This piece was whipped up with the usual recipe of Nick magic. Two parts haste, one part mild discomfort in my hands, allowed to rest for a few minutes before being cast into the blazing hot oven that is the internet.
Sometimes I find it tough to get started with the stacks, and usually I can trace a reason before I start, but other times the reason becomes apparent only halfway through, and today feels like it’s going to be one of those days.
I made two attempts to kick it off yesterday but the muse wasn’t coming to the party. I got other shit done instead. So now I’m pumping psytrance with absurd BPM to make my entire body move until all the words are on the page.
I am in one of those ‘everything old must die’ phases, making space for new things. Hello Scorpio Full Moon, happy to take the call. Maybe I am leaning into my ‘old style’ of writing, where I brain dump at full speed, that I may let it go and move onto bigger and better things.
This has been happening a lot lately. Since I’ve set the intention to develop my writing process and to be a little less shotgun, I find myself writing in my spare time, coming back to them and rewriting them, and generally doing what I set out to do. Crazy.
The other consideration is that my ‘full steam ahead’ approach to writing is not giving me that ahhhhhhhhh satisfaction that it once did. Good enough is no longer good enough. I knew I was painting myself into a corner with this intention!
There are a couple of reasons for this, but I’m going to go into the background. It’s been the theme of my last couple of weeks and now I see that this must be the theme I need to unpack.
I’ve talked before about the fact that I am a natural leader, but what I don’t think I’ve talked about is what the idea of this does to me internally. When I realise that people follow me, or listen to what I say, I hold myself to an INSANELY FUCKING HIGH standard, because I want the collective to rise up.
The catch? The only thing everyone wants anyone else to do is be themselves, as I’ve talked about here. When I stress myself out to try and reach these standards, I instinctively apply these very same unreasonable standards to those around me.
When nobody is reaching these goals, I become critical of everyone’s efforts, and feel like giving up. What’s the point of pushing myself so hard if nobody else is going to push themselves so hard?
YES, EXACTLY YOU IDIOT. There is no point, so why do I keep on doing it?
This internal pressure says I have to be perfect (which is bullshit) because I want everyone to be perfect (which is also bullshit), and to admit that things aren’t perfect (which is true) is like an admission of defeat (which is bullshit).
As you can see, there’s a whole bunch of bullshit being built into this underlying structure.
The last couple of weeks have been brutal in tearing down these illusions. They have been forcing me into unrelenting boredom, total stagnation, and have given no opportunities for escapism.
Good. That’s exactly what I’ve needed. Because this holier than Thou train that I’ve been driving ain’t mine, and I’m happy to get off it. One such example of trains that ain’t mine is social media.
I culled social media many years ago because it is bullshit. I know this to be true, so I bounced. Then I wanted to get the business side of life on track, and all current trends say, ‘you need social media for that’, so I went with it.
But the part of me that isn’t an insane overreaction to standards I’ll never meet is the part of me that says ‘hang on a second. Just because everyone else says something has to be done like this, doesn’t mean it HAS TO BE DONE LIKE THAT by everyone’.
Since using the internet for consumption (market research, client acquisition, you name it), I’ve also been receiving the input for subconscious comparison.
Why aren’t I as powerful as the Shaolin monk who has been practicing Shaolin arts every day for his entire life? Why don’t I have the insanely athletic physique of the gymnast who has been practicing gymnastics every day for his entire life? Why isn’t my business as wildly successful as the marketer who has been practicing and working in marketing every day for the last 20 years?
The answers to all of these questions will be no surprise to you.
Comparison is a motherfucker. It’s also total bullshit (word of the post, for sure) and gets you nowhere. Competition is good, healthy, and fun. But comparison, uffff, what a downer. You aren’t me, and I’m not you, and any attempt to compare us is just going to make both of us look like spuds.
And this is the entire core of Instagram and most social media platforms. Look at me, look at what I am doing/have done/can do. Nobody needs to spend their time in that space, it’s garbage.
(Sidenote: I still use Instagram because I do have clients there, but LinkedIn is gone. What a growth hackers paradise. And they’re coming for Substack too. Keep your eyes open and use the freedom of speech that Substack so actively protects to tell them to bounce back to LinkedIn!)
Compared to text-based platforms where thought, emotion, and creation is required (Twitter is included, but a process of rigorous selection is required to find it) the difference is blatant.
Even if I put this together in the manic grips of a typing frenzy, it’s still going to take half an hour to get all my thoughts out. That’s 30 minutes of time I dedicate to the doing, to being present, and to sitting with whatever I’m feeling.
I can’t just put on a smart outfit and take a picture and say ‘look how fancy my clothes are, you don’t have these clothes, I am better than you – like, subscribe, and follow for more regular updates on how small you are’.
I sit with feelings of procrastination, distraction, discomfort in my stomach, tension in my wrists, you name it, and I go through all of that to put something into the world. And I do it because I want to do it, because I’ve heard from enough people out there at random times in unexpected moments that something I’ve jabbered into a post has hit home and made them feel seen.
This is the driving force behind why my approach to writing is changing, and why I’m letting go of the unreasonable efforts in other areas. I like doing this, I want to do it better, and I want to give all of you a better experience, so I am choosing to take the focus off becoming the best person that I can be by never watching movies (more on that in the section on ‘joy’) and relaxing.
Instead, I’m putting the effort in writing pieces, thinking about them, editing them, restructuring them, sharing them with people for feedback (present piece excluded), and when they’re ready releasing them into the wild.
