Category: Investing In Yourself

My sister made an important observation at brunch this morning.

She said, “I just really want to be happy and anything that doesn’t feel good at this phase of my life, I’m removing.”

And she went on to talk about how her loyalty to people and places of work—while easily considered a strength—has turned out to be, as of late, a burden. Because while being loyal to people and places creates trust and depth of connection, it can also become a source of stagnation and toxicity. And remaining loyal to stagnation and toxicity isn’t admirable at all—in fact, it’s being disloyal to the person we should always keep at #1: ourself.

While it can be hard to detach from people and places you’ve built longstanding connection and trust with, if it isn’t serving you anymore and is making you unhappy, closing that specific chapter can be one of the most generous things you can do for the spirit of the relationship. Because not only will it create a new, fresh space for you to contemplate and play with… but it’ll likely do the same for everybody involved.

…And it’s too often that each of us forget: there is no growth without some kind of correlated “death.” You can’t keep everything the same and grow. By definition, something has got to go.

The question is, what are you willing to sacrifice for the growth you desire so?

In conversation with a few parents the other day, one mom felt that audiobooks didn’t count as reading.

She wanted her son to read book-in-hand, one-word-at-a-time, undistracted, in reality.

…But, why do we read?

Is it so we can exercise our eyes? So we can practice decoding and understanding text? So we can practice being still and concentrating our attention?

Maybe…

But, most importantly I’d say it’s to expand our mind by infecting it with the stories and ideas shared within.

And I’d say there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing that via audiobook… or via graphic novel… or via kindle… or via classic paper text… or even via listening to someone else read it to you in person.

The problem isn’t the kid not wanting to read IRL books.

The problem is trying to force the kid to obtain the life expanding, mentally nourishing, spiritually evolving ideas buried in books via a medium that doesn’t align with them.

It’s too easy to just go back onto TikTok and scroll your life away instead.

Show them where the real depth of life lies… show them where the worlds of the imaginations can truly go… show them how much better a 20 hour time spent book is vs 20 hours spent watching 5-60 second nonsense videos.

Align; don’t force.

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P.s. You can read the best of what I posted to MoveMe Quotes last week here.

Money is not the currency of life—energy is.

The greater your energy levels, the more living you get to “buy.”

The lower your energy levels, the less you’ll be able to afford before crashing and disassociating from life altogether.

One of the unique modern day dilemmas we face is that screens can stimulate us awake for extended periods of time even though we’re exhausted and crave sleep.

I’ve been experiencing this first hand.

I’ll be absolutely exhausted at the end of a long day, crash on the couch, and stay up WAY past my normal bed time watching a show or YouTube series simply because the stimulant of the screen distracts me from noticing and acting on my exhaustion.

…Which causes me to borrow energy from the next day (because I don’t get a full and proper sleep), which leads to less life I’ll be able to “buy,” which hopefully doesn’t lead to more screen time but likely will, which perpetuates the problem.

If you want to get more out of life, don’t obsess over hoarding money, obsess over maximizing your energy levels each and every day.

We buy life in energy we can bring to present moments—not in money we’re going to spend “one day.”

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P.s. Here’s the best of what I posted to MoveMe Quotes last week.

I played a strategy game yesterday for a few hours as I was intensely recharging.

Last night, I dreamt almost exclusively about the gameplay.

It was an isolated yet stark reminder that what you choose to fill your head with, acts as the raw materials with which your mindset and interpretation of life are formed.

It’s critically important to remember—now more than ever in the history of mankind—to choose what you fill you head up with wisely.

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P.s. In case you missed it, you can see the best of what I posted to MoveMe Quotes last week, here.

The more I learn, the more I also need to remember.

And my memory definitely isn’t all that and a bag of chips.

I can’t tell you how many times I learned something new from something I already read before. Or how many times I resurfaced an idea that I knew, but just hadn’t thought about in a long time.

It’s a mistake to think that once you’ve learned something it’s there forever and you can move on.

The more we learn, the more space we need to create for those new files, and the deeper those other files need to go into storage. We only have so much short-term memory space.

Taking time to resurface those files can be just as valuable, if not more so, than writing new ones.

Be humble in your approach to ongoing education. Never assume you know. Especially in today’s world where there are endless files being written into our brain’s storage every waking moment of every single day. Reread old books. Retake classes & seminars. Listen more carefully to the people you feel you’ve already learned plenty from…

There’s so much to resurface that’s already there.