Know Thyself

While meditating, I was struck by a phrase:

If you don’t know who you are, you won’t know who you can become.

Know thyself. Many a philosopher has ruminated on this mantra and proffered views of its meaning. It’s inscribed at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, Greece. In philosophy, “know thyself” is a call for self-examination and introspection. Understanding your own nature is how you achieve virtue and wisdom.

While I’m no philosopher, I’d like to provide my own interpretation, which expands on the concept in a novel way (I think).

Know thyself has a two-fold meaning:

1. To know thyself is to understand who you are, what you believe in, and what your purpose is. This is the internal understanding of the Self; and it’s aligned with most philosophical interpretations.
2. But to know thyself is also about understanding the external nature that affects the Self. To seek understanding, we must experience first-hand what we attempt to learn. Knowledge is achieved through direct and tangible contact with the objective goal. If you want to know for yourself, you learn by doing.

Therefore, we create the formula:

Know Thyself = Inner Truth × Outer Truth

The Inner Truth is about perception.

The Outer Truth is about connection.

But something is missing in the formula—the element that makes the inner and outer layers come to life. I call it texture.

With it, the formula becomes:

Know Thyself = Inner Truth × Outer Truth × Texture

Inner Truth

The Inner Truth is what you know and understand about yourself. In my experience, the most effective practices for finding your Inner Truth are:

1. Meditation: Sitting in silence and peace as you train yourself to focus and release.
2. Journaling: Externalizing your inner monologue through the written word.
3. Reading: Engaging with someone else’s words and ideas in a thought exchange.

Meditation

I tried meditation off and on again for years before settling into a real practice. I started with guided meditation, where a calming voice talks as you close your eyes and focus on your breath. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t a real habit yet. And then the pandemic hit in 2020. Along with everyone else, I wrestled with a lot of turmoil, uncertainty, and anxiety. Finding outlets of release became about survival more than mental hygiene. I needed it like food, water, or shelter. So what better time to commit to a real practice?

I read Stress Less, Accomplish More and Elastic Habits around the same time. The former gave me a foundational meditation practice; the latter gave me a framework for creating habits without the unnecessary rigidity. Together, they helped me build a daily meditation practice, starting at 5 minutes per day and working up to 30 minutes. Like anything, I found my own style. The books provided a mental model, and I adapted it to fit me. I’ve been meditating every day for 5 years. And it’s one of the most important things I do each day. It’s a keystone habit.

Don’t overthink it. It’s natural for your mind to wander. Just close your eyes, focus on your breath, and bring your focus back anytime it shifts. That shift is where the power is. You can use mantras or other techniques, but the power is in creating space for yourself to be quiet, calm, and in your inner peace. That’s it. The more you do it, the easier it gets. 30 minutes blinks by for me. If I could do an hour, I would. But alas, the kids and my (current) schedule won’t allow it.

Journaling

I started journaling consistently in 2016 when I felt big feelings and needed an outlet to understand them. If you want to interrogate your thoughts and clarify your thinking, writing is the way. It’s good friction. You slow down to externalize your thoughts; you form words, sentences, and paragraphs into a coherent whole; you create shapes that let you mold ambiguity into clarity.

Like meditation, there are countless ways to journal. And I’ve tried them all:

• Bullet journaling
• Productivity journaling
• Prompt-based journaling

But I’ve found the most success with interstitial journaling, where you write throughout the day. I write when I need to, not on a schedule. Worst case, I spend time at the end of the day writing. But my best days are when I create space throughout the day to write and understand my thoughts in real-time. A good walk always stimulates deep thoughts I can express and clarify through writing.

Reading

I always have a physical book near me and an audiobook loaded up on my phone. I mostly stick with nonfiction because I get my fictional release from TV and movies. But I’m not demeaning fiction. It’s a genre full of wonderful stories and powerful lessons. I just prefer to read psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, and biographies. I’ll read anything that is full of diverse perspectives and eternal principles. I especially love meditations on experiences in life. Finding the lessons embedded in what we go through is a powerful conduit of wisdom.

That’s why reading is so wonderful. You can instantly tap into the knowledge of all recorded history. You can go deep on any subject, consuming information in hours what took years to compile and concentrate. But even more than that, you engage in conversation with the authors. You see the world through their eyes, and reflect it back into your own worldview. It’s a dialogue.

To stay within the confines of your own narrative and perspective is to limit your understanding of yourself. Open yourself to new possibilities and perspectives. Seek out books you don’t agree with. Challenge yourself. And always keep reading.

Outer Truth

This is where my interpretation diverges from the standard definition. Knowing thyself isn’t only an act of seeking internal truth, but one of engaging with the outside world. It’s through the interaction with the external that we begin to understand the feel of things. In that understanding is where a truth emerges, like sunlight shimmering through the branches.

The Outer Truth is what becomes true about you only when you engage with reality.

The practices for finding Outer Truth are:

1. Contact: Placing yourself in the environment where truth already exists.
2. Sampling: Testing in small doses to encounter reality in progressive ways.
3. Feedback: Respond to the environment and tune into the signals that emerge.

Contact

I started drawing more consistently recently. I’ve always doodled and enjoyed sketching, but I’d consider myself only slightly above average at it. I started by sketching on the newspaper once we were done with the crossword puzzle. And then I sketched on paper since my kids always have computer paper lying around. I watched a few YouTube videos to try out different techniques.

