Daily Yamabushi

Keep creating. Keep putting your ideas out. Ideas out in the wild can be iterated and reiterated until they become powerful game-changers. Ideas out in the wild benefit from the network effect and snowball, but only if they are out in the wild, there’s no other way.

The most foolproof way to do this?

Keep creating. Make a habit of it. Habits are skills, so you could make a skill of it even. Keep pumping out work, iterate and reiterate on it until you’re blue in the face, then create some more. Get your ideas out in the wild.

Today I was climbing Tsuchiyu-Yama and as I was hiking up I noticed that the summit was shrouded in cloud. It looked really beautiful. I thought I should stop and get a time lapse, but I also wanted to make good time getting up the mountain. Turns out this wasn’t a smart plan.

By the time I got down, the cloud had already disappeared. There was now no point in doing the time lapse. Had I done it earlier when I thought about it, I would have gotten it.

Last year I suffered from not putting my content out sooner. I built up a backlog and it took me a while to get through things, and by then the season had changed and some of the videos didn’t feel as timely as I’d like.

I learned that it’s best to execute on your ideas as soon as possible. Not only can you learn from them sooner, you can gain more advantage by being timely or opportunistic.

Either the situation will change, or the way you feel about it will. Either way, remember it’s temporary.

When I was a kid my mum used to give me ‘mental health days’ because I never got unwell as much as my brother and sister. It was basically an excuse for a day off school, and it’s probably because I felt jealous (and let it show) that I had to go to school but they didn’t.

In any case, taking time off for yourself is so important every once in a while. It doesn’t have to be a whole day, even just an extended lunch would do at times, but making a conscious effort to give yourself permission to do nothing helps to maintain your freshness and productivity overall.

If you’ve spent much time living in another culture, you start to notice how some things are given much more, or much less, importance in society.

In Japan there is a real fetish for smiles. You’ll see the word ‘smile’ about in many different places, such as insurance or the names of meals for example.

This is all well and good, of course you want to see others be happy and a smile is one way in which you can do that, but smiles are also surface-level (a common theme in Japan I’ve noticed).

People can see you for who you are at any given moment, but we know that what they don’t see is what really matters. They don’t see all the context, they don’t see all the emotion, they don’t see all the struggles.

But why should they?

Well, to truly understand you as a human being that much is necessary, but even if they were to see all that context, that emotion, that struggle, they haven’t actually lived it themselves so all it would be is but interpretation.

You see, all that is now in the past. It’s no longer a part of you unless you let it be. It’s possible to live in the now, and the best way to do that?

A smile on your face.

A daily practice is as good a way as any to get through the slog. Even if you just do the bare minimum each day, that’s perfectly fine. What matters is that you’ve done it. You’ve gotten out there and put something out in the world. If you can just do that, then it all builds up like a snowball, and keeps gaining momentum.

For some reason, this month seems to be the month of magazines.

I was recently interviewed for an upcoming magazine in Japanese (details once released!), and I was approached by another seemingly popular magazine to write an article for them. I am extremely flattered, however it is proving quite the challenge, perhaps I’m thinking about it too much! Then, I was approached by yet another magazine, this time much more local, and will be featured sometime in the upcoming weeks as well (this one is in Japanese too).

I feel much more confident that I have now written over 1,250 blog posts. It’s the turning up each day that counts.

When you’re stuck for ideas, or just want to make the most of your brain, try writing on different mediums.

Recently, only God knows why, but Medium.com turned off the ability to write in-app. This for me was such a crucial part of the medium experience that I let my subscription lapse. You truly never know when inspiration will strike, and it is a real advantage for me to be able to put my thoughts down wherever I am. Put simply, it’s impractical to be carrying a computer around all the time, and I needed some way to get my thoughts out before I forget them.

In saying that, I still use Medium.com. Their desktop interface is very conducive to writing, especially at home. Plus, I am writing this on the WordPress app, while I also make extensive use of Google Docs.

Having different mediums like this means you can go about writing from different perspectives and different directions much more easily.

This works well if you can leave a substantial gap between writings, say a couple of hours or some sort of break, and if you can purposely not look at your other media while doing so. That way your thoughts are unique to that moment, but they are still your thoughts.

Try it. You can thank me later.

At the 2007 rugby World Cup, the New Zealand All Blacks lost in the quarterfinals against France, which at the time many blamed on the referee for missing a forward pass (myself included). By today’s rules that wouldn’t happen due to a change in the laws, but it doesn’t necessarily mean New Zealand would have won either.

After the game, then All Black coach Sir Graham Henry accepted the situation, and said that his team needed to be good enough to beat other teams even in the face of adversity. They knew where they had been done wrong, but they also knew they had to be better even in such circumstances.

