A Mason's Work

So, looking across the entire range of the

compasses that we've talked about over the course of the last several episodes,

it's easy to see that the compasses are a powerful tool for helping you

become aware of and identify, and even at some level,

create boundaries and limit behaviors and essentially what determines what's

inscable, what's out of scope and all that good stuff. But that whole process

is not something that the compasses, while they are awesome at creating that

line or helping you notice those sort of boundary violations,

they're not necessarily great at helping you create good answers to them.

So, you'll notice that you cross the line, but you'll very likely need other

tools to determine how to negotiate those lines moving forward from a

systemic level, from a behavior level, from a relational level.

You're going to need your other toolkits, you're going to need rhetoric to

help explain to others what's going on. You're going to need your 24-inch gauge

to essentially help you determine what your 24 hours in the day look like

in terms of the commitments you've made. You're going to need your logic

and your arithmetic to help you essentially put limits and determine

consumption rates and all that kind of stuff. The compasses essentially

is the line and it's the noticing of those violations, but it has no

creative capacity. So, you're going to want to bring an additional sort of

creative capacity to the table when it comes to or a generative capacity to the

table when it comes to how can you implement this in your everyday life.

And the personal sort of anecdote for the week here is counting impulses.

So, I started counting impulses on a regular basis. How many times a day

did I X or Y or Z? Did I desire for sweets or did I desire for

television or did I desire to doom scroll or you know sex or drugs or rock

and roll or any of the things? And then how many times in that same day did I

essentially feed those desires, those impulses? That helped me create essentially

what my boundaries look like, right? So, if I have a impulse satisfaction rate

of 20% as it goes up, I can say, hey listen, I am spinning out here or as it went

down, I was able to say, maybe I am over-constraining myself and setting myself

up for essentially a, you know, a bender later on or what have you, a period

where I just refute all systems and structures. So, when I started working on

this system, I realized that there were a good number of impulses that would come

up and they had a root cause. I was, for example, desires of sweets every

time I ran into a piece of work in my workplace that was like ambiguous.

How do I solve this problem? I didn't have a good answer right out of the gate.

So, I would just walk over to, you know, and get a thing of Cheerios and eat some

Cheerios. Turns out that's probably not a great way to move the work forward

and also counterintuitive to, you know, trying to keep a thinner waistline.

So, that noticing process helped essentially point the finger at some other

things going on that I was better able to kind of go after as root cause.

I can't tell you anything's perfect right now, but I can tell you that the

noticing process of applying the compasses has become an important part of my

diagnosis, my self-diagnostic process for evaluating what's going on.

You know, am I feeling X or Y or Z more often than I would expect?

Why is that? What's the root cause? And the compasses is all part of that.

It is one of the first lines of defense when it comes to really understanding

how to become a better version of yourself. So, I recommend you break that out.

I think you'll find it useful. But again, understand that it can't solve the

problems. It helps you notice. So, if you get to a point where you're like,

I've noticed these things, but I don't know what to do next. Find us in Discord.

We are building an Emasons Work community. And if you have questions about how to get

involved, just reach out to me directly. I should be easy to get at EmasonsWork.com.

Thanks.