21 Lessons from 999 Episodes

7 Lessons About Worrying and Overthinking

1. Stop worrying. Your fear of looking stupid to people you don't know is holding you back.

   1. These people aren't going to remember you, they're not paying attention to you, you don't look as stupid as you think you do, and you have this mis-calculated sense of how much these people are affiliated with you, they are not.

2. Put down your ruminating brain. Overthinking invents more problems than it solves. - Gurwinder Bhogal

3. Your brain is a machine gun at overthinking. It has been found that we can talk to ourselves at the equivalent of 4,000 words per minute.

4. Some rules about overthinking.

   1. You can't think your way out of a feeling problem. Overthinking is a feeling; trying to think your way into feeling emotions is like trying to drink your way sober. Similarly, trying to think your way out of overthinking is like trying to sniff your way out of a cocaine addiction.
   2. Your brain ruminates because you're getting something out of the rumination, and finding out how it secretly serves you is the first step toward overcoming it.
   3. Most people don't think about things enough, and you're probably not one of them.
   4. Don't trade the thing that you want, which is living, for the thing that is supposed to facilitate it, which is thinking.

5. Perfection is impossible; what matters most is how quickly you reset and where you finish in the end, not how you perform just now.

6. Perfectionism is killing your happiness. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.

7. You should back yourself even if you're at the start of your journey.

   “

   If I'm worth anything later, I'm worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning. — Vincent van Gogh

How Can We Slow Down Time?

TLDR: The routines compress time.

Q: Why do some days feel like years and some years feel like days?

A difference between the present time and the remembered time, your experience of time differs in the moment versus when you recall it.

Your present time will always remain at the same speed. But your remembered time can vary widely.

It's not that the week went so quickly, but I don't recall what I did during that week.

Memory is our way of reliving our past experiences and reexperiencing time. The more memories you have from a past experience, the more that experience gets expanded in time. So if time is memory and we want more time, then what we really want is more memories.

Your brain is lazy; it wants to do as little work as possible, to conserve as much energy as it can.

e.g., Think about how much you can remember from the first day of an activity (work, moving, travel, etc), compared to any day during the activity.

Your subjective experience of time is based on your memory, and the best way to ensure your brain remembers what you're doing is with 2 things:

1. Novelty
2. Intensity

Because in these 2 scenarios, your brain doesn't know what to remember (whether you would need this information in the future), so it just holds on to all of them.

Time flies when you're having fun, but it feels long in retrospect.

As we get older, days move quickly because we can't remember them, and we don't remember our days because we haven't done anything memorable with them. Our days are forgettable; therefore, we forget them.

To slow time down, you have to give your brain a reason to pay attention. Leading a full life means having lots of varied experiences that will later be memorable. This means you need to start saying yes to more new things and no to the same things.

Each day, you can ask yourself, What did I do today that would stand out in my memory? The more you can answer the question clearly, the slower your time will move. Eventually, you are going to look back on your life, and the choice is between viewing a beautiful, varied art gallery stretching as far as the eye can see, or a gray, monotonous hallway.

If you make your life memorable, you will remember it.

We need to escape our old selves to embrace our new ones

Another perspective with "The Lonely Chapter"

As you grow, you don't fit in with your friends, but this means that they don't fit in with you either. And this causes a reaction from their sight, too.

The hardest part of changing yourself is not just improving your own habits. It's escaping from the people who keep handing you your old costume.

Others don't just remember who you were; they enforce it. Which is why reinvention so often feels like trying to break out of the prison that you can't see.

Psychologists call this dynamic an object relation. When people interact with you, they're not engaging with your full living complexity; they're dealing with the version of you that exists in their head. Simplified character built from fragments of memory and colored by their projections.

We don't just carry people as they are; we have a mental sketch, which is why if you make a radical change, you usually meet resistance.

If those mirrors keep reflecting the old you, it's hard to step into a new one.

The brain thinks negative consistency feels safer than optimistic unfamiliarity.

Each transformation often required leaving behind one circle, one city, one audience, because people who knew you too well couldn't help but cling to the previous version of you.

TLDR

Many people don't like you because making positive changes is effortful to keep up with and it's threatening to their shortcomings, so they dissuade you from doing it.

Which is why meaningful change so often requires escaping your environment.

Change isn't just about building a new self. It's about escaping the gravitational pole of the selves that exist in other people's minds.

Errors in Hesitation are Equal to Errors in Action

Humans have an asymmetry of mistakes.

We tend to only learn much faster from errors of commission, which are things that we do, not errors of omission, which are things that we don't do.

It's obvious when quitting for a new career turns out to be a mistake; it's far less obvious when staying quietly drains years of your life that you'll never get back.

We obsess over the fallout of saying yes to the wrong opportunity, but rarely notice the quiet erosion of habitually saying no.

TLDR

We remember the noise of bad choices, but we rarely count the cost of silence.

Commission teaches lessons in days, and omission teaches lessons in decades.

Usually, it's too late to apply them.

You need to pay more attention to the unseen pains of jobs you never left, loves that you never dared, and the words that you didn't speak.

We wince at mistakes that make noise, but it is the silent mistakes that do the real damage.

Errors of commission bruise the ego, but errors of omission starve the soul.

It's everywhere that we just assume that making a mistake has to be an act. Making a mistake could be not acting.