The Round Year

The Round Year

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The Patterns of Reality theroundyear.substack.com

08/08/2025

Do What Matters

Every time you put effort and energy into an task, ask yourself: ‘What will this accomplish?’ It doesn’t make much difference whether your endeavor was useful, financially rewarding or simply meant to entertain: whenever you engage in an activity that requires work, there should be an expectation of results. People who are familiar with sorting their tasks by importance and urgency know that activities that are neither important nor urgent should be ignored (which they never are), but the next two quadrants are the ones where lives are truly wasted: the urgent activities. Many of them are reviled by companies, which have black listed them as productivity killers. The list is too long to mention, from last minute developing extra project options just in case, to the ad hoc meetings demanding progress reports to see where the project stands, to the worst offenders, paperwork simply meant to make one look busy. Nothing is ever that simple, because there is often a reward associated with these alleged time wasters: people feel that acting busy makes them look more valuable. Offering last-minute options might be a person’s way of agreeing to whatever a client wants to make them happy. That progress report nobody asked for may be someone’s attempt to increase one’s visibility in a group. There is no way of knowing whether something was worth doing other than obtaining the desired result. If you did, your effort was well spent. If you didn’t, your preparation, planning and regularly updated progress charts were a waste of time. Life is too short to explore every blind alley. Stop trying to persuade the unpersuadable. Stop doing things because you have the skills and stop working really hard on things nobody wants. Stop trying to shoehorn uncertain futures into rigid schedules that are unfit to contain them. The method, the structure, the organizational chart, the five-year plan are completely pointless time wasters when things turn on a dime and the factors influencing a project are unexpected, contradictory, yet to be determined or dependent on circumstances out of your control. How to know if what you are doing matters, then? 1. Is the result even possible? Or are you trying to please an authority figure, while being fully aware the expected outcome won’t happen. 2. Is the effort allocated to the endeavor proportionate to the reward? Or are you digging through bare rock to plant your garden? 3. Are you building your sandcastle in a tide zone? 4. Do you really care about what you are trying to accomplish? I know this is an obvious question. You’d be surprised how many times the answer is no. 5. Will the outcome fit into the larger plan of your life? And if not, is it worth the sacrifices necessary to accommodate it? 6. Will the result matter in a month, a year, a decade? Not to oversimplify this, but Any project requiring effort whose shelf life is shorter than six months should be scrapped right off the bat. Life throws curve balls all the time: the detailed plans we make for your future are easily undone by technological challenges, acts of God, personal crises, and sudden shifts in priorities, but people rarely regret doing the things that matter to them, even when those things fail or earn them public disapproval. Society has created algorithms for every task it is able to anticipate. There are tried-and-true ways to do just about anything you can think of. Find those algorithms first, and if they work, use them. They will be strongly recommended to you by default and you may second guess yourself when you feel they’re not a good fit for you; trying them anyway, against your better judgment, is the perfect example of an activity guaranteed to waste your effort and yield no benefit. Last, the important and urgent category is a unicorn. Unless the End Times are imminent, nothing truly important is urgent. Truly important things, the things that matter, need time to build their ecosystems, connect to other things that matter, sink below your reasoning threshold to become a part of who you are. Their progress is incremental; they grow in layers; they take wrong turns all the time and need to correct. They run into luck, or unexpected blocks, and you should expect both. They don’t live and die on a deadline. In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering? * Unimportant tasks are time wasters whether or not they are urgent. * Society has created tried-and-true ways to do just about anything. Try those ways first, if you feel they might be a good fit. Don’t second-guess yourself if you believe they don’t apply to your situation. * Life is too short to explore every blind alley. Stop trying to persuade the unpersuadable. Stop doing what you’re good at if nobody wants it. Stop working really hard on projects that are dead on arrival. * Stop trying to shoehorn vague futures into rigid schedules that are completely unfit to contain them. * Do you really want the result, and is it worth the effort and sacrifice? * Is what you’re trying to accomplish possible, and will it survive its infancy? * Any project whose result has a shelf life shorter than six months is a waste of your resources. * Things that fit into the important and urgent category are exceedingly rare. Important things, the things that matter, need time to develop and don’t live and die on a deadline. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

