Andy Johns: evaluation

Transcript context

…How are you doing? How are you doing on this journey? I'm good. I still have my ups and downs. I've arrived at an interesting part in my journey where it's something that I'm practicing now and I still don't quite have the hang of it. I'll use one more metaphor. I think the way that I approached the first part of my life was as if life was a big mountain to be climbed, where you're trying to head up Everest under this assumption that once you get to the top, you're going to have this bliss that will persist or that will make you feel that you had a life well-lived, and that that was the answer, but what I experienced was that once I got to the top of one mountain, then I had to find the top of another and another and another. Although you see and do some amazing things along the way, at some point it's too exhausting. At some point, you may really get yourself into trouble and you might not survive. The vast majority of people who die on Mount Everest actually die on the way down, not on the way up. You don't save anything for the return home, I think is the point. Instead of pursuing my life now as a mountain to be climbed in the hopes that reaching the top will make me feel good again, I'm instead trying to float down river. So for example, if you go whitewater rafting, they'll give you a little safety crash course at the beginning. They'll say, "Here's how you paddle. Put your vest on." One of the things they'll ask you is, what do I do if I fall overboard, especially if I fall overboard into the rapids or the cold water? This is maybe the most important thing they teach because commonly what happens if you're in sizable enough rapids and you fall overboard, the tendency is to freak out and to fight the current. When people freak out in the water, especially when the water's choppy, that's when they get in trouble. The thing they teach you to do is instead you go into mummy mode, right? You lay back, you cross your arms across your chest, and you stick your feet out like you're a mummy, and you do the opposite of fighting the current. You allow the current to take you where it's trying to take you. For me, I actually find that I believe that that's a more fitting metaphor for life. It's possible that there's something amazing for us downstream so long as we're willing to surrender and just let go, to turn off the intellectual mind a bit, to quit trying to plan as if you can predict the future, to quit thinking about all the edge cases and trying to optimize our life, which I think is a bunch of bullshit. It's possible that if you just relax and you instead pay attention to the signals around you, you feel where the current is trying to take you, maybe towards a potential life partner, maybe away from an oppressive work environment, maybe towards a place to live that is more calm and peaceful, whatever it may be. If you really tune in with yourself and pay attention to that current and you relax into it, you'll arrive at a destination that you were meant for. that is more calm and peaceful, whatever it may be. If you really tune in with yourself and pay attention to that current and you relax into it, you'll arrive at a destination that you were meant for. In a sense, that's what I did that has brought me to this conversation today. Instead of talking about investing in companies and what have you, I'm instead trying to connect with people on an entirely different level and help them make their own way downstream, so to speak. So for me nowadays, that's how I'm living at the moment. I'm actually in Vietnam. Just got here about 10 days ago because it seemed like the current of life was taking me here right now. It's likely that it's just the next lily pad towards wherever else I'm heading to, but I guess I'm in the mindset now where I'm willing to just surrender and see how it unfolds.…

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