A Mason's Work

[00:00] Yesterday, I said that there was a difference between wanting a thing and wanting a way.
[00:05] And I want to dig into that a little bit more because the gap between wanting a thing and
[00:11] wanting a way isn't random.
[00:14] It's not like you kind of pull, put one thing in, you know, into your mind in one way and
[00:21] then pull something completely different out.
[00:24] There is a translation or a specific moment where the desires that you have shift and
[00:32] turn from something alive and vital into something transactional and fixed and countable.
[00:40] And once you understand that moment and what that is, you start to see it everywhere.
[00:44] So here's how it goes.
[00:45] You get this feeling, right?
[00:47] That happens first to this sense before the goal, before the plan, before like all of
[00:54] this stuff, there's this sensation of something that you're wanting to move towards.
[01:00] It's an experience.
[01:02] Maybe it's something like feeling comfortable or ease or respected or a specific kind of
[01:09] freedom that comes from not having to worry about a thing, right?
[01:13] Before it translates into, like we talked about last week, this kind of if only perspective,
[01:19] like if only I was skinny or if only I was rich.
[01:23] Before that, there's a real meaningful desire and it's in your body.
[01:30] Like physiologically, there is a physical sense.
[01:34] There is an emotional sense for what it is you're looking for.
[01:39] And it's something that you don't have to defend.
[01:42] It's hard to explain it to somebody else.
[01:44] You can't put on a whiteboard and track it.
[01:47] So what you end up doing is you take off the Worshipful Master's hat, which is that wanting
[01:54] and desire and direction.
[01:58] And you put on the Senior Deacon's hat and you begin to translate it for the rest of your
[02:02] sort of psychology, the rest of yourself.
[02:05] And in that translation, it goes from a vibe to a project.
[02:13] It goes from a way you want to be in the world to a measurable, accountable thing before you give
[02:22] it to the kind of mental Senior Warden, right?
[02:24] And so this is a normal occurrence.
[02:27] Like everybody does this in a way, but what happens somewhere along the journey is we get
[02:36] it conflated with the vibe we were shooting for in the beginning.
[02:40] Like that thing that we really wanted to feel has been translated to outcomes.
[02:48] And those outcomes are not able to deliver the feelings and vibes that we were trying to get to.
[02:56] The reason this happens isn't that we're bad at knowing what we want.
[03:01] It's that the felt experience that we're shooting for does not, it kind of resists objectification, right?
[03:12] We've put stuff there that's an approximation.
[03:15] Like it would kind of come from as a result of these things.
[03:21] Like I would be, uh, if I was independently wealthy, I would have all of this freedom, but that translation isn't really accurate.
[03:30] And if we don't dig into kind of how we make that translation and start making it more meaningful, you end up essentially creating a trap for yourself.
[03:40] It becomes this hollow concept that is either a pie in the sky.
[03:45] One day we'll get there and it'll be a solution that maybe will give me those vibes.
[03:49] Or we'll create it as this thing we know we'll never get, which prevents us from actually pursuing it.
[03:56] The senior deacon carries all of that work, that process of translation.
[04:02] And in the book, we describe the failure mode.
[04:07] The book that I'm writing that's coming out May 1st, if you've not heard of it, um, describes the failure mode of the senior deacon very precisely.
[04:14] And it's this oversimplification, this stripping away of the complexity of the intent and the feeling to turn it into a soundbite.
[04:26] This isn't to say you shouldn't have goals.
[04:29] And I said that yesterday and I'll say it again and I'll say it every episode this week.
[04:32] Having goals is fine, but if you don't define the experience you have, that those goals are going to help you achieve.
[04:42] And the manner in which that's going to change from where you are today, the thing that you create essentially becomes this false idol, this false objective, this thing that becomes a surrogate for the feeling.
[05:00] And then you don't close the gap.
[05:03] There was nothing you could have done.
[05:05] Even if you got all of the things, it didn't close the gap because it was never designed to, it was a placeholder for that understanding.
[05:14] So we're not going to talk about how to set better goals.
[05:16] What we are going to talk about is how that signal, how that, that vibe, that emotional content, um, gets mistranslated and how you can reclaim it.
[05:29] And we'll talk more about that tomorrow.