You know, I have really come to love a good idea. And while I’m not exactly Japanese master inventor Yoshiro Nakamatsu, I get some of my best ideas in the shower. (I think I’d agree with his oxygen-deprivation theory, and have noticed that even in the shower my breathing pattern changes somewhat, so I wonder if this is related)

I know I said it’s ONE trick. But sometimes that ONE trick is really more like a bunch of steps, with huge life changes thrown in here and there! And with that, off we go:

Preparation the Night Before

This all starts the night before I take a shower.

I don’t stay up late anymore. This is mostly because in general, I find that my rested morning thoughts are absolute gold, compared to tired nighttime thoughts. Not only am I more resilient when I’m rested, but I just have more mental capacity and energy in general.

You could give me really bad news in the evening and it might absolutely crush me. You can give me the same news in the morning, and I might play with it like a toy. The rest makes that much of a difference!

So, late nights generally seem like a waste of time (unless I’m with people I love), though they may have some emotional energy recuperation benefit if the subject is cooperative. :-)

Morning Preparation (10-15 minutes)

If you’re familiar with Whole Productivity, as some of you are (thank you for your purchases—your support means a lot to me), you know that emotional debts need to be paid off, or else you’ll get the repo-man effect.

This is definitely true for me after a Sunday night’s sleep. There’s all of that “oh sh** Monday is here” emotion, tied up with any nightmare or stress-dream contents that may linger.

For that reason, I typically plan to lay in bed for at least 10-15 minutes before hitting the shower. During this time I open Google Keep, record some general impressions along those lines, including dream contents. I don’t want a poor emotional state to weigh down my creativity state.

Then I make a quick list of everything “boxy” that’s on my mind. The productivity stuff. Squares. I try to arrange it all in a sort of pseudo-schedule.

(By the way, at this point I’ve unbalanced my day in favor of Square (T) items, for those who have read about Task BATL. This is a huge risk—it’s a clear and present threat to my energy levels and day outcome—but at least I’m aware of it.)

Getting Prepped to Solve Problems

I wrote about caffeine before, and how much it helps with extraverted intuition—that is, the generation of ideas. So I take some of that before I get in the shower.

Depending on the quality of sleep, I also take some turmeric, or maybe ibuprofen if I woke up with a headache, which can absolutely happen if I woke up in the middle of a sleep cycle. Caffeine can’t solve every problem.

In the Shower

I like to put on some upbeat music while I’m in the shower. Yes, that does mean I listen to tunes like Smash Mouth’s Then the Morning Comes. Or if it’s a really hard day, maybe something like That’s Life by Sinatra.

Or if it’s a podcast, something light helps. Something pleasant, something I can mostly ignore.

In this mode I’m ready to think about anything. And ideas just come to mind—no forcing is required.

As new ideas come to mind, I use a memory palace method to remember them. But that’s only if I don’t have time to explore the ideas in my mind, in depth. Many of the ideas have a visual component (even if a simple chart or graph) so they’re easy to remember in that way.

After the Shower

At this point it’s easy to get derailed. A really good idea may seem to want attention NOW. But that can also totally backfire if there are lingering emotional contents, or other items that need to be addressed.

So it’s generally a good idea to get back on the schedule.

Overall, the best activity I know about after showering is walking through my journaling template. Keeping in mind what I wrote above about having a very unbalanced list—that’s very important stuff! It’s time to find balance, enjoyment, etc. and actively plan for it.

Nay, In the past, I did not love good ideas

This is all relatively new to me.

In the past I was generally more grumpy about “good ideas”, especially the really grandiose & positive ideas. I preferred my own subjective perceptions of what will happen as opposed to what could happen. And, unfortunately, a lot of those perceptions were pretty dark. This led me to a stance that was much more like, “sit back and watch negative events unfold”. It did not really reward a more creative, proactive approach to life.

I was also kind of in love with my ability to observe everything, self included, from the outside. Meta-cognition. Meta-perception. “Meta-perspectivizing,” as Dario Nardi calls it. I don’t really value that as an ongoing activity as much anymore, still finding it very helpful, but typically in small doses here and there.

So, my perceptive values have reversed quite a bit in recent years, an intentional process involving some flexibility with different modes of thought.

And you know, I think I consider this last item mindset essential for the best shower-ideas experience. You have to be open and optimistic, in a real problem-solver’s skin. Too much meta-commentary will kill this dead.

