Navigating westward.

I don't have any tattoos. If I had one, it would be a compass. That's the Eagle Scout in me -- always orienteering, always wanting to know which way I'm headed. In the hands of a skilled operator, a compass can give you a pretty good idea of where you are. More important, it can get you where you want to be. Of all the cardinals, West is looking pretty good at the moment.

I'm working on a book and taking the writing work seriously for the first time. My goal is simple: to get the damn thing published before I turn 30. When my grandfather published his first book, he used the advance to take his wife and four kids on a summer-long road trip out west.

While they were able, my grandparents traveled the world. The understood the value of experience, the importance of living outside of your comfort zone. They understood it so well that they were willing to load four kids into a station wagon and take them camping in places like Yellowstone and Badlands National Park.

Advances aren't what they used to be. But if I sell this thing, Frances and I are heading westward. While I'd love to repeat that summer-long odyssey, neither of us has three months of vacation. For me, the allure of the American west has been the inherent contradiction of the hardness of the country and its beauty. Any time out west would be time well spent.

Curtailing the need to compare.

A few days ago, I wrote about how I wrestle with the impulse to compare myself with others. This is an insidious, destructive impulse. This is what Steven Pressfield would call another manifestation of Resistance. Since I wrote about the topic, I've been experimenting with effective ways to curtail the need to compare. I think of it as editing my life. Like the sculptor, I'm chipping away everything that isn't the statue.

The most effective way of tearing out this impulse has been to slash the time I spend on social media. Instead, I read books. You know, actual printed books with pages, ink, and that amazing sawed-lumber scent. 

As I've written here before, I'm no neophyte. But social media makes it easy to get sucked into the vortex of comparison, especially with the rise of lifestyle-themed material that has permeated content generation, even outside of the corporate world.

This type of content is fine. It has its purpose. But it centers on the self. Reading books forces me into a more empathetic state of mind. I wander around in someone else's head. I wonder where they were at, mentally, when they put the words to paper. I think about what motivates the characters. The self fades.

This more balanced diet of content consumption has paid dividends. Aside from feeling happier overall, I feel sharper and more engaged, more empathetic. I also find I'm sleeping better, most likely because I'm not spending my last 30 minutes of consciousness in front of a screen.

My eyesight may be deteriorating prematurely, but so far, it's worth it.

Intentions | Drive.

It's a new work week here in my little slice of America. I spent yesterday getting things done. I'm going to spend today getting things done because I get things done for a living.

One of the most rewarding things about my job is that every night, the team makes a new product. It lands on people's doorsteps. It emerges in real time in their newsfeeds. It gets pushed to their inboxes or fed via smartphone alerts. We are makers.

When I was a teenager, I worked for my uncle's tile company in the summer. It was during the housing boom. We worked mostly in developments that were springing up all over Morris and Sussex counties -- half-million-dollar McMansions with fifty yards of backyard and your next-door neighbor within spitting distance. Sometimes, we could tile one of these houses (massive kitchen, full bathroom and powder room) in a day. We'd return and grout the next.

I remember looking in the passenger side-view mirror as we drove away from the job site in his battered, red Ford Scottsdale. Behind us was a fully tiled development. Together, we had made something. 

The ship that already came in.

There was a time I wanted to be a lawyer. A long time, really. I wanted to be a lawyer for all the wrong reasons. I wanted the money, nice suits, and a Jaguar. I wanted a three-car garage to park it in. I wanted the nicest house on the block and the nicest shit to put in it. I thought that these things were the currency of life.

I'm not going to lie to you. Some days, I still do. Some days, I get wrapped up the race to the nicest, best, fastest fill-in-the-blank. I obsess over what a few dollars more could do, what a difference it could make. I think it's only natural. I accept that. But I fight it anyway.

Listening to Tim Ferriss' podcast, I'm reminded that there are other currencies in life: family, experiences, knowledge, whom you choose as friends. Wealth in these areas, to me, is more important than money. Assessing life with these currencies in mind shifts balances into the black.

I also remind myself that this mine is a distinctly middle-class problem. The fact that I'm able to entertain these thoughts on this platform, and don't have to worry about where my next meal or clean drinking water is coming from goes a long way.

When I think about it like that, it's impossible to complain. It's impossible not to appreciate what I've received.

Inside the octagon.

I'm reading a book called The Professor in the Cage. It's about a college English professor who, fed up with his stalled career, decides the best way to get himself fired is to join the MMA gym that's just opened across the street from his office, and write about hardening himself to fight inside the octagon.

The book raises a lot of intersting questions about masculinity and violence. Thematically, It also addresses the life unlived.

The author, Jonathan Gottschall, says one of his primary motivations for writing the book was to figure out if he was actually a coward. After a liftime of shying away from physical confrontation, would he panic when the cage gate was bolted shut?

I'm following Gottschall's tale with the same rapt attention of a top-tier MMA bout. Here is somebody who's not content with the live unlived. We all have our octagons. Not all of us step inside.