David speaks with Michael Ashcroft, a writer and Alexander Technique teacher who previously spent 10 years consulting on clean energy innovation.
A lot of Michael's work centres around helping people expand their awareness. He's written several essays and posts I've loved, particularly about the concept of grinding, and how paying attention to our awareness can help us maximise our creativity, productivity, posture and physical engagement.
We talked about:
🔄 Corporate to Self-Employment – Freedom, ambition & avoiding burnout
🤔 Mindset & Decisions – Priorities, big choices & challenges
🧠 Awareness & Focus – Attention, non-fixation & efficiency
🎨 Productivity & Structure – Creativity, discipline & idea management
📝 Writing & Self-Discovery – Process, organising & personal growth
🥷🏽 Missionary vs. Mercenary – Mindset & long-term fulfilment
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📹 Watch on Youtube:
📄 Show notes:
[02:21] Life After Corporate Work
[05:29] Balancing Freedom and Productivity
[17:45] The Concept of Ergonomics and Burnout
[40:16] Embracing the Highs and Lows of Life
[41:53] The Morpheus Pill Dilemma
[43:19] Understanding the Alexander Technique
[45:55] The Power of Expanded Awareness
[47:27] The Luck Factor and Serendipity
[54:36] The Impact of Distractions on Experiences
[59:26] Balancing Effort and Flow
[01:07:36] The Interplay of Expansion and Contraction
[01:19:58] Exploring Flow States: Contracted vs. Expansive
[01:21:35] The Writer's Matrix: Discipline, Vice, and Serendipity
[01:24:08] Balancing Structure and Creativity in Writing
[01:25:45] The Concept of Trends Over Streaks
[01:28:09] Knowledge Management and Writing Systems
[01:31:08] The Snail Trail Analogy
[01:38:39] Redefining Virtue: Effort vs. Outcome
[01:40:15] Navigating Life Paths: Default, Country, and Desire
[01:45:28] Applying Alexander Technique to Life Choices
[01:50:09] Thrashing vs. Swimming: Finding Stability
[01:54:43] Concluding Thoughts and Reflections
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
Alexander Technique | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Technique
KPMG | https://kpmg.com/xx/en/home.html
Escape from Freedom | https://amzn.to/3PtObCp
Erich Fromm | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Fromm
NaNoWriMo | https://nanowrimo.org/
Jonny Miller | https://www.theknowledge.io/jonnymiller/
Luca Dellanna | https://www.theknowledge.io/lucadellanna/
Ergodicity | https://amzn.to/47TWBd8
Christine Carrillo | https://www.theknowledge.io/carrillo/
The Carbon Trust | https://www.carbontrust.com/
Perceptual control theory | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_control_theory
Frederick Matthias Alexander | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Matthias_Alexander
Richard Wiseman | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wiseman
The Luck Factor | https://amzn.to/3PpX1Qe
Six degrees of separation | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation
Dzogchen | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzogchen
Hooked | https://amzn.to/3PtSU5w
Nir Eyal | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nir_Eyal
Sam Harris | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris
Psycho-physical Unity | https://mouritz.org/companion/article/psycho-physical-unity
Hunter S. Thompson | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson
David Kadavy | https://www.theknowledge.io/kadavy/
Duolingo | https://www.duolingo.com/
Notion | https://www.notion.so/
James Altucher | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Altucher
Andrew Huberman | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_D._Huberman
Paul Millerd | https://www.theknowledge.io/paulmillerd/
Pathless Path | https://amzn.to/3i4LF7J
Khe Hy | https://www.theknowledge.io/khehy-1/
Rules Aren't Real | https://www.theknowledge.io/issue68/
Swimming and thrashing | https://www.theknowledge.io/swimming-vs-thrashing/
Tim Ferriss | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Ferriss
👤 Connect with Michael Ashcroft:
X/Twitter: @m_ashcroft | x.com/m_ashcroft
Course: Alexander Technique | https://expandingawareness.org/courses/
Website: Expanding Awareness | https://expandingawareness.org/
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
🐣 Twitter: @Delikwu / @itstheknowledge
🌐 Website: https://www.davidelikwu.com
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📖 Free Book: https://pro.theknowledge.io/frames
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📜 Full transcript:
Life Changes Post Full-Time Work
David Elikwu: So you were just saying, how life changes when you're no longer working full time. So I'd love to know, maybe you could talk about some of the roles that you did in the past and how you've transitioned out of that and how different daily life looks now.
Michael Ashcroft: Yeah, for sure. So I spent 10 years working in corporate and consulting roles in the uk like low carbon energy industry if you like electricity networks industry. So I had the classic nine till six, nine till seven job. Often with evenings weekends depending on the need. And did that for 10 years.
And then in 2021, early, I think January, I left KPMG at the time to go fully self [00:03:00] employed and my days have looked completely different ever since then. Just completely open, unstructured, I'm completely in control. I think it's, at this point I have a little bit of like leftover work trauma or something lowercase t, because I'm like allergic to putting things on my schedule at the moment.
I'm like, I want control. I don't want anything to impose on my freedom. And I think actually that's a bad thing. After a while you need to actually have commitments and responsibilities and things, but it's fun to go from one to the other quite so abruptly, I think.
David Elikwu: Yeah, was that a very natural transition for you? I know that you were already doing a bunch of stuff outside of work, but I find it interesting, I think, okay.
So my experience with leaving my last full time role, it's strange that there's an extent to which I remember right at the beginning I was brimming full of excitement and thinking, oh my gosh, I'm going to be spending all my time having all these conversations, milling about, you know, swanning around at cafes, working in lots of interesting places. And I think at the beginning it was like that, and then slowly meetings kind of crept back in and structure to an extent crept [00:04:00] back in. I think maybe I'm finding a bit of a balance now where it's not tremendously structured, but yet there is still some tension.
Balancing Productivity and Burnout
David Elikwu: I guess it's finding the balance between the extent to which you still want to be productive or prolific in terms of putting things out and still having some free flowing serendipity in your life.
Michael Ashcroft: Yeah, I think my situation was kind of weird because I left just before or just after Covid, and then we weren't traveling for a year. So I went nomading and that kind of just disrupted every conception of structure that I could have had. We only came back to London a few months ago, so I was still settling into the new routine.
But I agree with you. When I first started, I was like deconditioning myself from all the, habits and expectations of work. I remember the first month I was like, I downloaded five video game. I was Like, I'm gonna make myself play a game. I'm gonna like practice being unemployed to see what it's like to kind of have the freedom.
And it felt really uncomfortable. I actually didn't enjoy it. And it just took me a while to settle into like, oh, I'm actually in charge of my own time now. [00:05:00] And that took a few months honestly, to really believe that I had the control and that I wasn't expected to be somewhere or do something. Obviously I've been doing a lot of stuff since then, but it's the, it's the mindset shift that really messed with me for a while. Just like, oh, I can just go.
Even on weekdays now, I can just go to museum on Tuesday afternoon. I'm allowed, I know I don't have to ask anyone. And yet I still kind of find myself defaulting to like being at my desk during something like working hours, even though it's completely in an old system, that doesn't apply to me anymore.
Freedom and Constraints in Work and Retirement
David Elikwu: Yeah, I think it's really interesting how, very often throughout our working lives, there's this continual tension between, I think it's Eric Fromm who was a psychologist that talked about like, Freedom from and Freedom to. And so both during work and then also with retirement, I think you see people struggle with this where during work there is a yearning for some freedom, maybe from the constraints of a regular working life. And people might want to break out of, you know, you hear people talking about, oh my gosh, I want to get rid of my nine to five and I just want to be my own boss and do all of these things and this [00:06:00] tension between, okay, are you just looking for freedom from, I guess the constraints of an external, like someone external putting this impetus on you to be productive and to do certain things? Or is it that you want freedom to be able to chase and explore? And I think sometimes when it's simply just the freedom from, you can end up in a position where the, the external force simply gets switched out for an internal one and suddenly you are the one that's still, imposing those same constraints on yourself.
And then I think you see the same in retirement as well, where you see a lot of people, they're racing to financial freedom and they, eventually can quit and leave their jobs and like, oh, it's so great that I'm retired. And then, a year later, a few years later, suddenly they're depressed and upset and life seems so much worse because they didn't quite figure out exactly what they were going to do once they were retired. Like the retirement was the goal. And so once you've attained the freedom from work, you still struggle with figuring out what work to do, like what actually comes next?
Michael Ashcroft: [00:07:00] Yeah, I think in the retirement context, I've seen a static it could be out of date by now, but one of the highest risk years for male death is the year after retirement. because they work up into retirement and then like, now what? There's something is missing. It's like, the driving motivating force of life is kind of diminished in a sense.
So if you're not careful, you have to find yourself in the same position. I had an experience when I left work where I thought, hell, I was actually more productive on my side stuff when I was at work because, the Chinese expression about where you don't like your job so you stay up late into the night, so you can have more of your own free personal time before having to go to sleep and going to work the next day.
I realised that I was suffering from revenge productivity, I mean to say, Because like, I don't like the fact that I'm spending all my time working on someone else's stuff during the day. So I'm gonna have revenge and work on my stuff in the evenings and weekends. And once the work frame was gone, I didn't have the, well screw you energy of, I'll work on my stuff in the slivers of time that I have. And I have all the time but I haven't got the, I didn't have the immediate sense of like, oh, now I can just go off and do all the things I [00:08:00] wanted to do. I had to rediscover intrinsic motivation rather than a scrappy motivation.
David Elikwu: Yeah, I think there's also another interesting aspect to this. So just as you were saying that, an example immediately came to my mind, which was, I'm not sure if you've heard of NaNoWriMo, So National November writing Month. It's this thing a bunch of people do online around the world. And I've been doing it for a number of years. But what I found really interesting is the only years I've ever completed it are years where I was extremely busy working full time. So I think the first few times I tried, maybe I think, I was studying or I hadn't started working full time and I failed like two years in a row or however many years. And then I started working in corporate law and I'm extremely busy, the busiest I've been in a long time. And suddenly I'm able to do it not without its consequences, and I guess this is part of the tension.
So, there's a interesting balance where, okay, yes, because there's so many constraints on my time, I have to maximise the remaining time that I have for my own personal pursuits because I don't have too [00:09:00] much freedom. And I guess maybe this is some, some the interesting aspect of, freedom, right? When you don't have too much freedom, you want to make the most of the little freedom that you do have, and so I was able to maximise it. However, on the other side of that, then you can easily get quite burnt out. I think almost every November I end up being sick because it's actually a lot of work to write 50, 000 words in a month while you're working full time, especially if you're working in like a quite an intensive industry.
So I'm interested to know what you think about finding that balance, I guess, in two senses that we've just talked about. So one is the tension between how you maximise, I know maybe maximising your free time is another conversation, which is about productivity. But just this essence of grasping the time that you do have and actually wanting to use it when you're in control of it or I guess, the better question might be, should we be trying to control and corral the time that we have?
The Impact of Burnout and Finding Balance
David Elikwu-1: And then the other side of it is to do with burnout, which is something I know that you've [00:10:00] experienced. And you don't necessarily want to push yourself by max. If you're being forced to maximise yourself at work and then you're also trying to actively maximise, maximise the rest of the time that you have. You're maxed out all the time and then you can easily burn out because you don't have that many resources to expend. So I wonder what you think about the balance between those two things.
Michael Ashcroft: Yeah. So I'll give some context in that I was the improver type for all of my 20s, right? So I had the, the jobs working quite hard and then I, I always enjoyed tinkering on the side. So I had a job for a while where it's like a nonprofit organisation, so I could work in the evenings and weekends if I wanted to, but it wasn't worth it.
The progression wasn't there. The, there wouldn't have been a bonus. It was just like for the sake of it. So I didn't maximie that, but I was like a freelance journalist, freelance consultant. I took photos and sold them, like all kinds of like online tinkering stuff, as well as like self improvement stuff and my trainings and all of the, the classic, like how do I make myself better stuff?
So that was my, my 20s basically. And then in my 30s, I was fully on the, on the job and well I [00:11:00] pushed a bit too hard, basically. There was a period where I was, think six months 70 hour weeks in a context that wasn't really fit for it. So I know other professions will do that. So 70 hour weeks, not 70 hour months.
Other professions have the guide rails around that, so they'll like catch you and like, it's kind of a, peer thing. I didn't have that environment and it was just like not noticed. So I, I basically pushed too hard and then broke. I burnt out. My journey since I quit the corporate world has been to not recreate that for myself. So a lot of people, I think they'll jump from that world and go into self employment and then find themselves grinding all hours because that's kind of what they were used to, what they expect, or that they have the capacity. My journey has been about not recreating that and not going straight back into that mindset.
Michael Ashcroft: So my lifestyle now is a combination of, I guess two things. One is the, I'm not looking to maximise for money or for revenue right now. I'm looking to maximise for, let's say, healing and exploration and, figuring out how to sense make on my [00:12:00] own outside of that frame. But the other thing is that I was, I'm very fortunate in that I made an online course early on as I was leaving. That's actually why I was able to leave work that has largely sold itself via online, presence via social media. So I don't have to keep putting work in to generate revenue. I'm not generating enormous, you know, abundant wealthy amount of revenue, but I'm generating enough revenue that I don't need to get a job and I can live comfortably in central London, which is nice.
