PhotoCredit: StayCool
Last week felt like a segue. I spent a lot of April talking about the cognitive shift required to commence a new squiggle. There is a lot more to say about that. However, it gets a little navel-gazey at a point. Which feels deeply philosophical and academically interesting. It's also not the best way to start. The best way to start is to...wait for it...start.
We want to get into action and stay in action. Momentum is the secret to squiggling and many of last week's tips were focussed on staying in motion. #gather_no_moss.
Curiously though, once you start it feels like everything is conspiring against you. Issues pile on top of problems and you quickly find yourself very stuck.
Squiggling is seemingly an endless process of unsticking yourself. The art of creation requires many bad batches and endless prototypes. James Dyson rather famously, and proudly, states that it took 5,127 attempts at the Dyson vacuum to get it right. Even that wasn't a guarantee. The real battle for his life - and vision - happened when he went to commercialize what is now a household name and icon.
We can turn this into a cliche about failure, but lurking behind that is the very real human-ness of the equation. How we feel.
Unless you are a robot, failure takes a massive mental toll. We add that to an already lonely journey and the result is a cocktail that you wouldn't want to drink - despair.
Much like potato chips, we want to keep the ingredients for this cocktail out of the pantry. Which is where Andrew Huberman comes in. You may know of him already. He's become a legend in the world of peak performance. In this beauty of a podcast, Rich Roll (my first podcast love) goes deep with Huberman on how we can get out of our own way. It's long AF, but you know I wouldn't recommend it if I didn't think it was magic. It's full of inspiration and deep, usable science that will help you move through the stuckness. Or maybe bypass it completely.
Rich Roll says it best with his mantra "mood follows action." Stay oriented to action and your mood will take care of itself. True Story.