Yifei's Rough Drafts

Imagine a circle.

You’re in the center. Your family and closest friends form the innermost ring. Your acquaintances form the next ring. Your community, your city, your country form the ones beyond that. Keep going in this fashion until you reach the edge: all of humanity, the world, the universe.

Now look back to the center. How far does your influence actually stretch? For most of us, the answer is not very far.

While a man’s influence is something that grows over time, for now, I’m more interested in the circles that are closest to me — rather than global matters that are beyond my control.

For now.

A schmuck is someone who hasn’t earned your respect. A schmuck is clueless — an outsider who violates unspoken rules of the game. A schmuck is beyond saving.

Schmucks don’t get their business plans read. Schmucks don’t get their texts returned. Schmucks don’t get your full attention in conversation.

The thing is… we’re all schmucks to somebody.

The key is to recognize when you’ve been labeled as a schmuck — and to show the offender that they’ve made a terrible mistake in judgement.

Unless you can play on even ground, there’s little sense in playing.

We are all capable of feeling pain and doubt and loneliness and exhaustion. I urge you, however:

Refuse to allow yourself to suffer.

Pain is a reaction to the environment. It’s your body’s way of sending a message: “Don’t touch the fire” or “Eat something.”

Suffering, however, is submission to pain. It’s allowing yourself to play the victim, relinquishing control and adopting a passive stance.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is a choice.

Get to know the difference.

The bigger your world view, the smaller you know you are.

Sheltering yourself in a bubble doesn’t make you any bigger.

But it does make you feel bigger. And that allows you to act bigger.

This is why science will lose to fundamentalism.

A simple mental exercise:

Imagine that you financially own your surroundings. The building you’re in, the street it’s on, the land deed itself — all under your name. The people around you are employees and loved ones — your tribe, your people. The bathroom towels and the paper stationary bear your mark. Pat yourself on the back, Mr./Ms. Monopoly Moneybags. You’ve done well.

Now picture somebody littering in your building. Or hearing of about a threat to your staff. Or witnessing a car accident happen on your street. Would you look around sheepishly, waiting for someone to tell you what to do? Would you hesitate? Ask permission?

When we don’t fear the reprimand of others, we naturally do what we intend to. When we feel a personal responsibility for the outcome, we naturally take necessary actions.Thus in the comforts of our own homes, among friends, we’re all natural born leaders.

Perhaps leadership in the outside world is merely a matter of expanding the bounds of your living room.

Input and output. Efficiency and yield. These are words that I unexpectedly found myself using while thinking about recent work/life progress.

Yes, it’;s brutally objective. Sure, it’s heartless and inhuman. Yet that’s precisely why I found the “my life as a factory” analogy useful in this situation - because most of us have a tendency to sugar-coat our mistakes and look past our blemishes. Through the cold, calculating frame of a manufacturing manager, whose sole job is to run a lean, efficient production process, I was able to do some of the best damn introspection and planning that I’ve done in years.

Maybe you’re not so extreme. Fair enough. You’re probably still after the same things I am (and most people are) though: more time, more money, more freedom, more of what makes you happy. The ability to see yourself as you are (as opposed to how you’d like to be) is a tremendously powerful tool for plotting towards those goals. And the factory is a powerful analogy:

• What are you actually producing? At home? At work? In society?
• How much resources do you spend on it?
• How can you raise your output?
• How can you lower your costs?
• What if you had to do it in half the time?
• Where are resources being wasted?

At worst, you’ll reaffirm what you already knew. At best, you’ll stumble upon one of those inconvenient truths about yourself that nobody had bothered to tell you.

Yes, you should smell the flowers, eat the chocolate, and drink plenty of wine. Enjoy life for all that she offers and appreciate the heck out of being human. But when it comes down to self-evaluation, consider being a bit of a machine. Scrutinize without mercy. Analyze without emotion. And know that your human life will be richer because of it.