May 2022 - The Happiness of Pursuit:
This month, we explore how channeling a process-centric mindset will always defeat a mentality tied to outcomes.
This newsletter was launched to deliver insightful, concise information and resources that provoke thought. Our goal is to synthesise the best information we have consumed that month, and relate it to our everyday lives.
This is our attempt to get better each day, and we would love you to join us.
Quote:
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it difficult to plan the day” - E.B. White
Challenge of the Month - Enjoying the Process:
In start-ups, you live in constant fear of failure, so the concept of being content is something you can never let yourself feel. ‘Only the paranoid survive’ in the start-up world, but it’s hard to measure the weight this foreboding feeling has on your personal life. Recently I have found it particularly tough to find the pleasure in the process, and be present, as the goal we’re trying to achieve grows each month, regardless of whether we’re moving forward or backwards.
I’ve found that the only way to combat this feeling, in any high-pressure scenario or for any goal-oriented individual, is to create a system of work you can follow consistently. Drawing from James Clear’s ‘Atomic Habits’, my panacea for imposter syndrome is to draw on experience, rather than emotion, when rationalising something I’m concerned about.
By trusting my process, my mood generally follows whatever action I take, and I will begin to mitigate these concerns through a system of work that I know I can control. For example, if I am worried about our sales targets, all I can do is focus on maximising inputs and ‘winning’ that day - that often has the greatest impact on calming the mind while simultaneously making the biggest leap towards those sales targets.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself growing a start-up, it is that my true happiness comes in the pursuit of a goal, rather than in the pleasure of achieving said goal. This has made me realise the importance of enjoying the process, as I know that the destination I’m hoping to reach will be anti-climatic, and like the best objectives, that destination can never actually be reached due to ever-advancing goals and expectations.
Habit of the Month - Reading:
I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who wishes they read less. It’s the digital-native curse that plagues each of us with guilt as we watch older generations fly through books for pleasure, rather than achievement (something completely foreign to me).
I liken their response to my reading woes to that of a new-found sea swimmer, “It’s actually grand once you get in”. The fact is, I could never ‘get in’ to reading, no matter how much I tried over the last decade. No matter the book, the time of year, the mood or the goals, I always gave up.
In a perfect blend of naivety and denial of previous failure, I set out at the beginning of this year with my Everest, to read consistently throughout the year. The result? I’ve read multiple times per week, and have finally found pleasure in it. Here are 3 steps I took to achieving this that might be helpful to anyone in a similar position:
Accountability: If you’re competitive like me, or enjoy some external validation, find someone to keep you accountable. I luckily had my co-writer, Paddy Ryder who reads 5x what I do, which made it that bit more motivating.
Anything is better than nothing: Mood follows action, and I started associating small bursts of happiness every time I finished reading, like a mini-accomplishment. I noticed this feeling after 5 or 50 pages, so even when I wasn’t in the mood, I picked up the book to try. I recommend James Clear’s two-minute rule for anyone struggling with procrastination.
Mix it up: I always saw reading as ‘work’ or ‘productivity’. I would lose concentration on the pages of a non-fiction book as I started to apply ideas in the text to real-life challenges in my start-up, which often left me stressed (particularly when reading before bed). This year, I mixed it up. I never ‘tried’ to learn anything from these books, I just read for the sake of reading.
For more on the subject of learning to love to read, here is an amazing article by Naval Ravikant.
Book: “Mindset by Carol Dweck” (here)
To date, no book has had such a profound impact on the way I evaluate myself than Mindset by Carol Dweck. The main premise of the book highlights the difference between a “fixed mindset” and a “growth mindset”, also articulated in her Ted talk here.
In essence, a fixed mindset is the belief that your qualities are set in stone (e.g. I am a good student so I should get an A in my Economics exam). In contrast, a growth mindset suggests your abilities can be crafted through effort and work (e.g. focusing on incrementally improving will result in better test scores).
In the past I adopted a fixed mindset and felt an urgency to continuously prove myself or became disillusioned when a classmate exceeded my score. However, more recently I have adopted a growth mindset, which has assisted in maintaining a process-centric viewpoint.
This has not only enhanced my productivity, but has given me a sense of liberation as I draw a sense of happiness when I stick to this process each day, rather than being tied to an outcome-driven mentality which plagued me in the past.
Podcast - “The Happiness Expert That Made 51 Million People Happier: Mo Gawdat” - The Diary of a CEO, Steven Bartlett” (here):
Mo Gawdat is the former Head of Business at Google X, their ‘moonshot’ subsidiary of innovation. They apply their focus and resources to the wildest ideas and attempts to execute on the extraordinary. Following the sudden loss of his son, Gawdat shifted his pursuit from the future of technology to the concept of happiness, and how this profound concept can be rationalised, learned and shared across the world.
This is a podcast I would recommend to anyone, however it is particularly pertinent for the frantically ambitious. The desire to ‘be present’ and content with how lucky we are in our given position directly contradicts many of us who constantly desire more from ourselves in pursuit of the next mountain-top.
This podcast helps re-centre anyone who struggles to enjoy the process, and is instead obsessing over a destination often created by the forces of external validation.
Question to Ask Yourself: What does your ideal week look like in the future, if no one was watching you or output didn’t matter?
If you optimise for intrinsic value over external validation, and for enjoyment of the process over desired-result, you will inadvertently deliver strong output while enjoying it at the same time. This makes it very easy to plan the day!
Rabbit Hole:
In this section, we explore a topic or trend that fascinated us, guiding you towards three of the best information sources for those keen on diving down the rabbit hole. This month, we’re focusing on Uranium.
European grid pressures have been well documented in recent months, and with demand increasing, supply decreasing and consumers almost indifferent to pricing, Uranium (used to produce nuclear energy) is a space worth looking into.
Dive in below by learning about:
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Until next time,
Paddy & Charlie