Filed in: Ni /42/ | Intuition /63/ | Energy /121/ | Memorization /5/ | Ne /17/ | Planning /17/ | Openness /49/

Some Common INTJ Perceptions:

• I need a set-and-forget diet
• I need a set-and-forget investment plan
• I need a set-and forget daily schedule
• I need a set-and-forget spouse or partner

Some Common Outcomes of the Above:

• My diet worked amazingly well…until it didn’t
• I became an investor! Also…I didn’t exactly get the investment / financial returns I hoped for
• People tell me I’m super productive! Still, I procrastinate too much instead of sticking to my planned schedule
• I found an awesome partner! Also, my partner got sick of how lame & boring life was, every day. Despite my best efforts to keep this system in a set-and-forget state, things became un-set, and I was asked to “remember” and even change…

Solutions:

• I will plan to review, meddle, and mix things up so I can keep learning and growing
• I will be brutally honest with myself as problems crop up, rather than avoiding the problems I didn’t see coming
• I will vent, complain, or scream (into a pillow, ideally) when I don’t get the results I want
• I will scream a little bit, early and often, rather than building up into a nuclear explosion
• Eventually my set-and-forget will be more like set-learn-engage-change-integrate-remember
• My sense for systems design will become more nuanced, responsive, and even colorful
• Life is now a grand experiment, and I enjoy it more

Filed in: Energy /121/ | Productivity /120/ | Control /112/

The upside to doing everything yourself is that you get total control over outcomes:

• I see how everything can be improved. So I jump in and get involved with every outcome-influencing process from the start.
• This creates some “perceptive drag” on executive processes early on. But look, we’re avoiding big risks here.
• You see? I foresaw a problem and prevented it. A huge win for my visionary intuition! I know the best way to do things. (INTJ as risk-mitigator)
• But literally every detail is also now my responsibility, and I have to micro-manage people, or take all the work onto my plate.

The rest of the downside spirals into an epic saga:

• You can’t really work with anybody. They annoy you because they are not you and don’t think like you.
• They don’t like working with you. They’re annoyed that they have to hear your critical commentary on everything they do.
• You’re too stressed out due to all the attention people and things require of you, and too much is on the line for you to enjoy life.
• You reinforce a lack of tactical, moment-to-moment engagement and response, because you have converted every executive process into a perceptive process which is way too drawn out and risk-averse.
• Things break anyway, of course, despite your oversight.
• You can now do less about broken things than you could before, because you’re generally overwhelmed.

The nice thing is, you can start to reverse this spiral by working in little chunks:

• Ah, here’s an element by which I’m overwhelmed. I’m probably way too controlling about it.
• Instead of controlling, I’ll release some control in exchange for an increase in my own energy reservoir, and create a system for responding and engaging with this element when/if problems arise.
• OK, now I have less direct control, but I also have created a system for diving in when problems occur.
• This is not as stressful.
• (Repeat)

The annoying thing is, you probably have to work against the ol’ INTJ intuition when doing this:

• The intuition is subjective. It draws on your past experience.
• In INTJs, it’s dominant and always demanding a voice, especially when you’re tired.
• So if you haven’t trusted other people or systems in the past, it’ll be hard to let go at first, no matter how great your yet-unseasoned engagement and response tool-set.
• In this way, the intuition can easily wrest control away from people who aren’t aware of how it works. They trust it too much. And it creates a really long, annoying loop of crusty, unwanted results.
• The “system thinker” INTJ becomes a victim of a system. But they created it, and fear engagement with a “wrong” part of themselves, so instead of changing it, they credit the ego and just get emotional/pouty when others complain about the results.

It takes practice, but one can break out of this. And even the most painful, stumbling practice which involves learning and development is far, far better than nope-ing out of huge quality-of-life upgrades.

This is especially true for INTJs who are in “executive” career positions. People expect executives to experience, engage, and execute. They do not expect executives to anticipate, control, and interfere/micro-manage. If you can sprinkle some anticipation and a tiny bit of control into your experiencing, engagement, and execution, there’s a good chance people will be really amazed.

Filed in: Productivity /120/ | Control /112/

Here is BY FAR the most amusing relationship complaining I have read recently, from an anonymous INTJ:

Whenever I’m trying to be productive – either by reading, practicing music, etc. She (girlfriend) kinda just … kills time on Instagram with the volume on. I ask her to lower it every time, and I still need to ask her every time.

