Why Not Fear?

I don’t have a lot of childhood memories, but I vividly remember this one: I’m 10 or 11 years old. I’m standing at the top of the basement stairs, and I’ve just closed the door behind me. I look down into the blackness. There’s a tiny bit of light coming under the door, but it quickly fades as the steps descend. I can’t even see the landing at the bottom.

I feel afraid. Afraid to descend into the darkness. Afraid that, in that moment of vulnerability, that moment of blindness, that maybe, just maybe, all my imaginary monsters would turn out to be real, and would come boiling out of the darkness to consume me.

I stand there for a long time, contemplating that fear. And then, slowly, deliberately, I walk down the stairs, keenly aware of my fear yet consciously choosing to do exactly the thing I’m afraid of. I remember standing at the bottom of the stairs, in the darkness, every sense on high alert. I don’t know how long I actually stood there, but as vivid as the memory is, I think some part of me might be standing there still.

In fact, I’d say that’s true. I’d say some part of me died that day, standing in my dark basement, listening to my breath. The version of me that came back up the stairs was forever changed, in a way I will always remember. I don’t think I realized the significance of it at the time, but I certainly felt the emotion keenly.

I wonder if you have a childhood memory like this, of choosing to face down and overcome an irrational fear. Moments like these are significant in our lives. They are the inflection points through which we grow up.

I see now, today, that I am at a new inflection point. That some fear is preventing me from growing, and that I must confront it by standing right in the middle of it for as long as it takes me to see that it, too, is completely imaginary. I am coming to realize, more and more with each word, that my writing is an attempt to do just that: confront my fear and die to who I am, so that a more grownup version of me can be born.

—

FDR famously said, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Those ten words are packed with a remarkable amount of significance. It’s taken a great deal of contemplation for me to understand them—and I’m sure I could contemplate still more, coming to an ever deeper understanding.

What FDR was saying is that the things we’re afraid of are imaginary. 10-year-old Michael’s fear of monsters in the dark? Imaginary. That one’s obvious.

But FDR made this statement in 1933. Wasn’t the Great Depression indeed something real, and not imaginary, to be afraid of? Wasn’t the imminent rise of Nazi fascism in Europe something real, and not imaginary, to be afraid of?

Of course the Depression and Nazis are real. I’m not saying anything so obviously backwards. No, what I’m talking about here is more subtle. Pay Attention.

When we are afraid, we are not afraid of a real thing. We are afraid of our imagined version of what that thing will do to us. We are afraid of what’s going to happen in the future. And the future doesn’t exist, nor do the things we imagine are in it. We make them up. And then, often, we become afraid of them.

So young Michael wasn’t afraid of the dark. He was afraid of the monsters he imagined were in the dark, and what they would do to him if they caught him. Similarly, the world wasn’t afraid of the Great Depression. They were afraid of the hard times and starvation they imagined were coming for them. And free people weren’t afraid of Nazism. They were afraid of what the Nazis would do to their loved ones, their countries, and the world. But all those fears have one thing in common: they were about the future. And the thing about the future is that it has yet to be written—and being afraid of it doesn’t give us anything in terms of helping to write a good version of it.

For instance, when young me was standing at the top of the stairs ruminating on the darkness, he was afraid. But instead of wallowing in the fear, instead of letting it control his actions, he did something about it. He took control of the future he was afraid of. Because once he descended into the blackness, the fear disappeared, replaced by a more immediate concern: the need to pay close Attention, to be completely in the moment, to listen for the scrape of claws or slither of a tentacle, to feel outwards as if through sheer effort he could expand his sense of touch beyond his skin, to be open to the slightest smell that indicated danger.

In that moment, Michael was not afraid. No. In that moment, there was no room for fear. There was only room for being alert. For being activated. For being in the present moment.

And that kind of a moment is something we rarely experience in today’s world, precisely because we’re afraid of it. Yet, ironically, my experience that day in the basement taught me the first part of a lesson I’m still trying to realize today: that being in the moment doesn’t just temporarily push the fear aside. It actually disabuses you of the unreal notion of the thing you’re afraid of. There were no monsters in the darkness, waiting to get me.

But, again, I can hear you asking (and part of me is still badgering myself about this): aren’t I making a false comparison here? Wasn’t the job loss, deprivation, and starvation of the Great Depression something real?

Yes, of course it was. And I’m not trying to ignore or diminish the suffering people went through during those years. As I said, I’m trying to point to something more subtle. The world is more complicated than we know, and it’s good to try to look at it from multiple, seemingly-contradictory perspectives. Doing so forces us to stretch ourselves, and stretching causes us to grow. And growing (up) is precisely what we’re talking about here.

The point is not that the Depression wasn’t real, or that job loss, deprivation, or starvation aren’t real. The point is that when you’re starving, you aren’t afraid of starving. You’re simply trying to solve the problem. That, or you’ve given up. And both possibilities are—just like the experience of standing in the darkness—all-consuming. There is no room for fear when you’re starving, because it gets in the way of solving the problem, or because you’re too exhausted to care. In other words, fear is a privilege we exercise when we feel safe. And we exercise it precisely because we are uncomfortable feeling safe. (Which, now that I think about it, makes sense, because I think feeling safe is imaginary in exactly the same way fear is.)

And, finally, I think the reason we are uncomfortable feeling safe is because we realize that when we are out there taking action, trying to make the world a better place, we don’t feel safe. Feeling safe is a sign that we’re being complacent.

So, to sum up in other words: fear is a symptom of safety. If you want to be less afraid (and I both hope you do and think you should), then pick one of your fears, descend to the dark basement, and face it. Almost none of the things we’re afraid of in today’s world will actually hurt or kill us. Just like my monsters in the darkness.

Here, I’ll go first.

—

At first, when my memory of overcoming my fear of the darkness came back to me, I didn’t know why. I figured it was just some random whim of childhood memory. But in the writing of this piece I’ve come to realize that it came back to teach me something: all these years later and I’m still afraid. Not of the same thing as when I was 10. Not of the dark. But it’s still the same fear. The fear of something imaginary. Of something I have never seen, and believe on some level I will never see: death.

I recently re-encountered a Paul Simon song whose lyrics touched me deeply. (Listen here, if you like.)

Through the corridors of sleep, past shadows dark and deep

My mind dances and leaps in confusion.

I don’t know what is real, I can’t touch what I feel

And I hide behind the shield of my illusion.

So I’ll continue to continue to pretend my life will never end

and flowers never bend with the rainfall.

The mirror on my wall casts an image dark and small

But I’m not sure at all it’s my reflection.

I’m blinded by the light of God and truth and right

And I wander in the night without direction.

So I’ll continue to continue to pretend my life will never end

and flowers never bend with the rainfall.

No matter if you’re born to play the king or pawn

For the line is thinly drawn ‘tween joy and sorrow.

So my fantasy becomes reality

And I must be what I must be and face tomorrow.

So I’ll continue to continue to pretend my life will never end

and flowers never bend with the rainfall.

