Today was a good day (Ricky Weekly #96)
This is where I share 3 things every week with my friends and anyone else interested.
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A picture from my life:
Went to Hood River, Oregon with friends in July. It gets harder to spend quality time with people as you get older so I’m cherishing these moments.
A thing on my mind:
“Did you have a good day?”
Someone recently asked me how I’d define a good day and this is what I came up with.
A good day is a day where…
I am at the top of my game with things that are in my control
I am contending well with things that are not in my control
I am living life in full color
Things that are very much in my control are things like when I go to bed, when I wake up, what I put in my body, how much I move my body, and what I spend my time doing. When I think about “bringing it” everyday, this is what I think about.
Then there are the things not in my control that I’m saying, “BRING IT ON!” My emotions and my customers are examples of these things. Building a startup pushes me down negative emotional spirals all the time, and I am practicing getting out of them faster and reducing their occurrence overall. Instead of feeling even worse when my productivity gets derailed by these emotions, if I’m practicing new strategies, it can still be a “good day.” Similarly, customers don’t have to buy and keep buying what I sell, but if I am executing in a way that gives me new insights about what makes them more likely to buy, that still is a “good day.”
And while I’m doing all this controlling and contending, a good day is only a good day if I’m also living life in full color. That means fully engaging with all the things I love about life. San Francisco’s had an amazing summer so far and I’m walking all over (I did the Double Cross Trail recently), spending time with people I love, and pursuing whatever I’m curious about.
I’ve only recently started distinguishing things in my control from things that are not because building a startup has broken me too many times. My ambition means I’m willfully unrealistic about what is possible. My default is to reject rules, no’s, and ways of being if I think things can be better. But that also means I am constantly disappointed in myself in my inability to make fast enough progress.
I think my pain tolerance and scarcity mindset have held back my progress. I’d just beat myself up and suffer rather than changing my strategy to ease the pain. But now I know I can move a lot faster making myself suffer less. I can stage out my ambition to let myself get positive feedback along the way. Instead of writing off every good thing as “not good enough,” I can learn to recognize them as real points on the scoreboard. I can choose to see the game as the first quarter and not running out of time.
A piece of content I recommend:
Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance
I’m eight years late to this book. Regardless of how you feel about the guy now, he wrote a very good book that described how privilege works in our society in all of its complexity much better than I ever could. It’s a topic I’m very interested in and have written about in the past. Sendhil Mullainathan’s research on scarcity is my next area of exploration.
Bonus content: 30 For 30: American Son by Jay Caspian Kang
I wasn’t old enough to know much about Michael Chang but I think he was something like a Jeremy Lin of tennis back in the day. The part that struck me the most in the documentary was when Arthur Ashe wrote a letter to him as he was rising to prominence to tell him what it was going to be like as a minority.
Double Bonus: September 9, 2024 New Yorker Cartoon by Asher Perlman. I thought this was funny.
🤗
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As always, you can find out what I’m thinking in more real-time on Twitter and my essays are on my website. My primary focus (and where I focus) is on Flow Club.