There’s a magic to going into a situation completely open, unprepared and without a plan, and improvising your way into a beautiful dance.
Even though there’s always the risk that instead of a beautiful dance, you just stumble and fall flat on your face.
But if you’re not willing to get lost, you’ll never find yourself in an unexpected place. Being willing to get lost, to waste time, to look foolish, to make mistakes, is the price of admission.
TRANSCRIPT:
The last thought I had before we jumped on this call. Was
[00:00:03] I’ve lost my way by never getting lost.
[00:00:07]And what I meant by this, this was this was the. final sentence that I wrote when I did my 10 minute writing exercise, which today again, I did very late, basically an hour ago. So, and today when I did my, when I did the 10 minute writing exercise, I started off by writing today. I don’t know what to write about.
[00:00:27]And then I wrote. Usually, I always take just one moment before starting the exercise to ask myself, what do I want to write about? And that led me off a trail as I was writing it that I like to prepare myself for performance. Right. And ask myself, what am I going to write about? There’s an idea that pops up and then I’m like, now I’m ready to start the exercise.
[00:00:53]Why now I know I have some clarity, so I know this won’t be a waste of my time and I know it’s going to produce a result, something satisfying.
[00:01:04]I also do this. With the new story that I tell my sons every night, the good night’s story that I come up with every night. And there’s a distinct difference when I’m with them. I don’t ask that question. They give me the words and I just start talking and I, it just happens through me. I’m not thinking what’s the structure, what’s the end where I’m going with this just goes.
[00:01:29]When they’re not in front of me, I’ve gotten into the habit of thinking about the entire story coming up with the plot beginning, middle, and end, and only then do I start hitting record or record the audio and send it over?
[00:01:43]The what’s not true that I discovered today while writing is that. The asking of what will the story be about? Or what will I write about that? That saves me time. It doesn’t cause sometimes it leads to 40 minutes of me procrastinating before I started recording the story because I can’t come up with a good story.
[00:02:05]So I’m thinking about the plot. What will I record today? What will it record today? And I’m back in email. Well, I’m making myself a sandwich. I do something else and no shit, no story plot. What’s the plot. What’s the I just procrastinate. So I’ve wasted as much time thinking about the story before recording the story.
[00:02:23] I would have wasted a lot less time just recording what I would have done this. I would have recorded some times where the end result I wasn’t proud of or wasn’t perfect. Right. Sometimes the stumble of improvisation is a beautiful dance and sometimes the stumble proposition is just an ugly stumble, stumble, right?
[00:02:47] That’s it. And you, and your willingness to stumble increases the chances of it becoming a beautiful dance, right? The letting go of it, lets it blow out of you. And usually in beautiful ways. And when you start the improvisation and you’re like, I’m stumbling, this is awkward. Then it becomes a fall and you might end the thing with feeling terrible about entering into this without preparation.
[00:03:16] Why did I just start without thinking this through this sucked, but the struggle is just in the holding on to the need to perform. You don’t have a need to perform well you end up spending so much time thinking about doing the thing and much less time doing it versus the other way you could just do twice as much.
[00:03:39] And you would still save half the time sometimes, you know, and there’s something is there’s a time and place to be prepared. Right. We all know people that have stumbled when they shouldn’t have, we have all stumbled when we shouldn’t have, because we should have been prepared. And we did not, not prepare because we want a beautiful improvisation.
[00:04:02] We just didn’t prepare because we’re lazy or dumb or something. Right. Distracted it. We just didn’t do our job. That’s different. But then there are activities. That don’t need you to be perfect, right? Where the stakes aren’t that high, where it’s not, you just have to do your homework and just study for the test.
[00:04:25] There’s no improvisation here. There are times where for you to do the thing, right. To be free for you to live fully and a life you have to improvise the time jump. That’s the point of it. Sort of like, you’re jumping off a cliff into the wild ocean, but you’re, before you jump, you spent like a week, you have a parachute, you have a bungee rope.