So that caveat needs to be there, that I'm in a fortunate position that I don't have to grind and fill my hours with work. Therefore I don't if that makes sense. Not that I would encourage everyone to just stop working because I, I built a thing that means I can do that.
David Elikwu-1: Okay.
Aligning Personal and Work Missions
David Elikwu-1: I guess there's two really interesting things that you mentioned there. I would love to know, do you have to have created this thing that allows you to take the focus off of, like working for survival and being the rat on the wheel. Because you also mentioned that, okay, now you're able to optimise for, I guess, your happiness or for other things outside of just focusing on work. And I think [00:13:00] going back to something you mentioned earlier, what I find interesting, I think what you were saying was, in some workplaces they might have constraints that stop people from working too hard. And it's funny how, I was just thinking of my own experience working in corporate law and sometimes it's, just a false economy. They're not actually trying to stop you from, from working too hard. I remember I had a few conversations with HR where, you know, like they will call you in and sit down with you. And I think one of those conversations was like, oh, we've noticed you're not taking any of your holiday. Is everything okay? Blah, blah, blah. You know, maybe you should be taking more breaks and stuff.
And then the other conversation was just, yeah, I just looked exhausted all the time. And so people were worried worried about your mental health.
But I guess that the balance there is there's two sides of it. One side is you know, there's a bit of a principal agent dichotomy there, where on one hand, people say, yes, you should take care of yourself and all of these things, but on the flip side, you're not actually going to get rewarded for resting all the time. And so if you're optimising for, okay, how can I grow within this job? How can I grow within this [00:14:00] industry? You kind of have to do the work and you have to serve your clients and do all of that.
And then I guess the other side of it is the internal striving, right? Because there could be a sense in which you want to be elevated in all of those ways. You don't want to be seen as someone who is incapable or, you know, so if someone's asking, oh, you sure you can handle it?
That's kind of how, I'm interpreting what you're saying. Like, oh, are you sure you're cut out for this hard work? And it's like, absolutely, no, no, no, no. You know, this is all fine. I don't need any rest. I don't need any breaks. And so I'm trying to think and put myself in the mind of someone that might be listening to this, that is just living that life and they might not have a business or a course or something else that currently already gives them enough money to give them some of that freedom. Is there a frame that you think is useful to employ that can help you break out of, you know, on one hand, yes, ambition is good and you should want to be successful in of these things, but how do you balance that tension between the extent to which you can also prioritise other aspects of your [00:15:00] life before you're forced to?
And I guess that's something we can talk about later is this idea that, you know, sometimes the extent to which you prioritise things can affect the way can affect your ability to prioritise them later on. And so there's an extent to which if you don't get your priorities right early enough, by the time you've had some mental crisis or, some issue that prevents you from then being able to work as hard later on, you don't actually get to prioritise it. Your benefit is now capped, so you don't get to just suddenly decide, oh, I'm just going to switch things up and change things. So I, wondered what you think about that.
Michael Ashcroft: Yeah, I think that I was very fortunate in that I always knew when I was at work that it wasn't the right path for me fully. It's like walking with a, stone in my shoe the entire time. so I was like, this is fine. But a bit uncomfortable and I'd rather not be here. There's a different path for me.
So I always had this long game vision of like, tinkering, experimenting, trying different things. And you know, one day I'll find something that will let me do a different path, but it [00:16:00] took me at least 10 years after graduating to get my act together, if you like. And that entire time I was striving, you know, ambitious and trying to do a good job, and I had this awareness that I wanted to leave.
I think it's tricky if you go into that kind of career path where you're grinding and you don't know whether you want to stay on it or not, like you think you do, but then something will change down the line. I would encourage people to think about the long game. Really be honest with yourself. Is this something you really genuinely want to do? Like if you look at your boss or your boss's boss and look up the ladder ten years from now, like, do you want to be them? Do you want their life? And this answering that question requires real honesty. And I think awareness of internal states as well.
I know you just spoke to Jonny Miller about nervous system stuff. So like being aware of when you're in this workplace, when you're in this environment, when you're talking to these people, what is going on with your interoceptive with your internal states? Do you feel this thing that you know is fine for now?
Like, I can grind past, I can [00:17:00] deal with it, I can ignore it, but it's not going away. You know, it's going to be there and get worse with time. Possibly in an unhelpful way. So it's fine to grind, it's fine to push and be ambitious as long as you're not incurring psychic damage or physical damage along the way that might then get you trapped in the future.
The reason I could only quit when I had the online course was that I didn't have enough resources to just quit. You know, I didn't have the kind of jobs that got me like half a million pounds in the bank that, okay, I can live off this. But something I think whether it's a side hustle, or whether it's savings or whether it's moved to Taiwan or Bali or something where the cost of living is much lower, than you know, something will need to change if you do quit your job. But that might be more preferable than get into the point where you just have to make a change outside of your control when you want to make it.
David Elikwu-1: Yeah, exactly. I recently had a conversation with Luca Dellanna, I'm not sure if you've come across him. But he wrote a book, he wrote a book about this concept of ergodicity, and it relates very much to, in a sense, to what we were just talking about now. And in our conversation, I think what was [00:18:00] really interesting to point out was this idea that the incentive of you and your employer are not always necessarily aligned, or at least the odds don't always add up. And so when you think of this concept of ergodicity, it's a bit like, okay, the odds of you having some kind of mental breakdown at work or burning out is one in a hundred, the linear odds of for an employer, if you have a hundred employees and you spread those odds out against all those employees, that means one of those employees might have some kind of mental crisis. The other 99 are going to be completely fine and you can grind them for all they're worth, right?
And so how those same odds play out for your employer is very different from you trying to play out those 100 days of grinding. And one of those days you have some kind of mental breakdown. And so I guess that's the first layer of it.
But the second layer is that, what's very funny when we think about those odds is that implicitly, the initial reaction, at least for me, is like, okay, so I might know that [00:19:00] if I grind too hard for a hundred days one of those days I could eventually like fall sick or something could happen to me. So I'm only gonna grind for 99 days. But that's not actually how the odds work. What it means is that, any one of those 100 days could be the day that you burn out and fall sick. It could be the seventh day and so the concept of ergodicity means that like if you burn out too early, you don't get to take the rest of those shots. You don't get to have the 100 days, you may only have seven days, and if you get injured too early, if something happens to you very early on, that can cap the extent to which you can still perform on those other days. And so it very much changes the way that you can continue to work.
And I've had so many conversations with people that just, in my mind, I'm thinking of a conversation I had with Christine Carrillo I think last year or a while ago, and she was talking about how very similarly she was running a bunch of businesses, you know, I think eight or nine figure businesses doing extremely well, but working all the time. And then one day [00:20:00] she just had an incident, she had a concussion, and suddenly she's not able to work. She's not even able, it's not so much a matter of like willpower, like do you want to work this hard? You're physically incapable of working that hard, and so you now have to rearrange the entire way that you approach work because you, you've kind of hit the wall. You can't continue doing things in the same way you did them before. And so I guess that is, you know, it's a forcing function for change, and you probably don't want to get to the point where you are forced to have to make some drastic change.
Michael Ashcroft: Yeah, I agree. And there's a couple of extra things came to mind when you're talking there. One is that it's not a binary thing like. The idea that you can work at full power and then suddenly a thing happens and you, you know, you're suddenly at zero. That does happen, I think. But my experience was more like, I was at, I'd say 90% for several years and then like declining, declining, declining to about 80 or 70% and then down to 10 or something.
So like, there is a cost to the, the non broken days. But yeah, once I [00:21:00] had my incident I went down to like 20% for a while and then I only ever recovered to like 60 or 70 in a work context. So for the rest of the time in that job, I basically went from like a very highly performing manager you know, up for awards and stuff to kind of, just doing the job vanished a little bit. Like I didn't put the extra work in. And, you know, you can stay in a job forever in some context like that, but it doesn't feel good. Knowing where you were, it doesn't, yeah, it just kind of hurts. Then when I went to the next job after that, the one I ended up leaving for good. I was just allergic to any sense of working, working in a way that was extractive.
So I, I went to a place that is somewhat known for, put the work in, do the hours, do the evenings and weekends, because that's the expectation. And I just didn't see the risk reward being there for me. The benefit wasn't there. So I was just like, you know what? I will do the job, but I'm not gonna continue to burn myself in the way that you clearly want.
So yeah, the idea that, you can, you can work up to, up to the point of failure. I don't think that tracks. And then once you have had this point of failure, it can take a very long time [00:22:00] to recover. And even then, recovery doesn't mean going back to where you were, it probably means a whole different, a whole reorientation of what's important priorities and ways of working.
David Elikwu-1: Yeah, I think there's probably some interesting line, although I haven't fully drawn it out myself. Maybe you can help me with this, between this concept of like finding your work and finding, I don't necessarily want it to, to say like your calling or your, your passion, but you know, there there's a sense in which it could be that, but finding the work, which by doing it inherently is recharging or energising or is its own achievement as opposed to the work is the means through which you achieve some external achievement.
And I think I've heard you talk in the past about how easy it is to inherit the mission from your job. And what that made me think of, I guess that the, frame that I was thinking of it through is the balance between kind of like a missionary mindset and a mercenary mindset. And if you have a mercenary mindset, it's like, each job or each thing that you do, you are being sent on various missions in, you know, [00:23:00] you may be ultimately trying to achieve your own goal but your success is determined by the extent to which you can achieve all these other missions.
Whereas if you had more of this missionary mindset where you have this inherent mission that you are trying to go on. All the jobs that you do, and the work that you do is in service of that ultimate mission. And so, the mission dictates where you go. And sometimes that might lead you to changing a job, sometimes it might lead you to leaving a job entirely.
I'm interested to know, I guess, what you think of maybe that frame and how that connects to your journey in, okay, going from consulting, working in energy, doing climate change related stuff, now teaching the Alexander technique, writing, doing a lot of the other things that you're doing now.
Michael Ashcroft: Yeah, the example that I found most useful was when I was working at an organisation called The Carbon Trust, which is a nonprofit climate change energy place. And their mission at the time was to accelerate the transition to a sustainable low carbon economy. And I loved that sentence. I was like, okay, I want to do that. That's also my thing.
So I felt a real [00:24:00] sense of alignment with what the company was doing. And when someone asked me, Hey, what do you do? I could almost just say that, I'm in service of this mission. And it felt really good.
think one of the ways people can get stuck and I got stuck is as I drifted away from that mission I found myself, there are more parts of me that were complaining if you like, and I think this is a factor in the burnout is that the more of yourself that you have to suppress or crush or ignore to do the job, the more likely you are to get caught up in unhelpful gripping and tightness and all that kind of grinding behavior.
Whereas if you are aligned, I guess that means all parts of me or most parts of me are in agreement that we should go in this direction. And there's no like suppression going on internally. So I think finding your own idea of what that is for yourself and then other people and organisations that align with that. It kind of just diminishes this sense of having to fight with yourself all the time. Like if going to work is a chore because, oh, I don't believe in this, that expends [00:25:00] energy. If going to work is like, well, I do this anyway. That gives you energy, I think. So that's kind of how I think about the different, the parts of yourself do we all agree internally? Are we all okay with this? And then listen really carefully, like, are we not okay with this? Okay, which parts of me are complaining here? Which parts of me don't like this?
And then I realised that I was drifting further and further from my mission, and then my mission was changing. I think the energy and climate thing as I was going through my career was like, yes, this is really important, but I don't feel anymore that this is something I can uniquely contribute to.
There's plenty of good people and there are other things I can worry about or, you know, be involved with. So that's why my shift was happening. Even then I was clinging to the old self a little bit. It's like, oh yeah, I'm the energy and climate change guy. Even though I kind of wasn't at that point in my soul. So there was a lag, if you like, between my sense of what I thought my mission was and what my, I don't know, my inner guide, shall we say, was telling me the direction I was really going in was.
David Elikwu-1: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I guess, there's a question that kind of ties a bit back to what we were talking about before is, was that [00:26:00] signal to change more like an accumulation of votes, like you are continually getting small signs that change is needed or do the votes accumulate to like a tipping point where there's like a critical sign that, I mean, aside from, obviously I know that you had the, there's the mental health side to it, but was there a single point where you were like, oh, okay, this is actually the sign, or was, it just the accumulation of this building feeling that over time all of this adds up?
Michael Ashcroft: It was an accumulation of feelings, I would say. There were always like these quiet voices in my mind saying, this isn't right, this isn't the right thing. Like, you're gonna figure it out eventually, kind of thing. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, whatever. That's just anxiety, that's just, you know, whatever. Lack of whatever it's impostor syndrome or something.
When I discovered Alexander Technique, which I am now doing my thing online, I didn't know why I was going to it. I, You know, the training was once a month at the weekends near my office at the time finally. And I was confused as hell. I was like, this thing is weird and, strange, but kind of interesting and fun.
Yeah, it's [00:27:00] costing a lot of money though, so I might just stop doing it. And whenever I contemplated not doing it, I had this voice saying like, no, keep doing it. This is really important. And I was just like, okay, I guess I'll keep doing it then. And it turned out to be a really good call. But it was more like the lack of exposure and then trusting that in a sense of, well, I'm intrinsically motivated to learn this thing. I'm curious, it's unfolding in ways that are like exciting and fun. So I guess I'll just see what happens.
