It’s supposed to be hard, and that’s exactly why you should do it
Important things in life don’t come easy. Nor should they. Education, self-learning, staying fit, staying financially stable, mentally sane and acute, etc. — all of these things require friction. They require work.
The hours to put in. The struggle of not knowing where to go next. The thrill of finding a solution. The discipline to push yourself.
That’s why all education is, really, self-education. (As Maria Popova said, knowledge has to be claimed.)
And that is why we must not shy away from doing hard things.
Doing hard things brings freedom we can’t buy otherwise.
The modern agenda in a…
Two life-altering ideas that help me get through the hard times.
After being depressed for several months (and finding solace in self-destructive behavior), I learned to feel deep empathy for people who go through hard emotional periods. Nobody is immune from it.
One day you feel like you’re on top of the world. The next day your world crumbles, and it feels like there’s no hope.
It doesn’t necessarily have to do with anything significant (like, death of a loved one or going bankrupt), or it might. It can be both the little things and the big things that trigger you. It can even be nothing at all. …
Everything is a funnel.
Everything is a funnel.
You publish 10,000 blog posts.
Then the following happens:
- One thousand of them get people’s attention.
- One hundred go viral.
- And one gets you a million-dollar book deal.
Notice that you don’t control getting a million-dollar book deal. Nor do you control any of the later stages of the funnel.
In fact, the only thing you do control is getting those 10,000 blog posts written in the first place. You always control just the first step of the funnel.
This works in anything in life — music, creative work, personal success, even getting a doctor’s appointment…
My generation has a serious problem.
The big problem of my generation is boredom.
However, it’s not the presence of it that’s the problem. Rather, it's the absence of boredom.
Instead of embracing boredom for what it is — a natural way of life for most beings — we constantly run away: consuming more content and doing more things.
We do this in futile attempts of “having an interesting life.” You know, the one you see on Instagram: with yachts, sandy beaches, mojitos, giving keynotes in front of an audience of thousands, and making millions in blog ad revenue.
Every time we feel stable, we assume…
It’s about an elephant.
I have a theory. It’s about an elephant.
Well, not the actual animal elephant, but rather the “elephant in the room”.
I think — and again, this is just a theory of mine based on my own experiences and minimal observations — that people are generally bored and tired of how typical the content on the Web is.
Go to any platform — YouTube, Medium, even Google for fuck’s sake, –and you’ll get a river of bullshit that says roughly the same thing, just in different ways.
There’s a certain clickbait headline (“77 Signs You’re a Shmuck”), a certain format…
It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to be depressed. It’s okay to be unproductive. It’s okay not to hustle all the time. It’s okay to be lazy.
It’s okay not to love broccoli. It’s okay to have breakfast at 4 PM. It’s okay to eat peanut butter sandwiches for dinner, lunch, and breakfast. It’s okay to not have breakfast at all. (It’s even okay to write ‘dinner, lunch, breakfast’, instead of ‘breakfast, lunch, and dinner’, simply because you feel like it.)
It’s okay to want to binge-watch a whole season of Rick and Morty. It’s okay to want to…
Destroy something beautiful.
Remember that scene from Fight Club?
The main character punches Jared Leto’s character in the face. Blood spills all over the place. Jared Leto tries to fight but he can’t.
Once the main character wins, he kneels over his opponent (all covered in blood) and says: “I just wanted to destroy something beautiful.”
Next scene: Jared Leto comes to Tyler Durden’s house with a scarred, bruised face, and a black eye.
Life is often like Fight Club.
To build a new life for yourself, you have to first destroy the one you have. Perhaps it’s the comfy job you’re tired…
The world’s speed is too fast for our minds to process. Yet we keep on accelerating in the hope that if we do more, say more, consume more, we’ll catch up with what we miss. The irony is that the faster we go, the farther it escapes us.
We don’t even know what we’re chasing. We don’t have a name for it. A word. A label. The only thing we have is a feeling. That something is out of place, and it’s been like that for a while.
Some people think it’s happiness. They spend lives helplessly chasing happiness, oblivious…
“There’s nothing magical about writing. It’s just talking in print.”
The best writing technique I’ve discovered is just writing.
Just opening the computer and letting your fingers do the job.
There’s always something inside the box.
Ask any improv comic and they’ll tell you that the only thing that saves them on stage, when they have 0 rehearsals, is blind trust in that there’s something inside them already.
If that trust wavers for a second, you’re done. Paralyzed. Smashed. Destroyed.
As long as you believe in yourself and in having a box inside of you that’s not empty, you’ll be fine.
Find out what you’re thinking by writing.
You can’t know what you think until you actually start writing. Most of my articles…
You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to want it — simply doing is enough.
Everything changes when you start treating it as a job. For the better.
Many creators assume that “following your passion” equals doing creative work and perpetual glee, joy, and feeling of bliss. They’re wrong.
Not only you don’t have to feel uplifted all the time, you also simply don’t have to like your craft. (That’s contrarian, I know.) But I know movie directors who hate their work at the end of a 12-hour shift. There are writers who hate the process of writing. Musicians who despise certain parts of music-making. You get the point.
The modern “follow your passion” dogma…
Sergey Faldin
Making sense of the world and teaching others. One post at a time. | My books: https://amzn.to/2WfHBWS| Reach out: faldin.sergey@gmail.com
