Brad C

Great quotes are wonderful things. They can take a multitude of thoughts, conflicts, and feelings and boil them down to a single statement. Your own feelings can be shaped, summarized, and then presented far more eloquently than you could ever hope to do on your own. There are two quotes that have been doing this for me lately;

“To crave the result but not the process is to guarantee disappointment.” Ryan Holiday

“The purpose of a system is what it does.” Stafford Beer

I find it fascinating that these two reached what I view as the same conclusion coming from wildly different backgrounds. Ryan Holiday has become everyone's favourite stoic, preaching what I would consider to be an authentic message about how a stoic perspective can be used to cultivate a more rewarding life. This is in stark contrast to how oh so many douchebags co-opted stoicism to preach “If I was sad I just wouldn't be sad, stay hard.” Stafford Beer was a British management consultant, and one of the godfathers of systems thinking as a field of business philosophy. He was also a super weird dude, but that's show business baby.

The intersection of these two is in the idea that there is a fairly direct relationship between where you are and how you got there. What you want should be a direct reflection of what you do, and what you have reflects what you have done. If you work for an organization that values the contributions of women, but it keeps a serial harasser on staff, the organization doesn't value women. If you want to someday be an artist, but you don't draw, you don't want to be an artist. If you want to set a good example for your kids, but you don't do the things you preach to them, being a good example isn't important to you. Given that my first tattoo is a Paulo Coelho quote that reads “The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion” you can see how this super lands with me.

For those that know me personally, I try to be pretty open about having struggled with depression for most of my life. This led to many a strategy to deal with it, intentional and unintentional, which has included things like therapy, CBT, binge drinking, forming my identity around various activities, all the classic things for men who don't want admit that they are not okay. Medication this year was an absolute game changer, and has meaningfully impacted my mood. Because of this I now spend some time examining the sources of my discontent and trying to disentangle what it is exactly that I find displeasing.

This framework from Beer/Holiday has been useful in this.

So many frustrations are as simple as I have something I want to have or achieve, but I either can't or don't do the things to get there. OR someone tells me they have something they want but they don't do the actions to get there. In so many ways it is an overly simplistic, overly optimistic view of the world (just go do more jiujitsu Brad! It's that easy!) but not everything needs to be a silver bullet. Sometimes it really is as simple as “I need to stop saying or believing I want something if I don't want to do the work to have it.” There's no sense being upset that I won't be running a 3:3X marathon this year, when I don't want to make the trades necessary to spend time clocking the miles needed to make that happen.