And over time there was this reorientation but in no way was it like an overnight or like a, I journaled once and suddenly had a revelation. That's absolutely not how it worked for me.
David Elikwu-1: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. You wrote a really good post. I mean, I want to get on to talking about the Alexander technique in a bit, but just, you mentioned the word grinding a few times, and I remember that you wrote a really good post, was it last year or a little while ago that was, you can achieve your goals with less grinding.
I'd love if you could talk a little bit that. because I think some of the framing that you used in that, particularly towards the start, the analogy with like a car was really, really good.
Perceptual Control Theory and Grinding
Michael Ashcroft: Yeah, so suppose I'm thinking of, I was talking about, [00:28:00] there's a theory called Perceptual control theory which is a modified, like a human applied version of control theory from control systems. So the idea being that the way a cruise control works is that you set the thing to say, I want to be at 50 miles per hour. And then it adjusts automatically around that. So the way that works in control theory is that you measure the actual speed of the car, you set the desired speed of the car, and then the control system like either hits the accelerator or the brake to make sure that those two signals line up at the same.
The way that works in the human version of theory and perceptual control theory is that we, we don't control our actions, we control our perceptions. So right now I'm perceiving, let's say I'm a bit hungry, I'm sitting at this desk, I'm talking to you, and that's my reference perception. That's what's coming in right now. And I can have a desired perception of, I want to not experience hunger, I want to move around. And that's like my goal, my intention. And then I allow the system to [00:29:00] change my actions such that the desired perception is met. It doesn't mean that I am doing things like, I'm going to go walk to the kitchen. I'm not doing walking to the kitchen, I'm not doing moving around. I'm allowing my system to coordinate itself. Based on the, the difference between my desired perception and my current perception and where grinding can come in is where you have, let's say, conflicting intentions. Conflicting desired perception.
Let's say if I want to go for a, this may have happened to you, you want to go for a walk or something and you haven't decided whether you want to take your phone with you or not. And like you have both intentions at once like, I want to go for a walk and take my phone, but not take my phone. And you end up at this point going back and forth like juddering a little bit like, it's kind of stuck between the two states. Until you make a decision to cut off one of the paths like, okay, I'm not taking my phone with me. And then you can freely walk to the door or I am taking my phone with me, I'll go get my phone. But as long as you have these conflicting desires, your system can't solve for different things at the same time. It needs only this one can [00:30:00] exist. I'll go that way. If you want to be like in the work context, I want to be really wealthy. I also don't want to work more than 10 hours a week. I don't know how to do this. I'm gonna have a conflict. There might be a way of doing it, but I haven't found it yet. So it's really important to be aware of conflicts and your intentions because they will cause like these recursive grinding type conflicts In your body.
The other analogy with the, with the car and the grinding is like driving with the handbrake on ultimately. I actually had this experience where I was in Vermont I think, and I was driving across the state and I got to the destination and then I smelled fire and that kind of thing. And I realised I'd left the handbrake on a little bit. But I hadn't realised that. So I was like pushing hard on the accelerator which obviously is just damaging the car and everything's like handling worse and that kind of thing. So the solution in that context is not to push harder, it's to look for things that are resisting, is to turn off the handbrake.
And I think that happens very frequently in, in life and work where it's like, what can I do to stop the effort system rather [00:31:00] than how can I go faster? Because that's how you break ultimately. And that that perceptual control theory thing is one way of identifying, okay, I've got a brake on, I'm trying to do things at once. I'm trying to pull in two opposite directions. How do I stop doing that so I can just go in one direction easily, right? So there's a places that you can look to find ways in which you're getting in your own way and then turn them off ultimately.
David Elikwu-1: I love both of those analogies. I think there's a part of us that craves optionality, we want to keep our options open. We don't want to end up in a position where we only have one choice because that is also something that can cause a lot of tension that can make, that can feel like a massive constraint. But thinking just about the second analogy that you gave, which I also love, is this idea that sometimes we already know, releasing the clutch is something you should always do if you're driving. But sometimes that clutch can be something that we know that we should take off, but we kind of want to keep on and there's something that, there's that dynamic tension there between something we kind of want to keep in our lives and want to keep doing, but we, in the service of the greater goal, which is getting to [00:32:00] some destination or to move off, we have to release that.
And so, like you say, you can end up in this position where you are grinding and you need to exert so much more energy for the same amount of movement simply because you refuse to let go of this other thing because you haven't released the clutch. Everything becomes harder. Achieving both goals of keeping the clutch and also being able to get to wherever you're going is so much harder for the act of doing that than if you had just released one or even release the other.
And I guess the thing is, in reality, not releasing the clutch is dangerous.
If you were in a position where you already knew it would lead to a car crash, of course you would release the clutch. That's a foregone conclusion, you would never think twice about it. If you knew that doing it was dangerous and it would lead to some certain danger, you wouldn't do it. But the hard part is knowing when there are near misses and knowing like how far you can push it. This ties back to our earlier conversation, right? How far can you push keeping the clutch just a little bit down while you're still doing this other [00:33:00] thing?
So how do you find a mechanism of knowing when to release the clutch and when to kind of make that trade off?
Michael Ashcroft: I'm going to go on a tangent that will answer your question, I think, but the thing that I've been struggling with is the decision to have children or not, shall we say? Because that's a very binary, which way am I going, right? If you make a decision to go that way and have a child, you are committed, right? There is no giving that child back at that point, like you have a child. If you go this way, you get to a certain point where you can no longer have a child, right? You've passed the point, you've waited too long.
And the way that I'm thinking about this is working for me is to recognise that, both options are good, right? There's either way you're going to be missing out on something. If I have a child, I'm missing out on a child free life. If I don't have a child, I'm missing out on all the growth and love and all the stuff that I would have if I had a child. And I will have to grieve either way, I will experience loss whichever way I go. I will suffer and struggle whichever way I go. And that's okay, [00:34:00] right? It's not like I can't make an optimal choice because there are, truly there are pros and cons and there is no right path for me to take.
So I have to kind of go inwards and say like, what do I actually want? And this is one of the hardest questions to answer I find, because until you're at the decision point where like, okay, I have to make a decision now, you can just put it off like in the, in the kind of the driving sense of like, well, nothing's broken yet, you know, like the car's still going. Um Sure And at some point it won't, you know, at some point you're committed to having a broken car or reaching destination um in that example.
So for me it's again, real honesty and checking in with those felt senses of like, okay, neither option is perfect, which of these two options is preferable?
And then I will grieve the other one, right? So in back to the work example, if I were to get to, let's say I made a partner in a consultancy firm, that's not a bad option. Like, that's a perfectly good life and many people do it and good for them. Would I rather that or take the risk [00:35:00] of quitting and doing my own thing?
And then who knows where I'll be you know, it's a kind of 45 age. Okay, I want the other one, I'm going to just decide, I'm going to cut that one off. I can no longer have that one. And I can grieve that one. I can grieve the loss of the me who was a partner in a management consultancy firm. He's lost. But this is awesome, you know?
So I think it's just accepting that you will grieve and suffer and have to like, let go of something every time you make a decision like this. Otherwise you just end up in this recursive
Oh, that way and that way at the same time, and then you end up going nowhere, I think, or damaging and grinding in the process.
David Elikwu-1: The analogy that you used of likening it to deciding whether or not to have kids is really interesting. I'd actually love to know more about how your thinking has evolved on that, because as you were saying it, the immediate response or thought that came to my mind is that it's a bit of a, it's an asymmetric trade off. And, and I could be wrong on this, so this is just my, my thinking, so I'd love to hear your response.
To me, that decision seems like deciding [00:36:00] between a linear outcome and an asymmetric one, where the more you lean into the asymmetry, you could get asymmetric highs and asymmetric lows, right? Life could be drastically better or drastically worse, whereas not having children is a linear bet because, I mean, life doesn't change. Like you are perfectly in control over whatever life you end up having. And it's a bit like thinking about, okay, should I leave my stable job and start a business every month at my stable job, I get paid X amount and I can keep getting that every single month. If I leave and start a business. That business could do extraordinarily well, and quote unquote, betting on myself could mean that, wow, like I'm trading off, earning a fixed income for being able to earn many multiples more. But the reality of running a business is that there are also lows. It's not just a fixed income every month. Some months are lower, some months are higher. What you are hoping for is that it will continually trend higher.
And I guess [00:37:00] the, the other analogy I could tie this to is there's a sense in which, at least from everything that I know or I've heard about having kids, I haven't had kids myself, but there seems to be a qualia of what it is like to have kids that you can't quite guess at or estimate without actually having had the kids. You can't simulate having kids necessarily like kids of your own if you haven't actually had the kids.
And it's a bit like potentially, you know, trying to describe to a caterpillar what it's like to be a butterfly. And I think that's an interesting example specifically because butterflies, once a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, its lifespan is, actually dramatically shortened. So, I'm not saying it's necessarily, you know, in that way. Because the lifespan of butterflies is so short. I think caterpillars live for a few months and butterflies live for like a few weeks at the most. But there is a sense in which, I mean like to fly and to be able to do all of these things and to have wings and all of that stuff. I don't think you can, you can't [00:38:00] just guess what that would feel like if you've only ever crawled on leaves, like as a caterpillar. And it's not that the life of a caterpillar is any worse because you get to live much longer as a caterpillar, but it's an entirely different life.
When you're a butterfly, first of all, you could also become a moth. So you don't know what you're going to come out of that chrysalis becoming. But someone might like swat you out of the sky. Like there's all kinds of other dangers to becoming a butterfly.
But I guess, yeah, it's the trade off of the potential of this, you know, touching the sky and having, a magical life. But there's also some dangers with that and the certainty of having a life that you can predict and you know what it's going to be like because there's an extent to which you've already lived it. I wonder how any of that lands with you and how it tracks your journey so far in thinking about that decision.
Michael Ashcroft: Yeah. For me it comes down to a principle that is still emerging for me, but the idea that I want to feel more feelings, I guess that's my, my desire in life. For most of my life I [00:39:00] was, you know, there are feelings I don't like and I've shut them all down. My, my opinion is there's like one master volume dial on experience.
So if you don't like bad experiences, I don't like, this job, this food, this environment, I'm going to turn down my aliveness. I'm going to, like, mute everything. Like dissociation to some extent. Like everything's just a bit muted and dull. And the other direction is turning up all experience, turning up all feeling.
So you're going to get more of the good ones and more of the bad ones, but you're like, they're just like flowing through you and you're like, okay, I'm, just like being burned by feelings here of all kinds. And for me, I think a good life, a life worth living is one where I've been like rollercoastered on emotions frankly like that's what I'm here for.
I kind of have this image in my head of like, imagine there were a plane of existence where there were these non corporeal beings, right? There are these, these life forms that don't have bodies, they can't experience sensation. If they were looking down at us and going like, I really, like, I would [00:40:00] give so much to be able to experience the idea, like the feeling of hands touching each other. I would give so much to cry. I would give so much to have the experience of like a child laughing and see what that feels like, because I don't have feelings. I don't think they would care about whether they're good or bad feelings at that point. They'd just be like, I want to feel something.
Embracing the Highs and Lows of Life
Michael Ashcroft: And that's kind of how I'm thinking about the children is like, I've heard very similar things of, it's an asymmetric thing. Like, you are going to feel enormous highs and enormous lows. And I think that for me is the path I want to take. And this is not to say this is the correct path. This is the path for me, I think because of my life and my preferences. There are other ways of orienting, but yeah, the idea of like, just give me give me more of the human experience. You know, I'll take the risk and see what comes up. That's how I'm orienting towards this.
David Elikwu-1: Yeah, I completely agree with that. And I think, not specifically just as it aligns with the decision to have children, but in general. And I think there's an extent to which, you know, I talked about this with Jonny Miller as well, having negative experience helps the positive experiences to feel better. And the breadth of the experiences that you have is what [00:41:00] shapes your understanding of life. Like if you didn't have, just like the example you gave, I can imagine that if every single day of your life was a 3 out of 10, and if every single day of your life was a 7 out of 10, you might not end up feeling much different between the two of those. If no day of your life was truly awful but it was never really that good and it was just a 3 every single day, predictably. Versus no day is ever great, no day is ever wonderful, but it's never bad. I don't know if between those two states that ends up being a massive difference in your experience of life. I don't know if it necessarily feels any worse.
I think there is an extent to which you do need some of the rollercoaster, like you were saying, and some breadth of experiences that allows you to appreciate when something is a lot better or when something is a lot worse.
And I think maybe this can start tying into, oh, were you going to say something on that?
The Morpheus Pill Dilemma
Michael Ashcroft: I was just gonna offer you a, like a Morpheus pill question. I have a red pill and blue pill for you. The red pill [00:42:00] guarantees that every day, every day of your life from now on is like between a 4 and a 6 and the blue pill is every day between like 1 and a 9. Which pill do you take?