I’ve listened to that song dozens of times over the last few days. I cried almost every time, at first. For some reason, the song plucks at my sadness like Paul Simon plucks his guitar strings. But as I’ve come to know it better—to learn the lyrics and be able to anticipate them as I listen—it slowly becomes less and less of an emotional hammerblow for me to listen. It’s as if, in taking the song into myself, I become somehow inoculated against whatever sadness I feel there. It’s not gone. Not entirely. But I have become better at engaging with the feeling, and thus better at engaging with the song. I can use it, now, to examine the source of the feeling without being overwhelmed.

It’s the same as standing in the darkness to overcome a fear of the darkness. In every moment of feeling, we have a choice: we can merely feel our feelings (fear, sadness, etc), or we can let them lead us to a place of deeper understanding. And that’s what I’m advocating for, and trying to demonstrate.

So what is beneath the sadness this song provokes in me? What understanding have I gained? It’s this: Someday I’ll be dead. Someday you will be, too. The same goes for my parents, my wife, my friends, and my daughter. It’s true of everyone.

I grieve for us. That, at least, feels generous of me. To be sad that someday we won’t exist any longer. I’m sad because I love my family, and my friends, and you, too, reader. I’m sad because I love that little boy I used to be, who was afraid of those monsters in the dark.

But I’m also afraid. And that feels less generous, more selfish. Oh, it’s understandable, certainly. I’m not ashamed of my fear. But I am aware that it doesn’t serve me. In fact, writing these words right now, I can feel my fear trying to justify itself. I can hear the rationalization: “I’m trying to keep you safe.” And that’s actually true. Like any good deception, it has a lot of truth to it. The problem is, there’s no safety from death. Nothing I can do will make me immune to it. Maybe it’s the same as the monsters of my youth, in that nothing I could do would make me immune from them, either, because they weren’t real.

So… am I saying death isn’t real? I don’t think so. Not quite. That’s too close to the eternal paradises religions describe to us, and that story doesn’t ring true to me. Well then, what does ring true? I’m not sure. Thinking about how to write it, I actually feel… silly. Like, I don’t know what death is. I don’t even know what it’s like. Certainly not from the inside (so to speak). What will it be like to not exist? Do we even not exist after we die? How could we ever know that? Silly Michael, afraid of something he doesn’t understand, can’t describe, and has never experienced. I guess that’s just fear, though; it’s always about the person or thing we haven’t met.

I’m having trouble, I think, because I’m trying to write about something to which there’s no rational angle of approach. Death is beyond reason. Nonexistence is beyond reason. So what good will words do us here? Unless they can put us in a state of mind beyond words. Something like the old Zen koans: questions without answers, that get us to open ourselves up to whatever reason-transcending possibilities exist in reality.

And here’s the question I find myself asking: what is the opposite of memory? When I’m thinking about being alive (in an attempt to think about being dead), what am I doing? I’m thinking about memories using words (which themselves are memories).

And what happens when I stop using words?

Well… nothing. Nothing bad happens. The world just keeps moving along. And those moments of movement are happening across the universe, throughout all of reality, and they encompass everything that is. So, nothing happens… and also everything happens. Maybe that’s death. Nothing, and everything.

It doesn’t seem useful to be afraid of everything. And it certainly doesn’t make sense to be afraid of nothing.

Still, that’s only a rational answer. Even if it’s the best I can give right now, it won’t get me all the way to the other side of my fear. It’s just one step down the stairs. To go further will require hard emotional work—the same hard emotional work I did when I was 10 (which I clearly still remember to this day). I can do that work now, while I’m alive, or I can wait until I die and have it done for me. There’s no better or worse to it, no right or wrong. All I can do is follow the path I’m given. So that’s what I’ll continue to do.

—

Ok, I’ll pass the ball back to you here. What was that like for you? To witness someone doing his best to stand in the middle of his fear? Did it sound difficult?

How did it feel? What did you notice happening in your body as you were reading? Whatever it was, it’s ok. There’s nothing wrong with any feeling. They rise and fall in us, like waves. All they ask is to be noticed, felt, and allowed to pass on. But they do have something to tell us. What are you feelings telling you right now?

It seems to me there must not be any right or wrong way to go about being you. You like what you like, you’re afraid of what you’re afraid of, and that’s that. There’s no sense in trying to change any of it, any more than there’s any sense in trying to convince a rock to change color. A zebra can’t change it’s stripes, they say. So when you just sit, and pay Attention, what are you like? Who is the You that shows up? And what feelings is that You clinging to, and what feelings is it hiding from?

The answers to those questions may or may not surprise you. I don’t know. It seems safe to assume you approach these things differently than I do. And even though I don’t think there’s any right or wrong way to approach them (because I suspect that for you, same as for me, the only options are to do the work or have it done for you when you die), I hope you will choose to seek answers to the questions of who you are, what you’re doing here, and why you matter.

The thing about these questions is that the answers, like feelings, are always changing. When I was 10, I needed to stand in the darkness for a while in order to be who I was and become who I was becoming. Now that I’m older, I need to write. Different answers to the same questions, that we must continue to pursue if we’re to continue to grow up.

So. To answer the question in the title of this blog post: “why not fear?” After all this, I think there is no solid reason, other than that I don’t want to. I’m tired of being afraid. It doesn’t do me any good that I can see. So it’s time to let go of it.

And, finally, what about you? If fear still serves you, that’s fine. Maybe there’s something else in your life, something you want to get over and move past, but you’re afraid to. If you take one thing away from reading these words, make it this: if you want something, that’s enough reason to pursue it. And if you want to be rid of something, that’s enough reason to leave it behind. Just be honest with yourself. Be compassionate to yourself. When it’s your time to do whatever it’s been given you to do, you’ll do it. I know you will. Because I love you, and you love you, and love is the reason everything ever happens.

I hope you continue to happen.

I Decided to Write this Post of my Own Free Will… or Did I? (from Medium)

Originally posted January 13, 2018

I was walking on the greenbelt by the river when I came to a side path. I didn’t have any particular destination or deadline; I was just walking. I felt like the character in Robert Frost’s The Path Not Taken, looking down each branch of the path to see what lay ahead. I thought about how all of the things that had happened in my life lead up to this moment, this decision. Right? Or left? Wide path, or narrow? River, or park? Busy, or quiet? And so on. It felt a little like making a decision, but more than that it felt like an evaluation: which outcomes did I prefer, and how strongly? I realized that countless past experiences were causing me to lean one way or the other, going all the way back to my childhood. And how much say did I really have as a child? My clothes were picked for me. My food was given to me. I was literally carried from one place to another based on the decisions of other people. Perhaps my parents always chose the left path. Or the busy one. All the while each of these experiences shaping the things I wanted. Three decades later, that same baby, now grown, stood at a fork in the path and thought, is this truly my decision? Or am I slave to my past experiences that cause my present preferences?

Free will: Is it real? Or an illusion? Are we capable of making decisions freely? Or are we in truth complex automata, driven to choose in certain ways based on the things that have happened to us, destined to run a course set for us by countless past experiences we had no control over?

It certainly feels like we have the ability to make decisions freely, rather than simply following an inevitable set of rules. This is probably where the concept of free will comes from. It feels like it’s a real thing. But is it in truth?

