Nothing Subtle About It

You all know I read a lot.  I mean a real lot.

In a recent post, I mentioned the seven books that I was reading as of last week.

I skip from one to another, depending on my mood or where I last put the book down.  Some I leave on my night stand, some I leave in my car and others I leave in my office.  My house has numerous piles of books, my office has several piles and my car typically has five or so books in it.

One that I have really been loving is Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.

Please excuse the blatant pitch for it, but I have felt a little less stress in my life over the past week despite having the typical pressures involved with being an economic development professional in the pressure cooker.

Although I am barely a quarter of the way through the book, I have already read dozens of passages that struck a nerve in me.  When I think of pages that I would like to highlight and comment on, it winds up being nearly every page.

I could honestly write my next twenty posts about  this book, but since nobody would want to read that and I would not want to write it, allow me to share a few notions that captivated me early on.

Happiness Comes from Solving Problems

You may salivate at the thought of a problem-free life full of everlasting happiness and eternal compassion, but back here on earth the problems never cease.

Manson writes the truth, that problems are a constant in life.  As you solve one problem, another can crop up to take its place.  Problems never stop; they merely get exchanged and/or upgraded.

Happiness comes from solving problems, the keyword being “solving.”  If you avoid problems, as I am wont to do, then you are going to make yourself miserable.  If you feel like you have problems that you cannot solve, you will likewise make yourself miserable. 

He writes that the secret sauce is in the solving of the problems, not in not having problems in the first place.  To be happy, we need something to solve.  Thus, happiness is a form of action or an activity and not something that you magically discover in a top-ten “how to be happy” list on the Huffington Post or from one of the numerous happiness gurus.  It does not announce itself when you finally make more money to add an extra room to your house or purchase a new car.
 

You won’t find happiness waiting for you in a place, an idea, or a better job or a book.  You won’t find happiness by reading this post.  But you may just think of possible solutions to some problem that can help you become happier than you currently are.

I spent many hours reading many self-help books by many gurus since early 2016.  Many of the authors, speakers and bloggers preach new forms of denial and pump the followers up with exercises that feel good in the short term, while ignoring the underlying issues.

Remember, nobody who is actually happy has to stand in front of a mirror to tell himself that he is happy.

What Is the Pain That You Want to Sustain?

Everyone including you and me enjoys what feels good.  We want to live a carefree, happy and easy life, to fall in love and to have amazing sex and relationships.  We want to look good and make big money and be popular, well-respected and admired.  

Everybody wants those things.

Manson asks the more interesting question of “What pain do you want in your life?”  In other words, what are you willing to struggle for?  That seems to be a greater determinant of how well our lives turn out.

I, myself, have come across quite a few people who want to ease their way into high-paying positions.  I even know someone who succeeded in doing so.  Most of those folks happen to be lily white guys and some gals who grew up with a proverbial silver spoon.  You rarely run into an immigrant with that attitude in my profession.

But for most of us, getting to the point where we want to be requires many hours of hard work, dedication, diligence and perseverance.  Working on a project while others are watching reality TV shows.  Taking classes at night while your buddies are hitting the bars.  Working on blog posts or eBooks while your friends go to a movie.

Happiness and success requires struggle.  It does not just sprout out of the ground like weeds on my lawn.  Truly sustainable long-term success, and the happiness that results from it, has to be earned through the choosing and managing of our struggles.

So ask yourself, “What is the Pain That You Want to Sustain?”  That is the question that I am asking myself, and urge you to ask yourself.  

I’ll share mine with you.

I figured that once I started typing some sage words into the blogosphere, that the money would start rolling in.  I would get thousands of views, thousands of clicks and subsequent sales on Amazon, and AdWords would add another few hundred bucks per month to my stash.  I self-published a crappy book with a crappy cover, but figured that I would collect another few hundred bucks per month from it.

Wrong, wronger, and wrongest.

In a good month, I will clear fifty extra bucks and in a bad month, zilch nada zip.

Despite spending many hours lying in bed late at night contemplating my next successful eBook, what it would be about, what nom de plume and title to choose, and if I should pay a graphic designer to design the cover, I have done none of the above.

I wanted the end result without investing the proper amount of energy and effort into it.

Long workweeks become busy family weekends, which end too soon only to begin another long, stressful workweek.  It is not easy to find the time to crank out SEO-friendly words and then promote them on other sites to attract readers.  It is easier to crack open a cold drink and watch an episode of Parts Unknown.  I am going to watch another episode after clicking the Publish button on this one.  

Despite my three-plus years of fantasizing about my imminent success blogging and self-publishing, the reality has not come to fruition.  

I am not saying that it won’t.  I’m just saying that it hasn’t yet.

But what happened to me, and I suspect happens to others, is that I was in love with the result. 

The result being divulging my identity after putting in enough years to qualify for an IMRF pension, and then telling the world about my thousands of units sold and then going on a speaking tour.  Maybe starting a podcast or a vlog.  Maybe both.  

