☕ saturday mornings - September 17, 2022
striving, mastering the fundamentals & embracing detours
Happy Saturday all!
I hope you’re having a great start to your weekend.
What I’ve been up to:
After another week of classes, I headed to San Sebastián for the weekend. It's a picturesque beach town, known for its quaint cobblestoned streets, world-class restaurants, and a 12th-century fortress. Miles of white sand beaches, sealed off from the rest of the world by the Pyrenees mountain range. Yesterday I surfed (somewhat successfully) for the first time.
Here's a recap of the coolest things I've explored this week.
✍️ Quote I’m pondering:
John Coltrane, American jazz saxophonist and composer, on the fulfillment found in striving:
“The real risk is in not changing. I have to feel that I'm after something.
If I make money, fine. But I'd rather be striving. It's the striving, man, it's that I want.”
📚 Book passage I loved:
Fundamentals. That was a great gift Coach Graham gave us. Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals.
As a college professor, I've seen this as one lesson so many kids ignore, always to their detriment: You've got to get the fundamentals down, because otherwise the fancy stuff is not going to work.
― The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
💡 Idea from me: Embracing Detours
Kevin Kelly, perhaps the world's most interesting man, shared 103 pieces of life advice on his blog.
One has been on my mind recently.
“Ask anyone you admire: Their lucky breaks happened on a detour from their main goal.
So embrace detours. Life is not a straight line for anyone.”
As I read 'Tribe of Mentors' last year, there was one noticeable theme across all the ultra-successful people interviewed. They faced seemingly crushing failures in the short-term, which set them up for their biggest long-term successes.
The message? In the moment, we have to be careful labeling anything a "failure". Many failures are necessary course corrections before we strike it big.
Jeff Bezos was a failed investment banker which led him to look at launching a little business selling books using the Internet called Amazon.
Susan Cain, an author of several best-sellers, was a failed Wall Street lawyer. She admits, "If I had “succeeded” at making partner, right on schedule, I might still be miserably negotiating corporate transactions 16 hours a day." She was distraught at the time, but it forced her to step back from law and rediscover her love for writing.
Naval Ravikant puts it most succinctly:
"I'm lucky that I didn't get everything I wanted in my life, or I'd be happy with my first good job, my college sweetheart, my college town.
Sometimes you need to allow life to save you from getting what you want."
In the big picture of our lives, we really don't know whether a particular failure is actually helping or hurting us.
This theme reappeared at the European Innovation Academy. Many speakers, all highly successful entrepreneurs, expressed how non-linear and unpredictable their life path has been. They couldn’t have planned it if they tried.
As I was thinking about how to end this piece, I thought back to a conversation I had with a mentor. I was asking him about crucible decisions he'd made in his life and how he made them. I wanted to learn how to feel confident in making big life decisions.
At of his response, he smirked and said slyly "It helps to have goals, but looking back you'll find your life was a series of lucky accidents".
Life is not a straight line.
Embrace detours.
❓ Question for You:
If you're currently pondering “What should I spend my time working on?” perhaps a better question is “Where am I most afraid to fail?”
Steven Pressfield has a helpful rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.
The more fear we feel, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul.
Fear shows us that we care.
📸 Photo of the week:
Hanging out in San Sebastián!
If you have any feedback or just want to be friends, feel free to reach out.
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Have a fantastic weekend.
Much love to you and yours,
Tommy