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 |
Podcaster with 1bn+ plays. I write about the most important lessons from the best thinkers on the planet. 300,000+ people read my free newsletter. Press subscribe to join.
3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, The Gastric Band Surgery of Being Busy. After undergoing gastric band surgery, people’s risk of suicide goes up. That’s perhaps unsurprising - gastric band surgery is a big deal and can sometimes have complications, infections and painful outcomes. But one of the unseen reasons for the increased suicide risk is actually due to the surgery going right, not it going wrong. Many patients used food as a way to deal with issues in their lives like emotional challenges,...
3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, I’ve been thinking about how to achieve a Realistic Path To Enlightenment. As much as moving to a cave in the woods and spending a decade in silent retreat might be great for your spirit, it’s not going to be doable by pretty much anyone. If you’ve meditated enough, you know that you accumulate momentum in mindfulness, kind of like a swell moving underwater. After enough time, there is a force and a power to your ability to drop into the present moment, and...
3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, Post-Content Clarity. This is the best way to work out whether the content you consume is making your life better or worse. You see, there is a problem. While you watch anything, you are distracted by the content itself. Which means you can’t judge how the content impacts you. The creator has designed the content to be compelling and to keep you hooked, because if they didn’t, they’d be beaten by another creator who achieved that more effectively. But just because...