Also, can you go do something productive? I have a whole library full of books here. Isn’t there something you can research online?

Some people don’t research. They just kill time.

Blows my mind.

I love this guy. BUT that’s also pretty funny. I’m sure he understands why, now that I asked him that one secret clarification question.

But I’m sharing his experience here anyway.

If you catch yourself thinking this way about your girlfriend, boyfriend, mom, dad—whoever it might be—maybe treat it as projection first and foremost. The thing YOU fear about YOURSELF, projected onto those around you. YOU are the researcher. YOU get to do research in your downtime, if you want.

If you’re running away from your lazy-ass shadow—which by the way is a perfectly fine and great thing to have—and all you see is lazy people everywhere, treat it as a subjective perception first. Be super careful about projecting that stuff onto other people. That’s how we end up ruining perfectly great relationships.

(Seriously. WTF do you want your girlfriend to research? lol. Just the thought of ragging on someone for not doing research while they’re relaxing is kind of hilarious, sorry.)

(Parenthetical 2: Anybody else think she was probably begging for him to relax with her for a bit? That’s why the volume does not go down. “Whoops? Was my volume turned up? Sorry” Yeah, the volume will never be turned down when such things are felt. Tortured BF needs to spend time with GF, the GF inside himself and the one outside.)

Filed in: Relationships /78/ | People /74/ | Rest /22/

You deserve it. Waste time today. Do not delay. In Whole Productivity I talk about the blob. Reconnect with that part of yourself that is the blob.

Some of you guys write and tell me that you’re on like your fifth emotional-debt-building, hard-productivity marathon in five days. You don’t need tools for that. You don’t need research for that. What you need is a break. Do the exact opposite of whatever you think productivity is.

Become the blob.

If you can’t take a day off, take half a day. If you can’t take half a day, take a couple of hours. If you can’t take a couple of hours, take an hour. If you can’t do that, take fifteen minutes every hour. If you can’t take fifteen minutes every hour, take five minutes EVERY half hour and lay down, veg out, put your feet up, just be a blob.

Filed in: Therapeutic Practice /146/ | Rest /22/ | Control /112/ | Energy /121/ | Productivity /120/

Ready to Get More Done, Without Going into Emotional Debt and Torturing Yourself?

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Image Credit: Portland Japanese Garden Creek photo via Laurascudder.

Filed in: Energy /121/ | Procrastination /23/ | Productivity /120/ | Therapeutic Practice /146/ | Te /36/ | Publications /44/ | Thinking /70/ | Fi /35/ | Feeling /64/

I shared my recent experience with Jealousy with a couple of INTJs yesterday. The response was something like,

“WHAT? YOU GET JEALOUS? MAN I HAVEN’T BEEN JEALOUS IN A LONG TIME. HOW DOES THAT EVEN WORK?”

Interesting.

Let me ask you guys something: Let’s say you had a hard day and did some things of which you weren’t proud. Now you just need to vent a bit, to a friend. And your friend is that person. Could you “be vulnerable” around someone like that? I don’t know if I could. I doubt they could step up to the plate and provide any meaningful assistance.

It’s not that they don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s more that they’re actively pushing the topic away, off the table, into the dustbin. And that’s weak. I’ll put on my “critic/improver” hat here and say it: That needs to be improved.

These are just two people. And they have their strengths in other areas, of course. And some of you guys are amazingly adept at attention to emotions.

But also, this is a group thing. It’s a traditional, back-of-the-INTJ-manual, “troubleshooting” topic.

I get that INTJs aren’t known for wearing emotions like jealousy on their sleeves (far from it, right?), but this kind of reaction triggers within me a “why not? Can we not do better?” response.

So I will happily push this further. For growth purposes. For experimental purposes.

Take a Little Trip

Here’s another thing I’m taking away from my recent, scandalous, jealousy experience: The contents. Jealousy can also alert you to some unreconciled stuff in your life, and that’s also the healing ingredient, the catalyst to set aside and process later, when your energy is at a high.

In this way, you can take advantage of jealousy and treat it like a trip. You know about trips? Wink-wink. You treat it much the same way you would treat a special voyage to Peru. Part of that experience is in gathering information, as in, “WHOA! I didn’t know that kind of content was in there, part of me!” Emotional experiences like jealousy can work the same way.

