Your Bad Habits are Comic Book Villains

The American Dream, the idea of the happy ending, is an avoidance of responsibility and commitment.
– Jill Robinson

We’re coming up on the halfway point – conveniently, July 1st is the halfway day of the year. I’ll be six months into my first full year at Die Gallantly, six months into all the goals I’ve listed, and six months away from my 26th birthday and a whole new set of goals.

There are a couple more posts in the pipe and a couple more weeks to make progress before the Obligatory Big Halfway Check-in. But given that I’m starting to write those posts, starting to think about how far I’ve come and how far there is still to go, it’s time to talk about something:

Some wars are never over.

—

I’m a lover of fiction and storytelling, but I never got into comic books. It really bothered me that in most comic books, the same heroes and villains keep duking it out in different incarnations, exiling or killing or crippling each other only to come back and do it all over again next year. Every climactic battle is a prequel to the next; every “permanent destruction” is a minor setback, every big change is temporary. Everything always reverts to the baseline.

I found that profoundly unsatisfying.

I wanted the good guys to win – or, hell, even the bad guys, as long as something changed. When the hero’s lover died I wanted her to stay dead. When the villain lost his powers or went to jail I wanted him to stay gone forever – next bad guy, please, let’s keep this thing moving. When the world exploded I wanted the series to end, and I never seemed to get that payoff in a comic book plot.

So I stopped reading them. I went back to novels and movies where the story began and ended and you could tell that something had happened. Even if things didn’t go where I wanted them to, at least they had gone somewhere.

Win or lose, the fight was over.

—

The problem is that many of life’s challenges are like comic book villains. You beat them once – sometimes quietly, sometimes after a dramatic battle – but they don’t stay dead. They come back – this time with robot arms or an army of zombies or whatever – and they start giving you hell all over again.

And like in the comics, they don’t wait their turn – they’ll show up and ambush you while you’re fighting this week’s new villain, sometimes making it impossible to make progress.

—

Why bother talking about this, though? Yeah, our problems come back to haunt us over and over again – so?

There’s an important difference between fighting a once-in-a-lifetime struggle and winning against a foe that keeps coming back. In the first case, you can throw everything into the battle – if it’s do or die, it makes sense to pull out all the stops. You can make sacrifices against a temporary problem, knowing that once the problem’s gone you can make up for those losses.

That doesn’t work against recurring obstacles. You can’t afford to exhaust yourself beating something that’s just going to come back in six months – you have to find a way to win as quickly and painlessly as you can so you can move on.

That’s the difference – when dealing with “this old issue again”, don’t look for ways to win just this once – look for techniques you can use over and over, and expect to have to use them – that way, when the Anxiety Beast comes back for the fourteenth time, you’ll know how to defeat it and get back to whatever you’re actually trying to work on.

Maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll get so good at winning that fight that it won’t even feel like a fight anymore. Or maybe every time Your Recurring Obstacle comes up, you’ll feel like you’re in a life or death struggle.

Either way, some wars you should be prepared to wage forever. Acknowledging that might make it easier to win each battle.

Faith

Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.
– Michelangelo

I had dinner with my mom and sister the other day, and we got to talking about skydiving. We all went for the first time last year, jumping tandem with an instructor, and I mentioned that I’d like to at least go enough times to be able to jump completely solo.

They were both horrified. “I don’t think I could ever jump solo”, my mom said, and my sister agreed – claiming she’d be too scared of screwing it up, certain that she’d find some way to screw up the jump, fail to open her chute or break her legs on the landing.

I’m nervous about those things too, of course – but their total rejection struck me as odd. Most of us walk around talking (and thinking) as if we can handle anything, as if the only thing between us and massive success is (insert obstacle X here). It’s our job, our upbringing, our friends, our debt, our bodies, our sleep schedule – that’s why we haven’t conquered the world, yet. It couldn’t be because, fundamentally, we are not conquerors (or we don’t believe we are).

But then – here’s my family, openly saying that they just aren’t competent or courageous enough to do this thing that hundreds of thousands of people have done successfully before – jump out of a plane, pull a string at the right time, and pull some more strings to land. And not only that they can’t do it right now, but that they don’t think they ever could.

They didn’t trust themselves to do it – the way you might not trust a friend to show up on time or a coworker to do a task well, they didn’t trust themselves to safely land a solo skydive.

