I have always been a master of what the French call “l'esprit de l'escalier.” Staircase wit.

I am especially good at coming up with things to say after their opportunity to be perfect has passed.

Consistently, as time has progressed since my posts on ‘Building the Forge,’ I have found aspects of the journey that I want to cover or offer as addenda.

In previous posts, I discussed the qualities I would like to cultivate in myself. Today, I’d like to focus on the processes.

I’ve identified two that I believe are essential to the ability to achieve my specific set of goals.

They are Mindfulness, and Willpower.

While I’m sure it’s easy to reckon their use and applicability with little mental effort, lemme expound a bit:

Mindfulness is the cultivation of awareness of one’s mind. It’s taking a step back from participating in the eternal sway of mental phenomena, and noting the movement without necessarily participating. At first, mindfulness manifests in stubbing your toe and getting angry at the table, then snapping out of it, noting, “Ah, this is pain, and this is my mind reacting to that pain with the emotion of anger.” It’s walking down the street, lost in a sea of thought and sensation, interrupted with the epiphany of “Here I was, so lost in the internal saturnalia of thought, that I forgot about all else, including the World.”

It starts out small, with constant attempts to remove yourself as a participant in your own mind and act as an observer. Instead of listening to the voice in your head, you simply observe it. Allow it to ebb and flow as it does, while watching its motion, deducing what you can.

Over time, it grows into a habit, with myriad beneficial effects. A stillness burrows within, and grows, so that one does not get pulled into the current, opting instead to float on the surface of the waves.



While I would consider myself a relatively mindful person, overall, today I did little to better myself in that direction. In fact, I spent the majority of the day - of which the hours were many - wasting precious hours of the day.

I chose not to exercise the second process I mentioned earlier: Willpower (or rather the exertion thereof.)

Willpower is what is tapped into anytime that you undertake something. It’s effort. It’s what is abundant when you’re inspired, and necessary when you’re not.

Today, I exercised little of it, instead deciding to fall back on oft-mentioned lazy, path-of-least-resistance habits. Only now, with the vast expanse of today’s opportunity receding behind me, am I exercising it - forcing myself to create, regardless of my feelings of being tongue-tied or unsure of how to structure today’s exposition. I am chiseling that into my heart, so that from now on - from this moment, onward to today - whenever I catch myself falling back unto lethargy and complacency, I will utilize the latter to buttress the former (and vice versa.)

There is something truly, truly cathartic & euphoric about forcing yourself to do something that you don’t want to, but know you should.



Mindfulness and Willpower, when working in tandem, are the processes by which discipline and greatness are built. By fostering them, I foster the highest qualities in myself.