Stop Looking For It

Whatever it is you seek in this life….

Whether love, happiness, peace, money, joy, respect, knowledge, wisdom….

At a time in your life, release yourself from the deep yearning to have this for yourself….

Allow yourself to experiment, to see that perhaps in stopping the act of searching for it, and in halting the desire for it, it will come on its own….

The desire to make it happen may have actually been holding you back, interfering with your progress….

In my life….

I have said to myself….

To heck with it, if she doesn’t like me, she doesn’t like me….

(After dealing with crippling social anxiety.)

Then she liked me….

I have said, if I stop reading and I become ignorant and foolish, then so be it….

(It’s not that I don’t read, but I am willing to go through periods where I don’t read anything.)

Then I became wiser….

I have said, if I am unable to be tranquil because of a chaotic environment and situation (out of my control), then oh well….

And I found peace through the storms, even practicing meditation/mindfulness through them at times….

I have said if I invest in this thing I believe in, and it fails miserably, then at least I did something I believe in….

Many of those investments (in my own book projects, for example) did fail, economically speaking, but enough succeeded and they carried me forward into a deeper journey of learning, growing, and writing….

Over and over, I found that in releasing myself from the desire for an expectation, the desired expectation came true anyway, often right after I gave up on it.

As a chess player, one of the best things you can do in a losing position is to say to yourself “Okay, I am utterly defeated.” As soon as you truly accept that defeat, you open yourself to strange, threatening problems to pose your opponent.

There is magic in that moment where you see the futility and stare straight into it.

You accept defeat for a moment, but then you press on, never truly giving up. Even if there is one window of opportunity, that is all you need.

True awareness is where you find that thing you were searching for….

You come to understand that “I will never find this love – it is simply beyond me, but one day, maybe it will find me, if I keep on doing what I know I must do in this life….”

You give up, but just temporarily.

Then somehow, people in your life come to sense your newfound inner-worth, because you know you no longer need anyone else, and they become attracted to you.

More importantly, your love for yourself will finally have grown, as you stopped measuring your life by whether another person loved you….

Here is another example….

A few years ago, I developed tinnitus (ringing in one ear), and at a certain point, it was bad enough that I actually didn’t know how I would be able to focus again, with this loud, annoying, constant piercing sound in my ear. I had developed regular headaches, and it was a miserable experience.

But at a certain point, I accepted defeat, rather than searching for what to do about it.

I stopped looking for the feeling of relief from the tinnitus. I stopped hoping for it to go away.

I told myself that this tinnitus ringing sound isn’t even there. My brain is producing the noise (I believe this is actually true, medically speaking). This sound isn’t important. It’s nonexistent. I will go about my life like always. And I did.

And soon enough after that, the “sound” eased off. I barely noticed it anymore. I’m not sure if it actually got better, if I simply stopped noticing it, or both.

Strangely, in giving up on looking for any relief or solutions, it mostly went away. Now, it is quite mild and doesn’t affect my life.

(Of course, the one thing I did and continue to do, is protect my ears from loud noises, but that does not make the tinnitus go away.)

Understand this….

Typically, our life problems are self-created, working in cycles, over and over. And we exhaust ourselves simply to repeat them….

The desire to escape the pain or troubles, somehow actually manifests them, over and over.

If you truly inspect your life and see it for what it is, you are likely to find that you must do something different.

You must actually stop wanting that thing that you think you want, in order to get it.

And if you don’t get it, you may find that your life blossoms in other ways that you never could have guessed.

Of course, if you had a goal, you went directly for it, and you achieved it, then you are done. There is nothing else to do….

But I am speaking to those who have spent themselves totally, drained their life’s energy for a pursuit, only to have it escape them, perhaps over and over….

What else is there to do?

Accept defeat, even if just for now….

What is the worst that could happen?

Abandon the goal, or if not, at least abandon the hope that it will turn out in a certain way.

Let it go.

Find freedom there, in not needing everything to happen in a particular way.

Allow yourself to play with this life, to explore and see where it goes, rather than needing something from it.

Perhaps you can have love, happiness, peace, money, joy, respect, knowledge, or wisdom, just not in the way you had expected to find it….

Stop Looking

But still be there, present, aware, ready for when what you desire arises on its own….

Ready for when the ingredients to make it happen all line up for you….

Give it a month….

You’ve spent years or decades trying to get there….

If it didn’t happen, give yourself a month of not looking. Give it an honest try.

Get back into a hobby, play a musical instrument, get in touch with old friends, write a book, or whatever keeps your mind off of this so-called goal.

See how it goes.

Let me know….

The Heaviness of Thoughts

Today, I am light in my thoughts in that I am not particularly preoccupied with any given thought. And this is a privilege, for it means that my needs are taken care of for the day. If they were not taken care of, of course, perhaps I would be thinking of that more. And those thoughts would weigh on me heavily.

However, many people who have their needs taken care of still deal with endless, unhelpful thoughts. Often, we invite a lot of this heaviness in. For example, with the news, media, commercials, nonsense discussions, toxic individuals, and on and on. We open not just our ears and eyes to this useless information, but we open our minds to it, and it becomes a virus that infects us.

An issue with many of our thoughts is that they become giant monuments that we carry on our shoulders. All the thoughts you have ever had or been exposed to are like a giant statue you must carry with you everywhere you go. And the strange thing is that we stop realizing that we carry these with us. We think they are a part of us, but perhaps they are not. Maybe we have chosen to carry them around.

You carry these ideas and add new ones every day, and so every day, you become more sluggish, thinking that you know more but actually know less. In thinking we have accumulated facts and information, we believe ourselves to be smarter, more knowledgeable, or wiser, but we rarely are. What grows more than our knowledge is our mental anguish, as we invite the mental virus to infect us.

And so sometimes, there is nothing wrong with forgetting it all and retreating to a mental space of quiet.

But how do we get there? To tell you to meditate (or exercise or do yoga, etc.) may be futile. Either you do meditate, or you don’t. Either you know how to quiet the mind, or you don’t. Either you are conditioned to attend to thoughts and magnify their importance and obsess over them, or you are not.

It’s not that these patterns are unchangeable, but this change takes commitment, and it takes an awareness that the thoughts may have just led to self-poisoning rather than to clarity and knowing.

Clarity is in the thoughtlessness, where we are not dealing with cobwebs in the mind. You can attend to the few worthy thoughts when you clear those cobwebs. And there are just a few.

