On Self-discipline: it's a personal choice, not something we can impose on others

 Hi Rafael,

It's been a few years since I blogged here. Been some busy years, including changing countries, depression and trying to find myself back again. A lot has changed, a lot has stayed the same, but I've now re-found philosophy in my life and wish to continue where I left off.

And what better way to start again, than with telling you about my own struggles. Particularly, with regards to self-discipline. Certainly something I've been hyper-focused for over 6 months now. again, as I was back when I wrote periodically on this blog, but that in between I lost on myself.

I can't know the type of man you'll grow up to be. That's up to you and how you perceive your context. and your circumstances. But in being your father, I realise I'm often not fair to you. Because Self-discipline is just that, Self. The queue is in the name. I can demand that from myself, and I should, but I need to be more compassionate, kind and understanding. I don't do this out of a want to be hard on you, but because I. see your. potential and would love to see you flourish into a disciplined man.

But here's the problem, one can only be strict with oneself. It's not up to me to enforce it on you. All I can hope is that my own self-discipline may inspire you to do the same, and to be tolerant of how you, your sister and your mum choose to live your own lives.

This is my struggle, but one as old as humans.

Cato (the philosopher) knew this. He said "I am prepared to forgive everyone's mistakes but my own"

Ben Franklin knew this. He. said "Search others. for their virtues, thyself for tthy vices"

Marcus Aurelius (the philosopher king) knew this. He said "Be tolerant with others, and strict with yourself"

I need to remind of what these great men said, and I need to embody these values more. That's on me. Just know that I often don't live up these ideals, not because I'm mean, but that it comes from a place of love and wanting the best for you. I apologise for my transgressions and promise I'll keep working on improving this within me.

And I must do it, for many different reasons. Not only to ensure I don't get to regret the impact it could have on our relationship, but also because taking care of my own self-discipline is hard enough work.

As Ryan Holiday (Stoic author) writes:

"The only person you get to be hard on is you. It will take every ounce of your self-control to enforce that, and not because it's hard to be hard on yourself, but because it's so hard to let other people get away with things you'd never allow on yourself"

This is true, and hits like a ton of bricks. Trying t o escape my own faults, will take more than a lifetime will allow me, so that's what I must focus on. 

Maybe one day, if you decide to become a parent, you'll understand better where I'm coming from, and the reasons for my behaviour. Or maybe you'll be a better man than me, and from day one, you'll be way more compassionate and understanding than I am. I can only hope for that to be the case.

In the meantime, I'll be working on my self-discipline, and. hoping that what I show you day in and day one may one day inspire to choose for yourself to live a life of self-discipline. Because those who do, always live lives worth living and legacy's they can be proud of.

On Mapping your life

I've recently become acquainted with a management technique called Wardley Mapping, which is used to assess business landscapes. Quoting from hiredthought.com:

A Wardley Map is a representation of the landscape in which a business (or anything, really) operates. It consists of a value chain (activities needed to fulfill user needs) graphed against evolution (a measure of how individual activities change over time under supply and demand competition).

Due to my knowledge and experience with personal development frameworks, and particularly when seeing the approach could be used to assess Practices, through the evolution from Novel to Best, I tried the exercise of mapping out a lot of what I write about in my blog and by consequence the things I value. 

For the past year, as I opened my own business and decided to tackle some knowledge gaps I felt I need to close to be successful and the coming of a second child, I lost many of the good habits I had up until late 2017. And I've been feeling that something is off in my balance, but couldn't completely put my finger in it until I've mapped this out.

Now, I can't say any of this caught me completely off guard, but this mapping allowed me to get a better understanding of why I'm feeling unbalanced.

If I just mindlessly (as opposed to mindfully) let myself cruise through life, 3 things are going to happen:
- I'm going to be living in my head (in yellow), with my only good practices being acquiring knowledge
- I'm going to eat like crap and not exercise (in purple)
- I'll going to let comfort stuff creep back into my life (blue)

I'm happy with none of those, so this tells the things I need to work on if I want to be who I said I'd be.

The other interesting insight, is that I'm clearly hiding behind the acquisition of more knowledge and not producing the security and philosophy blogging that I so value (in red).

The great news is that seeing it this way, tells me ONE thing I can easily do in order to become more balanced.

Stopwatch on learning time everyday, and the waking hours I get from it, I need to find a way to work on my other goals. I may develop this idea further into an actual framework for personal development using Wardley Mapping concepts as basis, and Stoicism as the underlying doctrine, but at the very least and knowing how cryptic some of my communications are, I may use maps like these in the future to position the message I'm talking about and the type of movement I'm trying to discuss.

Happy to hear thoughts about applying Wardley mapping techniques for personal development.

On losing your edge and finding yourself back

I've last written about creating temporary imbalances so you can have deep focus on a particular area of your life for a Rapid improvement in it. Sometimes, this is exactly what you need to quickly develop in one particular area of your life.

The problem is the apathy and laziness that settle their roots in your core. Breaking ties with ingrained mediocrity is difficult. Much more than keeping momentum when you've gotten used to the ride.