And I think that’s also something special given a big, recent factor like the COVID-19 quarantine. You want to go to the beach, like I do? The mountains? Yes! But also, the trip, or “a trip,” is right in front of you. What color are your emotions right now? Can you work to identify feelings? Intuitions? Depending on where your energy is at, you may have “access only,” for processing later. Or you may have processing energy with which to review recent emotions.

In which safe spaces are exploded

But I don’t know. It also feels ridiculous to discuss this stuff on an INTJ blog, in a way. It’s not really building on latent strengths in a specific area. I mean, nobody talks about INTJs like they’re the most emotionally-developed people out there. And nobody, I mean nobody really wants to dwell on their weaknesses for long.

But on the other hand, this is building on core INTJ strengths: For example, a mindset that is open to learning. This strength can in turn push INTJs to growth and eventual change. Learning is always a first step in change. If you can learn, you can change.

Unfortunately, bridging from learning to growth is a frickin’ minefield, but that ought to be treated as a specific issue with its own tricks & tips, not a show-stopper that completely halts a big-picture communications process.

So, for now I’ll keep doing this stuff, even if some of you push back like you never heard of jealousy. Hah.

Filed in: Openness /49/ | Coaching /27/ | Therapeutic Practice /146/ | Fi /35/ | Fe /20/ | Control /112/ | People /74/ | Feeling /64/ | Relationships /78/

I was watching a pretty neat video online recently, when all of a sudden I noticed I was feeling really, really jealous of the person being highlighted in the video. I stared, open-mouthed, at the way their life looked so ideal. Every beautiful camera shot made me feel worse. I could feel my Hit Point Meter going down, down down. Finally, UGH! Critical hit! I wanted to cry. I suck at crying. So I closed the video.

WTF was going on?

First, it was obvious that the feeling was less about that other person, and more about me. OK, I’ve heard that before, about jealousy. I definitely did not really know this person, or their troubles, insecurities—all of those relevant things you’d expect to understand, in a more objective comparison.

On top of that, it seemed clear that the feeling was less about me and more about my big hopes and dreams. Like the jealousy is this voice that’s saying, “yep, just as we thought, those hopes and dreams will never come true.”

BUT.

It was also something else: It was the voice of my empty gas tank.

Emotionally, I already knew I was worn out. That’s why I was laying on the couch, staring at my phone and watching Youtube, in the first place. I was trying to rest a bit. Recover.

It helped to realize this. The jealousy-voice was me, maybe. But it was also a very transient, situational me. It was me in the state of being out of gas, thinking, as an exhausted person would: “I can’t do it. They did it, they win. No second place.”

The clock kept ticking. Laying there on the couch, I rested up. I got up, continued my work, and took it easy for a while. The jealousy faded. It packed up and went away. I even made some big, ambitious plans.

This all felt pretty darn resilient, considering all of the nasty things that voice told me, mere hours ago.

Jealousy—incredibly, frustratingly—seems to be me, needing rest.

The point of jealousy, after all of the pain, isn’t even me, or my goals. The point is: “No resources.” No energy. Get rest.

So from here on out, Jealousy goes into my “energy indicators” box. It used to be in its own box that I didn’t really want to own, so I like that it has this new relation now.

Quotes About Jealousy

My INTJ dad used to collect quotes in various notebooks. If you asked him about Jealousy, I’m 100% sure he’d dig up some quote which outright rejected jealousy. Like:

Like hatred, jealousy is forbidden by the laws of life because it is essentially destructive. —Alexis Carrel

Or maybe worse:

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity. —Robert A. Heinlein

(Poor Heinlein. I’ll bet he had some serious run-ins with jealousy. Anybody who writes that way is, in my experience, very concerned about being labeled neurotic and insecure.)

I’ll tell you what those quotes are doing: They’re making jealous people feel worse. And that’s really a shame. They’re Patton’s slapping incidents, more than they are help or inspiration.

When jealousy becomes an energy problem, pseudo-solutions like “well then, just stop!” or “jealous people are bad” are really easily identified as ineffective. Nope, when your energy’s low, you gotta deal with the energy levels directly.

I’d rather that all those quotes slamming jealous people just said: Get some rest. Find your next aid station on the road of life. Take good care of yourself. The jealousy will pass and you’ll be able to move on. You’re still as good as you ever were.

