How To Enjoy The Moment While Planning A Deep Future

00:00:00.000 | Next question, EJ, a 39 year old software engineer from Australia.

00:00:06.640 | How do you balance an ambitious plan for a future deep life while finding contentment

00:00:10.760 | in the life you have right now?

00:00:12.760 | Well, this is a complicated one.

00:00:16.560 | And I say complicated because I can speak from my own experience and my own struggles

00:00:22.680 | with this issue.

00:00:24.080 | I was reflecting on this and I realized there's been different periods of my adult life where

00:00:29.840 | I've had different relationships with this issue.

00:00:32.080 | There's been periods of my adult life where I am very focused on the now.

00:00:39.120 | What's going on in my life right now, finding gratitude in it, finding enjoyment in it.

00:00:42.600 | And those are actually pretty meaningful periods of my life.

00:00:45.320 | I do look back at those with nostalgia.

00:00:48.640 | And there's other periods of my life where I'm very future focused.

00:00:53.640 | Things are happening and it's harder for me to get to the now, which has its own issues

00:00:59.280 | with it.

00:01:00.280 | So let me be more specific.

00:01:02.560 | Thinking back on my life, my postdoc years at MIT, my postdoc years at MIT, I remember

00:01:08.040 | as a time where I was very focused on my life in the moment.

00:01:14.200 | So Julie and I lived on Beacon Hill during my postdoc years.

00:01:18.360 | I really liked it on Beacon Hill in Boston.

00:01:20.000 | I mean, it looks like a movie about colonial America.

00:01:23.960 | It's cobblestone streets.

00:01:24.960 | They have gas lamps and like fogs would come in off of the river.

00:01:29.200 | I mean, you really feel like you're living in Dickensian novel.

00:01:33.160 | And I really enjoyed that.

00:01:34.480 | It was like you're just this interesting, intellectually interesting place.

00:01:38.640 | I wasn't that caught up in work.

00:01:40.120 | I was writing a book.

00:01:41.120 | I was writing So Good They Can't Ignore You and enjoying that.

00:01:43.920 | My first year of a postdoc, I was just postdoc and I was writing research papers.

00:01:47.480 | I wasn't even really doing academic job searching yet.

00:01:50.000 | For some reason, I wasn't very worried about academic job searching.

00:01:52.440 | I probably should have been more worried, but it wasn't a source of stress for me.

00:01:57.080 | And I just had a lot of time where I would just focus on enjoyable things in the moment.

00:02:02.480 | Like let's read The Transcendentalist by the Banks of the Charles.

00:02:06.520 | So I did a lot of that.

00:02:07.680 | I ran every day year round for lunch along the Charles.

00:02:11.960 | Snow, heat, throughout.

00:02:13.400 | I got really into monitoring the seasons on my walk to work.

00:02:18.120 | So the same walk over the Longfellow Bridge.

00:02:21.680 | Okay, now this tree has leaves.

00:02:23.240 | Now this doesn't.

00:02:24.240 | You can tell I was reading a lot of Thoreau at this time.

00:02:25.600 | So that was often coming in.

00:02:27.480 | I would get lost.

00:02:28.480 | I'd read or listen to fantasy novels and just kind of get lost.

00:02:31.080 | Like what a cool world.

00:02:32.080 | Wouldn't that be interesting?

00:02:33.080 | I had a dog at this point.

00:02:36.080 | Was just spending a lot of time like training the dog and going for walks.

00:02:39.640 | Because I had a fake job as a postdoc and Julie had a real job.

00:02:42.960 | I had a lot of just alone time.

00:02:45.000 | Just a lot of time to fill doing whatever I thought might be interesting.

00:02:51.060 | And so that's just how I remember that time.

00:02:52.280 | Was really, really seeking out just things that were interesting or things I was enjoying

00:02:57.640 | about the moment.

00:02:58.640 | Now compare that to right now.

00:02:59.640 | I feel very different right now because there's a lot of interesting developments happening.

00:03:04.760 | Not in a period of stasis.

00:03:06.900 | We have the sort of online media company.

00:03:11.320 | Jesse knows about this.

00:03:12.320 | Like a lot of interesting stuff is happening, right?

00:03:13.960 | I mean, a lot of things are on the horizon.

00:03:16.680 | Things are moving.

00:03:17.920 | That's interesting.

00:03:19.280 | Interesting stuff's happening at Georgetown with the research I'm doing now, the research

00:03:23.120 | I'm shifting into, some of the public facing work I'm happening.

00:03:27.640 | Professionally speaking, there's just a lot of places where I'm hitting on all cylinders.

00:03:30.600 | Interesting opportunities are coming and going away.

00:03:32.440 | And so it's very difficult not to be focused on all these things that are developing or

00:03:37.820 | potentially coming.

00:03:39.340 | And I've noted like, I kind of miss the just extended gracious enjoyment of the moment

00:03:45.820 | that I've had at other parts of my life.

00:03:48.360 | But this is all trade-offs.

00:03:51.920 | So I would say during that period back on Beacon Hill, yeah, there was a lot more just,

00:03:57.520 | "Hey, I'm enjoying the spring sun by the Charles and reading a copy of Thoreau."

00:04:02.400 | But I think also there's probably more anxiety in that period.

00:04:06.080 | I mean, everything felt a little bit uncertain.

00:04:09.560 | There's this kind of background current of uncertainty, this little, some nagging stuff

00:04:13.280 | in the background.

