As we go through life, we encounter a lot of temptations. Temptations are things that at any given time, we desire to do, but also things that we deem wrong or unwise. And I think this comes from the sense that a few episodes back, I was talking about the true self verse, the true you versus the real you. The real you is kind of who you at any given time, who you are today.
But the true you is kind of maybe something that you hold as a target, something, you know, the type of person you want to be or that you should be. And hopefully a decent amount of you. Is that true you? But you're also always working at it. You're trying to improve yourself. You're trying to maybe have a certain state of mind or act a certain way around other people. Maybe you want to set an example for family or for coworkers and whatever example.
I mean, there's all kinds of things that we want to be in life, and hopefully the things that we want to be. One, hopefully we're a decent amount of that already. But two, these are good things, ethical things, moral things, rational things, right? Because we should all be contributing to, not to use a cliche, but to make the world a better place, right? Kind of leave the world different than how we found it.
So anyway, we go through life, and temptations are kind of things that take us away from that, right? And these temptations can be different things for different people. Your temptations may not be the exact same thing as my temptations. I mean, one who you view as the true you, the kind of target that you're going after, the person you want to be is not going to be the exact same as person I want to be. And so the things that take you away from that could be different.
Our value systems could also be a little bit different. So the things that maybe I think are bad or tempting or taking me away are just not the same as what you think are bad things. But either way, although I'm sure there are definitely universal ones that most people would agree are not great. But the temptations are the things that at any given time, it kind of wells up inside us. We kind of want to do them.
We think it'll feel good to do it, but deep down, we know it's wrong or it's just unwise, or at the very least, it's taking us away from who we really want to be. And I think there's something to be said for being very consistent through life with who you want to be, not just let's say, in a heated situation, that's where I want to be, and that's when it matters or when something comes to a head.
I think there needs to be a consistency there that every day we need to be working on the person we want to be. And in order to do that, then we have to have kind of a regular mental discipline of avoiding the various temptations that could creep into our life. And again, those temptations being things that take us away from who we know we really want to be. Examples of temptations are anything from eating too much food or maybe spending too much money. It could be kind of laziness, right?
Not getting around to something. Maybe it's venting on social media or just anger in general, gossiping. Or it could be feelings of jealousy. It could be pornography. Could be lying or cheating. Maybe it's abusing alcohol. There's excessive procrastination, even just watching tv. Promiscuity, whatever. And you have to decide which of these you actually deem are wrong. And then I have to decide which ones I deem are wrong. We don't have to necessarily agree on those.
Maybe at some cultural level, we need better agreement on what is right and wrong. But for the argument in this episode that I'm making, it's more about acknowledging that there are things in your life that take you away from who you believe you want to be. The question is, well, how do we do that? How do we just avoid it? It's not enough to just know it's wrong. It's kind of like someone who maybe smokes. Everybody who smokes knows it's wrong. Nobody thinks smoking is healthy, right?
But there's a big difference between knowing something is taking you away from who you want to be and actually doing something about it. There's a very big difference between those two. And so arming yourself with the techniques in life that can help you avoid temptations, whatever your version of temptations are, can be extremely helpful to you in your life and can lead to greater levels of productivity and better relationships with people.
Better success, really, by any definition of success, and perhaps more importantly than anything, a level of contentment, a level of kind of an inner peace that you have. Because, again, you're being consistent with who you are as a person. You have the ability to rise above the various temptations that take us away from who we want to be in life. And I also want to be clear that, as many of my listeners know, I'm not a fan of absolutist approaches.
I don't think if the chocolate cake is the temptation that takes you away from the type of healthy individual you want to be. That doesn't mean you can never eat chocolate cake if there's someone's birthday party, or if there's a special event, or if it is just once in a while. I don't think many people think a piece of chocolate cake once a month, or whatever it is, is going to kill you. And I think a certain level of a certain dosage. Dosage makes the poison.
A certain dosage can even be healthy because it allows you to. If you create too rigid a set of rules, then they tend to breed their opposite. Because you'll start to resent the system by which you live by. And you will find yourself splurging, let's say, for using the chocolate cake example or whatever the temptation is. I think if you create too rigid rules around things that do take you away from who you want to be.
If those rules are too rigid, you can end up resenting those rules and then doing the exact opposite. And I think we see that at both the individual level and the societal level. So when I talk about the importance of avoiding temptation, it's not necessarily in the absolute sense. Although maybe some temptations really should be approached in the absolutist way. But I think we always have to allow for a certain dosage. And this is why it comes down to a level of control.
You need to be in control of your emotions. They cannot control you. That's not saying emotions are not important. They are. I talk about that a lot. They exist for evolutionary reasons. They help us under highly complex situations. They tap into that kind of high dimensionality of nontrivial situations. But emotions are there to be used and directed, not to pull us in all kinds of different directions.
So whatever it is that represents a temptation in your life, it's not necessarily about squashing it out altogether. But it is about being in control. It is about having the mental ability to rise above it. And I argue that that's going to lead to a lot more happiness, more to the point, contentment and just success in your life. Regardless of what type of success you might be hunting after or going after.