This is a growth process that isn’t coming from trying to hold myself to an unreasonable standard, but from embracing the thing that I want to do. When I used to work at a pizza shop, at the beginning the goal was simply to get the dough relatively evenly covering the entire tray, but with time and experience I wanted to get it done with a bit of flair, and improve the time taken. The time in focus leads to improvement naturally.
And writing has been in focus for a long time. It’s been improving as time goes by, naturally, but the importance of it has been increasing rapidly of late and it’s clear to me that it deserves more of me because I like doing it.
In a world full of things I am not that interested in, this is one thing I’m really interested in. Learning how to write better and improve things doesn’t make me feel as if I need to hold you all to a higher standard as readers, and that’s how I know it’s a self-motivated process.
So, once again, I’m leaning more into my strengths and recognising my weaknesses. I’m no longer trying to adopt the routines, habits, and practices of other people in order to be more like them. Now, when I try new things, I try them to see what I can take from the thing that can help me be me.
And that’s what I’d invite you all to think about at the moment. Where are you doing things because you think you should, so that other people think more highly of you? Where are you holding other people to that same standard, because of the unfair conditions you’re imposing on yourself? Can you destroy all of these unreasonable behaviours? What would life look and feel like for you if you did?
With that, I’ll wrap this up and lead into a second, totally unrelated piece I wrote on Joy. This is part of the Prompt Writing series that I’ve been doing. It could technically have been published on Monday, but I thought it could wait so that you wouldn’t need to get too many emails from me all at once.
Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you all have a lovely weekend.
Best,
Nick
The theme of this piece is joy, and to begin I slow down and create an intentionality that ensures the words are printed carefully (the first draft was written by hand) and aesthetically.
The drive to fill a page or two as quickly as possible vanishes and the desire to embody the process dominates.
There is no joy to be found in racing for the finish line because I’m dancing. The narrative that has sold me into a race falls to pieces and a tango takes its place. On seeing this, I realise the paradox of the past week.
Life has been exceptionally slow, yet I have felt all but joyful. I have been removing layers of illusion, which has involved experiencing pain and misery, and I’ve wondered what was wrong.
But nothing has been wrong.
The pain and misery of dismantling the illusion has been a joy to witness and realise, but it's still been painful and miserable. I’ve still been in the pain and misery as I dismantle it.
Ideas of who I am, or want to be, have been collapsing, and I am seeing the human, flawed, Regular Roger that lives at the centre of my being, and have been inviting him to take up space.
This has manifested as a binge of the Harry Potter films - films that, until now, I’d never seen because I loved the books and like to hold myself above the world in small ways.
But in this dismantling, I realise that I simply deny myself little joys in order to feel supreme. Regular Roger wants to sit back and let Hollywood blast him from time to time.
Joy is the experience of the entire spectrum available. And I've been moving through the lower rungs in order to create more space, more depth, more capacity for experiencing reality. I've reconstructed no illusions. I've simply dismantled them.
The joy to behold is that progress seems to have been made. The knee-jerk reaction of killing illusion isn't leading to the automatic action of replacing it in another area of life.
Out of the frying pan, into the frying pan seems to have been dodged.
Instead, I'm in the fires of reality. Watching as change tears through layers of my understanding. No need to replace hot with cold. The joy is in the experience of both as they manifest. I've been cold for a while, but now I'm hot.
Rather than watching Harry Potter films, then flipping open thousand-page Russian literature novels, I’ve been watching films and then not watching films. No effort to punish myself for the enjoyment, and no attempt to reassert how much better I am on top of who I really am.
There’s been space for all layers, and there’s a time and space for Russian lit just like there’s a time for Hollywood.
Accepting that it's all necessary is a wonder and a joy to behold. Creating an internal capacity to sit in my boredom - and sweet Jesus have I been bored - has added insights around work and lifestyle to allow me to move forward.
The boredom is stemming from country life and not enough regular work. I found this quote recently: ‘the magic you are looking for lies in the work that you're avoiding’, and I see just how accurate this is. I've had so many narratives operating in my subconscious around work, and they've all been centred around one point: don't work.
But work is not the problem or the point. It’s all about how you do what you do. Work as a master, not as a slave.
This is the point. Getting a job and giving up on growing has no mastery, and I see that this is where my relationship to joy suffered such an intense beating. The grind (and believe me, I never really grinded) was just such a frivolous way to live that I shut out the idea of working completely.
But mastering everything that you do by paying attention and giving care gives rise to excellence, and therein lies joy. And this is work I see value in.
Not that excellence itself contains joy, but that paying attention and giving care contains joy. Excellence is simply a by-product.
When Cho spilled the beans on Dumbledore’s Army (which is absolutely NOT what happens in the books) I was incensed, and thought how terrible the film industry was. But when Snape popped into Umbridge’s office later and explained that he has no more truth serum because they used their last of it on Cho, I was really impressed with how neatly they tied that error into a conclusion.
Rather than sitting with the feeling that they butchered yet another book, I was able to see the film for what it is - separate from the book and enjoyable for its own merits. And it felt good. I enjoyed it.
When I do the best I can in each and every moment, only then can it be said that I have lived my best life. The best life will not be exclusively joyful either, but the experience of pain and misery will be the best version of pain and misery available in the circumstances.
When I slow down, I enable myself to give the necessary care and attention to every moment. And I'm able to achieve a level of mastery and excellence in my life.
Your life's work is just that. It is your entire life and every inch of it is included in the calculation. How you pay attention, how you care, how you experience pain and misery.
All of it gives rise to expressions of joy.
Joy is a way of being, a way of living. It rises and it falls, but it is always in the picture, even if our attention is elsewhere.
This really struck me, especially, how you pay attention and how you care. Thank God this is moving into mass consciousness. Keep writing.