But maybe it isn’t possible for some activities not to give back?

Richard Feynman’s learning method included teaching the concept he wanted to learn. Teaching was an important step; it assisted him in identifying the gaps in his understanding of the concept. But naturally, teaching also means allowing others to learn what he had already understood.

In his newsletter, James Clear explained that the one who learns the most in any classroom is the teacher. And his understanding of teaching is broad. For him, “teaching” can be to write a book, teach a class, build a product, or start a company.

Meditation is often associated with the idea of developing one’s habit of being kind to others through learning to be kind to oneself.

One happens with the other.

It isn’t either egoism or generosity. It is both.

Is it?

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The intuitive reaction is to reject it.

Why?

Does it feel like manipulation?

Does it feel like an excuse?

Does it lack authenticity?

Whatever it is, there is a sense of not trusting what one is being told.

Maybe it’s not worth it to look for trust.

It may be sufficient that the other is trying to be nice.

That’s worth noticing.

You don’t need to like what they say.

But it’s not worth it to dislike that person.

They may be trying to open a door.

Stepping through it doesn’t mean that one needs to like them.

It’s accepting them as a human being.

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A stone that falls into the water causes ripples on the surface. The previously undisturbed surface is now somehow blurred, and the depth of the water isn’t accessible anymore. The ripples are making it hard to see beyond the surface.

All one needs to do is wait until the ripples fade away.

But, instead, the reaction to the ripples is confusion, and the reaction to confusion is more thoughts. Thoughts that engage with the last thought in the simple hope of dissolving the confusion. But it’s more thoughts and thus more ripples.

All one needs to do is wait until the ripples fade away.

Sometimes the surface allows us to look into the depth. Sometimes the surface only allows us to see that nothing can be seen because of the many ripples.

Time to let go of some of the thoughts and let some ripples fade away.

The idea isn’t to stop thoughts from appearing.

It’s more the idea to refrain ourselves from creating more thoughts.

There is no need to argue with every thought that appears.

Like ripples, thoughts also fade away, allowing us to see more.

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When there is only one force, it isn’t balance we lean into, but resistance.

When the two opposing forces appear, it is because of them that we can benefit from balance.

Whenever we try to remove, avoid, or resist one of the forces, it is the balance that disappears. Not the existing and opposing forces. They have come to be out of balance.

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When I was an active member of JCI, I saw this countless times. A lot of people became members of JCI without being clear as to why they joined. They still needed to discover what they were looking for. And, somehow, JCI hadn’t been able to make it clear to them until then. I’ve come to understand that this is a normal feature of people joining an organization. At the beginning, people are simply interested; they join out of curiosity. While willing to invest themselves in the organization, new members still need support in discovering how. Which is a detail many organizations miss. They assume that the people who join are just as invested as the people who invited them to join.

Whenever people realized how they could contribute and found themselves liking this approach, it became noticeable to others that there seemed to be no limit to their engagement, and thus the time they invested.

Experiencing and noticing how this switch occurred to members has always been fascinating to me. It also helped me see the difference between resources and priorities.

The priority determines the allocation of our resources. Whenever there is no priority to attribute a resource, it most probably remains scarce. Or doesn’t experience a change in how it is allocated.

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It will often seem quite simple. It’s, for example, to know what to write in an offer to be certain that it will be accepted. It’s, for example, to ask the right question at the right moment, so that the result corresponds with what we want.

It seems easy, because we believe that we know what we want.

However, we don’t know what our experience will be when we receive what we want.

In a strange turn of events, I found myself in an unexpected conversation with someone hosting me. I hadn’t met him before, but he had a quite direct and open approach. Already when he called me to give me some instructions, he had shared that he is at the end of his life. When I arrived, I quickly learned that he is of the age my mother would have been now, and that he has cancer.

As our conversation progressed, he also shared that during his last conversation with his doctor, he had been asked if he wanted to know what the doctor knew about his sickness. My host decided that he didn’t know the answer to this question and had told the doctor that he would come back to him with an answer.

My host instinctively understood that knowing the answer to this question wouldn’t give him what he might want. And even more so, that receiving the information the doctor had might impact on his ability to remain hopeful or open to life, and that it might provide him with information he wasn’t ready to handle.

He is in a situation where being uncertain might be the better option.

However, here too, my host wasn’t sure how he would be able to continue to live with this uncertainty. One that could suddenly seem dreadful to him.

We may want to get rid of uncertainty, but we may not trust our ability to live with a certainty that reveals itself then.

My host’s situation makes it easy to understand how difficult such a dilemma between certainty and uncertainty might be. But the same dilemma may happen for us in everyday situations. It is up to us to learn to live with such a dilemma, i.e., to learn how we respond to it.

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He had changed his job and moved away from his family to take up that job.

