Every Thought Counts
Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of the Sunday Bagel. This email might be the best thing to happen to you since high school ended1.
Golf season is just about over today. This week I was part of a group of people who were out there trying to get their last swings in before moving indoors to simulators for the winter. And that’s what this week’s photo below is from.
The big learning of the season is that in order to start to fix your problems, you need a trained professional to look at them. While I’ve come a long way since I re-engaged with the game ten years ago, I still have some horrible swing flaws.
Once in a while I send a video of my swing to a golf pro on Fiverr, and for $15 he sends me back a video with something to work on. While this is not the best substitute for a proper golf lesson where the coach will see you work at it in-person, this highlights the need to collaborate with other people when you’re stuck.
If you don’t fix the problem, you keep enhancing your flaws. You start practicing your mistakes and you learn those better than the proper technique. Every swing counts, just as every pass at a line of music on your instrument counts.
I also realized that golf is so difficult that if you walk down the middle of the fairway while someone else is hitting a ball, the chances that you’ll get hit are quite low. Because this happened to me the other day and I’m still here to tell the tale 😁
Three Ideas from My Notebooks
Every thought counts. Every hour of your life counts. And you will tell me that you can’t be so rigid, but watch what happens when you let your thoughts go astray. They all matter. How you spend your time is how you spend your life, and your life is constructed by your thinking.
The term enlightenment is vague but a simple way of understanding it is having control over the situation. You are able to call the shots in your mind, rather than the other way around. Don’t expect to have this power over everything in your life, but sometimes you get this beam of light on a problem you’re facing, and at this point in time, you’re good.
In the morning after you wake from sleep, your brain is closer to the alpha wave state. This is a great time to get your most dreaded tasks done as you’re calm and have the inner critic lowered down. As the day goes on and your mind is stirred up, try to bring it back down to this level however you can.
This Week’s Track: The Miracle Network
What to expect from this track: Thick creaky piano on a meditative landscape. Minimalism. A new way of seeing the world.
The Artwork:
helped me generate the image for this which is this purple landscape. I then overlaid a photo of a man from my camera roll who was surrendering to the ocean, watching the waves take him to another level.Find it on Spotify, Apple Music or search most streaming services to save it to your library.
I’m happy to invite you to The Project Lab, which is a virtual coworking session in service of doing your Most Creative Work. The next session is on Tuesday, November 21st at 7pm EST.
We’re almost done this week’s newsletter, so feel free to write back or leave a comment.
I had two bagels yesterday, and I will probably have two more today. It’s been a great weekend.
See you next week,
Elliott
p.s. My other newsletter this week over at
talked about The Simple Power of Walking.Can we laugh for a bit at how bad high school really is? I started re-watching some of Degrassi High on Amazon this weekend so I can contemplate this a bit more.