Do Hard Shit Mondays: Embrace Your Weirdness
Episode 20: Self-mastery and weirdness, this week's challenge, Anna Quindlen teaches us to be ourselves, and David Goggins teaches us our minds are full of shit
Welcome to The Art of Becoming: the Do Hard Shit Monday chapter. We explore what it means to lead a happier, wiser, and more prosperous life by doing hard shit. We learn to be more resilient and embrace discomfort in a complex and challenging world. And maybe, better people for it.
I hope you join me.
What you need to know
Embrace your weirdness: the first step to self-mastery.
This week’s challenge: 300 reps in 10 minutes or less.
A quote from Anna Quindlen: why being yourself is the path to true freedom and happiness.
A quick video from David Goggins—about a minute but worth every second.
Embrace Your Weirdness
The hardest thing in the world to do is to be yourself.
To be a unique character, to stand out from the masses, means to flaunt our eccentricities and quirks for the whole world to see. Our idiosyncrasies can be cumbersome, at times, a burden.
It hurts to be different. It’s hard to be weird, to run against the flow of what is normal and safe.
For those who have embraced their weirdness, being safe and normal isn’t very safe. It’s a prison.
Everyone, at their core is weird. But for one reason or another, our inherent weirdness both shames and frightens us.
Enter Edgar Allan Poe and his weirdness and “lack of moral principle.”
Edgar Allan Poe was not accepted by his peers or literary critics.
Ralph Waldo Emmerson called Poe, a jingle man, and Walt Whitman questioned Poe’s artistic and literary morals. Whitman found Poe “almost without the first sign of moral principle.”
Even though Poe never strayed from his weirdness, he still wanted the approval of his peers. More than anything, he needed the public to accept his poetry and novels. Poe was the first American author to live on his writings alone. That commitment wasn’t enough. He never made enough money to support himself. Poe died an alcoholic, desperate, and penniless.
Decades after his death, his work fueled a literary revolution. He inspired writers such as Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, H.G. Wells, and hundreds more. Almost two hundred years after his death, his poetry and prose are woven into American culture. He was the first American author to write short stories, and he created the detective genre. Most of the horror and fantasy genres were influenced by Poe. Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut cite Poe as an inspiration.
Embracing our weirdness is what makes you, you. Accepting the quirky and eccentric part of you is the first step to self-mastery.
Though Edgar Allan Poe wrote the way he wanted, he didn’t truly accept his weirdness. He craved public validation of his poetry and prose. It came but only decades after his death.
Self-acceptance doesn’t need the approval of others.
What is self-mastery
Self-mastery is understanding and controlling your thoughts, emotions, and actions.
It needs a specific type of understanding for it to be acquired. It requires knowing who you are and, just as importantly, who you are not.
And the first step is to embrace your weirdness.
Try to find an example of someone who did not accept what made them different and became successful. You cannot.
Elon Musk is Elon Musk because of what makes him different. Good or bad, right or wrong, he embraces that truth.
Though he has an astonishing intellect, that is not what sets him apart and successful. There are more intelligent people than him. Justine Musk wrote what makes Elon different is his maniacal focus.
“Extreme success results from an extreme personality and comes at the cost of many other things,” Ms. Musk wrote. “Extreme success is different from what I suppose you could just consider ‘success.’ These people tend to be freaks and misfits who were forced to experience the world in an unusually challenging way,” she added, noting, “Other people consider them to be somewhat insane.”
She said only one ingredient was required for extreme success:
Be obsessed. Be obsessed. Be obsessed.
All extreme successes became extreme successes because they embraced their weirdness and did not care if the world accepted them. They often made the world bow to their will, as Elon Musk is doing with Twitter right now.
The blue pill vs. the red pill
In the Matrix, Neo is offered a choice of a blue pill which would keep his current reality, or as Morpheus said, “…the story ends and you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.”
Or Neo could take a red pill, stay in Wonderland and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Embracing your weirdness is taking the red pill. Doing that is challenging, uncomfortable, and not safe.
Most people take the blue pill and decide to live in the reality of their Matrix. Safe, comfortable, and normal.
But when you decide to take the red pill, to be different and intense, that’s when you live the wonderful, sometimes scary and painful, authentic version of who you are.
In other words, embracing your quirks, weirdness, eccentricities, foibles, oddities, and peculiarities starts a little thing called loving yourself.
That’s when self-mastery starts.
“how you love yourself is
how you teach others
to love you”
― Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey
Sometimes our families screw us over
I understand the need to be normal. To conform to everyone else’s rules and be safe.
When I was nine or ten, my brothers and sister thought I was weird. I was weird. I liked getting into fights, daydreaming, running naked into the mud, and climbing houses, trees, and telephone poles. I believed in UFOs, witches, and ghosts and that my real family was a wandering group of gypsies who sold me for a bit of extra cash.
The problem was that they could not stand my weirdness. I was too different and not enough like them.
I stayed weird for as long as I could. But when you’re alone, it becomes easier to take on other people’s standards and fears, and then one day, you don’t recognize the person in the mirror.
This willingness to conform to other people’s opinions of me continued until I was 27 years old and my daughter was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor.
My family wanted me to continue working for the family business and let my wife handle all the medical challenges.
I chose another path. I quit the family business to care for my daughter, to be there if she died, and find the best doctors in the world to help her.
Their path would have killed my daughter. My choices saved her.
When I was in my forties, my older brother told me I was the most intense person he had ever met. He said it wasn’t a compliment. I disagree. It was the best thing anyone had ever said to me.
I learned a lesson from my family:
Conformity kills.
So, take the red pill.
Accept the painful, beautiful, sometimes ugly truth of who you are. Embrace your weirdness and walk the path of self-mastery.
This Week’s Challenge
Last week, our challenge was to not talk, text, or tweet for 24 hours. How did you do? Full disclosure, I failed this challenge. I lasted about six hours. But that doesn’t mean I won’t try again. Or, as a friend keeps reminding me,
Nothing beats a failure like a trier. —Fred Bennett
This week’s challenge is physical once again, and like last week, it is simple. But don’t confuse simple with easy. It is not.
The challenge is to do 300 reps in less than 10 minutes every day this week. They can be any combination of exercises. The only criterion is that two exercises must include at least 100 squats and 100 pushups. For example, you can do 150 squats and 150 pushups. Or 100 pushups, 100 squats, and 100 pull-ups.
This challenge is to be done within 15 minutes of waking up and in addition to your usual workout.
A quote on being different
“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” —Anna Quindlen.
For me, Anna is trying the idea that true freedom and happiness come from embracing individuality and imperfections. In other words, our weirdness. Self-mastery begins when we live according to our nature, focusing on personal growth and self-improvement rather than trying to conform to societal expectations or ideals of perfection. In other words, stop trying to copy everyone else, go on a pilgrimage, write a book, do some fucking hard shit, and commit to being uniquely you.
David Goggins teaches us our minds are like a fucking garage.
Thanks for reading. I am grateful to you. Stay weird.
Michael