All those weird ideas that people “won’t like?”
Permit yourself to execute on at least one today.
A personal one for me: I’m not wearing socks when I walk to and from the gym, I don’t care how cold it is outside.
Crazy? Maybe, but I don’t care today.
It may be the seed of a great idea, or my feet will just be uncomfortable
Either way, I can wake up tomorrow and be sane again.
No worries.
I hate conventional advice. It’s watered down nonsense designed “for the middle.” The advice sounds good, rhymes, and you heard other people say it. Soon, you say it too because “if it weren’t true, why would people say it?”
Because not rocking the boat feels safe.
If you ever watch the best (or even the above average, for that matter) do anything 99% of the “you should have business cards” nonsense is out the window. In the process of overcoming everyday competence, they had to embrace their “weird.”
Being different means, you see the world differently.
Not when it is happening of course, then I wouldn’t be uncomfortable. But I like watching it after the event, almost like a video. I try to keep hold of those thoughts in my mind, although it is better to write them.
They are fascinating when looked at when I am in a healthy, comfortable place because I being to recognized how tinged they are at the moment. When I get uncomfortable, there is no filter; all my thoughts bleed into one another.
Those thoughts get mean and unreasonable. The things that I hate bleed into other things in my mind and every action becomes a strike against me. Didn’t pick me when I raised my hand – well you must have always hated me. Don’t answer my text, I am important. Every anxious thought I have flows into everything else, and I become a mess.
When this would happen when I was younger, I would use it as an excuse to escape the moment. I spent a lot of time running from anything that seemed uncomfortable. If I couldn’t run, I would come cold. If I shut myself off, then I couldn’t hurt anyone around me.I often thought, I’ll patch up the issue tomorrow, and thinking back on it, now I recognized tomorrow never quite showed up.
Lately, I have begun to understand my discomfort, and that is where the fun comes in. A lot of what you feel in life comes from how you frame it, and I recently began to think of being uncomfortability as growth. The best thing I can do is figuring out a framework of how to recognize it.
Most change is real – especially if you don’t allow that change to destroy you. Letting my uncomfortability run rampant was a way that I did that. Now I am trying to turn it into an exercise.A little cherry on top that signifies that this too shall pass, and I will be better for it.
It would be weird if they knew.
Sometimes, walking into a room I feel like they know everything – everything bad. When they pause, there is a piece of me that thinks they know I put the wrong shoe on that morning, the competitor that had better material, all those times I woke up late and was the last person to walk into the meeting.
I think they know that sometimes I surf Reddit, that I find the TV show Maury interesting, that I haven’t read half of my library. They know that I just recently added to the way I dress, and they have pictures of me dressing poorly, the shoes that I used to have, and an ill-fitting belt.
They will find out that I curse sometimes. That I am comfortable around the meanest group of people (comedians), I can drink a lot and get obnoxious. They know that I can comfort eat with the best of them, I spend too much time playing video games, and I love to binge watch TV. That one time I didn’t wash my hands when I left the bathroom in my apartment.
In short, I feel like everyone else knows that I am an imposter. That everyone else doesn’t do these things, that I am not committed to the mission since I do. But, it would be weird if they knew – since they just met me.
After sitting in a coffee shop yesterday, I thought about this for some time. I realized that yes, I do those things, and I will do things in the future that aren’t perfect. I am not the guy (yet!!!) that has the perfect routine, gym at 5 AM, and asleep by 10 PM. I am not the best read guy in the world. But the biggest problem that I face comes from my lack of self-compassion. People aren’t out to exploit you when they first meet you (except confidence men, beware of confidence men).
So the key to remember going forward is – its weird if they know.
P.S – Now you know all this stuff about me :-(.
From the desk of Adam Thomas 