00:04:14.440 | Whereas right now, there's a lot of excitement and stuff that's happening.

00:04:18.200 | I'm proud of things that are happening.

00:04:19.440 | There's a lot of long efforts starting to pay off.

00:04:22.640 | So like, that's a nice thing about now.

00:04:24.660 | And so they have their pluses, they have their pluses, they have their minuses.

00:04:28.240 | But these things kind of ebb and flow.

00:04:29.840 | Anyways, here's my solution, and I'll offer this to you, is that when you're in those

00:04:33.520 | periods where you're just present, you're Paul Jarvis on the island and you have some

00:04:41.660 | course you're working on, but mainly just spending time in your greenhouse, like working

00:04:45.560 | on your garden, have something that you're working on in the background to be excited

00:04:51.040 | about.

00:04:52.040 | Values driven, would open up interesting opportunities in your life or have an impact on the world,

00:04:57.240 | sticks within your vision of your lifestyle, but it's something new that you're heading

00:05:00.880 | towards.

00:05:01.880 | So that's how you offset the anxiety of unstable stasis.

00:05:06.600 | If you're instead in a period like me now, do hard work shutdowns every day, shutdown

00:05:12.280 | complete.

00:05:13.280 | Planning, even if it's exciting, I'm not going to do any more planning thoughts about

00:05:17.680 | a new segment for the show or what's going to happen with this new book chapter, this

00:05:21.520 | new research paper, working on hard shutdowns and make them hard, trust them.

00:05:25.960 | And then do a source of gratitude every night.

00:05:28.000 | I am going to go on a walk or do something with the kids or go see this movie where I'm

00:05:31.320 | going to sort of force myself to just be gracious about the moment, to try to generate that

00:05:35.920 | physical sensation of gratitude.

00:05:38.040 | And it's like a muscle you're trying to get those grooves in your brain engraved.

00:05:41.320 | That's what I've been trying to do.

00:05:43.260 | Some periods I'm better than that at others, but when I really get in that pattern, it

00:05:46.560 | really does help.

00:05:47.560 | So that's my advice.

00:05:49.360 | You have these yin and yang periods and whichever one you're in, you need to properly offset

00:05:53.840 | it so that you don't fall too far, too far into that particular, that particular direction.

00:06:00.600 | Here's a quiz, Jesse, what famous, I don't know why anyone would know this, but what

00:06:07.480 | famous, uh, thriller writer has long lived on Beacon Hill?

00:06:14.600 | Brandon Sanderson.

00:06:16.840 | It is where Beacon Hill is where Brandon Sanderson wrote name of the wind.

00:06:20.840 | So little known fact, Robin cook, Robin cook, who writes the medical thrillers.

00:06:28.040 | Okay.

00:06:29.040 | Because Beacon Hill is right next to Charles MGH.

00:06:32.440 | So a really good hospital in Boston and he was a ophthalmology, I think, resident or

00:06:39.520 | fellow.

00:06:40.600 | So he was living on Beacon Hill.

00:06:41.760 | So there's doctors, which is another cool thing about Beacon Hill.

00:06:44.200 | I mean, the houses are really narrow.

00:06:45.360 | They're kind of small, but they're awesome.

00:06:48.160 | And there's doctors from the hospital who live there.

00:06:50.200 | And when you get the big snow storms in Boston, they cross country ski to the hospital.

00:06:55.400 | So you would see them, not like tons of them, but there's at least one or two doctors.

00:06:58.800 | We knew that when cross country ski down to the hospital.

00:07:01.800 | Anyways, he was living there and then he hit it big with his, uh, whatever his first thriller

00:07:07.600 | was.

00:07:08.600 | And so he's just been there ever since.

00:07:10.400 | So he quit medicine because he was killing it on the books.

00:07:12.480 | But I went to see him speak when I lived there because of the Beacon Hill civic association.

00:07:19.360 | He would like once a year, like come and give a talk.

00:07:21.160 | And it was actually fascinating.

00:07:22.160 | He was like, he gave a talk about how he became a thriller writer and he basically like took

00:07:29.440 | a bunch of existing thrillers and broke them all down and wrote on index cards, like all

00:07:35.000 | the different types of beats you would see in these thrillers.

00:07:37.880 | Like I don't know, uh, being chased through a whatever the reversal, the whatever.

00:07:41.760 | And then just like took out all these index cards and just tried to figure out how many

00:07:44.840 | of these can I get into my book.

00:07:47.080 | And he would just organize them and then write his book along that way.

00:07:49.560 | So I thought that was interesting.

00:07:50.760 | And the other thing we learned from him is he was involved in, he was in the Navy and

00:07:57.040 | was involved in submarines.

00:07:58.920 | It was like a ship's doctor on submarines and also was involved in scuba, early scuba

00:08:06.600 | experimentation with decompression chambers and everything.

00:08:09.840 | And so there was periods of times where he was on submarines and when he was in decompression

00:08:13.160 | chambers for a week after doing deep dives, he brought his typewriter with him.

00:08:17.860 | So ultimate deep worker right there is he, he said I had nothing to do, but basically

00:08:22.520 | when I was in the decompression chamber, the internet with a typewriter, it's kind of like

00:08:26.240 | the shiny that I'd be worried about it.

00:08:28.080 | Anyways, interesting guy.

00:08:29.520 | He wears like weird pants.

00:08:32.800 | That's what you need to know.

00:08:33.800 | He wears pants with patterns on them.

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How To Enjoy The Moment While Planning A Deep Future

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