How I learned not to think BIG thoughts & the Power of a Costco Hotdog

A guy with some thoughts writes on his blog

Recently, a few thoughts crossed my mind - one or two over the course of a week - and I decided to take some time to share them. Recently, I've been thinking about the concept of purpose, the reason why one does things. Earlier in my 20s, I asked very fundamental and objective questions about life, "What is its meaning," "What am I supposed to do," and "How has Costco kept its hotdog prices so low after all these years?" I've now come to ask fewer big questions: why? Because $1.50 for a hotdog is excellent, there is no need to question those prices. As to why I've been asking fewer big questions? Primarily, it's because I've come to realize that life is not conceptual.

Now, John, where's the part of the blog where you're driving cars at 100mph across the desert or breaking down an ML company that you invested in - for those that are new to this blog - this is a place where my life intersects and somedays, I think about thoughts - and today's one of these days.

However, I stopped asking the big questions because concepts often fail to match experiences. Take this example: Your experience of physically looking at a red item is different from thinking about the color red in your mind. The experience of smelling lavender is an entirely different experience than thinking about lavender. To some of us, this is obvious; it's called having an experience, but to others, we float between thought and tangible experience without realizing where our attention has drawn us.

Often, I've spent so much time in my head that I've missed the things around me, telling myself I was smelling lavender when I was really thinking about it. For work, this served me well; the mind calculates, breaks concepts into components, and analyses those components in different scenarios. Often, though, the interpretation of your tangible experience requires no interpretation, and you can miss a lot of life by thinking about it too much.

This, actually, is the core of Buddhist philosophy (take it from a man with no religion and a Jewish Mother and Christian father). That conceptualization takes the place of experience all too often. I'll make this story brief because patience is one of the last virtues I've learned, and I assume that if we're friends, you might be working on that one, too. TLDR: the Buddha held up a flower, one guy looked at the flower and smiled, the Buddha smiled back, and the man went about his day, then the rest of the students sat there and listened to 2 hours on the nature of flowers, but simply looking and experiencing, that's what life is about, and only the man who saw the flower and did not attempt to interpret it, got it.

As I get older and ask what's missing, the answer really is not that anything is missing; it's that attention flickers from concept to experience (from the thought of the flower to actually looking at it), and when I feel stuck, I'm usually in a state where thinking and concepts take up too much of my attention, and tangible experience is pushed to the side.

Now look, I want this to not only be fun for me to write but helpful for you to read. As you read this, you are probably rushing through a morning, coffee in one hand, phone in the other. Take a moment to see where your attention actually lies, though. A good test of this is to reflect on your experience of music - music is naturally pleasing to humans, rhythm feels good, and connects us to ourselves. Frequently, though, when we spend too much time conceptualizing without realizing it, we hear music but feel less than we used to. If you play a song you liked as a kid and can't find yourself pulled into the rhythm, odds are that your attention has shifted to your mind over the years, leaving you less in touch with the music and your tangible experiences.

If you found that you struggled to connect to some of the music in a truly peaceful manner, the question you must ask yourself is: when I look inward, what do I expect to find? Typically, people look inward and miss the music because they are searching for something they expect to find.

For me, I made one of the most classic mistakes of all time: I expected that looking inward for years on end, evaluating the energy I felt, the thoughts I had, and the feelings I experienced, would lead me to find a singular, conceptual self. This was, and is, incorrect. What I learned is best summed up by my favorite mythologist, Joseph Campbell, when he says

"where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

Simply put, all big concepts are relative to our lives; the answers are in the tangible moment we find ourselves in, not outside of it. Nothing is objectively true; it's true to your views, your tangible experience, and sometimes, to the thoughts you hold in your moment of evaluation, and that's okay. We find ourselves not within our bodies, our thoughts, or our minds but with our connection to tangible experiences. We are ourselves when we only focus on the music, when we connect to our experience and look for nothing beyond it.

The truth that I had been seeking for a long time excluded my experience of MY life, in search of a greater picture, sometimes I even missed the people around me, and the places I was in; searching for something beyond myself, beyond the music, an abstract concept of self, something that is always impossible to find. I’ve learned that we can only find ourselves through the things we experience, not thought the ideas we think, so stop looking and go experience the magic of a $1.50 hotdog.

“This is it. If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere!” - Jospeh Campbell