Most thoughts are draining, not resolving anything, not leading anywhere, so I have learned to let them go.

Yet, to claim that letting go of thoughts leads to pure bliss or happiness is false.

Aiming for clarity and wishing to reduce unnecessary thoughts can also be exhausting. I find that for every 100 thoughts, either the rethinking of old views I’ve had or being exposed to new information that leads to certain thoughts, over 99% lead nowhere. Yet, I still prefer to move away from those thoughts, rather than to absorb them and concern myself with them.

Think of it. Whether you’ve had one thought per day or a million, what is the difference in the end? I would pity the person who had a million of them and revere the one who only had a single thought, as long as that single thought had been worthy.

Ultimately, we must choose the thoughts that can lift us up.

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If you enjoyed this post and want to learn some of the worthy Thoughts, you may wish to read 7 Thoughts to Live Your Life By: A Guide to the Happy, Peaceful, & Meaningful Life. (on Amazon and other major retailers).

Dance with the Present Moment and Experience Real Life

“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life. ― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

In my life, as I try to grasp the present, I’ve found that many triggers jolt us away from the Now.

The triggers are omnipresent, forever invading. We don’t even notice them. Life can quickly become one trigger after another, dragging us away from what life was supposed to be.

Then, when real life happens, we tend to see life itself as a distraction. When really, we couldn’t be more wrong. The things we focused on were typically not real life at all. And the things that distracted us were real life, calling to us.

Real life was the rare human moment that someone wanted to share with us. But when it finally happened, we failed to realize it and shrugged it off.

It was the birds singing, but we were too busy to notice. It was the stranger on the street who was having a bad day and needed help. Real life was the sunrise, sunset, and the stars above. Or the face of your loved one that you hadn’t bothered to truly look at.

But when these things happened, we thought they were the distraction, not real life itself.

The distractions from real life were in the job that we do, where if we ceased to exist, someone else would fill the slot within 48 hours. It was the negative and judgmental words that we yell at ourselves in our minds. It was the worries about the stock market going up or down. It was the concern over the most negative news story of the day.

We thought we were living real life in these times, but we were not in the present moment here. Instead, we were upset about the past or worried about the future or focused on our made-up problems. Or perhaps, we were just distracted by nonsense.

As we become so-called mature and modern adults, we get to a point where whatever it is pulling us into the Now becomes the thing that we wish to avoid. The Now falls into the background. We somehow manage to escape the unescapable.

Adults have escaped from the present as if it were a disaster to be averted. But we weren’t meant to escape the Now. It’s like trying to outrun your shadow. Humans today are disjointed from their own shadow, living in a world of illusion when they become disconnected from the Now.

So why do we seek to escape it if this cannot be done?

The present may be too powerful for us to handle. It is a zone where anything could happen. The plans you had may work, or they may come crashing down. Your feelings may be validated or dismissed. A revolutionary idea may help you find success, cause you to have a massive failure or even both.

But rather than give in to the power of the present moment, we often wish to take power back for ourselves.

Our inflated egos make us want to hold on to the need to control, plan, achieve, and predict.

Some mysterious Now couldn’t possibly be at the reins of this life – no, we mortal and temporal humans feel that we are the ones in power. This is the illusion that we work on maintaining all our lives. Our lives become not life but rather the illusion of one.

I was once driving to work, and I saw a disheveled man with a chaotic, long beard. He was swaying his hands almost like a musical conductor. He seemed to be guiding traffic and buses to go where they were going. This man did not work for the city. He had a wild smile as if he was having the time of his life. Somehow, I understood what was happening. In this man’s mind, he was controlling the universe. He directed the traffic, the pedestrians, and perhaps even the animals. In his mind, he had orchestrated it all.

But of course, they were all doing what they wanted to do, and he was pretending to have made it happen that way. He felt the power and the control but had none.

Sometimes, that feels like the analogy for what humanity has become. We insist on maintaining control over that which is actually out of our hands. We are happy to take the credit when it works in our favor, but any time something goes wrong, it was out of our hands.

Yet, just maybe, things were always out of our hands. I can’t force my heart to beat, but it continues to happen. Until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, it’s because it was never in my control, to begin with.

Maybe we are trying to control a universe that is actually out of our hands.

We find it difficult to let the Now be whatever it will be, to give us whatever it has to give, or to take from us whatever it wishes to take. And so, every day, we are resisting that present moment, as we have made it into the enemy.

We are not in the present moment because we have made it the enemy of our lives. We have succumbed to the triggers all around us.

Someone could spend a lifetime documenting these triggers that lead us away from the present, away from the Now.

When we have scheduled our lives away, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have plans and perceive nothing beyond them, we have resisted the present moment.

When we convince ourselves that we are failures and get stuck in self-pity, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have rejected a chance occurrence just because we did not expect it, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have labeled with language that which words cannot confine, we have resisted the present moment.

When we needed the security of knowing the outcomes of everything we may do, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have insisted on living by the patterns we have always lived by, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have denied our wild, spontaneous, and free side, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have failed to see the beauty in the beautiful, the sadness in the sad, and the wonder in the wonderful, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have gotten lost in thoughts rather than lost in the experience that is life, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have been convinced by false thoughts and ideas that do not stand up to reality, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have confused our temporary selves, emotions, and problems with being more important than the universe, we have resisted the present moment.

We do these things. I do them, you do them, and perhaps everyone I have ever known does them.

Seeing these triggers for what they are can take us even further away from the present, strangely enough. In seeing them, we start to notice them, label them, think about them, and interpret them, and all of this takes us further away from life.

But if we give ourselves to the Now, then there is nothing left to resist, and we become a part of that Now.

We don’t need to put much effort into this, as effort often works against the now. Going with the tides of now is effortless, but because we have resisted this for so long, it may appear to take effort to get there.

The Now is happening to us, whether or not we are ready to take it in and accept that. The power is more in the present than it is in us. We are predicting it, reacting to it, and explaining it, but are we experiencing it fully and living it? That is another matter.

Rather than grasping at the present, which cannot be grasped, it makes more sense to dance with it. We can focus on becoming aware and in sync with real life and strive to find a piece of that now. Even if we can’t have all of it, we can find some of it for ourselves.

The alternative is to live a life outside of the now. What kind of life is that?

