TF: What kind of first-of-a-kind group could you gather if you had a gun to your head? Rereading “The Law of Category” (page 276) and “1,000 True Fans” (page 292) might help.
✸ What would you put on a billboard?
“‘YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!’” [TF: CAPS are his.]
Shay constantly reminds himself of the shortness of life and inevitability of death. I also build memento mori (reminders of death) into my schedule, whether reading Seneca and other stoicism, spending time with hospice caretakers, visiting graveyards (e.g., Omaha Beach), or placing the memoirs of the recently deceased cover-out in my living room.
“If you earn $68K per year, then globally speaking, you are the 1%.”
* * *
Will MacAskill
Will MacAskill (TW: @willmacaskill, williammacaskill.com) is an associate professor of philosophy at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. Just 29 years old, he is likely the youngest associate (i.e., tenured) professor of philosophy in the world. Will is the author of Doing Good Better and a co-founder of the “effective altruism” movement. He has pledged to donate everything he earns over ~$36K per year to whatever charities he believes will be most effective.
He has also co-founded two well-known nonprofits: 80,000 Hours, which provides research and advice on how you can best make a difference through your career, and Giving What We Can, which encourages people to commit to give at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities. Between them, they have raised more than $450 million in lifetime pledged donations, and are in the top 1% of nonprofits in terms of growth.
“You can’t make a lousy charity good by having a low overhead.”
TF: Will introduced me to GiveWell.org, a site that conducts in-depth research to determine how much nonprofits and foundations actually accomplish (in terms of lives saved, lives improved, etc.) per dollar spent. This avoids the problem of most other charity “rankers,” which look at low admin and overhead costs as a flawed proxy for “efficient.” Of course, if a charity is doing the wrong things, being financially lean means nothing, hence Will’s quote. It’s all about real-world results.
According to GiveWell.org in 2016, three of the most effective and impactful charities are:
Against Malaria Foundation
Deworm the World Initiative
Give Directly
✸ Two of Will’s philosophical role models
Peter Singer, Australian moral philosopher and Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. His most famous works are the surprisingly readable Practical Ethics and Animal Liberation.
Derek Parfit, who has spent his entire life at All Souls College at Oxford, which is elite even within Oxford. Derek wrote a book called Reasons and Persons, which Will considers one of the most important books written in the 20th century.
“Follow Your Passion” Is Terrible Advice
“I think it misconstrues the nature of finding a satisfying career and satisfying job, where the biggest predictor of job satisfaction is mentally engaging work. It’s the nature of the job itself. It’s not got that much to do with you. . . . It’s whether the job provides a lot of variety, gives you good feedback, allows you to exercise autonomy, contributes to the wider world—Is it actually meaningful? Is it making the world better?—and also, whether it allows you to exercise a skill that you’ve developed.”
✸ Most gifted books for life improvement and general effectiveness
Mindfulness by Mark Williams and Danny Penman. This book is a friendly and accessible introduction to mindfulness meditation, and includes an 8-week guided meditation course. Will completed this course, and it had a significant impact on his life.
The Power of Persuasion by Robert Levine. The ability to be convincing, sell ideas, and persuade other people is a meta-skill that transfers to many areas of your life. This book didn’t become that popular, but it’s the best book on persuasion that Will has found. It’s much more in-depth than other options in the genre.
✸ Advice to your 20-year-old self?
“One is emphasizing that you have 80,000 working hours in the course of your life. It’s incredibly important to work out how best to spend them, and what you’re doing at the moment—20-year-old Will—is just kind of drifting and thinking. [You’re] not spending very much time thinking about this kind of macro optimization. You might be thinking about ‘How can I do my coursework as well as possible?’ and micro optimization, but not really thinking about ‘What are actually my ultimate goals in life, and how can I optimize toward them?’
“An analogy I use is, if you’re going out for dinner, it’s going to take you a couple of hours. You spend 5 minutes working out where to go for dinner. It seems reasonable to spend 5% of your time on how to spend the remaining 95%. If you did that with your career, that would be 4,000 hours, or 2 working years. And actually, I think that’s a pretty legitimate thing to do—spending that length of time trying to work out how should you be spending the rest of your life.”
The Dickens Process—What Are Your Beliefs Costing You?
The “Dickens Process” (sometimes called the “Dickens Pattern”) is related to A Christmas Carol, written by Charles Dickens. It is one of the exercises I completed over several days at Tony Robbins’s Unleash the Power Within (UPW) event.
My friend Navin Thukkaram is a millionaire many times over and lives a charmed life. He has been to UPW 11 times and told me, even if I missed some sessions, I could not miss the live Dickens Process. It was his main reason for attending every year. It serves as his annual upgrade and reboot. This chapter will give you a rough and simplified outline of my experience.
