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  • #291 Beliefs follow actions

    When you write every day, you believe you can write every day.

    When you don’t write every day, you believe you can’t every day.

    And so it goes for running, working out, eating healthy, playing the guitar, or anything else you’re frustrated or satisfied with.

    Beliefs follow actions.

    Actions confirm beliefs.

    So follow your actions to uncover your beliefs.

    Then change your actions to change your beliefs.

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    #45 The tragedy of the spoken word

    Language helps us describe the world we perceive. Yet in doing so, it closes our eyes, our ears, our touch, and our heart to the parts of the world we don’t have words for.

    Every language is a lens on a felt reality within and around us – both clarifying and categorizing the world, and limiting it by the words it has available.

    Learning more languages gives you new lenses – and a richer sense of reality.

    But just like the structure of our ears limit the sounds we can hear, and the structure of our eyes limit colors we can see, the structure of any language somehow limits our felt experience of the world.

    How do we re-access memories, emotions, hidden away in a long-forgotten language?

    How do we re-learn to listen to the voices of the wordless world speaking to our animal self… the voices that once upon a time, before verbal language emerged, were all we had?

    there’s an eternal song
    drowned out by the confines of my mother tongue
    a wordless melody that once made sense
    until our brain started blurring it with a lens
    narrowing it down
    neglecting its nuances through verbs and nouns

    with all its might language wants us to abide
    but the wordless world it tries to hide
    will forever be inside

    Lukas Van Vyve
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    #217 Inaction is not the lack of action

    If I don’t write the post I intended to write, I actively avoid the desired result of my writing.

    If I don’t do the workout I intended to do, I actively avoid the desired result of my workout (being in better shape, running a new PR,…)

    If I don’t have the difficult conversation I intended to have, I actively avoid the desired result of that conversation.


    Inaction is not the lack of action.

    Inaction is taking active action to avoid working towards the result you desire.

    The real question, then, is:

    Why do I actively avoid working toward a desired result?

    Am I worried that even if I write daily, I’ll never become a skilled writer?

    Am I worried I won’t enjoy writing anymore if I ever get recognition?

    Am I worried that writing every day will turn me into a skilled writer, but being a professional writer won’t be fulfilling?

    P.S. I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that I only have a limited repertoire of examples in this newsletter, my friend

    I trust you to apply the insight to your situation.

    And maybe, when you’re pondering the question above, you’ll come to the same conclusion as me:

    That more often than not, I’m more interested in the comfort of “wanting” something I don’t have than in “taking action to get something.”

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