We started talking about why they’d said that, and they both had specific reasons for why, specifically, skydiving was something they didn’t trust themselves to do. These struck me as excuses.

Don’t get the wrong impression – my mom and sister are both good people, and not generally cowardly. They didn’t think the issue was a lack of self-trust – they were sure there were things specific to skydiving, not specific to themselves, that made their fears justified.

This made me wonder – are there areas in life where I’m doing this? Things I won’t commit to, won’t pursue, because I’m just not sure I can handle them?

If there are, they won’t look like that from the inside. It’ll feel like I’m held back by circumstance or by very reasonable doubt, even when an outside observer might say “Nope. He’s just scared he’ll mess it up.”

How can I identify these areas – places where I’m not pushing as hard as I should, out of fear, things I haven’t even attempted out of doubt, “obstacles” that are actually convenient excuses to avoid testing myself?

I’m not sure, yet – but it’s worth thinking about. Next post will be about a way around these hidden obstacles.

The Unspeakable and the Indelible

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned

(This one’s a little scattered and a little conceptual, perhaps by necessity. I’m trying to get out something that’s been flitting around my head for a while. Bear with me, or don’t.)

There are things that can’t be said. There are truths about the world, sometimes very obvious truths, that you can’t just open your mouth and speak to another person.

There are some things you have to show, and some things you have to speak in circles around and hope the other person makes the jump for themselves. There are things for which you can’t even do this – things which you have to leave alone.

An Example: I can’t tell my boss that I don’t have a very strong attachment to my workplace, that I see it as trading my lifeblood for rent money, that I’d quit in a heartbeat if I could avoid the fallout and that I’m taking steps to do just that. I can’t tell him the work – and he himself, (mostly) by proxy – is the biggest source of stress, tedium, and frustration in my life. He knows these things, but I can’t say them – he’ll hear something else.

That’s one problem.

The other problem is this: there are things you can’t help but say. If you’re pissed, stressed, drunk – you probably can’t hide it from people around you. You might think you are, and they might even agree to pretend that you are, but we’re all pretty good at gauging each other’s moods.

Body language and nonverbal cues are the obvious example, here, but there’s a lot more to it – choosing one word over another, length of time to respond, what you do and don’t answer. *Who* you talk to. These are all messages, and you can’t stop people from receiving them.

An Example: At least one person reading this is going to think I’m talking about some difficult topic that I don’t want to bring up with them directly. Some of you will think I’m being passive aggressive, trying to pull the philosopher’s equivalent of the world’s worst Facebook status: “I just can’t stand the way some people…”

I’m not, I promise – but I can’t really help the fact that that message gets sent by the context, the phrasing, the bigger picture into which this blog post fits and the little details between the words.

I can’t say this without also saying that.

And I can’t say that at all, not with words – there just isn’t a sentence that gets the job done.

NB: The rules I’m describing apply to this post as well, but I’m ignoring them. Try to do the same for the duration.

Everyone, all the time, pretends these rules don’t exist and then acts shocked when they realize the consequences of breaking them.

An Example: You’re angry with your lover. They’re angry with you. They say “I’m sorry,” but they don’t just mean I’m sorry – you feel a rush of annoyance, and it’s because every other cue has told you they’re not sorry, they think you’re in the wrong and intend to try to punish you for it. You say words to this effect, and they retort in outrage: “I said I was sorry! What more do you want?”

Well? What more do you want?

You want them to send the message that actually means sorry, penitent, will work to avoid this next time. And that message just can’t be sent on demand – it has to be real (unless you’re with a sociopath, maybe).

An Example, closely related: You can’t ask the rules of a game without revealing you don’t know them.

You can’t blame the other person for refusing to ignore the information you’re giving them – and why do you want to? When your words disagree with your voice, your stance, your actions – which is more likely to be lying?

This is why honesty is the best policy, and it’s why people get an uncomfortable feeling from all but the very best habitual liars. Communication is just really, really hard to fake consistently.

So: I suggest you don’t try. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. Don’t try to make words do things they can’t, and don’t try to suppress all the infinite little side effects.

You’ll still be misunderstood, or understood too well – you can’t help that. But at least you won’t be wasting your stress on it.