Living longer is a focus for many, but it doesn’t mean much if we didn’t actually live those years. What percent of our lives took place in sync with the Now? That may be a more interesting metric to shoot for.

I’m not sure that being in the present is a skill or practice. It may be as simple as letting go of our ego, of our need to control and direct this thing called life. Rather than living the illusion of life, we can let it go and truly live.

Humans do have great power. But how great is that power when our lives are temporary, and every loved one will die? How great is it when everything built will fall, most of our predictions are wrong, and much of our lives occur in the imaginary world of ideas?

Our true power was in our ability to acknowledge the power of the present and to become one with it.

Join me in a never-ending dance with the present moment. That is the goal of this life if there ever was one.

If you are interested in learning more about the Present Moment, you may wish to read 7 Thoughts to Live Your Life By: A Guide to the Happy, Peaceful, & Meaningful Life.

“Don’t Walk in My Head with Your Dirty Feet”

“Don't walk in my head with your dirty feet.”
― Leo Buscaglia, Living, Loving & Learning

I just finished reading Living, Loving, & Learning by Leo Buscaglia, who was a professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Southern California. I enjoyed the book very much, and I think it would greatly benefit society if we could all read it and apply the teachings inside.

In the book, Leo Buscaglia tells the story of traveling to Japan and meeting with his “marvelous Japanese teacher” in a garden of giant bamboo. Buscaglia had learned many things in his travels and search for wisdom, and so he was excitedly sharing all of this with his teacher. He kept going on and on, wanting to impress his teacher with all that he knew.

Suddenly, the normally very peaceful teacher struck Buscaglia in the mouth, and he said:

“Don’t walk in my head with your dirty feet.”

I have had the experience of the Japanese teacher many, many times, where I felt like someone was introducing unhelpful and unnecessary, and perhaps even hurtful thoughts to me. And sometimes, these people go on and on. And I can’t really get away, not tactfully, anyway. I may feel stuck, at the mercy of this person’s wandering and untrained mind.

Different ways that people may walk in my head with their dirty feet are if they go on and on in a way that is angry, hateful, bitter, negative, boastful, worried, obnoxious, overly dramatic, self-obsessed, and so on.

In my life, my mind does sometimes experience negativity, and I may discuss that and introduce it to the world at times, but either I aim to keep it concise and be done with it, or I aim to teach others how to overcome those negative thoughts and experiences. Of course, no one is perfect, but I feel that this is better than rambling on with negativity and introducing it to others around me without any purpose behind it.

Of course, even if someone does “walk in my head with their dirty feet,” I would not strike them because of that. But I suppose the teacher in the story above wanted to make the emphatic point that if Buscaglia thought he knew so much, he should know better than to brag and ramble, especially when they were surrounded by beautiful scenery and a peaceful environment. And the teacher himself must know more than the student in this case, so perhaps Buscaglia should have been open and listening, rather than imposing his own thoughts.

This month I’ve been thinking of how we often let people walk in our head with their dirty feet. I think we invite it in. On the ride to my wife’s workplace, I often turn on the radio. And either it’s music that I don’t even like, or it’s about car crashes that have clogged the roadways, or some other bad news about how things are getting worse. Otherwise, if I get on social media or check the news, I seem to be inviting people or ideas into my head as well, often with their dirty feet.

Lately, instead of dealing with the radio, we sometimes ride our bikes together (with no radios), or I turn off the radio, and we either talk or sit in silence. It’s not so bad.

I’m making an effort to be more at ease with the silence. It seems most of us find the silence undesirable and prefer to have an endless chatter in the background, whether it may come from the TV, social media, or even the people we surround ourselves with. The reality is that often, these are not providing us with helpful and positive messages. They are the dirty feet of today. Ultimately, we tend to invite it in because we find the silence unbearable.

We seem to prefer dirty feet in our heads, over the silence. But it should be the other way around.

The silence may remind us of our own feet, which are often dirtier than anything else. By this, I mean that in silence, our mind wanders negatively, self-destructively, perhaps. This is especially true for the untrained mind (I discuss how we can train our mind in many ways in this post.). And so, in efforts to avoid our own feet or untrained thoughts in all their dirtiness, we tend to invite others to walk in our heads with their own dirtiness.

Books are a great resource for me because if they introduce ideas that I think have a dirtiness, where they are unnecessary, hurtful, irrational, wrong, or charged with negative emotions, I can close the book and move on.  

If I’m online and start reading negative comments on a social media page, I sometimes feel compelled to keep going and keep inviting more of these dirty feet into my mind. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it, but it happens. Once I get started, it’s hard to quit. I find it’s best to avoid it altogether.

Instead of getting sucked into all the unnecessary negativity, I believe it is important to stay positive.

And none of this even accounts for the advertisements that find us everywhere we go. They instill fear, worry, anxiety, depression, whereas they claim to be fixing these things.

Sometimes on the radio, I hear something like this in an overly concerned tone. “Have you been suffering from A and B symptoms? (Imagine any common symptom such as headaches or stomachaches.) Then they claim that it could be more serious than you think. Then they go on about how they can save you from your chronic illness with a particular medication they are selling.

Talk about “dirty feet.”

One day when that happened, I told my wife – “I really have to change the station at this point. There is plenty to worry about in this world, without me needing to think that a minor and common symptom could be a chronic and serious illness. Obviously, if we feel unwell, we see a doctor. I do not need a commercial to make me worried about my health.”

As another example, often politicians focus on all the ways that the “other party” is ruining the world, which provides us with a stampede of dirty feet. I often hear of the idea that either this party or that party, or this country or that country, or these people or those people, or this idea or the other idea, or this belief or the other are ruining the world. This is on such a regular occurrence that it seems normal. Certainly, these are dirty feet that have invaded our minds.

So, how can we wash our feet, metaphorically speaking? How can we wash ourselves of this emotional pain, harm, and negativity that we tend to spread onto others?

Maybe it’s a phrase worth stating more often – “Don’t walk in my head with your dirty feet.” Maybe that can help us to stay cleaner and teach people to be more cautious with the thoughts and words that they choose to share.

I’m retraining myself to say things in my mind like, “It’s no big deal.”

Sometimes I have this sense of urgency of needing to check my emails over and over because someone might send me a message. And I need to remember, “It’s no big deal.”