David Elikwu-1: Ooh, that's actually probably a better framing. It's interesting. I guess a part of me would want to pick between 1 and a 9. I think some of that might depend on what stage of life you're at. And because I'm still relatively young, I can , I can take the asymmetric option
Michael Ashcroft: Your ones are recoverable, I guess. Yeah.
David Elikwu-1: Yeah exactly. And you would hope that over time you go above five enough times that the benefits start to compound. And if I later in life, I'd probably pick between four and six because I'd rather have the consistency of knowing that I'm not about to get wiped out any day from now.
Michael Ashcroft: I guess with the, so the kids example or even the quitting a safe study career example is, what if you need to have more threes and fours for now, such that you can have sevens and eights and nines in 30 years, right? So like, yeah, my, my kids are growing up, I have grandkids. There's family around me like that feels to me [00:43:00] like it would be a seven, eight, nine experience.
But then you have like, I haven't slept in weeks and this thing is kicking me. And I was just like fluids everywhere. like this is definitely a two or a three Like There are trade offs across time that give access to, let's say, more enjoyable states on the line. it's not just a random event.
Understanding the Alexander Technique
David Elikwu-1: Yeah, there's an aspect of this which I think we can link towards starting to think about the Alexander technique and this idea of expanded awareness and leaning into possible experiences that one could have, maybe it would be best if you just start with explaining what the Alexander technique is and who Alexander is. That was something I wondered for a while before I finally Googled it, so I'd love if you could explain that.
Michael Ashcroft: Yeah. So the Alexander technique is essentially a kind of mindfulness practice that's practiced inactivity. And the way I'm going to describe it will be surprising to anyone who's listening who has heard of it, because they're probably associated with posture and movement and that kind of stuff. And I, so, yes [00:44:00] and I'm gonna say to that like, I've learned a very different when I teach a very different way.
So it's about noticing your habitual responses to the world and then being able to make a new choice in response to things that happen in the world. And the way that I teach it is via awareness, whereas other teachers tend to go via the body. That's the only difference, I guess.
So I'll give the story of F. M. Alexander and then we can, we can go from there. So yeah, Frederick Matthias Alexander was a Tasmanian actor, performer in the late 19th century. His issue was that he lost his voice when he was presenting his doing this like his presentations almost is speeches. And he went to a doctor who said, just rest, like you're just straining your voice, whatever. He did, his voice recovered a little bit. He went back on stage and lost his voice again. And over time, doctor couldn't help. And he said he figured out there must be something I'm doing specifically when I'm like, on stage that's causing me to lose my voice because it's not happening any other time. So he this sent him on like a multi year adventure to figure out [00:45:00] like what was going on. He sat up like a series of mirrors, and so he looked at himself in various different ways and he realised that when he was going into public speaking mode, shall we say, like giving a Shakespearean soliloquy mode, he would like depress his larynx. He would like pull and tense and do all kinds of silly things.
So this is all fine until now. But the important thing about Alexander technique is when he tried not to do those things, he realised that he couldn't, right? He said, okay, I'm just going to not do this depression on my larynx thing. And even when he tried not to, he would emphasise it more like, he would try not to do the thing and he would do it more. So this led him to develop a technique called inhibition, which is not the same thing as Freud's inhibition. I think he used it beforehand.
Inhibition is just the, the constructive not responding to something in a way that you could still do anything else. So rather than not doing this thing by doing it more or by doing something else, it's like pausing and creating a space for change to occur.
The Power of Expanded Awareness
Michael Ashcroft: The way that I teach this is through this thing called awareness.
There are two main [00:46:00] modes that your mind uses to perceive the world.
One is attention, the like this, then this, then this, then this, then this. Like we're all very familiar with this in the work context. And then there's awareness, which is a wide open field. It's like the thing that attention moves around inside. So right now I'm looking at like your eyes on the screen and my awareness includes the space around me. It includes the sensations of like touching my chair on the ground, the temperature, all that kind of thing. But my attention is still on you. So while we're familiar with the dynamics of attention, we're less familiar with the dynamics of awareness. And what tends to happen is awareness can go away really easily without us noticing.
So I'd invite you and your listeners actually like, just notice more of the room around you, just notice the space above your head, the space behind you. What's the farthest away sound that you can, that you can notice right now in any direction?
And you'll realise that there is like, oh yeah, I'm actually a being in space. There's like this spatial component around me. But then if I invite you to like that, your mind drift to the thorniest item on your to-do list [00:47:00] and like that thing you've been avoiding and that you just don't want to do, what happens to the world around you? What's the your awareness of the world around you? It kind of diminishes, it goes away a little bit when you're off in your head and not paying attention to these things.
And that's how I teach Alexander technique. When you encounter a stimulus, notice when your awareness goes away. Because when your awareness goes away, you have very little choice in life. Like you can't do something unless it first occurs to you that you can do it.
The Luck Factor and Serendipity
Michael Ashcroft: The way that I like to communicate this is a guy called Richard Wiseman, Psychologist who wrote a book called The Luck Factor, he said that lucky people are lucky because they're open and aware. So they will first notice the 20 pound note on the floor. That's why they can pick it up. If they're so focused on like their own world and like, I want to get to my destination, they won't notice the 20 pound note. So they can't pick it up. So you have to notice something before you can act on it. And when your awareness is like contracted like this, you are essentially living on like a railway tracks of habit. Like you can't get off the track [00:48:00] because you're just so tunnel visioned in on it. And when you expand in this way, you expand spatially, sure, but you also expand in being able to better notice emotions and physical sensations and thoughts and all these kinds of stuff. And then you realise, oh, I'm doing this thing. I'm caught in this pattern. I could not do this. And you know, when you realise, oh, I could not do this, then you cannot do it.
So this is the fundamental practice, and it deepens from here, but it's basically about being able to notice more things going on, and then being able to make different choices in response to when they happen.[00:49:00]
David Elikwu-1: Yeah, there's a lot of that, that I loved. One thing I wanted to jump on very quickly was you mentioned The Luck Factor, which is a book that I love. And one of the studies that Richard Wiseman mentions in there that I use often when I give talks and stuff that I find really interesting is a replication of another better known study that gave birth to the idea of six degrees of separation. So the original study was I think they sent a bunch of letters to, people in the south, and they had to send this package to a named stockbroker in Boston. So obviously these people are sufficiently far away that they probably don't know this person's name or who, you know, they don't necessarily know anyone in Boston. And so their job is just to send it [00:50:00] to whoever they think is most likely to know that person. And the study found that typically it took six passes for the package to go from the very first person to this random stockbroker in Boston. And so that's where we get the idea of six degrees of separation.
But the replication of that that I find interesting from that book was that the variation they added was they split these people into, people that said that they were lucky and people that said that they were unlucky. And so you run the same experiment. And it's so interesting that I think it was something like, I can't remember the exact numbers, but a much smaller proportion of the packages ended up going from the original people to, I think the destination was a generic woman's name. I think she was like a party, an event manager in Chelmsford or something like that. And so a very similar task, this was replicated in the UK. And a much lower proportion of packages made it all the way to the end. But then when you split it out into people that thought they were lucky and people that were unlucky, you realise that I think something like [00:51:00] 60% of the people that thought they were unlucky didn't even send the package. So it never actually left their house. And so if you think you're unlucky and you don't even contemplate the possibility that if you send out this package, it could eventually reach the destination. But for a large majority of the that did think of themselves as lucky, then you get the standard track of, okay, yeah, you can send it up to six times and eventually it'll reach there.
And so again, going to what you were saying, there's just this really interesting idea that, simply by expanding your awareness or opening yourself up to more possibilities, it can drastically change the outcomes that you have in life. I know that maybe that is an extrapolation of what we're talking about, which is maybe just in like day to day activities of expanding your awareness.
But I think it still tracks this idea that the more you believe in, whether it's luck or serendipity or whatever, the more you open yourself up to these possibilities, the more that you can achieve and the more that you can do. And I think maybe in a similar way, even just in your day to day life, the more you [00:52:00] expand the things you are aware of. So as an example, one thing that I think is a regular practice for me is trying to just go out walking. And I try and do, I don't know if you would call it expanded awareness, maybe it's a version of it, but just trying to notice more things. And I'm not specifically looking for things to notice, but just as I look around just thinking of all the things I could possibly notice, like I would just see interesting doors and you know, interesting people and interesting cars and lots of different things.
And I'm not keeping track of any of these things, but just by opening yourself up to the, I guess the wonder of all the things you could possibly find, the experience of the walk itself becomes a lot more enriching than if I was just walking with a fixed destination. 'Cause also when I do these walks, I have no idea where I'm going. I see a left, I say, huh, you know, this road is interesting. I haven't been down it. I just walk that way and I see where I end up.
Michael Ashcroft: And I'm guessing that when you do that, it's not just that it's more interesting, but the world itself, at least when I do that kind of thing, the world literally becomes more vivid. It gets more brighter more colourful the sounds are richer somehow.
And this is [00:53:00] a real thing, it's that same thing I was saying before about the, the master volume dialing experience. Like when you're living in your head or going for walkers, most people do now with podcasting or something like, you're not really in the world, you're like collapsed and contracted into this little like intellectual thing going on in your ears and you miss all of this going around you.
So one of the things I actually say in my course is like, go for a walk in nature without something playing in your, ears and do exactly what you're describing. And just like notice the world.
The one thing I'd suggest from what you said is, you used the word try and that's a tricky word, like try to notice more things because Alexander said that trying is only emphasising the thing you already know, so when you're trying to notice things, you're activating the existing familiar pathways if you like. Whereas if you let go of the trying, then you can notice new things that you haven't noticed before because you can't try to notice something that you already know. That you don't already know. because, like it, it, it's within existing patterns.
So there's a wonderful prompt from Dzogchen, which is a Buddhist [00:54:00] lineage, which is just listen for the sounds in the distant harbour. Any moment this is going on, like there's somewhere around you, there's a distant harbor. Just listen to the sounds from it. And there could be another one further away in the opposite direction. And just listen to the sounds from that distant harbor, that you don't know what they're going to be just like out there somewhere. There are these things you could notice and you're available to them rather than like, okay, I think it's in that direction, I'm going to strain my ear towards that harbor and try and hear the thing, I don't know, just like be available to the sounds as they come up. And naturally you'll expand out and start to notice things that you hadn't noticed before.
David Elikwu-1: There's a question that I want to ask you before. that I wanted to share something that what you were saying made me think of, which was, I think it's in the book, Hooked by Nir Eyal. He talks about another study where they gave parents money to take their kids to the science museum. And one group of parents, they told them to leave their phones at home. And then the other ones, they just didn't say anything, so they could take their phones. And then afterwards they asked them, and I think what's [00:55:00] really interesting about this is that it's qualitative rather than quantitative. So it wasn't like they tracked them and said, how much time did you spend on your phone? They just asked them like, how would you rate your experience out of 10? And what's interesting is for the group that took their phones with them, they rated that experience as worse. And it's almost not, not intentionally worse, but just lower than the group that just didn't take their phones. And it's interesting how the availability of distraction, even passively, can somehow detract from our experience of things. And when you don't have that distraction present, you just in a sense are almost instantly more open to the realm of experiences you could be having, even without trying.
So they didn't tell this group of parents, you know, have specific conversations with your kids. They didn't tell them, go and look for particular things. They just said, remove this distraction and just go and do the same thing in both sets, you know, the study was paying for it, so they just gave them the money to go have fun with their kids.
And so I think that's another really interesting aspect of what you were sharing, which is, you know, sometimes intentionally removing distractions just opens you [00:56:00] up to all the possible experiences you could be having, even without, like you say, trying even without striving or intentionally looking for something else that you need to do. The question that I wanted to ask was, oh, go on. Were you gonna say something?
Michael Ashcroft: Yeah. There's one, one layer I wanted to add in there with the, experience of those, kids at the museum, which is humans seem to enter what I call a shared awareness space. So like the example being you're watching a movie with you know, a friend or a partner at home and like, you feel as if you're in the same place, like you're having a shared experience watching this movie, but then you notice that your, your friend, your partner is like scrolling on Twitter on the phone. Like they're not really watching the film, like what is the felt experience that you have in that moment? So for me, there's like a, a disconnection. There's like a, oh, I thought we were in the same space and we were, and now suddenly we're in different spaces. We are not in the same space having a shared experience. And that I think causes all kinds of like tensions and like less enjoyment. And like, there's something about watching a movie together that is like more [00:57:00] fun because you're doing it together. And I think in the example of walking around the museum, let's say at the gallery, you're looking at something in the museum like, oh, I'm having a shared experience beholding the, you know, whatever this thing is. And then I realise that my child is looking at their phone and I'm like, oh, okay. This is not, you know, it's not just distraction, it's that they're not with you. They're not in the same place that you're in. And that, yeah, disconnection and discomfort, I think come from that.
David Elikwu-1: Yeah, it's interesting. So it kind of reduces the maximum cap of the experience you could be having simply by not sharing that experience. That's really interesting.
Effortless Attention and Non-Fixation
David Elikwu-1: Going back to, you pointed it out with me when I mentioned trying, I would love to hear you maybe expand more on how you see the balance of some of these different ideas. As I was listening to some of your stuff before and reading some of your work, the frame that came to my mind intuitively is almost like a circle, but also a scale where perhaps originally a lot of people think of the balance between inattention and attention. So inattention, there's a lack of focus. You're not actually trying to [00:58:00] think of anything, but it's a negative thing, right? You, you are not paying attention to anything. And then you have attention where you are actively trying to pay attention to something. And so there's already this dynamic tension between those two things.
