A head full of energy isn’t a miracle from a higher power.
It’s the result of avoiding mental drainers. They’re those things that quietly sap your energy, and sometimes, your will to live. They’re the things that seem harmless but are actually bad for you.
Let’s go through a few. Then we will zap them dead together. Sound fair enough?
Hidden jealousy
A sign of wealth: not being jealous of others.
— Greg Isenberg
I’m an idiot. Legit.
I expected to be a moderately successful writer and have everybody hold my hand and sing hallelujah with me. Haha. Not even close.
As soon as you get a tiny bit of success there will be people who get angry. Why? They didn’t do the thing you did.
People will be more successful than you. Life isn’t a college football game where there are winners and losers. Everyone who is breathing is alive.
Alive = Winning
In case you think I’m immune, I’m not. One of my favorite writers publishes banger after banger. Occasionally I get jealous. When this happens I stop the mental drain by firing off an email to them to acknowledge their success.
Encouraging your idols is the antidote to jealously. Easy.
Complaining about social media platforms
News Break is evil, you say. And? Do they care? Nope.
There will always be a new user to spawn up on the platform you left. Money can always buy new users or creators if things get bad. Humans are good at giving second chances. I mean look at Zuckerberg. We keep trusting him to steal our data and sell it to the highest bidder, so he does.
The truth is none of us know how any social media algorithm works. There are some who claim they do. They’re modern-day fortune-tellers. Don’t bet your career on a fortune-teller. They might tell lies to get money.
Social media apps aren’t there to get a customer service award. Companies like Google don’t even have customer service. You can’t complain to google for a bad google search.
*Spanks google on the bum* “Bad google!”
Nope. Your feelings about their platform aren’t part of their strategy.
If you don’t like a tech platform then stop using it. Take the energy you were going to waste complaining, and find another platform to spend your time on.
A gorgeous brain full of unspoken ideas
I once got yelled at in an email. I broke a cardinal sin by making an online course. This person thought only they should have the right to create courses. Anybody else who does so is a criminal.
Dumb.
Ideas mean nothing without execution.
We all have great ideas, and most of them are similar. Share your ideas. Give your ideas away for free. Do a James Altucher and write ten ideas per day, then send them to people you admire. Use ideas as a magnet rather than keeping them all to yourself in the hope you can sell each one for $1 million.
Investors buy execution, not ideas. That’s how the world works. Don’t let the mental drainer of trying to lock your ideas up in a bank safe inside your head ruin your life.
Being fed up with your employer
If you’ve worked in corporate like I have, you’ll know that a lot of your colleagues will waste their day being fed up with their employer.
“Why don’t they pay me more?”
“How come I didn’t get a promotion?!”
“Why can’t they pay for me to fly to that conference in Vegas?”
Complaints that are spoken behind the closed doors of a meeting room are silly. They make you feel bad about your job. They make doing your work harder. All of it is pointless, especially when …
LinkedIn allows us to change jobs like we change underpants.
There’s zero friction to leave and work elsewhere. Cheat on your boss. Date another company for a day at a job interview. Sleep around with various different leaders to see if there’s one you’d like to marry, so you can divorce your old pain-in-the-ass boss who doesn’t understand you.
Jobs are everywhere. You’re good enough. Flirt with new opportunities in LinkedIn direct messages. You’ll see for yourself.
Opportunities are limitless. Once you know that you’ll stop giving a f*ck about what your employer did this month to piss you off for the 121st time.
Doomsday predictions
The world can be a messed up place. After the last 2 years you wouldn’t be entirely mad to predict a major political problem, a riot, a war, or even a financial disaster worse than the Great Recession of 2008.
I met a surgeon in 2010. He made close to a million dollars annually. We got chatting about real estate.
“Nah, I’m not buying anything until the market crashes.”
A friend of his told me he’d been saying that since 1992. Even if the markets did crash, the prices still wouldn’t return to where they were in 1992.
He hoped to profit off a doomsday prediction. Instead, he let his cash sit in a savings account to rot away, thanks to inflation and the devaluing of the US dollar. Every day there are commentators predicting the end of the world.
They miss one thing: the power of human ingenuity to solve problems.
No matter how bad the problem, humans find a way. It’s why I’m glad I was born human and not some other species, like a rainbow crab. No problem is likely to be the end of the world.
Save your optimism muscle. Assume humans will figure it out, and we probably will (according to history).
Expecting people to behave
We’re not great at compliance. Look at the face mask drama of the last few years. Many people saw the requirement to wear a mask as a violation of their human rights, instead of a way to protect their health.
I didn’t get angry.
Recently in my hometown we implemented coroni-rona certificates. You have to show one before you go into a shop or enter McDonald’s and stuff your face with a vegan Big Mac.
After two days businesses stopped checking. It’s exactly as I predicted. We don’t like being told what to do. So all I did was expect people wouldn’t comply and kept wearing my mask while socially distancing.
It’s a drainer to expect people to care about other people. Modern society has taught us to be selfish and only take care of our families.
A return to unselfishness will happen again — but for the time being we continue to live through the individualism plague. Accept it and move on. Energy restored!
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