Do I really need an inbox of 20-30 messages per day? It’s like dust building up in my home. Now, I find that I respond less often. I mark more messages as spam if they are indeed spam. I unsubscribe from lists more often if I don’t really care about the messages. I used to get back to people on the same day. Now, I tend to take 4-5 days or sometimes more. It’s not because I don’t have the time. It’s because nothing is that urgent. The vast majority of the time, nothing is “that big of a deal.”

The world somehow finds the way to keep orbiting the sun, regardless of what we do.

I can’t think of a single email I’ve received in the last 5 years where it truly needed to be answered within 24 hours. Sure, in some cases, not answering quickly enough could have cost me a bit of money or inconvenienced someone, but it would never have led to some great catastrophe. It would never have really mattered in the grand scheme.

Even in the few times, someone may have contacted me about a dire problem in their life, often people resolve those problems on their own, or new problems arise and they forget about the old ones. I wouldn’t be so egocentric as to think that someone truly needed my advice at a particular moment to save them. I may have helped, but I imagine their lives would have continued without me. If nothing else, they would have found someone else to give them advice if they truly needed it at that moment.

Today, think of how you can wash your feet and how you can keep them clean.

It may be as simple as holding back a bit and questioning whether you really need to state everything on your mind. Will some of those things add needless worry, fear, desperation, or sadness to the people around you?

To make a true, long-lasting change, it may help to meditate, self-reflect, or otherwise look to make a positive change in your life. These can be changes that you work on implementing gradually if that is easier for you.

And also, think of how you can keep other people’s dirty feet out of your head.

Can you leave an environment, or if this often happens with someone, can you tactfully tell him that he is not helping with his comments? And perhaps, he is making things worse.

Today, let’s keep our feet clean so that we do not dirty the minds of the people around us. And let’s encourage others to keep their feet clean, so they do not dirty our minds.

What are you Training Mentally for?

Introduction

When it comes to physical activity, it can be easy to see that someone is training certain muscle groups to get stronger. They are running to get faster and build stamina, or they are training to improve at a particular sport.

But what about mental training?

Are you training your mind? To me, it is clear that the mind’s powers naturally regress and fall into laziness if not being trained for anything. This may happen earlier in our lives than we fear. Even when I was in high school, I distinctly remember that oftentimes I felt like a zombie, going through the motions.

Whatever the teacher told us was treated as fact and must be known for exams. In most classes, even if there may be room for dispute or disagreement in a domain, to disagree with the teacher was to guarantee yourself a lower grade. Anything the teacher did not cover must be assumed to be insignificant or irrelevant, even though in reality, of course, some topics the teacher did not cover must have been quite important.

My point is that sometimes you may feel that you are in training (e.g., taking a course or on-the-job training), but perhaps it is not enough. Are you truly training or just going through certain motions?

Here are some examples of what we can train our minds in:

Resilience

Having a resilient mind is critical to deal with the ups and downs of life. We all have problems that come up, sometimes when we least expect them, and we must be resilient to overcome them with calm and poise. We all know some people who are never fazed and never give up no matter how difficult things get. And we also know some people who give up on something as soon as there is a slight problem. This is the difference between people who are more resilient and less so.

To train your resilience, if you have certain routines that you always follow, you may purposely break them occasionally to make sure that you can manage or adapt either way. For example, if you always eat breakfast at 9 AM, you may occasionally eat it at 11 AM to help build resiliency. If you get used to that pattern too much, you may occasionally skip breakfast. (Of course, if you have any health conditions or concerns, speak to your doctor before trying any of this.) If you feel that you must do or have something in one way, that may be a good opportunity to practice your resilience by trying a new way.

Another key way to train your resilience is to train beyond what you think you need to. My friend Arthur, a mountain climber, recently told me that when you climb to the top of a mountain (metaphorically or real), you should keep on climbing after reaching the summit. You can do this through mental exercise (e.g., visualizations) or actual physical activity, depending on what you are training in (perhaps not actually to climb a mountain). Essentially, train yourself to go beyond the point to which you thought you would need to go.

Creativity

Most people that I know do not believe themselves to be creative. I always say we are all creative. Everyone dreams at night, and so our minds automatically create worlds, scenarios, characters, dialogue, and all in real-time. These are not scripted out in advance. Our minds seem to make them up at the moment. We can literally make stuff up in our sleep. So why couldn’t we do it while awake?

One of the easiest ways to train your creativity is to practice coming up with a list of 10 ideas every single day. (E.g., ideas for books to write, inventions, ways to save money, places to go on a date, things you could do with a paperclip, jokes to write, objects that could be used as a musical instrument, etc.). If 10 is too much, even 1 idea per day can make a difference!

Memory, Attention, and Mindfulness

Memory, attention, and mindfulness are quite interrelated, at least in how we train them. Often if you forget something, it’s because you didn’t pay proper attention to it in the first place. And if you’re not paying enough attention to what is happening around you, this indicates a lack of mindfulness in your life.

So the way to train any of these is to be more mindful. Use your senses and actually see and fully experience what is happening around you. Keep your mind on all that is there, not all that is not.

Avoid distractions, or rather, avoid the need always to be distracted. Our phones are, of course, an ever-present distraction. Most people I know could be doing anything – having a conversation, playing a game, or working, and when their phone chimes, they will check it right away. Perhaps find some hours in the day when your phone is not the most important thing and set it on mute.

In my case, I have noticed that a practice of meditation helps my memory, attention, and mindfulness. Often when I meditate, I end up remembering that night’s dreams in extra detail. I suspect this is because I am maintaining mindfulness within the dream, experiencing everything that is happening fully. And these effects are not limited just to my dreams. In real life, I will also remember more, observe more, attend more, mind more, and experience more fully.

Learning

Learning is an essential skill, so essential that we all do it even if we avoid doing it. As a practical matter, learning is often critical for being competitive in our careers. A person who doesn’t learn new things on the job may find in the best case that he never gets promoted and stagnates. In the worst case, he may lose his job and have difficulties finding a new job since he has not learned as much as other top candidates.

Beyond this, of course, learning is about exposing ourselves to new and interesting ideas. When you learn, you can prepare to understand and then create meaningful action in this world. What more reason to learn do we need?

This post isn’t just about performing an action but rather about training it. To train your learning, though, you must keep learning. If you truly want to improve your learning skill, you can also learn about learning. When you do this, you may learn some techniques that will help you to learn more effectively in less time.

