04/03/23

How To Know What To Do

on the science of Noticing

I recently read an essay by Isabel on comfort, alignment, and the human mind that inspired this piece. 

The overwhelm of indecision and uncertainty we feel when we are scribbling down pro and con lists, asking everyone for advice, and running through a logical justification for every possible option in our head simply melts away when we prioritize our intuition.

She perfectly worded what I have often felt – this hastiness toward tasks I think I’m supposed to be doing so I don’t get left behind. Or worse, to achieve whatever external metric of success I’ve told myself matters. 

A lot of us spend our lives on autopilot. It feels a little like: 

And when we do stop to question if we’re on the right path, we tend to get existential – is this in alignment with my needs at the moment? Is it co-evolving with me as I evolve? Am I getting stagnant? Is this what I’m supposed to be doing?

We tend to think – when I get through the next exam, the next degree, the next job, I’ll feel safe enough, maybe even comfortable to do X – We’re constantly moving through life waiting to get somewhere. Sometimes waiting to be happy until we get to the next thing. We lose the intention in our drive as we let external perception take the wheel. 

We all want to do things with intention, but sometimes the intention gets lost in the sauce. Next thing you know, you’re 55 in your safe career with your safe life reflecting and justifying, “..and then life got in the way”.

Doing things with intention requires you to know what to do. But how do you know what to do? It’s difficult to Eisenhower matrix your way through life when everything feels urgent and important. Additionally, as rational a choice seems, sometimes I still don’t want to do it because it doesn’t feel good.

As I surrendered to experimentation for life’s mundane minutiae, I uncovered a yearning deep inside to fill a meta existential divide. For the entire month of February, I decided to just lean into what felt right, with the guiding principle of: notice what you move toward. 

I think I went through a proper damascene conversion in this process. I was getting burnt out and this felt like a good experiment to try. For someone who tends to be type A with to-do lists and notion boards for everything – letting “what I moved toward” dictate my actions and therefore my feelings, felt weird at first. I was resisting it. I wasn’t committing to it. Intentional action requires committing to the action at hand. You can’t be watching netflix but feeling guilty about not doing the thing you think you’re supposed to be doing. I realized what I needed was to commit to presence – commit to ~being in the moment~. I never quite understood what that meant until this silly experiment.

More on this below, but in essence, presence led me to finding my intuition and noticing my intuition helped me identify what to do (my intention). Executing on said intention made me feel completely in alignment at all times. Turns out your feelings can tell you what to do.  

Presence

Presence is at the core of it all. To be more present is to practice mindfulness – having your mind on what you’re doing. It’s the opposite of rushing (being hasty) or doing too many things at once. To be mindful, you slow down to take your time. You do one thing at a time. You focus on what you’re doing calmly. 

And there it was, my biggest problem – not doing things slowly. Isabel ended up writing a great piece on this too as I was exploring this, which I recommend reading. 

Fostering slowness was difficult at first. I was constantly doing a million things at a time, and if I wasn’t doing them, I was thinking about them. To be honest, I am still struggling with this a bit. What has helped is to cultivate stillness. You can’t listen to your intuition without stillness. I do this by putting a stop to over-stimulation by turning off my devices and letting myself get bored. I found that boredom allows me to naturally “notice what I move toward”. Professor Cal Newport, author of “Digital Minimalism” is a big proponent of this. 

I recently read that for his 11th album, Tom Petty decided to start working with the music producer Rick Rubin.

"Rick loves music," Petty said, "that’s why I decided to work with him. It’s not because of his technical skill. He has no musical skill. He plays no instruments. He just loves music."

Rick Rubin adds, "what I have to offer is, as a fan, I can say what I like and what I don’t like. And I don't necessarily know why, but I'm true to my taste and try to steer in a direction that feels natural and good to me."

The first album Petty and Rubin worked on, "Wildflowers" (Petty's second solo album) went triple platinum, selling over 3,000,000 copies in less than a year.

Rick Rubin has no musical skill, but he has what Jerry Seinfeld identifies as the ultimate skill of the artist: “taste and discernment.”

“It’s one thing to create,” Seinfeld said. “The other is you have to choose. ‘What are we going to do, and what are we not going to do?’ This is a gigantic aspect of [artistic] survival. It’s kind of unseen—what’s picked and what is discarded—but mastering that is how you stay alive.”

The capacity to observe and revel in the things that make us feel most vibrant is presence. Presence builds taste. Taste gives direction to noticing intuition.

