I love Tim Ferriss.
I love Ryan Holiday.
When you go through something traumatic you find yourself looking for answers, grasping for knowledge.
You hate the way you feel.
You don’t know what to do yet, but you know you never want to feel this way again.
But what can you do?
You allow yourself to be teachable.
Allow yourself the opportunity to learn from your mistakes so you don’t have to relive them again.
Two
of the people that I turned to were: Tim Ferriss and Ryan Holiday. They
practice and preach Stoicism: the endurance of pain or hardship without
a display of feelings and without complaint.
In
these blogs I am going to break down 5 pillars of the philosophy (Time
Is Brief, Overcoming Adversity, Living A Life Of Character,
Self-Awareness, and Practicing Misfortune), and explain how I became one
without even knowing it. What a pleasant surprise! Nothing like having a
goal and realizing you are already there!
I
find the best way to allow yourself permission to be teachable is
either acknowledging the desire and need to learn or finding yourself in
stories about other people and applying it to your own life.
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Time Is Brief:
-
Don’t give small things more time than they deserve.
-
Be present, don’t miss moments of connection.
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Do not live as if time is forever.
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Live life on the offense.
-
Focus on what you can control instead of what you can’t.
-
Time is the only commodity you can’t earn back.
There is nothing like realizing the value of time once it is taken away.
It’s recognizing that the road is a dead end, but only after you are hanging off the edge.
Oops!
This
is something people usually grasp as they get older. At some point you
realize that you can’t go back and re-live anything. Time is the only
commodity that can’t be replaced. Your kids can’t grow up again. Your
parents can’t come back. You can miss moments and you can’t re-do
anything, so you need to make sure you are in the right mindset to do it
correctly the first time.
The
hardest part about this realization is it doesn’t trickle out, giving
you a chance to slowly get it, take it in a little bit at a time. It is
an avalanche, a broken levy, or a flash flood. Boom! You are wiped out
by the clarity of the situation, and it does not feel good. You are
drowning. You don’t know which way is up, but you know you are at the
bottom. Questions race through your mind so fast you can’t answer any of
them. You are in a tornado of thoughts, emotions, and darkness.
I
was an idiot. I risked time with my family in the future by the actions
in my past. Not only did I lose time when I went to prison, I was
mangling the time with them when I was doing the stuff to get put in
prison!
I am a dipshit! (was)
My
daughter only turned five once, and I missed it. She only graduated
pre-school once, and I missed it. Only had one first day of
kindergarten, and I missed that too. It won’t come back, ever. Time is
fleeting. No matter how angry I get at myself. No matter how much I cry.
No matter how sad I am, it is gone forever. Our lives are a series of
moments that we either partake in or, poof, they’re gone. You can be in
the moment today, you can make sure you are in it tomorrow, but
yesterday is gone. You either wasted it, or you didn’t.
Sitting in a prison cell 23.5 hours a day really allows for the gravity and “shortness” of time to sink in.
Even if you aren’t in prison, when you recognize a mistake, you realize what’s gone, and it’s massive.
Was that fight worth not talking to your son or daughter for years?
Did you let your ego get in the way of your relationship?
If no one knows, do you really think it won’t affect them?
While you are spending time keeping secrets over here, what are you missing out on over there?
While you are hiding secrets when you are home, do you really think you’re present?
You aren’t.
You are throwing away time.
You are the rich guy that burns his money to keep warm. Sound ridiculous?
It is! But so are you!
Time is MUCH more valuable than money!
I
understand you need to have some self-awareness to answer these
questions honestly. Chances are if you can’t reflect at this point and
see where you have been wasting time, even if it is just a little, you
may never get it. That’s sad. Because you will eventually. It may be
because your life blows up in your face (like me) or because you find
yourself at the end of your life and you will realize how much of it you
wasted.
And there will be nothing you can do about it.
So what do you do? You focus on the things you CAN control.
You
can’t control yesterday, but you can control today, tomorrow, and every
day after that. In fact, your tomorrow will be determined by what you
do today. Can you wallow around in pity about yesterday? You can, but
you would be wasting today, and messing up tomorrow. There are changes
that need to be made and putting them off is not going to solve shit.
Get up now, and do it now. The things you can’t control need to be left
behind so you can spend your energies on the things you can. Let go of
the small things, they hinder the attack on the big things.
My time away haunts me every single day.
My stupid actions haunt me every single day.
But
the clarity they give about what I am doing, who I am, and what I am
doing every single day as I grind to create a new life is priceless. I
am working 10x harder than I ever have in my life, on 10x the amount of
things. I know my Twitter and Instagram look like a cluster F now, but
it’s me, and it’s everything I am doing. Blogging, writing, music,
marketing, designing, etc. It’s a lot, but it’s me, it’s my time, and I
am not wasting a second of it.
It is all coming together, and all because of my: Accidental Stoic Lesson #1 – Time Is Brief
Joey
Snapchat: JustOneJoey
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