Life is hard. At birth you were issued a body that breaks down, a mind that talks back, a limited number of Tuesdays, and an unkillable suspicion that everybody else got a more thorough orientation packet. Nobody’s coming to fix this.
What do we do?
Well, here’s a thought so unfashionable it’s got a decent chance of being true: some of the best advice on how to live was written over a century ago by a guy who is now extremely dead and never sold a single supplement. His name was William James.
Yeah, a dead philosopher. I know. You were hoping for a neuroscientist or some Stanford researcher. Instead, you get a nineteenth-century professor. Good. You could use a dead philosopher. The living ones keep trying to build platforms.
He studied medicine at Harvard, struggled with depression, basically founded American psychology, and was one of the main figures in pragmatism, which is philosophy after it gets tired and decides to ask whether an idea actually helps anybody. He also had the kind of beard you only see on prophets and more committed baristas.
His 1890 tome, The Principles of Psychology, looks like it could stop a bullet, but inside are ideas that feel eerily modern. It helped shape the study of consciousness, habit, attention, and the self.
And James worked all this out in the eighteen-hundreds. He couldn’t point to a brain scan and say, “Observe, the anterior grumpulus is overactive!” But when people finally got around to inventing neuroscience, they realized that a surprising number of his intuitions kept refusing to die.
James understood a better life isn’t built by waiting around until you feel like the person you wanna be. It’s built by acting, choosing, and occasionally telling half the contents of your brain to shut up and sit in the corner. Which, frankly, is advice today’s world could use.
So yeah, the guide we need turns out to be a nineteenth-century professor with a beard, a melancholy streak, and a book large enough to stun livestock. This is embarrassing for modernity, but modernity has survived worse.
You wanted the future to save you. The joke is that the past got there first.
Let’s get to it…
Action Comes Before Emotion
I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of my life waiting to become the kind of person who just does things. Thinking, soon, surely, the more motivated version of me will arrive and take over this badly managed franchise. I keep expecting Better Me to show up. Actual Me, meanwhile, wakes up hoping that if I remain very still, adulthood won’t notice me.
James realized when it comes to feeling and actions, we often have it backwards. One of his most famous ideas is often compressed into the line: “We don’t laugh because we’re happy; we’re happy because we laugh.”
You’re not stuck because the correct feeling hasn’t arrived. You’re stuck because you gave your current feeling veto power over your next action. James says you move first, and the feeling catches up.
Example: you don’t feel like exercising. Congratulations. You’re alive. You think this lack of motivation requires analysis. Why don’t I feel motivated? But while you’re conducting this symposium, the ghost of William James rolls his eyes and says, “Just put the shoes on.”
Don’t wait to feel motivated. Manufacture conditions under which the mood can appear.
Why does this work? Because the action gives the mind evidence. Sitting on the couch says: we’re inert. Shoes say: we’re moving. The feeling doesn’t have to lead. The body can. It’s procedural sabotage against inertia, a controlled demolition of your excuses.
“But if I force myself, isn’t that inauthentic?”
You’re not being asked to invade Poland. You’re being asked to put on shoes.
“Fake it till you make it” is close to James and also dumber. “Fake it” suggests deception. “Act as if” doesn’t mean lie. It means behave like the person you wanna be, rather than obeying the mood you currently have. If you act affectionately to manipulate someone, that’s false. If you act affectionately because you want warmth to return to your relationship, that’s practice.
James says the self isn’t discovered; it’s enacted. You become by doing. You produce the state you want to be in by the way you behave. Character isn’t the feeling you happen to be having. Character is what you do with the feeling you happen to be having.
(To learn the counterintuitive way to get better at anything, click here.)
So the action precedes the feeling. But what about how you feel about yourself?
Self-Esteem Is A Fraction
Self-esteem, according to James, isn’t just about how much you achieve. It’s about how much you achieve compared with what you think you should be achieving. Somebody with modest success and modest expectations might be content. Somebody with great success and stratospheric expectations might be miserable.