But breaking out of the bad habits that may have generated (in my case, certainly do) requires real application of willpower. So how to deal with it? let 's break it down to 2 key questions

who or what are you doing it for? Get the fire burning again, focus on it as you lay out of bed and remind yourself often.

what is the alternative? think if the path you set yourself on is likely to lead you to a measure of success. Chances are you feel Ugly if that is who you were. We can safely apply the "Law of Holes" to this problem. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

The main thing to realise is that it's unlikely you'll be a balanced and complete individual if you're only "hanging your hat" in your area. That's not what we're about, is it ? Using basketball terminology, this is triple-double and aiming to go from great to phenomenal, whatever that ends up meaning to you.

On sprinting: being imbalanced for rapid improvement

Hopefully by now, you've integrated the belief that the route to success in any endeavour in the long term is made with journey of continuous and consistent effort towards improving your expertise and areas that impact and affect it. But we should also acknowledge that's not the only tool at our disposal.

In "Linchpin", Seth Godin talks about the concept of sprinting and how you should be doing it often.

In my own words, sprinting in this context means creating a temporary imbalance in yourself by narrowly focusing unsustainable effort for a short period of time with the intent of a) deliver something of value (or shipping as Seth calls it) or b) quickly attain or improve a particular skill that you believe you require immediately and do not possess.

This can happen for a number of reasons, whether to take advantage of an opportunity for better or different work or to make you more effective at reasoning with and influencing others with the right advice and considerations. I've used it extensively through my career and plan to keep doing so.

But it has a cost, and one must understand its cost if we're to manage the its impact on ourselves. The cost, at least in my case, usually comes in one of two ways. loss of sleep or dropping other things which keep me balanced to use the available capacity to focus on that narrow sprint goal.

It's a price you should be willing to pay if you really care about it, if you're serious and if you want something almost as bad as you want to breathe. If you're not willing to pay such price, that tells me you just "kind of want it". That you don't really want something as bad as you say you do, or better than you want to party or look cool. Never fool yourself.

The danger here, which will be subject of the next blog post, is how to ensure you don't lose yourself and that state of imbalance doesn't stay permanent, to a point you no longer recognise or enjoy who you are.

"I feel like I need to prove myself to everyone"

This post came to be over a sentence I've read in the book I'm currently reading. I didn't catch it on the first time I've read it, but on the second run it stood out. This is probably the most personal post I've ever written and will ever write as it details things in my life I've never mentioned to anyone before about, but I feel it is teaching me an important lesson to share with you, Rafael, and whenever my time comes it will give you an insight into who your father is and what shaped him like nothing else I'll ever write.

I hadn't cried since I've been 17 years old, but apparently it wasn't broken because writing this did the trick. :)

The sentence in the "The Phoenix Project" book is from Steve, the CEO, and he's sharing his personal life with his Board of Directors. "But it's hard being a poor country hick, surrounded by people from privileged families. I feel like I need to prove myself to everyone".

Let's first establish how I personally deal with this. When I look at my life, I've been through hardships that would've probably broken most people I know, if I'm honest, but I always focus on perspecctive. So many people have had it so much worse than me, and beat odds much less favourable than mine, that I'm never going to be complaining about anything. This is my story, everyone has theirs and theirs are as relevant to them, as mine is to me.

Perspective is what has kept me since I was 17 years old, but not until then, from feeling sorry for myself and blame the whole world for what I couldn't do and who I couldn't be. Now, onwards.

I'm 34 years old at the time of writing this, and I'm still personally dealing with feeling like I need to prove myself to the whole world, and I now clearly see it has to do with the fact that I've grown and currently work and live with people that come from privilege so I always feel the need to constantly be proving myself. This isn't necessarily healthy and I need to change.

Now, the key point is what it means to me "coming from privilege", and this where it gets personal.

If you've never missed a meal, you come from privilege
If you didn't grow up with an alcoholic parent, you come from privilege
If you've never had your parent want to go buy half a chicken, for you, your other parent and himself to have dinner, you come from privilege
If you've never seen your parent harm himself in front of you, you come from privilege
If you never, as a young child, been put aside by the teacher on a school party day because she assessed that your parent's contribution was insufficient, you come from privilege
If you didn't grow up as a coward because you couldn't stand up for yourself, you come from privilege
If you never been put to fend for yourself as a teenager, unskilled and unprepared, you come from privilege
If you didn't grow up with some of your social groups to constantly make fun of you, including girls and how that felt inside, because how fat you are, you come from privilege
If as a child you didn't spend a whole night crying, because your friends parents were so good to them and you didn't have any of that in your life, you come from privilege
If you never felt ashamed, for after having your initial break and start teaching, to be serving your engineer students at a coffee shop and you were working there because they fed you and your parent and paid you an extra €5 a day, you come from privilege

This what I mean when I say I'm surrounded by people that come from privilege, and please whatever you do, do not feel sorry for me or pity because I don't. Again, everyone has their own story, this is just mine. All of this early on, made me learn lessons that most people will never learn in a lifetime, and I knew them by the time I was 20, so my story is a growth one (downhill from there would be tough, even for Fortune :)) so there's nothing to be sorry or to feel pity about.