Philosophers have argued both ways, and both sides have on many occasions declared the case closed after presenting their reasoning, presuming their thoughts to be unassailable. Even Nietzsche, one of the West’s most brilliant thinkers, violently disagrees with himself from one book to the next. Free will is first an absurd self-contradiction, next an important route to becoming your best possible self.

Like so many philosophers before me, I get stuck in this circle. It feels like I have free will, the ability to choose freely, but I am still driven by my wants into certain decisions that it doesn’t seem reasonable to call free.

If it exists, free will is certainly a fragile and ephemeral thing.

I work pretty hard on developing myself as a human being. I regularly sit with a coach, and there are several themes that continually come up in our sessions, and I see them mirrored in spiritual philosophies from around the world.

One of these themes is the importance of having a connection to, and awareness of, my feelings. I’m a rather overly intellectual person, and it can sometimes be difficult for me to perceive what I’m feeling. So I have to practice noticing the way my emotions are tugging me, what they want me to do, being able to differentiate one want from another, and the degree of those wants.

Another theme is healthy emotional detachment. Of separating my self from my emotions. We see this in Buddhism, in Stoicism, in the asceticism of monks and nuns of many religions. The idea is that if you reduce your attachment to the world, and to things that happen, and you will suffer less. I’m much better at this one — perhaps too good, to the point where I can use it as a tactic to avoid engaging with life. So there’s a healthy balance to be struck here.

Now, let’s say we have a guru who’s an expert at both of these things. What does that look like? At its ultimate, it looks like a person who is almost totally absent of desire, who could legitimately be content whatever happened, whatever decision she made. She also uses her perfect attunement with her emotions to look at the tiny, almost invisible emotional wants tugging her in one way or another and realizes that she equally desires all potential outcomes, that no particular path is more or less attractive to her.

And then… she chooses anyway.

I think this is the path to true free will. To not be driven by the wants our experiences have programmed into us. Neither to make arbitrary decisions due to inability to discern our emotions or intentions. To choose, both fully detached and fully aware. To choose because choosing is a part of life. Only such choices as these can be entirely free, because only in these cases could we truly could have chosen any of the possible options.

And so free will becomes not something we are born into as human beings, or something that we are given as we grow older, but instead something to strive for, something that there are degrees of. As we become more centered, more healthily detached, more stoic, and as we learn how to better and better read the feelings that are there, beneath the surface calm, we earn the right to call our decisions free.

Because until we have done those things, we are in a way still slaves to our emotions, to the conditioning our culture and society and parents instilled in us. Few decisions in our lives are made completely freely, and in some people’s lives perhaps none.

I believe perfectly free decisions are something that is possible, just very difficult. I’ll be striving to do that work. What about you?

The purpose of life, from a cosmic perspective (from Medium)

Originally posted November 7, 2017

The universe is dying.

If you’ve been paying attention, this isn’t really news. We’ve known it for a while. And truth be told, it’s hardly an urgent issue: the old girl still has (depending on which theory you ascribe to) at least 5 billion years of gas in the tank — probably quite a few billions more. But regardless, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is still driving us down a one way road, the end of which still seems to be total cosmic entropy.

Now, at first glance that piece of information doesn’t seem to have much to do with the purpose of life, much less the purpose of your life in particular. So what am I going on about? Well, let’s dig a little deeper and I promise we’ll find ourselves circling back around to this.

The question we’re looking at is this: does life have a purpose? Do we human beings have a purpose in this dying universe? I believe we do. And while I certainly can’t tell you what your individual purpose may be in the grand scheme of things, if you come with me on this 1600 word journey, I hope when we arrive you’ll have a little more context for discovering your individual purpose within the larger one I propose here.

So. How do we discover a thing’s purpose? Let’s start with a simple example: that a hammer’s purpose is to pound nails becomes eminently clear as soon as you see it in action. From that we can understand that knowing the purpose of a thing requires looking at what it does. Likewise, in order to understand the purpose of life, we have to look at what life does.

But it can be difficult to get perspective on what a thing does when you’re inside that thing looking out. Observing from the outside, it’s obviously much easier for us to determine a hammer’s purpose that it is for the hammer to look at itself and divine its own purpose. Unfortunately, we don’t have this luxury with life; we’re stuck right in the middle of it for as long as we’re alive. And while a hammer might be able to find some other hammers to observe, life on this earth is the only life we’ve seen so far in this universe. We don’t have any comparable examples.

Because of this, in order to try to understand life’s purpose, we have to try to gain a different perspective on it — to look at it from the outside, or to compare it to other things that exist in our neighborhood.

Take stars, for instance; we have one nearby. What is a star’s purpose? Like with the hammer, we can determine a star’s purpose by looking at what it does: fuses hydrogen into heavier elements. Stars are the universe’s heavy element factories. This is their purpose.

What about planets? Some of the heavy elements produced by ancient stars have fallen into our sun’s gravity well and, over billions of years, have formed the eight planets of our solar system. Each of these planets contains a different mix of elements, and each of them is a constantly changing landscape, just like our earth. Speaking of earth, it is the one planet in our solar system that has done something: produced life. Who knows if, in the millions of years remaining in our solar system, another planet or moon will produce a similar result (or — in the case of some of the moons of Jupiter and their subsurface oceans — has already)? Each planet, with its unique qualities — elements, volume, gravity, orbital distance, and so on — has some greater or lesser chance to produce a replicating molecule of some kind, giving rise to life. But given a long enough time frame, it seems inevitable that many planets will do so. Planets are factories that produce life. This is their purpose.

And so we arrive back at life, conveniently with a couple nearby examples in hand for comparison. What does life produce? Most obviously, it produces more life, but this is not necessarily interesting or unique, since it could also be said that it is merely the planet in question continuing to produce that life. If we look just a little more closely, we see one possible — and very interesting — result: consciousness. There are all sorts of different varieties of consciousness that have arisen from earth’s diverse life. And, given the vast numbers of stars and solar systems out there in the universe, the probability of some of them producing different forms of life, and therefore different forms of consciousness, borders on certainty. So, life is a factory that produces consciousness. This is its purpose.

Which answers our initial question, though it’s not a particularly satisfying answer. “Really? I’m just here to produce consciousness? That doesn’t even make sense!” But this realization should suggest to us that our initial question might not have been what we really wanted to know (and it does raise an interesting question for a potential future article: Is consciousness something we are? or something we do?). In any case, now we must ask ourselves, “what is my purpose as a conscious being?”

To answer that, let’s return to our initial discussion of entropy.

When we gaze up at the black of the night sky — which represents only the tiniest portion of the vast darkness of the entire universe — the idea that entropy is slowly eating away at everything seems sensible. After all, what we see up there is made of mostly nothing, and that mostly nothing is spread out over an incomprehensibly enormous amount of space.

And yet, sprinkled throughout this blackness, we see those little pinpricks of light we’re all familiar with, and each of them represents an organized resistance to the slow decay of the surrounding universe. Little bubbles of order show up all over the place — billions of them, in fact.

