3 MINUTE MONDAYHi friend, When faced with a challenge, your nature might be to worry and obsess and grip tightly. The classic Insecure Overachiever mindset. Because worrying is so common in every pursuit you attempt, your successes are seen as proof that worrying is a performance enhancer, and your failures are proof that you should have worried all along. Unfalsifiable negativity. “A walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity” as Andrew Wilkinson says. You build a link between worry and performance. A belief that your performance would have been markedly worse if you hadn’t worried so much, and that the worrying is precisely what motivated and enabled the outcomes you wanted. Even when you reach black belt status and have confidence in your capacities, there’s a lack of enthused energy. Perhaps the worry has left you but it’s not been replaced with excitable enthusiasm, just high expectation. I want to propose a radical new approach… assuming that things will go well. After a while, I don’t think that the fear is aiding your performance. You’re primarily running on habit and skill and experience. Maybe the fear was needed in the beginning to narrow your focus and create the obsession, but now you’ve reached escape velocity and are drifting in space. So why are you still holding the controls just as tightly as when you were on the launchpad instead of enjoying the view? Fuck me this will all be over soon. You do realise that right? This isn’t going to last forever. Your final sports match, the last trip to give a presentation, a concluding project at work. You can look back on a great run of miserable successes, or actually try to embrace some enjoyment. Perhaps to even prioritise it. Do not confuse relentless dour severity with seriousness and sophistication. It is not more noble to treat your pursuits so sternly that the only positive element is the end result and absolutely none of the experience. Things will go well. You will figure it out, just like you always have. So go seek some joy. MODERN WISDOMI do a podcast where I pretend to have a British accent. You should subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. This week’s upcoming episodes: Monday. Thursday. Saturday. THINGS I'VE LEARNED1. “70% of women say a married man who has an affair is always morally wrong, while 56% say the same for married women. 53% of men say it is always morally wrong for a woman to have an affair, while 61% say the same for men.” — Rob Henderson 2. The real sign of success is when someone says “I bet you had wealthy parents”. 3. “Make your life an ongoing process of being who you are, at your deepest, most easeful levels of being. Everything other than this process is secondary. Your job, your children, your wife, your money, your artistic creations, your pleasures—they are all superficial and empty, if they are not floating in the deep sea of your conscious being.” — David Deida LIFE HACKA good article. Awesome article from last week’s podcast guest Lionel Page breaking down how happiness and meaning works. Pretty much answers most of the big questions we all ask ourselves on these topics. Read it. Big love, Try my productivity drink Neutonic. PS |
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3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, “No one deserves to be praised for kindness if he does not have the strength to be bad." — La Rouchefoucauld I’ve been thinking about the difference between choosing to do a virtuous act, and being compelled by your nature. I have a tendency to see other people’s emotional states as my responsibility. If you’re not ok, then I’m not ok. That someone else’s distress is a problem for me to solve. A while ago I rang a friend to check in on them after an amicable debate....
3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, I'm back in the UK. Come see me live this Thursday in London at the Eventim Apollo - https://chriswilliamson.live/london “I still find myself with this sense that success has to be earned. And the only way to earn it is to inflict pain on yourself. And if you’re not in pain you didn’t try hard enough. And it would have been better if you’d suffered more. And I think that’s a lie, and I want to find out if it’s a lie or if it’s true.” — Rich Roll I think it’s a lie...
3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, I'm coming to London! See me live next Thursday 28th November at the Eventim Apollo with 3499 other people - https://chriswilliamson.live/london An ode to people who don’t believe in themselves. What comes first, belief or action? Do you need to believe you can do a thing before you do it? “Fake it until you make it” is one option, but incredibly hard if you’re introspective or have low self-belief and high standards. So what about make it until you fake it? Here...