Originally title ‘Meditations On Staying Awake.’ (Amusingly, I’m translating this from ink to pixels at 3:28am in the morning.)

When does one begin to develop poor sleeping habits? Babies sleep like, well, babies. Poor quantity and quality of sleep isn’t typically a childhood problem. (Or is it? I’m ignorant on this! Mental note to look it up.)

When I was a child, I used to read books before going to sleep. I got massive amounts of reading done this way- I remember sometimes my sister would ask to switch the light off, and I’d read by the light of the streetlight coming through the window.

When adolescence came around and I, uh, discovered myself, I kinda changed my bedtime routine. That may just have been the cause of the single largest productivity-drop in my life. >_>

I’d also often spend late nights up online. There’s something about the glare of a computer screen that can keep me up for hours- Facebook, Twitter, random sites, random conversations. Sometimes I’d meet friends for coffee and supper, or movies, video games- and we’d stay up till the wee hours of the morning- sometimes even past sunrise. Many of those conversations felt powerful, important, insightful and relevant to my life. I can’t quite pinpoint the specifics, but the ideas arising from and evolving through those conversations have shaped me just as much as the books I’ve read and the experiences I’ve had.

Meta: A lot of it didn’t seem particularly practical or useful- we’d often discuss grand idas and share worldviews, but lead otherwise mediocre lives, devoid of substantial accomplishment. (The relationship between the protagonist and his best friend in Balzac’s Lost Illusions was painfully reminiscent of this.)  But now that I’ve started writing, and more seriously than ever before, it feels great to have all of that to draw from. I could never read another book and have another conversation, and still probably have enough material in my head to write a book with. (Of course, it wouldn’t be as good as if I kept reading and conversing with others.)

Not all of the time was fruitfully spent, I must admit. As I move forward with my life, I continue to desire and make plans to read and have conversations, but I don’t like the idea of sitting around, passively waiting for them to happen. I’ve noticed several trends or patterns ever since I decided to pay attention to my life, and I’d like to bring them to attention- both mine and yours- in the hope of learning something.

John Wanamaker once said that half of the money spent on advertising is wasted- but it’s impossible to tell which half. That’s a simple way of expressing the truism that we can’t tell the value of most things worth bothering about until after we’ve engaged them. You can’t know for sure if a random book, movie or conversation might just change your life forever- until it does. It’s almost always what you find when you’re out and about, either wandering aimlessly or looking for something else- something that you hadn’t considered or expected that turns out to be good for you, exactly what you needed. Positive black swans- like Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of Penicillin.

We do not have to leave it to absolute random chance, though. Our world is more complex than chaotic- and by that I mean to say that absolute random chance doesn’t quite exist in our lives. We all have routines and patterns, whether we realize it or not. One of the hardest thing for me to come to terms with was that my hate of routines and structures stemmed from the fact that I was far too comfortably rooted to my own unintentionally-developed routine. I’d do the exact same thing every day, in the interest of being “experimental” or “creative”. What a crock of shit, I can’t believe I used to believe it (and sometimes still do, when I’m not careful.)

Provocation has to be deliberate for serendipity to work it’s magic- you’re not going to find Mr. Right by sitting at home scrolling through Tumblr. You have to make the effort to step out of the door with an open mind, perhaps not looking for anything in particular- allowing your mind to drift and settle on whatever’s interesting. Failure is to be expected and budgeted for- there will be days or weeks where nothing happens, but eventually it will come.

You could describe this as a matter of faith in statistics. If you play enough hands of Blackjack, eventually you’ll draw the pocket Aces. But life is more complex than Blackjack. (Of course, the principles of card games can and do apply to certain contexts of life- there seems to be an entire blogging industry built around that sort of analogy-making- but it would be dangerous to treat life as no more complex than Blackjack.)

Sometimes in life, you draw a million hands and you still don’t hit the hand you’re looking for. The scary, exciting, interesting and beautiful thing about life is that we don’t know the cards in the deck. Context: You could be in a dysfunctional relationship, getting dud hand after dud hand. You could be stoic and magnanimous, playing every hand as best as you can- and still find yourself being drained out. That’s not a good place to be. You should move to another table where the deck isn’t rigged against you. Maybe that particular deck wasn’t compatible with your playing style. There’s a cost to moving tables though- keep table-hopping incessantly, and eventually when closing-time comes, you’ll realize you never quite enjoyed a single game of cards. What a tragedy.

The perfect opportunity will never come- you have to improve your skills as a player so that you can make good use of the opportunities that come to you. The cool thing about life that isn’t very much present in card games is that you have the ability to create better circumstances for yourself- to quite literally modify the cards in your hand through sheer skill and force of will. Don’t wish for better circumstances- wish to be a better player, work towards it, and create the better circumstances you desire. You get the idea.