These stars — many of which have planets, a few of which may have life, some of which could have produced consciousness — are pockets of space where something incredible is happening. In the midst of the slow decay of the universe, and apparently in contradiction to it, new things are being created: new stars, new planets, new life, new consciousnesses. (Some very rough math on this: if there are 10²³ planets in the universe, and 1 in a billion of them has produced life, and 1 in a billion of those planets with life has produced consciousness, there are a million different planets with consciousness on them out there right now, not even counting those that may produce it in the future.) Each of these consciousnesses is looking out at the universe and asking questions, learning about entropy, formulating a Second Law of Thermodynamics in their own equivalent of language. So while the universe itself may not be a conscious thing, parts of it certainly are, and likely more and more of them as time passes.

So what might these consciousnesses conclude as they look up at the night sky? What purpose might they divine for themselves when they look at the stars, planets, and other life in their neighborhood, as we have done here?

This is what I see: Gravity creates stars. Stars create heavy elements and their gravity captures and creates planets. Planets create life. Life creates consciousness.

Gravity creates. Stars create. Planets create. Life creates. Consciousness, too, then, must exist to create.

And what is all this creation in service of? Why, staving off entropy, of course! Holding back the encroaching darkness of the night sky. We conscious beings are partners with the stars and planets and life and consciousnesses across the universe in creating new things, bringing new ideas into reality, resisting entropy. Caring about our dying universe. Perhaps one day one of these million consciousnesses will create the idea that will extend the life of our universe, as a doctor does for her patient.

What if all acts of creation were merely practice for saving the universe?

What if music, language, controlled fire, cooking, visual art, tools and simple machines like the wheel, clothing, agriculture, domesticated animals, writing, government, religion, justice, sanitation, mathematics, engineering, philosophy, history, fiction, science, journalism, photography, radio, television, computers, the internet, smart phones, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, particle accelerators and increasingly powerful telescopes and detectors of all kinds were simply steps in a cosmic footrace against entropy?

If so, we need your creativity, too — and your work. We need you to bring the ideas in your head into reality, whether they be artistic or scientific or philosophical or spiritual. We need you for two reasons: first, because it is only by continuing the work of our species that we will have the chance to realize the potential we have in the universe; and second, because, just as a star that does not burn is no star, a consciousness that does not create is not conscious. Creating makes us more fully human, gives us purpose.

We are a part of one small bubble of order within a slowly disintegrating cosmos. All around us others shine dimly in the night sky; they would certainly be brighter but for the vast distances between us.

As eons pass, those lights will begin to wink out, one at a time. Stars will burn up the last of their fuel, planets will be released into the void, black holes will consume more and more of the flesh of the universe before they dissolve into nothingness. Perhaps before the end, our descendants, or the descendants of some conscious species out there circling one of those other lights in the night sky, will come up with the idea that will stop it, that will bring entropy to an end, that will reinforce the walls of their bubble of order to such an extent that they will never fall.

Carl Sagan famously said, “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” I think it’s more than that: we are a way for the cosmos to shape its own destiny.

Being a part of a story like that is purpose enough for me.

Home (from Medium)

Originally posted August 23, 2017

Our lives can be thought of as lines that slowly fade into existence when we are conceived, become much more solid when we are born, and end when we die. The path of any given life is, of course, so much richer than that, but let’s spend a few moments following the lines of lives, noticing the patterns they form.

Like many animals, we humans have an inbuilt desire for a familiar place that feels safe: a den, nest, lair, or pair of loving arms tenderly encircling, holding, cradling. This comes at least in part from our earliest experience of the womb, where all our needs were met, all pains were softened through a thick cushion of tissue and fluid, and we had not yet attained sufficient complexity of mind to recognize the competition and discontent built into the world in which we would soon find ourselves.

Our word for this place is home.

Home is what we call the place to which the lines of our lives return most often. Again and again we leave our home, striking out into a world that is both far bigger than we can comprehend and full of more ideas and experiences and things than we could ever hope to interact with, to accomplish some small task that we believe will help us live longer or richer lives. Each such journey is a loop in our line consisting of a going and a returning; we go out for food; for an evening with friends; for stamps from the post office; to take a course at university; to take our children to soccer practice. And each time, we return with fuller stomachs or minds or hearts to that place we call home, where we feel safe to integrate our experiences or make use of the new things we have acquired.

We execute these loops many times a day, such that our lives take on this pattern of transition; coming and going, leaving and returning. Our years consist of thousands of such loops.

Occasionally our home changes. Due to our decision or the decisions of others, we must find a new place, travel to a new land, seek a new center for our lives. The pattern shifts, moves over, moves on. But the loops continue.

Until they stop. One day, the line of your life will end. Perhaps it will be at home, and perhaps it will be in the middle of a loop. We can’t know, though we have secret hopes for how it will come to pass.

Most of us tend to think of this termination as the end of the line, for we can’t truly know what our consciousness or soul perceives after. Even those of us who believe in some kind of continued existence — reincarnation or an afterlife — have a biological fear of and inability to comprehend our own line’s endpoint. We spend many of our loops avoiding thinking about it.

But if home is the place you return to the most frequently, the place you spend the most time, the place someone is most likely to find you, then all we need do is zoom out a bit to see that at the end of our line, we have simply returned to the place we were before it started, where we spent more than 13 billion years: not existing at all.

From the universe’s perspective, nonexistence is our home. While we are busy following the line of our lives through thousands of loops, from a bigger perspective we are simply traveling through a single loop that is that life.

When the fear of death interrupts you on one of your loops, perhaps it will help to remind yourself that you’re not headed someplace new; you’re just headed home.

What do I care enough about to write about every day for 2 years? (from Medium)

Originally posted August 4, 2017 (Here we can see I’ve been wrestling with this question for 5 years. And that’s ok. I have a decent—if not succinct—answer now.)

I am one month into a project where I’ve committed to two years of writing every day for at least 20 minutes or 1,000 words. At first, I didn’t know where this would take me; while I’ve been well-educated in writing and have an aptitude for language (so I feel I have a voice), I’ve never felt the strong pull of passion, or a calling, or a vocation (so I don’t feel like I have a topic). Because of this, I’ve never been able to identify as a blogger or imagine what it would take to write a book.

But I do identify with Flannery O’Connor, who said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” Just a single month of writing every day has given me more clarity into what I think, what I care about, and the path I’d like to take.

Over the last month I have found my thoughts turning to existential, philosophical matters more than anything else: what makes a life good, upright, worthy, and meaningful? I have not extensively studied philosophy, and I don’t currently believe there is a great deal of value to be found in philosophically discussing the nature of reality or knowledge. (For those of you who enjoy the terms, I am more interested in ethics than I am in metaphysics or epistemology, though of course there is some interdependence between the three.) I mostly want to avoid getting sucked into endless conversations about the definitions of things, which so effectively distract from actually thinking about how people should live. In short, I wouldn’t characterize a life spent debating definitions as “good.”

Just because I’m writing every day doesn’t mean I’ll publish that often: compared to traditional blogs about, say, allergen-free cooking or succulents or planted aquariums, I have somewhat less control over how often I will have realizations significant enough to share, but I will post them when I do. I assume that as I write more, I will know more about what I think, so posts should theoretically increase in frequency as time goes on.

I have no special wisdom, so I’m not trying to teach philosophical lessons or shape myself into anything even remotely resembling a guru. I’ll just be sharing some thoughts about the path I find myself on. I hope those of us who want to do the hard work of learning what makes life meaningful recognize it is a lesson each of us must teach ourselves, even if we can help each other along the path.

