Motivation

I don't really have a strong 'WHY' as Tony Robbins would say.
So then what really motivates me to do and be more than a enlightened hedonist?

I feel that in the past it was more fear than curiosity.
Now I feel that it has flipped. It is a different feeling.

Lucky Problems

A lot of people I know have won the lottery.
It is incredible (and sad and obvious in hindsight) how winning the lottery brings on another set of problems, stress, and anxiety.
You won the lottery, but are still not yet able to sit back and relax in this moment.
There is a difference however between having real problems and winning the lottery problems.
While the stress during the moments of being stressed feels the same - it if it were a real problem, this feeling often lifts. And when it does, you find yourself grateful for your luck and can smile at your 'problems'.

Logging out of trello

Logging out of trello felt very good.

I believe the things you 'need to do' each day are obvious, you just need to have a little courage to stop fooling and distracting yourself.

I probably have already posted this aphorism but I love it, "If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead." - NNTaleb

Beginning to slow down

The thoughts that capture my attention are beginning to slow down. Removing stimuli from my surrounding has really helped - people, news, internet, travel, noise. That along with some sleep, greens, and activity have me feeling more in control mentally than I have in a while.

I consider myself as being lucky enough to have relatively good mental health. However I am starting to believe strongly that relative is very far from optimum.

I hope this is just the beginning of a journey to explore how very different from 'normal' a good  mental life can be. 

Drives, Desires, Purposes, Meanings, Priorities, etc.

It is becoming increasingly clear that what matters to us in life is not clear. It is not one thing and it does not stay still.

How to deal with this?

Maybe use as heuristic: Don't blatantly act in contradiction with multiple priorities.
Or as Scott Adams suggests: Use personal energy as a sort of master metric that will encompass all others.
Or we could use a regret minimization heuristic to guide us.

Or we could just try to be better at what seems to be the default practice or balancing and juggling them all at once.

Structure

One aphorism that has me puzzled: "If you know with any certainty what your day looks like, you are a little bit dead inside...".

But I also like the idea that structure provides simplicity and power through removing distractions and the profane.

How do you reconcile these two thoughts?

...

My idea is to have an unstructured day AND keep it simple. Focus on what's important, interesting, sacred and fuck the rest.

What is needed is shedding some adult misconceptions, adding some wisdom (acquired through trial and error), and recouping some childlike instincts for not doing what really doesn't matter.

Morning wonder

A friend and I like to tinker with building new habits. I think I found a good and simple one.

It was pointed out in a podcast I recently listened to that waking up every morning is mysterious. It's true. We wake up and can't really explain why the lights came back on (or why they were ever on in the first place).

Waking up and immediately thinking this awesome thought, daily, is seeming to have a good effect and powers up the gratitude and awe modules (if their are such things) to start the day. At the very least it is a better thought than what I "have" to get done today or what's for breakfast.