 

Worse Than Dust

“Right you guessed the rising morrow
And scorned to tread the mire you must:

Dust’s your wages, son of sorrow,

But men may come to worse than dust.”

– AE Housman, A Shropshire Lad, XLIV

(NB: this poem is about suicide. This blog post is not.)

Two things:

1. I’ve been enjoying myself a ton the last couple weeks – bike ride, three day music festival, three days in Chicago.
2. I’ve made almost no progress on any of the blog goals. Missed several days in the gym (both for lifting and fighting), a few days of blog posts, no significant writing. Between vacation and trying to keep up with work in between vacations…I don’t want to make excuses, but I haven’t been productive.

This week, being almost back in the normal 9-5 routine, has been a harsh reminder of how unsatisfying it all is. When I’m working 3 or 4 day weeks with long weekends doing awesome things, I forget that that’s not sustainable – the job, the house, the situation I’m in right now won’t allow that for more than a month or two a year.

The combination of relaxation and excitement quenched the fire, for a moment, and I forgot why I needed to work so hard.  At the tail end of 12 hours of utterly pointless tech work, I remember.

Getting out of this cycle, this slow grind to nowhere – and throwing away the security and comfort that come with it – I might burn this prison and find only dust remains.

But men may come to worse than dust.

The One Lifehack That Will Save You From Mediocrity

“The result is perfectly spreadable butter with no melted liquid, every time.”
– Josef Spalenka, genius, via Lifehacker

Now that you know this, your productivity problems are gone forever.

Goals: met. Relationships: orgasmic. Body: perfect, world: traveled, fears: conquered.

…

But seriously, how much better are the rest of the “hacks” we’re reading?

The Top Idea

It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.
– Paul Graham, The Top Idea In Your Mind

This post is a synthesis of two things I’ve read lately- Radhika Morabia led me to Ikigai (today we’re talking about this post) by Sebastian Marshall, which led me to this post by Paul Graham.

I’ve been a little scattered, lately, with everything but jiu jitsu. Trying to make progress on the house, reading, work…and I’m starting to feel new project ideas creep into my head.

This is bad, because I haven’t finished the big thing I’m currently working on in my free time – the monster erotica ebook, which is at writing time only about 5/6 done in the first draft.

So.

Sebastian Marshall talks about the difference between a generalist – an effective, productive practitioner of many skills – and a dabbler, who just messes around and doesn’t get anything done. The generalist, he says, ships:

“In order to avoid dabbling, ship work in the fields you care about before moving on.”
– Sebastian Marshall, What Separates a Generalist and a Dabbler

Paul Graham talks about the importance of what you think about in the shower:

“Now I’d go further: now I’d say it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.”
– Paul Graham, The Top Idea in Your Mind

So if I don’t want to be a dabbler and I want to do high quality work, I need to knuckle down and ship whatever my subconscious is chewing on, whatever I’m thinking about in the shower.

Otherwise the idea will fade, other projects will shoulder their way into my head, and I’ll be a dabbler rather than a generalist.

(For now, the idea is the erotica ebook. Sink or swim, it’ll be done.)

Wednesday

When you’re self employed, every day is Wednesday.
– Raptitude, The Frightening Thing You Learn when You Quit the 9 to 5

It’s Wednesday, again.

I think you should read this article from Raptitude, then consider this:

Just because you have a 9 to 5 or a secure school position and your bills are paid as long as you show up on time – it’s still Wednesday. You’re still sitting smack in the middle of your week – of your life – choosing how to spend the next minute (hopefully you’ll finish this post, thanks), the next hour, the next day.

It’s Wednesday. There’s no terrible Monday crash tomorrow, no Friday evening relief – your life won’t automatically get better if you can only make it to the weekend.

It’s Wednesday. Tomorrow will be only as good as you make it.

Mid-Roll as a Newbie (Or, First Princples)

First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?
– Hannibal Lecter, The Silence of the Lambs

There’s something that happens almost every time when I’m rolling as a new jiu-jitsu player. I know a handful of sweeps, a handful of escapes and submissions, two standing takedowns and a guard pull.

That’s barely one move for each of the six major BJJ positions.

This means that in the shifting chaos that is a BJJ roll, about half the time I know literally no moves to attempt from a given position. I’m in full mount and I can’t get an Americana or wrist lock? I’m stumped. My opponent is in my guard and my scissor sweep isn’t working? I’m stumped. Almost got back mount but I can’t flatten or get my hooks in? I’m stumped.