But I think what makes the kind of getting control over temptations difficult is not necessarily because they're so tempting. I think it has more to do with the fact that they start off fairly harmless. They start off not really being that bad, necessarily. Which is in line with what I'm saying about dosage. I think in small dosage, they're not necessarily that bad. But there's kind of that early and fine line between how much you allow and when the system kind of starts to run off. Right?
You kind of get the snowball effect. You get something that's a bit of a runaway. And we see this. We know that when situations, if you look at after the situation happened or whatever it is, it could even be like political, global, whatever, maybe like a world war or something, and you try to reverse engineer and find out the root cause, and, oh, this. This guy got assassinated, or this person said this or this, whatever, fired off a warning and something happened.
You know, the event is not really the root cause. Okay. You know, and and it's not even really necessarily a catalyst, although it definitely played a role, because the way situations actually happen in the real world is many different things come together and they build and they build and they build, and before you know it, they blow up into this big thing. And it's not really.
I mean, even if you think you found the trigger point, it doesn't mean another trigger point wouldn't have happened, because the problem was not the trigger point. The problem was the buildup of events that never got stopped, that never got prevented early. You recall in my free speech episode where the problem on both sides, but where if you use the one side where you're talking about shutting down free speech, it always starts off very harmless, right?
You take a look at someone who doesn't want to feel unsafe and doesn't want to be bullied, and everyone agrees with that, and it totally makes sense. But then the words start to get a little bit twisted. And now what it means to get hurt or offended starts to become almost anything, and on and on, and all these little concessions get made. And eventually, before you know it, you wake up and you look at your world, and you realize that you are maybe in a world you don't want to live in anymore.
If we're using the free speech example, maybe it's been suppressed to such an extent that now nobody can say anything, and we're all on tiptoes. And this is not the world that anybody actually wanted to live. And that's what you have to appreciate about the way systems happen. Nobody has to actually be wanting a specific world in order for that world to be created. Nobody does, because it isn't architected, it isn't designed.
It emerges, and it comes out of just the dynamics of the situation, of the way complexity happens. So I think what makes it challenging to deal with temptations in our life, the things that take us away from who we really want to be is not so much the power of the temptation as much as how the system takes off in ways that you don't notice. In other words, the temptation doesn't really seem like that big of a deal. And it's true because at the beginning, it's not that big of a deal.
Okay, if you have, again, chocolate cake as the example once in a while, it's not a bad thing, arguably, right? But at some point, it is going to become a bad. And if you don't understand how to draw that line and how to control the situation, then you're going to be, before you know it, waking up in a world where you're eating chocolate cake all the time. Right? To use this example, you can just take that as a metaphor. You can map any temptation that we're talking about onto that situation.
Eating too much, spending too much money, right? Laziness, venting on social media is not necessarily a bad thing. But if you're not cognizant it's part of a system that can take off and become a problem, then there's a good chance that it will become a problem, right? There might be little bits of jealousy that rise up in you. To some extent, that's going to be natural. But if you're not aware that it can become a problem, then it can run away on you.
Lying, cheating, alcohol, procrastination, anger, television watching, promiscuity. You can decide what you just have an honest conversation with yourself about the things that you believe are taking you away from who you want to be. And it's not about necessarily having an absolutist approach, because just like any emotion, you have to acknowledge it. But acknowledging it does not mean just allowing it into your life and letting it breathe and live however it wants.
You have to have the final say. There has to be a level of awareness, a type of cognition that has the final say over the things that can and will take you away from who you want to be if you don't have that final say, if you don't have that control. So what makes it challenging to deal with temptations is just a step back, right? I said, look, temptations are things that we at any given time, desire to do. And that's natural, that's normal. We have emotions for a reason. They go up and down.
They have kind of stochastic arrival times. We don't know when things, certain moods are going to be there. But we also have this awareness at a higher level that a lot of those things can take us away from who we want to be, because at any given time, we're not exactly who we want to be, right? We can live what I've called kind of like a target based life. Where we have targets, the reach exceeds the grasp. We have kind of a vision of who we want to be, which we update on a regular basis.
And we're never quite that person. We have the real person that we are now, but then we have the true person that we're always trying to be. And so we have to have, first an awareness of the things that take us away from them. And it's hard, I said, not so much because the things are so tempting, which is maybe part of it, but more to the point, it's easy not to be aware of how they can get out of control. A little bit of procrastination is natural.
And I've even argued that in some sense, it can be a bit good. There's a reason we procrastinate. Maybe there is a better time to work on something, and that time isn't now. But it can easily become an excuse just to not work at all. If you start to kind of fall in love with the notion of procrastination and you kind of use it as an excuse, then you'll find yourself working a lot less than you should at the things you know you want to do.
I'm not arguing for being a workaholic, but it is going to take a lot of work to become the person you want to be. And you know you should be working. So if it's something that you know you should be doing, then there should only be so much procrastination allowed in your life. Okay. When we think about, again, what makes us so difficult is that temptations run off. It's like an avalanche.