In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. In the Dickens Process, you’re forced to examine limiting beliefs—say, your top two or three handicapping beliefs—across each tense. Tony guides you through each in depth, and I recall answering and visualizing variations of:
What has each belief cost you in the past, and what has it cost people you’ve loved in the past? What have you lost because of this belief? See it, hear it, feel it.
What is each costing you and people you care about in the present? See it, hear it, feel it.
What will each cost you and people you care about 1, 3, 5, and 10 years from now? See it, hear it, feel it.
Why does this appear to work so well? I asked Tony months later, as I saw persistent personal results, and he sent me the following example via audio text:
“If they are coughing like crazy right now [from lung cancer], how do they keep smoking? They say to themselves, ‘Well, I smoked for years and it was never a problem.’ Or they say, ‘It will get better in the future. After all, George Burns lived until 102 smoking cigars.’ They find the exception to the rule because no one knows what the future is. We can make it up, we can convince ourselves it’s going to be okay. Or we can remember a past time in which it was okay. That’s how people get out of it.
“When we feel pain in one time zone—meaning past, present, or future—we just switch to another time zone rather than change, because change brings so much uncertainty and so much instability and so much fear to people.”
The Dickens Process doesn’t allow you to dodge any time zones.
Naturally, it’s one thing to read about swimming, and another to go swimming. The live process took at least 30 minutes, with Tony on stage and 10,000 people in the audience. I could hear hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people crying. It was the straw that productively broke the camel’s back of resistance. Confronted with vivid and painful imagery, attendees (present company included) could no longer rationalize or accept destructive “rules” in their lives. As Tony put it to me later, “There is nothing like a group dynamic of total immersion, when there is nothing around to distract you. Your entire focus is on breaking through and going to the next level, and that’s
what makes the Dickens Process work.”
After you feel the acute pain of your current handicapping beliefs, you formulate 2 to 3 replacement beliefs to use moving forward. This is done so that “you are not pulled back into [old beliefs] by old language patterns.” One of my top 3 limiting beliefs was “I’m not hardwired for happiness,” which I replaced with “Happiness is my natural state.” Post-event, I used Scott Adams’s (page 261) affirmation approach in the mornings to reinforce it. Now, I’m well aware how cheesy this all might sound on paper. Nonetheless, I experienced a huge phase shift in my life in the subsequent 3 to 4 weeks. Roughly a year later, I can say this: I’ve never felt consistently happier in my entire adult life.
Perhaps it’s time for you to take a temporary break from pursuing goals to find the knots in the garden hose that, once removed, will make everything else better and easier? It’s incredible what can happen when you stop driving with the emergency brake on.
“Being an entrepreneur is being willing to do a job that nobody else wants to do, [in order] to be able to live the rest of your life doing whatever you want to do.”
“I usually know when I’m on to something when I’m a little bit afraid of it. I go: ‘Wow, I could mess this up.’ ”
* * *
Kevin Costner
Kevin Costner (TW: @modernwest) is an internationally renowned filmmaker. He is considered one of the most critically acclaimed and visionary storytellers of his generation. Costner has produced, directed, and starred in memorable films such as Dances with Wolves, JFK, The Bodyguard, Field of Dreams, Tin Cup, Bull Durham, Open Range, Hatfields & McCoys, and Black or White, among many others. He has been honored with two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and an Emmy Award. He is the co-author of The Explorers Guild.
Near-Death Clarity and Shifting the Burden
Kevin described driving to his first real audition (for a community theater production of Rumpelstiltskin) in an old Datsun pickup. The accelerator broke and dropped to the floor, sending his speedometer from 60 to 80. He saw brake lights up ahead:
“I had my wits about me at one point, halfway through, when I realized I didn’t want to die. I threw the clutch in. There was never such a terrible whine but [it did engage]. . . . I was able to turn the key off, and I coasted to a stop, pulled over into the emergency lane, and didn’t kill anybody. I jumped out of that fucking car, hopped over that fence, and hitchhiked to my audition because I wasn’t going to miss it. I left it on the freeway.
“Because I had someplace I wanted to be. I had a place [where] something was going to happen . . . and, of course, nothing did. I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t have enough skill. I didn’t really know about Rumpelstiltskin. . . . But my imagination started to burn with the possibilities.
“I started to fall in love with something. Didn’t know if I was going to be able to make a living at it, but I finally got rid of the whispers in my head [from my parents], which were ‘What are you going to be?’ And I’d say, ‘It’s none of your business. I’m going to be what I want to be.’”
“When I articulated that I didn’t care anymore about what anybody thought about what I did except me, all the weight of the world came off my shoulders, and everything became possible. It shifted to everybody else [being] worried. Now they’re worried. But everything for me, it shifted to a place where I felt free.”
Let Us Suppose . . .
