Skip to main content

Simon says? Be yourself. A short blurb on how to be yourself.

Set the scene - you're driving your car, windows down, music blaring, and nothing but openness in front of you.  How do you feel?

Great, I imagine.  Those conditions enabled you to feel freely and genuinely you.  Unencumbered by intrusive thoughts, distractions, and hefty responsibilities, you were allowed to feel yourself. 

This is the feeling we are all after and the secret?  You can have it if you just allow it to be.

1)  We're told to be something else.  There is no world we can live in without some external forces us instructing us how to live.  On the one hand - that's good, right?  Objectively, we have sources of inspiration - should we choose to narrow our focus.  However, on the other hand, those external forces are often fake, curated, and doctored.  Those external forces us are trying to steer us to be something other than ourselves and that's a real problem.

2)  Individualism is not a bad thing.  Sometimes, I feel selfish for wanting to be myself.  However, I am miserable when I try to be something other than myself.  And so we must live with that tension.  It feels selfish to just be yourself, but feeling genuinely content can only come if you are yourself.  You don't need to dispel the tension in order to move forward - move forward and bring the tension with you and in time, it will lessen.

3)  Projection and "faking it till you make it" are real things.  You should lean into them.  If you want to be that suave, put-together-at-all-times person, then project that image for yourself.  We have that self-image of ourselves that we want everyone to see.  I'd like to think that self-image is a representation of the best version of ourselves.  Arguably, curated, but also legitimately us.  I don't think it's a contradiction, necessarily, to highlight your best self.  The tension here is how to square being your best self while also confronting the external forces (imaging force-fed to you by social media).  

4)  Be a finisher.  Do you know what feels lousy?  Moving around in life with a pile of unfinished projects and business.  Loose ends prevent you from being able to focus yourself in a direction you need to be moving.  The loose ends indirectly move you somewhere else that you don't want to be moving.  Tie those loose ends in order to move in a single, powerful path forward.

Popular posts from this blog

Fantasy Baseball: A few weeks in, how do we adjust and adapt?

We are several weeks into the season and, at this point, we can all agree that everything we knew going into the season was thrown out the window as soon as the games started.  That said, there is still a lot of baseball yet to play and for us, as fantasy nerds, a lot of in-season management to navigate.  As we move forward into summer, here are a few things I either have done or am thinking about doing. Use your FAAB to get the young pitchers and sell them, almost immediately, for impact bats. Put this one in the category of "shiny new toy."  Sure, I have preyed on our inattentiveness, but in re-draft settings, I see no issue with snagging these higher-end rookie pitchers and then flipping them.  In two different settings, I was able to flip Bibee for Miguel Vargas and then, separately, Mason Miller for Jordan Walker. Will these trades work out for me?  Probably not, but I have a lot more faith in Vargas and Walker, particularly, than I do in Bibee and Miller....
Read more

The More Good Days than Bad Days Principle

There are seven days in a week, about 30 days in a month, and 365 days in a year.   Not all of those can be good days.  No one has 7 perfectly good days.  Likewise, I've never gone through an entire year without a single bad day.   I have two reactions to that: The first reaction is the whole "control what you can control" thing.  You can control your effort and your attitude.  And that's absolutely true.  But sometimes a day is so bad that no amount of effort or attitude will fix it. The second reaction is that, in any given week, if you have 4 good days and 3 bad days, you're still winning.  Even if you have a few "meh" days, but the good ones are still outnumbering the rough ones, I think we're in a good place. The same goes for our practices with our little leaguers.  We've had some truly rough and awful practices.  The coach's didn't show up with patience, the kids didn't show up with their attention spans, a...
Read more

Fantasy Baseball: Mock Draft Reactions

It's December and, for the diehards, it's officially draft season for fantasy baseball.  Frankly, it's fair to ask whether the fantasy baseball season ever really ended.  While it's true that many of us began tending to our wounds in October, diagnosing the hits and the misses, a few of us never really stopped thinking, obsessively, about fantasy baseball.  For me, personally, I have been trying to stay permanently in "draft-season" meaning I want to be in some form of a draft between now and the end of March.  Recently, I was fortunate enough to join several industry experts, including Scott White, Frank Stampfl, and Chris Towers in a 12-team head-to-head points mock draft .  In this article, I will cover a few high-level observations (heck, even a few things that surprised me) and the lessons I learned. Lesson #1 :  Aaron Judge was not universally considered a first overall pick and that surprised me. This one surprised me.  As soon as I drafted Jud...
Read more