Live with your cross-generational families, and like 99% of our ancestors, you have no choice but to learn to live with

In this video, a few folks asked his Holiness, “How to rid oneself of negative thoughts?”

As he provided his answers, the expressions of those people were absolutely priceless: utter confusion. I shared the same feeling.

His answer had two parts:

1. Stop being self centered.
2. Accept reality as it appears.

He discussed emptiness and selflessness. He also mentioned prajna, upaya and altruism. I decided to find out more about these esoteric words. Only a sage can apply these teachings to curb the cravings for those damn cookies (aka negative thoughts)! His teachings were one of those “I get it but I will never get it” / “intellectually understandable emotionally impossible” kind of concepts.

As a result, I had to draw in order to try and understand more:

in addition, I wanted to apply this in real life. After hours of brain HIIT, I have come up with an instant noodle/Starbucks VIA version of his Holiness’ prajna (wisdom/般若) + upaya (Skills in mean/方便) Jedi mind trick:

Option 1: You can control how you react to a shit situation, even though you can’t control what and when and how shit happens to you.

It’s not you-It’s just your emotions.

It’s not your fault.

(I know that.)

It’s not your fault.

Next, say to yourself, “Fuck you, negative feelings!” Repeat this. Or, simply mimic Hugh Grant in the movie “Four Weddings and A Funeral”, and shout “Bugger! Bugger! Bugger! Bugger! Bugger!” when shit arrives.

Option 2: Go outside, find someone, and ask them, “What was the last shitty thing that happened to you?” Stop when someone shares one shitty thing with you. You will soon find someone telling you something shitty has just happened to him/her. See? Shit happens to everyone, and not only to you! It’s okay! See? We are all part of a big blob!

Option 3: Do 5 good things, immediately This is the “double expresso of altruism” move; this is the ultimate “Be water, my friend” move.

And I mean it when I suggested “immediately”. Literally, immediately as in when those shitty emotions arrive, do 5 good things at that instant. I am not going to tell you what. You have got to commit to spending all your energy to find 5 good things to do. Here is an example:

Today I was having my favourite salad from Tallore in Wanchai. I was standing under a tree. A bird pooped on my head and my salad.

“Fuck man, what the fuck? Why me? Jesus I love my salad! And I know I am not going to win the lottery because of this. COME ON!”

I then had to force myself to do 5 good things, immediately:

(1) I picked up all the trash around me.

(2) I said hi to three people.

(3) I found a door and opened it for 5 people.

(4) I waited for a tourist that looked dumb and lost to show up, and offered help.

(5) I volunteered to take picture for another pair of tourist, and praised their stupid Samsung phone.

Thanks, your Holiness.

#nowbrewing •1

As I am moving into a lifestyle where time is less defined, the first thing I will try to figure out is how to mold my days so when I look back, I have a higher chance to objectively conclude that my time has been well spent.

There will be commitments I will have to do: finish up with the renovations, repair my kids’ incorrect perception of the male figure in the family, things that will take some load off of my wife’s mission to grow robots on Jupiter, learn to not mix up salt with sugar …

Time poorly spent, as I have learned in the last 20 years, is when I sacrificed time for some imaginary future. Or to be less pretentious, now that I have retired, technically I will have fewer of these sacrificial wishful meaningless tasks, I should learn how to dick around more effectively.

In terms of how, there is one thing I have learned from my failed journey to 4.5 pack abs: baby tweaks.

Instead of reducing or removing carbs in every meal, remove carbs from breakfast, get you to reduce your carb intake by up to 33.33333%. Or if you want to become a faux vegan, instead of eat only veges on Monday, just make sure you eat more veges than meat during your lunches or dinners. Find the little small baby tweaks in your lifestyle.

Trying to eat broccoli and chicken breast and salad every day will work and then not work, because when your tongue revote and overtake your consciousness the ensuring guilt from dipping salty egg fish skins into that bucket of cheap ice cream will cripple you with unnecessary mind-body-soul suffering. Trying to work out every day at 5 am will not work, because the energy spent dragging yourself out of bed at that ungodly hour will kettlebell your brain to exhaustion.