When it comes to learning, sometimes we reach a point where we struggle to get any better at a given skill. This is why it is important to train ourselves to learn, to overcome such barriers. The best learners may work on learning in a variety of areas – physical skills, book learning, learning through experience, focusing on logical abilities as well as creative ones, abstract thinking, and also practical abilities. The best learners may also make it a point always to be learning something new. This way, you will always be training your learning abilities.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is about knowing how to find the relevant facts (especially when you have a problem) and then knowing how to come up with reasonable action steps based on those facts. Also, through critical thinking, you should be able to read facts and then be able to understand how some of those facts could influence the real world, or at least influence your own life. With critical thinking, you do not need to listen to everyone’s opinions. You can form your own independent opinions, just based on the facts.

To train your critical thinking involves many processes, and so this can be difficult for many people. But it is doable. Part of the training will involve searching for unbiased or less biased information sources. Also, it will involve learning to perceive when a source is biased. To learn what is more and less biased, at first, you should examine many different sources to see what they have to say about an issue. Withhold your judgment until you have read or experienced many points of view. When the information from different sources overlaps (or is the same), this is usually neutral or valid. If there is no overlap, the information may be less reliable in some cases, or in other cases, the source may have dug deeper to gain more information.

As another way to train your critical thinking, you may get used to reading facts and then coming up with your own viewpoints based on those facts. Rather than spending too much time with people’s opinions, you may focus on only learning the facts and avoiding opinions altogether. If you are not used to separating opinions and facts in your mind, you must get used to this. This will be an important process in developing your critical thinking. You will learn to give less weight to opinions in time and more weight to facts.

When you do give some weight to opinions, you should consider the expertise of the person who had the opinion. Often, you will find people giving opinions on topics where they have no expertise. You can safely discard such opinions or at least give them very little weight. At a minimum, to even consider someone’s opinion, perhaps they should hold a degree in the topic, or have read a wide variety of books on it, or have had a career or meaningful experience that relates to the topic. Ideally, they should have a combination of these.

As another way to train your critical thinking, you should get used to asking yourself a variety of questions to see how truthful any “fact” or statement may be. A key question I often ask myself is, “What is the evidence that supports this?” Then, you must ask yourself if the evidence is substantial, meaningful, and reliable. You can do this with your thoughts too. When I form a thought, sometimes I ask myself, “What is the evidence that supports this thought?” Just because you have a thought doesn’t make it true.

Concluding Thoughts

I believe it is important that we always work on training the mind. However, even if you do not consciously train, your mind is always being trained toward something. But if you are not careful, it can be trained in a way that ultimately works against you. You can train yourself to become less and less resilient, for example, if you do not have enough challenges in your life. Rather than moving in such directions, you should take control and train yourself toward something that will help you meet your life goals.

What are you going to begin training your mind in today? Or what have you been training in?

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I have written many books that operate as training manuals for the mind. Here are some of them:

7 Thoughts to Live Your Life By (to train resilience and more)

The Secret Principles of Genius (to train critical thinking and more)

Practical Memory (to train memory)

The Insightful Reader (to train reading abilities)

Idea Hacks (to train creativity)

No One Ever Taught Me How to Learn (to train learning)

Master Your Focus (to train attention and focus)

Looking Forward to It

We should have something to look forward to every day. Today is just an ordinary day for me, and so I thought this would be a good day to think up what I am looking forward to. The point is not to consider things I may look forward to for next week or next month – it should be for today.

Having something to look forward to makes the day better, more fulfilling, you feel more energized, and you get more done. The benefits are endless, so this is worth doing daily, or at least periodically. Also, if you struggle to come up with anything to look forward to, it is a sign that you should make some changes in your life.

I want you to consider what you are looking forward to today. Perhaps seeing my list below will help you to come up with some ideas.

I am looking forward to listening to music while I work

I have always enjoyed listening to a wide range of music, and this is something that I like to do when I am working. I usually put the volume low so that it does not disrupt my focus. Today I am listening to Kimbra’s album “Vows.” Many people may not be aware, but I have quite an eclectic taste in music. I find something enjoyable from almost every genre.

I am looking forward to picking up my wife from work.

The ride home is only about 10 minutes, but it feels great to see her so that we can spend the evening together. On the ride, we often discuss problems that came up during the day, either with my work or with hers, but this is our way of staying caught up on each other’s lives. Sometimes we also  discuss things we are looking forward to doing. Our topics of discussion tend to vary widely, but I suppose that’s something that we enjoy about each other’s company.

I am looking forward to writing today’s post.

This is a bit of a cheat, since I’m literally writing it right now. But this morning when I was getting ready for work, I was looking forward to writing the day’s post. I don’t have a specific plan for every post. Usually I just come up with an idea that I find important and want to discuss with you, and then I write it. I enjoy writing, thinking, sharing, and exploring new ideas, so of course I usually look forward to writing my post for the day.

By the way, I also look forward to hearing what you think about today’s post, if you would like to comment on it below.

I look forward to hearing from friends or family

A close friend of mine who is living in Paris now just connected with me on social media and sent me a message, so I was quite happy with this. These small ways to stay connected truly make a difference in my life. I have learned that it is important to stay connected with friends and to make the effort to maintain important relationships in our lives.

Some of the most frequent people I connect with, aside from my wife who I live with, are my Mom, my brother, Arthur (friend who has commented on the site many times), Dave (friend and co-author of Question Yourself), my readers of course, and a variety of other family and friends. I usually don’t know who will contact me, but I am honored to have enough close connections that on most days, someone will connect with me.

I look forward to the unexpected.

Most of my day is planned out. I know what I will do and when, and what my goals are. However, I have learned to look forward to the unexpected. Sometimes this brings something pleasant, and sometimes it is just an obstacle.

Even when new obstacles seem overbearing, they are actually manageable if we keep a calm head and evaluate our options.

As most of my day is ordered, I actually look forward to something new that will come my way that I didn’t see coming. Often, this will be my day’s challenge, and I am not someone who will shy away from this.

A tip I recommend is allowing some blank space (or time where nothing is scheduled) in your day so that when something unexpected happens, you actually expect it and can deal with it more smoothly.

Enough about me – Get a piece of paper and fill in the blank – Today, I am looking forward to: _________________

(Or of course, let me know in the comments below if you would like.)