But then if you pull more towards the right of attention, you could have expanded awareness, which is, it's not just that you are paying attention to one thing, but you are paying attention to all the things you could possibly be paying attention to. You're expanding the realm of things that you possibly be thinking about.
And then maybe going even a step further to the right of that, which in a sense kind of brings you round back to being to the left of inattention is non fixation. This is at least how it came to my mind non fixation is less than inattention because it's not just that you are absent minded and not being able to focus on anything, but you are intentionally not fixing your attention on anything. And it's still to the right of extended awareness because it's not just that you are expanding your awareness to all the possible things you could be [00:59:00] thinking about, but you are also not attaching your attention to any of those specific things, but kind of in a state where you are open to, I guess, the realm of experiences.
It probably sounds like a very esoteric description that I've just given, but that's how it came to my
Michael Ashcroft: Oh, I'm used to that.
David Elikwu-1: Is that how you would frame it a better way you could explain it?
Michael Ashcroft: So there are a few different things going on there. The first one to pick up on, I guess, is, the idea that you can intend very strongly towards something without putting too much effort into it, right? So I can, I can be very clear in my intention to be present talking to you and listening to you and looking at you right now without going like, right? Okay, what are you going to say next? And like, listening to you and like, what am I going to say? Like, all of all of the extra stuff that I layer in is a kind of effort or trying.
The same thing with active listening, like mm hmm. Yeah, keep, looking. what are you gonna say? Mm hmm. Yeah, all, of that stuff. Doesn't actually help with my listening. In fact, it just kind [01:00:00] of gets in the way because I'm doing all this stuff that isn't listening. All I have to do to listen to you is just nothing, ultimately. If you speak English fluently, you don't have to try it on to sound what I'm saying right now. Like, your brain just does it, right? So why do we then layer this extra stuff? So that's one thing of like, intention is a separate thing from effort.
The fixation point is interesting because that's where the, the grooves of habit come in. So let's use the example of, I want to say something. I want to make a point in this, in this recording. And I keep trying to like come back to it and like insert it in somewhere and like I might end up interrupting you and like it just goes a different direction. because I'm fixated on saying this thing, whereas if it's just in my awareness as a thing, I could say it's like, oh yeah, there's that, there's that point I could make. It's kind of over here somewhere. If it doesn't like have the right moment, I just won't say it. But if I'm fixated on it, then I'm like constantly being pulled towards it.
So the non fixation thing here is, my awareness has expanded, I have an intention to speak [01:01:00] clearly to you about interesting things, and I'm noticing all the things that I could say. All the thoughts are coming up, but none of them are like gripping me, none of them are like controlling me in any way. The opposite of the must say this, is must not say this, it's the same kind of fixation. It's like, don't go there, don't go there, don't go there, don't make that joke, all that kind of thing. But being able to kind of like notice the attachment, the tension of like, oh, this thing has gripped me in some way and then go, no, like it's still where it is. I could still say if I wanted to, but I don't have this need to go there or not.
So all of these things mean that you can still involve yourself very strongly in life. I would say even more so, like I can be really present with you without having to add all this other stuff around the edges. The fact that I'm non fixated or my awareness has expanded doesn't diminish the fact that I'm still choosing to attend to you.
And one more thing they said from the beginning was, when you're when it's expanded your like attentions and all of that those things, that's not the case. I think attention is still a serial, like one after the other one [01:02:00] thing. The fact that I can be aware of the temperature of the room doesn't mean I'm putting my attention on it, right? Doesn't mean that I'm attending to everything possible. It just means that I could notice more things and my attention could go to them if it were important for them to do so, right?
David Elikwu-1: Okay. Interesting. Is there a way we can train our attention or expanded awareness to tap into that state more often? Is it something that by and again, we're coming back to this idea of trying, is it something that you can try intentionally to do enough that you start to do it automatically? Or is it something that you, yeah. Like do you have to cultivate a practice of doing it, or is it something that can only happen if you tap into it unintentionally?
Michael Ashcroft: It's a fun paradox because trying for it makes it go away. Like trying to be aware is effort and strain and you'll just contract. So the thing that you have to learn, and again, this, this is, I think it takes time because it is very counterintuitive, is that you get the thing as soon as you stop trying for it. And the way that I encourage people to actually [01:03:00] do this in life is, yeah, guided like lessons of like, okay, notice these things. I my voice will be there. Let's say, saying, okay, notice the face behind you and that kind of thing. But in your own life, the best advice I can give is, first go for those walks in nature and just notice what it's like to have the expansiveness. But importantly, notice once you had a contraction of awareness, so it's very common to have the experience of like, coming back to yourself. Like, you know, you catch yourself doing something, you catch yourself thinking about something, and then you realise that you weren't really fully there. You were kind of in a simulation for the whole time. Like, oh, the last five minutes I've just been like, in my head worried about X. Oh look, I'm in a room. Oh, I'm hungry. Oh, I can go and do this thing. At that moment, get curious about what the experience was like that you weren't in the world, and what it was like to come back. Because that coming back, well, first of all, you can only come back once you've noticed that you're not there. And then the coming back is a skill that you can cultivate with practice as well.
But again, it's not a thing that you can effort your way [01:04:00] towards because effort is a contraction normally.
David Elikwu-1: Do you think of this as distinct from meditation or being in a meditative state?
Michael Ashcroft: Depends what kind of meditation, honestly. So the differences between what I'm teaching and meditation are there's no cushion. I don't want to be unfair to meditation, it's a very good thing. But one of the traps in meditation is that you can sit on the cushion for an hour a day, be like very present, and then get up and completely forget about the practice that you were just doing.
And the whole point is to take it into your life, right? So that's one thing. The other thing is that there are different kinds of meditation. So this is not concentration, this is not loving kindness. You can layer those things on as well, but the idea is it's more of an open awareness meditation. So you are, you can notice all things, more like the Sam Harris waking up stuff is much closer to this than the headspace stuff, shall we say, which is, you know, notice clouds and stuff and let them pass. But you'll come back to the breath. It's not come back to the breath. It's come back to all of what is happening right now without getting stuck on it, if you like. Just letting it, just the [01:05:00] spaciousness of the experience rather than the narrow focus of the experience.
David Elikwu-1: Yeah. I think going off of that, this came up in my conversation with Jonny as well, is this idea that the strength of the meditation and this can apply to a lot of practices. It's not how zen you are in your most zen like state. So when you are practicing your one hour meditation, you know, how high into the clouds can you go, but it's more how quickly can you return to that state throughout the day. And so there is a sense to the hour of meditation is only as useful as that training can enable you in every other moment of the day to return to that state. If you spend that hour every day and during the rest of the day, you're unable to like it doesn't affect the distance or the time in which you can get back into that state, then it's almost useless, it's a waste of time. It's a bit like, you train shooting some jump shots to play basketball and you shoot a hundred shots every morning and it doesn't actually help you get better in any game. Then what was the point of doing that training? You should only do the training to the extent that enables you when you're trying to shoot, to [01:06:00] shoot.
But I guess maybe there's a, it's not even necessarily the same as that, because at least from what I've heard Sam Harris say, I think part of the intention is that, the meditation is life. Like the act is only practicing for the rest of your life. The life that you live meant to be the activity of the meditation. And so learning, I guess in the same way as what you're saying cultivating this, is it a habit of expanded awareness or you know, cultivating a life of expanded awareness allows you to live the life of expanded awareness as opposed to having the habit of expanded awareness.
Michael Ashcroft: Yeah, to me, it's not so much that you want to be expanded all the time because there's a reason why it does the expansion and contraction thing. It's to bring that mechanism under conscious control. So that you don't end up having a day where you've been completely in your head, unconscious, not really in the world the whole time. And then you get home going like, well, what just happened that day? Where did that go? Sam Harris is saying like, your life is your life. This is not a dress rehearsal. This moment right now is your life, right? And the next one is going to be your life as [01:07:00] well. And then they'll be done at some point.
So the purpose of these practices is to be fully alive in every moment. And when you encounter something that wants to send you off into your head or off, kind of turn the volume down experience down. Let's say a bad emotion or a habitual response or whatever it might be, that you can go like, oh, I noticed this. I see that it's about to push me off somewhere else and I'm going to stay here actually and meet it, right? That's what this is about, It's staying fully alive and letting all that stuff just be, rather than stepping back and kind of checking out for however long because you don't like it or because it's a pattern you have.
David Elikwu-1: I want to ask you a bit more about this idea of expanding and contracting in a bit. But before that, one thing I wanted to ask, I guess connecting the dots of the last two things we were talking about.
I feel like there is a sense in which you can max out, you could reach 10 out 10 through various modes. You can get there by grinding, you can genuinely grind to kind of reach a 10 out of 10 in terms of experience. You can get there through [01:08:00] efforts just, which is not grinding. So it's not like where you still have the clutch down, where you're kind of pushing against yourself, but effort is just you're trying, right?
We talked about this idea of trying, and then there is also the concept of flow, and you know, maybe you're just kind of effortlessly in that space, continually.
I wonder, you know, what you think of the contrast between those different modes of moving and if there's anything outside of that which you think is also worth activating.
Balancing Effort and Flow
Michael Ashcroft: So in your, in your three modes, I see grinding as, there are parts of you pulling against the, the way you want to be going or where you think you want to be going. So like half of you is pushing towards the goal, the other half is going like, no, no, no, we can't, I don't want to do this. I'm like, you're fighting yourself and a bunch of energy is like being lost to friction internally.
The efforting version is like, when you put in more effort than is required for the appropriateness of the task, shall we say. Like, if you imagine a hundred meter sprinter, they are putting in exactly the right amount of energy and effort and tension into their bodies. [01:09:00] If they put more tension into their bodies, they would go slower, right? There is an optimal amount. So if they over try, it's like choking in sports as well. It's like, you know, I really must, I have to hit this ball because otherwise I'm going to lose my contract and people are going to think I'm dumb and all that kind of stuff, so I'm going to really try. And then they choke and they miss and they have whatever, like, it just, it goes badly wrong until they get out of their heads and like, just hit the ball, right?
So the thing that I'm nudging towards is not, no, don't expend energy towards a goal, right? It's not like floating through life. It's learning how to deploy exactly the appropriate amount of energy towards something and no more, right? So undo your conflicts, make sure you're all pulling in the same direction, and then learn that you don't need to push as hard as you think you do.
Because if you do, you'll get in your own way. You'll cause damage and you'll actually have worse performance in most cases because you don't need that extra stuff and that's just getting in the way.
David Elikwu-1: Yeah. There's two really interesting things that you mentioned there that I had some thoughts on and wanted to know how you would respond to it. So the very first thing, [01:10:00] which I thought was really interesting, I loved the way that you were describing, I guess, you know, the, tension of pushing against yourself.
And it just made me think of, I don't know if you were following this room temperature superconductor phase that the
Michael Ashcroft: Oh yeah, unfortunately I got caught up in that, yeah.
David Elikwu-1: Same. And it's funny because every day from, from that very first day when the paper came out, was back and forth one day, I'm super excited. Oh my gosh, it's changing the world. The next day someone comes and says, it's rubbish. And then quite literally, you know, suddenly I'm following all these superconductor accounts and you're getting the minute by minute updates and each one is back and forth, back and forth.
I think the thing you mentioned that made me think about it was this idea of losing energy to friction and this idea that, while we might be grinding and while we might be trying to do something, and a lot of people might take pride in the extent to which they can grind, if you're losing so much of your energy to friction or you know, you're losing so much of your energy just as a natural byproduct of this process, how much wastage that is and how much of that energy could have been converted to being able to do other things. And in a similar way, [01:11:00] when we think of the superconductors, if you have to keep it at such a low temperature just to get the maximum energy out of it, you know, like how much more could we be getting out of the effort that we're putting in?
So I guess that that's one frame that's already in my mind. And then the other one was tying to what you were saying, using the analogy of athletes. And yes, you could try really hard, and I think you've used the analogy before of like a child riding a bike and they are riding towards a tree and they focus so much on the tree that they can't avoid hitting the tree. And there's an extent to which sometimes when you're focusing so much, let's say as an athlete or as a performer in the workplace, when you're focusing so much on trying to make your bonus or trying to do the thing that is in some ways that hyper focus can lead you to burn out because you are focusing so much on that singular thing that I guess, you know, a lot of other stuff gets lost in the process.
You used too much of your attention on that thing. And what that reminds me of is I don't know if it was a study, but essentially they just looked at the cross sections of people's brains, they did MRI scans and the MRI scan of [01:12:00] someone that is anxious, let's say, because you have stage fright or you're worried about something is exactly the same as someone who is excited, maybe because they're about to jump out of a plane, or they're about to do something that they love. Like to your brain, those two states are exactly the same, the only thing that changes is your perception of that state. So whether you are extremely anxious and, worried about something or whether you're excited, your brain is lighting up in very much the exact same way. But by changing your perception of the way that you interface with the external stimuli, the way that you interface with the outside world, that is what changes everything about what that experience feels like. So a lot of the difference in the experience is what happens in your head.
