When reflecting on my latest turn around the sun, five lessons emerged for me that have a timeless quality I thought worth sharing - each with the specific reference point that challenged me to learn, to grow, to change my perspective or simply just open it further…
Being yourself is everything. It’s also the single most difficult and draining task we endeavor to do in this world that fights and pushes us to be normal. So many want to say – be yourself – and yet very few create an environment which allows such individuality, such beautifully remarkable differences to flourish. It’s not easy. To live an entirely authentic life. Every. Day. It’s not easy to build a business that empowers individuals to be just that, their own authentic self, day in and day out. But in the end, in my mind at least, it is what makes all the difference.
Jeff Bezos final letter as CEO to Amazon Shareholders – A colleague sent this to me, and I read it 3 times. While it’s admittedly interesting to me as a shareholder of the stock, the way Bezos shapes something so fundamental to us all with such realism changed the way I approached our business, our goals and life in general.
Therapy and mental health have been shaped idealistically into luxuries the majority of Americans neither need nor can afford to splurge on. It’s such a fascinating concept, which ties into a million other knots that make up our social construct, but ask yourself…who benefits from this perspective? Who stands to benefit most by the status quo in the world we live today? Who has the most to gain by stepping outside this box and owning whatever work lies within their own frame? These aren’t luxuries you can’t afford. They are necessities you can’t afford to overlook, ones that the most successful cohorts fully embrace and implement effectively.
How To Do The Work by Dr. Nicole LePera – Emily and I are reading this one together, one chapter at a time, and discussing the very deep topics each raises for us. It’s been an incredible opportunity to share our own unique perspectives, and grow together by considering the varying ways we tic based on the experiences that have shaped our pasts, and the work each of us is putting into ourselves every day.
Trust your gut. With people, with places, with paths. No one knows you better than you do. Trust in that. And if you find yourself doubting it, then take the invaluable time to connect, reconnect or simply center yourself with the values you hold above all others. Sometimes it’s so easy to overthink all of the hypotheticals, that it distracts us from the heart of the matter, the truth, our truth. This past year came with so much uncertainty, ushered in so much change, and truly tested the bonds of all relationships. For better or worse, we have so much more information to go off of right now. More data points through which to form conclusions. Trust actions, access choices, make decisions.
A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears – A quote by Michel de Montaigne, I admittedly came across via Instagram, and it changed my frame of reference and how I choose to approach my concerns/worries.
Investments made today are the ones that matter most. 1) First, because today is the only thing you can control. Investing is a long game, it’s a slow burn. In almost all cases it requires you to believe in something you cannot see in the current moment, faith at its finest. 2) Whether it’s money or time – our most valuable assets – decisions made today compound. With respect to money, to compounding interest specifically, think of it as a snowball. The earlier the snow starts to roll, the longer the run time it has to gain steam and more snow, the bigger the base of the snowman will be when it reaches the bottom of the hill. On time, I’ve found it so easy to get sucked in a million different directions. To fall victim of complacency or recency bias or a hole of purely unproductive outlets. It’s habit forming behavior, and it can be broken by steady, consistent commitments of growth. Whether it’s mental, spiritual, physical – there are so many things to learn, so many challenges to fact and so many hills to climb for us to waste whatever finite time each of us has on this earth wasting it on anything less.
@herfirst100k on Instagram – I discovered Tori Dunlap (digital creator, financial feminist) just recently and love the way she shares crucial content with respect to women and finance/money management. She makes it fun, but really encompasses everything women specifically need to know in order to improve their financial situation.
Magical moments are all around us…if only we’re present enough to see them, to feel them, and to soak them up for all they’re worth, because if this year has taught me anything, it’s that nothing is certain. Every day has the chance to be life changing, and every moment has in it a unique beauty that once passed, can never be recovered. So ephemeral are the lives we lead, but that truly is the joy of it all, if only we’re willing to seize it.
The Haunting anthology series on Netflix – I watched both Hill House and Bly Manor and was absolutely blown away by the creativity, the depth of each character, and the powerful emotion it elicited from me. Both were truly exceptional pieces of art that invited me to think intimately about things it felt I rarely ever had time for pre-Covid, already accepted as forgone conclusions with no need for revisiting…
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