true north

28th birthday edition

I turned 28 today.

So far, I’ve spent my twenties in pursuit of lots of different things.

That list includes (but is not limited to) money earned formatting PowerPoints, non-fiction books finished, SQL queries written, cities visited, consecutive days journaling, Instagram likes, job title, salary, random facts memorized, newsletter subscribers, etc.

I’ve often stopped to ask myself why I was spending my time engaged in such pursuits.

But a strange thing kept happening.

I generally seemed to have good answers, but things never quite felt right.

My life seemed to continuously lack resonance with a certain elusive frequency.

When the results are not quite resulting (when the vibes are not quite vibing), there are a few options.

You can question your strategy. You can question your execution. Or you can blame the world / other people.

After thoroughly assessing all three, I decided that I had spent the last several years optimizing my execution of a suboptimal strategy.

And that (unfortunately) it was all my fault.

I realized that I had been asking myself the wrong questions.

And that the right answers to the wrong questions are indistinguishable from the wrong answers.

If you asked my parents, they’d probably tell you that I’ve always been good at arguing. They’d probably *actually* tell you that I am insufferable to argue with.

But as far as I’m concerned, those are the same thing.

Being good at arguing is a useful skill…if your goal in life is to win arguments.

If, however, your goal is to live authentically — in alignment with the core essence of your being — it is not always very useful.

It can actually be quite harmful.

For some reason, it took me a while to understand this.

If you’re good at convincing other people that you’re right, chances are you’re also good at convincing yourself that you’re right.

This makes question selection really important.

My questions weren’t obviously wrong. But they weren’t right.

The problem is that when you ask “why,” the answer can be strictly rooted in logic and reason.

And this is the preferred domain of the “inner attorney,” who worships the god of reason and is dead set on doing one thing — proving you right.

I wondered what might happen if I started asking myself different questions. Questions that lent themselves to answers that had less to do with reason and more to do with feeling.

I wondered if that might stifle my inner attorney long enough to get him out of the way and allow me to (finally) start making some real progress.

For example, if I asked myself why I was trying to read 100 non-fiction books in 2020, my inner attorney would have immediately jumped in with all sorts of compelling answers about why accumulating knowledge would give me the necessary tooling to effectively navigate the complexity of the world.

But if I instead asked myself how it felt to be on page 450 of Thinking Fast and Slow on a Saturday afternoon, the only real answer would be “I’m not having a good time. This book should have been 400 pages shorter, and I should be sniffing roses right now.”

It’s easy to lie to yourself about most things.

But it’s hard to lie to yourself about how you feel.

Especially if you’re willing to listen to that quiet voice of feeling (intuition) that almost always has something to say, but is often drowned out by the table-pounding, pontificating, self-aggrandizing voice of reason (the inner attorney).

But people are complicated. We have a lot of feelings. And not all feelings are made equally.

So then, which feelings to listen to?

Comfort is a commonly enticing one. Then there’s happiness (whatever that actually means). And of course, their grumpy, high-strung cousins – sadness, anxiety, frustration, etc.

While all of these feelings certainly have important things to tell us, they don’t all make good compasses.

I decided to give “aliveness” a go.

I wanted to see where it might take me.

If, along the way, I started asking myself, “Does this make me feel alive?”

True north (of course) varies a lot from person to person.

Some people actually do feel alive when they’re formatting PowerPoints for money. Others feel alive when they’re doing yo-yo tricks. And others when they’re front row watching Shamu do flips at SeaWorld.

The possibilities abound.

You can draw inspiration from others – get ideas for which domains to experiment in. But only you can evaluate the results.

Only you can decide how alive something makes you feel.

It’s not obvious at first. The old patterns are loud — proliferating the tyranny of “should.”

But the thing about aliveness is that it doesn’t care about what other people think you should do. It doesn’t care if something is impractical or scary. It doesn’t care if other people won’t understand.

Its only concern is how alive things make you feel.

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” // Howard Thurman

You can tell when someone is alive.

It’s obvious in the way they talk about things. Their energy. The questions they ask. How they spend their time.

Alive people are curious.

They’re in tune with the richness of the domains of their own aliveness. And this sparks genuine intrigue in the domains of others.

Mark Twain said that “most men die when they’re 25, we just don’t bury them until they’re 75.”

I don’t think I was very alive at 25. Probably not at 26 either.

I cared too much about what I should be doing.

I cared too much about what other people might think.

27 felt like a step in the right direction. But I still have a long way to go.

I am probably in aliveness kindergarten.

But it feels good to be enrolled.

I’m excited to see what happens if I continue to take my curiosities seriously. If I continue to ask myself if what I’m doing makes me feel alive.

I’m not sure where the pursuit of aliveness will take me.

But it feels like the right compass to follow for now.

I am cautiously optimistic that next August, I’ll be a bit closer to true north.

As far as where exactly that will be.

That’s a question for 29-year-old Jarred.

//

Birthday posts for 23, 24, 25, 26, 27.

Shout out to my friend Jordan for introducing me to and having lots of conversations with me about aliveness.