I consume and curate a lot in the course of building my work and feeding my own natural curiosity. I’m a voracious reader and a frequent podcast listener. I love taking in lots of different perspectives and ideas from different sources.
In the course of some recent reading and listening, I came across a few interesting shares:
One podcast guest paid off his house instead of carrying a mortgage because it gave him and his wife a sense of pleasure and security to own it outright.
A writer said that as he writes, he works each sentence until it’s done. So that when he completes his piece, it’s not a first draft, it’s a final draft.
An athlete has a morning routine that includes a cold plunge first thing upon arising.
Even though each of these folks feels strongly about these behaviors, and they work great for them – none of these work for me. Not even a lick.
When I had my house in LA, I happily paid the mortgage each month, with any extra disposable income going to my travel fund or investments. With low interest rates, it’s practically free money. When I write, I spit out what Brené Brown calls a “shitty first draft” and go back over and over to refine it, or sometimes rewrite it completely – but that SFD is crucial to giving me something to work with. And when I get up in the mornings, I stay warm by putting on my cozy socks and sweats and sit down to meditate after making my bed. Everything unfolds from there.
What each of those perspectives, and many others that I come across, allowed me to do is taste-test (from the distance of consideration) options that are out there that I can take or leave. Which, really, is kind of the point.
We are surrounded by advice. Things that worked for other people in their situations. Or things that didn’t work, and now they advise against a specific action or behavior.
You can learn from everyone’s advice, but the most important thing to learn is that no advice is tailor-made for you. The best advice for you is a unique mix of various ideas, awareness of your own needs or wants, possible outcomes, all jumbled together and molded into a shape that could only be made for you, by you.
That right there is just a lil’ advice from me to you.
The result of some bad surf advice. Or beginner’s incompetence. Surely it must be the former :-)