Good morning all!
I hope you’re having a lovely Saturday morning.
What I’ve been up to:
I'm preparing to leave next week for Porto, Portugal for the EIA 2022 conference.
I finally completed the study visa application to attend university in Spain this Fall. I recently discovered I'll spend exactly half of 2022 out of Canada.
After over 3 weeks, I finished one of my favorite essays I've ever written on managing the inevitable ups and downs of life.
Here's a recap of what I’ve been exploring this week.
✍️ Quote I’m pondering:
Rapper Jay-Z on authenticity and being true to yourself:
“It’s just having the discipline, and the confidence in who I am.
If I go into a studio and find my truth of the moment, there are a number of people in the world who can relate to what I’m saying, and are going to buy into what I’m doing. Not because it’s the new thing of the moment, but because it’s genuine emotion.”
📚 Book passage I loved:
“I’ve found that a substantial fraction of many people's days is spent worrying about what others think of them. If nobody ever worried about what was in other people's heads, we'd all be 33 percent more effective in our lives and on our jobs.
You don't ever have to worry about what I'm thinking. Good or bad, I'll let you know what's in my head. Students and colleagues came to appreciate that, and they didn't waste a lot of time obsessing over "What is Randy thinking?"
Because mostly, what I was thinking was this: I have people on my team who are 33 percent more effective than everyone else.”
— The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow
💡 Idea from me: Finding Your Thing
We're told to find a path that's uniquely for us. Something we're naturally talented in and irrationally passionate about.
Obsessed with perfection and doing it right, we want to go straight to the "thing".
But what do you do if you don't know what that thing is?
I received a good piece of advice: “Try things until something comes easily.”
Life is a search. You can't always think your way into it.
Try a bunch of things and see what sticks. Pay attention to what excites you and what drains you. Notice what comes easily.
You won't get it right the first time. Part of learning where to step is learning where not to step. But you'll learn from taking action, and you can pivot and readjust.
Become invested in discovery rather than an outcome.
Give yourself permission to search and experiment. You have time.
✍️ Essay from me:
Give & Take (6 min)
Even if your daily routine is perfectly structured and your habits are fine-tuned like an F1 race car, life will throw you curveballs. Ups and downs are inevitable.
Sometimes life goes up, where things are easy and smooth, and sometimes life goes down, where everything feels like a struggle.
How can we interpret setbacks in a way that doesn't derail our enjoyment of life? How can we avoid taking wins for granted?
If ups and downs in life are inevitable, how can we best manage them?
❓ Question for You:
When envisioning your future, don't limit yourself. Think as big and as ambitiously as possible.
What's your magical outcome?
Let's work backward from that.
📸 Photo of the week:
Vernazza is one of the 5 centuries-old villages that make up the Cinque Terre, on northwest Italy’s rugged Ligurian coast.
Cinque Terre is hands down one of the most beautiful places I’ve been.
If you’re going to Italy, I’d highly recommend checking it out. It’s a ~3-hour train from Florence.
That’s all for this week’s edition of “saturday mornings”.
If you have any feedback, 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