Models I Live By

1. Replace ‘Shoulds’ Into ‘How Could’: I used to feel I’m doing my business – my baby – a disservice by leaving it to travel. But when we compare it to real life babies, we all know the importance of time away from your kids to fill your tank so you can come back reinvigorated, with new ideas and energy for them. I’ve been telling myself that travel isn’t what I should be doing at this stage of my business. But I want to be able to make it work anytime, ideally, and not have should or should nots in my life. I want the mindset of, what could I do? Increasing optionality is important. My relationship to work tasks can be maintenance, like a kid, making sure they’re fed, happy and occupied and safe. There will be times to go hard, and embrace those too.
2. Limitations are really powerful. Optionality is really powerful. Context is really powerful. Embrace each of these when problem solving.
3. You can be like Enzo Ferrari, who was ruthless and had one life mission with Ferrari. He got there, but it was a one dimensional life and suffice it to say, he wasn’t very popular. What kind of life do you want? Ask yourself what you want out of life, and make it happen to have a rich life. Travel is a part of mine.
4. I always remind myself, “at any one moment, I can make a different choice.“
5. Enoughness: ‘Enough work’ is an interesting idea. I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘Enough’ is personally defined. I know, if I wanted to, I could do work for two full weeks, six months, not feel it was enough – or too much – and really enjoy it. But I would be sacrificing relationships and life experiences, and I don’t even think I’d regret it. But in other times, I could post one really difficult marketing piece and feel it’s enough for the day. The truth is I could always do more and love it, because I love my work. To maintain energy to keep going, I need to know what I want at any one point in time and be good at getting it. That means knowing how much I want to do before I call it enough. No one is more responsible for my enough than me. Does enough even exist? It is perhaps more akin to a feeling you get about being honourable with your time to yourself. This mental load is somewhat removed by the nine to five, but if you have a personal life mission, it becomes a lot more loaded. The only way we can experience enoughness for ourselves is by exploring each of our own limits. And I think I’m slightly afraid, because I haven’t nearly seen my limits yet, kind of like going for a personal best in a deadlift, and it’s something I need to do once, not once, but continuously.
6. It’s also important to learn the skill of managing self expectations, especially difficult when you’re running the show. But it’s a muscle you can strengthen overtime.
7. Rest vs Rewards vs Pleasure: Rest or recovery based activities is functional in that it restores energy and renews it. Rewards are things we earn and can use them to our advantage. I can go out for a walk, a walk as soon as I finish this task, for instance, to trick myself into finishing something challenging and time bound. But pleasure bound activities are what makes life worthwhile. We literally do things to feel good in our bodies and avoid feeling bad feelings in our bodies. And pleasure based experiences help us understand what makes life worthwhile for us. Features of pleasurable experiences motivate our identity and growth, or novelty, creativity and exploration. Pleasure gives us reason to strive. It’s part of the cycle of life and keeps us engaged. Things that I enjoy that have nothing to do with my business are my relationships, for example, they’re the only things I go to where I’m not automatically trying to tie it purposefully back to work. I can go to my relationships, for reflection, laughter for tears. I also love being in nature. I love fashion and architecture and dance. They have nothing to do with my work, but they serve as a reminder to me that I’m a whole human with desires and loves and not just a machine. There will be times to go in and go hard, but pleasures in life round you as a human. And what’s the point in life if you’re not experiencing it fully?
8. To become a person with high agency, and to push it constantly, we need to do more different and own it, and that might be trying new things, trying lead hobbies against the crowd, leaving people with high energy, which is really important to practice, challenge stereotypes by through my knowledge, appearance, actions and relationships, find niche content so my information and knowledge are broader and practise radical honesty and integrity.
9. To live well, it’s important to use excitement, fear and satisfaction as your fuel gage to dictate if you are ‘shipping’ enough in life. Humans do gravitate to activities that give us a good feeling in our body and avoid bad feelings, which by default, means we actually avoid challenges that make us grow out of our comfort zone. The cost of convenience and comfort is life vitality. It’s important not to think about the immediate feeling we’ll have, but how we might feel in future, and that is where pausing and visualizing is very helpful. And so is actually doing, because momentum is a marvellous source of fuel. We don’t need everything to be difficult, but human challenges are what make life vibrant, and usually by default, that is inconvenient. There’s a tipping point, and it’s different for everyone, but we need to think about what things we actually want, where a convenient alternative actually has a draining effect rather than a revitalizing effect.
   • My example is prepared versus my own meals.
   • Another less obvious example, another less obvious example is a nine to five for the person more suited to running their own mission, which is far less convenient and so much more challenging, but infinitely more satisfying and revitalizing.
   • Another example is using AI to respond to something cognitively taxing, with the result that when you look at their response, you feel a little less as a person, the benefit of AI that it should provide is to boost your brain, not take away from your own thoughts, something that you need to proactively fight for.
10. Giving yourself space and time to think is so critical in life for self awareness. It’s easy to slip into default mode at any one time, and defaults and convenience can be marvellous for the purpose of helping us focus on the most important thing at any one time, but using what is happening in our bodies as a gage. We can sense when it happens, a sort of deadening. And if you’re not hyper aware and sensitive to it and continuously fighting for it, you can become pretty deaf to it. And that’s like having a disease without symptoms until it reaches stage four, and you find your options are just ultra limited, and the more sunk you are in a convenient life, the harder it is to get out.

It’s less convenient, but gives more life force, and if you’re not defining your own good life, what is the point of it all?