Master of Change

MASTERPIECE

Name: Master of Change

Author(s): Stulberg, Brad

Synopsis

Master of Change is a book that talks about how everything in life including our selves (mind and body) are constantly changing. It's a simple concept to understand but very hard to manifest. The author takes us through a journey where we learn how to first stop fighting change and instead accept it for what it is - a fundamental feature of how time and space have been setup. As thinking and feeling beings we have been programmed to cling to what is deemed "good" and avoid what is deemed "bad". This is the source of all suffering that the author nudges us to shed and instead be "open to the flow of life".

The book contains helpful ideas and frameworks that can help us navigate the small and big changes in our lives across domains like health, relations, finance and so on. In a time when much of the world is seeing prosperity and growth like never before, and as a side-effect is starting to erroneously believe that life is a completely controllable phenomenon, this book is a must-read to ground ourselves.

Core ideas

1. Everybody hurts, you will too: It does not matter who you are, where you are from, what you have - life will come after you with, what the author calls innocently, "disorder events". These are events that fundamentally shift our experience of ourselves and the world. To me, a way to identify disorder events are times that make us seriously ask ourselves; "Who am I? And why am I here?" - I speak from experience.
1. According to the author we experience ~36 disorder events in our adult lives, or one every 1.5 to 2 years. This is pretty accurate, I don't know how they got to that number, but I can confirm that every 2 years or so my life has undergone a disorder event that I had to reorient from.
2. It is the unfortunate side-effect of our material progress, especially over the last century, that we have come to expect life to be stable. This is not only laughably false, but also sets those who actually start believing it for some serious anguish, sooner or later. According to the author we have deluded ourselves with ideas of security, control and constancy. These ideas, at least for a select few segments of society (educated, upwardly mobile, financially secure and living in developed/sheltered geographies) are so often reinforced and so deeply rooted that even imagining a world where any inconvenience can't be solved with a tap or click or where life isn't a linear line from one amazing time to another is impossible. This is not a trivial point I make, we (myself included), who have been lucky enough to see a few good decades of stability and practically constant growth from childhood have told ourselves stories of invincibility and guaranteed good times, and we believe in those stories with every fibre of our being. God save us all.
3. Change is change, it is we who give it meaning. We do not realise it, but indeed the power is in our hands on how we choose to perceive even the "worst" of times. I wish this was easier done than said, but I cannot deny that it is 100% true.
4. When things go "wrong" here's the usual response:
1. Plain refuse that anything has happened - And go on living like an ostrich with its head in the sand. But you can't keep that nagging fear away can you? That you're just kidding yourself. As more and more evidence starts piling up. Yeah, you know it, and it starts gnawing at you.
2. Rabidly fight the change - Make its reversal the central goal of your life and identity. Until the change hasn't been decisively reversed and the situation not restored to the "before" state, nothing else will be on the agenda. Works in a few cases, but for most things in life, especially the important stuff like health/ageing, relationships/society, environment/ecology; does not. I wish I could say this weren't so and that modern science has the definitive solution to every problem. But then I'd be lying. Truth is, for many things in life, especially the important bits, you can never go back. If this idea scares you, sit with it, for a year or two, take your time. But you need to get this in your subconscious for growth to begin.
3. Think nothing can be done, so stop trying - And don't do even the things that you could do. Get a scary health diagnosis and give up healthy living or seeking treatment. Get your savings wiped out from a bad investment and decide to gamble away whatever's left on a casino run.
5. There is a better way to live through life's inevitable ups and downs; that is what this book is about.
2. Allostasis: Is a better model for explaining the movement of life and systems versus homeostasis. While the latter states that systems (including living beings) go from order to disorder and then back to order, the former posits that systems go from order to disorder to reorder; which means that they retain some part or imprint of the disorder event as they, essentially, pick up the pieces and move forward in time.
1. According to the author: "In the vast majority of situations, healthy systems do not resist change; rather they adapt to it, moving forward with grace and grit." (emphasis mine)
2. I think the above line is powerful in how the author has decided to end it; "grace and grit" - While its romantic to think about an adaptable person taking life in their stride and expertly dodging obstacles with grace, truth is that very often obstacles hit us flat on the face and leave us dazed for days, sometimes months., And at that time there is no grace, there is just grit, you have to move on, fully realising that this, whatever it is, is your new reality. From that day on, you just have to grit your teeth and move on. There is no other way. This too, fits in the allostatic model.
3. To get people to embrace the allostatic model "newer therapeutic models, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), teach people not to resist impermanence or try to get back to where they were, but rather to open up to impermanence, work with it, and transcend it."
