What do you have to prove?
What makes you try so hard, that you need to prove you’re a badass? Maybe you don’t need to prove anything. Not to the outside anyways. 🙂
Momentum
Today, this email comes from fellow daily emailer Tanya Moushi from Daily Inspire. It has such a resonance that I could not not share it with you.(Do go subscribe to her amazing dailies) Daily Inspire I don’t eat the frog.I do what builds momentum.Small wins –> Big snowballs. Tanya Moushi
Trade-offs
You can choose to do one thing above other things. If you try to do many things at once, odds of not completing all of them rise. You need to choose. To decide. To trade one thing for another. To pick one as a priority. And —usually— a priority is what stands out. However… You can’t live in priorities. Or in a constant state of emergency. Because if you live in a constant state of emergency, it’s not an emergency anymore. It’s chaos. Your way out: Be ruthless with what you say no to. It…
The hard choice
If you’re jumping from idea to idea, making all of them a priority as they show up, they’re not a priority. In fact, they might feel as emergencies, taking over each other constantly. And that’s not emergency anymore. It’s simply chaos. Here’s the thing Most of this happens because making the hard choice is… well, hard. As creatives, visionaries, or innovative people, we LOVE the new shiny object. But unless we get ruthless with ourselves and make the hard choice to pick and stick to the…
Feels like magic
Magic doesn’t exist. Yet you create it. Here’s something I learned from a magic course I took at university (entertainment for restaurants and bars —a past life): Magic exists. And it doesn’t exist. Doesn’t exist in the fairy-tale sense. However, magic is that awe people feel when they get to find, see and experience the unexpected. Magic is about surprise. About delight. It takes a shit-ton of work to get it done, and when it does, it’s not about the performer, but about the audience. About…
Point of no return
Going into things and thinking there’s a point of no return, where you just need to keep going. That’s another definition for sunk costs. When you feel you’ve already invested so much it’s not worth quitting so you hope for the best, despite all the red flags. When you know you’re desperate, but think it doesn’t show. When you think you need to prove something. When you think that prospect will be turned off by you reaching out. Here’s the thing You can return. Regroup. Retreat. Is it hard?…
Fairness
“If someone is working more, they deserve more. That’s fair” [Overheard in a conversation.] That’s not necessarily true. It generalizes that more effort (aka work) is tied to more rewards. If that were the case, interns should be millionaires by now. A book that took 11 years to get written, should be the most awarded. Or… It could have nothing to do with it. Like this song, by Beastie Boys “It was summer 1986. We wrote it in about five minutes. We were in the Palladium with Rick Rubin,…
Everything’s been said
Jain. [German expression for Yes and No at the same time (Ja+Nein)] If you have this feeling that when you’re writing (daily), you’ll get to a point where you’ve said it all. You might be right. Or not. Everything’s been already said (mostly) by someone else. However, you have a perspective very few people (if any) have. Your own experiences. Your own fails. Your wins. And your burns. Being original is an spectrum. Like life, it’s not all black and white. So, go ahead and repeat. Plus, if you…
The thing about your ONE thing
What’s THE thing about your one thing? What makes it unlike to what others might say about the same thing?
Things I’m afraid of — on daily writing.
A daily mailing list. For 365 days. Fucking scary. Been doing this for 252 days till now and it still feels scary, but GREAT. Joining Jonathan Stark’s Email365 last year to get to write consistently (again) was challenging/exciting. Over half a year of doing this, there are still these mind tricks playing around: Will I have something to say? What if I run out of things to write about? What if I’m not clear enough? See the pattern? → Me, Me, Me There was a shift Taking Me out of the equation…