Don't Forget
I sit back in the velvet couch.
Window open behind me, cool air brushes by my neck in bursts. The soft patter of rain in the trees settles the world.
"Daa daaaaa" - he climbs up next to me. Tiny fingers gripping my shirt.
Eyes wide he smiles.
I smile.
He giggles, burying his face in my chest. Curly red head pushed up under my chin.
Big sigh.
The cool breeze brushes by. He nuzzles closer.
Rain rushes down the gutter in a moment of silence as he tangles his tiny fingers in my beard.
My mind wanders.
I have so much to write.
So much to do.
What will the next article be? I am flooded with the simultaneous feeling that I have too many things to write about and no idea what to write about.
And will it be enough?
Am I going to get what I really need and want from all this?
Sure I've got enough now ... but is that always going to be the case? What do I need to do?
What can I do?
What should I be doing?
"Daaa ... da da ... dooiiii ... ba ba"
Tiny boy talking to himself, does a little dance in my lap.
So,
What if I'm not doing what I should be doing?
I've got all this experience copywriting, I've got this experience with AI, with email, in all these different markets.
What if I made more information and teaching around AI and copywriting?
I could expand on my course,
Create a ton of assets that people could use. Prompts. Mini courses. Freebie offerings.
I could use AI to make it all!
I could have many different lead gen funnels leading into a list that I could run completely using AI. What if I made the personality behind the list not me but an AI generated personality?
And then I could sell anything AI related.
I could just run that almost on autopilot minus setup and batching.
And then I could really be making a lot of extra money and cashflow and we'd never have to worry about things again.
I could buy a lot more Guard and continue to set ourselves up in the future and-
knock knock knock
It's later now. I'm down in the office. Door closed. Words to the page. Weird line of thought ... why'd I go all the way down there ...
What was that I heard?
knock knock knock
"dA deEE?" "Daaa DEEE?"
I open the door
"OOHHHHHH" Huge smile looking up at me.
Arms shoot into the air.
"UP UP"
Into my arms he flies.
The world fades away.
One tiny hand grabbing my shoulder. The other pointing. He wants to show me something.
We go investigate.
If only I had not f*ked things up so much.
I had a relatively huge audience. I thought it was tiny and irrelevant at the time. But I've made much greater impact with much smaller audiences since then.
1000 attentive people is more than enough on an email list.
And I had 30000.
It wasn't getting me what I wanted, so I stirred the pot. Aggressively. Mixed it up, poured it out, poked at it with a stick, let it set, put it back together.
I got somewhere with it. Somewhere significant,
And yet I sit here having nearly nothing from it in the end. Except ...
What if I made a Substack with all the remainder?
What if I just started publishing all that again and taking my old list and running ads.
I've got a lot of good old content ...
Not that I want to make a lot of new content around that subject, I'd have to find other people to write because I'm just not feeling it,
But
But ...
It was all there.
I had it.
I could have made something of it.
It could help me now still.
What if I just started putting all that out and brought back the podcast then I could have a whole new possible flow of lead gen leading into everything else I'm doing and-
"NOM NOM NOM NOM UP UP UP"
I snap back to the present. I'm at the dining table. Soup is in front of me. I must have fixed lunch.
My thoughts deep in the past.
Trying to make something happen.
Why is that?
It's not like I'm doing nothing in the present.
"UP UP UP" tiny hands, big grin, huge eyes, practically jumping out of his socks as he tries to get in my lap.
I smile.
Dunno what I was thinking about.
I pick him up. Legs kicking in excitement "AHHHHHHhhhhohhhhhh" he points to my bowl of soup "nomNAM?"
Can he have it?
"AHT AHT?"
"Yea little guy, it's quite hot still. How about some cheese?"
"EEESHHH???!!! OH OH!" He practically leaps from my lap
A little flutter of a run to the fridge
"EEEESSSHHHH!!!!!"
Time for lunch together.
How many times have I been in a place that's exactly where I want to be and I've fucked it up because I couldn't recognize that I have everything I want?
Or maybe because it was actually good, and I only knew how to feel like I was ok if I was trying to fix something broken.
All the times.
I think that's the answer.
I can look back in the past and see a few moments of present awareness. Where I knew what I had was unique and awesome ... and fleeting.
I wonder if I used to avoid that feeling of presence because deep down I knew it has always been fleeting.
When I lived in a different country and found myself working from a tiny cafe in the tropical heat. When I saw myself sitting in the calm waters of the bay in the tiny cabin of the boat writing in the morning sun. When I had the simple studio apartment, large doors of a Juliet balcony opening into a line of trees facing the setting sun, and the only responsibility on my shoulders was to myself every morning.
And now, when I look into the eyes of my children who are figuring out all the wonders and challenges of the world and looking to me for guidance and understanding. When I wake up in the home that I own, on the edge of a forest on the edge of a city on the edge of an ocean sound, riding the line of balance between modern life and some connection to the natural world where I can step out my door and breath in the clean air of pine and maple in the cool crisp drizzly rainy morning.
Instead of fucking it up this time, I'm writing about it.
Because even in the midst of the moments throughout the day when I can just step out of this office and catch the wild happy grinning baby running toward me, and when I can pick up my older kids from school, and when I can help them navigate the wild tumultuous truth of the reality they are growing up in ...
My mind still wants to say "yea but ... are you doing enough?"
"Are you enough?"
"Shouldn't you be doing more?"
"If you were doing more it would all be easier."
"what if...?"
And
"But if you had done such and such ..."
"All his life he has looked away ... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing."
