Thank you, Lauren, thank you all of you for giving me big shoes to fill.
So, what is one thing, right away with a question, what is one thing that you could eliminate
from your life that would give you more...of something?
That is something you could do right now, you could make a decision to say "No," to
something you've been saying, "Yes," to for a long time.
Maybe there's been a series of "Yesses" that should have started as a "NO."
What is that one thing for you?
It could be, for me it was to stop drinking alcohol for 30 days and it turned into almost
a year now.
So it could be something like that.
And hold that as we go through this.
In the Mafia we have a saying, "Only focus on the pebble in your shoe."
If you're not in the mafia that might sound weird, but what do we do when we have a pebble
in our shoe?
I mean it's pretty basic, right?
We get the pebble out of our shoe.
We take our shoe off...get the freakin' pebble out of the shoe.
Ok.
I don't want to insult anybody's intelligence.
Pretend that we didn't know that.
Let's say you have a pebble in your shoe and we just don't know what to do about that.
So we're walking around and maybe the first thing is, "Man, what the hell?
I can't walk right.
What's going on?"
So after a couple of weeks, summers coming up, suns coming out and I've got this really
nice blister on my foot.
It's just glistening in the sun and I'm kind of insecure about going to the pool.
So I'm going to go to the doctor and they're going to be like, "Ok this is great, you're
going to need this cream and these balms and we're going to sand it down for you."
So you go to the doctor and you get that scheduled, now you're putting creams on it (the blister).
And then the next thing you're doing is you're going and maybe that pain is just building
up so then you get a pain killer, because you don't want that blister to just...it's
causing a lot of pain because of that friction in your shoe.
And you're like, "I just don't know what it is."
So then you go to YouTube maybe a few months later and you're like "I'm walking funny.
How do I get rid of this thing in my shoe?
Every time I put my shoe on I just don't know what's going on."
And then you find a MeetUp group nearby that offers a workshop on getting rid of pebbles
in your shoes.
And you meet 30 brilliant, amazing souls who all have pebbles in their shoes.
And you commiserate together for 72 hours and it's amazing.
You just dropped $10,000 and you feel really good.
And you're in there and you get your shoes off and you're running around like, "Ahhhh,
this feels so amazing!"
And it's like smoking crack (I've never done it) You get really high.
You get really, really high.
And then three days after the workshop (Slaps Hands) You're back to your pebble in your
freakin' shoe.
And this goes on.
And this goes on.
And for years and years, and maybe in an extreme case and thousands and thousands and thousands
of adding all of these processes to your life just to get a pebble out of your shoe...
When all you had to do was take this thing off and maybe shake it out and get your hand
in there drop this pebble.
Are you with me?
(Yes!)
Ok.
So, that's what we do in the Mafia.
Now I'm not in the Mafia.
So focusing on the pebble in the shoe, this is exactly what via negativa is.
Mohammad Ali said something along the pebble lines of, "It's not focusing on the mountain
that's ahead of you that will wear you out, it's the pebble in your shoe."
We're all people in here, we all have big goals, we all think about, you know, how we
want to transform lives and transform the people and transform ourselves and I gotta
add, add, add and continue to do these things.
It's natural.
Via Negativa.
What the heck is via negativa?
This fancy name that I decided to use.
It means the negative way.
Which is also my nickname sometimes (I'm Timo Way).
(Crowd laughter).
Via negativa is something the theologians back in the day, these church people, they
said God is this huge, this thing that we can't even comprehend, or describe with language,
because it's just so big and infinite.
Even saying that God is infinite seems like we're encapsulating it into something that
it can't be described within.
So whether that for you is God, or Nature, or silence, or whatever that is for you.
Like, how many times have we been able to proficiently been able to define Love?
E.g Define love for me in a sentence.
"Well, it's this feeling, but it's this, and this, and this, and this."
[via negativa] is an indirect definition describing something by what it is not.
And in terms of subtraction, we learn from this great story that, evoking some more church
fellows, the Pope back in the day - guys, this is also not exactly word for word what
happened here - but, in my mind, back in the day there's this guy Michelangelo.
Anybody recognize Michelangelo?
He created this thing 'the Statue of David'.
This beautiful marble statue of a naked guy, just chiseled.
And it's such a beautiful work of art - perfection even.
And the Pope asked Michelangelo, "Michelangelo, how did you do this?"Again, paraphrasing.
And Michelangelo said, "Pope, it's simple.