[00:04:50] You have all kinds of tools as you’re trying to make this jump as secure as possible. And by the time you jump, what’s even the point. If you want safe. Sit don’t Trump. The point of jumping into this ocean is the thrill that there’s some layer of danger involved, right? If you want to kill the thrill, then you don’t have to do the activity.
[00:05:13] You could do something else. And the stories with my kids, oftentimes that’s a very playful, magical thing. My stories don’t have to be perfect. But I like being great, especially in front of them, but in front of everybody and myself. So I don’t want to, like when I’m in front of them, there’s a cer some sort of a sort of magic by their presence that I just flow.
[00:05:40] But when they’re not around, I don’t trust myself to flow. So I prepare, but there is. There is a magic. It’s fine. Like some of the writing that I’ve done where I asked myself before, what do I want? I have not had it yet where it became like a painful thing where it was, what should I write about? I don’t know.
[00:05:58] Well, then let’s write later. I never have done that yet. I mean, I just started a week ago or something, or two weeks ago, no, a week ago. So it’s not been enough days, right? And I’ve not had it where I thought about it for minutes. It’s always been, what am I writing about? And three seconds later, this cool.
[00:06:14] Let’s go. Right. That’s a nice, yeah. But today was beautiful because today I was surprised about what I wrote, but I was only able to surprise myself about what I wrote and what I learned about myself while writing. Because I jumped and I was okay with any outcome. There’s nothing like I literally just leaped for it.
[00:06:39] I did not think for a second. I want to land well in the water, or I want this to look good or I don’t know how it is go, but come on. You can do, it’s going to be good. I had no attachment to the outcome. I started writing and I was completely okay with it. Sometimes I have set I’m okay with whatever outcome, but there was a 10% reservation.
[00:07:03] There was a little bit of a holding onto wanting it to be good. That alone could ruin it. It’s ever so slight. The difference between you really don’t care and you care not too much, but a little bit, but I didn’t care today. And maybe not caring is not enough. I could have not cared and it would have been nothing, right?
[00:07:22] Nothing sauce. I’m not saying this is a guaranteed recipe, but the beauty in my experience today was that the writing happened to me. I didn’t. Make the writing. And it was surprising. I wrote something that as I was writing it, I was learning something that I was not thinking about consciously before, after it was not on top of my mind was just, it just it’s like you discovered it, it came to you, you tapped into something that you received it.
[00:07:58] Exactly. It’s like a it was received versus he was created. And that led to the final part is I was writing was like, what is the point of living if you’re not getting lost sometimes? Because I think part of what I was writing was about like, when you leap into something, it might lead to a beautiful place or to a dead end.
[00:08:21] You just don’t know. But that is part of the magic. And then it was like, what’s the point of being alive if you’ve never gotten lost. And that led to the, I thought that I’ve lost my way by way of never getting lost. Like my focus became to never get lost anymore in life. Hence I’ve lost the beauty of all the available paths I could take to experience life.
[00:08:49] I’ve now narrowed narrow down my options of what I can see and where I can go to only places I know in control
[00:08:57]and I’ve been thinking like, now that is working inside of me, that thought of when is the when is it right to be prepared? And when it is, when is it beautiful to let go and just. Flow. Yeah. And I I noticed like a lot of times with you where we would jump on calls in the past, I would ask myself, what am I going to talk about today to remain?
[00:09:25] This is actually something it’s something I have on my mind, almost with anybody that I talk to. I very rarely will get on a call with someone. And just flow. It’s not that I have an agenda, but I have an idea of what we might discuss. And it’s part of my personality of here. You can ownership of this conversation and making sure that when we get to talk, there’s something to talk about.
[00:09:55]Not risking that we’re going to get lost, not risking that. It’s not going to be a good call, always making sure. And I’m okay. Then if the person leads the conversation a different direction, but I CA I, I’m never totally blank slate. Now, the last week or two of our conversations, every conversation, I’m a blank slate.