If this journey I am embarking on sounds like it may be interesting or valuable to you, I would be honored and humbled if you came along. If so, please follow, comment, or contact me outside Medium (contact info is in my bio). Thank you for reading, and for wanting to spend well the handful of years you’ve been given. I look forward to seeing you out there.

Not Writer’s Block

I don’t usually suffer from writer’s block, but I do suffer from something a lot like it: not-sure-what-to-write-about…itude. (I don’t know the proper suffix.)

“Writer’s block” certainly sounds more eloquent. But there’s an important difference between the two things. Writer’s block is when you don’t know what to write. Where the words simply won’t come. I have no problem with finding words to say things. No, not-sure-what-to-write-aboutitude is a problem that happens at a different level—a higher level.

Not-sure-what-to-write-aboutitude has to do with all sorts of big questions. Who am I writing for? What do they need? What do they think they need? Do I think those two things are the same? Why am I writing for them? What difference will it make? Will it make any difference? What if none of this matters?

And then I’m right back there at that familiar place, that cliff of meaninglessness, that dark and scary pit into which some part of me has always believed we’re all slowly falling. And I wonder, once again, if I believe on some fundamental level of me-ness that none of it matters, that none of it has meaning, and that we’re all here to do some kind of perverse dance for a few years until we vanish into the eons the universe has yet to churn out.

In other words, a crisis of faith. (I realize it might sound like depression, but it really isn’t. I love being alive, having experiences, connecting with myself and others. I’m excited to be a father and a husband and to build a writing career and to see what happens today, and tomorrow, and on into the future. The universe is filled with magic and delight, and when I’m fully absorbed in those things, all my big mopey questions evaporate into the silliness they are. And yet…)

And yet.

And yet that silliness often feels like seriousness. Like the most serious thing there is. And there we go. I’ve completed another small circle from faithlessness to faith and back again.

The embarrassing thing here isn’t the the contortions of feeling I find myself going through. It’s that I’m pretty sure I know the way out of them, and I continue to be too afraid to take it. No—perhaps that’s too judgmental of myself. It’s not that I’m afraid, so much as that I don’t want to yet. I’m not ready to lose myself.

Because that is the answer: to lose myself. Or, maybe it’s clearer to say “my self.” To learn how, through meditation and spiritual practice, to allow my sense of my ego—my Thinker, in the parlance of my book, The Forest is the Tree—to dissolve back into the fabric of the reality which birthed it. I know at some level, deep down, that I’m not me—that I’m not Michael. But I’m afraid to fully recognize that truth, because it is death. I’m afraid of death, still. After all these years.

Anyway, this post began with not-sure-what-to-write-aboutitude. And we can see, both from the long gap in blog posts here (it’s been more than six years since my last one) and from the vast and mildly embarrassing difference in content (I used to write about resumes and a coaching business which always made me feel like a bit of a fraud), not-sure-what-to-write-aboutitude is nothing new for me. I just never named it until now.

But I think I have at least resolved the worst of the unsettledness, the searching, the grasping. None of the things I tried before worked because none of them were a fit for who I was. For what I was most interested in. Which is… well. It’s kind of everything. And that’s kind of the problem. Ok, ok. Not problem, exactly. It’s a feature of being me. And that’s just fine. But, still. I don’t want to write about resumes or a coaching business that never came to be, or even, really, about tutoring the LSAT—which is a business that I’ve had good success with.

I want to write about… this. About what it’s like to be alive. To be human. To be, to a lesser degree, me.

(I am aware that I generally attempt to avoid that last topic—myself—out of a mild sense that I ought to try to be less egocentric—along the lines of what I just mentioned earlier about spiritual practice—but, really, at a fundamental level, me is the only thing I know in all the universe. Humanness and aliveness are sort of second-order effects—at least when looked at from a Cartesian perspective.)

Because, really, I actually don’t want to write about myself at all. I want to write about us. I want you to see yourself reflected in my words. To sense where that reflection holds true, and where it is different. To come to know yourself and your existence more intimately. I want to show you the world (here it occurs to me that maybe I’m just parroting Aladdin, but if so I guess that’s funny enough, so let’s roll with it). The trouble, of course, is that I can’t show you the world. You must look for yourself. Everything you see is but mirrored to you through your own Observer. And since that’s also true for me, then it seems at least partly true that the only way I can point anything out to you at all is to use myself as the pointer. But I hope my intentions are good. I like to think they are, anyway. That I’m not trying to talk about myself, but about the infinite, ineffable way that we are the same. So, yeah. To reflect. To be a mirror. That’s not egocentric, right?

…right? Hmm…

And with that, we’ve hit writer’s block. Time to wrap up!

Every moment is full of a million deaths (from Medium)

Originally posted July 30, 2017

Each and every moment is full of a million deaths.

Some are spectacular; a star explodes in a violent and fiery supernova as it consumes too much of itself for gravity to hold it together any longer. Some are tiny: an apple rots forgotten in a cupboard, never to be tasted nor to grow into the tree it was meant to become. Some are mundane: you go for a walk and don’t even notice the ant you step on. And some are life-changing: a parent, friend, wife, or child dies unexpectedly, leaving a conspicuous and unfillable hole in your soul.

Even things that we see as vital and living new creations spring from a legacy of other things’ ends. An original, beautifully dark and brooding melody springs from a heart recently broken by a relationship’s demise. The delicious summer cherries you so look forward to only come into existence following the withering decay of the blossom. Even the birth of a new baby, pushed slimy and squalling into a crushing sea of air its lungs are ill-equipped to handle, betides the end — the death — of the pregnancy that grew it (along with postpartum feelings of loss sometimes compared to those following the death of a loved one).

For those of us possessing a heightened awareness of the ends of things — attuned to the transience that is built into all objects and into each moment — it can sometimes be overwhelming simply to move through the world.

An illustration:

On an ordinary day many years ago I was walking down the street when I came across a squirrel, sitting in a small tree in someone’s front yard, no more than a few feet from me. Being naturally curious creatures, the squirrel and I paused to regard each other. I wondered what it was thinking, what it had been doing with its day before I interrupted it. I looked at how it sat, it’s feet so unconsciously confident of their position on the thin branches of the tree, how its slender and agile hands grasped the crab apple it had been eating. We stood that way for a minute or so, and then I went on my way. I assume the squirrel resumed its meal.

From one perspective, this was an utterly ordinary encounter, the kind that we have dozens of times every day (there is no shortage of squirrels where I live). But for some reason, this particular encounter profoundly moved me. I found myself thinking about it, eyes misting, for the rest of that day, and indeed for months and even years following. I sometimes wonder if I will think of the squirrel as I myself am dying.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized why this short encounter so deeply affected me, because it required looking at the encounter from a perspective almost diametrically opposite from the one which made it seem so unremarkable. What was it that I realized?

Here is the story from that other perspective.

