“It’s one of those moments you’d give all your money just to take a clean shower”
My neighbour told me those words while we were standing on an open-air roof trying to fix a problem that has been going on. Due to some infra changes, running water was cut off from our neighbourhood for three consecutive days. We spent the entire day trying to fill some huge water tanks on top of our building, by pumping water up from ground-level using a motorized pump.
Although it goes without saying that just tap water is one of those ‘available’ things that we take for granted, moments like these are a wake up call for all those other things that you & me take for granted. Because we’re very caught up in the high-level, like I strive for startup success but what other smaller forms of success am I missing on?
If running water is a delight, and startup success is a delight, then there sure exists in between a whole range of easy ‘daily delights’ that we rarely pay any attention to.
If we wait to get joy out of very high-level goals, then it’s a contract we will never be content through the day to day, because these goals are very hard, and take time. But if we abstract this just a few levels down, we have joy in much simpler things that can happen during the day, and even everyday. They don’t cost any money and they’re always there, it’s just that you have to re-adjust your thinking in order to see them — Everything is like a frequency and you’re like a radio. If adjusted for the right frequencies, you can find real delight in things that are all around and that never run off. Moreover, at this state, a normal typical day becomes just a transition from one simple delight to another.
So for example, yesterday was day 3 of no water. But also, in my world, yesterday was a successful day. I spent a total of 7 hours working, not 17, I spent some time in a morning sun chair, petted the stray dog, thanked the barista, tried a new protein powder flavor that has real biscuit crumbs in it, sent some good memes over the gc, ate whole food, did a successful 40-min strength workout, and listened to this live set.
Very typical, yet is a very 'successful iteration'. If I spent the next year doing what I did yesterday for 5 days per week, that would amount to ~250 successful iterations — and I can't help but think: how great could that be?
I realized that one of the biggest reasons your startup could fail is you yourself. If I did everything right for 17 hours a day for 200 days straight, and then burned out over the next few weeks to the point where I couldn't give the bare minimum, it's NOT even the equivalent of maintaining a sustainable workload over the whole period. In fact, it's much worse. Why? Because a few weeks of being "out" is more than enough for assured startup death. I believe it’s the same for many other similar disciplines.
The real move would be sustain the same positive outlook over years, without losing focus, and without losing life. And this is really crazy when you think about it. Because starting out, in our early 20s, we think life is about us versus the world, then as we grow up, it becomes more and more about us versus ourselves.
However, returning back to the concept of ‘daily delights’, I’m finding books, music, and weight training are some of the most underrated things that can save a typical day from being dull, wasted, and forgotten. Partly because, in lots of ways, if all what you ever did that day was read through a book, have a good mood, and do any form of training, that’s easily a successful day, right?
Another thing I found about books & training in particular, is that they work different for everyone. Lots of people will tell you you have to read in the morning, you have to train at 6am,… — The thing is you DON’T have to do anything. The most enjoyable time you spend reading a book is when you don’t intentionally allocate a time slot for it. For example, a friend was just telling me how he was planning on reading a few pages of a book we were discussing and then finished the whole thing in one setting. I think this level of entropy is what makes anything meaningful. You can do anything at the exact opposite of what everyone is telling and still win.
Templates, like ‘morning routines’, fuck up with the concept, because the whole point is to receive what's coming at you in whatever state you're in. Templates, by definition, state that you have to be at a specific place, feeling a specific feeling, and doing a specific thing — which, in the morning example, is not the case. A real delight is only possible due to a moment that happened with zero prep. Templates mess up both experiences and expectations. They rip joy out of a moment because it feels like you're following a script, and they put unnecessary burden of doing something every day that you don't need to.
The morning routine script is probably written or painted by a Canadian influencer who has been struggling with mental illness for so long and finally found their way back using a set of morning rituals that fit with their environment, profession, marital status, and lifestyle. This is exactly the reason why you should never follow any script from a video or a book.
A very simple proof of this: If over the following 30 days you iterated your way to a simple morning routine that fits with your environment, profession, marital status, and lifestyle, then posted it online, everyone including your friends and me, we would be ready to glamorize the fuck out of it.
The reason for this is most people don’t do the simple things, we got things backwards now. Everything that was so simple back then, like sunshine everyday, is becoming an impossible, while things that were nearly impossible, like create a human-grade intelligent chatbox, is becoming 3 lines of code.
And the second reason is, people like it when you hand them silver platters, such as: “Here’s a life changing routine that results in life changing mental benefits” — well, life-changing things happen to you and me through iteration, and iteration only. If we’re not able to iterate, then that’s it, a choice has been made.
Changing beliefs is an evident form of growth, and I bear no regret to say that for so long I was living like the guy in this pic. And for so long, I was mistaken — Now everyday I try to ask myself, what’s the most ridiculously simple change I can do to this iteration?