It’s been awhile, a long while since I last sat down to write a blog. I originally created this blog as a way to deepen my understanding of books I read, through review. It was quite satisfying thinking back, and it definitely helped me become more familiar with the content at the time.
But yet, my first book review ended up being my last and that’s what I want to discuss in the bulk of this post. For now, lets look back on the book I reviewed “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. I recall enjoying it quite a lot, but I’m disappointed that I can’t remember anything from the book without first jogging my memory with the material.
It wasn’t as though the book didn’t offer good advice, it seems that I merely failed to engrave the messages within myself. The only concept I seemed to take out of the book and integrate into my life is the idea of putting things out of sight when we want to reduce a habit.
An easy example is keeping cigarettes out of eyesight if you have an addiction to smoking. And also the opposite idea of keeping good habits within eyesight to encourage the behaviour. Like keeping your gym membership out and in plain view to remind yourself of what must be done.
Writing this as an anxious mind can be cripplingly difficult at times. I say this as someone who knows they can enjoy writing and go on absolute rampages of writing non-stop at times.
Everything becomes infinitely difficult as I overthink about the infinite things that could be done better, or simply be better. Am I writing in a way that flows? Or am I jumping all over the place? What if I can’t find an opportunity to speak on a topic later that I could easily segue into now? Am I using the best word in this scenario? Am I even expressing myself the best I could through these sentences? Is my punctuation proper? (It’s not).
These thoughts, these ideas, these are what stop us from ever beginning, ever having the opportunity to learn and grow. Most of these thoughts, these anxieties, are simply solved through doing.
My punctuation will improve over time as I write more and learn more. Whether or not I worded something properly can always be fixed later, and over the long-term, I will get a better feel for how I want things to be written.
I can go on and on about things that cause me anxiety, and I hope by talking about it, hopefully some people can find comfort in the fact that they aren’t alone, or learn ways to deal with it, or I might even figure these things out myself.
One last thought on anxiety I want to talk about, given that it’s heavily related, is the anxiety that I can’t retain or learn information well. To be honest, I have no clue how common this is, but what I do know is that it’s one of if not the biggest pain in my ass.
I read a book less than a year ago and I can’t recall the contents, but I jog my memory and quickly remember much of it. Problem solved. What about how I tried to learn calculus in high-school and would get anxious about how I wasn’t understanding and others were and began feeling stupid and worrying that my teacher would realize that I don’t belong in that class and would demote me to a lower math.
I’m embarrassed that I am this way/was this way. My hope is that by reflecting upon it that I can figure something out. If I’m struggling then wouldn’t it be best to slow down and take a deep breath?
Take the best steps I can and do what I need to learn the contents? If this fails then what next? Acceptance is what is next in my mind. I naturally don’t have the ability to learn this content, learning this content requires more from me than others.
My current strategies of studying and seeking out help within my inner circle aren’t working. I clearly need a tutor. If that tutor can’t help, then I search till I find one who can. At some point I decide I’m done trying.
In my mind that’s okay, I gave it my best shot. I weighed the pros and cons and decided it’s not worth it. I accept the fact that I don’t understand the content and I accept that even with high effort I cannot learn this content.
If I am to learn, it will take more than I’m willing to give. If this makes me stupid in some peoples eyes then so be it. I am proud of myself and that is what matter. There is a saying “Comparison is the killer of all joy”.
This is all to true, through this reflection it becomes very clear that the key is to focus on yourself. Set your own standards, the only one who you can disappoint is yourself.
I apologize if this post seems rambly, it feels weird saying that because I don’t even know if anyone besides myself will read this. If it’s not clear already, this post in a lot of ways was written to myself.
And you can see myself working through problems I have or perhaps if this was as productive as I feel now, then “had”. This post may not provide much value to the average person on the outside, but it has already provided tremendous value to me. This all comes back to the main ideas for this post, anxiety.
Is this worth my time? What even is my time worth? Answer one, well I’ve already found this first post therapeutic, so it’s at least valuable in that way. Answer two, my time is mostly spent distracting myself from this world, so I’m pretty confident that some of it can safely be spared.
If you’ve made it this far, then you must enjoy my writing to some extent, so let’s talk about “the plan” or what my plan is. Essentially, I want to begin doing daily posts as I have a lot of time right now, naturally if things get crowded I can reduce the number, but my hope is to do daily.
I want to explore interesting topic and extract content from it that I believe could benefit our day to day lives. The first topic I plan to explore is the 7 deadly sins. While I consider myself to be religious, I don’t plan to take an overly religious view on the topic, I more so want to look at what the 7 deadly sins are and how they affect us and how we can avoid them. Of course I will be giving my personal stories related to each topic as well as my two cents on each topic also!
The last thing I should mention is why, as in why I want to do this. Obviously as you can see in this post, it can be super therapeutic, as I pretty much get to navigate my own brain and all the thoughts that come with it.
But that’s not actually the main reason for continuing the blog. I want to write a book, or rather I started writing a book (I’m only a few hundred words in). But who am I? And who wants to read my book? Realistically, nobody right now, which is why I’m hoping to build up a little bit of a following to give myself a better chance at success. I also plan to return to my Life Leveling YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Life-Leveling/videos. I think at some point I would like to make the same kind of videos I was making, but I’d rather do that here and there as I get the inspiration.
That’s kind of the main reason I quit the channel to begin with, I had things I wanted to say and I said them. I didn’t want to force myself to keep talking. So perhaps I will pursue some other creative endeavors on the channel, but that won’t be for awhile, as I am awaiting the reconstruction of my personal place.
So if you want to follow my journey and see my content, you can of course subscribe to the newsletter on the blog to see when I post. You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel to see when I start posting. Thank you for your time, and have a good day 🙂
Atomic Habits (Affiliate Link)
Leave a Reply