How to Life Hack

A story about slowing down

sitting on a rock where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow composed poems in Maine

I’m sick of the promise of instant gratification. Hacks for everything, pills for everything, tricks for manifesting the good life without any effort at all. Snake oil salesmen have been around since the dawn of civilization, dressed up in whatever clothes the day requires for them to pawn their promises. But, as it’s been since the beginning, none of this is real.

I was talking to a friend the other day about life hacks and he said: what if life hacks, in the end, make you a hack? No one wants to be a hack. A hack job is a job poorly done. No matter how much we glorify hacks as workarounds to success, nothing gets you there except actual work. The grind, the hustle, the hours on end putting your head down and getting into it.

It’s not our fault, exactly. We’ve been sold this bill of goods by hucksters capitalizing on the human inclination for results. And the chance to bring that goal sitting on the horizon a little closer. Yet somehow we’re all surprised when things we’ve barely fought to acquire fail to deliver satisfaction. The instant gratification disappears nearly as fast as it arrives. As they say: easy come, easy go.

So what’s the antidote? Long-term projects.

Commitment to something where the end lies beyond the horizon situates your mind in the practice itself: the practice of living, of creating, of growing. And, slowly, you might start deriving satisfaction from the practice and not the results, ironically making the actual results that much more attainable.

I’m no great example; however, some things in my life require this mindset. Building custom homes, for instance, often takes two years. We have our blueprints—the end goal conceptualized—but on the daily I show up and move the needle a fraction of an inch, one stud / wire / window at a time.

The novel I’m trying to sell to a publisher took three-and-a-half years to write . . . one word at a time.

Perhaps more universal is physical fitness, which also happens to capture the difficulty of pulling this off. My water polo coach in high school always said: it takes three weeks to build your fitness, three days to lose it. Because it’s all about the practice. The effort must never stop. No coasting allowed (that’s called dying). So don’t stop. DON’T STOP!

The thing is most people stop. It’s easier to crack a beer, turn on Netflix, and check out every night than gain what you actually want in life by these almost imperceptible increments. And these people wonder about those “overnight success” stories.

Overnight success does not exist. My friend Brendan Leonard drew this cartoon . . .

do yourself a favor and read Brendan’s work at Semi-Rad

Notice how the line barely lifts off the x-axis for soo long. And, yeah, that’s how it goes. The only ones who ever leave the ground are the ones with commitment.

My favorite quote is by Goethe: at the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to help you. The universe knows when you’re committed. All the trials and tribulations are merely tests of your commitment. Pass the test. Keep going. Even if the rest of the world ignores you, the universe sees you.

Few people want to hear the truth that there are no hacks in life. We’re surrounded by glossy visions of the future, all just as disposable as the goods being pedaled to get us there. This kind of thinking is absolutely everywhere. Take the news, even.

As

Gurwinder

wrote here on Substack: the news cycle moves too fast for us to truly absorb anything. Before we can contemplate one update, we’re hit with another. Lack of silence turns news into noise. The media, in their eagerness to make us care, make us indifferent.

I feel that indifference, to the news, to social media, to a lot of things. I feel it all the time. But we’ve got to be careful—indifference is the putrid smell of commitment rotting. And as we said, commitment is the key. So when indifference creeps in . . . kill it. Consume it. Convert it into the committed energy for something else.

Now sometimes there’s only so much you can say about a thing before action must overtake words. So there it is. As Lao Tzu said: a journey of a thousand miles begin with a single step.

Get walking.

-Martin

p.s. I came across this video this week that can only be called a true vision of commitment . . . enjoy.