5 min
07/13/2025

Protecting Your Peace

We waste untold amounts of time and energy on things of no consequence. We don’t see that in the present, as the situations always present themselves as urgent, critical, and dire. Very few tasks are truly urgent and most things are fixable; those that are not are often outside our control. All of them take up real estate in your mind and emotions, however, wearing you down while yielding no benefit. They are energy wasters. In an environment that constantly instills a sense of emergency, how do you protect your peace? People give the mechanism of detaching from the illusion of crisis different names, centering, grounding, me time, but it works more or less the same way, by disconnecting you from the stress source. Whether you do that through meditation, visualization, personal rituals, focusing on something that holds meaning to you, enjoying a relaxing hobby, praying, it doesn’t matter. What all these activities have in common is they alter your state of mind. They take you to another reality, one which is quiet, pleasant and fully within your control. Take some time to see the current situation from the perspective of a few years, months, weeks, days. Would it still matter then? You will be surprised to realize most of the problems that wear you down and keep you up at night will not be relevant even a few short months from now. Look into your past, five, ten years, at all the problems you were struggling with then and assess how many of them even register as a memory now. This is what most of our daily grind looks like. Life is full of fake emergencies and problems that never happened. In no way am I advocating the abrogation of one’s duties, which is the burden of every responsible adult, just know that most of the dire emergencies are not, and a lot of the worries you carry are about things that are outside your control. I’ll illustrate the latter with an example we’re all familiar with: the plane is being delayed because of inclement weather, and every minute that passes brings you closer to missing your connection, a very important meeting, or the exciting event you were traveling for. This is something you can’t control, and no amount of stress will help you wind back the clock to fit your plans into the shortened time frame. As a wise person once said, you can’t should have done something yesterday. Most of the things that stress us out regularly, dire news, antagonistic political views, hypothetical or far away disasters, conflicting health or parenting advice, other people’s opinions of us, have literally no connection to our lives, and while it may be useful to be educated about them, they don’t warrant the expenditure of psychic energy. A quick exercise can eliminate most of these false crises. Ask yourself the following questions the second you feel the tension in your stomach, or the cortisol drip burning your veins: Is this my problem? Does it matter? Will it matter a year from now? Do I have to address it immediately, do I have to address it at all, and if yes, when? Putting anything on a schedule relieves you of the pressure of having to carry the worry of an outstanding task. You would be surprised how freeing it is to set a time for an activity, commit to respect it, and put it out of your mind until then. Determining whether a problem will be relevant some time from now helps you scale and reframe it. Here is another example: a deadline. It is your responsibility, and it is relevant in the present, but it will not matter a year from now. If you have enough time, you can deliver it as planned, and you should probably start working on it immediately. If you don’t have enough time, you could try to push for a delay. If you have more time than the task requires, there is no reason to let it take up space in your brain: put it on a schedule and out of your mind. In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering? * Most of the things that stress us out regularly have no connection to our lives, and don’t warrant the expenditure of psychic energy. * No matter how important the task or event you are late or unprepared for, you can’t wind time backwards. You can’t should have done something yesterday. * Detach from the illusion of crisis by disconnecting from the stress source. * Activities like meditation, visualization, prayer, personal rituals, focusing on something that holds meaning, engaging in hobbies, alter your state of mind and take you to a place you can control. * The second you feel stressed, ask yourself the following questions: is this my problem? * Does it matter? Will it matter a year from now? * Do I have to address it immediately, or at all, and if yes, when? * Assessing whether a problem will still matter a year from now helps you get a true sense of its scale. * Putting the task on a schedule puts it out of your mind. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

5 min
07/06/2025

Voices of the Past

Who are we, without even knowing it? How many people speak with our voices, think with our minds, quietly guide our beliefs and our actions? If we dig a little deeper into our identity, we’re likely to find our parents’ convictions, our friends’ preferences, our mentors’ codes of conduct, the faith of our spiritual role models. We are all aware of this, of course, maybe take it for granted, and don’t realize that our core identity has been molded by countless generations, through the socio-cultural past, farther back in time than we can possibly imagine. We function as repositories, securing the convictions, knowledge, and moral development that earlier generations deemed essential to preserve and hand down. Everything we are has been touched by another, sometimes in the present, sometimes across centuries, often against our will, and the voices of our inner council leave and change with time, using our minds like large and rather disorganized meeting halls, where congress is kept in small groups, according to the various topics, priorities, and moods. Your ancestor from the 1800s and your high school guidance counselor convene to discuss your choice of profession. Your grandmother confers with your new best friend to help you find the perfect balance of ingredients for your baking. Your genetic heritage silently impacts your preferences, expressing itself through choices and motivations beyond your conscious awareness. We unknowingly carry the legacies of our ancestors, encompassing fears, dreams, and biases that persist despite the passage of time and the emergence of new concepts. Wisdom is kept alive in oral traditions which morphed to adapt to modern and incredibly sophisticated social models. Centuries of experiences we never had speak through our instincts and get revealed in dreams. It’s a humbling truth that we are not living, but rather being lived by many. Along with this comes the responsibility towards them and the privilege of embodying their wisdom. We have been granted the honor to decide which aspects of their traditions, initiatives, and talents we are willing to take on and incorporate into our lives, one which adds profound richness and depth to our perception of reality. In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering? * We are many people. They speak with our voice, think with our mind, quietly guide our beliefs and our actions. * We function as repositories of valuable thought. * Everything we are has been touched by another, sometimes in the present, sometimes across centuries. * The voices of our inner counsel leave and change with time, using our minds like large and rather disorganized meeting halls, where congress is kept in small groups. * We hold our predecessors’ fears, dreams, and biases far past the point when history would have condemned them to oblivion. * We are not living, we are lived by many, and have responsibilities towards them, as well as the privilege of carrying their wisdom. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

