3 step personal system upgrade

Warning: Unpleasant Reality Check Ahead.

This installment of Clear Thinking is free for everyone. I send this email weekly.  If you would also like to receive it, join other smart people who absolutely love it today.

👉 If you enjoy reading this post, feel free to share it with friends! Or feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏

---

Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year. The Jewish year 5784 started this past Sunday.

Like any new year, it’s a time to make resolutions which we will soon break.

You resolve to stop eating cookies. 3 weeks into 5784, a friend at work offers you some lovely biscuits (she comes from a country where yummy cookies are called lovely biscuits). Slam dunk. End of New Years resolution.

This always seemed problematic to me.

Why do we make resolutions, break them and then come back next year to sign up for more resolutions which we will soon break?

Is this the way the world is wired? Why do we just accept this?

In order to find an answer, I built 3 models of the world and tested them against empirical data.

The time model

The first model has one variable - time.

In his monumental book, Sein un Zeit (Being and Time) the German philosopher Heidegger describes the nature of time and human existence.

The basic idea of Being and Time is simple: being is time.

Heidegger’s concept of time merges past, present and future.

There is no first and second half and a half-time show and going home.

This is important and we’ll come back to this.

An authentic human Being must remember that they will be dead soon. Steve Jobs discussed the concept of death and its influence on life decisions in his famous 2005 Stanford commencement address. In his speech, Jobs said:

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. ... Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent."

We can confront our mortality and live authentically or we can avoid confrontation, hide in the crowd and live vicariously in social media.

Yes - I know, what you are thinking. Heidegger was a Nazi (for a while). Let’s not get distracted by politics.

The basic ideas of a time model of Being were introduced in the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh).

The Tanakh references a time model in several places using the word T’shuvah. In books of Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and in other places, the word T’shuvah is used to refer to ‘tkufat Hashanah’ or a period of time in the year.

During the Jewish High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the word is used to describe repentance.

Our time model fits the empirical data on repentance nicely. We repent on cookies. Make a resolution and and break it later. Come back next year. Rinse and repeat.

In the time model, the period between life and death is not a straight line.

It’s a circle. This is a good model. An optimistic model. You can come back next year and do a bit better. Or next week. Or this evening.

In physics - an event that will happen in 1 year cannot influence your actions now.

But, the time model breaks the laws of causality of physics.

The future influences the present. You look ahead 1 year and you say:

“I will be a person who does not eat cookies”.

That future thought influences your actions today.

Can you be anything? Unfortunately not.

You have a personal scale of achievement, moral discipline and ethics.

You have your own scale. You go up and down on your own personal scale. You are not going to be the Dali Lama. You are not going to be Moses, Muhammed or Steve Jobs. You will start the new year in a better place. During the year, you can try out all kinds of things. Some will work. Most won't. You will make resolutions, break them and come back for another lap. Continue the experimental protocol.

The space model

The second model considers Being as a location in 3-dimensional space.

In all of the Tanakh, there is exactly 1 place where the word T’shuvah does not refer to a period of time. It refers to a location.

Here's the passage from 1 Samuel 7:15-17 :

Samuel continued as Israel’s leader all the days of his life. Each year he went on a circuit from Bethel to Gilgal to Mizpah, judging Israel in all those places. But he always went back to Ramah, where his home was, and there he judged Israel. And he built an altar there to the Lord.

He went home. Home to his mother Hannah. No matter the greatness of a leader, he must always come home.

In the space model, we make change our location. We move from one tech company to another and relocate from San Francisco to Austin to NYC. We get fired after a startup goes bust and find another job. Or work as an independent consultant. Or change jobs and become a writer. Or a third grade teacher. Or make natural vanilla and sell it online. Working from home.

But coming home is not enough.

We need a third model - the truth model.

The truth model

On the way home, you need to do a hard reality check. The kind of hard reality check that your German grandmother would force you to do if you grew up in Milwaukee or Berlin.

She would look at you straight in the eye and tell you to stop telling stories.

We all do it.

You were lead DevOps engineer at a healthcare AI company. You were competent worked hard, did a good job and made good money. The company downsized in 2022 and then you got promoted to VP Engineering. All because of your talent. Not because everyone else were fired and you were the last man standing after the blood bath between the founders and the investors.

That’s the narrative you told yourself.

You forgot all the nasty details. Like how your mistakes cost the company $150K while you were trying to be VP Engineering and DevOps lead at the same time trying to be a hero for the company and you were burnt-out and not paying attention to the AWS bill.

And so on.

The 3 step system upgrade

It doesn’t matter if you are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu or an undefined religious variable.

5784 is time for a system upgrade.

I like to think about myself as Danny version version 5.7.84. The 5.7.83 version of Danny ate cookies. Version 5.7.84 trains on Qi-gong every day and eats cookies in special social situations.

I will not bull-shit you. You cannot just want this. You cannot be all you can be or any of the other marketing b/s. You cannot just watch some TikTok videos and master Qigong. It will not happen just by wanting, or by reading posts on LinkedIn.

You will have to sign up and pay for the system upgrade.

Step 1 - execute the time model

Confront your own mortality and live authentically. Use the future to influence the present. Look ahead 1 year and say:

“I am a person who does not eat cookies”.

Use that future thought to influence your actions today. Understand your personal scale of achievement, moral discipline and ethics. Pay someone to help you figure it out. It is money you need to spend, because there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Step 2 - execute the space model

Come home. You get to let your German grandmother in Milwaukee beat you up. It’s worth it. Maybe coming home to make natural vanilla and sell it online is what you need. Pitch it to your grandmother. If she gets it, you have a winning pitch deck for your next gig.

Step 3 - execute the truth model

Confess and stop telling yourself stories and made-up narratives. If you’re Catholic go to confession. If you're Jewish go to your local Chabad and talk to the shaliach.

I don’t know about Catholic priests but Chabad is super-user-friendly and non-judgmental.

Be yourself. Spend the money and tell yourself the truth.

Before I go break another New Year’s resolution

You might have noticed that I changed the name of the newsletter from “Back to the future of work” to “Clear thinking by Danny Lieberman”. People wiser than me, advised that back to the future was a bit too cute. “Clear thinking” is well, clearer.