Dead Things

The second time I thought my mother-in-law was crazy, she was ripping buds off flowers in her garden.
She crouched down in the dirt, gloves covered in grime and forehead covered in sweat. Her eyes moved back and forth like darts. When they found what they were looking for, she would pinch and remove the offending piece of plant.
“Um, what are you doing?” I asked.
“Just deadheading a few of these plants.”
And so she was.
(Listen to this^)
“Deadheading” is a practice most gardeners will be familiar with. Quite simply, it’s the removal of dead or spent flowers from the rest of the plant.
Here are a few of the benefits of deadheading:
- The plant conserves energy
- The plant is able to set new buds
- It prevents a plant from growing out of control by self-sowing too many seeds
- (And, naturally) it makes your garden look much nicer.
I worry in today’s culture we forget things are supposed to die. We hold on to certain employment and salaries long after we have outgrown them. Instead of allowing a movie franchise to rest, we instead remake it 12 times.
“Why pioneer when you could sit comfortably in nostalgia?” movie producers seem to ask.
We are unwilling, both on a personal and a cultural level, to truly release the past to make room for the future.
As a creative person, I have to die every single day. I know that seems extreme, but it’s the only way I know to survive. In my complete reset, I try to identify and remove these things:
Dead People
Passion is contagious, but so is apathy.
Like passion, apathy is circular — an infinite loop of indifference.
UNlike passion, apathy takes almost no effort to catch. It will seep into your bloodstream like poison and infect your thinking, your mindset, your relationships, and your health.
People who simply don’t care pass along all of these symptoms, as well as the disease.
Flush them out.
Dead Habits
In Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, he outlines three distinct pieces of every habit loop.
First, we have the cue — an event or stimulus which triggers us.
Then, there’s the behavior — the action we take after we are set into motion by the cue.
Finally, there is the reward — when our brain grants us a little spike of happiness for fulfilling our action.

Most of these happen without our even thinking about it. We are essentially habit machines, with dozens of these patterns stacked up in our daily life.
A dead habit, then, is one in which the reward is objectively detrimental to the goals we are trying to achieve at any given time.
Look at the third part of the equation there — the reward. This means at one time or another, a habit we formed gave us exactly what we wanted. If you developed a habit of smoking, it was probably because the reward of being accepted into a peer group was worth any risks you might have known about.
However, if you were to develop lung cancer because of that habit, the “reward” is probably no longer achieving what it once was.
I try to scour my habits at any given moment, knowing they will change to line up with whatever I care about.
I think that’s the trick.
Dead Jobs
Okay, this is an easy one. Do you know why? Because it requires no explanation.
You know when you are holding a dead job. You can feel it in your gut. You whole body will reject the idea of trudging into another dismal day, full of tasks well below your new skill level.
We stay at dead jobs because of fear, I think. Fear or ill-preparedness keeps you chained to a place you know is not your place any more.
No job will ever keep you intrigued or motivated for a lifetime.
Dead Ideas
Terry Pratchett (RIP ❤) once wrote a book called Nation. In it, the main character’s whole village is demolished by a crushing tsunami. The boy is a preteen, and now must decide how to survive.
Along the way, he meets a shipwrecked English girl who has tools beyond his wildest dreams. As he struggles to understand why his culture ran around naked while hers constructed an entire civilization, he has this insight:
“We didn’t have any new problems. There was no need for any new thinking.”
You can always tell when you are moving forward in life because you will run into new problems. Although they are irritating, new problems can keep you fresh, keep you sharp, keep you moving.
But when you are stagnant, the mind, body and spirit begin to atrophy. It is all too easy to get swept away in the pace of our own new world, to drift along with whatever we are handed.
New ideas will revive you. They will energize you. They will free you.
They will keep you alive.
Infinite Ideas
That last line there isn’t just rhetoric. I truly believe ideas are innately human. They make us whole.
That’s why I wrote — The Ultimate Guide to Infinite Ideas — which I’m giving away for the price of an email address.
Also, it’s probably worth mentioning that my mother-in-law is objectively not crazy, and probably the best mother-in-law anyone could ask for.
-TB

