The Balance That Keeps You Sane

Life works like music:
you need the pattern and the break in the pattern. Too much certainty makes you bored.
Too much uncertainty makes you anxious.

The skill is holding both at once. When you stop chasing “the one way” or “every possible way,”
life finally starts to make sense.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Music requires pattern and breaking of pattern. These are the
two things that you need in order to have good music.
You need harmony and disharmony in order to create good music.
The interest of the music is the level to which
there is a good balance between things going as you

(00:24):
would predict and things not going as you would predict. Right,
And if everything is unpredictable, then we call it noise,
And if everything is predictable, then we call it boring sounds.
And if things are understandably expected but a little bit surprising,

(00:50):
then we call it music. People get really tired of
it making sense or not making sense. They want it
to do both. We want almost every aspect of our
lives to both make sense and not make sense a
little bit. And if we don't, we get upset. If

(01:11):
your life is completely certain, then you will get bored
to death. You'll go nuts. If your life is completely uncertain,
then you will freak out. Life will be so unpredictable
that you will not be able to manage life. And
so in order to have a good life, two absolute necessities,

(01:31):
actually not even to have a good life, just to
not go crazy. You must have a life that contains
a certain level of predictability and a certain level of unpredictability.
They're both requirements and if you make either one the solution,
it'll ruin your life. This ties to all sorts of

(01:52):
other places. You'll notice a lot of people get obsessed
with the single answer, and then a lot of other
people get obsessed with oh, well, there's no one answer, right,
these two things will happen. There's one camp of people
that are like, look, it's all this way, and all

(02:14):
the people that are suffering are just suffering because they
can't face up to the fact that it's all just
this one way and they need to learn how to
accept and life is hard. Usually that goes with this
particular life view, but like there's an acceptance of this
is the way and that's how you will fix your life.

(02:35):
And then there's another camp that it's like, look, it
causes so much pain when people are so attached the
one single way. And there's so many other people, you know,
that have learned that there's different ways, and look, there's
no one way. Man, it's all so different. And these
two camps fight, you know, like every fifty years. One

(02:57):
generation one is called the Hippies of the you know
the world and then they flip to the other camp
as the hippies of the world. But both camps suffer
tremendously because you actually need a degree of it's one
way in your life, and you need to degree of

(03:19):
there's multiple ways. And if you obsess about always making
it about multiple ways, Look, there's no true facts. Look
that everything's debatable. Look it's like you know, truth is
a social construct, right, you know these things. It'll wreck

(03:40):
you because your life will be in such anxiousness and
disarray that you won't be able to organize anything. But
then if you spend your life just going it's this way,
this is how it works, and when you go to
learn a new topic you always just ask the question, Well,

(04:00):
tell me the way, and it must be this way,
and I will execute on that and that is it.
Then you will have a different form of anxiety. You
won't be open to true innovation, you won't be open
to curiosity and beauty, you won't be open to a
life well lived. You will stagnate and limit yourself, and

(04:22):
you will make the people around you suffer. They both
cause suffering. I mean, yes, suffering exists, that's always there.
At that's fine, But this This creates a lot of
suffering when you obsess about these two angles. But if
you put them together and you're willing to maintain the

(04:44):
paradox of hey, there's one way a lot of times, meaning,
for example, you need to accept that, look, if you
need to lose weight, you need to do just a
couple of these things and just get over it and
get to work. And then also accept that there's a variety,

(05:06):
there's multiple ways to solve a problem, to realize, oh,
I hate the gem and I just need to burn calories,
and so yes, the one way of burning calories. But
you know, I could take walks with my friends, or
I could go play flag football, or I could do
twenty other different things. All of a sudden, life starts

(05:27):
to make more sense. But if you just commit to
one or just commit to many, you tend to struggle.
If you'd like to build your life and business with me,
go to the link below or go to apply dot
Josh cherry plays dot com.