4 • creating & nurturing a 212 mind
This is part of the 212 life series—an ongoing exploration of living and working at 212°. The premise—Water is hot at 211 degrees. Heat it to 212, it boils and creates steam. And with steam, you can power a machine. 1 extra degree changes everything.
A 212 mind is a reaching mind.
Comes to some with ease. They’re born with it. They can’t see things any other way. It’s an optimistic curiosity—enthusiasm for thinking, learning, and continually improving things. A gift.
Others might discover it on their own through experience or an introduction to it, like I’m doing for someone now—maybe you.
Either way, as with so many important things to living an enjoyable life, the reaching mind needs to be nurtured continually if one wants it to stay strong—self-nurtured and guided by others (parent, teacher, friend, colleague, leader).
If you’re one of the lucky ones born with a 212 mind that naturally self-nurtures, enjoy that good fortune. Just be careful not to look away for too long. Atrophy of something good is unpleasant.
Also, if you have that gift, like someone who receives a large inheritance or lands in a place of power from a few lucky turns, the kind thing to do is to help those with less good fortune when you can.
“I want a 212 mind.”
Good. It’s more fun. There’ll be obstacles at times—other people, circumstances—you. But, if you really want to enjoy where the reaching mind can take you, you have to make a choice to—
Pay attention as much as you can.
Minimize your ego.
Fall in love with continually making things better for others and yourself.
Stay with it through the obstacles.
° Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly, even if they roll a few more upon it.
Albert Schweitzer
German medical missionary and Nobel Prize winner | 1875–1965
Tough to do if you’ve let the wind guide your mind for a long time or actively developed the reverse. I’ve been there and I’m still there at times with more decades than you on this planet. (Okay, Dad. Not you.) But the choice is always there for you.
Practice and resilience are the roots of a 212 mind. They keep the momentum moving toward good—reaching.
Practice is action and paying attention to action—noticing and adjusting based on experience.
Resilience is the ability to get back to good when things don’t go well. Clean and fast resilience is the goal. No residue. A special place where mistakes and misses don’t linger in the air and trip up progress.
° Chronic remorse ... is a most undesirable sentiment ... On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
Aldous Huxley | English writer | 1894 - 1963
None of this articulation is about a cute or clever acronym with some trite image of steps, a gear, or a wheel. It’s about helping you play a consistently better role in making good things happen for yourself and other people. Me too. Writing this helped me see things I’ve not noticed before. (Look at that! We’re a team🤗)
A reaching mind is a 212 mind—
Pay attention as much as you can.
Minimize your ego.
Fall in love with continually making things better for others and yourself.
Stay with it through the obstacles.
We’re all at different places in our ability to do each of these things. If you’re weak with a point, don’t worry about it. Just start to practice. It probably won’t be a clean linear progression like you see in the movies. Just jump into the mess of it, knowing it can be a wonderful thing in time.
Enjoy the beauty and energy of not settling. Step away from any bad history.
The choice is always there.
° You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.
Marcus Aurelius | Roman emperor | 161 - 180
1—Pay attention as much as you can.
Paying attention is the deliberate act of directing your mental focus toward something specific. It’s sustained attention with intent to notice—to see and process.
It’s an investment of your mind to become aware—best done undivided, when you can. More challenging in the last 25 years given technology and all that it’s bred, but it can be done.
You’re doing it now.
You’re reading to explore and discover something that might improve how you approach things—that might make your relationships and experiences better—maybe even fatten your bank account. You might also find something here that gives you more confidence about the way you do things now—a validator.
Your attention is here.
I’m no mental giant. I’m often a puppet to my thoughts and react like a bug. But, with practice and guidance from others—reading, watching, listening, noticing—I believe my life is better than it would be otherwise. A little better every so often, with a few slips along the way, works for me. I’ll bet it can work for you, too.
I’ll add some of my favorite resources on this here at some point, but let’s keep going.
2—Minimize your ego.
This should be easier as you live and gain more experience, but it depends on your path and all that influenced it.
If you can get out of the way of yourself and the world, it liberates you and helps you with the next steps—falling in love with improvement and staying with it. You can explore things more and take more risks in thinking and doing. You disappear. Creating more good for others and yourself becomes easier because you’re not carrying the baggage of you.
A little ironic, huh?
I find it helpful to remember the truth of my mortality. I know that I do not matter beyond the brief part I play in the lives of others now and what good I might leave behind—as nonpermanent as it will be.
° What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists, and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.
Walt Whitman | American journalist & poet | 1819 - 1892
Here’s a picture from NASA’s Voyager 1 that I find helpful in minimizing my ego. It was taken in 1990, 13 years after its launch.1
That’s Earth from 4 billion miles away—the dot in that ray of light that looks like it might be a bad pixel on your screen.
Carl Sagan, an astrophysicist, wrote about the image in his book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering … every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
Feel lighter?
Oh, and—
You don’t enjoy big egos in others. Remembering that can be helpful to you, too.
3—Fall in love with continually making things better.
This is the practice of reaching—enthusiastically and with an open mind. The joy that can be found here is profound. It’s how all the comforts of our lives happen. Someone says, “What if?” and perseveres.
