- Resentment
- Self-hatred
- Jealousy
- Shame
- Guilt
- Fear
—They accomplish nothing.
They merely stand in the way.
I help busy people do inner work.
—They accomplish nothing.
They merely stand in the way.
It never ceases to amaze me how much we can learn from ourselves when we actually take the time to sit and clearly write the content of our minds.
We have an entire lifetime of experience, have processed an unfathomable amount of raw information, and have one of the most powerful computers synthesizing it all 24/7.
Don’t undermine yourself. Don’t sell yourself short. Don’t underestimate your abilities.
There’s more to you than you think.
Writers block is a real problem for many people. But, talkers block? It isn’t even a thing.
Well, what is writing but talking, edited?
If you try to turn your writing into something that sounds completely foreign to how you talk—of course it’s going to be a real problem.
You’re trying to write down words in a way you’d never usually use them.
Don’t do that.
Write how you talk.
Then, after you’ve said all that you can think to say—edit. Make it better. Cut out the fluff. Reorganize what you said for clarity. Give your trains of thought some tracks.
Authenticity is what makes great writing great—not fancy words and complex grammar application.
Commit to being more yourself in your writing and suddenly, writers block disappears.
Because what’s blocking you from writing isn’t the words you could say (I’m sure there’s plenty you could say about any given topic), it’s the pseudo-persona you’re trying to embody when it comes time to write.
Game changer: add “up until now…” to any and all negative self-talk.
Because now, that version of you is in the past.
Negative self-talk might come from a seemingly inevitable negative reality, but the only thing inevitable is your continued negative reality if you don’t change how you talk to yourself.
You will never outperform your self-image.
Now is as good of a time as any to change it.
Generating ideas is not like emptying a reservoir.
You don’t tap into your idea source and then drain ideas until they’re all gone.
It works more like, well, a generator.
It requires mechanical energy in, but as a result, you get electrical energy out.
You expend energy getting into the right state, meeting up with the right people, organizing the tasks of your day, staring at enough blank screens, cataloguing through the other ideas of the world until—it happens.
Your mechanical energy is converted.
And you are no longer draining a reservoir, but rather are generating a type of electrical output that lights up your mind and charges your whole body.
The reality is, if you feel like you’re “out of ideas,” it isn’t because you’ve emptied what you had—what’s really happened is your generator needs to be looked at and fixed.
This might involve a change in how you optimize your state, changing who you spend your time with, organizing your tasks in more inspiring ways, being more patient with your process, forcing yourself to get more bored, or spending more time cataloguing other idea sources.
And if your generator isn’t broken, then, you simply need to put more mechanical energy in.
Perfectionism doesn’t beget perfection.
If anything, perfectionism begets hesitation and disappointment—over and over again.
For every time you look close—another flaw, wrinkle, fault presses itself forward and prevents you from acting or feeling in the desired way.
And as long as perfection is the standard, disappointment will continue to be the byproduct.
Why? Because perfection is the antithesis of being human—we are anti-perfect creatures.
We’re filled with flaws, wrinkles, and faults that are constantly pressing themselves forward into the forefront of our minds.
They demand our attention and are constantly reminding us of the paradox of our situation: imperfect creatures fighting to become perfect.
And so we hesitate. We feel disappointment. We fill with anguish.
Until, of course, we don’t.
Until we align with our nature rather than fight it. Until we fill our minds with acceptance rather than inadequacy. Until we stop seeking perfection and start embracing what’s imperfect.
Until we finally choose to become anti-perfectionists.
Let us not forget that today we are:
And are:
…As the greats that came before.
There is no reason why we too, cannot be great.