Hello friends,
It’s so easy to get overwhelmed by the flow of life and choose to let things happen to us rather than choosing and making them happen ourselves.
It’s easy, when you give yourself a choice.
The most annoying part of the whole “being an adult” thing is about making choices. For the sake of being responsible, we constantly fight against our lizard brain who just wants to play, sleep and eat junk food.
In the past couple of weeks, I gave myself the choice not to write posts or newsletters. I would like to hide behind the fact that my classes started again and I didn’t got the time but it would be a lie.
I had more than enough time, and energy, and ideas.
I just chose not to make a good use of it.
When I gave my lizard brain the opportunity to be lazy in the first place, I had already lost. But, being aware of that now is my path to redemption.
Stop trying to make hard-work easy.
Part of the reason why we struggle so much at being responsible and productive is that it’s… just not easy it all. It’s painful. When we know how much time and energy a task will take, we are bound to postpone it again and again until we just can’t anymore; by then we can only feel the pain of all these wasted days. 😅
A solution would be to stop trying to make hard work easy. I mean, it’s in the word, isn’t it? Hard-word is supposed to be “hard”, and that’s exactly why it feels so rewarding when it’s over.
“You don’t need to be great to start, but you need to start to be great.” — Zig Zagler.
Instead of being so reluctant to do something because we expect it to be easy, we should just accept it for what it is and brace ourselves because only us (yes, only you), as intelligent being can achieve it.
More often than not, once we are in the “flow”, we will realize that the hardest part was getting rid of our fears and actually starting 🤷🏾♂️.
Going forward…
Going forward here is what I plan to repeat myself and do my best to live by:
If it’s important for you, don’t give yourself a choice.
If it’s too easy, it’s probably not worth doing. Brace yourself for pain and sweat. Yes, it will be hard, but it will be rewarding.
Don’t try to to be perfect or satisfy everyone, it’s the best recipe for failure.
For today, I think being yourself is more than enough.Yes, you will fail.. a lot. Who doesn’t? Just make sure you get back on your feet and try again.
Hopefully my misadventures can help you on your own path.
Quick Note: If you were forwarded this newsletter, you can subscribe right here:
— Learning and building in public 😇
In 2021, I decided to learn in public. I’ll admit, it’s not easy for me. I tend to overthink things and try to perfect them. But I want to (and will) share more about what I learn and what I build, in the open.
💌 This newsletter was sent to 45 awesome readers across the world. The previous one had a 48% open rate.
👀 This month the blog totalized around 1385 visits, from 1026 visitors in 60+ countries.
My free Notion template for students was downloaded more than 105 times and generous individuals contributed around 6.21$ (more templates are coming).
— What I loved this week
📱 One tool I'm loving: Command Browser. Amazing and very practical browser for iPhone and iPad, Command Browser allows you to take highlights from any website you consult and either organize them in the app or directly export them to Notion, Readwise or Remnotes.
📰 These days, I’m mostly diving into the Jira docs, trying to understand what the Agile Methodology is. What is SCRUM, what is Kanban, what are things like Epics, User Stories and Sprints? I’m taking it slow, but I’m enjoying a lot learning about the principle and philosophy behind the popular Agile methodology.
🗣 Quote of the week: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
— Victor E. Frankl (in Man’s Search for Meaning)
— What I created this week
Here is what I created for you lately.
👨🏾💻 Github Jobs API Challenge
As part of my #100DaysOfCode Challenge, I got the Github Jobs API challenge (from Frontendmentor.io) down with Next.js and Styled Components. Although the design is not from me, all the code is, you can check it out here :
That’s all from me for today, see you next week 👋🏾