In which Wolf describes the stuff your life is made of. Watch this episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/AxdAch9tmW0
Your heart beats, your blood flows, your synapses fire. You’re a living, breathing being. You think, you feel, you relate, you get older. While we’re alive, we’re always moving energy around and transforming it. We work, we enjoy, we create, we earn, we spend. We spend money, we spend time, we spend resources, we spend our life.
But what is this “life energy” we’re moving around, or creating, or wasting?
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this over the years. Physics teaches us that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but that it can change forms. I think this is true for what we might call “life energy” as well.
The psychologist Carl Jung associated the term “libido”, which Freud mostly associated with the human sex drive, in much more expansive terms: to him it meant “life force” in general, that which motivates us to live that can only be guided, at least somewhat, by our intentions, and that has a tendency to flow in ways that help regulate the health of the psyche.
The idea that life energy flows and that you can’t just will yourself to “be better” at something is very important. This was hilariously depicted in the movie Kung Fu Panda, in which Po the Panda is passionately interested in learning to be a Kung Fu master, but fails at all the traditional training techniques. The revelation happens when his master Shifu realizes that Po can do amazing feats when he’s looking for food, and then starts using that as the motivator for Po’s training.
(movie clip plays)
In this way, we have to learn to dance with our life energy, to learn what works for us.
The way I look at it, “life energy” falls into several distinct categories. If you care about how your life is going, or how you’d like it to go, then I’m going to help you understand these categories so you can manage them well and do more of what you would like to do with your precious life.
When you hold a piece of paper money in your hand, what are you really holding? A piece of paper, sure. A work of art? Kind of. A symbol? Definitely. Symbols represent things. What’s being represented here? One Dollar or One Euro, OK… but dollars and euros are exchangeable, which means they both represent something deeper and more fundamental.
The typical way of acquiring money is by earning it: you trade something of value for it. Once you have it you can trade it for other things of value. That gives us a clue: money is about value. Specifically, money is often called a store of value.
What sort of “value” are we talking about? Think about it this way: the number of hours you will live is finite: in that sense they’re “scarce” in the same way that gold in the Earth’s crust is scarce. If you mine an ounce of gold out of the earth, there’s one less ounce of gold in there. And if you spend an hour of your time, there’s one less hour of time to spend. If you’re working to earn a living, then money is what you will trade the hours of your life for. Put another way, money represents life energy.
“But not everything is about money,” I hear you say.
Of course not. But money is just one representation of stored life energy. What would be another?
All of your physical possessions count as “frozen energy”, too. Your bed is something that you need to be there, because a good night’s sleep helps you function in every other way. When you use your bed, you’re turning a little of the money you spent on it into another form: time you spend awake, alert, and healthy the next day.
When you invest your time to learn a skill, that skill also becomes a kind of “frozen energy.” Any skill you can then turn around and trade for other forms of value, like money, are “useful skills.” But just because you know something useful doesn’t mean you’re going to use it. So skills you don’t use are like inventory stacking up in a warehouse.
But what would it mean to “sell your inventory” in this case? Really, it depends on how you want to measure “success.”
Success doesn’t necessarily mean just “earning money”. You might measure your success in time spent with your spouse or children, or worldwide cities visited, or poor people helped. When you decide that you know what counts as “success” to you, then you need to get a sense of how much “success” you’re achieving right now, and what achieving more success in that area would look like. Notice that I didn’t say that success is a place you arrive at, and likewise a goal isn’t a destination: success is the rate at which you achieve your goal. So stop thinking of success as a place you might get to someday, and start thinking of it as a needle on a gauge. That needle is always sitting somewhere, even if it seems stuck at zero.
So using your skills, gifts, and yes, money to increase the rate at which you achieve success is what I mean by “selling your inventory.”
Some of us have more or less skills, or money, or other advantages and yes, disadvantages too. Almost everything I’m talking about here can be understood negatively: what’s negative money? Debt! But what’s a “negative skill”?
When you walk through the warehouse of your life taking inventory, you’ll see shelves full of stuff you can put to good use, and a bunch cool but useless stuff, but you’ll also find a special, dark section of shelves over there in the corner. Go closer, you’ll find the shelves holding your personal collection of cursed artifacts: your bad habits and addictions, your personality faults, your credit card debt, your self-doubt and resistance. Generally these have negative value, so you can’t sell them directly, like you can sell your ability to flip burgers.
So if you want to take stock of all the “frozen energy” in your life, you’ve got to have two columns, just like a business have two columns on their balance sheets for “Assets” and “Liabilities,” you need to list both the positives and negatives that are currently true for you. I guarantee you that neither column will be empty, and facing the facts is the only way you can actually learn to manage what you have, good and bad.
OK, so the good stuff you can sell for more “success,” whatever that means to you, and the cool but useless stuff will just sit there and hopefully remind you to invest your time more wisely in the future, and you’ll have to learn how to manage your cursed inventory as well. But to do anything at all with what’s in your warehouse, you’ll need the final ingredient: time.
Time is the magic ingredient that lets you turn the frozen energy in your life into success. Unlike money, or skills, or bad habits, which people have more or less of, time is something that you get a chunk of in the morning to spend throughout the day. You get the same amount as everyone else: you can’t choose to not spend it, and if you ask for more the universe will just laugh at you.
Try this thought experiment: pick someone living who you admire, someone who is successful in ways that you’d like to be successful: someone you envy (and see my previous podcast on the subject of envy so you understand why that’s not a bad thing). I’m willing to bet that one of the biggest differences between you and that successful person is how you spend your time.
That’s right, you don’t get to spend more or less time, you only get to decide how to spend the time you do have. So time is also a form of energy flowing through your life.
OK, so let’s sum up. Life energy is meaningless without a way of measuring the rate at which you are successful. So start by figuring out what success means to you.
Then take stock of the energy frozen in your life: money, possessions, talents, skills.
Then there’s the liquid energy flowing through your life: the time you get to manage every day. You can invest that energy in buying more inventory, that is, learning new skills or unlearning bad habits, or you can use it to turn your inventory into increasing your rate of success.
There’s no single right answer for how to manage your life energy in all its forms. One thing I can say is that managing your life energy is a path of mastery. You can step onto or off of the path, but the path itself never ends.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below, like the video, share it with a friend, and I also hope you’ll subscribe. See you tomorrow!