Fueling Your Neurology For Work And Play

(The Africa articles have been difficult so I've decided instead to get back to writing with a random article. This is a personal piece and I hope you enjoy it. Stay tuned.)

In marketing there is a principle which states that...

"Most people, by the time they become adults, will lose their capacity for youthful abandonment. They will never lose the CRAVING for it but they become psychologically starved because they no longer have the ability."

This is pretty fascinating when you consider all the advertising with images of adults with big beaming smiles on their faces while using the product – but when you think about it, how many adults do YOU know who have the ability to have that much fun??

By my own personal estimation, fun is probably one of the least commonly experienced emotions among adults.

When an adult says “I’m having fun” it’s more often a vacuous jargon that means “I’m interested in what I’m doing” as opposed to the ecstatic abandonment they enjoyed when they were kids.

Of course, most folks would never admit it to themselves because fun is thought of as being the “light at the end” of the tunnel for achieving success.

You get to have fun during your leisure time, so if you want to have more fun, simply become successful so you can take time off. Right??

This is basically thought of as being a truism.

Probably because it WAS true at one point, but as you get older you don’t realize your neurology has changed.

(We’re using the word “neurology” pretty loosely in this article -– but you catch my drift).

The way it works is basically like this.

Your neurology adapts to whatever circumstances you’re most accustomed to.

So if you’re a little kid who’s used to playing around all day, you’re probably going to feel antsy and restless when you’re asked to focus on school.

And if you’re an adult who slaves furiously to meet deadlines for years on end, you’re probably going to feel trapped in your head when you’re out trying to have fun.

This has been a hot topic on my mind for the past several years.

Back when I used to go out and chase girls 7 nights a week my personality was basically a barrage of humour and jokes.

Then I sat down to write “The Blueprint” in 2004 and I found myself jittery and resentful for having to focus for hours at a time.

I remember getting up to walk around the back yard every few minutes, grudgingly buckling back down to write, and then getting up to scurry around again and again.

Later I adjusted to working an hour without distraction. Then two hours. Then maybe four or five.

Finally as I started adjusting to the extreme workload that came with RSD’s struggle in 2005 I found myself rolling out of bed, turning on the computer, and working straight through until it was time to go back to sleep.

There were periods of consecutive months between 2005 and 2007 where I worked 16 hour days. I simply adjusted and accepted it.

Around 2006 I noticed my personality had changed, both for the better and the worse.

On the positive side I found I could hold multiple concepts in my head at the same time and see how they came together without losing my train of thought. My attention span seemed to increase noticeably while my fluid problem solving skills and creativity became lightening fast relative to where they’d been before.

At the same time, I noticed everything I thought about, spoke about, or spent time on, was work.

Simple socializing like small talk and joking around became awkward. If it wasn’t about work I felt anxious like something bad was about to happen. As if I lost my momentum for even five minutes I’d go back to slacking off and spend another year struggling to get back on track.

The only exception was teaching bootcamp because I could rationalize to myself “This is for work”. Bootcamp was always the part of the week I looked forward to because I could have fun and let loose without feeling guilty about it.

(Funny enough I also came to understand why students often speak of being “exhausted” after each night of bootcamp. It’s because their neurology gets burnt out from several hours of fun in a row and they need to re-connect with their introverted comfort zones).

Anyway the pressure I was dealing with in my mid twenties was probably more than was reasonable for a person of my age and maturity at that time. So I’m proud of how I dealt with it overall.

Then as I came into 2007 I made the ambitious decision to make it the “most fun year of my life” – which I stated publically in the New Year’s Eve blog video as a way of committing myself to follow through.

Now you might think to yourself “Having fun?? Uhhh, that’s easy!!”

The difference is that when you’ve got a team who relies on you to produce results, or else they don’t eat and there’s no roof over their heads, having fun suddenly becomes a source of stress because it feels like a massive waste of time.

On top of that, and this is obviously a generalization, I’d noticed over the years that most of the folks who had a talent for being relaxed and having fun also tended to be flunkies and underachievers in their professional lives.

This was an interesting dilemma because on a certain level these were the guys who I modelled and admired.

Usually they’d spend a lot of time laughing and hanging out with friends and taking life easy, which gave them a sort of care-free vibe that was attractive and contagious.