The day of our encounter, I stepped out of my house to run an errand. I set off down the street, choosing one of perhaps a dozen paths through the neighborhood that would deliver me to my destination. Each step I took, each turn I made, decided by who knows what turnings of thought in my head, served to deliver me to that tree at that moment, feeling open, aware, curious, and vulnerable. And the squirrel had exactly the same experience that morning. It woke up in its nest, set off to find a meal, and whatever turnings of thought led it to decide that some crab apples would be nice — resulting in it being in that tree, at that moment, feeling more curious than afraid — must have been remarkably similar to my own. For that moment in time, the squirrel and I shared a connection that I have rarely felt before or since. We were the same. Both brought, serendipitously, to a moment in time and space where we — two separate, conscious beings — gazed upon another and saw mirrored there ourselves.

The series of events and decisions that day that delivered us both to that exact place has not occurred before or since in this universe. It was a perfectly unique moment, precious as only a perfectly unique thing can be. That was the other perspective. I got goosebumps as I realized it.

But even that perspective wasn’t the full truth. The moment was in fact even more profound than I initially realized, thinking only of the timing of the decisions the squirrel and I had made that day.

A series of realizations began to cascade over me: this encounter would not have happened had I chosen to live in a different apartment, perhaps even on a different floor of my apartment building. It would not have happened had I not gone to the school I went to, earned the degree I earned, moved to the place I moved to in order to make use of that degree. It would not have happened had I been raised with a different set of values, or in a different nation. It would not have happened had my parents not met when they did, or if their parents had not met when they did. It would not have happened had a few dozen men and women of foresight not collectively developed the idea of the United States of America (and determinedly brought about its birth), nor would it have happened had European empires not viciously conquered the “new world,” nor if mankind had not discovered agriculture in the fertile crescent, nor if the precursors to homo sapiens never learned to stand on two feet to gain a view above the prairie grasses of Africa. It would not have happened had the spinning cloud of dust that became this solar system been structured just slightly differently, or if earth had come to rest in an orbit closer to or farther from the sun, or if some cosmic collision had not created the moon, whose tidal forces for millions of years pulled and pushed on the crust of the earth, freeing the necessary elements to create life. My encounter with the squirrel was, from the most remarkable perspective of all, the culmination of everything that has ever happened. It was therefore an even more profound perfectly unique moment than I had formerly realized, and my awareness of it still occasionally shakes me to a depth of emotion I rarely feel.

And then it was gone. I just… walked away, and got on with my day. That moment vanished like a mirage, existing only in my memory, a pale, imagined replica made of connected neurons and electrical impulses. It was the death of a moment the universe spent billions of years creating.

Is it not the deepest, most profound of tragedies that we live in a universe where such miracles as this pass us by in countless numbers and we hardly give them a second thought?

Everything that exists, that has ever existed, that will ever exist, shares one common fate: someday, past or future, it will exist no longer. Individually in our own way, in our own time, we will die. In this you and I are the same as the gazelle, the tree, the squirrel, the worm, the blade of grass, the rock, the dirt. It is a connection shared by everything in the universe. Even the universe itself, to the best of our knowledge, will someday burn out and die.

Sometimes I think all of it is meaningless. That only the first perspective is true — random chance filling our awareness with utterly mundane occurrences, again and again, until we die.

But then I think this: at this moment, you are sitting, reading this post. In your bedroom, or a coffee shop, or on the bus, or listening as you drive home from work. An ordinary day in your ordinary life, reading an ordinary post on an ordinary website. And all that’s true. From the meaningless perspective.

From another perspective, you are sitting in the middle of a miracle. Before you were even born, a million decisions, made both by you and others over a lifetime of moments, have brought you to this moment. From your parents instilling you with a desire to know the meanings of things, to your learning to read, to your having disquieting experiences that reinforced to you the transience of your life, to the recommendation or search that led you to this post, every single thing you have done in your life has delivered you to right now, reading these words, thinking these thoughts. And in this moment, you and I are connected in a profound way. I sit here in my home, reaching out to you, though I don’t know who you are. I want you to know the profound sense of privilege I feel to be able to share these thoughts with you. I want you to know that the miraculous series of events that has brought our minds into this brief union is special because it, like each moment, is perfectly, radically, wonderfully unique. No one will read these words in the same place or time as you, will interpret them in the same way, will take away the same lessons. And the moments that delivered you here will continue on, delivering you a thousand more miracles every single day. And all you have to do to see them is look.

This deep sense of connection existing in each moment is one of the things that makes life precious. When you next stand in line at the grocery store, think about how it is that your life and the life of the person next to you have delivered you to almost the exact same moment in space and time. That you are, right then and there, in the middle of the most ordinary of activities, sharing an intimate connection almost unlike anything that can be imagined. Can you feel the power of it? And we just watch these experiences go by us, time and again, day after day. We don’t even notice.

All I ask of you is… start noticing.

Transference

Transference is a fancy word. I have a vague idea of what it refers to. Something to do with psychology, I think. Maybe I’ll look it up later and write something about it.

But the psychological definition isn’t what I’m talking about right now. No, I’m talking about transferring some essays I wrote on Medium years ago here, to my own blog.

I’m not sure exactly what shape my writing career will take. I do plan to write more books, but now that the little one has come along, uninterrupted writing time has become difficult to carve out. So do I spend that time writing emails to my subscribers? Posts on this blog? Posts on this blog which I then email to my subscribers? Or, a second book?

My thought at this precise moment is to write here, in the blog, for two reasons: first, to generate and refine ideas that could go into my next book; and second, for posterity. I wrote a LOT of words over the last three or four years—hundreds of thousands of them. All of them were written to go into The Forest is the Tree, but none of them have seen the light of day. I wonder if they deserve to.

Well, for my next book, I can find out. I can start doing all that preparatory work here, in public, on my blog. In a way it seems like a crazy and terrible time to start a blog. Haven’t we moved on from all these words? To things like TikTok (is that even how you spell that?) and, uh… whatever the newest social media platform is. And maybe the answer is “yes.” Maybe it is a terrible time to start a blog. But, meh. Writing is what I do. It’s what I’m good at. It’s what I love. I’m not going to shoehorn myself into some other platform or category just because it’s the latest thing and all the cool kids are going there or whatever. Maybe eventually I’ll need to branch out, but for now?

For now, I think this is just the right fit.

Anyway, if you’re reading this blog from back to front, you’ll see a handful of articles, uh… transferenced… from Medium next. And if you’re reading it front to back, what are you, some kind of monster? I hope you enjoyed those older articles. We can think of them as the prototype for this instantiation of my blog.

Tony Robbins talks about our motivations

I came across an old TED talk (old enough that the speaker, Tony Robbins, praised Lance Armstrong for his resourcefulness and determination) about our motivations. I was more excited about it when I read the title than I was when I finished watching it, but only because it didn't turn out to be what I expected it to be.

In short, Robbins boils down human motivation to six needs: certainty, uncertainty, significance, connection/love, growth, and contribution to something bigger than ourselves. He uses a lot of anecdotes, and consequently doesn't say much about how he developed that model, but what struck me is how his work is in some ways the reverse of mine.

Over Robbins's years of experience, he has developed his list of needs, and theorizes that they are the base-level motivators of all human behavior. He now works from the bottom up, determining how those six needs relate to specific experiences that people have, eventually producing behaviors which are either desired or undesired.

When I work with my clients, we start with thoughts, behaviors, and words, and dig down through a series of "why" questions to arrive at the beliefs they hold that cause them to do what they do.