3 min
06/29/2025

Action and Reaction

In physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction; the same applies to the realm of the mind. Every thought you nurture, especially profound beliefs and openly expressed convictions, will create both its intended result and its conceptual opposite, and will somehow manage to attract both of them into your reality. You can think of this as reality testing you to see if you meant it, and outlandish as it seems, it works with incredible consistency, and in ways too blatant to miss. I don’t know why that happens – the principle of balance, unconscious resentments from opposing thought groups, contrarian reactions, good old-fashioned spite. The important point is your thought will always bring its outcomes into your life, and also an opposing view of equal strength. That opposition, that resistance, will challenge you directly. If you embrace pacifism, you will gather a following of peace-loving individuals but have no other choice than to wage war. If you spread a message of love, you’ll resonate with love in the world and also find plenty of reasons to despise people. Being open-minded draws in like-minded people, but it can also unknowingly steer you towards embracing prejudiced ideologies. Choosing certain individuals over others is inevitable if you promote equality and strive for social justice. The concept that we draw both our karma and its opposite, regardless of our actions, is not comforting, however, recognizing this can help soften the irritation of having our thoughts mirrored back to us, both as expressed and in the negative, especially when we believe them to be virtuous and valuable. How to defeat this perverse feature of reality? I’m not sure we can, or should. Reality managed to keep itself in balance despite our hubris and delusion that we can make it better, and progress, when made, is slow and delivered in homeopathic doses. Knowing this happens will keep you humble, so when you invariably become the opposite of everything you believed yourself to be, even briefly and in insignificant ways, or when the perfectly crafted theoretical model you devoted yourself to yields less than palatable unexpected results, you’ll treat yourself with kindness and get back on the wagon of enlightened thought without surrendering to self-loathing. The world is filled with complexities and unintended consequences, but if you persist in your intention, things will eventually align in your favor. The metaphor of changing the course of an ocean liner comes to mind, together with the understanding that changing the course of the latter is an action requiring continuous effort, focus and control, and it encounters constant resistance. In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering? * Every thought attracts into your life its physical consequences and its theoretical opposite. * Resistance to your thought is commensurate to its power. * The underpinnings of society are unconsciously primed to test you, to see if you value your core beliefs and moral principles as much as you claim to do. * Expecting this to happen will keep you from running amok with your theoretical concepts and losing touch with the practical consequences thereof. * Consistency of thought eventually triumphs over the constant and equally strong opposition every one of our ideas and intentions attracts, but it does so slowly and requires sustained long term effort. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