Then I relearned the same lesson with so many things, but especially so with drawing: there’s no substitute for just doing it.

If you want to get better at drawing, then you draw—a lot. And you keep doing it, trying new things, and failing repeatedly until you tease out moments of progress. Those moments stimulate motivation to keep you going. And you do, getting better—even in the smallest of ways—with each line you sketch on paper.

But you need to do the thing. You need to hold the pencil, make the motions, and see the drawing come into existence. Make contact with the work.

Sampling

Life is an experiment. We try things to see what we like and don’t like. Knowing what we don’t like is often a better indicator than sticking with the knowns. You have to explore, take risks, and be brave. But it’s not as risky when you try before you buy. Take a sample.

If you’re interested in drawing, draw for 30 minutes for 7 days straight.

Any activity, done repeatedly, will show you how much you like it. Because the only way to really judge something is to understand it. And the only way to understand it is by doing it.

Start small, working outwards in larger concentric circles.

Feedback

One of my favorite parts of writing code is the speed of the feedback loop. You write code, save the file, and run it. If there’s an error, you see it immediately. Then you change the code, address the error, and try again. Doing this over and over creates an iterative feedback loop.

When you try something, find the feedback loop. Establish the fastest path to learn what works and what doesn’t work. And then try again.

Drawing is another example with fast feedback loops. When I draw something, I immediately see whether or not it’s representative of what I’m trying to achieve. If it’s not, I sketch again.

Slow feedback loops kill iteration speed. Slow iteration speed kills quality.

Texture

Our world is becoming more and more synthetic, artificial, and digitized. We spend days on video calls, talking to people in chat interfaces, and automating anything we don’t like. Part of the reason I gravitated to drawing is to reintroduce texture back in my life.

What even is “texture”?

the feel, appearance, or consistency of a surface or substance

That’s the accepted definition of texture, but I think of texture as the feel of something (the first part of the definition). When you run your hand over a fabric, a surface, an object. The properties of something come to life when you make contact with them.

Embrace Friction

Friction is a powerful force. But every change in technology feels like it’s designed to remove it from our lives. I remember waiting 2-3 weeks (or more!) for an online package to arrive. And you never really knew when it was going to show up. Now you can order something on your phone and have it delivered the same day while tracking the truck on a map in real-time.

AI is the ultimate remover of friction. Why write something AI can write for me? Because the process where friction occurs is the process where learning takes place. Knowledge is a compound motion. You don’t immediately notice its effects until it grows over time, little by little. The same thing happens in the opposite direction if you remove friction. You chip away at learning, at growth, at critical thinking, little by little. And the effects are disastrous.

Embrace friction. Find space where intentional friction forces you to think and to learn.

My wife and I were talking about accidental discoveries and I mentioned the discovery of Penicillin as an example of accidental discovery. But I couldn’t remember the name of the scientist who discovered it. Instead of rushing to Google for the answer, I waited. And guess what? It came to me while I was brushing my teeth (Alexander Fleming!). The name is sticking with me now while I’m writing this. It should because I even featured him in Paradox of Speed.

There are countless ways to embrace friction. Write by hand, take walks, have hard conversations. Do the things that, when done slowly, compound growth.

Prefer the Physical

We started getting the New York Times print edition delivered daily. We read the paper and do crossroad puzzles by hand. There’s something about the feel of a newspaper you can’t beat—something special about engaging with the words physically. I’m also reading more physical books and writing by hand more. As AI permeates more cognitive work, I’m starting to gravitate to the physical over the digital (artificial).

• Reading physical books.
• Doing crossword puzzles by hand.
• Sketching ideas and drawing on paper.

There’s a reason the phrase “touch grass” is permeating culture. We spend more and more time inside, on screens, away from the natural world.

Prefer the physical. Get outside, write by hand, read physical books. The physical also introduces more friction, making it mentally stickier and more enjoyable.

Invite Unfiltered Feedback

Years ago, I wrote a piece called Active Analysis on the 2020 version of my website. In it, I explored the idea of actively seeking out information rather than passively ingesting it. Human nature is to gravitate toward entropy. We crave acceptance. The paradox is that the things we most avoid are the same things that help us grow.

Feedback is one of those things.

Seek out feedback. About everything. Building software products revolves almost entirely on capturing feedback. Most of the feedback I read every day is negative. Humans crave acceptance, yet skew negative in our reaction to others. When you speak to someone through a screen, there isn’t someone to look in the eyes when you say it. Providing unfiltered feedback over the internet, it’s easy to forget the human on the other side when you’re not looking at them.

Invite unfiltered feedback. Engage with it directly. Talk to people, think out loud, and take part in a constructive conversation focused on making it better.

Perception Meets Connection

The Inner Truth is about perception. The Outer Truth is about connection. Together, they form a philosophy of Know Thyself set in context of the world we live in today.

Experience the Inner Truth through meditation, journaling, and reading.

Experience the Outer Truth through contact, sampling, and feedback.

To know thyself fully, step outside the artificial and introduce more texture in your life.

Feel things to know yourself more fully. The human experience is a lived experience.

How are you living it?