But later as I’d get to know them, I realized they were projecting an illusion of coolness, because their lives were mediocre at best (and a total train wreck at worst).

I’ve often suspected many of these guys were burdened by a delusion that someday they’d get paid just for being cool. Like a male version of Paris Hilton or Tila Tequila, I’m not sure.

The problem was that a part of their “cool factor” was they lacked an inviolable personal standard for the quality of their own lives.

Their “neurologies” were never burdened down with stress or compulsive analysis because if things weren’t going well they’d just laugh it off and rationalize. But years of living in this zone also left them with no ability to deal with friction, setbacks, or adversity because their higher priority was maintaining the flow and their happy vibe.

In my experience this was a form of weakness because their external circumstances often weren’t in alignment with the happiness of their internal world, which forced them deeper into personal denial.

Put them into a situation where avoidance and rationalization could no longer deal with their problems, and suddenly they’d be whining like young children with no ability to cope.

Again, this is a generalization of many people who I met over the course of my life. But I also feel it’s fairly on point in terms of the commonalities I saw in many people who on the surface seemed socially super successful.

In my early twenties I remember feeling somewhat nervous and approval-seeking around these types because they had something I wished that I had myself. But as I hit my late twenties I became more indifferent, if not sympathetic, because I realized they’d taken a route that would cause problems for them down the line.

I guess that’s what you’d call “coming into your own” – which really just means you don’t buy into other people’s values above your own. Funny enough it often makes people question themselves because you seem so confident in your own way of doing things.

Anyway over the years I discovered that there’s actually TWO ways of getting that carefree vibe...

The first is just to ignore reality and make having fun the higher priority.

But the second, which in my view is the more powerful way of doing it, is to continually challenge yourself in your professional life while learning the art of separating work from pleasure.

What they don’t teach you in school is that your neurology becomes ADDICTED to whatever emotional state you’re accessing most of the time.

So when you notice that most guys who party all the time seem mentally retarded in their professional lives, it might seem so sad and pathetic that it turns you off of letting loose.

But at the same time, you have to also realize if you sacrifice fun for the purpose of professional success for too long you are essentially FRYING your ability to enjoy life – which is equally short-sighted.

Doing this will lead you to a place where having fun becomes “going through the motions”.

You become so analytical and disconnected from the REAL EXPERIENCE of true enjoyment that you don’t even know what it is anymore.

As absurd as it sounds, you wind up analyzing it the same way you would a business proposal, with an objective criteria of what fun “should be” instead the emotions you’re actually experiencing.

"I’m doing something interesting (or that costs a lot of money). Therefore the conditions for having fun are now met, which means I must be having fun."

There’s no ACTUAL lighting up of the “happy centres” in your neurology. That part of your neurology has withered away.

It’s like if you lie in bed for a year and now all the muscles in your legs have atrophied and withered away. How much of a “work out” can you really do??

Maybe you can exercise lightly for a few minutes, but then after that the tissue has been worked and you’re forced to take a break.

Only after a few months of repetition have you gradually built back enough muscle tissue to work it without burning it in more than a few minutes.

This is the vicious cycle which so many adults wind up trapped in without their conscious knowledge.

You’re having “fun” but you’re not REALLY having fun.

You’re not detoxifying yourself from all the cortisone that builds up in your system at work, so there’s no renewal taking place.

You show up for a fun activity because you think you’re “supposed to” but the truth is you’d rather be back in your work-addicted comfort zone.

It’s just that if you stopped going out altogether then you’d have to admit to yourself that the way you’ve been living is wrong.

And that’s almost impossible because you have so much invested in it personally, let alone with your family and staff who depend on you to pay the bills.

So what do most adults do??

They use ALCOHOL as a crutch because it stimulates those emotional pleasure centres for them.

(At least for an hour or two before they become belligerant and a pain in the ass).

To get past this you have to make a very deliberate effort to pump up your “happy” neurology on a regular basis, so it doesn’t lose its capacity to process those types of emotions.

That means continuing to dominate in the professional arena and producing the results that people expect from you, but at the same time, making a clear separation between work and play.

In my case I started out by going to the beach a few times a week. I hated every minute of and thought about getting back to work the entire time (which isn’t fun either but at least you get rid of that anxious feeling that nothing is getting done). But it was a start.

Then I started doing hiking and getting outside to add to that. I’d drone on about work to my poor buddy Olcay but over time I was able to recognize what I was doing and minimize it by putting myself in check.

