21 consecutive days without complaining or gossiping is finally over, and what I discovered surprised me.

To recap, the experiment was to cease complaining or gossiping for twenty-one straight days, as long as that took. If I complained, I started the count again from zero. The idea was inspired by the book A Complaint Free World, by Will Bowen. The original post is here.

I cruised through the first week complaint-free, then cracked on my eighth day. I had to restart four times in total. My last screwup was on the eighteenth consecutive day, within 72 hours of finishing.

It took a total of 55 days. Read More

by David Cain on April 5, 2010
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The End of Negativity – Raptitude Experiment No. 5

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No complaining

Time for another experiment. This one I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. The idea behind it has made the rounds for a few years now and I’m not the first to do it, but I think the concept is fascinating and brimming with potential.

One day Will Bowen, a mild-mannered Missouri Reverend, challenged his congregation to develop their habit of gratitude by going 21 consecutive days without complaining or criticizing.

His method was quite simple and ingenious: Read More

by David Cain on February 4, 2010
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A New Relationship With Food – Experiment No. 4 Results

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light meal

Another experiment has come to an end, but as usual, I’m not going right back to what I was doing beforehand. Just like my last experiment, 30 Days Without Drugs, one of the habits in my life has been permanently renegotiated.

To recap, a month ago I decided I’d go thirty days eating defensively. That means no indiscriminate eating. I defined four rules to govern my eating during that month:

1) Eat whatever you like. There are no foods to be avoided outright, except foods that make you feel sick. Listen to your body.

2) Never eat until you are full. Always stop at a moment when you still want to eat a bit more. This is the most important part of the diet. Again, listen to what the body says, not the mind.

3) Eat only when you are hungry. Never out of comfort or boredom. Do not eat within sixty minutes of the last time you stopped eating.

4) Water is the only drink. You may still consume any liquids you want, but they are to be treated like food.

These rules served me well, and prevented a lot of needless and excessive eating, but each had its loopholes and grey areas. Read More

by David Cain on October 5, 2009
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Defensive Eating – Raptitude Experiment No. 4

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pastries

So I get on one wagon and fall off another.

My third official Raptitude experiment, 30 Days Without Drugs, was a resounding success in my eyes. I accomplished my goal and dismantled a persistent problem in my life. I’m now much less inclined to compromise my state of mind with the offhanded use of alcohol and caffeine. Now a month since the experiment ended, my lifestyle seems to be permanently changed for the better.

But during that time, I’ve slipped into an apathetic attitude towards food intake. I find myself eating more, and more often.

My workout routine also fell off the map, as it was already starting to by the end of my slightly less successful kettlebell experiment back in May and June.

As a result, I’ve put on an unappetizing ring of midsection fat. It shrunk while I was working out regularly, but now it’s back, trying to make me its permanent home. I want to get rid of it, which means getting rid of the habit that put it there.  Read More

by David Cain on September 3, 2009
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Beer and Coffee: My Problem Children, Put to Bed at Last

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drinking man

Thirty-two days ago, David began an experiment wherein he vowed not to touch any drugs for thirty days.

And I’m a new man. Just like that.

This last month has definitely begun a new chapter for me, and perhaps closed an old one.

To recap quickly: thirty days ago I was a daily coffee drinker, and I had a habit of drinking alcohol to excess on a weekly-ish basis. I have spend the last month completely un-high, with not so much as an aspirin passing through my system. The last time I went thirty days without a drug was probably over ten years ago, when I was a minor.

Though I have never been (quite) out of control, certain drugs established an alarming regularity in my life. I used them so casually, and for so long, that I suspected they might actually be necessary to hold my work and social lives together. Getting drunk and buzzing out on coffee had become too normal an activity for me to still feel okay about it. I didn’t want drugs to be part of who I was.

So I set out to discover who I was without them. Read More

by David Cain on August 6, 2009
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