I write 1-minute insights daily. Below are my latest. Like? Enter your email to get updates.
I help busy people do inner work.
I write 1-minute insights daily. Below are my latest. Like? Enter your email to get updates.
You are so much more likely to find the love of your life while you’re in love with life.
Think about who you are when you’re in love…
Radiant. Energetic. Generous. Bold. Excited. Kind. Helpful. Cute. Funny…
And I suspect a lot of people mistakingly think they need to be in love with a person in order to express this elevated side of themselves.
But the truth is, you just need to be in love with life.
And if you can figure out what makes you come alive and express yourself in the above ways…
I suspect the love of your life will finally figure out that you’re the one they’ve been waiting / looking for.
A friend and I got to talking about memento mori—the Latin phrase that means “Remember your mortality.”
I asked if she had ever heard of the Memento Mori Calendar. She said no. After I explained what it was, she said, “Oh no… that would freak me out!”
To which I replied, “That’s the point!”
You get the Memento Mori calendar, not for decoration, aesthetics, or because it’ll be a fun coloring activity for you to do… but precisely so that it’ll freak you out.
…And hopefully so much so that you’ll get busy living your life to the fullest. With fewer hesitations… more bold choices… and no regrets left when your time comes.
Because your time will come.
…It’s not a question of if… only a question of during which dot on the calendar.
A good practice after an experientially rich weekend, is to deliberately and carefully store a key moment or two into your long term memory banks.
What you do is simple… carefully review the experience in full and narrow in on the moment(s) you want to save.
Replay them as vividly as you can… inviting all of your senses to participate.
And then—and this is the key—imagine yourself remembering that moment far into the future.
Repeat both of these steps for as long as it feels appropriate for you.
And if you don’t, all that’ll happen is the moment(s) will get picked for you (or none will get picked at all). For better or for worse…
Two of my friends have been butting heads recently.
And it’s for no reason other than their personalities clash. And even though they’ve been friends for years… they’ve also been evolving for years.
It’s nothing malicious… they just don’t agree on things… and feel more strongly about their opinions… and don’t understand why the other person misconstrues or misunderstands what they say and feel.
And here’s the thing: that’s okay.
Not all of your friends will be friends for life.
You will evolve. They will evolve.
You’ll slowly get pulled in the direction of your ever changing tastes and preferences and ideas and goals and unique circumstances.
…And so will they.
Sometimes, those directions stay aligned for a lifetime. And other times they stay aligned for a season or chapter of your life.
…And that’s okay.
There is a story of a little girl who got home from visiting her friend later than her mother had expected.
When her mother asked the reason for the delay, the child said, “I was helping Jane. Her doll broke.”
The mother asked, “Did you help her fix it?”
The child said, “No. I helped her cry.”
Don’t confuse helping with fixing.
Sometimes the best help is help with feeling.
One of the most annoying tasks I used to do before publishing a video was typing out the captions. One letter at a time. One line at a time. One time-marker-in and time-marker-out at a time.
A one minute video could easily take 30 minutes to caption edit.
This is an excellent AI use case.
If I could push a button and have all of my words captioned into a video? I would do that without hesitation—it would save me so much time.
And it’s not even like it’s taking a job away from somebody who would love to do that kind of work—typing out captions manually is a pain in the butt for just about anyone I’d say.
What I refuse to do, however, is push a button and have AI write the pre-captioned words for me.
There’s a magic that happens in the labor of writing.
One that literally updates my brain’s software in real time… one that sparks creativity as I push and pull and plug various different thoughts into and out of each other… one that uncovers gold nuggets as I dig into various life experiences and memories with upgraded software and enhanced creativity…
There’s no magic in having the words written for you.
But having your words—your hard-earned, carefully-curated, imperfectly-selected words—transcribed, turned into captions, or otherwise used after the fact… is a mundane bore of a task that could easily be outsourced to AI and could easily buy you back mountains of time that you could spend… you know… laboring for magic instead.
“Nobody kills your dreams on purpose. You just stop feeding them. And eventually they stop bothering you.”
Unknown
Of course we want our dreams to come to life.
We fantasize of the day when we officially close on our dream home, or visit our dream bucket list destination, or become an author of the book we’ve always wanted to write.
…None of us kill our dreams on purpose.
But sometimes, we let the talking get in the way of the feeding.
We talk to friends and family about our dreams, we talk to our diaries about our dreams, we talk to social media and teachers and strangers about our dreams…
And we continue to talk and talk and talk to the same circles of people while the dream itself starves from inaction.
You can only talk about wanting something for so long, while simultaneously taking zero action towards obtaining it, and staying precisely as far away from realizing it as you ever have… before you simply stop believing in your ability to close that gap.
And you stop being bothered by the dream because its energy continues to dwindle while you invest precious time, energy, and resources into other life tasks. Many times into things you would happily sell back on your deathbed like TV, video games, social media, work you hate, and people you don’t like…
What’s your dream?
What was your dream?
Have you let it starve?
And can you reclaim some of the nourishment of your life and feed it back into that dream?
…Or are you really okay with it starving and withering away?