Back to conversations. I find that conversations, like most things, have marginal diminishing returns. Which is to say that after a while, the same people in the same circumstances won’t have anything new or interesting to say. They have to have new experiences and come into contact with new ideas before they can have productive conversations. Of course, mindless, mundane conversations can be immensely pleasurable, just as it can be pleasurable driving to nowhere, or doing something simple and mundane that allows you to relinquish conscious control over what you’re doing- like gardening, perhaps. Good conversation is an art form- reading cues and signals from your partner and figuring out how to communicate to them the information that they desire in a manner that is tasteful and appropriate.

Personally though, while I can write for personal catharsis with no clear purpose, I prefer to write productively (well, there’s a balance to be struck between the two, of course- but for now let’s focus on the latter, because doing the former isn’t a problem for me.) I find it unproductive and unstimulating to meet the same friends everyday for an extended period of time. It’s okay if you’re catching up with old friends after a long break- then there’s usually a lot to discuss, especially if you’ve both had different experiences to share, data and information to exchange.

If you have grand designs like me, though, simple conversation alone may not fulfill you. I imagine Lance Armstrong enjoys cycling for pleasure, and Michael Schumacher might enjoy a long drive down an empty highway. But there was something that compelled them to take it to a whole new level, to push the very limits of what is believed to be possible, to challenge themselves tremendously.

When something becomes overly repetitive and predictable, it becomes drab, boring, even tiresome. I think gamers often relate to this problem- there’s usually a sort of saturation point after a while, where gamers begin to lose interest in a game- and that’s usually when game developers introduce updates, patches and the like to keep people interested and engaged. You want to be challenged, to feel like you’re growing, learning, being a part of something greater than yourself, drinking deeply from Life’s gilded chalice. (I had to!) And as usual, I find video games tend to reveal certain insight about life at large, at least with regards to what people want.

Again, I think we can get more from deliberate practices than depending entirely on chance. That doesn’t mean planning conversations by putting people on a strict schedule.  It becomes a chore, a target to set- artificial and contrived. You can’t force chemistry, but you can make yourself more receptive to it. I think it’s important to learn how to manage ‘downtime’. (“I’ll make the most of all the sadness,”- John Mayer, “Turn my sorrow into treasured gold,”- Adele, “Turn shit into sugar,” 50 Cent & Robert Greene, The 50th Law) Windfalls, when you suddenly find yourself freed up to do anything. I usually spend such time mindlessly roaming around the internet, which is usually an incredibly wasteful pursuit.

I realize there’s a way to make the most of that, though, if I stubbornly refuse to leave the computer- and that’s exploiting the opportunity for conversations. Facebook Chat is perhaps the most underutilized value available on Facebook! Try this- start 5 or 6 random conversations with friends on Facebook who’re online, but you haven’t spoken to in a while. If someone doesn’t respond, close the conversation and open another.

(I do realize that this is the sort of thing that enthusiastic salespeople and Multi-Level-Marketing freaks or evangelists might do- and it’s frustrating being on the receiving end of those, because their ulterior motives always shows through, and you feel a little violated, used, reduced to a statistic. What I’m suggesting is to use the same approach to do the opposite- be genuinely interested in talking to people, asking them questions, finding out about their thoughts and lives. Aim to make them feel good about themselves, help them feel like they’re more than just a number on your list- the opposite of the effect that bad salespeople have.)

After a while, you’ll develop a mental network of individuals you can click with in a proper conversation. (Especially precious are the people you can talk to without any clear direction- the sort of mutual, free-fall exploration- that’s my personal favourite state.) Now that’s useful information, real social capital. When people talk about networking, that’s what it really means- people who would do you favours because they like you, not people who know your name and and share an uneasy parallel coexistence with you on Facebook. Facebook is now getting subtle and complex enough for you to put these special people into a unique list, so you can keep track of them. You don’t have to tell them about it- it can be your own secret label for identifying the high-calibre, high-potential individuals that you’d want to build better relationships, and simply be around- because of the effect they have on you.

That’s the crowning glory of the potential of social networking, as I see it. Yet most of us use it for the incredibly trivial and mundane (which is fun!), and nothing more.

It can seem like a daunting challenge, and too much work. But we can break it down. Every time you find yourself mindlessly whiling away the hours on Facebook, have private conversations instead of going around clicking random things. There’s always a qualitative difference between speaking in public and in private, and I feel the same applies on Facebook- public updates are best used, I feel, to encourage individuals to respond- following which private conversations should be initiated. Using Facebook to bitch, whine and complain is almost always a bad idea. (It took me a while to get around to accepting this!)

Trying to engage people en masse in a public communal space like Facebook always feels a little strange and awkward, don’t you think? I think it’s because it’s almost too open- it’s too easy for anybody to say anything, which often means that everybody is saying something, and everybody is sort-of infringing on everybody else’s space- fighting for everyone else’s attention span. And we’re kind of possessive of our attention in this crazy age of information overload- we take it personally when somebody shares something that we perceive to be wasteful, stupid or offensive in a public space. The politics and power dynamics underlying it have been very interesting to pay attention to.

