Adversity Reveals Character

Happy Monday, folks! We had a good week in Texas. We got a teeny bit of rain to give the plants (and me) some relief. We finally broke our streak of 45 days in a row above 100F by only hitting 99 earlier in the week.

Football is starting!

We caught a live scorpion in the house and now I’m tapping my shoes upside down every morning.

As always, I’m looking forward to hearing from you! If you have any suggestions for how I could add more value to you, I’m all ears.

​

A Quote

“ Today, the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems. But there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems. — Naval Ravikant, from “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant”

​

Three Things

1 – 🐋 Project CETI – A group of people are working to decode whale “speech” in order to communicate with whales. It will be pretty neat if they get it to work!

2 – 👨‍💻 Obsidian – This is the tool I use as my “second brain,” aka Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). I’ve relied on it for three years! I got some time this week to tweak a few things that had been in my backlog (like my Readwise export formatting).

3 – 🎨 Bing for DALL-E 2 – I have been perpetually tempted to use something like Midjourney for AI image generation, but I just couldn’t justify the monthly fee. This week I noticed that Bing has integrated DALL-E 2 for free and it does a great job. Note, you need to be using Microsoft Edge to access this.

​

Deeper Dive

Adversity reveals character.

Every hard thing lets more of the real you shine through. Hard things slough off the outer layer of your persona, revealing the real you underneath.

The harder the thing, the deeper you have to dig to get through it. The more you have to learn about yourself. Your principles. What truly matters.

The harder the thing, the more you also learn what you can accomplish – which is invariably more than you thought you could at the outset. Continuing to successfully survive things builds your self-confidence. The higher your self-confidence, the less energy you have to put into being someone you’re not. Another level on which adversity works to reveal character.

This is why you should do hard things! You don’t know who you are or what you’re capable of until you’ve been tested.

On some level, life is hard enough. We will all likely get plenty of practice with adversity. I get that we don’t necessarily need to go seek out even more opportunities to get smacked upside down. That said, I suspect that in the physical realm there’s likely a little opportunity for you to seek a challenge. Those don’t come up as naturally in the modern world as they used to.

It’s part of the reason I seek out tough physical things. It could be a running race, Crossfit, obstacle course racing, or more recently, rucking. I did a nearly seven mile ruck this weekend smack in the middle of the 105F heat. I was out there for a little over two hours. The vertical distance was up the equivalent of 85 floors. I underestimated my water needs and only took 1L of water, which ran out in the first 40 minutes. By the end, my mouth was like sandpaper. I had some sort of muscle cramp where I couldn’t push off my right leg. It caused me to hobble the last 20 minutes.

Oddly enough, the feeling I felt was pleased. I was out there experiencing the world. I knew I’d make it home. I knew I’d recover. I’ve been there before and gotten through. I was learning a little more about myself.

I was also learning that I need to bring more water next time.

Because I’ll be out there again next weekend.

Some adversity I’ll choose. Some adversity will choose me. Either way, I’ll do my best to view both with appreciation. They’re the opportunities to keep chipping away the marble, revealing the character that’s underneath.