So if self-esteem is low, you can raise the numerator: be more successful. Achieve more. But James adds a second possibility: lower the denominator. Want less. Stop pretending you’re obligated to accomplish every impressive thing imaginable.
Aaaaaand this is where the modern mind begins coughing up sparks.
We’re not accustomed to being told “want less.” Most of us have been conditioned to believe there’s only one acceptable way to feel better about ourselves: increase the numerator. Achieve more. Win more. Become a sleeker, sharper, more marketable person-object. Wanting less sounds like giving up.
But that’s not what James means. He’s not saying, “Abandon desire.” He’s telling you to look at your expectations and ask whether they’re actually yours.
“But maybe I can achieve everything I want. What about that, Mister Smarty-Pants?”
Spoken like a true mark. Don’t feel insulted; some of the most successful people you know are falling for the same con. Be real: the moment you get something, the denominator expands. Yesterday’s achievement becomes today’s minimum. Each success moves the finish line farther away. Achievement is an accelerant unless accompanied by denominator discipline.
“But won’t this perspective make me lazy?”
Laziness says, “I won’t do the work.” James says, “Maybe this work was assigned by an idiot.” And the idiot might be you. Many of our desires are really insecurities. A lot of ambition consists of trying to win arguments with people who are no longer in the room. This is understandable. It’s also ridiculous. It turns life into a revenge drama performed for an audience that’s gone home.
Writing your goals down helps. Inside your head, an expectation can sound like destiny. On paper, it often sounds like something said by a child wearing a cape. Look at each thing on the list and ask: do I need this to live a good life?
(To learn more about how to increase self-esteem, click here.)
Feels good to have someone say you can do less, right? Okay, time to make things hard again…
Practice Difficulty Before Life Requires It
James said, “Be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it.”
Translation: every day, do something mildly unpleasant. Use the stairs. Tolerate boredom for five minutes instead of grabbing the glowing rectangle.
“Um… why?”
I hear you. Only idiots romanticize inconvenience. The past wasn’t better because you had to chop wood, churn butter, and die from scratches. Anybody who says that should be asked if they’d like some dentistry from 1820.
But there’s a difference between enjoying ease and needing it. If you require convenience, you become fragile. And for most of us in today’s world, inconvenience has been hunted to extinction.
James is saying you should push your limits a bit. Why? Because one day you’ll need that capacity for something that matters. If you never push yourself except during emergencies, don’t be shocked when the car fails to start.
You’re paying an insurance premium on your character. Yeah, insurance is the least sexy metaphor in the world. You pay insurance when nothing’s wrong so that when something does go wrong, you aren’t devastated. James is saying your character is no different.
(To learn more about how making things difficult can improve your life, click here.)
A lot of smart tips from Mr. James. But enough about smarts; let’s discuss wisdom…
Being Wise Is Knowing What To Overlook
A big part of wisdom is omission. Not letting unnecessary information get in the way of what matters. Filtering what gets to you before it causes a traffic jam in your skull.
These days we’re big fans of addressing this problem passively: “My attention was stolen!”
Was it? Did a masked man rappel through the skylight and force you to read an article about a celebrity’s reaction to another celebrity? Really?
James says: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
It’s one of those sentences that sounds pleasant until you realize it makes you responsible. And most of us appear to have agreed to attend to a social media sewage canal of grievance, algorithmic bait, and the fourth person’s take on the third person’s reaction to the second person’s framing of the first person’s bad statement.
Keep offering your attention to junk and you’re not allowed to be shocked when your inner world starts to resemble a bus station restroom.
What you pay attention to is your life. Not symbolically. Actually. A life is made of what consciousness touches.
Wisdom is selective ignorance. And on the internet today there is just so much worth ignoring. Overlook what doesn’t deserve your attention so you can attend to what does.
Choose what you let in.
(To learn the six secrets from neuroscience that will increase your attention span, click here.)
