3 Timeless Tips for Better Encore Living

You probably have heard about the Oracle of Delphi. If you went to— if you participated in compulsory public education, your social studies teacher at some point talked to you about Hellenistic cultures, the Greeks and the Romans, and you learned a little bit about the Oracle of Delphi. One of the things that sometimes remains in our consciousness after the 7th or 8th grade is the thing that we most often associate with the Oracle of Delphi. Some people also associate it with Socrates. Some people also associate it with Thoreau. They all said the same thing, but as far as I know, it originates with the Oracle of Delphi. And that's above the doorway, it says, "Know thyself." Has everybody heard this phrase before? Um, so Socrates also said it, Thoreau, many, many historical figures have talked about this, the importance of this idea of knowing thyself. Here's a couple things that you might not remember from your history class, and yes, I am a total geek, a weirdo. I was a history teacher and a classics, aspiring classics major. I won the Latin IV Prize 4 times in high school, so I, I will try not to get get too deep in the weeds on this stuff. But the Oracle of Delphi inside had some— I can't remember the exact number, but it had like 128 or maybe even more of these maxims carved into the stone. And these were kind of considered to be rules to live life by. Montaigne, one of, you know, a famous French kind of philosopher and somewhat of a statesman, had many of these carved in and painted on the beams of his study at his home. Um, there are, in addition to "Know thyself," there are two more that are above the doorway. One is "Nothing in excess," and the other is "Certainty is ruin." So why would you care that these things are carved into the stone above the Oracle of Delphi? Because these are principles that you're actually studying inside the program inside the book. We begin with know thyself. You're encouraged— I'm encouraging you, I'm inviting you to consider playing your game in the second half of life. The first half of life, you did what you were told, and you did what your parents and your peers and your teachers and your bosses expected of you, and they, they you know, did that through, you know, compulsory education and compliance and conformity in the classroom and in the workplace. For the— unless your experience is different, and of course everyone's experience varies. But, you know, I, I for one, have rarely come across a client that says, you know, my parents and my teachers and my boss always encouraged me to explore and exploit my unique gifts, the, the difference only I could make and bring my full self into a workplace, school, yard, whatever. And we don't get much training about that. So this idea of knowing thyself, we have the exercise that we did yesterday. So if you, if you weren't here last time, check out the exercise about seeking your becoming by being what you've always been and do a little archaeological dig of your past to pull out some of your values and talents and where you felt that strong sense of belonging. In the book, there are, um, two additional exercises, two surveys, uh, one that's based on positive psychology, um, the other is, is just based on a long-standing scientific approach to uncovering talents. So you can look there. And, um, the very first chapter of the book is Memento Mori, remembering that your— that life ends, which is why it's meaningful, and have that conversation with yourself on your deathbed to get clearer about what you would want to celebrate more of and what you would want to regret less of. So those are some ideas that all come around this idea of knowing thyself. Um, nothing in excess. So I am famous for that sign that's behind me. This is the idea, um, that less is more. And if you take it a step close— a step further, again, in the first half of life, it's nothing but a pursuit of more. The pursuit of happiness means the pursuit of more, more status, more stuff, more salary. And in the second half of life, we often are seeking significance. We're which has— and we recognize that our significance, our meaning, our sense of joy and fulfillment and contribution is really not— has— doesn't have a lot to do with the role we played in the workplace, with the status that we had in the neighborhood, with the amount of money in our bank account, and the amount of stuff that we had in our house and in the storage unit because our house couldn't hold all the stuff that we had. So What we learn in the second half of life is this idea, um, and Dan Nicholson, who's going to be on the broadcast on Thursday, really speaks to this beautifully, this idea that more does not equal closer. It's time to start thinking about letting go of the undisciplined pursuit of more that many of us have engaged in up to this point, and to think about what is it that we really want. Know thyself. And what are the essential steps that are necessary to get there and nothing else, because less is more. And how do we learn to execute those steps effortlessly with the least amount of, um, effort, with the least amount of risk and the most amount of options? That's again, a Dan Nicholson reference. And the last part is this idea of certainty being ruin. So since I'm mentioning Dan so often, he has a thing called the Certainty Tools and a Certainty app, and his whole platform is about creating certainty around what you want and how you're going to get there. I think in this context, certainty and ruin is more of the idea of the classical idea of hubris, right? Hubris is excessive confidence, excessive pride in our abilities our entitlements, and that sort of thing. So, you know, we don't have to look too far to see that it appears that overconfidence about things that you cannot possibly have any confidence about gets rewarded, at least in this country. People that ex— that present as very confident and authoritative, they believe what they believe because they believe it, and they surround themselves with other people that believe the same thing they do. And they all throw rocks at the other side to confirm that this is who we are, and that's who you are, and never the twain shall meet. And it happens on all ends of the political spectrum, all ends of the religious spectrum, all ends of, you know, the economic spectrum. But it's, it's a natural human disposition. We, we, we crave identity. And we, and when we crave safety, and we crave identity, and safety comes through belonging, we want to identify with people that identify like us because that provides us with a sense of belonging. And when we do that, we have this— we start to adopt this dogmatic thinking. And if you read, if you're on my list and got the Who Let the Dogs Out post on Friday, this speaks to that. I think it just posted to the blog today. Dogmatic thinking is I believe what I believe because I believe it, and you can give me absolute proof to the contrary 'Or you can give me cause to, you know, you could speculate and give me cause to reconsider, or at least be open to possibility that there's another way.' And you won't, because you believe what you believe because you believe it, and other people believe it too, and you don't want to upset that idea of belonging and safety in that group. So the encouragement that comes from this idea of certainty is ruin is and, and Deb and Penny will be very familiar with this idea, the idea of let's open the loops. Open-loop thinking. There's a really fabulous study from the Harvard Business Review called Teaching Smart People to Learn, and they talk about closed-loop learning. Smart people love to close loops. If they come across something they don't know, they Google it, they, they look at it, they say, okay, got it, check. And it's— there's no like consideration. There's no— they just, they want the immediate understanding because smart people like to be smart and they like their smartness to be validated. In the second half of— and we all have this, you know, we all present this way at various times in our lives. This guy right here, more guilty than many. And, you know, in the second half of life, the imitation is Can you, um, in your pursuit of trying to be a little bit more helpful and useful, can you also be a little bit more curious and considerate? Which takes actually a lot of courage because it's not something— we don't reward people for being curious and considerate. We reward people for being certain and sometimes rude. So So those are the three edges that I think, you know, that they're already baked into the learning. But, you know, I was thinking about this this morning on a call with a client, so I thought I would just kind of share. This is just another perspective about some of the same ideas that have already been presented in the past call and also in the book itself. So any—