Letters to my sons
A collection of thoughts and lessons I've learned along the way for my little men,
and anyone else that's interested.
My sons,
Time is the only resource in life that you can never get back. Each of us has 24 hours in a day, and once those hours are used up, we can never recover them, can never replenish them. Our days are numbered, and while we cannot control the quantity, we can control the quality.
Unfortunately, our world has created a system where most of us have generally surrendered in the fight and have accepted low quality days for the large majority. We have created a culture that is so hyper focused on achievement, on attaining things - titles, promotions, cars, houses - that many of us go through life trying to maximize the number of things we get done in a day in order to keep it all afloat. That in turn causes us to be exhausted and to have limited time resting and recovering, which in turn leads to a very poor quality about our days.
Understanding this should cause us to endeavor to slow down, to reduce the number of things that we attempt to get done in any given timespan. Not only will we have a greater capacity to pay attention to the task at hand, but we will get more done because we will not have to redo, backtrack, and regain our focus dozens of time per simple task.
The well-quoted adage telling us that “less is more” is pertinent here, albeit in a slightly modified form. Here, we must “go slow to go fast”.
Too fast
It is a beautiful thing in life to dream big, and to run hard after your dreams. One of the greatest things of our modern culture is that we encourage people to dream and to work hard to turn those dreams into a reality. It’s wonderful. Really.
Until it’s not.
Our world has taken dreaming too far. We have turned those dreams into obsessions, turned those fanciful could-be thoughts into goal-oriented must-be ones. As with many things, we have taken this beautiful, uplifting, and life-giving thing and have put it in an incorrect place thereby turning it into an unhealthy, identity-defining, stress-inducing obsession.
In his thought provoking book The Pathless Path, Paul Millerd posits that not only have the majority of us bought into this success-focused path for life, but most of us do not even believe there is an alternative path that will lead us to a great life! Achieving our big dreams is no longer a grand and lofty wish but rather a measure of our value.
A result of this mindset is that leisure no longer feels leisurely. We think of leisure as a means to an end. We run so that we can achieve a marathon. We go to parties so that we can network. We read so that we can be profitable in our endeavors. We stay home for the weekend so that we can rebuild the house. We take vacations to recover so that we can be even more productive at work.
We do not enjoy simply for the sake of enjoying!
We’ve gotten so used to running fast that many of us no longer feel comfortable at a slower pace. We don’t know how to exist if not at a breakneck speed. We cannot fathom a Saturday without 18 things on our to-do list. We even think that our default after dinner activity should be work. 8 hours of sleep a night is not only never attained, it’s never even attempted!
And as a result, we are empty, we are drained. Physically, mentally, emotionally.
Always on, always available
The advent of the internet was supposed to be a beautiful thing. Having the convenience of the world’s information at your fingertips was supposed to make our life unambiguously better. More information should lead to better, more informed decisions. Better decisions should lead to more efficiency and effectiveness. More efficiency should lead to more time and more margin.
But this has not happened.
Instead, we have simply filled the time that efficiency and effectiveness have bought us with more things, more inputs, more information intake. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that increasing the amount of information we consume comes with no costs. This is false. It comes at the cost of exhaustion. Nothing in this world is free. By increasing our information consumption, by increasing the hours we spend on communicating, writing emails, producing documents, we have inadvertently increased our fatigue. All of the things that require depth are suffering - relationship, connection, deep learning. We are pulled to the surface. We are not our best selves.
Slowing down to speed up
When we keep our minds and bodies in a constant state of fatigue, we simply cannot be our best, cannot perform at peak performance, cannot reach our full potential. We need the time and space to relax, to rest, and to recover.
So how do we do this? How do we slow down and allow ourselves to recover in this frantic, always connected, always competitive world that we find ourselves in?
A few ideas.
- Create a distraction free space. One of my favorite things about working on the Kindle is the hyper focus the team has on building a distraction free device. If we want to slow our lives down, we need to take a page from their playbook. Create a space in your life that is distraction free. Whether this means creating a room in your house that has no digital devices, finding a spot at a local park that has a dead zone in reception that you can visit, or simply dedicating a nook in your room that is your focus space, we all need an environment that supports us slowing down.
- Carve out analog time. This may mean creating a routine on a Saturday morning where you leave your phone at home, or a dedicated physical book reading time with your kid in the evening, or even going for a scheduled walk with a friend without devices, we need to have boundaries of analog time where we slow down.
- Leave your phone charging in the next room. One of the worst things our digital lives have done to us is to have brought all the noise and distractions of the outside world into our most private spaces. This is especially true before we go to bed and right when we wake up. The time before bed sets the tone for your sleep. The time right when you wake up sets your tone for the day. Can you really afford to have both of those critical times be driven and determined by your digital devices?
I know these things are counter-cultural. I know these habits will be hard to build. I know you will have a million and one excuses not to do any of these. But if we’re serious about getting our time back, serious about recovering our mental health, serious about seeing the world in bright, vivid colors again and enjoying the fine details in life, then we’ve got to force ourselves to slow down.