I didn’t know either of these people, but reflecting on my thought process now, I had assumed two things very quickly: that I wasn’t as good as them, and their mythical lifestyle was worth expending emotional energy being jealous of.
Comparison
The approach when it's not a Rubik's cube
With our personal lives, we usually know what to do to solve our problems. But the ones we’re paid to be solving are nuanced, fraught with risk and unlikely to have a solution that pleases everyone; as Seth Godin rightly says, all the easy problems are taken.
When you've got a problem
Hearing Bas’s story, it’s reminded me of the situations where another perspective has helped a lot more. Sometimes we don’t need expertise. We need a reframe.
"It"
Not the movie. A thing. THE thing. A place, an achievement, a title, a certain amount of money, an experience. That thing we desperately want. The desire to be in the next place.
The most underrated quality
When I started writing this post last week, I picked four different qualities that we underrate, and riffed on how we might develop them in ourselves. Then I watched Marriage Story on Sunday evening, and I realised there was really only one that I was so interested in, in equal part because I find it so hard and because it’s so important.
Comfortable with uncertainty
I’ve been asked what my “thing” for 2020 is – habit, words, goal, whatever. This year, I’m going to try and get comfortable with being uncertain.
The place of pressure
Pressure can propel us, and other times it can stifles us.
Merci. Gracias. Kia ora. Arigato. Faafetai. شكرا
I’d like to pause and consider some of that New Year self-help rhetoric. As when the clock strikes twelve, it can be so easy to forget where we were this time last year, this time last decade.