Finally one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle was deliberately forcing myself to laugh and joke around.

I got this idea from the principle that “Changing your physiology will change your state”.

The idea was that I’d force myself to laugh in the places where “normal” people would – ie: at the points where I USED to laugh before I became a peak performer self-parody.

To do this I actually told my friends “I’m going try to joke around more and laugh more. It will probably seem insincere but I need to do this.”

This helped me to get past the internal resistance of appearing incongruent.

I’d noticed over the years that the fear of being perceived as incongruent was probably the biggest hurdle which held people back from reaching their potential with success with women. So I knew I had to get back to a space like when I was a pick-up newbie where I was pushing envelope in terms of testing out new behaviour and not caring what people thought.

This was tough around guys like Tim and Olcay who are super socially intuitive. These are guys who KNOW if I’m somewhat “faking” it, and because I know they know it, it’s even harder.

But these are also my real friends and genuinely supportive, so I didn’t let it hold me back.

The cool thing was that over about 6-10 months it became natural and internalized. I still felt my neurology being exhausted having too many hours of fun in a row, but the threshold where that would happen was a several hours more.

I’m probably at about 60% of where I know I could be (typical analyst – wooo!), but considering my work ethic is at about 200% I know I can eventually catch that up.

What I learned from all this is that work and pleasure need to be separated consciously and deliberately.

As a peak performer the temptation is to make work your entire life.

You’ll make vacuous statements like “You have to be well rounded” because you THINK you’re supposed to say things like this (or maybe that balance might make you a better performer).

But it’s as much of a rationalization as the flunky who talks about how he’s rejected the professional world because he’s above the fray of capitalist society, when in reality he couldn’t secure a decent job to save his life.

The key is to treat both fun and focus as different muscles that need to be worked and trained independently (even if you’re training them at the same time).

It’s cool to build your neurology to cut through ungodly loads of work like the mental equivalent of Jay Cutler.

More than just pride of being a true producer, there is something philosophical about being a person who can talk about their dreams and really achieve them (as opposed to telling yourself random lies).

But you ALSO have to force yourself to laugh and have fun throughout the day. Otherwise your dreams will probably turn out to be meaningless.

That’s because when you’ve lost your capacity for true abandonment, you wind up doing things just to do them. For no real reason at all.

I think Robert M. Pirsig hit the nail on the head when he said:

"Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum."

And you know, once you’ve stepped into the mindsets and behaviours of a corporate “suit” it’s not going to go away over night.

You have to gradually nurse yourself back to a state of semi-normalcy. That means putting in the identical effort that you put into developing your professional skill-sets to discovering how to have fun again.

In the meantime, you don’t want to lose that ability to put in a week of 16 hour work days in the urgent situations when it’s called for. So you’ve got to maintain a balance where you don’t revert back to your old teenage-self who struggled to produce results.

Peak performance is the art of being fully engaged with “focused present energy” and then renewing your mind and spirit with total relaxation and being fully unplugged.

From my perspective I feel like I’m coming into a really good zone, because I’ve been cultivating that “carefree” side of my personality while I’m still enjoying the benefits that come from working hard.

And the cool thing is that by combining hard work and having fun synergistically I finally HAVE been able to have the most fun year of my life.

The trips to Mexico and Africa this year never could have happened if I haven’t taken it to the next level in terms of my work ethic, but at the same time, I was actually able to enjoy them because I’d also taken the effort to make having fun a personal priority.

So in my opinion you CAN have your cake and eat it too.

You do NOT have to become another victim of the professional world any more than you have to become a victim of being a burnt out party-boy.

Moderation.

The Greeks have been talking about it for thousands of years and deep down you probably knew it was true.

My hope for my own career is that as I evolve and progress people can look at me and say “That guy is a really hard worker, but he also seems like a balanced, cool guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously.”

The whole cartoon character thing is OK in your twenties because you’re LEARNING and it’s about trial-and-error.

In your thirties it’s about as uncool as holding onto existential angst... Uhh, NO.

There’s a time and a place for everything, and I think that as you get older you really need to work all this stuff out.

Anyway that’s my goal, and hopefully this article has offered you insight if you’re in a similar position.

I’ll be back later with the details from my recent experience in Africa.

Thanks for reading!!

Tyler