[00:10:16] Even today. I thought earlier, I want to talk about pigeons and then. 20 minutes before we talked. I was like, I don’t even want to talk to him, but I know it’s going to be fun. I just don’t see it now. Like I just don’t want to talk. Right. And then we’ve started talking and it just is flowing out of me. It just kind of happens.
[00:10:34] I’m not, I don’t know what I want to talk to you about. Um, but that’s so funny, man. Like, I sensed that and I had this thought where I’m like, oftentimes steely is like, kind of like this train on a track, on a conversation moving in a clear direction.
[00:10:47] Right. But recently it was like, ah, interesting. It’s now it’s kinda more like, I don’t know, strolling around walking a bit and it doesn’t have that. Clear strong pool in one particular direction. Yes, because I don’t fucking know. Yeah. And some of our calls have been my favorite, the tie here. This has been a lot, you know what, uh, you know, the one big difference is every conversation we’ve had in the last one to two weeks.
[00:11:21] Hi belong. This has been going on let’s less last week for sure. Every single one-hour conversation I’ve been more energized and happy at the end that at the beginning. Yup. And I can’t say all our calls, it was kind of a hit or miss. Right. Sometimes we ended with magic and sometimes we started with it and then kind of at the end it was just work and something was just work.
[00:11:45] It was kind of a mixed bag. Now, I don’t know what we produced. Like, I, it’s not like, Oh, we had this, these great nuggets that everybody needs to hear, but I don’t give a fuck. Like I am filled with gratitude and energy and I enjoyed the conversation with you without the thinking of, does this produce good content to create any good ideas?
[00:12:09] Was this quote unquote productive, right? I’m just like, this is enjoyable. I just love. Fucking jamming with, Rameen just shooting the shit, just yeah. And that’s not typically how I go about things because I take it bring too much seriousness and everything. And so I am, I have ownership. I have a call with them.
[00:12:29] I mean, let me make sure that if all strings, if everything doesn’t work out, I have things to talk about. So it’s going to be a useful call. Hmm. And that again, don’t want to pull on that. That has its time and place, but when you do that with everything in life, You just shit on being alive. It just, it makes, as I said, it creates now you’re in this new town and you’ve Google map.
[00:12:59] Three places you could walk to safely and boom, this is all you’re going to see. What you’ve lost is you’ve lost the chance to discover the town and yourself through it. Yeah, but you’d have to take those yourself too, like feeling the vibe and just going with the flow. You’ve closed yourself to experience yourself and this place fully.
[00:13:22] But to do that, you have to be open to the idea of getting lost, to getting to bad places, to getting to ugly places, to wait, wasting quote, unquote time you have th that is the price of admission. Not willing to get lost. You can find yourself. Right full of quotes today. It’s just rainy out of me, hand control it.
[00:13:46] It’s like, I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you. This is just, and I’m throwing all this magic just in front of you. It’s just like, that is the pains me. If we could replace you on these calls with like about a million people in an audience, then this would be actually worthwhile, but no answer. Oh, I have this, you as an audience and I’m giving you like magic magic, my best pearls before swine man, it’s fucking Jimmy Hendrix playing his best songs in front of the friends.
[00:14:16] We all have never heard these songs. It’s a crime against humanity. That’s what it is. I know you got better songs, Lou fuck you. Fuck you. Yeah I’ve never, I’ve never realized this as clearly as I have. Moments ago when I was, when this was writing itself, like I, and I, as I said, I’ve not thought about this in the last couple of weeks.
[00:14:40] This has not been a topic. I’ve not read a book about this, this just crystallized itself. But it, it, you know, the, the moment I wrote it, I could see the pattern in my life. I could see so many different things, um, and how it affects these things in ways that were not visible to me before.
