☕ saturday mornings - February 19, 2022

striving for happiness, finding success & recording wins

Tommy Dixon

Feb 19, 2022

Good morning all!

Happy Saturday. I hope you’re having an excellent start to your weekend.

Below is your edition of “saturday mornings”, a weekly recap of what I’ve been pondering, learning, and exploring.

Thanks for being here.

Total read time (bolded sections) = 1 minute

Total read time (all) = 4 minutes

✍️ Quote I’m pondering:

“Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.”
— Chuang-Tzu

📖Book passage I loved:

“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.
For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued … Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.
I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge.
Then you will live to see that in the long-run ― in the long-run, I say! ― success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”
― Victor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning

My translation: Chill out. You have lots of time. Stop trying too hard.

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“Continually remind yourself how many ambitions you have attained. When you see many ahead of you, think how many are behind!”
― Seneca, On Brawn and Brains

One of my close friends, while battling a bout of depression, received simple advice from a highly regarded cognitive-behavioral therapist: At the end of each week, write down 10 wins.

Think about 10 things that went well, 10 things you’re proud of, or 10 of your highlights.

In other words, your “weekly wins”.

A few months later he attributed this exercise as the #1 thing that helped him pull out of a challenging depressive spell.

While I hope you aren’t in the same position, I think the act of reflecting on and writing down your “weekly wins” can be extremely valuable.

In this post, I’ll show you what my monthly reflection exercise looks like.

Why?

Because it’s easy to imagine other people moving through life with unflappable confidence and ease. This, of course, is an illusion. I have to physically write down what I accomplished each week to feel like I accomplished anything at all.

If you’re anything like me, you often find yourself in continual pursuit of more, rushing to get to the next task to complete your to-do list. Always looking to the next thing.

While this mentality can be helpful for conquering the world, it doesn’t help us enjoy the fruits of all our hard work.

There will always be a “next thing”. As a result, we’ll always be in search of more.

The Weekly Practice

I’d recommend journaling on a weekly basis, and then reducing the frequency once you’ve made appreciating your “wins” more of a habitual thought pattern.

Nearly every Sunday morning, I sit down with my French Press (PC Dark Roast West Coast Coffee is my go-to) and a pad of paper.

At the risk of oversharing, below is one of my real entries for my “wins” for the month of January.

I’ve typed out the text below the image, as it’s easier to read.

January 2022

Polar dip in Balsam Lake
72-hour fast
Built finance course + ran a session with +30 students
Raised +$1200 to build school bathrooms in Ethiopia (+$1500 by month-end)
Placed 3rd (on the podium) in JDCC Finance case competition
Build and ran ACIIC Private Equity educational session
Wrote a post with my favorite links on the internet
Wrote “How to Win Friends and Influence People” book summary
Read ~3 books (6 on the go)
Spent 3 weeks in Costa Rica
Conquered Fear - 15-foot cliff dive, zip line over the forest, 30m vertical Tarzan Jump
Coffee Tour + had some of the best coffee of my life
Wrote 4 strong newsletters I’m proud of with a more structured writing process

[END]

So… What’s The Point Again?

“The greatest human weakness is self-deprecation - that is, selling oneself short... Most self-evaluation consists of making long mental lists of one’s faults, shortcomings, inadequacies.
It’s well to know our inabilities, for this shows us areas in which we can improve. But if we only know our negative characteristics, we’re a mess. Our value is small.”
― David Schwartz, The Magic of Thinking Big

There are three ways to interpret the above journal entry, and they’re not mutually exclusive:

1) I’m trying to build confidence

In high-level sports, I learned the best way to build confidence in your future performance is to remember that you’ve done it before. If you had a great game last week, you can do it again.

As I have a tendency to discount my past success, recording my weekly wins has helped me to convince myself I’m capable of continuing to do great things and provides a much-needed confidence boost.

2) I’m trying to appreciate life

The reality is that there will always be more to do. So, I think it’s important to look back and appreciate what you have done, and recognize your efforts, instead of always looking to the next thing.

There will always be more. I’ve read enough counts of rich, successful, and miserable people to know that.

Recording my wins forces me to appreciate what I have accomplished, instead of being solely future-focused.

3) I’m gamifying improvement

As a competitive person, I’ve found it helpful to compete with myself to make each week better - by trying to be 1% better every day. Competition always gets the juices flowing. It’s a bit sad to be outdone by your past self.

Journaling on wins also helps to focus on the important and holds you accountable for how you spend your time. Unfortunately, responding to emails and formatting slide decks won’t make the list.

Could doing something as simple as recording your weekly wins change your life?

As crazy as it might seem, I believe the answer is yes.

That’s all for this week’s edition of “saturday mornings”.

As always, if you have any feedback or thoughts, I’d love to hear from you. Reply to this email, leave a comment or find me on Twitter @tommy_dixon_

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Have a fantastic weekend.

Much love to you and yours,

Tommy