Every day you wake up, you are given a fresh new set of hours to work with. Yet if you’re stuck with the feeling that you have no control over these hours, then you might as well not have those hours to begin with.
The joy of dealing with this pickle is in being able to direct your energy to exactly where you want it to go.
Sure, there is gravity. There are people or situations in your life that you would rather not have to deal with.
Yet all those situations are a result of other events that happened before it.
So the question is, are you going to resist what is in front of you and see it as a barrier to entry, or are you going to realize what you have and see it as an opportunity?
Will you take a random bunch of ingredients and decide that they don’t mix well together, or will you make an Asian-Italian stir fry?
The food is going to get tossed out anyways. In other words, we will all be dust one day.
So what do you have to lose by making a stir fry out of your experience here?
Three Ideas from My Notebooks
Get in the habit of not taking every interaction with everyone personally. Start with the low hanging fruit by reading the news and noticing how personal some issues feel to you. Yet you had absolutely nothing to do with the story you’re reading and now you feel like someone is inside your home yelling at you.
The outcome isn’t the problem. It’s the structure that creates it that needs fixing. If you have a leak in your home, the puddle on the ground isn’t the problem. The problem is two or three levels above that.
The only time a discussion will lead to something getting done is when everyone in the discussion is fully aligned with what needs to be done. Until that fictional time happens, the best course of action is to focus on what you can do now, which is also called Elbow Grease 💪. In a world full of distractions that lead to everyone second-guessing themselves, Elbow Grease is more valuable than gold, oil or silicon. This applies to internal discussions and dialogue that you have with yourself just as much.
A long archive of the ideas are located in The Ideas Index:
Elliott’s July Homepage Playlist: By The River Banks
This week I have dug up a track that I seemed to have “finished” in July of last year. Yet I went back in September and removed the sound of the running water for some reason. And that running water was the premise of the song title in the first place.
Today I listened to it for consideration in this week’s newsletter and to add to the July Playlist, and of course, the original version was perfectly fine, if not way better than the one where I second-guessed myself.
The other funny thing about this piece is that at some point I decided it was not worthy of ending up anywhere in my aggressive release schedule over the past year. This is a lesson to go with your early, first instincts. They are usually right.
I wrote this last week:
I yearn to not only record music more sloppy but to keep sharing that slop, imprinting it on the atmosphere long after I’m here in the cellular form.
Today I will add to it:
I hope to write music that helps us slow down and swim through time, savouring every second of our experience here.
What do you wish for this week?
Feel free to write the answer back directly to me.
Thanks for reading today, and have a great week ahead 🧡🥯🧡
Elliott