Both of these paths are valid and interesting, and ultimately have different goals. Robbins works with his clients to help them make changes in their lives. I work with my clients to help them change the way they communicate about themselves and their organizations.

See the full video here. I would be interested to hear your thoughts about the differences between Robbins's and my philosophies. Thanks!

How to write the best resumé of your life, Part 2: The Writing Process

May 14, 2016

Hi! Thanks for reading Part 2 in my 3-part series on how to write a stunningly good resumé. Part 2 here is all about the writing—actually putting words on a page. If you haven’t checked it out yet, Part 1 is here, and it has some really important ideas, like what a resumé is for and the kinds of things you should know about yourself (these are not as obvious as you might think).

Part 2 Overview

You have your coffee, and you’ve sequestered yourself in a comfy chair, or at a coffee shop, or at your desk—wherever it is you work best. It’s time to start writing, so let’s go. Here is the general outline of what you will need to do to write the first draft of your actual resumé.

1. Write these things, in this order:
   1. Summary
   2. Experience
   3. Objective
   4. Education
   5. Other stuff—awards, volunteer activities, hobbies, and the other things that make you an interesting human being
2. Start building your list of references
3. Review the stuff from step 1 with a friend or colleague
4. Rewrite based on that feedback
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 as necessary

Sound good? Let’s look at each of these in a bit more detail.

STEP 1.1: WRITING THE SUMMARY

The summary is where you describe your professional character (the one we talked about in Part 1, remember?). This is the core—the vital, beating heart of your resumé. Every single thing you include on your resumé must support this one paragraph, because this is the exposition of who you are as a professional. Spend most of your time here. The summary is simple in concept, but it is not easy to write.

If I listed a bunch of rules for how to do this, I would be making them up; every awesome summary will look different, because every awesome summary describes a different awesome person. Instead, here’s some advice:

• Make it as short as possible, but no shorter.
• Be authentic: write like you talk.
• Keep your goals in mind (see below).

Your goals are as follows:

• Clearly communicate the strengths you identified in Part 1 (after all, this is why you did that).
• Ensure your passion comes through. You have to care in order to get someone else to care.
• Make a clear value statement about yourself.

Here’s a challenge for you: You want to come across as authentic, as I said, but of course you also want to describe yourself as you want people to see you. If you lack self-confidence, for example, an authentic summary would communicate that (which to be clear, yes, would be bad). The best way to write a confident summary, though, isn’t to fake it; instead, start working on your self-confidence. Nobody’s perfect, but everybody is capable of working towards who they want to be. Successful people aren’t those with a lot of money or power or fame. Nope, they’re people just like you, who made the decision to work towards who they wanted to be. You can do it, too. And then the person you’re becoming can come across in your summary.

Here is an example of a lackluster summary:

Senior engineer with over fourteen years of experience in application design and development with various Java and .NET frameworks. Experience in database design, software engineering and development. Can jump into new projects and learn new technologies quickly.

And for contrast, here is an example of a strong summary

I have architected software for seven different companies over the last 20 years. During that time I worked with many different software architects and learned that the best of them shared three common strengths: they were organized thinkers, they were adaptable to changing requirements, and they were highly technically proficient. Over these last 20 years, I have developed these strengths to the utmost, and use them to do what I love: design software that solves people’s problems. My experience, strengths, and passion mean I will be able to solve your customers’ problems, making me an ideal software architect for your company.

The first summary is simply a list of experiences and qualities, while the second is a description of personal observations, strengths, and passions, which as an added bonus, hints at overcoming past adversity. The first summary is dull and dry, while the second establishes skills, passion, and value.

Guess what—both of these descriptions were written by the same person! It’s true; a client of mine with long years of software development experience wanted to make a transition into a role as a software architect. (For those of you who are nontechnical, this is an orthogonal move—not insignificant, but not drastic.) And yet his early summary, since it was rooted only in his self-image and prominent past experience, had no chance of landing him the architecting jobs he really wanted. But when we wrote a summary that described him as the software architect he wanted to be (and which, of course, he had the skills for), his summary became clearer, stronger, and more authentic. And it reshaped the rest of his resumé, as well. Which brings us to the next section, your experience.

STEP 1.2: LISTING YOUR EXPERIENCE

The lion’s share of physical space on your resumé will be dedicated to a list of your relevant past work experience (the one exception being if you are a recent graduate, in which case it will be expected that your resumé is a little shorter). The basic format of this section is a list the companies you worked for from most to least recent, with dates and your job title.

Traditionally, for each company and position on the list you would include your main responsibilities and activities. That sort of resumé is exactly what we’re NOT going for. Instead of listing what you spent the majority of your time doing, it is much more important to list your activities and accomplishments that—and this is REALLY important—directly support the summary you just wrote, whether or not they were your main duties. If you have done a good job of developing your summary, it will be much easier to find and describe these kinds of experiences.

Here are a few examples from the same resumé as above.

• Bad example
  • Filled a variety of development roles, both in leadership and non-leadership positions.
• Bad example
  • Responsible for the implementation of web applications including: utilization of Java and J2EE technologies to create and deploy both small and large scale Internet/intranet applications; administration, maintenance, and performance tuning of J2EE server environments and related applications; maintenance of legacy CGI scripts and PL/SQL applications.
• Good example
  • Architected in-house applications to meet the following needs:
    • Rapid deployment for all our Internet and intranet applications
    • Maintenance and performance tuning of our J2EE server environments
    • Automated maintenance of legacy scripts and applications

The first example is bad because it isn’t specific. It shouldn’t take 13 words to say this little. Space is precious!

The second example is bad because it doesn’t support the summary. The work described there is not the work of a software architect. That’s not to say it isn’t valuable; this applicant would just want to find a way to communicate how the skills he gained doing this work now contribute to his expertise as a software architect.

...which is exactly what the third example does. The individual projects were broken out for clarity and so that the main point could be communicated first: “I architect solutions to problems,” is the entire point of this resumé.

One piece of information that would have made the third example even more effective would have been the inclusion of a quantitative improvement that these applications made at the company. For example, if, after the company started using the rapid deployment application deployment times decreased by an average of 30 minutes, that is powerful testimony to this person’s effectiveness. Know your numbers and list them.

Another story: One of my clients was a hardware testing engineer. He loved the troubleshooting process, finding errors in areas no one else had thought to test. He excelled at using his problem-solving skills to identify fixes for those issues, and worked with design and manufacturing teams to improve the products his company made. As he was looking for a new job, one of the items listed on his resumé under a previous position as a technical support engineer was the fact that he served as a mentor for some of his more junior colleagues. While mentoring may have been an important part of his role then, it was not what he enjoyed doing, nor did it support the story he was telling of himself as a Technical Problem Solver. On the other hand, his years as an emergency paramedic provided many valid experiences, even though they were in an unrelated field. “Identification of proper stabilizing medical procedures in a fast-paced, high-stress environment,” probably doesn’t capture the chaos of dealing with life-and-death ambulance rides, but it definitely demonstrates his experience with troubleshooting and solving problems.

