Aphorisms I live by

I've created a list of short phrases that my calm, sober, wise self can use to quell my wild emotions when I'm angry, rambunctious, and chaotic...which is often. They act as little reminders about how I aspire to live, and since I use this list often and find it valuable I wanted to share it with the world.

By themselves these aren’t particularly profound or useful, like most heuristics or cliches they can be dismissed as overly simple, and at face value they are.

So with each one I've added context.

1. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care
2. Deadlifts solve all problems
3. Respond, don't react
4. Health is wealth
5. Live with less
6. Attitude is contagious
7. Tell the truth at any cost
8. Stay alert stay alive
9. You’re the luckiest person on earth, act like it
10. Find anti-models
11. Say yes to adventure

Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care

This idea came from my favorite book, Infinite Jest. A book that taught me that in day to day life there is no such thing as atheism, it taught me that everyone worships something. The real problem then is making sure that you are the one doing the choosing, you are choosing wisely, and you are choosing the greatest most long term good for yourself and everyone in your world - none of which is easy. What you choose to worship becomes the basis for all of your behaviors. 

“Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.” 

I mistakenly spent most of my life as an atheist, a philosophy that doesn't propose a belief structure at all. I drifted between worshiping all sorts things along the way. A range of rationalism, materialism, drugs and alcohol, hedonism, money, and any other self indulgent thing I could get a dopamine hit from. None of it had any substance.

Choosing our temple of fanaticism has almost nothing to do with religion and everything to do with being very careful about what we value. It applies throughout your entire existence from business, to personal relationships, health, and more. The temple we choose to worship as our highest good shape all of our behaviors.

Deadlifts solve all problems

Deadlifts are very difficult. Physically and mentally there isn't much you can do that is more taxing on your body, there is power in volunteering for such a miserable tax every day when it's very easy to skip.

We are presented with easy and difficult choices every single day. You can take an escalator or take the stairs, you can drink water or drink soda, you can do bicep curls or you can do deadlifts, you can go to work and bust your ass or you can stall while you wait for Friday, you can doom scroll tiktok or you can read a book, you can hold your tongue or you can have a difficult conversation.

All of these small and seemingly inconsequential choices compound over the decades and become very consequential as they make up who we become. If you can muster the willpower to go to the gym and do a miserable set of deadlifts week in and week out for the rest of your life, all your other decisions will be easy in comparison, all your other problems will get solved.

Respond, don't react

This one is definitely been the hardest for me. I was given this wisdom 20+ years ago by my friend Johnny Robinson and I have been trying (and failing) to embody it ever since. Countless times in my life have I mouthed off, made a rash decision, or some other type of emotional outburst in the heat of the moment that I later regretted. It's cost me in friendships, financially, and probably in a myriad of other ways that are incalculable.

If you can master this one, you'll be the master of yourself

Health is wealth

Mental health follows physical health.

You've been sick and you've probably had injuries and I bet you are in a lousy mood when you're hurt or sick. Poor eating habits and poor fitness habits have the same result but the negative effects are subtle and they compound over time so they sneak up on us. If you eat lousy and skip the gym you'll feel worse, maybe it's not so noticeable in the day to day, but as someone who still deadlifts a lot of weight in my 40's I can show you many of my peers who've spent 20 years skipping the gym now spend their days feeling worse than me.

Most of the people I talk to are interested in financial freedom, but in the most pragmatic sense good physical health will buy us more time on the earth and a lot more freedom than any amount of money can. There isn't much more important in life than taking care of your body - this magical vessel that carries our spirit and identity.

Live with less

Want a stress free, low risk, and financially abundant life? Live light

Nice cars, big house, new clothes, designer anything, consumer debt, going out for dinner, expensive hobbies, tech gadgets, are all luxuries.

We all like luxuries, but as Tyler Durden famously said in Fight Club:

You may tell yourself you deserve it, you may be able to afford it, but most of the time you're emotionally justifying an impulse to spend money on the material ad the material will never bring fulfillment, worse, you will become addicted to it. Lifestyle inflation is the #1 risk to your financial and mental health. The vast majority of Americans are stuck in jobs they hate and in debt for things they don't need, this is a phenomenon never before seen in human history: this is voluntary wage slavery at scale.

Luckily, your peace and freedom is simply a few sacrifices away. I know that sacrifice isn't everyone's favorite word, but it will work. The average American salary is ~55k per year. Imagine if you made $5,000 per month in passive rental income and lived on $3,000 per month. Your life wouldn't be luxurious but you would be completely free, and as close to financially bulletproof as one can get.

What about everywhere in between that situation and the countless number of people who make $100,000 per year and still live paycheck to paycheck. This is a long and stressful way to live just to have a slightly nicer car that will decay like all the others.

Sacrifice is a word you should engage with every singly day

Attitude is contagious

Inside every interaction between two people there is a battle for whose attitude is going to set the tone of the conversation.

This isn't explicit but it happens whether we want it to or not. When a person with a negative attitude talks to a person with an optimistic attitude one of them is going to infect the other, and I personally tend to think that negativity is a bit more contagious than positivity, which makes it important to deliberately choose our attitude at every interaction.

Do you want to be the negative person who is bringing other people down and bumming them out? Or do you want to be the optimistic person who uplifts other people and brings them confidence.

How do you treat the fast food worker when you're hangry and they are going slow and making mistakes, or the airline attendant when your flight is cancelled and you have to get somewhere and they seem incompetent, these are the easiest moments to spew negativity but it's the attitude you choose in difficult and easy moments that not only make your own life better, but you spread it to other.s Not to mention people don't go out of their way to help fussy complainers with an attitude problem.