So I'd love to know, I guess how you respond to, to those ideas and how I guess you would connect those dots between, I guess one is the internal perception and how we interface with the, the outside world. And then the other part of it is how do we channel the energy that we might otherwise be losing? To a more efficient process. You know, how do we become the room temperature super [01:13:00] conductor.
Michael Ashcroft: I love analogy there, that's amazing. So the thing that comes to mind is that internal story to some extent. Like you mentioned the story of excitement and anxiety, almost like, if I feel sensation to my body, I can tell myself I'm nervous, or I can tell myself I'm excited. That's just a, a narrative.
I think there's a similar thing going on, in the world of grinding at work, right? A lot of people I think have this narrative that grinding is virtuous, right? That if they're going through work effortlessly, or at least it's not, I don't mean to say no energy, but like in a way that feels effortless, like things just flowing like naturally easily.
That's not okay, right? You need to be struggling, you need to be suffering, you need to be like, yeah, grinding. And people need to see that you're grinding for you to be good. I think that's a really common story that gets in the way a lot and it causes people to put in a lot more, visible effort, shall we say, strain than is necessary and undoing those stories and kind of all of us agreeing, we don't care about how hard you look like you're working. We care about the outcomes. [01:14:00] if you can do it effortlessly, good for you that's even better.
I had this experience at school where we had this ridiculous grading system where we'd get like a letter and a number. The letter would be for the achievement and the number for the effort. So a was like top grade and one was most effort. And the way they framed it was that A1 was the best score, because like you got the best grade and you're working really hard when obviously the best grade is an A5. Because you end up with a top grade and you're not working for it. Like, that's clearly, that's the best thing, and the worst outcome is the E1.
And I feel like we're kind of stuck in this A1 mentality in life where if you look like you're not working then you know you shouldn't come to work kind of thing. That's, that's not good enough. So I would work on undoing that narrative.
The thing that comes to mind with the fixation on the goal. You mentioned, you know, working towards the bonus and getting burnout. I think that's true, and it applies at more day to day levels as well. So let's say you're working a project and you are working towards a goal in a way that you think is the right way. Like you are convinced, you are fixated on doing it [01:15:00] this way because that's the way it is done. And because of that, you are not able to notice the ten better ways that might also be there because you're so fixated on that particular way of doing it. So again, the expansion of awareness is not just like, oh, I've noticed space. They go together. I can notice I'm doing this in a very inefficient way, or you know, my colleague suggested something, it's actually a really good idea. Rather than me trying to get the glory for having it my way, what if we just do it easier way. But you have to be able to notice your fixated opinion and viewpoint and way. And unfixate from that going like, you know what, actually, I'm going to put that idea down and try it this way and it might work out better. You have to go and try it.
So I think a few of these things can come together to create a, at least a work life and more broadly a life where you can achieve more, where the perceived exertion is less and you're enjoying it more because you don't have all this extra strainy try efforty thing going on.
David Elikwu-1: Okay. So I think this ties very well to another question that I had, [01:16:00] which was connecting to something you mentioned, which is this idea of you don't want to be in a hyperattentive state all the time. You don't want to be having, you know, expanded awareness all the time. There's this perhaps necessary balance between expanding and contracting, and that has very strong parallels to when we talk about work and play. You know, you have activity and then you have relaxation.
What is the benefit of the interplay between these two? They seem like polar opposites. I don't know if you would say that is the case. But yeah, like what's the benefit of having the interplay between those two modes?
Michael Ashcroft: Between attention and awareness.
David Elikwu-1: Between, I think, well, what made me think of it was when you mentioned expanding and contracting, you don't want to be necessarily in an expansive state all the time, but you actually, maybe there's some having a balance.
Michael Ashcroft: Right. So I don't actually know for sure if contraction is necessary. The reason I say that is that, for one thing, I suspect that whatever the Alexander technique of enlightenment is for meditators would be like near permanent [01:17:00] expansiveness. So you're just like in the world fully. I'm not there. I don't know anyone who is there.
The reason I say that is people often ask, well, don't you need to be contracted to do certain activities like writing, coding, high attentional activities. And my answer is always, maybe, I don't know. The reason for that is that I think in a lot of cases, contracted awareness is kind of like a, a strategy for let's say poor attention control. And when I say poor, I don't mean like bad, I mean like imperfect. So if noticing the sounds outside will cause your attention to like just bounce over there, then maybe it's constructive to, to close off the world around you. It's just that there is a cost of doing that.
One thing I haven't mentioned about Alexander technique is the idea that, mind and body are one process. It's called Psychophysical Unity. In Alexander technique, it's called body, mind and zen. The idea that in this case, when your awareness is contracted, your body tends to follow , right? So if I lose the space above and behind me and my world awareness wise gets [01:18:00] small, I tend to kind of shrink down like this and kind of get tense, right? So, sure you can kind of find yourself down here and then like, oh yeah, posture, and kind of pull yourself up here. But all I'm doing is moving this like tense contracted thing, like down up, rather than if I just expand out, my body can expand into the space as well.
So when you do contract your awareness, you do tend to get these kind of physiological stress responses. Your breathing gets more shallow. You have this tension across your body. Your heart rate might increase slightly. These things I've noticed on myself. But it works right in the same way you said, like you can get to, you can get to 10 by grinding, you can get to 10 by efforting. It's just, there could be better ways.
This is why I think meditation also trains concentration. So like, whatever happens in the world, you can keep your attention on the breath or whatever it might be. And in life, we don't tend to train either awareness or concentration or attention. So to the extent that we're not perfectly enlightened buddhas, I think some contraction is constructive for the context that we're in.
However, I also think that if we were more skilled in all of these domains, [01:19:00] we might find that it would be fine to be expanded all of the time, and then we could just keep our attention solidly on something at the same time.
David Elikwu-1: Something you said brings about, an interesting question. Is the flow state expansive or contracted, like this comes back to this duality of, you know, okay, you've got flow, you've got effort. Assuming that being in a flow state is a good thing and it's the optimal state that you might want to be in. Let's say when you're working, when you're writing, when you're doing some activity, is being in that flow state, a state where you are so locked in on doing the work and on what you're doing, that it allows the work to feel effortless? Or is it that you enter a state of effortlessness that allows the work to feel effortless. Like is it that you are expanded and so writing doesn't feel like it has any cost? Or is it that? you are locked in and concentrating on the act of writing that, you know, time can pass and you can just enter that kind of contracted state?
Exploring Flow States: Contracted vs. Expansive
Michael Ashcroft: So my [01:20:00] theory is that flow and awareness are independent of each other, but commonly we access flow in a contracted way. But I imagine like a, go up to my consultant days, a two by two here with awareness and flow. You can have, and most people know about contracted flow. So writing, coding, play music, it's like kind of, it's in here and then you lose hours. And then like where all that kind of good stuff that we know from regular flow.
And then of course there's the other two boxes, which are just not flow. But the one that interests me is the expansive flow. And I have two examples for this one. One is, imagine like a martial artist. Who has like opponents, like one to the left, one to the right, and one in front. And any one of them might attack at any time, but it doesn't know which one, right? That person, that martial artist is about to be attacked. So they're definitely like, fully involved in the process of being available to respond. And they're, I would say they're in flow, but their awareness is broad and open because if they like get ready for this guy, this guy will hit them, right? They can't get ready in any particular direction. So that would be an open flow.
Another [01:21:00] one would be like a, a pitch sport like football or something, where your awareness needs to be on, okay, where's that guy? Where's that guy? Where's that guy? Where's the ball? Like what time is it? Like you're fully available and open and I would hope you're in flow as well. Although looking at the quality of many footballers, I'm guessing why not. But they're fully involved in doing it, so that they can respond appropriately. They're not like in their own heads.
So I think we just have more examples in at least knowledge work, where flow is spoken about. We have examples of like contracted flow, but I think expansive flow is just as much of a thing. Doesn't need to be contracted to get flow.
David Elikwu-1: Okay. That's interesting.
The Writer's Matrix: Discipline, Vice, and Serendipity
David Elikwu-1: And maybe, I guess this can take us to talking about your own process as a writer and maybe any processes that people listening to this might have. So what you were saying makes me think of my own 4x4 matrix, where you might have, the balance between discipline and vice and structure versus serendipity. And what I find interesting about thinking of that, that framework is, I feel like you can find someone on the internet that pushes each corner [01:22:00] of that as being the ultimate thing, right? Being disciplined and structured is the perfect way to be as a writer. And if you're disciplined and structured, you will get so much done and that that's perfect, or discipline and serendipity and okay, if you have this incredible discipline of, you know, returning to your workplace, but also you open yourself up to serendipity and other areas where you can meet people and encounter lots of different ideas, then that's also the perfect state.
Or like vice and, and structure where, you know, you have some very notable people that were incredibly driven to their vices. They, they took the same drugs every night. They do all the same things all the time. They're always high when they're writing. That
Michael Ashcroft: The Hunter S. Thompson approach.
David Elikwu-1: Exactly, Yeah, that's the requirement of good writing. You have to always be drinking alcohol or even going to the other end, it's like vice and serendipity, where I think maybe that's like the complete openness of whatever life brings that will give you the, fuel for your, for your craft. And I think maybe there's a lot of comedians that fall into that category where it's like, I just go out and [01:23:00] enjoy life and that brings about the interesting situations that allows me to use for my work. And I think maybe there's an aspect of each of these things that people could optimise for. I would love to know maybe, first of all, how you think that framing falls within thinking about like expanded and contracted states and what you think about, like what the best place might be to be in, I don't know whether it's specifically for you in your own work, or if you would have something you would prescribe for other people to at least to try on, on that matrix.
Michael Ashcroft: I guess it depends where on the journey they are, right.
Balancing Structure and Creativity in Writing
Michael Ashcroft: And I, speaking for myself, I am very much towards the serendipity end of the spectrum. And I, I'm bad at discipline, so I, know that you have a weekly newsletter, it's very good and you like manage to do it every single week. And I'm like, damn, that is something I've tried to do a few times and I keep failing because I just can't consistently ship or commit to shipping like that. But my, my process is like, have lots of conversations, read stuff, and then when something is sparked, then I can like cohere it.
I'm [01:24:00] also slightly coping because my discipline is quite low in that sense. Like, I could be better at that. So I have that in mind as I'm talking about this stuff. Like, it's also a sense like I could just be better at discipline. That said though, I think one of the, failure modes of writing is just getting stuck in churning out derivative stuff. Like if you're very disciplined and structured, then you can churn out stuff that has no insight in it. And that's like, that's the risk I want to avoid getting caught up in.
I will take the sacrifice of being inconsistent and perceived as a bit, you know, low output. If I can come up with stuff that like, yeah, you know what, that thing I wrote there that feels like I actually contributed something that feels like it's a, I'm contained within it. It's not just a summary of that person's stuff. And that's just a, there's nothing good or bad about any of these things. I think a lot of people have had great success with high volume communication of like good ideas that aren't necessarily their own. That's totally fine. It's just not the path I want to be on.
So the link with the awareness I think is serendipity. Again, like noticing the $20 bill on the floor, you can only do that if you notice it, if your awareness has [01:25:00] expanded. Similarly, if I'm reading something, I want my awareness to be sufficiently open that I can connect this thing with this thing. Like these things are quite far apart or that conversation with this thing I read, that requires a level of openness and an unfixation of how you think the world is for these new connections to be able to be formed. If you have a clear sense that this is how things are, then it's harder to have something disrupt that in a way that could actually be really interesting and useful, I think.
David Elikwu-1: Yeah, it's a really interesting point. I think, first of all, I'll just respond to you thinking I'm very disciplined. I think, I'm definitely not maxed out on discipline. I use some elements of structure as a backstop for my ill discipline because I have like spurts of discipline. There are some times where I can write every morning and, you know, everything is fantastic and then I can easily fall off that track.
The Concept of Trends Over Streaks
David Elikwu-1: And I think even that takes me to, there's an idea that I went back and forth a bit with David Kadavy on which was my belief in trends over streaks. And so instead of focusing on streaks, which I am very prone to, I think I am naturally very [01:26:00] much like a striver, I'm hyper competitive. On Duolingo, I think my current streak is like 150 something. But this is the key actually, because I, first of all, I know there's people that have years worth of streaks on Duolingo, but I used to have a streak of about a year on Duolingo. And again, it's for no reason. I don't even think it's necessarily the best way to learn language. I'm not even necessarily learning anything new. Because I've studied Chinese for years and years. I spent some time in China. But it's just a good way of practice. But I remember I had this very long streak, and then one day it broke and I was like, oh man. And that was it for probably like two years. I just didn't even use the app anymore, that was it. And so once the streak breaks, then I lose all the, the tension and the engagement.
And so I think what I'm trying to focus now is on, on the trend, which is like, If more often than not you do the thing that you know that you should be doing, then eventually you will end up going where you need to go. And it doesn't actually matter if it happens every single day. And in fact, it's almost better that you think of it that way, at least for me. Because when you think of it as a streak, as soon as you drop the streak, you're back to zero. Whereas if you think of it more [01:27:00] like batting average, then every single shot that you take is an opportunity to increase your batting average. So it doesn't actually matter if you ever miss a shot. What matters maybe is if you continually miss the shots. But after every misshot, you have an opportunity to increase your batting average. So that opportunity is always there, the next day is always there. And so you always have an opportunity to, to keep pushing that thing forward. So maybe that's what I would say on the discipline front.
