Good morning, team!
Back with another one of these. No long story this week. Just 6 thoughts about growing and getting better at being a person that have been stuck inside my head, and I wanted to pass them along.
A couple of them are uncomfortable. That's usually how I know they're worth sharing.
Steal, share, or save any of them. Liberally.
Marissa Mayer was one of Google's earliest employees and later ran Yahoo. This is how she described the way she pushed herself:
Notice the words she picked — “a little”. Not completely. Not wildly. A little.
Last week I told you about the time I thought I would run 120 miles when I'd never gone past 13. That was “a lot” not ready.
Pick the thing that's one step past where you are. Not ten steps. Then say yes before the part of you that wants to wait stops you from moving forward
Thomas Szasz was a psychiatrist, best known for his 1961 book The Myth of Mental Illness. In The Second Sin, from 1973, he wrote this:
Kids learn fast because they haven't built an ego they need to protect yet. The longer we go, the more there is to guard. The title. The reputation. The story about being the one who already knows.
Every bit of that gets in the way of getting to where you want to be.
If nothing has bruised your ego in a while, you're probably not learning much. That bruise is the cost of getting better.
Brandon Webb, who trained Navy SEAL snipers, boiled getting good at something down to an equation:
Failure on its own doesn't teach you anything. You can fail the same way for ten years —and many people do.
Reflection is the part most of us skip, because it's the part where you have to look deeply inside yourself at what you actually did. At who you really are.
Pick the last thing you failed at. Spend ten minutes writing down exactly what happened. Try it again next week.
Sarah Hepola wrote Blackout, a memoir about getting sober after years of drinking. This is what she says change actually looks like:
Sweat and humility and slips. She put the slips in the sentence on purpose. Because they happen. You’re human. Not a robot. The bridge doesn’t get built without setbacks.
If you slipped this week, you didn't wreck the bridge. Lay the next brick.
Jim Rohn spent decades teaching personal development, and this is the line of his I keep coming back to:
Most of us treat the goal as the prize. Rohn reminds us to treat it as the bait. What it is really doing is pulling you into becoming someone who is capable of achieving it.
Which means if you hit the number and you haven't changed, you may have set it too low.
Look at what you want this year and ask who you would have to be to achieve it. Then start being that person in a small way today.
And Susan Sontag, in her journal, years before she was famous. She had just counted up the "sentences" she felt she had served: her childhood, her marriage, and her child's childhood. Then she wrote:
She didn't write "I should." She wrote "must."
And look at what she set against it. Not failing. Waiting. A lot of what we call patience is just waiting.
Pick one thing you've been waiting on and change a small piece of it this week.
Quick note.
If you missed last week's issue, it's the one about the time I told a stranger I would run 120 miles when I'd never gone past 13, and my body quit at mile 70.
It lines up with this week’s theme more than I planned.
Pick the line that stung a little. That's probably the one.
And if you reply to this email, it comes straight to me. I dare you.
Love you all. 🖤