☕ saturday mornings - December 3, 2022
the power of love, bad moods & eye-opening epiphanies
Happy Saturday!
I hope you’re having a great start to your first December weekend 🙂
What I’ve been up to:
I've finished classes and am writing exams for the next 10 days. I also have two essays in the works I'm excited about.
I revisited this video from 2014 where Carey Price, my childhood idol, answered a question I sent him (0:28). Eight years later, it still gives me the excitement of a kid outside a toy store.
Here's a recap of the most interesting things I've explored this week.
✍️ Quote I’m pondering:
Alex Hormozi, serial entrepreneur, on youth versus money:
“When I was 20 I wanted to be a millionaire…
Now that I’m a millionaire, I want to be 20.”
📚 Book passage I loved:
Never will I allow my mind to be attracted to evil and despair, rather I will uplift it with the knowledge and wisdom of the ages. Never will I allow my heart to become small and bitter, rather I will share it and it will grow and warm the earth.
I will greet this day with love in my heart.
Henceforth will I love all mankind. From this moment all hate is let from my veins for I have not time to hate, only time to love.
... If I have no other qualities I can succeed with love alone. Without it I will fail though I possess all the knowledge and skills of the world.
I will greet this day with love, and I will succeed.
― The Greatest Salesman In the World by Og Mandino
💡 Idea from me: Anywhere, But Here
This August I had an eye-opening epiphany: There seems to be a deep-rooted human desire to be somewhere we're not. A need to be"anywhere, but here."
It shows up everywhere.
Living in Canada for most of my life, I dreamt of traveling across Europe, imagining the delicious joy it would bring. In 2022, I spent 26 weeks abroad, but half the time I missed the familiarity and comfort of home. Nearly everyone I met in hostels, even in renowned cities like Rome, Prague, or Vienna, would babble about all the places they want to visit next, despite the grandiosity of the place they're in.
City slickers visit small towns and ache at how picturesque it would be to live there, while the townsfolk are scratching and clawing to escape.
Single people are lonely and crave the warmth of a relationship, while those in relationships desperately miss the freedom of being single.
The masses crave the luxury and opulence of money, while the rich complain, burdened by meaninglessness and shackled by golden chains.
The young desire the stability and resources maturity brings, while the old yearn for the vitality and opportunity youth delivers.
Someone on Twitter wrote: "my investment banking and consulting friends complain they work too much and can’t find meaning, my software engineering friends complain they work too little and can’t find meaning."
Peter Thiel was on track to become a lawyer, working for a prestigious law firm in New York City where the hours were long and the competition was cutthroat. He recounts, "On the outside, everybody wanted to get in. On the inside, everybody wanted to get out."
When I had a straightforward career path, I missed the coming-of-age experience of "figuring my life out". Now my career path is less predictable, I long for the certainty of what I once had.
Each of these cases doesn't apply to everyone. But, most people have experienced at least one.
There's an annoying cliché that, "we want what we don't have". But, it's more than that. You could nearly say: "we want the opposite of what we have".
Why? I have no clue. (If I did, I'd probably be rich and wouldn't walk places to avoid a $2 bus fare).
But, clearly, the result is harmful: instead of enjoying what we already have, we spend our life trying to get things we don't have, in the belief that once we have them, we will be happy and search no further.
How do we course correct?
As far as I can tell, books, YouTube videos, and a stern "talking to" won't help. We ignore second-hand instruction. We only learn by first-hand experience.
I have a friend. Let's call him Jeff. A few years ago, Jeff had a good job but desperately wanted to break into the finance industry, for all the wrong reasons. He glorified the 80-hour weeks, fancy lunches, and gargantuan bonuses. A mutual friend came to me, worried Jeff was losing sight of himself. No matter what he said, Jeff wouldn't listen. Jeff was convinced a job in finance was the missing piece of his life. Eventually, he got the investing job he wanted. Within days, reality hit him like a brick wall. Within weeks, he wanted out, aching for evenings with friends and weekends with family.
This is the closest I can come to an explanation: We create ideals of the things we don't have. They seem perfect in our minds - the jagged edges are smoothed over and glowing with magnificence. But, because we haven't experienced them, they lack detail. But, reality has a surprising amount of detail.
When we forget the detail, we completely miss what that thing is actually like. We don't consider the lower back pain as we sit at our desk for the 14th hour, the steel springs that poke into our side in a hostel bed, and the headache of having our new $120k Corvette scratched.
No books or lectures or podcasts can supplement the amount of detail reality has.
This isn't to say we shouldn't want things. We're biological creatures, evolutionary hard-wired to want things. But, we need to be careful of what we want.
Our desires are the axiom of our suffering; be thoughtful of what you're willing to suffer for. Perhaps, as I realized, you don't have it as bad as you thought.
In 2023, instead of wanting to be "anywhere, but here", I want to think: "I'd rather be here, than anywhere".
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❓ Question for You:
What would it take to snap me out of my bad mood immediately?
Tony Robbins believes we can change our emotional state by how we move our bodies. “Motion creates emotion”.
I've found a combination of music and movement works best.
Although it's difficult, at least immediately, to want to get out of a bad mood and take action.
📸 Photo of the week:
Holiday lights around the old town of Pamplona, Spain!
If you have ideas or feedback or just want to be friends, please reach out 😊
Reply to this email, leave a comment, or find me on Twitter @tommy_dixon_
Have an excellent weekend.
Much love to you and yours,
Tommy
I love how you write about the details of reality!
I remember sitting in Barcelona, Spain, on a warm Summer's night, alone on the smallest plaza, lit by lanterns which soaked it into an unreal orange. Staring amazedly around me, trying to grasp that this was indeed reality, jotting down the impressions of my first weeks into my new adventure of having left on a one-way ticket.
Just recently, I read an article abodt how the father of the writer would sit back, look around and say: 'if this isn't good, I don't know what is!'
This has stuck with me and since then, I have held my breath, taken in my surroundings and my feelings and thought: if this isn't good - what is? ☺
My guy.... been thinking about the same idea
People always seem to want to get away -- ie I want to move from Toronto to SF, not realizing what makes their current home special
Romanticizing what they don’t have at a detriment to what’s currently in their hands