STEP 1.3: WRITING YOUR OBJECTIVE

Even though it will probably be the first thing on your resumé (but more on that in the formatting section of Part 3), I recommend you write your objective third, because until you know where you’re coming from—which you just described in your summary and experience sections—you can’t know where you’re going.

Your objective should be one short sentence about what you genuinely want to accomplish. And when I say genuinely, I mean it. This should not be spun for a certain audience, nor is it for placating crotchety hiring managers or anyone else. Your objective should be the one thing you most authentically want to accomplish in the context of whichever company you’re applying to.

Let’s look at a few examples. Remember, our most important criterion is authenticity.

Sally: “To obtain a position as copy editor at the Huffington Post.”

If Sally has been working for years to obtain copy editing experience and training, and finally has an opportunity to apply to a publication she respects and admires, this is an authentic (if somewhat dull) objective statement. On the other hand, if Sally simply saw the job opening one day and sent over a hastily written resumé, the statement is still true, though not particularly authentic. And, interestingly, this is why this objective is bad if coming from the Sally who really wants to work for the Huffington Post; it’s indistinguishable from the statement of the Sally who just wants a job, any job. A good objective statement would make it perfectly clear how passionate Sally #1 was about about being an editor for HuffPo. Something like, say, “To bring my years of journalism and editing experience to bear for a powerful and influential online news publication.”

Aretha: “To make the world a better place by solving people’s problems one by one.”

Aretha’s objective looks pretty idealistic at first glance. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as it’s authentic (are you seeing a pattern yet?); the bigger problem is that it’s rather vague. For a life coach, for example, it could be an authentic expression of how they see their role in relation to their clients. For an individual app developer, it might actually be a pretty good description of what they do. But for someone applying for a job whose top requirement was, “strong problem solving skills,” it’s simply saying what someone else wants to hear. And that never ranks high on the authenticity scale. A better statement would be more specific: “To help my coaching clients overcome each obstacle on their journey to create fulfilling lives for themselves and their families.”

Sam: “To land a job that will pay the bills.”

Our third example seems to have been written by a kid, and kind of a lazy one. “To get a job.” Really? I suppose they could have written, “To have a resumé,” or even, “To write an objective statement with no grammar or punctuation errors.” But despite its excessive brevity, even this statement could be effective if it is truly (you guessed it) authentic. If I’m a teenager looking for a job and am not particularly self-aware, this might be the most honest statement I could make. And if, as an honest person, I’m hoping to catch the attention of hiring managers at fast food restaurants who value my kind of authenticity, this statement would give me the best chance of getting a job that I would actually enjoy and can be successful at.

The point of the objective statement is not that you think it would sound good to someone else. The point is that it’s a statement that you will defend 100%, no matter what challenges it receives. That is how you know your objective is authentic.

STEP 1.4: LISTING YOUR EDUCATION

I won’t talk too much about this; it’s fairly basic and self-explanatory. List your education in the same format as your work experience—newest to oldest, sorted by institution, with years and degrees listed. (If you graduated with honors, I think it’s worth mentioning.) You want to paint a picture of where, when, and what you studied. If you have room and desire to include bullet points, do the same as with the experience section; make them support your summary, even if they initially seem unrelated. See my resumé at the bottom of this post for examples. My original education was for teaching music, but I drew out some relevant experiences to my current writing career.

STEP 1.5: LISTING THE OTHER STUFF

This includes, but isn’t limited to: awards, activities, accomplishments, hobbies, volunteer projects, memberships to personal or professional organizations. Anything that is a part of your life that justifies inclusion by supporting your summary statement should be added, and you can even add things that you are particularly proud of that don’t support your summary statement. For example, if you’re an amateur cook who won the barbecue sauce competition at the state fair three years running, that’s unique and cool, so say something about it! Keep your categories as few as possible, but make them descriptive. I think Awards and Activities is a catchy section heading, as is Organizations and Memberships. Those two groupings capture just about everything that you might want to list, and I include a Hobbies section on my resumé as well.

STEP 2: REFERENCES

In brief: Make a BIG list of pertinent references.

While you’re writing the things above, start working on your references section. Hiring is a human process, and human beings are social creatures. We are seen as greater or lesser by the number of people who esteem us. Your past professional relationships are important; not only are they a part of who you are today, but they are a reflection upon your personal and professional character. So, include references. Lots of them. Every one you can think of, in fact.

This might go without saying, but if you put someone on your list, make sure to let them know. You don’t need to ask permission, just shoot them an email or text that says you added them, and include a compliment or two (which shouldn’t be hard; they’re on your list because you liked or respected them, right?). If they don’t want to be listed, let them be the one to say so.

Never submit your references directly with your resumé, especially if you have a list of, say, 100 people. If they are requested, you will have them ready ahead of time. When a company asks for your references, send them along, formatted nicely in the same style as your resume (this point is to not make your reference list an afterthought). Here’s my list of references (with contact information obfuscated), for example.

So don’t make your list merely the 3 colleagues you would most want a potential employer to call. List anyone and everyone from your professional and educational past who you think would speak positively about you, and about whom you would speak positively if someone were to call you about them. But make sure everyone on your list is a professional reference, not a personal one.

STEP 3, 4, AND 5: REVIEW AND REVISE

This is such an important part of the process that I broke it into three different steps even though it’s conceptually probably the simplest thing on the list.

By now you have your resumé filled with content, and you feel like it’s a pretty good draft description of your professional character. Nice work! BUT! Don’t take it for granted; get another set of eyes on it. Step 3 is to find a friend or colleague that you trust and who is a good communicator. Give them your draft and ask for feedback (though not on format, obviously, since you haven’t done that yet). Don't explain your vision (you won't get to explain it to a hiring manager), just hand it over and let them read it. Then, ask them to explain to you what they just read. See if their explanation matches the idea in your head about what you were trying to communicate. Listen to their feedback and write it down (very important). At this point, you are only allowed to do two things: one, ask clarifying questions, so you understand their point of view; and two, say thank you. Do NOT defend or explain anything; the point of this exercise is to get feedback on what you’ve written, not to communicate what you were going for. Depending on your personality, this might be excruciating, but it is critical. Step 3 is to listen and understand only.

Step 4 is to humbly consider (later, on your own) whether or not your friend’s points are valid. Maybe they asked a question that showed they didn’t understand something you thought you made clear. Maybe they pointed out some grammatical errors. Maybe they didn’t like the tone you wrote your summary in. You may agree with some of their points and disagree with others, so you don’t have to make every change they suggested. Only make the ones you think are valid. Be deliberate, not reactionary, but keep your ego out of it; your resumé won’t be perfect, so make changes where necessary.

Finally, you’re nearing the end. Step 5 is to repeat steps 3 and 4. You might only need to do it once, but you may need to do it several times. You can use the same person as you did the first time, or a new person. It all depends on how many people you know and how much time you want to spend polishing up your resumé. The more important it is to you, the more times you should cycle. The ideal end result is that the reader of your resumé should be able to describe to you exactly the professional character you wanted them to get out of your resumé. Once you hear your own thoughts coming back to you from someone else’s mouth, you know you’ve written an outstanding resumé.

My Resumé is here.

Come back soon, for Part 3: Formatting, optional sections, and alternative viewpoints. Thanks for reading!