Smash Notes
What happens when your expectations don't match reality?
I sit down with Julian Weisser, who does Growth for a company called Virta Health which has figured out a way to reverse type II diabetes without the use of medication. Julian was an absolute blast to talk to and is one of those behind the scenes geniuses. He even has a framework for attaining happiness!
Notes
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Frustration happens when expectations misaligned with reality. There are three ways to attain happiness and remove frustration from your life: understand the misalignment, changing your expectation, and then change your reality.
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Julian Weisser, head of growth at Virta Health, tells Stewart Alsop on Crazy Wisdom that frustration is an expectation that does not match reality. From that definition he offers three ways to be happier, which he also treats as three ways to lower stress.
The first is to accept the misalignment, and to see that the expectation and the facts are simply different. The second is to change the expectation, and to admit you were imagining a situation that cannot be, should not be, or is not. The third is to change reality itself, which he calls harder and still possible.
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Stress can stem from frustration and different levels of frustration can turn into other emotions like anger, sorrow, etc. Stress is an overarching umbrella of other underlying emotions.
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On Crazy Wisdom, consensus reality is the reality most people have agreed to treat as real, even when it is not the whole picture. The example is Steve Jobs and the reality-distortion field. He believed something so hard that other people started to believe it, and then it showed up in the world. Pretending belief can do the same job.
Under that agreement, the conversation says, there is a more immediate layer. Sounds, sensations, and thoughts, as they are right now, are a private experience. There is also an objective reality it would be unwise to ignore.
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Julian Weisser tells Stewart Alsop on Crazy Wisdom that heavy funding can make creative companies worse, not safer. Firms that raise hundreds of millions of dollars fail at higher rates. The money feels like room to make mistakes.
He splits the pressure into people constraints and capital constraints, and says the two are tied, because you cannot hire without money. He recalls advice, possibly from Paul Graham, that a fast-growing team should always feel slightly short of people. Short of starvation, that shortage is a forcing function. If you cannot finish everything, you have to name the work that matters.
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Some people are beginning to use meditation as a technique for work enhancement or increased productivity. Ultimately, meditation is sometimes used as a quest for power.
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It is helpful to have one-on-one interaction with someone trained in meditation in order to experience the full benefits. Otherwise, everything is biased through an individual's own filters which makes it difficult to progress in meditation.
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On Crazy Wisdom, in the conversation with Julian Weisser of Virta Health, meditation is described as a way to connect the rational and the emotional. If many more people practiced, the hope is a calmer, less angry public. The hope is tied to Weisser's framework for frustration, the gap between what you expected and what is real. Acceptance may be meditation's part in closing the gap.
The same conversation refuses to treat the practice as a luxury. Yoga and mindfulness can sound like something only wealthy people have time for, when the stress in front of most people is rent, sleep, and more than one job.
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One can be doing a lot of things, but what are they actually causing to happen? Is the output having a meaningful impact on one's world and community? It can be helpful to shift perspective.
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To serve others.
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