Lately, I’ve been looking for core values to direct my habits and work. I’ve condensed them into three four letter words:
- Bold
- Kind
- Lazy
Boldness comes first. Among the five regrets of the dying, three would not happen for those who live boldly. Life is incredibly precious and short. To be bold is to embrace awareness of life’s miracle, and use that energy to stand up to the fear of failure and the weight of convention. Those who regretted working too much on the wrong things, living life on the terms of others, didn’t muster enough courage to take bold action. This is perhaps the foremost trap of human life.
How to be bold? I’m just a beginner at it. I try to focus on the fleeting nature of life, and to walk more on the knife’s edge. Remember Marco Polo’s dictum: “the bold may not live forever, but the timid do not live at all”. Or Disraeli’s: “life’s too short to be small”. Whatever dream becomes more intense in the space of your awareness, boldly follow it. Learn to embrace the discomfort of not doing exactly what’s expected of you, or of appearing as weird in others’ eyes.
Kindness is the essential complement to boldness. To me, there is a much worse destiny than being a cog. What if your boldness turned you into a Hitler? That’s why kindness is essential. It directs all your boldness into action that is chiefly for others’ benefit. And others’ are not just a specific group (such as Tony Soprano’s clan, or Hitler’s Aryan Race) — others are all sentient beings. Boldness without kindness only intensifies the damage you unleash on others through your bold actions. If you’re not going to be kind, better not be bold either.
How to be kind? I’m just starting to figure it out. For now, I try to maintain awareness of the impact of my actions on others — all others. If I start to see others as objects in my planning, then it’s time to take a step back and reconsider.
Laziness comes the most natural to me. Why is laziness important? Because one could always be doing an infinite amount of things, especially things that others expect you to do, without really doing anything of significance. Most of what we do doesn’t matter. Laziness forces you to focus, really focus, on those few things that make a huge difference, and just focus on them. It’s a way (perhaps the way) to be bold on a tactical level.
The enemy of impact is busyness. Busyness leads to irrelevance, because busyness measures actions by their efforts, not by their results. And busyness considers all actions to be relatively of the same importance, rather than focusing on the vital few. Someone focused on being busy is someone focused on doing things, not so much on which things.
Laziness also has another advantage: by focusing on what you think is important and challenging assumptions, you’re setting a much higher bar for yourself. If you didn’t do what was expected of you, you better come up with something much, much better to the table. And that is the whole point! When you’re fully engaged, you can create work that’s of a different caliber and relevance.
Finally, laziness can create the necessary space for rest and awareness. If you’re very bold and very kind, you need ways to open up, tune in, do something different that might spark a creative angle, rest and recuperate. Laziness creates space.
Recently, I watched Band of Brothers with my wife. In the last episode, one of the veterans said that when the war was finishing, he and many others had a feeling of being able to do anything they dreamed of after the war. But that feeling of power quickly faded away after the war, at least for him. Perhaps it was the awareness of living your life at the knife’s edge that brought that power. I certainly don’t want to live my life in a state of war; but through certain habits of mind, cultivate boldness, kindness and laziness, so that I can summon some the virtues of living in a state of war, and therefore make the best use of my life for the benefit of others.