Every person you meet you have the opportunity to make their day little better just by having a good attitude - it's free, it's abundant, and it will spread.

Tell the truth at any cost

The short term relief that avoiding a difficult conversation provides is never a good trade for the long term of pain that allowing a held tongue creates.

Being conflict avoidant might mean not getting into fistfights, which might be a good choice, but taken too far it becomes avoiding any discomfort at all including uncomfortable conversations. How can this be good for you? Avoiding conflict does not end the problem it forces the problem to transform into worse things like backstabbing, politicking, scheming, or the worst of all: resentment and regret.

Telling the truth serves your well being, it allows you to set boundaries, it manages expectations for yourself and others, it earns you respect from others. The only downside is a short term discomfort that, frankly, you get used to. Have that difficult conversation or tell that person the terrible thing you need to tell them immediately so as to get the pain out as fast as possible because keeping the peace never keeps the peace it just creates an unseen tension that builds over time.

Stay alert stay alive

I learned this phrase in my first day of the Army and I will never forget it. Maintaining a high level of situational awareness is only somewhat useful for day to day life, especially if you live in a safe place like the United States, and a constant level of threat maintenance can be exhausting and counter productive.

Scale matters. Being aware of threats when walking down the street might not always be so important, but there are many types of threats...

Your health will decay, are you doing anything about it? You will not have as much energy to work at 50 as you do at 25, are you preparing for that inevitability? The economy will crash a few times in your life, do you have a strategy for that retraction? Are you properly assessing the risks 10, 30, 50 years into the future and building plans for them? Are you aware of social and political risks that you're exposed to? Do you know what the top 5 reasons for divorce are and getting ahead of them with your spouse?

Are you staying alert to these types of risks?

You’re the luckiest person on earth, act like it

I was born in America, I have a lady who loves me, I have a little money, and I'm healthy

This puts me in the tiniest percentage of luckiest people who have ever walked the face of the planet. I did not do anything to earn my right to live in the US, I was just born here. I was born with with halfway decent genetics. If you earn $30,000 USD a year you're in the top 1% global earners and you're wealthier than most kings in all of human history. Miss Kate loves me like on one else ever has and I didn't earn it in any particular way, I just showed up and got lucky.

You might be tempted to dismiss these things because most people (the ones I know and who will read this) live in the US, have a partner, make over 30k a year, and are of decent health. A person who dismisses these things doesn't invalidate the statistic, it just makes them a ungrateful peice of shit.

Gratitude is a magical state of being, it prevents me from getting angry of things I don't have or don't go my way, and it stops me from being entitled since I so often remember that I have so much.

I wrote this page on a laptop, a technology that didn't exist 30 years ago. This week I took a flight from Texas to San Diego and it was safe, comfortable, had wifi, and only cost $300. The largest cause of death in America is heart disease due to over-eating, an inconvenient byproduct from us over-solving the #1 cause of death for the last 12,000 years of human history - starvation.

It's healthy to remember that even a mediocre first world life is light years more luxurious than any time in the past or that for the first time in human history you and the richest and most powerful people on planet earth share the exact same tool to accomplish your goals each day - the cell phone, and we did absolutely nothing to earn that benefit.

Find anti-models

Instead of finding a person you want your life to emulate, write down all the people you don't want to emulate and whatever small but wildly unique lifestyle that you find in the gaps, that's you.

“People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up” - Taleb

It's easy to be distracted by flashy influencers all whom have alluring claims of success but how do you know which path right for you? It's exhausting trying to keep up with every investing or social trend, and even if you skim through the bullshit and the scams most paths are not going to be a good fit for your innate personality and individual goals. Someone trying to sell you a pathway towards success is much more likely to make themselves wealthy rather than you. We are designed to emulate the people we think we want to be like and I think the core of the problem is rooted in the idea that we are terrible at deciding who we want to be like. In general people are lost sheep looking for a shepherd and will follow nearly anyone who stands up straight and says proudly "I can lead". Unfortunately it's much easier to profit from sheep than to lead them honorably.

Instead of finding a leader I want to be like and run the highly likely risk of choosing poorly (which I've done many times) I pay attention to all the people I don't want to be like and the lives I don't want to emulate. This amusing story is reflects a similar idea:

If you want to embody your greatest good to the world and live your highest version of self you have to cut away everything that you aren't supposed to be. It's most likely there is an incredibly small number of people you will want to emulate in the world, so few that you may not know these folks exist. You must reject the influence of the overwhelming majority to be able clearly see what's left

Say yes to adventure

You have limited time on this earth and you can't take your money with you so what are we here for if not a grand adventure.

There will always be an excuse not to go, and you'll never be ready, but your worldview, your confidence, and your humility depend on you going on adventures. Small and large, adventure allows you to expand your horizons, experience a world vastly bigger than you, it will quell your fear to go do something scary.

If you shook the hands of every single of the 350 million Americans in our country you would still only have met 4% of the worlds population, a blip. Go hike a volcano, go do something physical, go get in trouble, go be part of someone elses life for a while, try some new difficult craft, go do the things that scare you most. I am terrified of heights so I became a paratrooper at 18 years old and hated every fucking second of it. Now I get to tell that story, I'm stronger for it, I am fuller for it.

Adventure comes in many forms, say YES to some version of it and you'll live a big life - and when you die you'll have zero money just like the rest of us.

Thank you for reading, hopefully this is interesting and/or useful to you. Tell me what you think