🔴 Do It But Don't Rush It
Have you had days when creating feels like a chore?
Maybe you've been creative in the past but lack the motivation to start or finish a project today.
To be candid, that’s how I feel now.
When do you classify something as a slump?
When do you classify a slump as laziness or complacency?
Yes, building a personal brand is important. For God’s sake, half of these newsletters are about growing your brand. But more important than growing your brand is taking care of yourself. You have to listen to your body. You have to know when to run and when to recover.
Your bandwidth is like a rubber band. You'll snap if you go from 0-100 in a day. But if you go from 0-10 then 10-20 then 20-30, one day you’ll realize you’re handling 100 with ease.
It’s ok to take some time and just be.
The issue is when you don’t care for yourself mentally and physically.
In that case, it’s easy to spiral downward and believe that you’re less than because you lack the progress you used to see.
A trope many people fall into is thinking progress should be measured against someone else.
I once interviewed the main guy from @theschoolofhardknockz. You’ve probably seen his videos. He interviews millionaires in fancy cars and receives great advice.
He’s a sharp, well-spoken, JACKED, 24-year-old kid.
He’s the one on the right in the post below.
Seeing his demeanor in person I thought to myself… this kid is so far ahead of me in life.
In moments like that, we fail to acknowledge that their success doesn’t come at our expense.
Why does it matter if it looks like you’re ‘losing’ to someone else?
You don’t want to live their life, anyway.
It’s easy to think that becoming popular on social media should be the end goal because it comes with cool perks.
A few days ago I played basketball with GaryVee in a public park in NYC. Across all social channels, he has around 30 million followers. I thought he would be swarmed as soon as we started playing.
We were there for two full hours. One person stopped to say hi. One. They didn’t even want a picture. After over a decade of energy to build a following, ONE person approached him for a 3-second interaction.
Success isn’t a follower count or how much money you have.
Success is being happy with who you are now compared to who you were in the past.
We don’t need to rush the process, either. Especially for my friends who are in their twenties and thirties. We are only young once. Let’s live a little.
On the topic of not needing to rush anything, let’s talk about one of the most famous paintings of all time, the “Great Wave.”
The artist, Hokusai, painted it at 72 years old.
The artist was painting since he was 6 years old, and it took him 72 years to break into the mainstream.
According to Calza (2003), only a few years before his death, the artist Hokusai said:
From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own.
Imagine spending your entire life painting and having “nothing worth taking into account” until you’re 73 years old.
We make life too complicated by holding a measuring stick to our accomplishments.
Everything You Need To Know
I stumbled on a video that perfectly articulates the beauty of pursuing your interests.
The video starts with a young boy asking a man on stage “Can you tell me everything I need to know?”
The crowd bursts with laughter, and a man with his eyes closed answers excitedly…
Everything you need to know is this, truly. Whatever options are available to you at any given moment, choose the one that contains more excitement than any other, even if it's just a little bit more. Act on it to the best of your ability, taking it as far as you can until you can take it no further. Do this with integrity, and do this with absolutely no assumption or insistence on what the outcome ought to be, how it should look, or how you should get there whatsoever.
When you do that three-part formula—act on your highest excitement to the best of your ability with no insistence on the outcome—you open up and activate the toolkit of excitement. The toolkit contains everything you need to be supported in life, in whatever form it needs to come in. It becomes the driving engine that moves you through life, the organizing principle of synchronicity that allows you to do what you need to do when you need to do it, in perfect timing and perfect order.
It becomes the path of least resistance that allows you to flow through your life effortlessly. It connects you to all other expressions of your excitement, even if they don't look like they're connected on the surface. It becomes the reflective mirror that reveals to you anything within your consciousness that might be out of alignment with that excitement so that you can identify those definitions that don't work for you, let them go, and add their energy to your excitement to continue to expand.
Then, any circumstance or situation that arises from those actions, no matter how it looks, if you give it a positive meaning, you will only get a positive and beneficial effect, regardless of how the situation may have originated or anyone else's opinion or experience in that situation. That's it. That's all you need to know. - Bashar
Later, I learned that the person who said the above claims to be channeling a non-physical being from the future known as Bashar.
Whether you believe Bashar is real or not isn’t relevant. I have no stance, I just discovered this person a few days ago.
What he said is a beautiful articulation of the butterfly effect when you pursue your interests with no expectation of the result.
If you’re looking to find where to put your energy, the 🔴 THREE Method can help.
If you liked today’s newsletter and want to support it, consider becoming a paid subscriber!
I find it so interesting, how people can inspire you to make progress in your own life, yet that person deep down is struggling with something, and probably doesn’t even realise the impact they and their work has had on you.