PNTV: Enough Already by Alan Cohen (#203)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV Today, another great book. Enough already. By Alan Cohen, the Power of Radical contentment. What would your life be like if you said, you know what? I've got enough already. My life is awesome. That's what this book is all about. Alan Cohen is awesome, as I shared in another episode on why your life sucks and what you can do about it that we had earlier this week. He's a fantastic storyteller, one of my favorite authors and teachers and human beings in general. This book is great. Philosopher's Note, bunch of big ideas, and we're going to look at five now. First one, be total. Be total. So the Buddha says, if anything is worth doing, do it with all your heart. I think it was Seneca who said, the wise man or woman does nothing reluctantly. Alan says there's nothing more annoying than someone who's doing something but complaining about it the whole time. Choose to do it or choose not to do it. But if you're going to do it, go all in. Be fully present. Osho described this as being total. Now, you might lean this way or you might lean that way at different times, but be all in. Be all about whatever you're up to. Sit or stand. I guess it'd be the other way around. Yeah, sit or stand. But don't wobble. Don't go back and forth. Make a decision to go for it, learn from it, and then go do what comes out of that. Ralph Waldo Emerson says, speak what you believe today in hard words and speak what you believe tomorrow in hard words, even if it contradicts everything you said today. We want to believe in where we're coming from, put our whole hearts into what we're doing, be total. That's the first big idea. Second big idea is a good one. Alan's a super chill, mellow guy. If you spend time with him, you just get dialed back. He's just all about ease and flow. And he's got this great line in here and a great passage about, are you a heartaholic? Heartaholicism is a big epidemic, he says. And are you a heartaholic? Are you committed to making everything in your life hard because you don't need to? And what's fascinating is we've been talking a lot about Ellen Langer and her work, the scientific research on mindfulness that just the act of telling people that what they're doing is work affects them dramatically, not for the positive than telling them what they're doing is play. So if you're Constantly telling yourself what you're doing is hard and it's going to be hard, and you expect it to be hard. Well, guess what? It's going to be unnecessarily hard. You can change your mindset and say, well, what if this was actually easy and fun? Discipline myself to approach this all the time. Whenever I hit a little bit of a creative bump and I'm starting to wonder, how's this coming together? Easy. This is easy. I've got this. Reframe it so it's not hard. Now, of course we're going to have challenges in our lives. We want to be honest about that Stockdale paradox and see with functional, realistic optimism that life gives us challenges. But we don't need to make every single thing and every single moment of our lives and every project a unnecessarily arduous. Ellen Langer again, she said, even if you've convinced yourself that a particular task is arduous, the issue isn't with the task. The issue is with your mindset around it. Now, it might be hard to switch your mindset, but you can make anything more enjoyable, period. So check in and see if you're an unnecessarily hard on yourself or thinking that things are hard. A hardaholic. Related to that big idea is this one Alan tells again, he's a great storyteller. Tells a story about an airplane pilot. If you're in a plane and you're cruising around and you're experiencing turbulence, right, and the plane's getting all moved around, what does a pilot do? Pilot simply shifts altitude. Here's where the turbulence is. It's at this altitude. So they either shift up or they shift down, but they don't keep on driving into it. They're just going to get racked with unnecessary turbulence, right? They go up, they go down, they shift their altitude. And then once this little storm or whatever it was, passes at that altitude, they can go back to their normal cruising altitude. That's what we want to do. If we're heading into turbulence. You don't need to keep on hammering away at it. Shift. Maybe you can take a nap and just relax, or you can go for a workout and get your altitude up. Here you can go listen to some music that inspires you. You can take three deep breaths, get out of this little chop by shifting your altitude. By shifting your altitude, you shift your attitude. And by shifting your attitude, you shift your altitude. You can navigate with a heck of a lot more grace. And again, it doesn't need to Be quite so hard. That's the third big idea. Our fourth big idea is a good one. Precrastination. Now, we're familiar with procrastination, which is putting off that which you think needs to be done today. Now we, you know, different times we'll struggle with procrastination. But Alan says, I actually think the bigger issue for most people is precrastination. They're doing things today that don't need to get done, right? So think about that. And we've talked about this in a different context, but rather than create a to do list, right? That's one way to approach it. Create a success list, right? What's on your success list? Focus there. Pay less attention to the to do list. If you're all about to do list and you have to do every single thing on it, you might be procrastinating. You might be doing stuff that would have been better, never done before. Peter Drucker is the one who said, there's nothing more inefficient than efficiently doing that which never should have been done in the first place. So by focusing on our success list, which by definition is short, what, one thing, maybe two, maybe three, do you need to get done or do you choose to get done today? That would qualify as a successful day. It would just be an awesome day. If you got that done. Create that list and start there. You're going to have great days. You're going to do a lot less of the precrastination and burn yourself out and all that good stuff. That's our fourth big idea. Fifth big idea. Desires versus tantrums. So Alan tells us that the Buddha talked about non attachment, not non desire. So desire is natural. We're of course going to have desire. Even the desire to be enlightened is a desire. We're never going to get rid of all of our desires. Remember when I first heard that from Wayne Dyer years ago, I'm like, whoa, that's cool. Desires. It's not the. Desire is not the issue. Attachment is the issue. And Alan has a great way to describe it. He says, look, say you want a particular thing. Okay, fine. Now say that thing doesn't come into your life. Two different ways to deal with it. You can be not attached and say, okay, well, it is what it is, and I'm going to accept my current reality and I'm going to choose a new desire and move toward that and we'll see how it goes. That's a healthy way to approach it. Or you can have a tantrum and kick and scream and get so upset that you didn't get what you visualized or you felt entitled to or whatever. That's attachment. That's the issue. That's the root of suffering. So embrace your healthy desires. Move toward them. And if they don't come to fruition, don't be attached. And definitely don't throw a tantrum. And notice that if you're throwing tantrums, if you're suffering, you're likely throwing tantrums. Let it go. Move on. Focus on your success. List the process. Step into the next way of being Adjust your altitude. Turbulence altitude. Move up, move down. Then you can move back to your normal cruising altitude by changing your attitude. Heartaholic Are you one See if you can make things easy. Ask how could this be easier? What could I do that would just make this more fun, more enjoyable and easier? And come back to that. Anytime you find yourself really struggling with something, take a break and reframe it like we talked about yesterday. Find a more positive spin and then be total. Be all in. Chris Dorris has some great wisdom on being all in. There's no question about it. You're all in. You're total. If it's worth doing, you're going to do it with all your heart. You're not going to complain. You're not going to do anything reluctantly. Why doesn't the wise person do anything reluctantly? Because they made a decision. They chose. I'm going to do this. I know that I could choose not to do it, but I'm not going to do anything that I chose to do reluctantly. I'm going to be here. I'm going to be all in. And there you go. Quick look at enough already. Hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See you.