This was a great lesson for me, made even greater by the fact that NZ kept Sir Graham Henry on as head coach in a move that turned out to be a great one as the following two world cups attest to.

When seriously anything can happen, don’t blame the situation, accept it, and work towards a better solution. Nothing ever goes completely to plan, if it did, life would be very boring indeed. Best to take things as they come, accept them, and move on.

Uncertainty is the worst. Well, it’s possible to make uncertainty even worse.

How? Overreacting to it.

Not knowing the situation fully but still reacting as if it is a forgone conclusion, that is a recipe for disaster.

Enter monk mode and accept the situation for its uncertainty.

It’s uncertain. Leave it at that.

Leave your reaction for when you have the facts straight.

There are some people who differentiate between habits and skills. I don’t.

Wendy Wood

What a great line to start a video with, sucked me right in. I had never considered that these two things could in fact be the same thing.

But it makes sense.

Repeated enough, habits do become skills. Developing a skill is developing a habit. The only way to develop a skill is to make a habit of it until you’ve done it enough that is becomes automatic.

This was most certainly the case for me when it came to things like swimming and learning Japanese. I made a habit out of it until it just became second nature.

So I guess it’s a matter of building habits. Of doing something repeatedly until you forget what it’s like to not know how to do it. And how do you do that?

A little and a lot.

Promise yourself to do something to work towards the habit/skill every day. Put it in your calendar. And then do it.

Sometimes when I’m hesitating to reply to someone for whatever reason I start off with a draft response. Then if it works even as a draft, I set it to automatically send some time in the near future, enough time that I would be able to change it if I needed to. Writing things like this helps to clear your head, and if you can give it a little time, when you come back to it often you find things that could be better. Then it’s just a matter of hitting the send button.

We go into any endeavour because we seek answers. We go into any endeavour because we have questions that we want answered. Questions come from our curiosity. If we knew everything, we wouldn’t have anything to do. Nothing would be new. Life would be boring. So, having questions means you are naturally curious. And not being satisfied when you get the answers, that shows that you are still curious. You are still learning. We are still learning.

One rule of thumb in sport is that you always get your basics right before trying anything fancy. In fact, the teams that win are most often the ones who really get their basics down.

This could be seen as a boring way to go about things, at the start at least. But if you can get your basics down, then you have a license for true expression.

When the basics of both teams are already good, then the fanciness becomes the point of difference. But this is built on the assumption that the basics are there. It doesn’t work any other way.

In other words, practice practice practice until your basics are right. Then, and only then, can you try and go out on a limb.

The exercise you do is the exercise you should do.

Tim Ferriss (I think, don’t quote me on this)

The stuff that you do actually do, that’s the stuff you should do. So how do you do something new? How do you learn a new skill or go to new places?

Simply put, you have to carve out time for it.

In the case of exercise, if you’re struggling to get started, start off with the baby steps. No one is expecting you to climb mountains (but if you can, even better!).

Likewise when building habits, it’s the stuff you do do that counts. Try to make time every day to do just one thing to put you on the road to progress.

Make time in your calendar for it, and do it, do it even if it sucks. Do it enough, and eventually you’ll realise that if you’re going to do something, you might as well do it well.

Then do it well. Whatever that means for you.

Whatever you’re going to do, do it. That’s the exercise you should do.

We all know what it feels like to make an excuse not to do something. There are tons and tons of reasons not to do things that we sometimes really should. Procrastination is a real potential killer. But excuses work the other way too; an excuse can be a reason to do something.

For me, besides not seeing my family, sitting on the floor for extensive periods of time is the hardest part of Yamabushi training. For years I’ve been trying to loosen up my hips so I can more comfortably sit on the ground. I did do an online hip course, but I did maybe a maximum of 100 days and then simply stopped doing it.

It wasn’t until I started actively going to a yoga class each week that I was finally able to sit with both knees touching the ground (with a little bit of help from my arms, mind you). It is now much easier for me to sit on the ground for long periods of time, not to mention in meditation on a Zafu cushion.

You see, this yoga class provided a great excuse to do something I should have been doing all along. The same can be said for things like language classes, learning to swim, or learning to play an instrument etc.

Turn excuses from a reason not to do something, to a reason to do something. Err on the side of action. That way we can get over the resistance, at least a little!

Whether you do or not depends on how you get back up. If something shocking happens, focus on maintaining your daily rhythm and give yourself time to get back on your feet.

No pressure. On your on time.

One lesson from Yamabushi training is that you be ready as soon as you can. It’s kind of like the scouts motto of always be prepared, and an important point is that if you are ready, you can better help others who may not be.