[00:15:00]I read if I read somewhere the quote, even the, like, you can’t find yourself. If you’re not ready to get lost, if you, if you’re not willing to get lost, you can find yourself. That’s the kind of. Word vomit that’s sounds pathetic, but it’s very hard to see the meaning in it. Like I could read that and go sure.
[00:15:19] It’s like, everything is nothing and nothing is everything in nothing. Everything is something, but something is not nothing and everything is okay. And it’s like, what? This means, this is just word garbage, but it sounds poetic. And this is beautiful. Beautiful word salads. But now when I say it it’s full of meaning, like what I say is deep and meaningful and practical.
[00:15:46] I know exactly what this means to me in my life. It’s not just the words, but I could see me saying it, tweeting it in a moment and I could see my self. A day ago, reading it and going, I, this means nothing. Like, what does this mean? Whatever. You’re not ready to get lost. You can’t fight what? I don’t know what this means.
[00:16:06] Somebody is trying very hard to sound deep. That’s what he’s trying to be philosophical. That’s all. This is, that’s an interesting one. Why, why, like we can read something or think something on, one day , and another time it, is so meaningful to us, Yeah. Because this goes back to what we’ve talked about so much. This is, this is something that I’ve, this is one of the few things that I’ve discovered on my own when it comes to reading books, I think, and that I’m like, They should be more well known.
[00:16:38]But you cannot consume anything. It’s actually not just words. Hi, you know, it seems more meaningful to me with words than with like other art forms, you and the words you’re consuming, hearing or reading are a unique experience.
[00:16:55] In that moment. It’s not just the words, it’s you in that moment. That is kind of the, the ground on which those words are either a seed that can grow into meaning or not. But it’s so difficult for us to see ourselves as half of the equation. Right. I read a book, let me say, I read a sentence and it meant nothing.
[00:17:18] And a year later at the same sentence and it meant everything. It made me cry. Make me break down. How can this be? Well, the words were only half of it. You were the other half and you are not a stable and the words are actually stable. Like the words are not changing during time, but we are so not a stable entity.
[00:17:41] We are, we are fluid and so ever changing from one moment to the next. So you could read the same sentence 30 times and have. 27 different responses to the same thing, especially when time passes. Like that’s even more pronounced. If you read something today and then 10 years later, you read it, right?
[00:18:01] It’s not, yeah. It’s not even the same. It has nothing to do. Like you, you could swear. I’ve read certain books, five, six times books. I love. And at the sixth time there were chapters in them that I could swear didn’t exist before. Okay. I could have sworn, given sworn testimony in front of a judge that this chapter did not exist before.
[00:18:25] It’s impossible. Okay. I know this book inside out. I love this book. It is not possible that I read this book and forgot about it, but I did, because at that time, that chapter wasn’t shit to me. Like it was just like, whatever, I don’t care. That didn’t resonate. Right? Yup. Yup.
[00:18:49]what is the background noise? What is drip? Is that a tie? A clock? No. Something when Slack, Oh, this construction, but yeah, it’s construction. It’s construction. It’s like a tie motivated worker hammering something. Uh, we should, we should, could we make this a sound for like an Apple watch or something that I could download?
[00:19:15] Like, uh, and it’s like a little tie worker that’s hammering. As the time as the time piece, actually, it would be deep as well because the thing I love about ties and I have very limited understanding of Thai culture and type people. I’ve only visited it a bunch of times. I’ve never lived there, but, and I’m not tight, but there is a supervisor by to tie call to like, you know, take it easy work, but not too hard.
[00:19:43] Don’t forget to fund by the way. This need for a break, take two, just to be safe, you know, there’s that life philosophy that, uh, that we need to be layered on top of our time. You know, just like this watch is going to be going half a second, slower than watches. You’re going to be losing an hour in the day, but you’re really going to be winning your life.
[00:20:16] This is the, this is the negotiate. Your days only gonna have 23 hours. On your watch, your life is going to get much richer, much, much because of it. It’s a good deal. The tie watch, unlike it, like we should, we should develop this.