The cautionare tale for both of us, because I'm sure that as your father and as a high achiever, there's the risk that you'll feel the need or even I have the expectation that you live up to my achievements and go even further that I'll ever be able to go, because I'd love you be as engaged in your craft and passionate about learning and development as I am, but know that your life is yours and you need to live by your own terms, understanding the skin in the game you have of making your own decisions and taking your own risks.

As your father, it is my job to warn you of perils ahead and you'd probably be wise to listen :) but at the end of the day, you are the sole owner of your life (after you're an adult and never before, until then it's called parenting and it's legal :D) and you're the one, because we all are, responsible for the outcomes we want or have in life.

Don't feel the need to prove yourself to others, not even to me, Rafael. Prove yourself to you.

On living a happy and productive life

By our very human nature combined with modern heavy data consumption and online social activity levels, it's probably more difficult than ever in human history to feel happy and lead a simple and productive life.

But if we are to aim for that, which we should, we need to consciously decide on some fundamental principles that are to serve as the compass to our decision making, such that knowing what the right thing for you to do is in any given situation is automatic and self-evident.

I believe that living a happy and productive life and defining what that is for you, in your personal circumstance and context, with your goals and aspirations but also your shortcomings or what you still need to work at is key to the being a content person.

To be productive you first need to shut down the noise. There's too much noise in our society, and attention spans are ever smaller. You can't live a productive life whilst being bombarded with multiple stimuli constantly. Shutting down the noise implies that you can filter what's essencial, so that's the first question.

What is essential for you to feel balanced and in which order ? This can usually be derived from your values, the things you hold dear. To me, it's my family, my career and my health. IN THAT ORDER. This is key. Knowing what takes precedence even if it's uncomfortable to have to choose one over another.

Determine activities that support your balance and productive goals - these are the things you do to get action behind what comes out of your mouth. An example would be knowing I need to keep studying and learning if I'm to support my career goals. Or ensure I go to the gym regularly to support my health goals.

Identify the 'fun factor' in those activities- look for the little or big things that you really enjoy on those activities. You may not like all of it, but there are usually aspects of what makes you productive you like. It helps if you actually enjoy your work for instance. Then focus on that particular aspect of the activity and not what you don't like so much about. For instance, there are many types of physical training, choose one you can actually enjoy if health is something you value.

Choose activities that maximize both fun and productivity - Now you have the baseline set to choose to do things that maximize fun and your sense of well being, but also productivity towards doing and being the things you value. For instance, for me Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is the one activity that spans all 3 things I value (my ability to defend my family if needed, the carryover to my career from being able to face adversity and discomfort and it's a great workout so it's productive for me to train regularly so I can maximize what I hold dear

Go do it - Then the framework is set, and your job is to wake up and do those maximised activities every single day, so you're always one step closer to being who you wish to be across everything you hold dear.

That's it. Then, day to day decision making and routine becomes simple, easy and enjoyable because you're always doing things you like. It may be a 6 in happiness as opposed to a 10, but it's also productive so that's good enough and is helping you build your character on a daily basis.

Life becomes mostly automatic and decision making simple and easy. You do the things that keep you balanced and that allow you to move forward in all areas you value in your life.

On Fools and Cowards: Be neither

This post is inspired by a quote usually attributed to William Francis Butler.

“The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.”

I would suggest this to be true not only to the nation, but also to the individual. You must be sure not to be either. This sentence suggests that the warriors train their craft so much and devote so little time to study the ways the world, strategy, politics, sociology and philosophy that they are fierce and brave but also fools in that they lack other important knowledge.

Inversely, the strategists, politicians, sociologists, philosophers and businessmen spend so much time in their crafts and devote negligible focus in their fighting and physical training, that though they have the knowledge and authority to make decisions, they are cowards at heart as they cannot deal with confrontation.

Neither is being self-sufficient, and neither should be acceptable.

But it takes time to develop these things, and it takes commitment and it takes the self awareness to know where you really are, where you should be and work to bridge the gap.

To not be a fool, you need to study the past, the present and what believable people think the future will bring. subject matter expertise is important, whatever it is you choose as your area of interest, but knowing how the world and society around you works is also crucial if you are to be all you can be. You aim to be wise.

To not be a coward, you need to be comfortable with physical training and fighting. That means being able to carry heavy weights, handle your own body weight and be flexible. In fighting, I hope you join me in jiu jitsu at least as a self defense tool but also know how to give and take a punch because you never know when you'll need to protect yourself or those you love. And the mental fortitude that comes from practicing tough training sessions both in the gym and on the mats will yield benefits in your other knowledge areas too. You aim to be strong and brave

I hope you get these at a young age. Rafael I certainly didn't, and know that if I had gotten them earlier in my life they would've been extremely valuable and I would've stood up for myself more growing up, but I guess it led to where and who I am today, so it's all good and all part of life and living.

Be Wise, Be Brave and Be Strong. Be whole.