Like many families, ours has a tradition of giving gifts on birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, and Hanukkah. There is a quirky twist with us, of course. After observing how gift-giving was working (or not) in the early years, we began emphasizing that gift-giving is primarily an opportunity to express to the recipient 3 things: I see you, I know you, and I value you. We constantly reinforce that two gifts are being exchanged: the physical gift that is unwrapped, and the emotional gift of being seen, known, and valued. Consequently, a prized norm in our family is to bestow gifts that show the giver’s understanding of and celebration of the recipient’s preferences and aspirations. Because we treasure the recipient, we bestow things and words the recipient will treasure.
The downside of this strong norm in our family is that it makes us very sensitive to bad gifts. How can a gift be bad? When someone claims to care for you but cannot be troubled to pay attention to your life, your preferences, your aspirations, or your influence on them, their inevitably bad gift only demonstrates that they do not see, understand, and value you. They may intend to give a gift, but they in fact give disdain.
The Thought That Counts?
Because intention sometimes does not correlate with consequence, someone concocted the phrase, “It’s the thought that counts.” That idea is a comforting blanket for our lazy consciences because it grants us ease to focus only on ourthoughts, our intentions. A more useful version of that aphorism might be ‘It’s the recipient’s thoughts that count.’ It is how the gift will speak to the recipient and what they will think about themselves upon receiving it that matters. Investing the time, attention, and energy to consider the gift’s effects on the recipient and to do the practical work required to give an affirming, inspiring gift – this is an act, a choice, a sacrifice that matters far more than a convenient ‘thought.’ No, it is the act that counts.
The unreliability of intention is pointedly clear in matters beyond gift-giving. 90% of Americans who have an idea for starting a business never actually start that business. 90% of all diets fail. 90% of New Year’s resolutions are not followed through to completion. Everyone plans; few execute. While we spent a few years living on a boat sailing around the Caribbean, countless people would say to us something like, “Oh, I have dreamed of that for years, and someday maybe I will.” Our response was always the same: “It is not complicated. You can do it. But you must act boldly to leave behind you comfort zone.”
It is easier to dream than to do.
Human beings have an extraordinary imagination and a great gift for storytelling. Our mouths often write cheques our souls cannot cash. Perhaps that is why our lives rarely live up to the tales we tell ourselves and others.
If you want to live an extraordinary life, do not satisfy yourself with plans, intentions, and dreams; act boldly.
Intuition Versus Rationality
I am not making the case that we are merely instinctive animals. Thinking matters. Will matters. Self-discipline matters. We can influence our patterns of behaviour through conscious, rational choice. One of the traits that most distinguish humans from other animals is our ability to mediate primal stimulus-response patterns. We do have some degree of influence over ourselves. After all, this book would be a hopeless exercise if we could not rise above instinct and exercise a bit of agency in our lives.
But rationality is cognitively expensive. We simply do not have the time and energy to be rational about every decision. So, most of our decisions are not driven by rational thought; they are intuitive, pre-rational. In his book The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt presents compelling research demonstrating that our most common mode is act-rationalize, not reason-act. In everyday situations, we construct edifices of rationalization after-the-fact for intuitive decisions. We confidently assert that the rationale drove the decision, when in fact the decision preceded the rationalization. In common parlance, we are mostly heart, not mostly head. We have the ability, at great effort, to act with willful rationality in cases of great importance to us, but we are terribly bad – with ourselves and with others – at identifying the true intentions behind most of our actions.
Attention and willful rationality are the most precious resources you can spend. Guard your attention and allocate your willfulness carefully. You cannot attend to everyone and everything; instead, you must choose who and what gets special attention and allow the rest to be processed in the background. You cannot make every decision through conscious, rational analysis, so you must choose to trust your intuitive self on most of them.
Consistency
Naturally, you will worry that making so many choices intuitively will make you look inconsistent. This worry is a sleight-of-hand by your rational brain, which is smuggling in a biased notion of consistency: consistency with a rational story of yourself. Our rational brains are fixated on the stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are. But these stories are not who we actuallyare. To paraphrase Emerson, you cannot help but act in accordance with your true self, but you can easily act inconsistent with a story you tell of self.
One of my least favorite sayings is “I cannot believe I did that. That is not me.” Invariably, this statement follows some action that is incongruent with the personal identity myth they have been peddling about themselves. The action is perfectly true to the self; the problem is that the story of the self is not true. Who we are is who we have been, are being, and will continue being.
Your true self may not correspond to any story you can tell now, but your true self will ensure by the end of your days that the sum of all your actions will distill into a coherent story of who you were.
A reliable source of stress and anxiety in my life is when I am struggling to be true to a myth that I have told about myself. That I am patient. That I can handle monotony. That I can tolerate fools and bullies. That I am good at small talk. Living to a myth is a struggle because it is fiction; I have imagined a story of who I am, and the story does not correspond to reality. Maintaining such a fiction is exhausting.
Such myths are particularly problematic when I drink my own Kool-Aid. When I assume that my myth is true, I turn off my intentionality and just live happily by my intuition. Inevitably, I soon notice that my intuitive navigation of life is about to collide messily with the myth, and I am presented with an unexpected bill: admit the deception or expend tremendous energy to reshape my true self in an area I have not prioritized for such attention. Neither of these alternatives is good, hence the anxiety.
Creating a myth of self that is at odds with your true self
is a recipe for anxiety.
Self-Control and Self-Acceptance
You will act sometimes in ways that bother you. Avoid soothing your conscience with the snake oil that your rationalized intentions somehow convey desirable meaning and value to your ignoble actions. This lie cannot be maintained for long, and it will only reduce your incentive to actually act nobly. Leaning on intentions is the road to hell, disconnecting yourself from the unadorned reality of action. If instead you see that your actions reveal your true values and priorities, the path forward becomes clear. If you do not like the identity story your actions are writing, you can change your values and priorities—but, it will cost you great energy and attention. Otherwise, you must accept the values and priorities presently driving your actions and the story those actions will tell about you. Either way, the story of your life is an action story.
Owning It
My real self cannot be defined as anything more than my expressed actions. On my last day, the reality of Scott will be simply the sum of what I did. It is mere myth-making to claim that there is something nobler inside me that somehow did not express itself in action. I am a man, not a myth. A good father is nothing more nor less than someone who acts in ways that are good for his children. What is it to be a son, a friend, a spouse, a leader, a neighbor, an employee, a mentor, a sailor, a trustee, an inventor, a guide, a volunteer, a diver, a mystic, an engineer, or any other labels I might like to wear? My actions are writing an integrated story of being and becoming all these things to various greater and lesser degrees, a story that will need not mention intentions, plans, or dreams. We cannot see my story clearly yet, but we will.
I am everything that I have ever done and everything that I will ever do. I am my lifetime of actions, and I make no pretence of being more. Intentions are just a warm blanket for flattering oneself, and my Self does not need flattery.
Neither does yours.
Article by More to Life Elder – Scott Davis
Article published in More to Life – Edition 66