I was telling one of my friends about my plans to hack my social network, and she was mortified. “That’s so elitist!” she exclaimed. I suppose it could be described as such. (It’s such a loaded word!) It’s important to note that this isn’t about discriminating against any arbitrary group of people, and it’s not about bragging rights either. It’s not about excluding people, though it may seem like it- it’s about acknowledging the limitations of our time and resources, and choosing to focus on the people and projects that matter. If you don’t do that, it means you’re splitting your time between people who deserve it and people who don’t deserve it as much- and isn’t that being kind of unfair to the first group?

A person who tries to master everything at once will be mocked and laughed at for trying to bite off more than he can chew. It’s just generally not a good idea. You can’t watch TV, listen to music, do your homework, talk on the phone, eat dinner and have multiple conversations online- and expect that you’ll be able to do any of those things effectively. Anybody who sees you doing those things at once would mock you, and tell you to focus on doing one thing at a time.

So why is a person who chooses to give his focused, undivided attention to a few people labelled an elitist, when a person who focuses his energy on a single task is disciplined? I suggest that we further refine the term elitist to signify a person who specifically avoids contact with others- who sees others as beneath him, unworthy of his time altogether. A prodigious writer isn’t elitist if he spends his time focused on his work. But he could come across as such if he seems unapproachable, rude or inaccessible. So I think it’s okay to be “elitist” as long as you have a healthy attitude, are open to criticism, make an effort to engage people at all levels, and remain polite, approachable and accessible.

Richard Branson hires the best people he can find, and then leaves his billion-dollar enterprise in their trusted hands as he goes gallivanting around the world in hot-air balloons. Does that make him an elitist? He apparently gives his phone number to all his employees- believing that they’d only trouble him if it were something important enough to necessitate his attention and intervention. (I thought that was pretty damn brilliant.)

There are many writers and artists who work almost exclusively in isolation. Are they elitist? How accessible should you allow yourself to be? What if that accessibility damages your ability to create your art? It might seem that we sometimes hate people for being successful because they remind us that we’re mediocre, and not really doing anything about it.

The biggest irony, I feel, is that a lot of the people who make themselves intentionally inaccessible escape criticism… precisely because nobody notices them.  It’s the idiots such as myself who get the worst of it- we seek excellence, so we try to make the necessary sacrifices, and at the same time, we try to share this with others- an act which is almost always perceived as gloating. What people don’t realize is that idiots like me are the naive ones. I’ve since learnt my lesson (I think!) and I avoid speaking excessively about my plans in public now. It appears people aren’t interested in successful people until after they’re successful. (I sincerely believe this doesn’t apply to everyone- this blog is built on the faith that there are others like me out there, who’d like to witness the evolution and growth of an individual from incompetent and doubtful to accomplished and fulfilled- in real time.)

We present our conflicted selves in the hope that we would be seen for what we are- normal people struggling to be extraordinary, and sharing their experiences with others in the hope that it might initiate generative conversation that benefits everybody. Unfortunately, hardly anybody is seen for what they are- we are seen as we are perceived, usually labelled with the flaws of the perceiver- I’ve been labeled both “hopelessly insecure” and “arrogantly self-assured” by different people at the same time. Aren’t we all like that? It’s impossible to defend yourself against such accusations, especially when the accusers have already made up their minds. So I decided to stop trying.

We live in a world where sharing your doubts about your own perspectives and arguments is seen as weakness. This needs to change.  I was once told I should stop singing because I made ears bleed. I accepted the reality of the situation, but not the suggestion. I intend to one day be described as a good singer- to prove that statements such as “you should…” are things we could do without. Someone once told me I should stop writing, too! That gave me a good laugh. (Although perhaps it may have had more impact on my subconscious that I can know.)

Hardly anybody writes the way I wish they would, so here I am. Not going to stop, sorry. You don’t have to read this if you don’t like it. Don’t waste your time- on this, I am unshakably stubborn. Tell me how to improve, or what doesn’t work. But don’t tell me to stop.

Anyway, I imagine some of the people who look to me for optimism and cheer may be a little startled by some of this. I’m not giving up on people- I have faith in people, because I am a person! Other people have had faith in me when I didn’t deserve it, so I have faith in myself, and in others- whether it’s deserved or not. If you’re reading this, and you’ve read so far, then I have faith in you. I’ve simply reacquainted myself with the simple and eternal truism that you can’t please everybody. Rediscovering its truth was like discovering a mathematical proof for myself- sure, you always assumed that it was true, but do you remember the first time where you really felt its validity resonate through you? It’s a wonderful feeling- a minor epiphany. I realize that to change the world, you have to change yourself (Thanks, Gandhi!), and that in doing so you inspire a devoted community (Thanks, Jesus!), and then start a chain reaction of sorts. We have to focus on the people and projects that matter.