For his role in the film JFK, Kevin didn’t want to go too far out on a limb with speculation. He wanted to protect himself and his credibility and came up with an elegant workaround:
“When I came to certain things that I was unsure about, and some other people questioned a little bit, I said, ‘Oliver [Stone], I’m not comfortable saying this. I would be more comfortable saying, “Let us suppose . . . ,” as opposed to “This actually happened.”’ Because the ‘let us suppose’ is framing things for people to see. Because if there’s no actual eyewitness there, you go, ‘Let us suppose this happened. . . .’ And Oliver didn’t fight that at all, to his credit. He said, ‘That’s fine. Let’s just paint this picture because that’s the picture I believe is there.’”
Taking Chances
Kevin described a rare heart-to-heart conversation with his dad, who was critical of Kevin becoming an actor. By this point, Kevin was an adult and had succeeded. His dad was sitting in the bathtub:
“He looked at me and he says, ‘You know, I never took a chance in my life.’ I was almost in my own Field of Dreams moment. There were some tears coming down. He says, ‘I came out of that goddamn fucking Dust Bowl, and when I got a job, Kevin, I didn’t want to lose it. I was going to hold on to that, because I knew there would always be food on the table.’ And I said, ‘There was. There was.’ There was really kind of just an amazing moment, my dad sitting there.”
“On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice. It’s actually very easy to give people good advice. It’s very hard to follow the advice that you know is good. . . . If someone came to me with my list of problems, I would be able to sort that person out very easily.”
Spirit animal: Owl
* * *
Sam Harris
Sam Harris (TW: @SamHarrisOrg, samharris.org) received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA. He is the author of the best-selling books The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue (with Maajid Nawaz). He also hosts the popular podcast Waking Up with Sam Harris.
Behind the Scenes
Sam and I first met in the bathroom at TED in 2010, immediately after I’d accidentally (truthfully) eaten two enormous pot brownies. I was not prepared for the THC or Sam Harris, and especially not mega-THC and Sam Harris.
Morning “Routine”
“What you should have in your mind is a picture of controlled chaos. These are not the smoothly oiled gears of a well-calibrated machine. This is somebody staggering out of his bedroom in search of caffeine, and he may or may not have checked his email before the whistle on the kettle blew. But I do meditate frequently and certainly try to make that every day [for 10 to 30 minutes].”
On Appreciating the Risks of Artificial Intelligence
“Jaan Tallinn, one of the founders of Skype, said that when he talks to people about this issue, he asks only two questions to get an understanding of whether the person he’s talking to is going to be able to grok just how pressing a concern artificial intelligence is. The first is, ‘Are you a programmer?’—the relevance of which is obvious—and the second is, ‘Do you have children?’ He claims to have found that if people don’t have children, their concern about the future isn’t sufficiently well-calibrated so as to get just how terrifying the prospect of building superintelligent machines is in the absence of having figured out the control problem [ensuring the AI converges with our interests, even when a thousand or a billion times smarter]. I think there’s something to that. It’s not limited, of course, to artificial intelligence. It spreads to every topic of concern. To worry about the fate of civilization in the abstract is harder than worrying about what sorts of experiences your children are going to have in the future.”
Exploring “Self-Transcendence”
“Buddha and countless contemplatives through the ages can attest to the experience of, for lack of a better phrase, unconditional love. That has some relationship to what I would call ‘self-transcendence,’ which I think is even more important. So, there’s this phenomenon that’s clearly deeper than any of our provincial ways of talking about it in the context of religion. There’s a deeper truth of human psychology and the nature of consciousness. I think we need to explore it in terms that don’t require that we lie to ourselves or to our children about the nature of reality, and that we don’t indulge this divisive language of picking teams in the contest among religions. [My book W
aking Up is] about the phenomenon of self-transcendence and the ways in which people can explore it without believing anything on insufficient evidence. One of the principal ways is through various techniques of meditation, mindfulness being, I think, the most useful one to adopt first. There’s also the use of psychedelic drugs, which is not quite the same as meditation, but it does, if nothing else, reveal that the human nervous system is plastic in a very important way, which means your experience of the world can be radically transformed.”
Mindfulness and Mental Chatter
“‘Mindfulness’ is just that quality of mind which allows you to pay attention to sights and sounds and sensations, and even thoughts themselves, without being lost in thought and without grasping at what is pleasant and pushing what is unpleasant away. . . .
“We’re so deeply conditioned to be lost in thought and to have this conversation with ourselves from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep. It’s just chatter in the mind, and it’s so captivating that we’re not even aware of it. We are essentially in a dream state, and it’s through this veil of thought that we go about our day and perceive our environment. But we are just talking to ourselves nonstop, and until you can break that spell and begin to notice thoughts themselves as objects of consciousness, just arising and passing away, you can’t even pay attention to your breath, or to anything else, with any clarity.”
Tools of Titans Page 46