I spend a lot of time defending and attempting the same move again and again because I just haven’t learned what to do. Other times, I try something new and it ends up being completely wrong, even the opposite of what I should have done in that situation. I had no way of knowing, because I’d never seen it or attempted it before.

I realized today that this situation applies to most of life.

Sometimes you’re lucky – you see a problem you’ve dealt with before and you solve it the same way you did last time. Problem seen, problem solved, moving on. Most of my day job is like this.

The rest of the time – especially when you’re pushing yourself – this won’t be the case. You’ll be constantly facing problems you’ve never solved before, and you’ll have very little prior experience to draw on.

In BJJ: how do I learn to defend against a sweep I’ve never seen or attempted myself?

In lifting: how do I know if my posture is correct, and how do I correct it if it’s not?

In relationships: how do I make the right choices with a new person, in a new situation, with new goals?

In life: how do I choose how to spend my time? What should I do with the next hour that’ll get me closest to my goals? What should my goals even be?

The obvious and best solution is to have wider experience. See more things, and more of the things you see will be old news. This is a good solution and it’s one of the many reasons we should read, research, and experiment. But it’s also time-consuming, and when it’s decision time it’s usually too late to stop and broaden your horizons. You may not be able to recreate the situation at all – it’s not like you can go through ten practice careers or ten practice girlfriends or ten practice lives real quick so you know how to make the right choice in this one.

Here’s my theory.

When you need a plan of action and you haven’t seen the situation before, retreat to first principles. Consider the deepest, simplest nature of the thing you’re trying to accomplish and pick the course of action that seems to fit best with that, even if you don’t know how the specifics will play out.

The retreat to first principles ensures that even if you don’t know what to do, you’re thinking of the right direction when you choose. At the worst, your choice will be wrong – and you’ll know it because it will take you further from your principles.

Of course, to return to first principles – especially in times of uncertainty – you have to be pretty damn sure of what they are. Here are some of mine:

In BJJ: Keep my weight on my opponent, my shoulders off the mat, my base solid, my limbs close. Disrupt my opponent’s attempts to do the same.

In lifting: Get slow, clean, repeatable reps. Drop weight as necessary to do this, add weight until I can’t, then work until failure. Go at least a little harder than is comfortable, but don’t cheat.

In relationships: Be honest. Be ambitious. Be strong and loyal to your values, and be courageous. Make the decisions you’ll have wished you made, later, and the decisions your ideal self would make (even if you don’t feel like your ideal self right now.)

In life: It’s not surprising that this one is a lot like relationships. Do the thing that makes you proud above all. Seek challenges and don’t let fear of failure keep you from trying.

That’s it.

Know your first principles – and when the path fades and you’ve never seen this part of the woods before, you’ll at least know where you’re trying to go.

For Newbies, Magnitude

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who had practiced one kick 10,000 times.
– Bruce Lee

Last time I talked about how you need a winning combination of magnitude and velocity to achieve victory. To truly master a skill, you need both – knowing the right move at all times and being able to execute it with speed and force.

But what if you suck?

If you’re a newbie, your situation looks like this:

You don’t know what to do and you can’t do it well enough anyway

To become a master, you’ll need to improve both the magnitude and the direction of your moves – but both of these take time, and practice for them is usually very different. Doing one move 1000 times won’t help you choose what move to use (it might actually hurt, biasing you towards that move over others). And studying the broad array of possible moves for a given situation won’t help you execute any of them – again, it might hurt if you’re too paralyzed by options to execute anything decisively.

So in the long term, you’ll need to do both. But what if you want to win in the short term? What’s the most effective way to practice?  (This is particularly relevant to me, as I’d like to do well in my first-ever BJJ competition, coming up in two weeks.)

Here’s my answer:

Study the field and pick what seems like a common scenario. In the case of white belt BJJ at the grappling tournament I’m going to – one of us is going to pull guard (hopefully me), and then one will attempt to pass that guard while the other tries to get a basic submission (armbar, triangle, collar choke, Kimura) or a sweep to side control or mount (for points).

It’s possible that white belts from other schools have a very different basic strategy (ex: they might try for wrestling-style takedowns), but this is the most likely scenario for my skill level.

