Live a Powerful Life I: Lifestyle
With 2020 now reaching the 2 month mark, it’s probable that by about now that most people’s lofty goals of “New Year, New Me” are lying in the dust, ignored or worse, forgotten.
It will be for many an additional occurrence of an annual tradition of failure, regret, and despair. Why?
Why is it that resolutions are almost never resolved, and fail more often than they succeed? It’s simple — because they’re resolutions.
Just as you can’t easily fix a burst water pipe without turning off the stopcock, trying to spotfix your life without addressing the causes is simply futile. We are creatures of habit, and unless those habits are addressed, we simply will not change ourselves or our lives with any degree of permanence or robustness.
There’s a reason why you don’t go to the gym, why you don’t lose weight, or why you can’t get organised (the three most common New Year's Resolutions) after promising that you would, and it’s the same reason why you didn’t before you made the resolution: your lifestyle hasn’t changed. You’re a product of that lifestyle, so you were simply fighting the tide. So how do you change your lifestyle? And what the hell is ‘Lifestyle’ anyway?
Lifestyle is, broadly speaking, how we behave. That can be both towards ourself or our surroundings. It can be how we think, and how we act. It can be how we react to stimulus vs how we proact.
All of these are independent of each other, although crucially they feed into and influence each-other.
To keep things as concise as possible, for this article we’ll only look at the first to pairs mentioned above, which for simplicity we’ll call the internal/external and the mental/physical.
For those sick individuals amongst you who like me enjoys mathematics, the obvious next step is to plot these two axes on a graph.
This we can divide into eight regions:
- Physical — This is the realm of physical fitness and achievement. Exercise, in other words.
- Physical/External — Getting the grind done and making things: work, basically.
- External — Our environment, both social and locational.
- External/Mental — Creative play.
- Mental — Meditation/mindfulness, and sleep.
- Mental/Internal — Learning
- Internal — Diet, both nutritional and informational.
- Internal/Physical — Physical skill development.
Of course, this is a fairly crude model, but it’s better than the monolith we had before.
It also highlights something that is missing from the simple ‘resolution’ paradigm that plagues humanity the first couple of months of the year. And that is simply balance. Without adequate sleep you’ll never perform at, or even get to the gym. Looking at it like this, unless you know where you are already, no resolution in the world can ever work. Trying to build a resolution when your lifestyle is unbalanced is like building a skyscraper out of oatmeal.
An exercise for the reader: Go round the above 8 areas and consider how much effort or even thought you put into each. Be as honest with yourself as you can, this is your life we’re talking about, it’s too important to lie about.
Compare the areas above where you previously failed resolutions, and look at the opposite. Can’t stick to a diet? Stop hanging around toxic places and people. Creative funk? Learn to juggle.
This approach of supercharging your resolutions is missing the more important effects of this lifestyle paradigm — learning from failure, and the strength and power that gives you. Resolutions are singular, and so failure is devastating. Of course it is: everything else is exactly the same as it was when you started. Lifestyle change creates constant failure states. By adopting a holistic approach these failures self-mitigate. Failure is now given the space it needs to go from a merciless foe to a tough-loving ally.
Of course, we can also turn the whole paradigm on its head, as the always excellent CGP Grey does in his video on annual themes.
This approach is effectively equivalent to the lifestyle paradigm however, and the most important observation still stands: that without knowing where you are, you can’t possibly know where you’re going.
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