Evolution

I'm not sure whether the idea of the blog is evolving but it seems to be moving in a new direction. I sat down and started writing the other night and got 12 pages of material. The idea began around the movie American Psycho and the fact that the main character Patrick Bateman has a very specific routine in the morning when he gets ready for work. I have been giving this some thought for sometime because I thought it might be interesting as part of the book to focus on this routine and then to expand it to other routines that would form a sum of parts around how to live in that particular way. I started writing out chapter headings based on the things that Patrick consumes, like popular music, technology, he and the fact that he was always using Zagat's to find the best restaurants. When I started writing I realized that it quickly moved into a different direction and actually came back to what I think I'm trying to do with the blog. With the more thought I give the project, the more it seems like it all comes back around to the same outlet. I'm trying to capture the idea of living in a minimalist manner and living simply but I am also talking about how to have experiences and what those experiences mean in shaping us as individuals. I think a morning routine, when it comes down to it, is nothing more than a culmination of experiences we have of what gets the best results for us. There are a plethora of videos out there by very knowledgeable individuals outlining particular routines but we don't really know what works for us until we try some of those things out. The routine that I outlined for getting ready in the morning is based largely on my experiences that have been synthesized from learning about other people's routines. Borrowing the things that I like as well as the things that seem to give me the most positive results. But in my mind I keep coming back to the thoughts around how to bring this all together and make it one unified effort. It seems to be fragmented between a number of different interests and endeavors. YouTube videos were something I started thinking about over the last day or two and I've had the blog for years now. I don't want to create content simply for the sake of generating output so it makes more sense to funnel it all into a single project. And in reality I think it is all connected. I'm looking forward to seeing how it all turns out. I think in the end it all comes down to the systems we create for ourselves. In various situations in our lives we can create complex or very simple system and it is the way we go about doing this that makes us who we are as individuals. This concept goes beyond the interests we have. It became apparent to me as I was going back through some old blog posts and some old journal entries and trying to make sure that they are all collected and organized. For better or worse I have evolved as an individual. I'm not the same person I was 10 years ago. Many things have happened between then and now but part of my evolution as an individual has also been based on the impact that my systems have had on me. What I mean by this is that if I look at the sum of all of my routines, I'm able to see what impact those routines have on my personality, my stress level, and my emotional stability on a daily basis. My life is moderate to high stress. But how much of that is the product of my own system I have created and my own routines that I engage in on a daily basis? Email for instance is something I have continued to struggle with. While I am very organized about the way I approach my email and maintain my inboxes I am on email constantly throughout the day. It is a source of interruption and I believe it keeps me from being optimally productive. So when I consider things like this I start to realize that it is more beneficial to take a step back sometimes and evaluate what we are doing and decide what is important and what is necessary (or unnecessary). It is that prioritization of routines and tasks that ends up being difficult for many of us. So what I want to try to do is break things down into digestible chunks. To make things more manageable and to try to categorize things so that I can speak about the best ways that I have found to approach those tasks. But if we simply limit ourselves to the things that are important to us we can run out of room. We need to be simple as individuals, but we need to cultivate a desire to try new things. To learn new skills. To have new experiences. That is where everything culminates in the Tao of How. It is about seeking those experiences but grounding those experiences in the reality that we can only maintain a certain number of interests in a given period of time along with all of our other obligations. And when we take on too much we do nothing more than stress ourselves out and tax those systems. So we need to have a ways to approach those experiences and acknowledge them for what they are, but then to be able to prioritize our interests as well and ensure that we are not taking on too much. How productive and efficient can we truly be? How much multitasking can we actually engage in effectively? This, I believe, is a significant part of the equation and if we can figure this out and we have figured out how to win the game. We can look to plenty of individuals and see how they have figured out ways to win the game but what they do I only work for them. A while back I had the idea of studying individuals who are optimally efficient in different ways from different walks of life to figure out what has worked for them. I think this creates a good character study but I think it is more important to discuss how we as individuals can develop our own tools that will help us to identify whether we are moving in the right direction or not. Simply trying to take someone else's template and impose it on our own lives is a difficult if not impossible way to truly make progress. We can try techniques and tips and tricks but in the end it is more about how we might be able to use tools that are more meta-in nature. So I think for each routine I outline, what I really want to get into is why I am engaging in that routine. Shaving just happens to be where I started because that is where I have been doing the most product and technique research at this point. I started to address this in my writing the other day but perhaps I didn't realize that the importance of that section of the book is not the technique itself but explaining why that technique is what it is. Why that routine is what it has become. The fact that there are practical reasons for engaging in a particular set of steps in a particular order and following all of those steps. But to also go beyond the practicality and discuss why it can be an enjoyable thing. Because I think what we need to do is find more joy or enjoyment in what we are doing. In the end everyone can create their own individual routine and I can provide examples on routines that I have created based on other individuals I have learned from. But the point of it all is to stress the importance of finding one's own routine. And how to identify the important aspects that need to be addressed with coming up with a routine. The practicality, the impact, the time that it takes to engage in that routine, the importance of that routine in the grand scheme of things, and what that routine means if and when it is maintained over a long period of time. These ideas seem to be coming together and they also seem to be coming to the same end. So that's where things stand at this point. I will continue to create this content and to get these ideas down but I will utilize different mediums to try to accomplish that. In doing so I think I will come up with a common set of parts in different mediums that will all culminate in a consistent message.