Noticing

As I got more into this habit of letting myself be bored and building “taste”, I was reminded of a DBT (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy) technique I’d practiced long ago called “The Wise Mind” – which refers to a balance between emotional mind and the rational mind, when a person is able to make decisions and solve problems by taking into account both their emotions and logical thinking. 

The emotional mind is characterized by intense feelings and impulses, while the rational mind is focused on facts and evidence-based reasoning. When a person is in their wise mind, they are able to integrate these two aspects of their mind, and make decisions that are grounded in both emotion and reason. 

Being in the wise mind allows us to make balanced and thoughtful decisions that take into account both feelings and the facts of a situation. Noticing our intuition, what we move toward, what feels good, both emotionally and rationally help us bring into consciousness our intention – “what to do”.

Connecting the dots between what the “findings” of my experiment and this DBT technique was validating. I started seeing the rational as believing in what I want, and the emotional as noticing what I need

One could make the most correct decision based on all the pros-and-cons lists or decision matrices but if the outcome doesn’t feel right, then it is worth nothing. Our feelings are trying to tell us something – intuitively moving us toward our intention. Noticing them is important.

Execution

I observed that executing on whatever my identified intention through presence and noticing allowed me to be in the happiest and most fulfilled state I’ve ever been. I can only describe it as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes flow. 

And flow state is recognized for inducing a loss of awareness of time, which in turn is associated with presence. In other words, when we are fully present in the moment we tend to lose our perception of time. 

When intention meets execution, we’re in alignment. Executing in alignment helps us be more present. 

From first principles, the following are actionable steps that worked for me: 

1. Break everything that holds together your experience at the time.
   Nothing is that urgent. Nobody is dying. There will always be work to get done or people to answer to. Let go of the performative persona. (Is your intention fueled by external perception?)
   
   I did a more radical version of this recently. I quit working on a startup I’d been building over the last year or so. I also took a step back from numerous side projects and other old dead-end projects.
   

2. Cultivate stillness.
   You can’t listen to your intuition without stillness. I turn off my phone and just let myself sit in silence for a bit. I let myself get bored.
   

3. Notice.
   The way to notice what you move toward, to notice what moves you, or notice what does not serve you is to listen to your own intuition. Pay attention. Paying attention is a form of discipline. It takes practice.
   
   This can be difficult at first – especially balancing the dichotomy between rational and emotional faculties (discussed above is the concept of the wise mind).
   
   Emotionally, I followed my guiding principle. Leaning into noticing what I was naturally drawn toward included giving myself permission to just do things I wouldn’t normally do. I allowed myself to get bored. I ended up randomly joining a dance studio, which allowed me to play. The more I did things I enjoyed, the stronger my intuition became, and the more I got to know myself, the more I trusted my decisions. In that moment, I realized that that was key – self-trust. The reason why I was yearning for external validation was because I didn’t fully trust myself. I didn’t trust that I could make the best decision for myself because I wasn’t noticing my feelings. All the external knowledge of the world didn’t matter if the decision didn’t feel right. Emotions play a significant role in shaping our external perspective and self-perception. Leaving them out of the equation was precisely why my conjecture couldn’t get to the proof. Decisions are better when they’re emotionally driven because they feel right. Intuition and self-trust become stronger with practice. At least for me, seeing evidence in trusting my intuition was the only thing that made me want to do it more. 
   
   Below is the adapted algorithm for installing Noticing reflexes from Neel Nanda’s The Skill of Noticing Emotions. I’ve found it to be a great mental model to deploy to increase <intuition-seekingness> sample size. 

   • Choose the mental state

     • Eg. Last time I didn’t know “What to do” 

   • Choose your marker action

     • E.g. I turn my phone on airplane mode and let myself sit still 

   • List 1-10 previous recent examples where you've felt this mental state

     • E.g. Two days ago, I was super anxious about not knowing what to do. It was the type of existential dread anxious. 

   • Mentally simulate each example, and take the action when you feel the emotion

     • E.g. Two days ago when I felt this way, I had had a long day of meetings. It was a result of spending the whole day on work and nothing that fills my soul. What made me feel better was taking a bath and working on a personal project for a few hours. 

   • Actively practice this over the next 2 weeks – this is the learning period

     • E.g. I felt this same type of anxiety again today and I was able to feel better by repeating the same technique.

4. Do.
   Self-trust is built by keeping promises to yourself. Executing on intentions over and over again makes it stronger while helping us get in alignment.

I’ll leave you with the following quote from Raymond Carver that reminds me of noticing the stillness

“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”

Thanks to my friend Maaria Shah for proposing the experiment, connecting the dots of Noticing with DBT, and for helping edit the piece.

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