Brian
00:01
So last week we talked about your work, getting your work done, whatever that might be. And the hard part in many cases about that is for some of us, we have no idea what our work is. And when I say our work, I don't typically mean just your vocation. I mean, the work of being a productive man in today's society and or, or woman is the case may be, but the, the understanding of what that work is is a little bit difficult. So we'll start kind of around the edges with the easy stuff. So there is some stuff that is your work and can never be anybody else's work, not even a little. And so things like your own health and hygiene, for example, you, you, you can't outsource or give someone else the work of lifting the weights at the gym or running the time on the treadmill or whatever your physical sort of maintenance routine is in terms of keeping your body, you know, muscular and healthy and all that stuff.
Brian
01:13
You can't really ever get rid of that. And so that work will always and forever be your work. And that's just sort of one small part of it. The other places to look for your work are the places where you are the, the arbiter and decider of the outcomes. So, so what does that look like? It looks like things where self-improvement is a great place to start. And so things like when you say lose your temper or fly off the handle with someone, that is now your work to understand what that is, why it is. And to the extent that you wanna prevent it from happening again, take control of it. There are some natural sort of processes in doing your work that you'll find emulate other understandings from other people. So for example, the not wanting to lose your temper as a thing. A lot of folks are gonna tell you like losing your temper on a regular basis is a bad plan. It has long-term negative consequences. Your work is to come to that understanding through reflection and analysis of your own behavior. That understanding is pretty significant and pretty consistent across most people. So we can look at some of the work and go, okay, it, this represents a universal understanding or a universal capability or a universal way point in personal development. And those way points, you can understand them intellectually,
Brian
02:59
But a lot of that has to come from understanding them from an internal, the difference between knowledge and wisdom kind of perspective. And so as you start to do your own work, you'll find that the, you'll come to some sort of standard truths and conclusions. There's work done in the psychological field on this, the work of Claire Graves, where he talks about values evolving directionally and pretty much linear linearly. But there is tons of supporting material here to indicate that these understandings, while are they need to be deeply personal to be effective. They are fairly consistent across all people. And so the temptation then is to knowing that, is to give work to other people and say, well, you need to go figure this out, or you need to figure that out. And the answer is no. You can't do that. You have to do your own work.
Brian
03:55
You have to find your own stone and the rough edges of your own stone. And you can help other people when they come to you in an environment where they are struggling or suffering and say, Hey, listen, some I struggle with something similar and here's kind of what I, what I went through to stop struggling with it. But you can't remove that suffering in the same way. You can give people advice on how to lift weights at the gym, but you can't lift the weights for them. So as you're discovering your own work and trying to figure out what that is, the peril is that you're gonna look for easy solutions as well. That other people say, ah, well, you know, that's how you figure out what your life purpose is. Or, oh, that's how you figure out how to unscrew your behavior with women.
Brian
04:42
Or how do you unscrew your behavior with unhealthy eating? And the reality is all of that's gonna be how to material. You have to figure out the sort of underpinning why to and what to material that needs to be developed. That is your work and that is only work you can do. Avoiding it will not, will not solve the problem. So as you're trying to figure out what your work is, start with easy stuff, hygiene, rest, you know, health and fitness, diet. Those are the kind of easy mode things because they're relatively conceptually easy to get your head around. You'll find that if you have any of those in a pathological way, if you do any of those in a way that doesn't work well, that the, the discovery process of figuring out why you do that is gonna be really, really important to, to, to start to dig into. But as you move from there, you're gonna find other places where your work will materialize. And then just as be, be mindful as well that you are not gonna be able to give work to others and correspondingly don't take on other people's work. We'll get into that in future episodes. It's, it's real easy to want to do, but we'll talk about why it doesn't work and one of the episodes coming up. Thanks.
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