If you curate what gets your attention you’ll have more time. But if you really want to free up some time, do this…
Automate The Routine So Your Mind Is Free For What Matters
James again: “The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.”
“Automatism” sounds cold. James doesn’t mean we should automate the good stuff. He means that we should automate the nonsense that keeps interrupting the good stuff.
Stop spending premium brainpower on discount decisions: Where are my keys? What should I wear? What should I eat? What time should I go to the gym? These are things we spend a shocking amount of time on and don’t need to.
Pick defaults, build habits, and don’t think about it again unless something goes screwy. Self-discipline is what we call a system after we’ve forgotten how cleverly we arranged it.
(To learn the 7 secrets to building good habits, click here.)
You’ve got more time for what matters. How does he feel about how we should measure our achievements?
Measure Effort, Not Just Outcomes
Work evaluates human beings based on outcomes. Metrics. Whatever can be counted is important, and whatever can’t be counted should be ignored until it becomes a problem for insurance.
But in our lives as a whole, James felt we needed to think more about effort, not just outcomes.
Most cultural messages choose one or the other. Either you’re entirely responsible for everything, including luck and circumstance; or you’re responsible for nothing, because everything is structural and therefore you might as well lie on the floor eating cereal from the box.
James says: circumstances matter, but so does effort. Outcomes matter, but they’re not the whole story. This makes room for compassion without dissolving responsibility.
With this perspective, you become less cruel in two directions. First, less cruel to yourself. You stop treating every failure as a revelation of your worth. You don’t say, “I failed, therefore I’m a failure.” Sometimes, a small accomplishment requires immense effort. Give that some respect.
Second, you become less cruel to others. You stop assuming the person who achieves the better outcome necessarily worked harder. You stop assuming the person who couldn’t is weak. This doesn’t mean you excuse everything. It just means you judge with less stupidity.
(To learn the most surprising path to happiness, click here.)
Okay, we’ve covered a lot. Time to round it all up, and we’ll learn the final lesson William James has to teach us…
Sum Up
This is how to get unstuck…
- Action Comes Before Emotion: Waiting to feel motivated is a great way to become old while maintaining noble intentions.
- Self-Esteem Is A Fraction: Your misery might not be caused by failure. It might be caused by the ludicrous fantasy version of yourself you’re carrying around.
- Practice Difficulty Before Life Requires It: If I obey comfort every time it speaks, I’ll become the kind of person who needs a nap after opening a difficult envelope.
- Being Wise Is Knowing What To Overlook: Not everything deserves your attention; the trick is remembering that your life does.
- Automate The Routine So Your Mind Is Free For What Matters: Pick three things you decide every day that don’t deserve the cognitive load. Choose defaults so they’re no longer decisions.
- Measure Effort, Not Just Outcomes: James isn’t saying, “outcomes don’t matter.” If a dentist removes the wrong tooth, I don’t want to hear he experienced tremendous inner growth during the procedure. Reality is still reality, despite the best efforts of people who use “manifest” as a verb. James is saying outcomes aren’t the measure of moral worth. Effort is.
Here’s the part that’s meant to make you uncomfortable, and then the part that’s meant to set you free, and they are the same part.
We’d like to be told we can think our way into a better life. But if thinking were enough, every anxious intellectual would be a saint. James says the opposite: act, and the self follows. You’re what you repeatedly attend to, what you do when nobody’s watching and no applause is coming. Your life isn’t waiting for your insight. It’s being built, right now, out of your actions.
Act before your mood supports it. Lower the denominator before it crushes you. Attend to what really deserves your attention. Automate the unimportant. Do hard things so comfort doesn’t become your master. Measure effort. You’re not waiting for a better self to arrive. You’re practicing one into existence.
You don’t have to become magnificent. Magnificence is unstable and difficult to park. James doesn’t promise that we can become new people overnight. Thank God. New people are exhausting. But he can return you to the only place change ever happens:
The next thing you do.
