Perception and Action
🤖 Perceptions:
I have been getting back into reading non-fiction books, and I picked up “The Obstacle is the Way” by Ryan Holiday. Ryan Holiday is a writer and an internet personality. Most of his work is based on stoicism. I was re-reading Marcus Aurelius’s classic “Meditations” when I came across his online content. This is Ryan’s first book that I am reading, and I will definitely be reading more of his stuff. One of the themes of the book is to make yourself understand that the world is not as it seems to be. We color the world with our senses. We perceive things to be good or bad.
Information has only five ways to get from the outside world into our minds, through our senses. Our senses are not designed to show us the whole picture. They evolved to reveal things to us that were necessary for survival. We attach fear to a face with no expression. Two people look at the same abstract painting and feel different ways. We decorate the world with our senses. That means what we perceive to be something good or bad is not really either; It just is. Good and Bad are judgments placed by us humans. We can choose to look at obstacles in a positive/optimistic light. They are only there for us to overcome.
“We suffer more in imagination than in reality.”
—Seneca.
I like this quote from Seneca. It is not polluted by any judgment. He is not saying that we should stop suffering the imagined troubles and only struggle with real ones. He is just making an observation, a curious insight. It is simple awareness. In personal experience, often times simple observations help more than self-judgment because they don’t have the negative emotions associated with them.
🕹️ Actions:
Our perceptions cloud our judgments. Instead of looking at things as they are we start to think about what it means. Asking things like why me? are an example of bad judgments because they stop us from acting in a productive way. Now, some things are tough to go through and we need support, but we often magnify our troubles by thinking about them too much and too long.
One of the themes of the book is performing unselfish actions. No matter what the situation is, there is something that we can do about it. We paralyze ourselves by setting up big targets that we know we cannot achieve. It is much more productive to break the problem into subproblems and then more subproblems if needed. Before long we have some small tasks that we can just do. This is the spirit of taking action. Just working little by little and being mindful of the personal judgment that we do not seem to be moving forward working on so small a task. I have grown to appreciate the idea that we overestimate what we can do in a month, but underestimate what we can do in a year. Consistent action is the key to success.
It’s a form of persistence. I have personally experienced both constructive and destructive persistence. Destructive persistence is based on negative emotions. For example, I am overweight so I need to go to the gym, or if I don’t get an A I am a bad student (What does bad even mean here?). Although negative emotions could help get started, I give up on most things if I keep using them as motivation. There is also constructive persistence which is based on positive/happy emotions; I love getting a runner’s high so I am gonna run 5 miles today or I love studying Quantum mechanics so I am gonna spend an hour reading my textbook. Finding and appreciating tiny moments in everyday life is also a form of persistence.