They start off perfectly harmless, and they are in that small dosage, arguably harmless, but because they're part of these dynamics that take off, that's what makes them difficult to draw the line and to do it. And so what I argue is that we really need to nip temptations in the bud. This is the need that we have, and this gets into the technique. Now, that is not necessarily the absolutist approach, but it is something that is very, very early.
I think that when we are talking about things that we know take us away from who we need to be. We want to be in life, that we need to nip those in the bud early so that they don't become part of this avalanching system, this cascading system that takes off to the point where now it's really hard to reverse it and it's really hard to get over it and the damage has kind of been done. Right.
And so as an example, again, we're often tempted to not work on something that let's say we are passionate about or someone we know we want to be. And so the delay seems harmless. A little bit of procrastination, which is true, a little bit is, it is harmless, maybe even beneficial. I would argue a little bit of procrastination is actually beneficial. Let your mind arrive at the work when it's ready.
Okay. But this can become an assumption that we'll just always naturally get around to doing what we do when we need to. Right. I think we need to have the mental discipline to nip the delay in the bud and to work closer to immediately avoiding the temptation to not work so that there is little energetic barrier to doing it. Okay, so remember, I've talked about in the last episode or a few episodes back, the energetic barrier to getting things done right.
The more you kind of have anxiety around getting to do something, the more you think about it too much, the bigger the barrier gets. And then you've made this kind of mountain out of a molehill, and now it's really hard to get done. If you can nip something in the bud early, then the mountain never gets too big. A little bit of procrastination is fine, but you should still work at nipping that.
You should still work at preventing the system from cascading to a point where now it's really hard to get around to doing the work. It's one thing to delay it a few hours or maybe a day, but if you haven't touched it for a week now, you start to forget what the project was even about or the task was about.
You've lost the momentum, you've lost the interest, you've lost the context that allowed you to be in the frame of mind to know why you're doing something in the first place, which is so critical to doing quality work. Okay? So I think as a technique in life, we need to become good at nipping our temptations in the bud. And the technique to do that is to really place our mind into an action that we know is right. Right.
So if we are procrastinating and we have this awareness that we're procrastinating, and maybe the small dosage of that is fine, but we still want to work at starting to rise above that procrastination and place us into the action that we know we're supposed to be doing. If I'm supposed to be writing, maybe I delay it a little bit, but as early as I can, I just start writing, right? I don't wait for the mood to necessarily be there.
I know that once I start writing, my mood will be there, because the action leads to the mood. We shouldn't wait for the mood to lead to the action. We should allow the actions to lead to the mood. And as you learn to rise above these temptations, to place your mind somewhere else, there is great contentment that comes from rising above that. There is a control that you feel.
You realize that you have the final say, the level of cognition that you have to look over your emotions, recognize them, acknowledge them, but have the final say on them and direct them. Taking the example of procrastination, the excessive procrastination, when you're able to rise above that, not because you're in the mood to work, but because the knowledge of working is something you know you want to do, there's an energy in that.
There's an energy in the juxtaposition between not being in the mood to do something and having the mental discipline to do it. That contrast between those two things, when you know you're rising above, it, gives you an energy that you can use and direct, and it ends up feeling like motivation, often within a few minutes of starting the task, which is really interesting because there's an energy to it.
So whether you're eating too much, spending too much money, being lazy, social media, gossip, jealousy, pornography, lying, cheating, alcohol, procrastination, anger, tv, promiscuity, whatever it is, you have your list of temptations. You know, these are taking you away from who you need to be in life.
They can be very difficult to fend off, and not because they're necessarily so tempting, but because they are part of these runaway systems and that they just start harmless, and they are genuinely harmless. But then they evolve over time. And so what you really need to do to take control over the things that take you away from who you want to be is to nip those temptations in the bud. Do it very early, not necessarily absolutist, but early.
And if you can rise above those temptations by placing your mind where it needs to be and placing the action where it needs to be. I don't need to eat that chocolate cake. I can go for a walk. I don't need to procrastinate. I can actually just start writing. I don't need to go out drinking. I can do this. You can switch the action, place your mind into a better place, and over time, like a muscle, this will get stronger and stronger, and you'll be able to cap things off in an early state.
So whatever the temptation is, I think you need to learn to cap it off at a very early stage, and you'll get better at doing this. Don't wait till the mountain is large. Don't wait till the energetic barrier is huge. And now it's very difficult to do the task, or it's very difficult to avoid the junk food, or it's very difficult. Whatever it is you're trying to do, nip it in the bud. Do it early and develop that mental muscle to get really, really good at doing that.
And you'll find that you'll be able to focus on the tasks that you know you should be doing. And that includes relaxation, because, again, it's not about work. Being a workaholic, if you know you should be relaxing and taking a break, remove the temptation to work, remove it early and go relax. Nip the temptations in the bud, stop the process early, and take control over your thoughts and who you need to be in life. Okay, that's it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.
Until the next one. Take care. Bye.