how to do cool things without losing your sanity
it's not as hard as it sounds, I promise!
As someone who’s accomplished quite a bit, I’ve developed a somewhat novel approach to success that I don’t see mirrored online.
It’s very easy to be impressed by achievements on the surface:
Someone made 6 figures of revenue in her writing business
Another person got promoted at Google
Someone else reached 100,000 subscribers on YouTube
These are all amazing accomplishments. We often don’t see the other side of these achievements, however:
The 6 figure business person? Worked 90+ hour weeks for 3 years to get there.
The Google promotion? Had to attend conferences, which meant less time with friends and family
100K on Youtube? Has been creating online for over 10 years. Still hasn’t made much money online from it.
Now, you might read some of these sacrifices and think “Honestly? Seems worth it to me.” And that’s completely valid.
As someone embodying soft ambition, I’m interested in achievements that don’t require such grand sacrifices. Ultimately, every journey will ask something of you, but that ask may be easy for one person, and much harder for another.
My goal is to find a pursuit where the ask is something I would do with my eyes closed. The ask must be so menial, that it would be stupid to not go for the opportunity.
So, here’s how I do cool things without going insane.
1 - Set reasonable constraints
What are you willing to give? What do you want to keep?
A lot of us want the external achievement, but don’t want to do the internal work for said achievement. Unfortunately, doing cool things doesn’t come for free.
Identify your areas of leverage. The book The Unfair Advantage talks about the main advantages people have and how they can make use of them.
It’s called the MILES framework.
Money: How much money do you have? How much are you willing to spend to do something interesting?
Intelligence and Insight: How creative are you? What areas of intelligence do you thrive in (emotional, social etc)
Location and Luck: Where are you based? What are the trends happening near you?
Education and Expertise: What formal education do you have? Are you willing to self-learn
Status: What’s the quality of your network? Who do you know, and who can you access? How strong is your personal brand?
Typically, the MILES framework is used for you to understand how you can tailor your advantages to a pursuit. In this instance, it’s a useful exercise for knowing what you’re willing to give for a given pursuit.
If you want to write a book, there’s a few ways you can do that:
Pay someone else to write it (Money)
Write the book yourself (Intelligence and Insight)
Be based somewhere where there are more writers (Location and Luck)
Do a course on writing a book (Education and Expertise)
Contact someone who’s written a book (Status)
Notice how all those tasks correspond to an unfair advantage? It’s important to identify how a pursuit can be approach, and thus, which task is relevant for you.
Some of those tasks may be completely infeasible. Others may work but may not be the thing you want to do.
The important thing here, is to define what’s worth it for you, and what’s not. If I had this goal (which I do), I would write the book myself.
I don’t have the money to pay someone to write it. I could find a course that would help with writing a book but I don’t have any contacts who are authors. I am based in a country where there are a lot of writers, so I can use that to reverse engineer the process of both writing and launching a book.
2 - Create an experiment
I’m currently reading Tiny Experiments, and the biggest takeaway I have from this book, is how the experimental-driven approach is a lot less daunting than committing to a goal.
Lets take the book example again. Writing a book would be quite daunting to someone who’s never written a blog post before.
A good experiment would be to write 5 atomic essays. Atomic essays are 200-300 word blog posts that focus on one core idea. If someone can write 5 atomic essays, those can be easily combined into 1 blog post.
Experiments following this could be:
Write 5 blog posts (1,000 words)
Write a short ebook (5,000 words)
Write a longer ebook (10,000 words)
Write a standard book (40,000+ words)
See how the goal of writing a book is a lot easier to process with the relevant experiments?
You can pivot at any point in an experiment. The beauty of them is the data they give you. You might write 1 blog post and decide writing a book isn’t for you. That’s not a failed experiment. That’s clarity.
In your pursuit, think of 1 experiment you can conduct to test whether it’s something worth committing to.
Your experiment should be:
Quantifiable (i.e. compose a 30 second jingle)
Achievable within a specific duration (a week is good to start with)
Linked to a repeatable practice (i.e. I’ll spend 30 minutes a day composing)
3 - Divorce from the outcome
In a world that is obsessed with appearing to do the cool things, it’s important to remember that the journey is the destination.
I’ve fallen into the trap of finding something that I love doing and thinking that it has to be a bigger thing that it currently is. I’m definitely not the only one who learned to crochet and was told to “turn it into a business.”
This practice of divorcing from the outcome, is less about not caring what something becomes. But rather, focusing on the practice of becoming. It helps ground you in the practice of a pursuit, rather than the external representation of it.
Imagine you write a book and no one buys it. Is the book a failure? Or have you learned the practice of writing a book, and thus, can learn how to write a book someone will buy?
Letting go of how something turns out is about remembering that the external world tends to catch up to our inner ability. If we wait for the world to reflect what we want, we will be waiting forever!
I’m yet to make significant money from writing online. But one thing I do know, is that committing to the process will lead to something. And, whilst I enjoy writing online, why not continue?
Even if it doesn’t become anything more than what it is right now. I enjoy it, people like what I have to say, so why worry?
Doing cool things is simple
It’s a matter of:
Identifying what you’re willing to leverage
Creating experiments that would help get you there
Letting go of how the experiments turn out
Remember, what you define as cool, should be up to you. Don’t let society tell you what is cool. Whilst the examples I gave are somewhat typical examples, it’s important to give yourself the permission to go for what you deem as cool.
I’m currently on a journey of identifying the ways I can embody soft ambition and self-permission in my life to achieve interesting things.
If that’s something you’re interested in, I welcome you to join in and subscribe so that you can get these posts into your inbox!