Filed in: Anxiety /32/ | Essays /53/ | Relationships /78/ | Therapeutic Practice /146/ | Control /112/ | Energy /121/ | People /74/ | Feeling /64/

Canadian George Costanza writes:

Bacon on a burger. I normally don’t get my burgers with bacon. Not because I don’t love bacon.

But because it’s awkward and out of place in an otherwise homogenous concoction of bun, beef, and cheese. It’s the same reason I usually do no tomato and no pickles. My go-to creation at a local joint, for example, is as follows: patty, cheese, lettuce, caramelized onions, caramelized mushrooms, sriracha mayo.

And if the lettuce isn’t a butter lettuce, or if it isn’t shredded, or if there’s (gasp) stalk , it’s coming out.

I’m not against tomato and pickles, by the way. It can be done, but both need to be practically shaved and layered. This allows the juices to seep out and get mixed in with the rest of the burger and get to the right temperature.

The last thing I want is to get something cold, wet, and acidic on my tongue when I have such a yummy warm, beef+cheese+bread thing going on.

Now as for the bacon. The flavour pairs great, it’s not that. It’s simply awkward to eat and doesn’t mesh well the way it’s typically presented. Here’s my answer to bacon in a burger. Two options:

Oh and the bacon always gets low-n-slow baked and dried well first.

Chopped up and mixed into the mayo. So it’s effectively a bacon mayo. You need bottom and top bun covered with a thin layer.

Chopped up and sprinkled on top of the cheese, as the cheese is melting. So that it holds tight as you munch into it.

Dear George,

You got me thinking.

Where food is concerned, you’re what I’d call an Integrator. Your goal in eating is singular. “Experience the taste of the thing”. You want to taste the “bacon burger,” if that’s what you’re having. The burger is the combination of ingredients, and that combination is what you want to taste.

When I eat with Separators—those on the other side of the spectrum—their bacon is falling all over the plate. Or their stalk of lettuce gets caught on their cheek and falls to the plate. They pick up the thing and eat it by itself. Crunch crunch. A blob of mayo, some of the cheese, whatever. They’ll enjoy it by itself.

I’m convinced that the Separator position is something like: “Foods taste better when the components are falling apart or at least individually easy to separate and enjoy on their own.” They want to kind of pull the thing apart, often literally. (To an Integrator, this can be a bit embarrassing, if not infuriating—imagine your dining partner holding up “the thing” they ordered, and pulling it apart instead of eating it as one unit!)

Integrators come with our own quirks. I think we Integrators invented processed food. Not just in the bad form, but also in the good form. Do you enjoy a good processed snack? I sure do.

But also, yeah, the bad form. Integrators can fall into this trap of wanting to eat machine food, because they think of themselves as food-experiencing machines. They want it to taste the same next time. NONE OF THE BITS SHOULD COME APART.

There’s also a novelty-pressure which means that no possible extant food can create the experience they’re hoping to enjoy next. So a new thing must be manufactured.

I wrote a short story a while back which I now recognize has some of my Integrator-preferences built in.

Filed in: Interests /112/ | Essays /53/ | Randomness /26/

I was reviewing a post from 2017 counting about 300 frameworks.

After reading it, I wondered where I was at as of 2020. Here’s a screenshot of the frameworks I’ve worked on this month—April, 2020:

Some of these represent big edits that took a lot of time, and some represent little updates here and there, like applying the Unified Experiencing Template to a bunch of loose notes.

As of right now the total number of these files is about 900. I may cross over 1,000 soon, but I also want to be careful: Quantity is not quality. I’ve also combined quite a few frameworks since 2017.

Also, many of these are really low-quality in terms of objective information. They’re mostly subjective, which is the point—they’re about me learning stuff, not you or anybody else. You know that voice that tells you, “you probably already know this stuff?” You’d probably be right in a lot of cases. However the real treasure to me is in factors like:

• Where I left off with my last experience in this area
• Where I want to go next with this interest, hobby, or general framework
• Maybe some resources, like links I don’t want to have to search for next time
• The history of me and a particular interest—when did it start? And why?

The older I get, the more important that sort of thing becomes. This is a broad support base for a very broad set of interests. And those interests give me energy & good vibes.

It’s fun to re-open some of the old frameworks, and see what I’ve built up over time, too. In my RPG frameworks, it’s easier than ever to pick up an old campaign and keep playing.

Filed in: Interests /112/ | Energy /121/ | Therapeutic Practice /146/ | Productivity /120/