Category: Thinking Clearly

Cancel Them All

Published on October 25, 2023

A modern day savings trick in a world obsessed with subscriptions: cancel them all… and obsess over one at a time.

This is a trick I’ve been applying to my own life as of late.

Netflix, Disney +, Paramount +, HBO/Max, Showtime, Hulu, Peacock… each service makes you believe you’re missing out if you aren’t subscribed to them. And they do this by advertising the heck out of their blockbuster (oh, the irony) shows, creating irresistible offers, and making you feel like their service will give you access to the media that most of your friends will be talking about.

The reality is… it’s all media brainwashing.

You don’t need all of them all at once—it’s preposterous to even consider how many options that gives you access to when it actually comes time to sit down and pick something to watch.

No.

It’s time to take a new approach.

One that’s not only better for decision making, but for your wallet, too.

That’s right: cancel them all and obsess over one at a time.

And when you’re out of options on the one (if ever), cancel that service and switch to another. The beauty of the hyper competitive subscription space is that you can almost always cancel anytime with no fees and the other services will roll out the red carpet to get you back.

Wash; rinse; save; repeat.

Inconvenient and Unpleasant

Published on October 23, 2023

Remember from a few days ago when I said, if it can go wrong it will?

Well today I got a flat tire while driving.

I was 16 minutes away from home, 35 minutes from my mechanic, an hour out from changing it myself, and several hours out from getting the car towed/fixed/back on the road.

None of these were convenient options.

…When is getting a flat tire ever convenient though, eh?

Very fortunately for me, just as I was rolling up my sleeves to change it myself… I saw a car shop just down the road.

I slowly drove there and they very kindly got me patched up and back on the road within 30 minutes.

It couldn’t have been a more ideal situation for a thing gone wrong.

This is a rarity, though.

Usually, things only continue to complicate after the initial inconvenience. Which is why I’m suggesting, yet again, you meditate on solutions to things that could very possibly go wrong in your life. Some starter ideas:

Flat tire with no cell reception… do you know how to change it yourself?
Lost your phone and all the information on it… do you have a backup?
Your basement flooded… are really important items stored off the ground?
A pipe burst and water is spewing everywhere… do you know where the main shutoff is?
Somebody breaks into your home and steals the five most valuable things laying out in the open… do you have a safe?

While it might feel inconvenient or unpleasant to reflect on this now… imagine how much more inconvenient and unpleasant it’ll be when you have to figure it out after the fact.

If It Can Go Wrong—It Will

Published on October 21, 2023

Every now and again it’s useful to meditate on Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong will go wrong—as it pertains to various aspects of your life, and use what you see as fuel to better prepare for what’s to come.

Some examples:

Business / Work: If you lost your job tomorrow, what alternative paths could you follow? What kind of time will you have before running out of savings? What side hustles coud you turn full time?
Relationships: If your best friend(s) suddenly moved out of state, could you cope? Could you start connecting more with other people in your life? If your loved ones stopped showing you the love they once did—could you still find ways to show love to them and yourself?
Personal safety: If somebody attacked you on the street, what training/ tools will you have at your disposal? What if somebody broke into your home? What if somebody targeted a family member—what training/ tools will they have?

None of this is meant to scare you or jinx anything you have that’s going great in your life. It’s merely to say, it’s useful to be prepared.

Because if there’s anything I’ve learned over the course of my life, it’s that life has other plans.

…And many a time, it felt like it was going all wrong in comparison to the plans I made.

Shoving your head in the sand and hoping nothing goes wrong isn’t a good strategy.

Assuming things will go wrong, however, and coming up with a plan for if/when it does… is.

A Strategy For Stupid Floss

Published on October 17, 2023

I’ve been using this new floss lately that rips every… single… time.

It’s so incredibly frustrating.

At first, my thinking was that it was me… and that it was I who needed to treat the floss more nicely.

After all, floss is supposed to be designed specifically not to rip, eh?

Welp, not this floss.

…Must’ve missed that kind of important step in the design process.

Fast forward a few more flosses and ripping became the unavoidable pattern—regardless of how careful I was in navigating the crowded spaces between my teeth.

My first attempt to make this awful experience less awful was to treat it like a game: will today be the day I make it all the way through my mouth without a single rip?!