Find a handful of baby tweaks, let it go when you mess up, recite “good enough, good enough” to yourself often, and publish it on Facebook instagram and LinkedIn.

So, back to the present moment. Here are the baby tweaks I will slide into my days:

Read a short blurb of Chinese and then write a short blurb of Chinese, a few times a week.

Read some book about writing less like a ESLese, steal one idea from it, write something base on it, a few times a week. Hello semicolon.

I will start here, it’s good enough.

Hack this instead.

There are so many life hacks out there: morning routines, brushing with your opposite hand, intermittent fasting, swallow a live frog …

One trait about all life hacks (or hacks in general), is that they are meant to save you time by offering you “secret” hidden guilty-free shortcuts. While some of these hacks are probably practical and effective, life hacks by themselves, more likely than not, become permissions for us to skip the intellectual rigor to solve problems and to fall prey to unintentional negative consequences of excessive reductionism. (Fxxk yea that sounded so smart).

At the same time, there are things that we encounter on a day to day basis, that we don’t seem to spend enough time understanding how we (and our brains) approach them.

Let’s take a look at one of them: Food.
The facts are quite straight forward. We eat too much crap. Let’s not go down the route of fasting, veganism, or gluten-free yet. Those are hacks. Those are alternatives that appear to be easier than just eat better. “Eat better” simply means eating a bit more plant-based food, a bit less processed shit, and eat less. The reality is, these things are tough to achieve. We love meat, we can’t give up chips, and buffets are designed for the hunter-gatherer inside of all of us. So we then try and compensate, by adopting hacks to counter the mistakes and diluting the harm with superfoods.

However, if we take a bit more time and observe, it is a matter of how our brain works, how we react to our mind, when we are faced with these decisions: Steak and salad and cheesecake: what’s going on in my head? When did I give in? What were the things that got me to consider giving in?
By no means, it is easy to outsmart our own smarts. The fact that this is very hard is probably a good indication that we might want to actually work on it. This is because if we practice on master our damn mind, we have a much better chance of handling all the shit that will happen to us, in life. Plus, since these are such mundane minute day to day events, they, therefore, become frequent and consistent mental practices for us to improve. There are literally hundreds of moments every hour for us to practice.

Let’s compare this with some life hacks: One hack asks us to use our opposite hand while brushing our teeth. This hack supposedly allows us to work on different parts of our brain. If this hack indeed works, our brain will gain …. around 10 minutes of brain exercise per day. That’s 1% of our awaken state. Alternatively, if we utilize all those mundane moments in life to exercise our brain, simple math will tell us where we should spend our time.

After all the rants, here are five really mundane things that we could utilize as opportunities to observe our own monkey brains:

“What mental mistakes did I make that lead me to …”

Not sleep 7+ hours?
Not eat enough plants?
Not take the stairs?
Not call my loved ones?
Check my phone … again?

Pick one, start there, and that’s probably the best hack ever.

I am convinced that whoever designed Buddhism did kettlebell swings, used grayscale on her iPhone and brought her own coffee mug to order masala chai with almond milk. The fact that all these ridiculously vague stuff was so well summarized into bullet points convinced me that this person was a geek, or a great chef. 3 Gems, 8 paths, 4 truths …

Here are 3 #GrowthMindsets you need to embrace in 2019:

1. The “Shit and not-so-shit come and go and come” mindset:

When you have a shitty day, think of one better day that happened, and therefore the fact is, a better day will come again. Therefore there are two ways to embrace this mindset: Life is always going to be shitty, experience it, or life is always going to be not shitty, enjoy it. Therefore if you accept this, you will expect less, fear less, and be more free (supposedly).

Dad vs Daughter:
“Why were you sad when Santa gave you a jumper?” 
“Because I wanted a L.O.L Surprise (plastic piece of shit) doll!” 
“Ok. Let me help. Why are surprises so fun?” 
“Because I didn’t know it’s coming!” 
“Good. Do you get it now?”
“Oh, I should not expect to have a LOL and then Santa will give me one?!”