3 min
06/20/2025

About Focus

Focus is the ability to ignore all signals save one. Your mental capacity stays unchanged, but it’s solely focused on one objective. Focus runs on emotions and excitement, not willpower. If you need to force yourself to pay attention, your subconscious is telling you the task doesn’t interest you enough. That’s why people often struggle to focus on their tasks while unrelated trivia lingers in the background. It usually implies that the chosen subject of concentration hasn’t managed to hold their attention enough to drown out the surrounding noise. Remember all those hobbies and interests that made you lose track of time, forgo bodily needs, and put off everything else? The computer game that, by any reasonable standards, is just entertainment, but of which you can’t let go until you clear the current level? That quilt you can’t put down until you figure out the right way to put the pieces together? Even, for some weird people, I won’t name names, putting together IKEA furniture. That’s real focus. Reading the same wordy paragraph for the fifth time because you can’t zero in on its meaning is not. Focus is fired by interest and motivation, with reward, which is the most common reason for its application, coming in a distant third. The report you need to write in hope of a promotion pales in comparison to your genuine passion, whether it’s collecting stamps, handicrafts, or social media posting. Life is a collection of all the things you give your attention to, and its goal is understanding and experience, which is why your unconscious mind filters out things it deems unimportant. Your reason may tell you they’re worth the effort, but your instinct discards them with the efficiency of a sorting machine. Focus is subservient to your emotional side. If you want to dedicate all your mental capacity to a subject, you must love it passionately, everything else will only yield mediocre results. If focus were noise-cancelling headphones for your brain, your problem is that the music you’re listening to is likely boring and the traffic noises are filled with the wholesome sound of life. Focus is dead without passion. When the latter is present, time passes so effortlessly that you become oblivious to it. When it’s not, five minutes feel like forever. What if you have to focus on something that doesn’t hold your heart and soul, but it’s vital to your life plans? You have my sympathies. You can make yourself focus on a subject, but remember your heart won’t be fully engaged, and you should expect only 60% of the results, which is still better than nothing. In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering? * Focus is the ability to ignore all signals save one. Your mental capacity remains the same, but it’s all dedicated to one goal. * Focus runs on emotions and excitement, not willpower. * It is fired by interest and motivation, with reward, which is the most common reason for its application, coming in a distant third. * Reward motivated tasks don’t hold a candle to subjects that pique your genuine interest; you can force yourself to pay attention to a subject, but you will never achieve maximum results. * The summation of all the things you’re paying attention to constitutes your life, which is why your unconscious decision center will not allow you to pilfer focus. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

3 min
06/05/2025

Honoring the Gift

Those born with exceptional traits often remain unaware of them until adulthood, as we tend to take our own mental and physical capabilities for granted and assume everyone else is the same. What is a gift? It is an innate skill, sense, or ability that is so second nature to you that you’re oblivious to others not having it. Do you possess a heightened sensitivity to your surroundings, easily detecting overlooked details and connections? Do you possess a special musical ability to recreate concerts and symphonies in your head, with all the instruments? Are you able to mentally multiply large numbers as quickly as a computer? Do you have a green thumb? A gift for healing? A deep understanding of how others feel? Gifts can take on various forms, some familiar and others so unusual that they can’t be labeled, but you’ll instinctively recognize your gift. You may deny it, but you’ll never doubt it, because that’s how gifts work. You underestimate the value of your special gift, dismissing it as common or worse, unnatural, and fail to realize it is probably the reason you exist. Gifts don’t wait for you to guess what they are. They won’t leave you alone until you grab that brush, that pen, that psychology manual, that watering can. It is near impossible to deny a gift. They are persistent, loud, and will drown you in guilt for ignoring them, and your life’s purpose. Don’t expect your gift to benefit you financially and set you up in a comfortable life. They rarely do that, at least for you. We’ve diluted the meaning of valuable to only signify things that have monetary worth. Empathy, intuition, artistic talent, a sunny disposition, dexterity, social intelligence, an unusual memory, even unique events in your life that have not and could not have happened to somebody else, those are your special gifts to express. Being able to orient yourself in a new city with almost magical ease is a gift. How to do right by your gifts? First, do not ignore them. If your heart compels you to draw, take charcoal and a piece of paper and get started. We are all so conditioned to do things for social approval, the very act of rebelling against what would people say will be a boon to your life. Dance, if the spirit moves you. Even if somebody is watching. Once you start seeing your talent as an expression of your own being, rather than a way to engage socially, it will truly shine. Many revelations and deep understandings of the world emerge from allowing yourself to practice your talent and give it a special place in your life. Second, don’t dismiss the insights your gifts reveal to you just because you don’t like them. The unexplored part of you, where all talent originates, is incapable of dishonesty. Whatever it tells you, it’s probably useful and true. Third, if you can’t resist the social pressure to give up an idea or practice that others don’t approve of, it’s better to keep them to yourself. No one goes to their grave regretting they didn’t conform more. Never give up on anything that brings you happiness or a sense of purpose. In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering? * If you are born with unusual qualities, you may not realize you have them until adulthood, because you assume everyone is like you.Your gifts, while constituting your raison d’être, may not result in financial benefits. * Certain talents, such as music or art skills, physical dexterity, or technical abilities, are easily identifiable, while others are too unusual and distinct to be named. * Denying a gift is nearly impossible; it will manifest in your life through any means available, often unconsciously. * Don’t reject the insights your gifts provide just because you find them unappealing. Those unplumbed depths of yourself from which those revelations come don’t know how to lie. Whatever they tell you, it’s probably useful and true. * If you can’t resist the social pressure of abandoning an idea or practice everybody doesn’t approve of, keep them to yourself. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