125 years ago, electric lighting and indoor plumbing were not common. Most people didn’t have a flushing toilet. In-home refrigeration and air conditioning didn’t exist. Telephones, radios, and photography were just getting started. The convenience of frozen foods, fast food places, and supermarkets was still to come.
“What if?” is a beautiful question. It’s a reaching question. It begins in curiosity and imagines.
“What should be?” is its sibling. It’s another helpful push with a tightened focus on morality and existence.
It’s what initiated our democracy in the United States and produced its constitution. It’s what eliminated slavery and created child labor laws. It gave us the Civil Rights Act, modern medicine, and universal education.
“What should be?” brings social conscience to “What if?”
“What’s next?” is the coach of continually making things better. It keeps us two-twelving in our success—resisting complacency.
We make something good happen, we celebrate it—maybe rest with it for a little while. But eventually, a 212 mind asks, “What’s next?”
What if? What should be? What’s next?
That’s love for better.
° At Microsoft, we have this very bad habit of not being able to push ourselves because we just feel very self-satisfied with the success we’ve had. We’re learning how not to look at the past.
Satya Nadella | CEO of Microsoft | 1967 -
Since Nadella said that in 2019, the company’s annual profit averaged just over $60 billion ($164 million every day, including weekends), and its market capitalization has increased from about $800 billion to $3.7 trillion.
4—Stay with it through the obstacles.
Practice your focus and resilience.
Please understand—I don’t believe in never quitting on something. Sometimes it can be the wise move. An absolute is tough here. That line is all over the place with all kinds of different things. This point is more about staying focused on improvement despite how messy it might be or the milieu in which you might live—the social environment.2
A 212 mind perseveres through the challenges of a lack of this or that, or negative people, or any poor self-talk. Being in love with making things better doesn’t mean things won’t be difficult at times. I love my partner, but it’s not been all sunshine and rainbows along the way.
We have to practice resilience. It begins with truth.
How to be more resilient—
Focus on truth. What is fact? Drop the ego and stay objective. Minimize any drama in your mind. Pride and concern for the judgment of others is lost time and attention that you can direct toward solutions and action. Pay attention to results—what is.
Learn what you can. Embrace your mistakes and misses as cautionary reminders and an education. Let them inspire you to new ideas and actions. “I won’t do that again. What if I did this?”
Keep practicing. Get back to now as quickly as possible—now being your next steps on the project, experience, or person in front of you. Keep doing with your added experience.
Return to truth. Allow your mind to smile. Rest with the bigger picture of existence. We’re here to experience and enjoy things and make them better—now and for the future. And we get to play a small part in that.
I understand the concern for the consequences of someone’s judgment—boss, friend, acquaintance. Navigating that well comes with experience. To me, it’s an unfortunate truth that steals time and better results—an important topic I’ll revisit soon.
“Today, I lose as few nows as possible to things that don’t matter, and I get back to now the second I realize my attention drifts to what’s not useful.”
That’s a line I say daily—sometimes several times a day. I find it helpful to my resilience. I use it when I notice I’ve allowed myself to get distracted. Not just when I catch myself looking at the news or some feed while I’m working, but also when I hear any negative self-talk or notice a particularly unhelpful emotion rolling around in my head.
Take it, revise it for yourself, or create your own reset phrase or touchstone.
° I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all be distilled into actions, and into actions which bring results.3
Florence Nightingale | English pioneer of modern nursing | 1820 - 1910
Same goes for negative people who might get in my way of trying to improve things—using their clichés of resignation and mediocrity.
That’ll never work. This is stupid. It is what it is. No use fighting it. It’s out of our hands. What are you gonna do? It’s not my place. The list is long and a bore.
Sometimes it won’t work and might be stupid, and all of the others. But if the sentiment is more complaint, close-minded, or lazy, I prefer not to allow that kind of talk around me for long. I’ll pick up what I can from the cynics, pessimists, and naysayers, but we’re not hanging out.
I see my mortality and have things to do🙂
You?
A 212 mind is the foundation of a 212 life.
Your mind is with you forever. Love that thing.
Pay attention as much as you can.
Minimize your ego.
Fall in love with continually making things better for others and yourself.
Stay with it through the obstacles.
Practice. Enjoy all that it brings.
Keep reading » how to help others develop a 212 mind
Revisit » 1 • a spark | 2 • 212 attention | 3 • seeing 212
Mentioned: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
Please email me with typos, thoughts, comments, or suggestions (or put them here in the comments). Please don’t be shy or worry about my feelings. Quick, blunt, and maybe interesting or helpful4 is always welcome.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 originally had a 5-year mission. It’s now in interstellar space in its 47th year. Poor thing must be a little lonely.
I can be as hypocritical as anyone. “Why not just say social environment, Sam?” Aren’t you The Comms Cop? Don’t you detest the unnecessary use of fancy words‽ 😔 Yes. But milieu! It’s so tasty.
Florence Nightingale finished that thought with, “Do you think a babe would ever learn to walk if it were to talk about its living in such ‘strange times,’ ‘I must learn to use my legs,’ and so on?”
“Maybe interesting or helpful” is meant to free you of concern.
I’d rather you risk sharing something with me than being concerned it might not land well. If your thought implies I’m stupid or an asshole, you might be right. If so, I’d like to try to fix it.
Much to think about…thank you!