Josh Allred's Blog

My oldest started online kindergarten. It has been a multi-hour commitment for our family each day. It didn’t seem possible to do, and yet, we found a way to do it. That’s because we don’t need more time to accomplish our goals, we just need to prioritize them.

Most days there is an excuse to not sit down and write or paint or compose. “The dog ate my homework” is a powerful story we tell ourselves. It never feels like the right time to show up. It never feels like the right moment. Tomorrow maybe things will change.

What’s normal is walking around feeling a bit tired. The alternative is to complete something. Because when you do, you might get a sense of accomplishment and feel more motivated to do something else. And maybe not. You might still be tired afterward. At least now you got something done with that tired.

We find time to eat and sleep. We need to find time to do art too.

Have you ever been so immersed in a videogame that when disruption comes you realize that you were playing a simulation not living it?

Life is a pause from reality.

We’re so immersed in this experience that we forget what happened before and what goes on after is the reality, not the temporary one we experience.

I’m not sure what happens next but…

If you have nothing to die for, you have everything to live for.

Eventually, you are going to hit a wall. Humans are only capable of running so fast before you can’t improve on time anymore. You can climb only so hard before the holds are so small it would be impossible for anyone to pull on. You can only power lift so much before your bones would break.

The giant leap in physical achievement is over. In the last 50 years or so, every major record has been broken thanks to technology, diet, and training. So, where do we go from here? Because the records being broken today are often measured by tenths of a second.

Perhaps, this is one of the reasons we are seeing a rise in popularity of E-Sports. Either way, finding ways to make a giant leap forward are more difficult than ever.

The bottom line: Don’t scoff at incremental improvement because that’s likely the path ahead that’s available. Making the next leap is likely going to be assisted with more technology than we ever imagined.

Originally coined by George Orwell in his famous dystopian novel, 1984, doublethinking is the process of indoctrination where people begin to accept ideas as fact even when these ideas contradict each other.

Orwell describes our strong desires to fit in and to gain status in the community. That we will lead lives of contradiction if it means we will be seen, accepted and loved. But it comes with a price. Eventually, reality kicks in and it’s difficult to escape a world where truth is suspended.

Going against party lines or family and friends is difficult. Peer pressure is a powerful force and we are all biologically wired to fit in. It’s the way we survived for thousands of years. Thrown out of the tribe and you will not survive.

“If you are not with us, you must be against us.” When we have lost our ability to discern, temporarily suspend reality and turn over our decision-making to someone who is promising a “better future”–we begin to make dystopias a reality.

In 1977, computer scientist Donald Knuth published a paper that showed songs move from complexity to repetitive dullness. 50 years later, it turns out Knuth was correct in his assumption. Pop singers are using formulas now more than ever to write their songs. And frankly, are not finding anything new to say. Instead, they are sticking to the script.

It seems the legends (and ones on the rise) use a larger vocabulary to write their songs. I don’t think that is a coincidence. But perhaps the biggest difference is each of these songwriters had the guts to say what they really wanted to say instead of catering to the masses and record companies.

The point is rock stars can also succumb to the pressures of the world and struggle to say how they really feel. It takes courage on everyone’s part to say something that will push back the status quo. To write a song that will make a difference and matters. Even though it can alienate some of their fans.

You can choose to repeat what has been said before or choose to say something important.

The point of skiing isn’t to get from the top of the mountain to the bottom. The point is to find fresh powder and to ski it as long as you can in search of flow.

Flow where your abilities meet the challenge. Where time is lost. When people are so absorbed by an activity everything else falls at the wayside.

This irony cannot escape me: there is no fulfillment without struggle. We live in a unique point in history. To choose to throw ourselves into adversity and not just take the easy path.

RIP Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

In our world of capitalism, the default answer seems to be wealth. But when is the last time we talked about raising the difference we make in the world?

More money is probably not the answer. Perhaps, it is time to have something ignite your very soul. To do work that is dramatically changing someone’s life. That is worth getting up for every morning. Not another digit in the bank account.

Work used to be measured by how much you carried in a day. The more you lifted, the harder you worked. Get a team together and you can move faster. Design a machine to create a mechanical advantage and you can be even more efficient.

In the last two hundred years, if you were more efficient than your competitor then you made more money and perhaps knocked the competition out.

But what happens when everything is cheap, instant and we could have every convenience ever imagined?

This mindset has moved into our personal lives. Become more efficient and you will make more money. Make more money you can have more time. More time to be creative. More time to spend with our loved ones. More happiness.

The question I have is why are you not doing those things now?

Because now when we have free time we’re too tired to do those things. It’s just one big giant rat race. We are working so furiously to be done and then have the emotional energy to do the things we want to do.

Flip that around. Do the things you must do for your soul. Write poetry. Sing a song. Take a jog. Do community service. And fill in your time with your job. Happiness isn’t found before you experience it. If we are not carving time to be happy, we will look up 20 years from now with regret.

Studies show 17,000 older adults in Greece saw a 10 percent drop in mortality by staying in the workforce for an extra five years. There’s purpose in the work. We just need to find it. We are missing the point of why we started on this path to begin with.

We have enough food to feed the entire world twice over. Yet, we don’t know how to distribute it. 811 million people will still go to bed hungry tonight and are not sure when they will get their next meal. Yet, ironically, the way we produce our food is also killing our planet.

It’s impossible to do no harm even with the best intention. The person who invented the ship also invented the shipwreck. We solve problems and create more in the process.

I like to alter the moto:

Do the right thing.

Harm reduction is a natural product of making the world better. The world is certainly in no shortage of problems. What we are in short supply of is people to stand up for justice.

When Radiohead started recording their follow-up album to Ok Computers, Thom Yorke had nothing ready. He confessed he was battling with writer’s block and said, “I felt like I was going crazy. Every time I picked up a guitar I just got the horrors. I would start writing a song, stop after 16 bars, hide it away in a drawer, look at it again, tear it up, destroy it… I was sinking down and down.”

Except writer’s block isn’t real. It’s fake. Sure, writers can talk themselves into thinking they are blocked. That what they have to say isn’t any good. Then again, we sometimes are so harsh on ourselves we might not be very good at deciphering what the market likes either.

It’s not like Yorke forgot how to write a song. He might have thought the songs he was writing were not the quality he set with Ok Computers–considered by many today as one of the greatest albums of all time. That’s a high bar to clear for anyone. We might write something that could be considered a masterpiece by only a few.

Kid A after receiving mixed reviews would later be named a top 20 album in Rolling Stone’s list of Top 500 Albums of All Time.

It’s frustrating not being able to convey what you feel–to get the words just right. The good news is we are not suffering from a condition with no treatment.