- Yoda
I think the deep irony of our biology and our psychology is that when we do have absolutely everything we really want (whether we recognize that or not), we stop being in a state where we need to chase, where we need to push, where we need to do and go and fight and scrape and find and hunt ...
We stop actually being in that state because we've arrived,
And in that reality ...
There's a void.
A void of all the behaviors we thought we should be doing. Chipping and scraping away. Going for more. Always digging and fighting and grasping.
But if you keep that perspective, those behaviors, those kneejerk reactions, those inbuilt mental kicks that say "you're not enough, you don't have enough, you're not doing enough" then you keep fighting and digging and scraping and grasping ...
And when you have exactly what you want, the only thing that can do is take you away from it.
Funnily enough, that state of fighting and scraping and hunting and grasping is maybe always a state of trying to live in the future (or running from the past). Trying to say that what I have now is not enough and I need to get more, I have to get more and be more and do more, and all that more is down the road from where I am.
But what's not down the road is this life now.
In the burden and victory of responsibility.
In the magic of all that can only ever be but for a fleeting moment.
I realized as I was writing this that you, the reader, might read some of my thoughts, which are real thoughts and snippets of trains of thoughts I've delved into whenever that feeling of "well do I need to do more" starts to crop up,
And I realized that my ideas might actually sound good.
I mean, that should make sense. They sounded good to me when I was thinking them.
Enticing.
And I've even gotten into imaginary arguments and conversations in my head with other people about why I should or should not do a thing.
I think part of the challenge is that there are actually a lot of choices that can be made. And on the surface, most choices are not bad choices. It wouldn't be a "bad idea" for me to do more with AI and make a list around that and all those things.
Not on the surface anyway.
And when presenting those thoughts and ideas to others it can be super easy to fall into the trap of "well why DON'T you do that? Wouldn't that make you a lot of money? Isn't that worth the time and effort?"
All of the ideas and thoughts I presented above I've sifted through extensively and in the context of where I am and where I want to go, and with the information and understanding I have now, they are not the next best step for me to take.
I don't even talk about ideas like those as if they are bad or I should or shouldn't do them anymore.
I just look to my constraints toward what I want to achieve and how I want to live my life and I determine if those ideas are constraints or would help me solve those immediate constraints ...
(Or better yet, instead of trying to take an idea and see if it fits in constraints, just looking at the constraint in front of me and seeing what’s the simplest way to serve the function)
If those ideas aren’t immediately relevant, then for me it's probably not worth putting the effort into them.
Anyway,
If you looked at any of my rambling future thinking and past thoughts from series above and thought "hey that's not a bad idea, why DON’T you do that" - now you may know why.
As much as my human mindset is inclined to look at the things I could be doing and what I could be having, every time I take an intentful breath I'm brought back into the moment and realize I'm exactly where I want to be and the only thing I need to do is make sure I can keep being here and now.
Because if I chase things that don’t serve me in the present, then I’m not here.
Where my children are.
Where my life is.
It's funny how much perception shifts with life over time.
When I was younger and hot headed in my 20s, I remember observing such perspectives on life like that episode of The Simpsons which follows Homer's experience as a young father working at the power plant to make just enough money to follow his dreams (I believe it was working at a bowling alley).
And then the unexpected kept coming along to the point where he was forced to go back working at the power plant. It was all doom and gloom. You're gonna be stuck here forever in this shitty situation you don't want to be in was the message.
Of course I remember thinking "how could I ever want to do anything but chase after my dreams?"
Didn't think my dreams were actually secretly nothing I was chasing after.
And that they were always changing, while also always being right where I was.
It's all fleeting.
It's all temporary.
It's all for the moment for the now.
Never again will my boy be as tiny as to squeeze into my lap, facing me, big wondrous eyes and grinning face looking up as he tangles his tiny fingers in my beard (and then gives it a good yank for baby science).
And that's actually great.
Makes it special now.
Makes living life now better than anything.
The things I tailor the now for will always change because life changes.
But if I get caught up in the whirlwind and drive of what if, or if only, then I'll just be constantly pulled out into the past or the future. Never quite living in the present, and because of that, failing to grow and move forward to things I really want.
I might even possibly intentionally fuck things up just so I can have a semblance of control. If I'm busy fixing a broken thing, then I'm busy working and doing.
And maybe that's what it all comes down to.
Presence
Certainty, or Clarity
I think clarity tends to give people certainty, or rather, a lack of clarity breeds uncertainty.
If I don't know what's going to happen in life or how I'm going to make things keep being good, it's a breeding ground for uncertainty. Uncertainty means lack of control.
But,
If I'm really clear on what I want in life then it's much much easier to let go of the future thinking ideas of what if, or what could be, and just be in the present with what matters now.
In the presence.
I can just let go, and literally be with all that is good in the moment.
That doesn't mean I don't have interests for the future. That doesn't mean I've got everything I want in the totality of life. That doesn't mean I don't walk a path that will take me there as I live and create and build ...
It just means I have everything I want and need RIGHT NOW.
Which actually makes it a lot easier to live in the present, serve the present, and do things which increase the likelihood that I get the things I am also interested in having, the life I'm interested in doing, in the future. I don't need to be in the future now to have the future I want then.
I just have to remind myself,
Never Forget why I do what I do.
Never forget the reason behind it all, the things that matter most to you.
As long as I hold onto that, then the decisions I make will serve what matters, rather than take me away from it.
I think we're far better served by being attentive to that, and letting go when we start to grasp beyond what that is. Find the way forward in the present moment because that's always where it ever will be.
Be Useful. Be Present. Love the Journey.
, CMO The Guardian Academy
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