Take a Breath

Take a slow and deep breath in and out right now and see how it feels.

It feels good. We should do it more often with conscious awareness.

Taking a breath can help avoid some tricky situations, as it provides an action that gives you a few seconds to relax and stop reacting to what is happening to you as if you were a machine.

I think we could all use this reminder to take a breath. Perhaps you’ve heard it before. Perhaps someone has told you to do this, and you thought it was silly. Today, try it out anyway and see what happens (especially if you didn’t do it above):

Take a Breath

Today, before you respond to hate with hate, take a breath.

Before you respond to toxicity with toxicity, take a breath.

Before you respond to someone who exaggerates or misrepresents the facts by doing the same thing yourself, take a breath.

Before you allow yourself to get triggered by the statements you read online, take a breath. And if this happens a lot, maybe take a break from visiting those sites.

Before you make someone feel inferior or as if they are not important, take a breath.

Before you think you know it all and that someone else knows nothing take a breath.

Before you feel the need to get back at someone who wronged you, take a breath.

Sure, life isn’t always that easy. But sometimes, we are just making things harder than they have to be. Sometimes we can feel like we must react and respond to everything happening around us, but that isn’t true.

Keep in mind that getting into heated debates with people is not a game with any real winners.

We have to be willing to take a step back when someone makes a hurtful comment and think:

• Does the commenter seem genuinely interested in having a calm and reasonable discussion? (He should not be obviously trying to provoke a reaction). If yes, proceed.

• Does the comment have some truth or basis in reality? If yes, proceed.

• Am I capable of having a reasonable discussion with this person? If yes, proceed.

• Will I know when to walk away if this ends up being an attempt to trigger me into getting angry and upset? If yes, proceed.

These are straightforward questions to ask yourself. If you cannot answer yes to all of these, do not get involved with people who make hurtful or potentially triggering comments. What is the point in walking into situations that will make you angry, upset, and feeling foolish?

Many of us have become obsessed with needing to be “right” and lost sight of whether being right even matters. If you “win” an argument by being toxic about it, then no one learns anything. You will end up becoming more set in your ways, and so will the person you argue with. Nothing is accomplished – in fact, it makes things worse somehow.

So the next time you feel the need to be right, take a breath.

Anytime someone does or says something that may have been intended to provoke or upset you, take a breath first.

Take more breaths in your day – nothing bad will come from it.

If someone asks why you are taking breaths, tell them it is to create a pause in between thought and action, or action and reaction, so that you can see and act with clarity. Encourage them to do it too.

Think – what would happen if the entire planet took a moment to take a breath at the same time? It would be a moment of peace and happiness, wouldn’t it?

7 Reasons to Meditate

I have meditated on and off and to varying degrees for over 10 years now. On average, I meditate once or twice per week, about 10-20 minutes per session. I don’t view myself as an expert on meditation, but I have had some interesting experiences from it that may help you or that could make you curious enough to try it.

These are 7 reasons to meditate, based on my experiences practicing it.

1.     Separate your Thoughts from Yourself

I have come to understand on a deeper level that I am not my thinking. In fact, through meditation, I have been able to separate myself from my thoughts. The thoughts are there, but I do not cling to them, and in practicing this, I no longer see the thoughts as my true self. I can reflect on the thoughts and interpret them if I wish, but sometimes I decide that they are not so important, and they are not me, so I do not need to focus on those particular thoughts.

2.     Be Relaxed and Mentally at Ease

Now, if someone gives me a list to remember, I can do it more easily because I am not experiencing thoughts like “don’t forget this, it’s important” and “sometimes you struggle to remember lists, maybe you should write it down” and “if you forget this, you’re going to make them mad – so you better not forget.” Strangely, I don’t “feel” more focused – I feel relaxed like it’s all okay. If I forget or misunderstand, it’s fine. In that relaxed mode, I can comprehend more without needing to verbalize and picture everything in my mind. The information is absorbed more readily.

3.     Remember More Dreams and Experience Them More Vividly

This is good and bad. I have had some dreams where loved ones died, and of course, this was troubling because I experienced it very vividly and realistically, and then later, I was able to remember the dream fully. However, I find it interesting to remember precisely what happens in my dreams - sometimes, I use this to reflect on my life path.

Ultimately, meditation has helped me to be mindful, present, and aware, and so it makes sense that by doing this in my dreams, I can experience them more vividly and remember them better. Rather than just dreams, I believe that my memory has improved in general through meditation. I believe this is because my mind is not considering all of the unimportant - and can focus fully on what is actually relevant at any given time.

4. Understand Your Dark Side

In meditation, if I am anxious or overly worried, sometimes dark thoughts or visualizations pop up, “interfering” with the meditation process. This used to worry me, but now I believe that rather than being an interference, it is a necessary part of meditation. Rather than dwelling on these dark thoughts or visualizations, I can see them and observe them without needing to fear, worry, or even react to them. I can see them without needing to allow them to affect me.

If this happens to you and you find it disturbing, you can always take a break from meditation or pursue an expert that can help you to work through this and benefit from the experience, rather than getting stuck at this point.

5.     Enter a Mode of “No-Thought.”

Many people may think this means thoughtlessness or mindlessness, but they are not the same. We tend to believe that those who think more are smarter or more capable somehow, but this isn’t necessarily the case. The more time I spend in no thought, the better I can accomplish my goals in life. The mind naturally runs wild and goes all over the place, thinking of things that are irrelevant or unhelpful or even harmful to us. I am more at peace in no thought, and I feel free not to be concerned with everything that the world focuses on. When I need to or choose to engage in thought, I can accomplish what I need to in a highly efficient way. Through meditations, I can produce the least amount of thoughts to meet my objectives – that seems to be the goal, anyway.

6.     Free Yourself from Negativity (or Negative Thinking Patterns)

Sometimes during meditation, I actually visualize or imagine that my neurons or neural networks are being freed from needing to create certain harmful or irrelevant pathways. For example, if I had a negative experience with someone in the past, does that mean my brain should forever associate that person with negative things? Perhaps it is better for my brain to literally rewire and stop needing to connect that person to certain negative ideas. I will imagine myself being released from these harmful patterns. And I think it works. I’m not sure if it works because I imagine it this way or if it works as an automatic feature of the meditation process. In time, I have spent very little energy thinking about things that I perceive as negative. I am aware of the negativity when it is there, but I do not create extra negativity in my mind by dwelling on it or cycling through it.