2. The “Bite me in the ass” mindset:

Your actions cause some reactions. Even though it is hard to truly believe that all actions cause reactions that will bite you in the ass /do you good in the future, it surely is a good alternative to always use this mindset to approach everything.

Dad vs Daughter:
“Should you tell Betty you are not her BFF today? But what if this could bite you in your ass?”
“Should we finish the entire cheesecake? But what if this indulgence would indeed bite you in the ass?”

3. The “I don’t exist, therefore ‘me’ is unimportant”” mindset:

I don’t actually really exist. The good news is, no one else really exists either. We are just a mixture of the same shit. All cakes are just mixtures of some flour, eggs, yeasts, salt, water, sugar and heat. Therefore if we choose to think that we don’t really exist, it is easier to just figure out what else to do when we don’t have to worry about ourselves. The next level shit of this mindset is, we don’t exist because we are part of everything … hmm … grand … the cosmos … ok. WTF?

Dad vs Daughter:
“You and I are basically the same.” 
“You mean I am not special?! You said I was special!” 
“No. You are special, I am special, everyone is special!” 
“I am not special~~~~” 
“Listen to me, it is a fact — we are not special. Accept this fact. It’s the same as accepting the fact that I am your father. Accept this, and we are freed to focus on something else.” 
“Now you are saying I am just like Betty! She is thin and smacks her food! And I don’t like you!” 
“See? The moment you keep thinking about yourself you are in pain!”
“Mom, he is being mean again!!”

#impermanence #non-self #interdependence

2 appointments a day.

Bob Buford and Coach Raveling are probably very different people. This is one thing they both do/did and preached. They both proposed to slow down and selfishly protect time for themselves by limiting the number of appointments to 2–4 a day. Bob reinvested his time to reflect while Coach spends the extra time to read a ton. They both stressed how instrumental this hack was to help then slow down and re-prioritise on what’s really important.

I thought this would be an interesting hack to try.

When I first started, I felt guilty, because I felt unproductive, and I had to turn a lot of people down.

I wasn’t that proactive. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with the free time. I spent more time on YouTube instead of meeting people or working on work stuff.

“Free time to plan my free time!”

The first thing I learned quickly was I needed to plan ahead a lot more. This is easily understandable because my availability decreased exponentially. I used to have 5–6 meetings/touch bases/connections whatever per day.

But slowly I started to realize the first gift of limiting the number of daily appointments, was free time to plan your free time!

I find this perhaps the most important aspect of this hack: we never had time to think and plan our free time. When we were busy, we never had time to plan our free time. Think of those weekends where they just arrived and you just went through them, and then Monday came again …. and that cycle would just go on for months.

This is what my typical work day now looks like:

Morning block (8-noon):

• Plan my work calendar 14 days out — review accept reschedule appointments and requests.
• Review my plans for my free time of the day.
• First appointment + time to reflect on the discussion.
• Some work stuff.

Lunch block (noon — 2pm):

• lunch
• First / second appointment

Afternoon block (2–5pm):

• Plan my free time to track my personal goals.
• Second appointment + time to reflect on the discussion.
• More work stuff.

I can go on and talk about how I used my free time, what I gained from them, etc. however I think we all could expect what those are … more time with family, more time for my body and mind, more time to develop a hobby/side gig/second career, etc. you can go find books websites whatever to help give you ideas.

Give it a try. Pace yourself. You don’t have to go down to 2 right away. Just like any hacks, you approach it by following the direction of what the hack intends to take you. Just be intentional on how you might want to use those free times: use your free time to plan your free time.

If you really need some ideas on how to spend your free time, here are some I find quite helpful:

1. Write a biography of your life.
2. Write an imaginary commencement speech.
3. Write a letter to your child to tell them who you are.

Oh and yes, you guessed it right. I planned my free time to use my free time to write stuff.