2024W19 - back in action
Resuming a weekly writing cadence
Why
After three months of wallowing in my own thoughts and outsourcing my thinking to my close friends (thank you for enduring this), I realized I found my emotional footing again and am ready to sort out my thoughts in writing.
What
The intention of this blog stays the same: share what I’ve learned so that you can learn from my mistakes.
What’s different this time: while the baseline content is still a summary of my weekly errors and the lessons learned from them, occasionally you’ll find travel content here or articles about specific topics.
Where
Today I arrived in Prague for the Polyglot Gathering, starting on Wednesday.
It’s also the start of a two-week vacation, the longest I’ve had ever since December.
I’ll be back in Tallinn next Monday.
In the last three months…
… I developed a clear vision + plan of action for:
exiting Bolt,
growing Decode Estonian,
and getting financially ready to live off entrepreneurship
So far so good.
Don’t overpromise
What I’ve learned:
I’ll never make two-year promises to myself again.
It’s unnecessarily limiting.
There will be a certain satisfaction in keeping my promise (or so I tell myself) in December, and this experience will hopefully be a useful reference experience (I can make long-term commitments and keep them, even if it gets hard).
However, it pains me to say “no” to so many interesting opportunities that have come up on the way so far, let alone opportunities coming in the next six months.
The worst thing is: I primarily promised this to myself.
Which means I am the only person who can release myself from that promise.
This really feels like having painted myself into a corner :)
Feelings
Breaking news: you can express feelings using words and actions.
I made an effort in the last three months to express my feelings (of any kind) more proactively and be more honest with myself and others.
It’s difficult to admit, but at the age of 33, I still feel felt insecure about dating and relationships, i.e. while everyone around me seemed to enjoy this part of life, it felt like I don’t have access to this for a lack of … knowledge and experience.
Following repeated recommendations, I read Mark Manson’s “Models”.
Not expecting much from the book given its cheesy title, the first few chapters about neediness and honesty had a real impact:
I was more needy than I thought I was,
there is a way out of neediness
Manson defines the latter through three principles:
Honest Living - understanding what you want from life and acting accordingly (e.g. not staying at your comfortable job when you want to be an entrepreneur), or to put it differently: investing in the identity you want.
Honest Action - acting despite any fears you have (e.g. will they fire me if I tell my boss I’m thinking about leaving, even though everything is great?)
Honest Communcation - communicating true intentions and feelings clearly (e.g. “I really like working here, but I feel like teaching Estonian is my calling and eventually I will have to follow it”)
As you might have noticed, while these ideas come from a book about dating, all of the examples given above aren’t about dating.
That’s because all of this is true for having integrity and quality relationships of any kind.
So much for the good news.
The “bad” news is that all three of these are a skill that requires regular practice.
Practicing these skills never ends, at least if you want to have relationships of any kind with the people around you (which for most of us is until the end of our lives).
Stuff I found interesting on the internet
🎬 Love and relationships are at odds with each other - Never stop to think about this, but YouTube decided to show me a new channel and I actually don’t mind recommendation - it certainly gives food for thought.
💭 Hedonism is not necessarily “the egoistic pursuit of short-term gratification at the expense of others.”, but can also be “an introspective attitude to life based on taking pleasure yourself and pleasuring others, without harming yourself or anyone else”. The latter definition actually sounds attractive.
💡Adam Curtis on self-expression being the conformity of our time, which prevents us from taking effective action as groups, because group membership and making sacrifices for the needs of the group is at odds with self-expression and hyperindividualism.