How to Stop Anxiety, Understand Status, and Work Hard
you get: 1 hard truth, 2 book insights, 1 new mental framework
Hey, it's the Jona Digest.
Rundown of Today:
My struggle: Anxiety kills creativity
Hard truth: Kindness is the shortcut
Non-fiction book: The Status Game by Will Storr
Fiction book: Dune by Frank Herbert
Mental Framework: Effort is just opportunity cost
This Week's Struggle
I hate hearing this. You probably hate hearing this. And 99% of "high performer" advice loves ignoring this.
But: anxiety kills creativity.
Even positive anxiety, telling people that they'll get paid to do a creative task, puts a harsh stop to their ability to be creative.
Suppose I start writing a video script with views or likes in mind. My brain rebels. It starts producing slop and disengages from the words on the page.
Well... That's not good.
Hard Truth
To excel in any non-routine+creative task, you need to overcome this anxiety.
Think of how you'd react if a scared puppy showed up at your doorstep. You don't need any fancy framework or therapeutic method to know how to calm it. You'd:
Slow your movement
Speak softly
Relax your muscles
However, if it's you who is anxious, you react with harshness, willpower, and punishment.
I've learned one way to overcome this from Martha Beck, she calls it K.I.S.T.
Kind
Internal
Self-Talk
Being unconditionally there for the small, scared version of yourself is an empowering experience. Try sentences such as "tell me everything, I know I can only imagine how much it sucks".
On the note of "non-routine tasks", if I were you I'd spend the coming years on gaining as complex & intersectional skills as possible. Everything else will be automated: Harvard predicts ~30% of white collar jobs to be displaced in the next 5 years. Integrate skills from completely unrelated fields, and above all, learn to learn.
Jona's Library
Non-Fiction: The Status Game by Will Storr
What drives humans? Money? Choice of partner? Power?
Yes, but also no... to all of these.
What Will Storr argues in his book The Status Game is that the fundamental currency motivating your behavior is status.
Your relative standing to the other monkeys who learned to speak.
Research shows us that your status is the strongest predictor of "feeling good" we have. Low status also, which blew my mind, increases your inflammation, risk of depression, and anxiety.
Now, there is a simple question: do you play the game or do you opt out?
I have to disappoint those who chose the latter, because your chances of actually opting out are close to zero.
The act of taking yourself out of the game is a status-driven move in and of itself. We see "spiritually enlightened" people who vehemently defend themselves as more spiritually enlightened than most people they know.
The game is always running, and I don't have an answer for what exactly to do about that.
But the most useful thing I have taken from getting through half of the book is a much clearer understanding of what makes the world go round.
Religion is institutionalized status.
Politics are too.
Morality is too.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Even my writing this letter is a sophisticated way of signaling to the world: "Look how smart I am to see through all of this."
Be wary of those claiming they don't care for status; they are playing 4D chess with you.
Fiction: Dune by Frank Herbert
After many weeks, I finally finished the first part of Dune.
But here's the warning I took from this masterpiece: we are deeply wired for religion. The rush we feel when we think we have found our savior surpasses everything else. And this can lead to our ruin.
Paul, the main character, leads the Fremen as their messiah. They kill & die for him, as he is the one.
I will not spoil the book for those who haven't read it, but the warning comes in the impact this has on Paul.
Even though we are wired to love cults of personality from the innovative CEO to the influential creator, we rarely stop to consider what kinds of people are pulled to those positions.
Let me know if you read/watched Dune, and what you thought the deeper lessons to take from it are. You can send me a message or write an email, and I’ll reply.
Effort is Just Opportunity Cost
This is a mental framework I've learned from reading through the literature of goal pursuit.
When you and I focus on a task, it is likely the only thing occupying our attention. Because of that, we, by definition, are missing out on the opportunity to give our attention to something else.
This means that we not only pay the cost of effort but also the opportunity cost of what we're missing out on.
What we perceive as effortful is our subconscious understanding of the opportunity cost of our actions outweighing their benefit.
In simple words: when we realize that we would actually much rather be spending our time on something else than to get the reward from the task we're doing right now.
I think that's why the entrepreneur who understands their true personal gain at any given moment will perceive their work as less effortful than the employee who knows someone else is benefitting 10x as much as they are.
Life Snapshot
In Berlin, spending almost all my time alone & working. That shit's not really the best for being present and focused, which is why I'm happy that two of my best friends are visiting over the coming weeks. And then I'm heading to an exciting entrepreneur city in the US (hint, it’s boiling hot)!
I'm excited to tell you about it first ;)
Much love,
Jona