As a side benefit, I can often see through the negativity of daily life, and I find myself laughing at it - sometimes only mentally if it is inappropriate to actually laugh out loud. Many of us in this life get stuck in needing to react to the negativity around us. In doing so, we generate and spread our own negativity. Sometimes all you can do is laugh at the irony that people tend to react to negativity by spreading more of it. When your faucet is leaking, do you react to this by pouring extra water on top of it?

I am grateful that meditation helps me to avoid needing to repeat negative thinking cycles and negative behavioral patterns that I may have committed in my past. I can be free.

7.     Feel Interconnected with Everything

When I fall deeper into meditation, which is not always easy to achieve, I can reach a point where I do not sense my own body or mind. Rather, I may feel as if I am one with everything around me. This is not so easy to explain, but rather than being an active being with a goal or needs to accomplish something, I become just another point of awareness. I can still hear and feel, but I will manage to at least temporarily extinguish thought, the desire for thought, the desire to extinguish thought, and the desire to interpret thought.

This means that for any sensory experience I have, it seems as if it is important just for the sake of the experience itself, not because of how it relates to a self or a prior thought. I lose the sense of self, as I lose my ego. The experience may be or sound scary to some, but when you get there gradually through deeper meditations, it is a pleasant experience. If you reach this stage enough, some of the insights gained here will transfer to your daily life.

Final Thoughts

As a caveat, I cannot be certain that I have had all of these experiences due to meditation. However, sometimes I meditate to help me work through a problem, and the more I meditate, the more quickly I tend to work through those issues. I do not take any medicines regularly, so this has been my regular dose of healing in my life. Also, keep in mind that I generally practice mindfulness and work on improving my awareness. I view these as all related to meditation. To me, mindfulness is just about practicing meditation in your daily life and actions, rather than only practicing it alone and in silence (as traditionally expected).

Overall, I think meditation helps to have greater and deeper insights into life that cannot easily be put into words. You can read I. C. Robledo’s Thoughts (this site) and intellectually understand certain ideas. But some things need to be experienced directly to truly understand them on a level deeper than the intellect allows.

For example, how much does the intellect help you to understand love? How much does it help you to understand a beautiful sunset? How much does it help you to understand cruelty? Some things cannot be figured out intellectually and must be experienced to see it for what it truly is.

Meditation can provide some of those types of experiences. However, keep in mind that I have meditated for many years. If you need to see rewards immediately, then this may not be a useful path.

I believe we should all have some form of meditative experiences, but some people may prefer other routes – physical exercise, yoga, spending time in nature, mindfulness, or journaling. If meditation doesn’t work for you, try something else.

As a final note, if you are not familiar with the meditation process, countless books and sites explain it. There are many different types and ways to practice meditation. Since you can find this information easily anywhere, I have decided not to go through it here.

The Value of NOT Thinking

I find it valuable to think – it helps us identify problems and find ways to resolve them. But oddly enough, there may be a great deal of value in not thinking that most of us are unaware of.

Have you ever had an experience that was supposed to be fun, but you got caught up in thought? You were busy wondering if this was as fun as something else you had done if the hot weather was ruining the experience, if you had too much work to do, and should not even be having fun in the first place.

The thoughts rolled on and on, as you almost forgot you were even having this so-called fun experience. The experience that seemed to be so much fun actually turned into a series of thoughts in your mind. Your thoughts pounded in your head, and the experience faded into the background.

Many people go on yearly or periodic vacations. And I think what we often want is to get away from our lives, ourselves, and thoughts. But what do you do when the same old thoughts you always had follow you around everywhere you go?

Can we take a vacation from thinking?

Even if you master your thoughts and don’t allow them to interfere with your experience of being and living, how will you react when people around you are bombarded by thoughts? Meaning well, they may feel the need to avoid uncomfortable silences and constantly talk about the weather, their kids, their lives, and their plans. And communication is a wonderful thing, but just as with thoughts, sometimes communication can get in the way of the experience we are having.

What if someone near you asks: Are you enjoying yourself? Do you need more of something? What do you think of that thing that just happened, that was wonderful, wasn’t it? We should take a picture – let’s pose for one here. Etc.

This sort of behavior will, of course, take us away from the experience. And we cannot always control our own thoughts, let alone the thoughts and actions of the people around us.

The first step here is to figure out if your constant thoughts are getting in the way of truly experiencing your own life. Is the analysis of everything that happens to you actually holding you back? Do you have to find meaning in everything you do, or are you let down by the fact that something was just a normal life experience that didn’t result in anything useful?

The topics I discuss on this site are not meant to cripple us in thought and anxiety over whether we are making improvements in our lives. That would be counterproductive. If you become depressed or anxious over your inability to improve in your life, then we need to reset your expectations and perhaps take a break from thinking.

Sometimes our thoughts hold us back, even if they appear to be useful or positive. This is a strange thing for many of us to realize. Our own thoughts that seem to be trying to help us can actually get in the way. Even seemingly good thoughts can get in the way of experiencing something to the fullest.

We are not our thoughts.

This is something many people fail to realize. Some people have a very dark thought, and they become distraught. They think this means they are a bad person because they have had this horrible thought. The thoughts are not just coming from us. They are produced by all of our life experiences and all that we have seen. We have all seen darkness – in ourselves, in some behaviors of the people around us, and most certainly in the news, movies, and other media. Many thoughts are not our own. Rather they are created by our experiences with the outside world.

When I have thoughts that are not especially helpful, I pretend that there is an iPad in front of me, and the sole purpose of this iPad is to record all of my thoughts. It records every single thing that happens in my head, line by line. When you see it that way, you see your thoughts as separate from yourself, and you can select the ones that are useful and forget about the rest.

The main tool I have used not to allow thinking to interfere with my experiences is to meditate. Everyone has heard about this now, so it is nothing new. To explain briefly, when you meditate, you sit quietly and observe your thoughts passing through you. You do not need to hang onto them or dwell on them. If you wish to begin, start with a few minutes of meditation per day and gradually work your way into it more deeply. Over time, this can create radical changes in the way you think or don’t think.

Mindfulness can also be useful. With mindfulness, you train yourself to be more aware of nature and what is happening around you. Rather than get lost in thought, you aim to immerse yourself in the environment around you.