3. Non-dual thinking: Realise that nothing is "this OR that", but "this AND that". This will help you avoid a lot of anxiety and heartburn in the future. The most powerful application of this concept, according to me, is that we can have both pain and happiness at the same time. I took a long time to understand this, and used to unconsciously believe that unless there was absolutely no pain in life, unless it was completely perfect there couldn't be happiness. I have come to realise that this is not only false, but really a self-imposed prison. Happiness and pain CAN, nay, DO coexist. In fact, in a paradoxical twist, having pain in life actually makes the happiness more meaningful.
4. Rugged flexibility: Is what you get when you apply non-dual thinking to stability and change. It recognises that after disorder there is no going back to the way things were - there is only moving forward with a new order (re-order). The goal is to get to a favourable re-order; "to maintain a strong core identity, but at the same time, to adapt, evolve and grow".
1. Rugged and flexible mindset
2. Rugged and flexible identity
3. Rugged and flexible actions
5. Be open to the flow of life: No one denies that change is the ultimate truth of life, yet are surprised and thrown off balance when it happens. The default stance in life should be to start from acceptance, there is no other way. I absolutely love this line from the book: "Remember, life is change. If you fear change, then, in many ways, you fear life"
1. Start with acceptance and then see if there is any wiggle room to get to where you want to go. But resisting change is futile and harmful; for the mind and body alike.
2. Having vs being: If you tell yourself stories where it is important to "have" then you're in for trouble, because what you have can be taken away at any time. In fact, it is almost guaranteed that it will be taken away at some time in the future. But if you tell yourself stories where it is important to "be" then you are able to better face life and its inevitable changes. Because "being" is a choice that is completely on us, while "having" is not always in our control. Let go of wanting to have, and start being instead.
3. Inescapability trigger: Once you realise that certain things in your life are there to stay, then you are much more easily able to accept them. There is no longer a desire to control or manipulate them, there is only acceptance. If we can accept the hard truths of life instead of deluding ourselves then the reward is a meaningful life. Futile resistance or superficial delusion is no way to live.
4. I can also add from personal experience that while it is true that the irrevocable losses in life such as those from death, disease and disability are without question sad, it is also true that it is precisely because of these events that we become kinder, our work becomes more impactful and we start living more intentionally.
6. Happiness = Reality - Expectations
1. Apart from the time that we are babies or very little children, we do not experience life objectively, we experience it subjectively basis what we expect to experience in the first place.
2. So if you don't expect much from life, then you'll be pleasantly surprised along the way. On the other hand if you have convinced yourself that your life will be nothing but an unbroken chain of amazing experience after amazing experience then you will be very morose indeed.
3. Tragic optimism is being able to find meaning and joy in life despite its inescapable loss and suffering. It's about knowing that life will be hard and will contain numerous challenges, and yet moving ahead with a positive attitude. Note how tragic optimism fits in with the non-dual mindset, that one can be sad at the inevitable losses that life will bring, yet remain positive in the moment that we get to experience this life in the first place.
7. Suffering = Pain x Resistance
1. Pain is what happens to us, while suffering is what we make of the pain by resisting it. note that it's a multiplicative equation and not an additive one. Which means that with every "unit" increase in resistance we increase our suffering by more than one unit.
2. "If you can align your expectations with reality and minimize your resistance to pain and discomfort—or more broadly, to everything that is hard to face, to the truth of dukkha—you set yourself up for the best experience and outcome, regardless of what you are facing."
8. Don't get too attached to your identity
1. Holding on to a particular self-concept can lead to anxiety, stress and burnout.
2. Keep it fluid, keep it broad and let it evolve over time as you go through life.
9. But make sure your core values are on point
1. They are the things that matter most to you. Stuff like courage, wisdom, hope, intent, ownership etc. Good to have three to five.
2. When faced with a disorder event, it is your core values that will guide the way. This does not mean that the situation will magically improve but rather that you will be able ot face it with more courage and clarity, and take steps in the right direction.
3. You should define your core values in specific terms and come up with a few ways to practice them each day.
4. Over time if you find a few of those values changing or morphing, that's okay.
10. So, the point is that your core values should be carefully decided but once decided should remain more or less constant (rugged), but the choices you make and life you craft because of those values can be changing and evolving (flexible). Hence, rugged flexibility.
11. When you think you are faced with an unsurmountable challenge and think there is no point doing anything. Know that there is - if you act in alignment with your core values (even if the action is only indirectly related to the situation) you will feel more in control, and if you feel in control then that spurs future action. Remember, we do not think our way into a new way of acting, we act our way into a new way of thinking.
12. Responding is a better way to go through life than reacting because responding allows you to take some control over the situation. Learning responding is a skill, we are prone to default to reacting during times of change and anxiety, but we can learn to default to responding with time.