In terms of the other thing you mentioned, which I think is interesting, I guess going back to this balance of, you know, that that matrix and, and where you fit on it.
I think the serendipity is a key thing.
Building a Sustainable Writing Process
David Elikwu-1: So I, can tell you maybe a tiny bit about my current writing structure, which I don't know but I just have a few small guardrails that help to cultivate the serendipity. So for example, with writing, when I was grinding and putting in a lot of effort, that's when it was hardest. I was losing too much energy due to friction and losing all this heat energy, light energy, all kinds of energy was draining out of me because I was grinding so hard just [01:28:00] trying to write one newsletter a week. And it was so hard, I was getting burnt out all the time. And again, you lose the streak, you lose motivation all kinds of things can happen.
I think what changed is that, so right now I didn't, I think you've done building a second brain. I don't necessarily follow that kind of rigid process. I have one, I have two databases that I keep all of my knowledge management stuff in. And saying the word database makes it sound more sophisticated than it is. You could probably replicate this in, in any way that you choose. One is basically just bookmarks, so anytime I come across something interesting, I save it in notion. What I like about using Notion for that is that it saves the entire article, which means I can search for it later, then I make sure that the title is something searchable. So I'll just add a bunch of like SEO keywords so I can find stuff. And then I have one database, which is notes. So just stuff that I'm writing.
And so I don't focus on trying to write stuff every time I come across an idea that I want to write, I just make the note. I just at least write down a heading or a few bullet points. And [01:29:00] then I had this system that I called Velocity, and now it's starting to sound a bit more systemized and it's sounding more complicated, but I assure you it's really not.
So I just have this system of like a star ratings, so like a one, three and five. So there's no twos there's no fours. But what that means is however much of an idea that I have, if it's a one that's just like it's a heading or it's like a few bullet points, I don't actually, I haven't thought about this too much, I just had the idea, I came across it. A three is like, okay, I've got a few bullet points, or maybe like a loose structure. And then a five is like, I've got a few paragraphs.
But what that means is that's a small bit of quote unquote discipline or structure that allows me to be extremely unstructured because I don't actually have to sit down and write anything anymore. I almost never do write something from beginning to end. I just throw out all the ideas. We will have this conversation, there's a bunch of great stuff we talked about. I'm going to write a few things down and I might just write one sentence. So then whenever I come to write, depending on how much energy I have, I can go to like the ones or the threes or the fives and just take that thing to the next level. Like I'm not going to finish it. I'm just [01:30:00] gonna say, if I just had a vague idea, like a one sentence heading, how can I take that to like a few bullet points? And then that's it, and then I can go away. But what that means is that I have so many ideas because I'm always just like, I'm never finishing anything and I'm just always running around having new ideas, having interesting conversations, and then that allows these ideas to build up. So that's why I call it velocity, because it's like snowballs rolling down a hill. So eventually these ideas accumulate and eventually it reaches like a critical mass where I just have to finish it. Like I have to write something and then now I something share. But at no point did I ever sit down and have to write all of this from scratch because it makes my head hurt. It's a lot of work, a lot of mental energy.
Michael Ashcroft: So each of your newsletters is kind of, it could be weeks or months in the making, because you've got like this little snippet that you had, that you caught like months ago. Now it has just surfaced in this newsletter, for example.
David Elikwu-1: Yeah, exactly. And it's so interesting because very much like you say, there's a bunch of ideas that I have, I almost wish I finished it before because sometimes the moment passes, like it might be something that is topical or relates to something topical [01:31:00] or I had the idea and I haven't had a chance to share it. So for example, there's one post, have I finished? I haven't finished. I can't remember if I finished it. But I definitely haven't shared it.
The Snail Trail Analogy: Productivity Insights
David Elikwu-1: But it's about snails and the analogy was, it's not specifically about snails, it's kind of about like productivity. So I just found some interesting facts about how, I think snails use up to 60% of their energy making the trails. Because that's how they move around. So they create the snail trails Because that's how they get around. And what's cool about this, the snail trails, it allows them to, you know, walk upside down, walk on walls, do all kinds of stuff. so it's really useful, but it's very metabolically expensive. And you spend, yeah, as a snail, 60% of your energy just doing this thing so you can walk. But snails could move 50% faster if they just used other snails trails. If there was three snails and two of them just followed the first one, you know, they could all take turns and move 50% faster. But they don't. Every snail makes its own trail.
And so the analogy is very similar to work and a lot of our lives. Very often we can move so much [01:32:00] faster if we just collaborated with other people and actually just looked to people that were ahead of us and followed their snail trail and looked for, okay, what are the lessons that I can learn from someone that's done this before? But instead for some reason, everyone seems to want to do things themselves and people insist on using 50% more energy making their own snail trail over there because it looks cooler or for whatever reason, but it's completely unnecessary.
So anyway, all of that to say that's an idea I had a long time ago, and kind of built up the idea. I haven't finished the post, but I've had that idea. It is just been sitting around. I haven't actually sat down to finish writing it, but yeah, that's the kind of thing, I don't know. Maybe one day someone else will write it and then I'll wish, oh, I finished that earlier.
Michael Ashcroft: Well it's in the podcast now. so you've claimed it.
David Elikwu-1: Exactly.
Michael Ashcroft: Well, one thing that occurs to me actually is like, how you select your goal for writing really affects the effort you have to put in.
So a lot of, like weekly newsletters are, I read these three things this week go over and read them and that's like, just read and that's like at the low effort end of the spectrum. The way that I've tended to do like newsletters is like, I had this [01:33:00] experience in my life and here's my like, processing of the emotional stuff behind it, which requires me to have emotional experiences and like want to write about personal adjacent things. And it sounds like you've hit a really nice, like sweet spot in the middle of you're generating It's like, really interesting personalized stuff in a way that you can turn out consistently. So it's not just here are three links, it's like, here are my original thoughts.
So yeah, I'm going to compliment you again. That's, I think that's very difficult, to kind of, to be able to do both at once consistently, honestly.
David Elikwu-1: Yeah. Another thing I'll add not necessarily to accept the compliment, but just because this has been a long process of, of striving, right? Because naturally I'm a, grinder and it always kills me. Like I always end up sick or something always happens. It's, it's really not good. But I think slowly you get to a better process and it's still not perfect because it's still very hard to have a consistent process of writing. And I feel like I'm not as consistent as I could be and all of those things.
But I think the other part that I think is useful about doing things in this way is that it allows ideas to percolate more. So sometimes I come [01:34:00] across something and I don't necessarily know what I'm going to connect it to, because I always like connecting different ideas. James Altucher calls this idea sex. So it's not just like, oh, I found this one fact, I'm going to regurgitate it. It's like, I found this fact and it connects to this other weird thing that I came across somewhere else and the combination of those two things is extremely interesting.
So, for example, one that just came to mind, although I can't remember how I wanted to talk about it, was this idea that treadmills were originally invented, I think it was in Danish prisons as a form of drudgery, right? Like they were forcing prisoners just to walk for days, like for a really long time, and it was stressful.
Okay, here's how I wanted to connect it, but again, I haven't finished writing this, this idea that people run for fun, which is so interesting. Like people get on the treadmill in their gym and they like looking themselves in the mirror and seeing themselves exerting all this effort and this idea. Oh, in fact, as we're talking, this is great because I'm actually writing the post because, I'm seeing how the dots connect. But I think it's this idea that, Okay, this thing that was originally invented as basically like a torture device, we now use it as a form of, you know, like we [01:35:00] get excited by it. It's almost a trophy you see yourself sweating in the mirror, running on your treadmill. But again, all that changes, like we said before, is the perception. And it relates to, there's a study I came across a while ago, which was, I think is it Andrew Huberman that talked about it, where you have like two mice on different wheels, but the wheels are connected together. And so both of the mice, you want them to get a certain amount of exercise per day. The issue is one mice's wheel is connected to the other ones. And so whenever that mice exercises voluntarily, the other one exercises by force. And so even though they're getting the same amount of exercise every day, you know, because however much one exercises the amount, the other exercises, the stress differences, right? The differences that has on their brain, or how they feel is completely different because one is doing it for fun and the other one's been forced to do it by, you know, forces outside of their control. And it connects to this idea like we talked about before, where when there's an external force, when your job is telling you you have to work, you have to do all this stuff, it feels horrible, but when you voluntarily do it, maybe it [01:36:00] feels great because you are re-crafting the narrative in your mind about how this is amazing, I'm achieving my goals, I'm trying to lose weight, I'm trying to do all these things.
So yeah, that's a kind of interesting idea where I just connected a bunch of random stuff that we and maybe it becomes useful.
Michael Ashcroft: Yeah, that's a nice, inversion of that as well where, you know, the treadmill was a drudgery device which turned into a joyous one, well not joyous, enjoyable. The other one of that is like the dishwasher or the washing machine. It's like, oh, I have to unload the dishwasher. Oh, I have to like do the laundry in this amazing time saving device that people a hundred years ago would have killed to have and saves like hours and hours a week. Ugh, I have to do this. It's just the story. It's like if you just went to like, oh, this machine has cleaned all of my things and I was doing some work, it would be a whole different experience, but we just get stuck in yeah, in the story changes the whole experience. It's the excitement, anxiety thing again.
David Elikwu-1: How do you think this connects to the idea of, I think we talked a little bit ago about this idea of like success or what we optimize for when very much, just in line with what you were saying, I saw a [01:37:00] video, I think it was on Twitter the other day of it was just like some farm machines and it was one of those videos where you just see them doing like repetitive stuff, but it's so cool. Like we have this machine that can go along and pull rows and rows of carrots out of the ground instantly. And I was just noting that in five minutes of this machine switching on it does what used to be an entire day's work for an entire family of maybe like seven people, right? So people, people intentionally built these massive families just so that they could work. Because if you had a small family, you would starve, everyone would starve. you need a big, big family so that everyone can do lots and lots of work and spend your entire day, months and months working, harvesting all these crops so that eventually you can eat and, you can survive.
And it's interesting how we have abstracted away so much of that, this machine switches on for five minutes. It does an, entire day's worth of work and yet the entire family is still working. There's less people in the family, so you actually have less mouths to feed. But everyone's still so busy and it connects to this idea of, I don't know if it's just a Gen Z thing, but people are, like, oh, I'm so tired [01:38:00] of work, I hate working. I can't believe I have to do this every day. I don't know if I'd necessarily go to that, to that extent. I think sometimes, like when we were talking about retiring, that there is some benefit in doing, having some purpose and having something that you do. But yeah, like how do we find the balance of what we want to be doing and what we think is whether it's enough or doing enough, I guess, whichever way you think about that, because there's some extent to which you can keep pushing that buck down the road forever, right? You could always continue pushing yourself to do more, you could continue striving to do more even when you don't necessarily have to, right? You have this magical dishwasher, it should save you hours and hours of time, and yet people are still stressed out having to use them.
Redefining Virtue: Effort vs. Outcome
Michael Ashcroft: I think it really comes down to what you define is like a virtuous life. So I was saying before, is effort virtuous or is an outcome virtuous? Is it feeding your family or is it working hard to feed your family? Like which of these is the proper way to orient life? And you really have to undo a lot of, or look closely at a lot of [01:39:00] like societal conditioning because a lot of the conditioning is, work is virtuous, effort is virtuous. And so even then when we have the, the machines that will for us. We find other places to be virtuous by doing effort. Places that we efforts now are the places that we haven't yet figured out how to automate away effort because we need to effort it seems.
So we I think get to redefine this to some extent. I think there is some virtue in trying in that, you know, putting energy towards things and striving. The thing I'm talking about here is just, you know, how you strive. I don't necessarily think there's value in over exerting yourself pointlessly that seems counter to nature if you like. I don't see a, a gazelle like running faster than it needs to run or running exactly as fast as it needs to run, right?
Wasted energy is a bad thing. I think humans are very good at doing more than is required, shall we say. For some reason we have the, the capacity to go beyond appropriateness in that sense. So there might be a case of checking in, like, okay, what is appropriate? Well, I can feed my family and it feels effortless. [01:40:00] Cool, great. I've won. You know, but there's something in this that drives us to, to do more. And that's the thing that is worth looking at carefully. I'm not saying to disregard it completely and reject it, I'm just saying like, keep an eye on it and ask whose interests it has in its, you know, at heart.
Navigating Life Paths: Default, Country, and Desire
David Elikwu-1: The last train of thought that I wanted to go down it might be, I don't know, two or three questions, but just following on from what you were saying is I'm interested to know, so you were previously on what, our friend Paul Millerd would call the default path. You had this job, you were at KPMG, you were going down this path of, you know, traditional success and you've kind of stepped off that and you're trying to reorient yourself in the world. I think there was a bit of a process around that of trying to figure out, okay, how exactly do I use my time? How exactly do I use my attention and my resources, my mental energy, all of these things. You're running the course, you're doing all these things.