This is as simple as packing your bag the night before, rather than the morning of, and thinking of contingency plans in advance, which, admittedly, isn’t very Yamabushi as it takes you out of the moment.

The thing with always being prepared like this is that it means you have the best chance to take opportunities when they arise. It also means you reduce the likelihood of forgetting something important.

When you know you’re going to have to do something, get ready for it as soon as you can, in other words.

With enough motivation, we could learn a second language on our own. We all have access to tools like duolingo, and I think this is where something like Clubhouse could come in, but how many people actually do that?

MIT and other well-known higher education providers have free online courses where you can learn anything you want really.

The reason we don’t? We need an excuse to do so.

In my area of Japan there is a local teacher who has a log house where every month people get together and play live music. What better excuse to learn how to play an instrument?

Oftentimes when Japanese people meet me, they say they should pick up their English again. What more excuse do you need to start practicing than meeting another English speaker (including someone with your same native language!)?

Gyms are also the perfect example. Gyms are there to not only give people the motivation to get fit, but an excuse to do so.

The place I feel this the most though is definitely with Yamabushi training. Yamabushi training gives people, without really realizing it, a really good excuse to get out into nature. Nature is there already, nothing is stopping you from getting out there, but with Yamabushi training, you get to experience another side of nature that takes you back to your childhood, a time before the modern world seeped its way into your mind. That for me is as good an excuse as any to get out into nature.

What’s your excuse?

Sometimes taking things day by day is the best thing you can do, focusing on the long-term goal while doing the smallest things you can to push things forward. And that’s perfectly fine.

Focus on maintaining a routine, however small, and making sure your house is in order. Other things will come in time. Chin up, and keep pushing forward!

There are certain things that take priority, and for those things it is paramount that you make an allowance. Often this allowance has to be more than what you expect, so be very lenient when making them. These allowances should grow in proportion to the importance, so how important you deem something determines how much extra allowance should be given to it. Get your priorities straight, and make allowances in accordance with them, basically.

Yesterday I was listening to a podcast with former All Black and the face of mental health programs in New Zealand, the legendary Sir John Kirwan. In the episode he talks about how he asked his father to define success. His father’s answer? How many bastards are there to hold your casket.

While a bit morbid, I think this is probably the best definition of success I have ever heard. How much have you touched those around you in a positive way? Positive enough that they would care when you leave? That for me is success.

Today I went for a hike with a friend of mine who is more of a recent Yamabushi. The difference in our tabi (Yamabushi split-toed shoes) was stark. My shoes are covered in mud and scratches, his, while still worn, are still rather white around the edges.

At least they were.

Now that we’ve climbed the mountains, both of us have dirty shoes.

It doesn’t matter where you start. What matters is that you do it.

I’m slowly going through and changing the names of the mountains to their original Japanese names. For example, Mt. Haguro is known as Haguro-san in Japanese, and I’m going to update my website to reflect the original Japanese. There are a few reasons for this, the main one is that I was convinced to by a group of mountain hikers I’m in as that’s how the mountains show up on maps and what they are known as to locals. This means that if someone who didn’t speak Japanese was asking for directions, they would be able to get help from locals.

It also reflects the local culture a bit better, I feel. Some mountains have different suffixes. For example, there is a Kamuro-san and a Kamuro-dake relatively nearby. Distinguishing both of these is I feel very important for locals, but it also has a role of distinguishing between similar sounding mountains.

For the URLs, I’m probably going to have to use redirects, but I will be putting the full mountain name without hyphens. I will have to see how that goes and may have to change it at some point.

One other point I’m slowly changing is that I put ‘climbing season’ on my mountains pages, but this is not factually correct. The best thing to say would be ‘best time to climb’, so I’m going through and updating that as well. It felt strange for me to say that Shoga-dake was only open until the end of August, in spite of the fact that it is on Chokai-zan and Chokai-zan is open until the middle of October. I need to update the short descriptions of each mountain as well.

Thanks, and as always, you can see all the mountains at https://timbunting.com/mountains.

(Oh, I’m having issues with my hosting, so photos aren’t always showing up. I’m hoping to have this issue fixed soon. DO NOT USE Hostgator!!!)

There are three things in my life that I feel are like secret weapons. Three things that I know of or do that are guaranteed to put me in a good mood no matter the situation.

My first secret weapon

The first is, who would have guessed, Yamabushi training or being in nature. This is not just simply because it’s fun, but also because it’s the ultimate chance for reflection, and the ultimate chance to give yourself permission to simply be in the moment.

This is what I most want to share with you, although doing the training is not exactly practical for many, being in nature is for most.