4 min
05/29/2025

Child Themes

Intent is not precise, nor is it linear, it loosely aims for the direction you plan while bringing about many echoes, counterpoints, and unintended results. Their effects continue long after the flame of their original intent has died out, often surprising the author, who has already moved on to something else and forgotten the purpose of the initial action. Every project comes with child themes, effects that blossom around it, coexist with it and further its intricacies, a result of the greater context coming together to create your desired outcome. Nothing happens in a bubble: all ideas, all creations, produce their own patterns. Their unexpected scions never follow your plan, and keep growing in complexity like sprawling tomato plants, until they require too much effort to produce. They start to fade away when their initial motivation fades. Sometimes the number and magnitude of offshoots dwarfs the original idea and humbles it with their life-changing outcomes (apps, electrical appliances and antibiotics are good examples), while at other times, they drown it in a spawn of unnecessary and bizarre derivatives. In either case, a whole range of objects, exuberant in its variety, comes into existence, just like a new species. Ideas are like rabbits: keep them around long enough and you’ll be overrun with the results. This progeny gets surrounded by a large number of related concepts, specific tools and amusing asides, which eventually split from their source to lead their own ironic lives, often at odds with it: fish tacos, dessert pizza, adult coloring books, his and hers items, grapples, valet trays, tea cozies, labradoodles, sporks, glamping, none of them echo their original purpose. These unexpected oddballs come packaged together with the desired result, like the salt and pepper you must always buy together, even if you don’t need the salt. They are the action hero figurines to your movie, the seldom used tureens to your soup bowls, the extra hardware to accompany furniture with assembly required. You may not have asked for them, but they will arrive anyway, because, albeit unexpected, they are secondary outcomes of your intent. In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering? * Every idea generates many sub-themes which split off to exist separately from the concept that birthed them. * Ideas crossbreed to produce surprising hybrids. * The offshoots of an idea can sometimes be much larger and more useful than the original. * You can never anticipate all the outcomes an intent will produce: echoes and variations that were not initially planned for form as the bigger picture comes together to achieve the desired outcome. * Nothing happens in a bubble. Ideas form their own fractal patterns. * The unexpected effects of your plans are unavoidable; they are secondary outcomes of the original intent. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

3 min
05/12/2025

Don’t Tell Me What I Think

Maintaining control over your mind when the latter is challenged in the battle of influences, inducements and restrictions we call daily life is a critical survival skill. People fight to win this battle because they don’t understand eliminating mental spam shouldn’t take any willpower at all. Just because someone makes a conjecture, that doesn’t mean you have to entertain it. We flitter away a lot of emotional energy in trifling mental brawls with no consequence. Remember, when these intrusions occur, that no matter what the background noise is that day, your truth did not change. I say your truth, and not the truth, because we all live in personal bubbles and can’t behold absolute truth. We don’t have access to it. From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, irrelevant blather constantly bombards our minds. While we easily ignore thoughts with neutral emotional value, the ones that have negative connotations weaken our focus: our brain treats them as emergencies, and dump cortisol into our systems in anticipation of fight or flight. These thoughts, which can be anything you find unsettling, but usually cluster around insecurities, regrets, failures, personal tragedies, health concerns, dominance issues and relationship problems, will consume all the bandwidth you have available for processing and leave no room for you to think. Thought challenges serve a singular goal: to split your focus. Treat them like you would the malware that floods your computer system with inconsequential requests until it crashes. The key word is inconsequential. Don’t use your energy to fend them off; the useful reaction is not processing them at all. All the thoughts that make a difference to your life have been catalogued and sorted by you the moment they came to your attention. Everything that appears out of the blue is probably a drain on mental capacity. You can label them trash and erase them without checking their contents, the same way you do with junk mail. Create a sorting mechanism for every thought that enters your mind: * Is this thought mine * Is this thought relevant to my life * Is this thought beneficial to my goals * Is this thought true and * Is this thought worth storing to process later? It seems cumbersome and time consuming, but in reality, this analysis is lightning fast, and deftly clears the mind of clutter. In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering? * Maintaining mental control in the face of irrelevant thought challenges is a critical survival skill. * No matter what the background noise is that day, your truth did not change. * Negative thoughts throw you off balance and weaken you, because the brain treats them like emergencies and starts preparing you for fight or flight. They only have one purpose: to split your focus. * Treat mental spam like you would the malware that floods your computer system with inconsequential requests until it crashes. * Sort thoughts the moment they enter your mind to check whether they’re yours, relevant, beneficial, true and worth storing for later. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

3 min

The Patterns of Reality theroundyear.substack.com

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The Round Year
Years Active

2024 - 2025
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27
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Clean
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