But I am not in love with the process.  I do not want to work on writing at ten o’clock at night after a long and stressful work day and then being a great father and husband after work.  I hate doing housework, but am definitely not wealthy enough to hire someone to help us, like many of my relatives and some of our friends do.  I have to put the time and effort in on that.

I cannot even write that I have failed at this point because I simply have not put in enough effort.  I have written many posts, but I have not tried very hard at all yet.  It does not mean that I will not, it just means that I have not.

I have not written much about it yet, but I am totally fixated on being able to generate a significant income within the next five to seven years so I can ease my way out of the municipal economic development racket.  

If I was to testify in court and swear upon the Torah, I would cite the end of 2025 as the time when I must have an alternative and significant source of income.  At least a few thousand bucks per month.  
It sounds like a very long time from now in June of 2018, but it is coming up faster than you think.

But I digress…

My high school coaches yelled clichés like “No pain, no gain” at us near the end of our cross country, track and basketball practices.  I even yelled the phrase, myself, while spending eight years coaching Pony League baseball with my father.

But that phrase is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our success.  

Manson writes that it is a never-ending upward spiral.  And if you think at any point you’re allowed to stop climbing, both Manson and I are afraid that you are missing the point.

An Average Mensch

Manson correctly writes that most of us are pretty average at most things we do.

Sure, you might be exceptional at one or maybe even two things.  You may be a great cook.  You may be a really good financial blogger.  Heck, you might be a millennial who does not have any college debt, has purchased your own house and have already saved six figures.  Maybe closing in on seven figures.  You may be on your way to becoming financially independent and retiring early.

Chances are, you are none of the above and your retirement may not even be a permanent one once you discover what health care costs when you are older or if you want to help pay for your children to go to college.

No, it is a statistical improbability that any single person will be an extraordinary performer in all areas of life, or even in many areas of life.  You may make a shitload of money but your relationships aren’t going well.  You may be a successful writer or business person but with bad habits that will become worse over time.  I don’t know you, just like you don’t know me.

But scouring the Internet and reading stories about success, murder, suicide and the bizarre day after day is overwhelming.  We are flooded with images from Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Reddit, YouTube, TV news shows, reality shows, Twitter feeds and on and on…

All day every day we are flooded with extraordinary stories.  The best of the best and the worst of the worst.  People killing each other over small slights.  Whiz kid college dropouts attracting millions of dollars for development of a new mobile app.  Government agencies taking babies from their parents and then forbidding their captors from even hugging them.  Threats of nuclear annihilation.  What the Kardashians are wearing.

Our news feed are filled with information from the extremes on both ends of the spectrum, whether the spectrum is your political views, financial standing, sports fandom or whatever floats your boat.

But most of our lives are in the humdrum middle.  The vast majority of our lives are not extraordinary.  They are, dare I say, rather mundane.

Studies abound, and I know because I have read several of them, that the deluge of exceptional information drives us to feel insecure and upset.  I know this to be the case with our daughter, who constantly shows me where her friends are on vacation during holiday breaks.  They go to the Hawaiian islands, Mexico and the Caribbean while we shovel our driveways in the Chicago suburbs.

They are out on their boats or at their weekend homes while we spend most of our time locally.

Rather than lecture her on how hard we work to be able to live in an old house in a marginal neighborhood that feeds into a great school district that happens to include many wealthy families, I feel like I am letting her and my family down.  After all, these other parents do not really seem any smarter than we are.  Do they work harder than I do?  I do not think so.  Do all of the mothers work full-time in high paying positions?  Not really.

It just so happens that both of our children excel in their activities and are and were high achievers and tend to socialize with other high-achieving kids from high-achieving families.  Their fathers are not multi-millionaires, but they are lawyers, dentists, engineers and small business owners.  In other words, they may have cracked the top twenty percent, while we are still looking at it from the outside.

I digress again, but the point is that many of us are average.  We may be looking at our daughter’s friend vacationing in Aruba while we remain at home, but that does not mean that we are major losers.  It just means that we are fairly average when it comes to our income and lifestyle.

I would love to write about making an extra ten grand this month and getting ready to upgrade something at our home or buy a flat screen TV or take my family to an ocean vacation.  In the dream scenario that played out in my head last night that was the case.  But in the reality scenario, I am only making ten bucks this month (one one-thousandth of my goal) with my online endeavors.  The ten grand that I am making is from my day job, so I will not be quitting that any time soon.

I would like to become an extraordinary mensch.  Being “average” has become the new standard of failure.  The worst thing that you can be is a boring old, middle of the pack average guy. 

In his book about not giving a f*ck, Manson writes that a lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept it, they’ll never achieve anything, never improve, and that their life won’t matter.

He writes that all this “every person can be extraordinary and achieve greatness” stuff is basically just jerking off your ego.

And on that lovely thought, I urge you to check the book out at your local library like I did or, if it is not at your library or you live a many miles away from one, I'm sure that you can find a way to buy one.

 

There’s nothing too subtle about that, is there?