I start with a block and I just remove everything that isn't David."
That's via negativa.
That's the art of it.
(turn the timer on for me if you're willing.
I should be okay with that not being there, that's via negativa, too (laughter))
This work of subtraction and defining something by what we are not, it's getting back in the
spiritual essence of it.
It is, "Okay, God is definitely not this.
It's definitely not that.
I'm definitely not that.
It's getting and shedding all these layers in which the ego is trying to take the center
and trying to say, "more, more, more, money.
More going out, more alcohol, better job, better title, better this, better that, all
these layers pulling us away from our center.
It's deciding "I'm taking the wheel."
Via negativa says, "No.
That's not it.
That's not who I am.
That's not who I am.
That's not who I am.
You subtract until it's boring."
You subtract until it's just you, naked in the world reborn so to speak.
You kill it all until it's just you.
So we like to add, right?
The pebble in the shoe.
We like to add, and sometimes the ego takes the wheel.
There was a woman in Ohio who let Jesus take the wheel.
And she went into oncoming traffic.
True story.
I have to throw in an Ohio reference.
That's via stupitiva.
We love to add.
And I'm here to tell you that adding is not always...adding has a lot of downside.
And if there's one thing you remember from 'adding can be negative' is that a lot of
problems were once solutions.
Think about that.
Macro level, we have dams that are coming down at record pace.
The Elwha Dam here in the State of Washington was the largest dam removal in United States
history.
Why?
Why did we remove the dam?It was supposed to have a purpose to give us more.
A lot of dams around the country were supposed to give us more power, more electricity, more
of something.
But, they ended up impeding the flow of salmon and ended up blocking nature.
Ended up lowering salmon populations that then affect the Orca and other endangered
species populations that are in the Puget Sound.
And this is happening, the same story, over and over again.
We are natural interventionists.
We want to intervene instead of listening to John Lennon when he said, "Let it go."
"Let it be."
sorry :). (audience laughter).
What solutions in your life ---what problems rather in your life were once a solution?
"I'm bored so I'm gonna go out with the boys tonight and then buy a round of tequila, and
then she looks nice!
Annnd 3 years later...what happened?
I don't know.
So what I want to argue then is that subtraction, it is subtraction, omission that has no downside.
When you remove something, what is the side effect of not doing heroin?
What is the side effect of not drinking?
What is the side effect of not doing X, Y, or Z?
Whatever that pebble in your shoe is, what is the side effect of not addressing it?
Omission has no side effects, but omitting to do something about that one thing in your
shoe does.
Because then we tend to do it by adding.
So, if we can look throughout history we can see people like, my favorite, Martin Luther
King and Malcolm X and the guy in the prison in South Africa, what was his name?
(Nelson Mandela).
All three of them went to prison.
All three of them had their life subtracted from them.
And within the confines of a space where it was completely subtracted and reduced to one
space where nothing was around them and added to them, they created, all three of them,
created their movements.
From a space of zero.
What I want to bring for you today, because I want to honor Lauren and the talk and give
something practical to think about, is: What is that one thing?
As we talked about, that one thing you can subtract from our lives that will give us
a bigger upside?
Whatever it could be.
It could even be a rule.
There's a lot of fun ones going around right now.
There's a book titled, "If it's not
a F*** Yes, It's a No."
My grandfather had one that was, "If a doctor has a MBA hanging in his office, leave."
I love that one.
For me it's no drinking, it could be no carbs.
A lot of things can be just a couple of simple rules instead of thinking and planning out
a million different things it could be just as easy to say, "Well, I'm not gonna eat anything
white.
I'm not gonna drink my calories, and I'm not gonna eat sugar."
Watch what happens to your body then.
Let everything else be normal.
So think about what that is for you, let me know what it is, and I will keep you accountable
if you're willing to do it until the end of the month.
We're already like 2 days into the month anyway so it's shorter.
This is like February 2 for you if you want to do a challenge, because all the New Years
resolutions have failed mostly because they're via positiva, additive goals that all fail.
Because they're trying to add something to your life that you're not ready for, because
you need to subtract before you're ready to add anymore.
So think about what that is for you.
And with that, just know that perfection, perfection seems to get a bad rep.
I learned in this corner over here that I had to be okay with accepting 'Good Enough.'
So, I'll cheers to that.
But, perfection is a negative act.
Perfection is an act of negation.
Because when something is perfect there is nothing left to be removed.
(Applause)
Q&A
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