And once I realized that game was impossible to win, rather than revert back to pure frustration… I came up with another idea… one that’s been working ever since:

I started expecting it to happen.

Which, doesn’t sound like a revolutionary mindset change, but here’s what it did:

It evaporated my frustration because I was no longer surprised.
It gave me the new strategy of starting off with extra long pieces of floss so I could finish without having to re-pull and re-wrap my fingers (sometimes multiple times).
Which, by and by, allowed me to get the job done in less time.

If there’s a similar situation in your life that, no matter what you do or how you do it, it still seems to result in the same incredibly frustrating outcome…

Maybe simply expecting it to happen… and planning for that… is an option worth exploring moving forward?

Restoring Past Versions (Of Ourselves)

Published on October 15, 2023

“How can I remove 3,000+ infected files from my websites?”

…Has been the focal point of my thinking over the past two days.

The options that I keep rotating between are:

Option 1: Hire a web developer.
Option 2: $199 to clean each website then $249 to protect each for the next year.
Option 3: Learn how to remove malware myself.

…None of the options looked good. And the longer my websites were down, the greater the penalty would end up being.

Until it occurred to me… reinstall the backup.

Rather than try to remove each and every line of infected code… or hiring someone else to do it… I could simply reinstall a backup version of my website from a week or two ago with the hopes of it being a pre-malware infected version.

…And let the overlay of the fresh code wipe out the malware altogether.

Which isn’t only a solid strategy for malware infected websites… but, for malware infected minds, too.

Hear me out…

What if, instead of focusing the majority of your thinking on the 3,000+ problems in your life (mind)… what if you simply found a way to revert yourself to a point in time when those problems didn’t exist?

What if you focused all of your time/energy/attention on doing what you used to do when you were feeling your happiest? On reconnecting with the people who made you feel your best? On engaging back into the communities where you felt your most seen and heard?

What if… instead of obsessing on the problem… you tried obsessing on possible solutions and doing more of what you remember giving you solutions in the past?

Letting Go After Doing Everything You Can

Published on October 14, 2023

I found out today (October 14) that both of my websites: MoveMe Quotes and My Blog were infected with Malware.

And not just a little bit of malware… but, 3,000 compromised files worth of malware.

This is not even two weeks after my websites were down for other reasons I shared.

And I’m frustrated.

And I have anxiety about all of the content that’s at risk that could be lost.

And, maybe worst of all, I feel helpless.

…When it rains, it pours, eh?

But, I’ve done all that I can do. My web developers are on it. I have an appointment set up with a specialist on Monday (October 16). And all I can do now is wait.

Maybe you’ve found yourself in a similar situation recently. One where there was plenty to worry about, but nothing more that could be done about it.

And while we could allow the frustration to flourish, the anxiety to continue to brew, and the helplessness to continue to fester in our minds…

…What these situations could also be are opportunities to practice letting go.

And practice filling ourselves up with gratitude that we have something (someone) worth feeling this way about. And meditate on ways we can better prepare ourselves moving forward—because this sure won’t be the last time something like this happens, eh?

And to be clear, this isn’t empty “positive thinking” and this isn’t head-in-the-sand avoidance.

…This is how we flex our resiliency muscles.

…This is how we keep moving forward in life rather than mentally dragging ourselves to an intolerable standstill.

…This, my friends, is Grade-A strategy.

Skipping Thinking

Published on October 5, 2023

Thoughts that we try to remember end up throttling our brains—like a skipping record that’s stuck playing the same beat.

Here’s how I imagine it going down:

Average thought
Average thought
Average thought
Average thought
Average thought
GREAT IDEA
REMEMBER
REMEMBER
Aver—REMEMBER
Averag—REMEMBER
Avera—REMEMBER
Ave—REMEMBER
GRE—REMEMBER

Essentially all further thoughts get halted as our brains try and remember the one.

We need to write down/record the random thoughts/creative ideas we have so as to free up our minds for smooth, continued thinking.

The more we try to remember, the fewer total ideas we’ll have.

And the fewer ideas we have, the lower the chances we’ll come across (allow) our best ones.

P.s. I use the notes app on my phone for this. It’s simple and easy. Don’t complicate this. You just need an easily accessible place where you can brain dump on the fly.