Highlights from the Internet: Part 8
Below you'll find part 8 of my collection of highlights from the internet. I read and highlighted most of it in the Pocket app.
Add More Constraints for Better Decisions
Same goes for career options and income-generating opportunities. Start by eliminating options that aren’t fascinating, stimulating, and fun. Rule out whatever doesn’t feel purposeful and heart-aligned. Drop ideas that aren’t likely to be highly lucrative. Dump the possibilities that aren’t creative and growth-oriented. Keep narrowing your options till you start wondering if your standards might be too high.
Setback or Step Up?
Remember that life has an incredibly playful side. Work is just play. Making money is play. Relationships are play. Writing is play. Even paying bills is play.
Stressing out in a negative way is optional. Enjoying some positive stress is called excitement or passion.
Life will challenge you. That’s what life does. That’s what games do. Can you still have fun even when you’re losing? Are you actually losing if you’re having fun? Or are you actually losing if you’re technically winning the game but not having fun?
Imaginary Failure
A good place to start is to consider what other people experience routinely that may seem to be difficult or impossible for you. This can help you identify some beliefs about yourself that may not be accurate.
How would you know that you can’t make $100K in a week, love vegan food for a month, and attract an amazing relationship? You obviously would have had to have directly tried all of them – with intention and direct action. And your efforts would have needed to fail repeatedly, not in your mind but in reality.
Dump the Freedom Frame
A framing that works much better is to look upon income-generating projects as fun and creative ways to express snd enjoy your freedom.
Assume that you’re already free. You can use that freedom to express many different ideas, values, and aspects of your personality. What would you want to express, explore, and experience if you were already free? Do that now.
If earning income is boring, tedious, or stressful for you, that’s because you’re using your freedom to express income generation in boring, tedious, or stressful ways. You don’t have to do that! You can use your freedom to express income generation through fun, playfulness, wildness, creativity, humor, connection, love, appreciation, purpose, and more.
Don’t try to earn freedom. You don’t have to earn it. You already have it. Just use it and run with it. Go straight to the fun parts. Go straight to the meaning and purpose. Go straight to the scary stuff – which is actually fun!
Income generation is a form of PLAY: Powerfully Living as the Abundant You). It’s part of the dance with reality. There’s no need to prove anything or earn anything. Just express the full juiciness of your freedom because you’re already free to do that.
It’s so much easier to earn plenty of income through play, creativity, and connection when you recognition and appreciate the tremendous freedom you already have.
Caring vs Pretending to Care
What will you offer yourself today?
Will this be a day of engaging with what truly lights you up inside… or another grayscale day?
Appreciation Density
If you’re feel unsatisfied in some area of life, look at your appreciation density. Are you deriving enough satisfaction from your investments? If not, where’s the waste? Where are the empty calories? Where are you investing time, energy, money, or other resources and not getting much satisfaction in return? Obviously that waste needs to be cut if you want to increase your appreciation density.
Buying Appreciation
The key is to pay more respect to the emotional reality of a purchase. I now give more weight to how much I’m likely to appreciate and value an item for the time it will be with me.
Persisting as a solo founders
Over time I've realized that action precedes motivation and procrastination precedes guilt.
This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)
learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
Fragile vs Resilient Relationships
It can be good to apologize when you feel you made a mistake, but the capacity to forgive is more important. If you and the other person are good at apologizing, but if even one of you can’t forgive, the relationship won’t endure. You could both be bad at apologizing, however, but if you’re both good at forgiving, your relationship will be more resilient and can endure.
We always have the option to tread cautiously around other people to avoid running into any fragile edges. Or we can live more like free spirits and be fully ourselves, smashing those fragile edges to smithereens whenever we encounter them. What’s left when all the fragile edges break? What’s left are powerfully resilient relationships with people and with life – the kind that we couldn’t break even if we tried.
Declining Emotional Invitations
A good way to shift over to the aligned side is to get really good at saying no to misaligned invitations.
Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles
Focusing on big goals rather than on making money, and on creating more value than you capture are closely related principles. The first one is a test that applies to those starting something new; the second is the harder test that you must pass in order to create something enduring.
The Relationship Frame
Look at an area where you tend to struggle or have a hard time accomplishing your goals. What do you see when you use the relationship frame on that area? Is your relationship based on trying to force yourself to push through resistance? If so, how could you improve the relationship over time, so you naturally enjoy engaging with this area of life? This simple reframe can generate powerful insights that can radically transform your results.
Hidden Goals and Illness
You can also see this as a lifestyle problem. If illness starts to look better than wellness, at least to give you access to a short period of rest, that signals that your lifestyle is out of balance and that it would be wise to incorporate more rest. You can claim a lifestyle that includes sufficient time for rest and play. Maintain a lifestyle that provides an accessible pathway to the benefits of illness without actually having to get sick.
Subtract
Life can be improved by adding, or by subtracting. The world pushes us to add, because that benefits them. But the secret is to focus on subtracting.
The least successful people I know run in conflicting directions, are drawn to distractions, say yes to almost everything, and are chained to emotional obstacles.
The most successful people I know have a narrow focus, protect themselves against time-wasters, say no to almost everything, and have let go of old limiting beliefs.