I write 1-minute insights daily. Below are my latest. Like? Enter your email to get updates.
I help busy people do inner work.
Matt Hogan's Blog Posts
Featured Post
- I have a new employee starting today.
- It’s one of my friend’s son’s birthday today.
- My aunt is moving into her new “forever” home today.
- My co-worker is having an intense back surgery procedure today.
- And while I was driving home today, I saw that my neighbor’s house caught fire and burned down. Literally four houses away from where I live.
For each of the above situations, there are things I can do to help out. Things I can do to show thoughtfulness and care. Things I can do to make a real difference in their day… maybe even longer than that.
And my bet is, that’s probably true for you, too. Maybe not to the same extent that it happened for me on this particular day… but there none-the-less. Heck… maybe even more so?
My point is… maybe you’re focusing too much on the grandiose or getting too distracted on screen impact… and not enough on the folks in your own neighborhoods and in real life (IRL). The time, energy, and effort invested IRL can have an exponential effect compared to the same invested into screens.
I made a very deliberate choice to publish these daily writings with no images.
It streamlines the process and challenges me to make my words the art.
But sometimes, you come across an image that’s so good, you start to question whether there is any possible way to explain the idea better with only words…
And the below image (link here if it’s not showing) felt like one of those ideas:
…This is what this daily writing practice is about.
…This is what having some kind of reflective / therapeutic practice is all about.
…This is what inner work is about.
It’s about taking everything that’s floating around nonsensically and non-linearly in our head—out of our head—and laying it all flat on paper, canvas, or screen… and making sense of it all and giving it some kind of linear understanding.
The people who don’t make time for reflective type inner work… experience a harder type of existence. Not because their existence is inherently harder… but because they haven’t done the smart work required to make it easier.
…Yet.
P.s. ICYMI you can read the best of what I posted to MoveMe Quotes last week here.
I had about one hour of usable time for this post today… and I spent all of it karaoke-ing and dancing in my house, by myself.
It started with car karaoke with a friend, put me onto an old, FIRE playlist that I haven’t listened to in a while, and ended with the above decision vs killing the vibe and staring at a blank screen until words happened.
Here’s the thing that inner work has taught me: if you find yourself in an ideal, ecstatic, overflowing state… then no further work is needed. What more could possibly be done?
…You’ve arrived. You’re living the byproduct of the work. The only thing to do from there is nothing but enjoy.
…Don’t miss the forest for the trees.
I was speaking to a friend today about doing hard things.
And he was reflecting on a time he did a 4x4x48: 4 miles every 4 hours for 48 hours (which totals up to 48 miles).
He was talking about the self-deflating inner dialogue that happened throughout (“This is so stupid…” “You can’t do this…” “Why’d you let those guys talk you into this…” etc); he mentioned the moments of sheer frustration and agony… to the point of hallucinating images of and having conversations with The Banana Splits; he recalled how he got sick immediately after and how it took him three months to fully recover…
And yet…
…In the same breath, he curiously pondered the idea of doing it again.
The paradox of our reality as humans is that our mind is constantly trying to box us into the most comfortable, predictable, easy, secure, luxurious space possible. Our hearts, however… yearn to stretch. They seek adventure… depth… challenge… wonder… meaning…
And something magical happens when we accomplish an incredible physical feat like a 4x4x48… when our heart is beating faster and harder than our mind can think new thoughts…
…We’re reminded of this.
We’re reminded of the power of following our heart and quieting our mind. Either by increasing the volume of our heart or by decreasing the volume of our mind. And once we taste that: the feeling of adventure lived… depth explored… challenge completed… wonder revealed… meaning felt…
The volume of our heart never returns to it’s prior level. It remains a little louder than it was before. And even when the mental chatter gets turned up… the whispers of our heart more regularly break through.
- I noticed I was holding a thought for this blog… and that I was forcing myself to stick to a routine rather than simply aligning with this rare moment of inspiration from my muse and writing it out. Once I noticed it, I chose alignment instead.
- I noticed I was making myself feel guilty for having a slow morning. I slept in, allowed myself extra time to watch videos as I woke up, took a longer than usual shower… and then realized, this is something I’ve earned. Slow mornings are one of life’s real luxuries and is something I should embrace and align with when possible—not make myself feel guilty about.
- While I was writing the above bullet point, I noticed I wrote, “Woke up late” where I now have, “Slept in.” I didn’t wake up late… I intentionally decided to sleep in. Woke up late sounds like I made a mistake… like I missed my alarm… like I had something to feel guilty about… but I didn’t. It was intentional and rewriting it allowed me to own that.
- I noticed an urge to rush to “catch up” after I finally started my morning tasks. I wanted to get my workout done so I could finish my quote curating and daily writing so I could get my car cleaned so I could go food shopping so I could finish my taxes… and then I realized, rushing is how time is wasted. And today, I decided I didn’t want to waste any of it.
- And finally, I noticed that noticing is a lot easier when you’re not rushing. And noticing is step one towards essentially all inner work growth.
After the death of her mom, Cheryl Strayed turned devastation and grief into self-sabotage.
She blew up her young marriage, estranged herself from her family, and started doing hard drugs—including heroin.
“I tried to wreck my life as a weird way to honor the death of my mom…” she admitted as she reflected back on that delicate time many years later at a live talk here in Buffalo, NY.
…Which I think is a very natural, knee-jerk kind of reaction to such overwhelming pain due to loss or grief in general.
We want to show how much we cared for a person—how much we loved them—by showing how deep our pain goes. And so we make this perverse decision to self-sabotage and wreck ourselves and our lives to display this deep love and care.
…But—and this is such an important but to consider when dealing with a blinding and unrelenting force like grief…
“…What we really need to do,” Cheryl said from the clarity of her further healed and more deeply considerate mind, “…is thrive.”
This is how we really honor the ones we love.
Not by causing further depths of pain and hate.
…But by embodying the depth of that love and becoming the living legacy of the absolute best version of that person. Spreading not more pain into the world—but, joy. Spreading not more hate into the lives of those around us—but, love.
…Leaving us not nearly dead and alone with a needle sticking out of our arm—but alive and thriving and accomplishing unimaginatively impressive feats that’ll inspire not only those around us today… but those in many generations to come.
I uploaded a quote today that read, “The more the heart expands, the less offended I feel by other people working out their particular stage of being a human.”
And boy, isn’t that the truth?
It wasn’t until I understood that hurt people, hurt people… that I started softening my approach towards people who hurt.
It wasn’t until I experienced the fear of having to stand up to a bully and put my own wellbeing in danger… that I understood why people might choose to be a bystander in the face of an injustice.
It wasn’t until I experienced loss and had emotional outbursts… that I understood the potency of the fuel and blinding effect behind emotional outbursts and learned not to take outbursts pointed towards me personally.
Before you take offense to something somebody says or does… try expanding your heart a little further. You just might find yourself observing a very human stage that you, too, once experienced and had to work through yourself. Or at the very least, a stage that you—a very human kind of human—could’ve found yourself in if you experienced all that the other person experienced, too.
Inner Work Prompt: Bring to mind some of the recent experiences you’ve had where you found yourself feeling offended by something somebody said or did. How can you expand your heart to better understand where that decision stemmed from?