In his previous job, he was away from home most of the week and was paid a low salary. His new job means that he is away from home most of the time, but it provides him with a salary he’s looking for.

Considering the situation, he decided to work even more. It would allow him to earn more money than before, and as he described it, pay for the sacrifice of being away so much longer than before.

Seeing it as a sacrifice is making an abstraction of his initial choice. That is, from the assumption that it would be possible for him to earn the salary he aims for wherever he wants to live.

Considering his situation from the perspective of his desired revenue or the job he likes, his choice has been to give up living with his family most of the time. But acknowledging this point of view is too difficult for him; it would bear the risk of being seen as not loving his family enough.

Seeing himself as sacrificing himself for his family solved his dilemma.

It doesn’t necessarily make him a better person.

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But accepting something wrong is wrong. It allows it to be right.

These are not opposites. To address something that is wrong, one doesn’t need to know how it would be right.

Addressing something that is wrong doesn’t require us to transform it into something right. It doesn’t require us to get rid of what is wrong, either.

What we decide to do and how we want to transform the situation will depend on the situation itself.

But knowing what is wrong and being clear about it is a necessity.

It’s your ability to be aware and clear about your values.

Allow yourself to know your position.

But don’t confuse it with criticizing something you don’t like.

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It’s a type of game that may focus our attention on winning every hole and constantly comparing our game with that of others. This observation may determine our strategy, and, for example, impact how much risk we’ll take. Whatever the other person’s result, it has become our guide and asks us to find out how we can play better than the others.

This may suit us, as it might be our motivation to win over others.

But for some, it may make it difficult to play well. For them, the focus moved away from how they play to how others play. And they may not be motivated by something external as much as by something intrinsic.

For someone who needs intrinsic motivation, having an external focus can be destabilizing. What they’ll look for in such a situation is an internal motivation that can be used instead.

In a match-play, this can be any type of objective for one’s own game. By being aware of the circumstances and using them, one becomes able to choose an objective that transforms one’s own game in such a way that it may allow one to win the match. Such an objective may, for example, be to play one or two holes more than usual with the number of strokes suggested for that hole.

It works for golf. It works in our professional lives. It works in general.

With a given external motivation, find a corresponding internal motivation enabling you to achieve your objective. For others, it may be the other way around. Complement the internal motivation with an external objective.

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Such tools have every chance to be useful. The information they provide can serve us in many ways. However, most of their potential is lost when the measurement serves to judge what we’ve done and categorize it as good or bad.

When using measurement to judge, we forget that the measurement isn’t the experience. It is a quantitative description of the experience. One that doesn’t say anything about the qualitative experience. And one that doesn’t say anything about future experiences.

Nothing replaces our ability to sense, for example, if we slept well and enough. What the measurement can provide us with is information about our sleep patterns. Including those we may not be conscious of. It is up to us to analyze the information and find out how it aligns with our experience. The result may be more awareness and an enhanced sense of our qualitative experience.

The measurements don’t tell us what we should have done. They can, however, make us aware of some of our habits and how compatible they are with our physical needs. If we constantly feel tired and learn from the measurements that we only sleep 5 hours per night, we may have to change when we go to bed and how long we give ourselves to sleep. It might not be the answer to our lack of sleep, but it is a useful experiment.

Such measurement is information that provides us with support in achieving an objective we’ve defined. They don’t tell us what our experience was. They can’t tell us if what we did was good or bad. They can only tell us if the measured result corresponds to something we wanted to achieve. We may learn from it whether what we wanted to achieve is useful to us or not.

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And.

Doubts certainly are one of the worst tools available to us humans.

If doubts lead to curiosity, they’ll help us to discover a whole new experience and world.

However, when doubts intend to serve perfection, they’ll help us to dig deep into the gap between the current state and its perfection.

But it’s a gap that can only be overcome with a leap of faith.

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It seems counterintuitive, but as long as we rely on facts and information to decide, the more difficult it becomes to decide when new information becomes available. That’s because new information adds possible consequences we’ll try to consider and integrate.

A way to dramatically reduce the amount of information to be considered is by giving oneself clarity on what the decision is for.

This means to involve a bet in the decision-making process. That is, to let go of the desire for certainty and instead decide to use an option we believe in.

The desire for certainty is rooted in the idea that a solution exists and that we simply need to discover it. But that would mean knowing what the future brings. Or to know how what we want feels when we have it before having it.

Betting on an option we believe in is based on the acceptance that we can’t know beforehand. And it is giving our experience and sense of self a chance to express themselves through the belief we choose. It is grounding what we do in ourselves.

Repeating this process allows us to develop trust in ourselves.

If, and only if, we accept seeing the things that went well. A focus on the problems associated with the decision-making process and its results will keep us linked to our desire for certainty. The quest to erase every possible doubt to achieve certainty is an impossible dream.

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