“It’s too late for this.”
“The world isn’t ready for that.”
Both are invalid excuses to not do the work.
You’ll always fall behind.
And you’ll always be ahead of your time.
All you can do is getting the most out of the now, while keeping in mind the past and keeping an eye on the future.
Intentional living is about reminding yourself of what’s most important to you.
Reminding yourself that you can choose to be a writer, a runner, a musician, an artist, or a bon vivant.
Reminding yourself that you can choose to be kind to others.
Reminding yourself that you have a choice to act differently.
Reminding yourself that the past does not equal the future.
Reminding yourself that this, too, shall pass.
Reminding yourself that at any given moment, whatever reminder you need the most, you likely won’t think of yourself.
Reminding yourself that for this reason, it’s OK to get help and let someone else remind you with short daily notes.
And me, reminding myself that the act of writing daily reminders for you is the reminder I need to remember that I do, in fact, choose to be consistent, and I choose to be a writer.
Reminders upon reminders upon reminders that we will constantly get distracted, and we will always have the choice to come back to what truly matters.
I can worry a thousand times until my worries come true.
I can envision my dreams a thousand times until my dreams come true.
Not because of the act of worrying or the dreaming itself.
But because my worries or dreams will incite different present actions taking me down different paths.
Whatever future I focus on a thousand times, I’ll be drawn towards.
Choose wisely.
Learning a foreign language is both a frustrating and liberating experience.
We can focus on the frustration of not understanding the words the way we understand our mother tongue. Or we can realize that without the words, we are free to fall back on other ways of capturing and understanding meaning.
A crying baby can be soothed by words it does not yet understand, because she senses what’s behind the sounds, lets the meaningless melody cradle her to sleep…
Similarly, we don’t always have to know what’s behind the words, as long as we make an effort to understand the meaning behind the sounds.
Hearing a foreign language brings us back to that wordless world the way we experienced it as a newborn, before we tried so hard to put everything within and around us into language.
It makes us remember, there’s more to life than our words will ever allow us to express. And somehow, that’s a soothing thought.
When you realize nobody truly knows what they’re doing
Doesn’t that give you the freedom to say
Let me do this my way?
Here’s a question Tim Ferris asks startup founders (and himself) when deciding to invest time and money into a new project:
“If, in one (or two, or three) years from now, this whole project has failed miserably… Which assumptions you hold today were proven wrong?”
Tim Ferris
Answering the question first requires defining failure and success.
For my project of publishing a daily insight on this blog success looks like this:
Write & publish.
Edit.
Write & publish.
Edit.
Then write & publish some more.
Good, bad, well-received or not, received or read by anyone at all, it doesn’t matter.
Because first of all, writing is a creative outlet for me.
Second: long as I write & publish consistently, I trust I will get better at writing and publishing.
Finally: I trust that from all that sculpting away, day by day, will come better and better insights.
A pretty low bar for success – which, counterintuitively, often leads to more progress long-term.
Now we have established that:
What are the assumptions that could be wrong if next year, it turns out I failed to write & publish every day?
Here are some I can think of:
Will these assumptions be proven wrong?
Only time will tell.
Until then… I write & publish… then write & publish some more.
Passion is writing whenever you can.
Discipline is writing even when you can’t.