The more you think, the more those thoughts crowd out the whole experience you are having. The more you focus on the experience fully and the physical sensations it causes, the less room you will have to obsess over your thoughts.

Experience more. Think Less.

As much as I think deeply, this is counterbalanced because I spend much of my time in a non-thinking mode. For example, as I write now, my mind is only on what I am doing. I have trained it not to worry about any other problems or goals that I have in my life. This is my sole focus. So I am thinking, but only on what is necessary at the moment. In anything I do, I aim to immerse myself into it, only focusing or thinking about what is necessary. Even if I have other thoughts, I don’t focus on them. I don’t give them extra attention.

These patterns are a daily practice. If you find that you have a huge log of thoughts piling up in your head every day, holding you down rather than helping you, it will help to practice meditation or mindfulness. Yoga, martial arts, or other physical exercises may produce similar results for some people as well. You can also consider having a professional massage or going to the sauna.

Whatever it is, find something that will help you to have a vacation from thinking (or perhaps a mini-vacation). This can be used as a tool to refresh and reenergize your mind to make your thinking more clear and powerful.

Be More, Do Less

When you get up in the morning, and you prepare yourself for the day, most of us probably think, “Today, I am going to do A, B, and C, etc., tasks that I have on my to-do list.” And there is something about this that becomes exhausting. Everything on the to-do list is something that we tend to resist. If we didn’t resist it, why would we have to write it down?

Do you write down that you will eat, go to the restroom, love your significant other and kids, watch TV, and so on? Probably not, but you probably do all of these things. This is because these things are in your natural state of being.

Reflecting on these ideas helped me to come to a simple yet powerful realization. We should aim to do less and be more. The amusing thing here is that as far as behavior goes, it’s all the same. Being and doing end up in you performing some actions, usually. Someone who is observing you may not be able to tell the difference, whether you are being or doing at any given moment.

However, there is a clear mental difference. Any time I am doing, I am resisting something. Perhaps it is me that I am resisting. Perhaps it is society and the fact that it makes demands on me. Perhaps it is my family who has given me these extra tasks. Whatever it is, I feel that resistance. Maybe you do too.

And so, I have learned that a key goal of life should be to be more and do less. I still have to-do lists, as there are some things which must be done. But if your whole day constitutes trying to check items off a list, something is seriously wrong. Items to do are done mostly with the purpose of completing them, so most of your life will become a series of events that you were busy completing. This appears to be joyless, and strangely enough, purposeless.

If your purpose becomes to complete tasks, you will always feel that you are not fulfilled. This is because we create endless streams of tasks to complete. Every day you will wake up feeling de-energized, as whatever you accomplished in the past seems not even to matter. All that matters is this towering list of new stuff you have to complete, so you can then move on to the next series of stuff you have to get through.

By trying to have goals and impose purpose in your life, you have actually run away from it. It’s as if our purpose in life has become to have purpose through completing tasks. And somehow, paradoxically, this is the worst way to achieve true purpose in our lives.

Then, how do we accomplish our true purpose? Not through doing tasks, but through being who we already are. Purpose is about self-discovery and then being what we have discovered ourselves to be. And through being ourselves, we learn more about ourselves, which helps us be more centered with who we already are.

Unfortunately, when we become too task-focused, those tasks are usually not for ourselves, to begin with. Some tasks are because of the boss, the significant other, the kids, the neighbors, organizations we belong to, taxes or debts we owe, etc. And when we work on tasks for others as a big part of our day, we tend to feel as if our life is not in our hands. We are doing tasks not even for us, but for other people. And so we feel exhausted and drained because we are not being for ourselves, but we are doing for others.

Obviously, as you may be thinking now, real-life does constitute many tasks that most people don’t want to do. And for many of them, there is no good way around them. My point is that we may have more control than we think. If we consciously thought through our daily rhythms, we would find that no one is forcing us to go through certain tasks. We have made it up in our minds that we needed to do them and stress about fulfilling our own need to accomplish tasks endlessly.

Every day, ask yourself: How can I be more and do less?

Trust me when I tell you that every task on your to-do list does not need to get done. And trust me when I tell you that if you are resisting yourself and exercising all your willpower every day to get through your tasks, then something has gone horribly wrong.

An overnight life change may not be practical for you. But at least search for small ways to be more and do less.

For example, I used to have to-do lists for my business that were 4-5 pages long. This was reoccurring every week. Every week, I would check some things off and add some new items, and so my list was always 4-5 pages long. It always felt overwhelming, and through the years, I realized that I had a lot of resistance. I resented this list, and I had no one to blame for it because I happen to be my own boss.

Several months ago, I realized that most of the list was not that important, and I aimed to simplify my professional goals. Currently, I only have 1 page maximum of to-dos for my business. This has helped me focus more on being who I am rather than doing an endless set of tasks.

To be more and do less means asking yourself what the most important thing in your life is. Perhaps you have many important areas in your life – such as family, a career, hobbies, etc. You should ask yourself which areas of your life are most important. And perhaps, which sub-areas of your life are most important. When you know what truly matters, you can focus on being in the moment for those parts of your life.

When you focus on being, you will be more energized, fulfilled, and more in line with your true purpose in life. You may find that being so task-focused was robbing you of your own life, and you will be more committed to avoiding getting sucked into doing so much.

Most of us have to-do lists, but I have never heard of someone having a to-be list. This is because we naturally want to be beings. We are beings, not doings. So our natural state is to be who we are, and no one needs a reminder to be who they are.

To focus on being, aim to create situations where you can be yourself more comfortably. Or aim to surround yourself with people and settings that help you to be yourself. Strive to be with people who value you personally for who you are, rather than just for the number of tasks you can accomplish per day. I realized that most of my childhood friends were just people with whom I felt comfortable being me around – and I was shy, so this was not always easy to find. As a last note, if you have the power, you may consider creating systems or settings that allow others to focus more on being rather than just doing.

There is a big difference in how we live when we are being versus when we are doing.  I find that when I am being, I am focused on being mindful. I want to savor what is happening, I want to live the moment as deeply as I can, and I am enjoying the journey of being rather than needing to have an endpoint. Rather, when I am doing tasks, I often allow myself to enter into a mindless state. This means that I become okay with doing the task to get it done, just to get to the next task so I can get it done, and so on until everything is done.

So we have to ask: Are we meant to live mindfully or mindlessly? Are we meant to be or do?