So I’m practicing the shit out of this one scenario, and practicing the others just enough to give me a half-decent chance of forcing the game into this one.

Pull guard, sweep to side control or basic submission (I like Kimura personally, but the opponent has to leave themselves open to that so I’m also practicing a collar choke).

Or, if guard gets pulled on me – pass to side control, knee on belly, then mount, then very cautiously look for a submission while mostly maintaining point advantage and avoiding sweeps.

I think this is the right strategy for a newbie who wants to be as good as possible. Pick a single, viable strategy that applies to a lot of scenarios and practice the shit out of it. You won’t be versatile enough to handle every possibility – you can’t, yet, and you don’t have time to learn. Because it takes much longer to master every possible path, you’re better off mastering one and trying to force your opponents into it.

This won’t work at higher levels where your opponents understand the game better – and this is a strategy for winning, not learning. A true master might have a specialization, but he studies every path.

The newbie doesn’t have that luxury, so he has to pick one likely path and try to push it hard enough to win.

(Yeah, I’m doing the tournament for experience and fun and I don’t expect to win even my first match – but I’m not the kind of guy who doesn’t at least try to win.)

Thoughts? Disagreement? Been in a BJJ/grappling tournament and want to give me some advice (PLEASE). Shoot me an email at diegallantly@gmail.com or comment below.

Magnitude and Direction (or, BJJ and Starcraft)

Guessing what the pitcher is going to throw is 80% of being a successful hitter. The other 20% is just execution.
– Hank Aaron

I’m still a total newbie at Brazilian jiu-jitsu, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot in preparation for my first ever competitive match (coming up at the beginning of May, and marking 50% completion of one of my big goals for the year. Sometimes it’s okay to pat yourself on the back. (This is also something you’re forced to do in jiu jitsu))

I’ve noticed a similarity between jiu-jitsu and, of all things, Starcraft, which I used to be fairly competitive at (high Platinum Zerg player, at my best).

In both of these games, you win by doing two things: choosing the right strategy for the moment and executing it as perfectly as you can. You choose a “move” (a build order or attack timing in Starcraft, a submission or defense or escape / transition technique in BJJ), and you perform that move as well as you can.

The combination of move choice and move execution is what leads you to victory or defeat.

A crappy move, executed perfectly, will often fail.

The perfect move, executed poorly, will often fail.

A perfect move executed perfectly will make victory seem effortless.

Bear with me: for the first time ever on Die Gallantly, I’ve created a diagram to show you what I’m talking about. Say you’re at the X, you’re choosing your move.

Your move will be represented by a vector – a math construct composed of a direction and a magnitude. Direction is your choice of move (arm bar, guard pass, zergling rush, early expansion) and the magnitude is how well you perform that move (slow, shitty triangle or fast solid one, getting resource locked or timing everything ideally).

Landing anywhere in the green means you win! Landing in the white, sadly, means you lose.

You Are Here

It’s pretty obvious that some directions are terrible. I can draw a pretty long arrow from our position to a still-losing position if I pick the wrong path – this is executing a flawless guard pass and having it countered, or timing your build perfectly only to run into an impenetrable defensive wall.

This is when you bitch that your opponent used a cheap move

It’s also clear that some directions are easy – if I pick my move carefully I can win without much skill (in that move) or effort. This is when you throw a guillotine an opponent never sees coming, it’s locked in before he can react, and he doesn’t know any effective counters. This is when you go all-roach rush against a zealot push (trust me, you’ll win even if you’re shitty).

This is when your opponent bitches that you used a cheap move

If my execution is really, truly amazing (I’m so strong and so fast that my gi chokes from guard are basically unblockable; I’m so good at Zerg that I can beat mass marines with mutalisks), I can win even if I’ve picked the wrong path.

This is when your opponent quits the sport

And finally, if my execution is bad enough, there’s no path that gets my shitty self to victory (none of my submissions ever take; I can’t stop getting supply locked).

This is when you quit the sport

So what have we learned? Move choice and move power (direction and magnitude) are both key to achieving success in strategy games like jiu jitsu and Starcraft. It’s possible to win with just one or the other, but it’s much, much harder.

What else? Agon sucks at Paint.

This is how many tries it took me to draw a map that didn’t look (much) like a penis

That has some implications for newbies that I’ll get into next time.