1. The author has defined a framework to develop the habit of responding over reacting - it is called the 4Ps - pause, process, plan, proceed.
2. When facing a difficult situation you can pause by naming what you are feeling. The more precisely you define (i.e. name) your feeling the more power you gain over it, since doing this creates a distance between the feeling and yourself. You sort of realise that you are feeling a tough emotion, but you are not that emotion itself.
3. To process and plan you can follow RAIN: Recognise what is happening, allow life to be just as it is, investigate your inner experience with kindness and curiosity, non-identity with the experience and view it from a larger perspective instead. Also, you can imagine if a friend or a family member were going through the exact same situation as yourself and the advice you would give them. And you can imagine an older version of yourself speaking to yourself, and think about the advice they'd give you. Going amidst nature and other places that inspire awe for you can also be used to develop a wider perspective during times of uncertainty.
4. Proceeding is easier done when you think about the actions you are taking as experiments. Because during the processing and planning phase one can get into "paralysis by analysis" and not be too confident about the right way to proceed because life is probabilistic. And since your mind doesn't like being wrong, you can allow it the comfort of knowing that you'll be trying multiple options if the first approach does not work. There is literally no limit to the angles of approaches you can come up with if you consider each action as just an experiment that may or may not work, but will definitely give you a lot of learning for later on.
13. Psychological immune systems: Just like we have a biological immune system, we have a psychological one too. The former protects our bodies, the latter our minds. Just like you can't trick your biological immune system to work faster, you can't trick the psychological immune system to work faster either.
1. Therefore, when going through especially tough times where it is hard to see the silver lining, the best thing is to just be patient and kind with ourselves. It's okay for things to just suck and to feel like shit, not everything needs to have a deeper meaning, give yourself and your psychological immune system the room to heal.
2. For smaller challenges the psychological immune system is ready and the response is mounted in a matter of minutes, hours or days. But for disorder events, the psychological immune system needs time, it needs to be able to process what is happening and putting together a response takes time.
3. Give it the time it needs, it will come to your rescue. Forcing meaning at a time when everything looks bleak makes you "feel cheap" and think that you're just fooling yourself and can be detrimental to progress.
14. Difficult times seem to last forever because they are the opposite of flow states - While in flow time seems compressed since we're so engrossed in an activity, during times of difficulty time seems elongated since we live each moment vividly, we slice each moment into smaller and smaller experiences and that makes us think that time is moving slowly, that we're not getting anywhere and that the difficult times are going to last forever.
1. The good news is that once challenging period is over the same times feel compressed and contextualised. "As such, they don't feel as devastatingly long, and we have an easier time constructing coherent and meaningful narratives."
2. Further, recency bias makes us think the the most recent difficult events in our lives are all there's going to be be for the rest of our lives. But we are bad at realising the power of our psychological immune system as it silently works away to help us make sense of things, accept and move on with the right actions.
3. "The vast majority of people eventually find meaning and grow from difficulty. The more rattling the change to someone's life, the longer it takes for that process to unfold."
4. It is more than useful during tough times to ask for help, and it is not a sign of weakness. Rather I think it shows that you aren't willing to back down from life's challenges even if it means getting other's involved to help.
15. Routines and rituals are additional ways to reduce anxiety during difficult times as they bring a sense of control and predictability to an otherwise chaotic time.
16. Fatigue can be real and it can be fake: Its real when your mind and body are genuinely tired after long effort, it is fake when you know that usually during that time you don't feel tired, such as feeling fatigued at 9AM before a big presentation. Real fatigue is cured through rest, while fake fatigue is cured through action.
17. Life makes us softer around the edges: It makes us more compassionate towards others. We start understanding that everyone is going through some challenge and no one escapes life unscathed. This realisation brings about a kind demeanour towards all (not just people we know). Also, just like we develop compassion towards others, we must also develop compassion towards ourselves. According to the author, it is best when we combine fierce self-discipline with fierce self-compassion. This takes time, hence we must practice self-compassion throughout our lives. We must take honest action and then be kind to ourselves even if the output takes time to come, knowing full well that we're doing the best we can. If anything good comes out of suffering it is the fortitude and compassion that we develop as we face trying times.
18. Hard times get easier with practice: There is no shame in admitting that hard times suck, they have and they always will. Suffering is part of living, to live is to suffer. "Loss, grief, and sadness are the price we pay for love, care, meaning, and joy." The silver lining is that for each tough time we encounter, we get a little better at handling the next one.