What I was thinking about, which I think is also interesting also having spoken to Johnny Miller and Khe Hy and a bunch of these guys is, I don't [01:41:00] think necessarily there's just the dichotomy between, or there's just the, the balance between default path and I don't know, Pathless Path. I think or what I'm interested to explore, and maybe you can tell me what you think about this. There also seems to be like the transition point of moving from, okay, maybe how I would frame it on a, spectrum is you have the default path, which is the traditional way that everyone does. And then there's kind of like the country path. A lot of people leave the default path to go on the country path and that's when you went to Bali, lots of people go to Bali or you go to Lisbon or you go to one of these places and you do a few of these things where it's like, it's not the default path, but everyone certainly uses this other path to figure out where they are going to end going. Which invariably a lot of the activities are still kind of the same. Maybe it doesn't have the same pressure, but it's still another path.
And then there is maybe what you would call desire paths. And desire Paths are what you, it's a civic you know, civic term of, I don't know if it's architecture, but it's a term of, okay, let's say you are building a park. There are paths you intentionally build and then there were pods that are [01:42:00] worn over time by lots of people wandering off in a very different direction and eventually that turns into a path.
I remember I wrote this essay, I think it was earlier this year, I think it was called Rules Aren't Real. And it was about this idea that, very often the desire path becomes the path. And so you start off with a path where everyone is on. So let's say academia, actually, academia for example, used to be the desire path. It used to be the case that everyone was working and then some people would elect to actually just spend longer training with some masters and learning a lot more. First of all, you probably needed to have some money to be able to do that, but a lot of people would spend most of their time pursuing academic pursuits and that was the desire path. And then slowly over time the desire path became the actual path. And now everyone has to go to school and instead the desire path is leaving school to go off and work and to go and do all these other things. And so I guess, yeah, it's interesting how there's this circular pattern between these three different types of path.
I'd be interested to know where you think you are on that spectrum and how you think, like what [01:43:00] do you think of the interplay between those different paths and how we can orient ourselves between them. Obviously, depending on what we're optimising for.
Michael Ashcroft: Comment first on the, the Bali nomading thing, the travel thing that, that Paul seems to advocate for is that I think there's something about a lot of us growing up reading the lifestyle bloggers in the, the 2000's or the, the Zen habits is the minimalist and that kind of thing. So people of a certain age kind of want to go after the travel thing.
So there's, you know, you've been working for 10 years and you wanna have a complete change. So you go off and travel and like value's a good place to go, there are other places, obviously, there's also the cost of living difference. So for me it was like I want to go traveling. I didn't want to stay in London. It was too expensive and blah, blah, blah. That's why I did it.
But as I talk to some people who are obviously like nomadic by nature, like Paul, it's been a minute to me he feels like he's a, he is a nomad. He could happily move every few months and that's his preferred lifestyle. I had an interesting experience at the end of my year traveling was that I realized I wasn't a nomad. Like this has been really fun, but I like having a sense of [01:44:00] place and community and roots. And I've even been toying with the idea of like getting a part-time job because I miss having colleagues and a team and like working towards a shared purpose. The thing I've been learning is that it's very easy to get fixated on, on a new story. So yes, I stepped off the default path, but I could very easily step onto default path A or default path two. You know, the other one, the one that everyone who quits their jobs goes off and does. And that's a trap, I think unless it's what you actually want, then cool. But this journey is no, what do I want? What do I want in the absence of being told what my options are, and it might be that I want one of the options. It might not be, but the journey is to figure it out for myself and like see through all the things I've been told in my life and the things I've been told I should want. Now what do I actually want? And that's a very difficult question to answer because you have to unwind a whole bunch of stuff and then listen to yourself in a way that you might not be practiced in doing up until this point. That's where I am, It's like, I could go hard in a bunch of [01:45:00] directions, but I'm not because I want to like, check in with myself, like, which of these is aligned? Shall we say, which, in which of these directions will I not be fighting half of myself because I actually don't like it? And it's not easy to do that. I think that needs spaciousness and allowing yourself to feel lazy. And I'm very privileged that I have this income stream that, and I I don't work as well, but like, I know I don't have to work a difficult job. The same struggle exists, right? Regardless of context. If you want to figure out what you want, you need spaciousness. I think for that.
Applying Alexander Technique to Life Choices
David Elikwu-1: How do you apply, I guess your teachings to this practice of carving out your desire path, like is there a way in which you use the Alexander technique or expanding your awareness to enable you to think of I guess it's like divergent thinking, right? What are all the possible paths I could be going down, expanding my attention to think of all the like, I can imagine when you were working at KPMG, you were a consultant, you were a manager, you know, you might just have this trickle of thought in the back of your mind about, hey, there's something interesting that I found I [01:46:00] could go and be doing that. I don't know if your immediate thought was like, oh, I'm going to jump off and go do this full time. Like how has, I guess, going through this practice of using the Alexander technique in your day to day life, maybe affected the way that you approach your work and play whatever states you inhibit.
Michael Ashcroft: Yeah, the main way I do it is to notice the things that I want. I tend to get fixated on. It's like, oh, I could go off and do X and then catch yourself. Like, hang on, wait, wait, wait, wait. I was about to reorient my entire life to do this thing. It's a very silly example of this. I caught myself a few months ago listening to some Bollywood soundtracks. I think it's the, the Dum soundtrack it's great.
And I caught myself, maybe it was like a mild ADHD style adjacent thing, but I caught myself like an hour later. I've done a rabbit hole of like, Hindi learning. Like, okay, this is the Hindi grammar. This is like all the sounds this is like the etymology of words in Hindi. And then I thought, oh, I could learn Hindi. Wouldn't that be cool? And I like looking at Duolingo, And then I suddenly stopped, like looked at myself going like, what the hell am I doing ? Like, I have no [01:47:00] need or actual desire to learn Hindi. It was just like triggered by this ridiculous, like, I enjoyed the sound of this song, and suddenly I'm on the edge of like, you know, doing some short course in Hindi for some reason.
Like, that moment is like a microcosm of things that are happening all of the time. If we don't catch the contraction, you know, I got lost for an hour, I contracted my awareness and I got caught up in this path that wasn't mine. Like, that's a very silly example, but being able to notice like, oh, I could write a book, I could make a course on this.
So people who have like audiences, I think there's always a temptation to make a course on how to grow an audience and that kind of thing. And I've always been like, don't do it. Don't do it. Don't be the guy who makes money online by teaching how to make money online. Like just, I don't want to go that way.
But there's always this tendency of like, oh, you know, I could, I could. And then like the, the pause of like, that's not my path. Does this feel alive and aligned? No. No, it doesn't. Leave it alone. But the Alexander technique kind of creates that spaciousness between stimulus and response so that I don't just go straight in [01:48:00] and spend two weeks building some new micro course on something I don't actually care about. Like, and things like that, right. That's, that's the kind of thing where it comes up and learning to become aware of my own embodied responses that interoception, that that Johnny talks about of like, do I actually feel good when I'm involved in this thing? Or do I feel sneakily bad in some way? Is there like a thing that's fighting me? Can I learn to notice the thing that is pulling against the parking brake, the you know the, I'm in the wrong gear, that kind of stuff. I am in the wrong gear. I have got the brakes on, okay, do I want to grind through this? Probably not. Can I resolve the conflict? Turns out I can't. I'm not going that way then, right? That kind of stuff is, is a slow unfolding process, but it's a valuable one, I think. And that's where AT for me, comes in.
David Elikwu-1: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think the last question I'll ask you It's perhaps a slightly harder version of that same thing you were talking about.
But what I'm thinking about is that's kind of like the, the freedom from version I'm also interested in how you might approach the freedom version to for, oh, sorry, that's the Freedom to version. I'm also interested to know how you might approach the freedom from version for [01:49:00] anyone listening to this that might be struggling with the, the converse, which is, okay, so on one hand you were just talking about, okay, you have the freedom to chase all these things and do all of these things. What I'm always cognizant of is sometimes there are some people that maybe they're stuck in a particular position and they want to move or to navigate or to, you know, explore other paths but they don't necessarily have the freedom, maybe that they're not making money from some other side gig or they're not making money for doing something else, and they are trying to think of, you know, yeah, the freedom from version, which is in a similar sense, here are some things I could go off and be doing to allow me to go and live this other life. And that can be its own snare and that can be its own trap very much in the same way, but just simply with a different impetus, right. So I'd be interested to know how you might apply, I guess the same line of thinking to someone that was coming from the other side of things.
Michael Ashcroft: So someone who is in a job, let's say, and in the Freedom, they want the freedom from their situation, shall we say. Is that what you're pointing
David Elikwu-1: [01:50:00] yeah. so for example, instead of exploring other options or exploring things you could do simply out curiosity, you're almost exploring things out of a necessity. Okay.
Thrashing vs. Swimming: Finding Stability
David Elikwu-1: The best example I can give this is, I wrote a while ago about this dichotomy between swimming and thrashing. And So sometimes, and I'm always very careful to catch myself in this, Is that sometimes I can be thrashing. Let's say if things aren't going well or I see an opportunity, I am thrashing, I'm kind of like flailing about. And again, there's two modes of being in the water. One is like you're just thrashing, you're just, oh my gosh, you see something that looks like a life raft. let me just work my way towards that and, and you're thrashing to try and find some kind of psychological safety as opposed to swimming purposefully.
Even if you're swimming in the wrong direction, you probably lose a lot less energy by swimming purposefully in the wrong direction and then figuring it out and turning back and going in the right direction, than thrashing in whatever way seems to promise the most safety because you could get there and it's a false economy.
There is no safety there, and so I think that is also a trap I've definitely felt myself in and perhaps there's a [01:51:00] that might also find themselves in that version of the trap as well, where you exploring things just because they seem safer.
Michael Ashcroft: Got it. Okay. Thank you for clarifying. So I guess using your, your thrashing analogy there, there's two versions of thrashing, right? There's one, because you're actually drowning. Or you're exhausted or you're in trouble, you're unsafe in some way. So if someone is thrashing in that sense, then for me the advice is like, find safety. Like do whatever is necessary to grab onto something that you know, someone's hand, a raft, something that will keep you afloat and like create embodied sense of safety that you actually feel, like, okay, I can, I can take a breath and relax.
That's probably not most people though, actually. Most people I think are thrashing out of a kind of panicky, like trying too hard, like overwhelmed thing. And for those people, like first of all I check, am I actually unsafe? Are things actually unsafe here or is it this other thing. And if you are thrashing out of this sense of panicky effort, then honestly just what happens if you stop thrashing? because with the, with the swimming, [01:52:00] if you just let go quite a lot, you'll move better, right?
A lot of that thrashing makes you sink, honestly. There's an act of courage and faith there. right? Like you think you're drowning, you think that if you don't thrash then you won't make it. But actually that's not the case. If you just stop, then you find that you float, and you have more energy. There's that moment of like, I guess it sounds like bungee jumping or like doing a parachute jump or something like that, but you have to trust that the thing will catch you. Will this be okay? Oh, it turns out I stopped thrashing and I'm okay. So the move to notice the extra effort you're putting in and then just stop doing that and see what happens, can often unfold into, oh my God, I was just putting in like 10 times more effort than I needed to. Everything's actually totally fine. And now that I've stopped thrashing, I can just like swim in the direction. I want to go in, this might need help, this might need a conversation with people, this might need like all kinds of restructurings, but the first move there is to just like, stop thrashing.
But only, I think once you've actually ascertained, would it be safe to do so? If I'm actually drowning, I want to grab something before I just like, stop swimming,
David Elikwu-1: Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
I think [01:53:00] it's the courage to break away from the instinctive, you know, just reaching out grab something as a default. And sometimes, I've definitely caught myself doing that in the past where yeah, because there's a perceived lack of instability. You just reach out to grab the nearest thing or to go and do something else.
But funnily enough, kind of like you're alluding to, sometimes you could reach out and grab something and that thing ends up to be a worse thing than the boat you just jumped off, right? You thought you were in trouble and now you've, you're out of the frying pan into the fire. You've gone and grabbed something because you wanted to grab something, and now you're doing something that's even worse, even more painful, even more stressful than, than what you were doing before.
Michael Ashcroft: That's exactly what I did when I left my, the job I burnt out, that was like National Grid in the UK and I went to KPMG of all places. Like that was not a good move, like that was a thrashy move and I suffered for it.
So I agree with you that the courage move of like, just ask yourself like the stoic question. Like if the bad thing comes to pass, how bad is it really? And can I recover? It's Tim Ferriss fear setting. It's you know, Prima [01:54:00] Dotatio, Malora, I'm nothing of like if I get fired, if I don't do this project, if whatever, will I be safe? Do I have savings? Do I have family? Do I have like support mechanisms? If yes, can I give myself a week of not thrashing to get myself some headspace and see what happens?
Okay, cool. Then reflects, this again, There's Johnny Miller's nervous system mastery stuff. It's his, okay, right now I'm thrashing because I'm super activated. I am like in a stress response, in fight or flight. Deal with that first and then look around, right? Because as long as you're in that narrow focus, like danger mode, you're probably make bad choices, frankly. So deal with that first, and then yeah, see what, see what appears to you once you're no longer in that hyper agitated mode.
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