MOVEMENT ONE — JUST IS

1 · There Is No Verdict

There's no such thing as wins and losses. That's people that see black and white, zeros and ones. I see every shade in between.

Something happens. Then you decide what it means.

Those are two different events. They feel like one, because the second one arrives so fast you never see the gap. The car cuts you off and you are already angry. The text goes unanswered and you already know what it means. The deal falls through and it is already a failure, already a sign, already a story about you. It feels like the world handed you the ruling along with the facts.

It didn't. The world hands you the facts. The ruling is yours. You add it. And here is the thing nobody tells you: the adding is the only part that costs anything.

The car cut you off. That's it. That's the whole event. It took a second and a half and it is over. The anger you carried into the office, the replay at lunch, the version you told at dinner, the tightness still in your shoulders at ten o'clock — none of that was the car. All of that was the verdict. The event was free. The verdict you paid for all day.

I want you to sit with that for a minute, because the whole book is inside it.

The gap

Let me tell you how I see things, and then you can decide whether it's useful to you.

I don't see wins and losses. I never have. When I say that to people, they think I'm being humble, or that I'm doing some kind of positive-thinking trick on myself. I'm not. I mean it literally. What I see instead is lessons, and the wisdom you keep from them. That's the other half of the sentence, and it gets its own chapter, because it's the half that pays. When I look at a situation, I don't see a scoreboard. I see a situation. It has a shape, it has details, it has a hundred shades in it, and none of those shades is called "good" or "bad." Those two words are not in the picture. They are something people bring to the picture, and then they walk around thinking they saw it there.

Black and white. Zeros and ones. That is how a machine sees. A machine has to sort everything into two bins because it can't hold a shade. It can only hold on or off. And a lot of people have trained themselves to see the same way, because two bins feel safer than a hundred shades. If it's a win, I can relax. If it's a loss, I know what to do — feel bad. At least the feeling is familiar.

But you are not a machine, and reality is not made of two bins. Reality is every shade in between, all at once, all the time. When you force it into two bins you don't get a clearer picture. You get a smaller one. You lose everything that didn't fit.

So here is the first move, and it is the only move in this chapter. Find the gap. Between the thing that happened and the thing you decided it meant, there is a space. It is small. It is real. Everything in this book lives in that space.

What you actually suffered over

Think about the worst week you had this year. Don't pick a tragedy; pick an ordinary bad week. The kind where nothing went right and by Thursday you were done.

Now go back through it honestly and separate the events from the verdicts.

The events were things like: a client changed their mind. A person you counted on didn't show. You said something in a meeting that came out wrong. Money you expected didn't come. Somebody was rude to you for no reason.

Each of those took a few minutes, or a few seconds. Add them all up and the events themselves might fill an hour of a hundred-and-sixty-eight-hour week.

Now look at what filled the rest. The replaying. The what-does-this-say-about-me. The what-should-I-have-done. The they-shouldn't-have. The this-always-happens. The it's-going-to-be-like-this-forever. The tightness. The short sleep. The snapping at someone who had nothing to do with it.

All of that was the second thing. The verdict. You suffered over everything twice, and the second time was the one that hurt.

I am not saying the events were nothing. Some events are heavy. Some cost real money and real time and real trust. But look at the proportion. An hour of events, a week of verdicts. That ratio is the same for almost everybody I've ever talked to, and most people have never once measured it. They think the week was bad. The week was fine. The rulings were bad.

It's not positive thinking

I want to be clear about what I am not saying, because there is a cheap version of this idea and I don't want you to confuse it with the real one.

I am not saying everything is good. I am not saying look on the bright side. I am not saying find the silver lining, or it happened for a reason, or the universe has a plan. Every one of those is a verdict. It's just a nicer-sounding verdict. You still added it. You still paid for it. You just paid for a pleasant story instead of a painful one, and pleasant stories collapse the second reality stops cooperating.

What I am saying is smaller than that and much harder. I am saying: there is no verdict. Not a good one. Not a bad one. The event happened. It just is.

That sounds cold when you first hear it. It isn't. It is the warmest thing you can do for yourself, because it gives you back everything you were spending on the ruling. You get the energy back. You get the hours back. You get the shoulders back. And you get something else that takes longer to notice: you get to see what actually happened, in every shade, instead of the two-bin cartoon of it.

A person who sees every shade has more options than a person who sees two. That's not philosophy. That's just math.

Where the verdict comes from

You might be wondering why we do this, if it costs so much. Fair question.

The verdict feels like protection. If I decide right away that this was bad, I feel like I've done something about it. I've filed it. I've assigned blame. I've learned my lesson. The ruling gives the mind a place to put the thing, and the mind loves having a place to put things.

The verdict also feels like identity. I'm the kind of person who wins. I'm the kind of person things go wrong for. I'm unlucky. I'm sharp. Every ruling is a small vote for a story about who you are, and the stories are comfortable even when they're miserable, because at least you know the ending.

And the verdict is a habit. You started doing it before you can remember. Somebody older than you was doing it out loud, and you learned it the way you learned to talk. Good boy, bad boy. Good day, bad day. Good job, bad job. By the time you were ten you were a full-time judge with no salary and no days off.

None of that makes the verdict true. It just makes it familiar. And familiar is the most expensive thing in your life, because you never think to check the price.

What I actually do

When something happens now, I try to let it be what it is for a moment before I let it be anything else.

That's the whole technique. There is no trick. The car cuts me off, and instead of the anger arriving in the same instant, there's a half-second where it's just a car and a lane and a guy who probably wasn't thinking about me at all. Most of the time that half-second is enough. The verdict doesn't form, because it turns out it never had anything to stand on. It was just going to be a reflex, and a reflex you catch is a reflex that fades.

Sometimes the half-second isn't enough and the verdict forms anyway. That's fine. I'm not perfect at this and I'm not trying to be. What I do then is notice that I've added something, and I look at what I added. Usually it's a "should." He shouldn't have done that. This shouldn't be happening. I should have known better. The should is the tell. Any time you hear a should, you are looking at a verdict, not an event.

I'll give the should its own chapter, because it deserves one. For now, just learn to hear it.

Every shade

I said I see every shade in between, and I want to tell you what that actually looks like, because it isn't mystical.

A deal falls through. Two-bin thinking says: loss. Every-shade thinking says: the deal fell through, and inside that there is a client who is under pressure I didn't know about, a number I quoted that I can now see was ambitious, a conversation I had on Tuesday that I could have had on Monday, a relationship that is still intact, a lesson about timing I'll have for the rest of my life, a week that just opened up on my calendar, and a version of this deal that comes back in six months because I handled the ending well. That is one event. That is eight shades of it, off the top of my head, and there are more.

Which person is better off? The one who filed it as a loss and felt bad for a week, or the one who saw eight things and used six of them?

That's not a rhetorical question. It's the whole reason I wrote this. The person who sees the shades has more to work with. Always. And the only thing standing between you and the shades is the verdict, which you are adding, which you can stop adding, which costs nothing to stop.

There is no verdict. There is what happened, and there is what you do next. Everything else is a tax you're paying to a court that doesn't exist.

Practice. For one day, from the moment you wake up, notice every "should" and "shouldn't" as it forms. In your head, out loud, about yourself, about other people, about the weather. Don't argue with them. Don't fix them. Just count them. Keep the number. Do nothing else with it today. Tomorrow we'll talk about what it cost you.