Notable quotes

• Clinging to the illusion of permanence, hoping that we won’t be struck by change, that we’ll stay more or less the same, is misguided at best and leads to suffering at worst.
• Though the historical concept of homeostasis has deeply penetrated our collective psyche, it is an outdated model for navigating life, supporting mental health, and pursuing genuine excellence. Allostasis makes a lot more sense.
• Non-dual thinking recognizes that the world is complex, that much is nuanced, and that truth is often found in paradox: not this or that, but this and that.
• Cultivating a strong and enduring sense of self means treating your life like a path. It requires that you do not become too attached to any period of “order” or to any specific route, which usually causes more harm than good and leads to all manner of missed opportunities.
• Hard as it may be at first, if we can bring ourselves to answer plainly, we’ll lift an enormous weight off our shoulders: that of resistance, denial, and delusion.
• Be present with what is, not with what was or could be.
• If we are to live meaningful lives, change is simply part of the deal.
• I suspect many people don’t realize the heavy emotional burden they carry by absorbing an ethos that says, implicitly and sometimes even explicitly, that you should be positive and upbeat always—even though sadness, boredom, and apathy are inevitable parts of the human experience.
• People’s experience of happiness and fulfillment are correlated to the accuracy of their expectations.
• If you can align your expectations with reality and minimize your resistance to pain and discomfort—or more broadly, to everything that is hard to face, to the truth of dukkha—you set yourself up for the best experience and outcome, regardless of what you are facing.
• First, we’ve got to drop the weight of denial and resistance and instead open to the flow of life, accepting that the only constant is change and seeing it clearly for what it is. Second, we’ve got to expect it to be hard, which, paradoxically, makes everything easier.
• If you rigidly dig in, hoping to stay the same and trying to insulate yourself from change, then you run the risk of falling apart. But if you are fluid without any boundaries or direction, then it can become quite confusing as to who you even are.
• For all the things in life that you cannot control, there is at least one that you can: your core values, which represent your fundamental beliefs and guiding principles.
• Fortified by your core values, change, disorder, and uncertainty become a bit less threatening and intimidating.
• When faced with change, disruption, or uncertainty, ask yourself what it might look like to move in the direction of your core values. At the very least, how might you protect them? The manner in which you practice your core values will almost certainly change—being able to manifest them in new ways and situations is the crux of flexibility.
• Though we are conditioned to think that our being influences our doing, it is amazing how much the opposite is also true: our doing influences our being, too.
• The more you engage in certain patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting, the stronger those patterns become.
• Not everything has to be meaningful and you don’t have to grow from it. Why does what you are experiencing right now need to have some greater purpose? Why can’t it just suck?
• Try as we might, we cannot trick our psychological immune systems with delusion any more than we can trick our biological ones. Meaning and growth emerge on their own schedule.
• Suffering sucks. Period. But it is also part of the human experience, a nonnegotiable consequence of living and caring and loving in an impermanent world. Loss, grief, and sadness are the price we pay for love, care, meaning, and joy.
• For each period of disorder we experience, we get a little better at navigating future ones.
• If we can get to the other side of our most challenging trials and tribulations, strength, meaning, growth, kindness, and compassion await.
• There is no need to place extra pressure on yourself. Simply showing up and getting through is enough.
• Be kind and patient with yourself—hard as it may be—and do what you can to lean on others for support. We are all in this together.

In closing

This book, in my opinion, is a masterpiece and a must read for all. I like how the author pulls no punches in talking about change and how some things, once changed, will never go back to their original form. I like how he admits that change sucks and how we'd rather not have it in the areas we don't want to change. Yet, still within the bounds of realistic thinking, it admits its that impermanence itself that makes everything even more meaningful. The book gives us room to breathe and admit that we're all hurting, sad, scared - and paradoxically when we admit that we're hurting is when we start to develop fortitude, sad is when we start to see hope, scared is when we start to develop courage.

I particularly liked the point on defining and operating from one's core values - the world is forever changing, but we can find stability in our core values. Things might not still go our way, and I can attest from personal experience, but when we operate from our core values there is no fear or regret - because we have the comfort of knowing that we did the best we could from our truest selves, and that, is really what any of us can do after all.

Life is hard and particularly good in configuring itself in a way that challenges each of us uniquely. But truly, this is what it means to live, to strive in the face of challenge, to smile through the pain, to hope through the despair - that is proof that you are alive. The tools mentioned in this book are solid and help us move in the direction of crafting a meaningful life.