☕ saturday mornings - June 25, 2022

eliminating jealousy, being yourself & manhole covers

Tommy Dixon

Jun 25, 2022

Good morning all!

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

What I’ve been up to:

I spent last weekend in Toronto with my Dad and brother for Father's Day. Growing up in the suburbs, I never spent much time in Toronto but it's a great city in the summer. I won't comment on the winter...
I've had some excellent conversations with some amazing people this week. It reminds me what life is about and how many good people there are out there.

Here's a recap of the coolest things I’ve been thinking about this week.

✍️ Quote I’m pondering:

Naval Ravikant, entrepreneur and investor, on being happy being yourself:

"One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn't just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn't say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person.
Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you're not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.
Once I came to that realization, jealousy faded away because I don't want to be anybody else. I'm perfectly happy being me."

Source: The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant

💡 Idea from me: Choosing To Be Yourself

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I've been struggling.

In a world where we're bombarded by the advice of others, I've found it hard to be myself. To want to be me.

Inside every piece of advice is a seed of desire. There's a little voice that says you need to be different. You're not enough as you are. Not doing enough, not smart enough, not successful enough.

If you felt you were enough, and were perfectly content with who you are and what you are doing, why would you listen to advice?

Advice is helpful on a small scale. There's a lot we need to learn in this life.

But too many voices, telling you a million things you need to do, becomes deafening. They mute your ideas on what you should do and who you should be. You begin to believe the answers you need are outside yourself.

The gap, between where you are and where you want to be, becomes a crater.

I believe the more authentic you can be, the happier you will be.

Perhaps, then, the goal isn't to be like others, but to be more and more "you" every day.

If I had Naval Ravikant, Boyd Varty, and Steven Pressfield in a room, here's what I think they'd say.

Choose to be Yourself

There's a Buddhist saying: "Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are."

What happens when you listen to podcasts, read a new book, or scroll through Twitter?

You beat yourself up and scribble notes, thinking “I need to do this, and I need to do that, and I need to do…”

No, you don’t need to do anything. All you should do is what you want to do.

If you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them, you get to listen to the little voice inside your head that wants to do things a certain way. Then, you get to be you.

Don't get me wrong. There's good advice out there. Certainly, listen and absorb, but don’t try to emulate. Don't build lists and checklists and decision frameworks to replicate what other people are doing.

You’re never going to be them. You’ll never be good at being somebody else. It’s a fool’s errand.

There's an old story of an ambitious boy leaving home on a quest to find a wise merchant. After months of travel, he arrived at the merchant's door. The boy said he desperately wanted to be like him. But the wise man's message was the opposite: Be yourself, with passionate intensity.

No one in the world is going to beat you at being you.

You are Unique

None of us are born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. We come into this world possessing a highly refined and individuated soul.

The combinatorics of human DNA and experience are staggering. You have specific knowledge, capability, and desire nobody else in the world does. There is no one else in the world like you.

And if your soul and DNA are unique, wouldn't it make sense your life purpose is unique?

You Have a Unique Path

We all have a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become.

Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you.

Don’t try to be someone. Find something so engaging that it helps you forget yourself.

Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

Source: The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life, The War of Art

📚Book I loved: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

Randy was diagnosed with terminal cancer in his early 40s with three young children. Given 3-6 months to live, he wrote this book on achieving his childhood dreams and the life lessons he learned along the way.

It's full of heart-warming stories and profound wisdom that makes you zoom out and appreciate life. The reality of listening to a man preparing to leave his wife and kids almost makes you cry.

At the end of the book, titled The Dreams Will Come to You, Randy notes that although the focus was achieving your childhood dreams, it's not what the book was about. "It's about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself. The dreams will come to you."

The final twist? The book wasn't written for us. It was all for his kids.

You can watch his last lecture on YouTube (+20M views).

❓Question for You:

How much overlap is there between what you say is important to you and how you spent your time over the last month?

📸Photo of the week:

I took this in Hallstatt, Austria one of the most beautiful places in the world I've ever seen.

Ignoring how cool it is to have manhole covers designs, it offers great little reminder: take care of what you love.

If you like art, check out the painted manhole covers in Japan. I only heard about this while chatting with a man who taught English in a small town at the base of Mount Fuji for +30 years.

There's actually a name for finding fascinating manhole cover designs: drainspotting.

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_

If you’re reading this on Substack or were forwarded this email, and you’d like to subscribe, click the button below.

Have a fantastic weekend.

Much love to you and yours,

Tommy