[AKN #71] How To Fit Everything Into Your Life: The Art of Half Assing it
LAUGH: Whose Line Is It Anyway?, LOVE: The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
Sup homies?
Fucking Tuesday. I have a weird relationship with Tuesday.
Back when I joined the workforce, I started at a traditional hardware engineering company complete with cubicles, apathetic management, and coworkers more interested in counting the years until retirement than doing actual work.
Like Haley Joel Osment in 6th Sense, I felt surrounded by dead people. But those dead people came filled with stock cliches like “we don’t need to reinvent the wheel” or “looks like someone has a case of the Mondays.” So it was more like Zombieland meets Office Space.
I hated it there, so naturally I stayed for four years…
Over those four years, Mondays weren’t bad because I would come in riding the high of the weekend and not even notice the day.
But Tuesday. Tuesday was the morale killer.
Tuesday morning it settled in that I had four more days of this.
That realization would trigger an existential rage that could only be extinguished by distraction or the sweet Taco Tuesday deals at Nick’s Crispy Tacos.
Since morning tacos are frowned upon by our oppressive society, I would enter the Internet vortex in search of fun factoids, videos, or articles to fill the void for a few hours.
I loved the dopamine hit of finding something great.
A brief respite from the agony of my first world problems.
Every Tuesday I craved novelty to combat the monotony stemming from the feeling like I was going to repeat this week for the next 40 years.
That is what I think about when I write this newsletter.
I write it for younger me who would be sitting in his 5-foot by 5-foot sadness cube reading this thinking “damn this newsletter is the tits.”
And maybe, just maybe, if he reads closely enough he will learn he has everything he needs to change his life right now.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: How To Fit Everything Into Your Life: The Art of Half Assing it
There are a finite number of hours in the day. Everyone knows that. However, advice never seems to reflect that reality.
Every Internet guru claims that you should spend hours a day meditating, reading, writing, exercising, working, pursuing your hobbies, and building your network.
But how on Earth could someone fit all of that into their life?
The answer: You can’t…
Unless you learn the art of intelligently half assing a lot of things.
The Ideal Amount Of Work To Do Is The Bare Minimum
In college, I thought hiring managers cared how hard you worked at school.
The fear of having to sit in an interview and tell a compelling story about how I spent my time in college drove me to cram my waking hours full of courses and interesting sounding extra curricular activities.
As a result, I never got amazing at one subject, but instead 87th percentile in five different subjects.
Which is sad.
Because — now that I am on the other side of the table — I realize the only thing a hiring manager cares about is that you are amazing at the one or two things they need help with.
If I knew this in college, I could have dropped courses which I was taking to sound impressive, done the bare minimum to get a decent grade in the required courses which didn’t matter, and put all my effort into mastering the courses that produced useful, marketable skills.
I would have side stepped most of the busywork AND gotten better outcomes from the job market.
Not to mention that I would’ve freed up hundreds of hours to focus on things that truly brought me joy such as figuring out the ideal juice-to-vodka ratio to make Jungle Juice or perfecting the lube consistency required for an effective KY jelly wrestling event.
(Did I mention I was in a frat? I was so cool.)
The secret to unlocking this blissful reality would have been figuring out what I should’ve half assed and what I should’ve full assed.
What does full assed mean? Glad you asked.
Ice Cube’s Principle
For decades, philosophers argued over the underlying relationship between percentage of ass involved and level of effort.
However, in 1999, the philosopher king Ice Cube cemented the positive relationship between ass and effort with his song “You Can Do It” (hat tip to RE).
As he spoketh the great words “I can do it, put your ass into it”, Ice Cube’s Principle was born:
As the proportion of your ass involved increases, so does your effort level.
Therefore:
When you no ass something, you don’t do it.
When you half ass something, you put partial effort into it
When you full ass something, you put all of your effort into it.
Now that you have been educated, we return to our regularly scheduled programming.
Full Ass Brainwashing
Society sends you signals to full ass everything by lionizing effort and bestowing virtue on “hard work.”
It is encoded in our language. Like inspirational phrases always sound like “give it 110%!” and not “have you considered that you have other stuff to do so maybe you should give it like 70%?”
Now “giving it all you got” is great, except for the unfortunate reality we began with: there is a finite amount of time.
Thus, if you full ass everything, you will eventually run out of time and have to no ass a lot of things.
Which is fine, except often times the things that end up getting no assed are the things you most need to do.
For example, as you put more and more ass into your job, you find that you are no assing your workout routine.
The solution to this problem is rather than letting your circumstances dictate what you have time to do, you instead deliberately half ass things to free up time.
What To Half Ass And What To Full Ass
In order to know what activities to half ass, you need to start with a strategy.
Strategy — as Robert Greene describes it — is “a mental process in which your mind elevates itself above the battlefield. You have a sense of a larger purpose for your life, where you want to be down the road, what you were destined to accomplish. This makes it easier to decide what is truly important, what battles to avoid.”
In other words, if you start with the end in mind, it becomes much clearer what you should prioritize. But if you don’t, you will waste your time on a set of incoherent actions which don’t point in a single direction.
Once you have a vision for your future in mind, you can select the activities which you want to “go all in on” and which you “just want to be passably good at.”
As an example of this, I started to half ass fitness.
As much as it hurts to admit, I am not a professional athlete. However, I would still like to maintain a certain level of fitness for aesthetic appeal and general health so I try to figure out the minimum amount I need to do to avoid morphing into the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
In practice, half assing fitness looks like decreasing the amount of time I spend in the gym as much as I can without getting too fat. This allows me to recover a few hours each week to repurpose elsewhere.
Juxtapose that with how I have been full assing writing.
I get a lot of enjoyment out of writing this newsletter and I am actively interested in getting better at writing.
Thanks to the time I have saved from not spending endless hours in the gym, I am able to repurpose those hours into getting better at the craft of writing by focusing on shipping this newsletter weekly, daily journaling, and working on editing my writing.
The time had to come from somewhere.
Priorities Evolve, But How To Find The Time Stays The Same
These are my priorities today.
They will change in the future as my interests evolve and I experiment with other activities, but the process to find the time remains the same.
I make deliberate decisions about what to half ass so I have time to full ass the things I love.
LAUGH: Whose Line Is It Anyway?
I LOVE watching old skits from Whose Line Is It Anyway. This was one of my favorite comedy shows growing up.
It is best consumed while being 15 years old at home, sick on the couch, covered in a blanket whilst sipping chicken noodle soup, but on the toilet in between meetings might have to do for some of you.
This “Press Conference” skit is a good example of how fun this show was. I recommend going down the YouTube recommendation rabbit hole here.
LOVE: The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
I love that I now have a name for this phenomenon because it so accurately describes how I consume news.
Complete and utter disgust about the way they describe something I know about followed by turning the page and reading what they have to say about everything else.
Closing time
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
Mahalo,
Kevin