My second secret weapon

Which leads me to my second secret weapon, early mornings. I feel sorry for night owls, they miss the best part of the day. The best part of the day is always the first part of the day, and if the weather’s conducive, I always try to go out for a walk to take in the sunrise. This does mean I go to bed quite early though, last night I was probably asleep by 9, which seems to bother some people. Don’t dis it until you try it!

My third secret weapon

In the past few years I’ve noticed this question more and more, but people always ask how I’m able to stay skinny. This one’s easy (in principle).

I swim.

And swim. And swim.

I aim to do 10k in a week, and have been hitting that mark recently too.

Even though I turn out brighter than a tomato, swimming is by far the best exercise for me. I played waterpolo for 10 years, even making it to third in NZ on multiple occasions (we never quite got to the final), and that has meant I am able to swim quite well.

Swimming I feel is a secret weapon for those who can do it, and I truly feel that if you are able to swim non-stop, like going for a jog, it is the gift that keeps on giving. If you can’t, learning to swim will change your life, I’m certain of it.

My secret weapons

So there you have it. My secret weapons. Three things that I do that always manage to put me in a good mood.

In Japanese if you say ‘Kamo kamo’ it means ‘it might be a duck’.

Maybes and mights, shoulds and shalls, coulds and woulds.

Make a decision and work from there, it’s much easier than working with ifs and whens. Especially when other parties are involved and time is of the essence.

Here’s Kamo Kamo by my favourite NZ band for you.

The nail that stands out, gets hammered down.

The nail that doesn’t stand out, rots.

The nail that stands out too much, can’t get hammered down.

Ironic, yet refreshing, that this came from a Japanese person.

When I gaze upon the mountains that surround us here in the Shonai region, I’m teleported to the mountaintop. I sense the cool wind and chilly fog that encapsulates. I picture the alpine flowers and grasses that blow in the wind, the stony paths and the shrines dedicated to the Kami.

Mountains represent solace.

Mountains represent reassurance.

Mountains represent life.

So when I don’t quite feel myself, when I don’t quite feel 100%, I gaze at the mountaintop and imagine myself up there, a floating existence amongst the cool breeze.

And then I feel solace. I feel reassurance. And I feel life.

If you play your cards right, things might just well go your way.

But you have to play them first.

It’s no use having a stellar hand if you aren’t going to use it.

Find, build, collect your cards.

Then play them.

Let’s start with a conclusion: I can see a use case for ghost.org websites if and only if you have an existing fan base. I think it would be great to use if you were say a YouTuber looking at building a website and having a way for your fans to get access to paid content.

For me, it was too expensive to justify upgrading to the status that allows you to do more customizing than just choosing a theme from an extremely limited number. If I had some backers that could help cover that cost, I think it may be worth it, but it simply isn’t doable for me currently.

In other words, I think if you want a newsletter like mailchimp or some way to share info with your subscribers, and you also want a website, I think ghost.org is a good way of going about it.

Pros of ghost.org

Ghost does have a number of things in its favour, just unfortunately they weren’t for me at this stage.

• Offers tiered access to content
• Customizable at a certain pay point
• Can keep all your income rather than losing percentages which can add up
• Using markdown is an extremely intuitive way to write. It’s so simple and useful
• Photos are also automatically adjusted for web, there’s no need to upload media like in WordPress and other services (medium.com does this well too I feel)
• They cover hosting and domains
• The websites are very fast
• They claim to be good for SEO, I couldn’t really check that
• WordPress you have to manually update plugins, themes etc. and it’s really really annoying. Ghost did all that for you.

Cons of ghost.org

For me, I simply couldn’t justify the price for a few reasons, namely:

• True customization starts at the non-starter level
• There’s no dedicated app, so I would have to pay for and use something like Ulysses to be able to write on mobile, which is where I do a lot of my writing (same reason not to use medium for me)
• You would have to pay extra for zapier to automatically post to Twitter, Facebook, and the like.
• There was also no function for a contact form, although that could be my lack of knowledge
• I couldn’t link a subdomain from Google domains, it seems Google domains and ghost.org don’t mix well. I had just bought another year’s worth of domains from Google and didn’t want that to go to waste
• I was able to download all my posts from WordPress and upload them, but without the images, and without a lot of formatting. It would be a lot of work to fix the more than 1,000 posts I have.

So, I’m kind of back to square one. I think the best solution is some kind of combination with WordPress with crossposting on Medium (that I need to do a much better job of). WordPress is so old and clunky it comes with so many strings attached, but it’s also so versatile. Hard to know what’s right really!

Back yourself.

The old cliche ‘if you don’t back yourself who will?’ runs true if you let it.

Trust yourself to be your best, and then be your best. If you can do that, you have nothing to worry about.

But it starts with trusting yourself to back yourself.