Are you practicing writing? Or giving up writing?
Are you practicing persevering? Or giving up?
Are you practicing doing what you know is good for you? Or ignoring what you know is good for you?
You’re always practicing something. And what you practice, you’ll become good at. And what you practice will persist.
You don’t know what tomorrow will bring.
But you do have a say in how you spend today.
And when you go to bed, and tomorrow becomes today, you’ll have a say in that day too.
And when you spend every today doing what’s important, maybe you don’t even need to know what the future holds.
The easiest path is to miss all days – you never get going in the first place so you don’t know what you’re missing.
The second easiest is to never miss a day – you’ll get where you want to go with little detours, even if you pay the cost of discipline.
The hardest (and most common) path is to miss a couple of days here and there – now you run the risk of getting lost.
We all miss a day sometimes – so we all get a little lost once in a while.
So what do we do?
We remind ourselves why we got started.
We remind ourselves where we’re going.
We remind ourselves that we’ve been lost before – and that we can always get back on track.
What do we do when AI can cobble together in seconds essays that take us hours (or days) to write – not even counting years of practice?
Maybe it just raises the bar for us – requiring is to make new work that continues to stand out from AI-generated content.
As things stand, that’s still possible.
But what happens when the bar is set so high that our human brains can’t jump over it anymore, even with a lifetime of practice?
A memory is what we decide to remember from an experience – and what we decide to delete and forget.
Intuition is the instant hunch we get after we’ve repeatedly created memories from experiences; the moment we don’t need the conscious memory anymore.
A small (or unrepresentative) sample size leads to inaccurate intuition.
If I’m betrayed three times in my life and have created strong memories around that, my intuition whenever meeting anyone else may be that they’ll betray me too. Three bad experiences have shaped, and skewed, my relationship to billions of others.
How to develop accurate intuition?
The more memories we create, the bigger the “sample size” for our intuition to emerge from, and the smaller the weight of “outlier events” (like being betrayed).
The more deliberately we create these memories, the more deliberately we hone intuition.
Create more memories. And create them deliberately.
We all live in a maze of mistranslations and misunderstandings about who we think you are and who others think we are.
Now, by lack of a way to know who we truly are, misunderstandings can be comforting, my friend; there’s no doubt about that.
But when you get so lost in the maze that it causes suffering, it might be time to start mending the misunderstandings.
Could it be that mending is nothing more than making another mistranslation about who we are that makes us happier?
After all, I can perceive myself as a struggling writer or a skilled wordsmith – both perspectives hold their truths.
It’s the power of our misunderstandings that molds our reality.
Today marks day 400 of the Daily Insight newsletter – which calls for a longer post and a question for you.
Let’s start with three lessons I learned from publishing daily.
I wasn’t inspired every day in the past 400 days – but many days I was.
And I wouldn’t have had the inspiring days without the uninspired days.
Maybe writing when you’re not inspired is the whole point.
Because showing up for the bad moments makes it possible to be there for the good moments, too.
In the past, I just couldn’t get myself to write, not even if I really wanted to.
Now, I just write.
Doing something new always goes against your current beliefs and always comes with resistance – otherwise, you would already be doing it.
But seeing how tiny daily actions can normalize a behavior that in the past seemed unattainable was incredibly empowering.
You don’t have to be ready to get started. You get started to become ready.
For the longest time, I felt like I always gave up on things that were important to me. I just couldn’t persevere.
So, I chose to start writing daily. But I could’ve also decided to run every day. Or knit.
In the end, the activity itself doesn’t matter. You can choose any desire you feel resistance towards…
And start using it as a symbol of your defiance against your limiting beliefs.
In its essence, such “Tiny Trust Builder” actions, as I came to call them, are symbolic.
Pick one. Attach meaning to it. Use it to prove to yourself that your aspirations are not just pipe dreams. And see how your life changes.
Maybe it didn’t have to take 400 days to prove to myself that I could write every day – or maybe it did.
Either way, I did it. And now the question arises: what’s next?
To answer that question, I need your help.
Why are you subscribed to this newsletter? What do you get out of it?
Could I do anything to make the newsletter more interesting to you?
Let me know by replying to this email so we can shape the next 400 newsletters together.
Thanks for being along for the journey!
