Develop A KISS Relationship With Yourself
I encourage you to develop a KISS relationship with yourself.
Hold on, buddy…
Are you going to tell me to rock & roll all night?
AND party every day?
Gosh, I wish.
Wouldn’t that be great?
No, what I mean is keep it simple, silly.
Here’s my advice.
Let it go.
Let it all go.
And once you’ve done that, then pick up the one thing that keeps calling to you.
This has been one of my biggest problems post-FIRE.
I keep trying to cram too much in.
And I am typically not cramming in the most important things.
My first year post-FIRE was 2020.
I did alright that year.
I was still working on my PhD.
And I was interested in investing in real estate.
I even took a 10-day trip to Florida to check out the Destin area.
Oh, and I wanted to really relearn my back catalog of songs.
And, oh yeah, then I wanted to re-record them.
And, oh snap, my friend was recommending we start a podcast together.
So I started learning how to do that and went out and bought a bunch of equipment.
Yes, yes, these are good, I thought.
But What else?
there are visits to see family. Yes, that’s always good. I was able to get one of those in.
And building out The Leavers business plan.
I spent a good amount of time on that.
Oh, and our logo design. That was 2020, too.
All good, all fine things to do.
And then, BAM,
the pandemic hit. That changed everything.
What did I do then?
Well, I can tell you that I wasn’t getting very far on my dissertation, that’s for sure.
Now I realize I was completely burnt out.
Honestly, I think I still am.
I was burnt out from a career that was not always a great fit.
Plus, thirteen years of the commute from hell.
and, a very intense and fast-paced work environment.
Pile a PhD program on top of that.
Oh, and I decided to write a song every day for three years (1,100 songs later…)
Plus, relationships (when I could squeeze them in… I always let these suffer. Sad.)
And I was committed to keeping the FIRE engine going toward Freedom.
I never let off on that front, thank goodness.
Yeah.
It was a lot.
But back to my first year of FIRE…
I was in party mode! I wanted to break loose and have a blast after leaving the corporate grind!
One problem. No one was around.
Everything was on lockdown due to the pandemic.
It sucked, big time.
I ended up drinking by myself at home, too much.
Every other day? Probably.
And I watched a lot of F’ing YouTube.
I even dabbled at trying to make videos for a YouTube channel.
Oh jeez. What crap.
Plus, I was getting into astrology.
My friend who suggested we start a podcast together got me curious about it.
That was a lot of the YouTube surfing, and a part I don’t regret. I learned a lot.
It’s not some kind of evil, taboo system to be scared of or such, in my opinion.
There’s something bigger at work we can’t comprehend scientifically, but maybe someday we will be able to do so.
YouTube is fine as a search engine.
As an algorithm taking over your life, it’s insidious.
But, not all the other YouTube watching was bad either, per se.
One of the videos I watched was by a woman who said she burned fat by walking 15,000 steps per day.
I watched another guy who said, why stop there?
You can go up to 20,000 per day.
Hmm.
Well, with the lockdowns, I have time.
Why not?
Oh, and I have that pull-up bar that I have never mastered.
Yes, let’s see what we can do.
Three months later… wow, what a change.
I started in mid-May, and by August I was getting fit and lean.
But that was about all I did during the Summer.
It was a very simple existence.
Besides partying by myself, dabbling with making videos, and watching a bunch of YouTube, that was what I did for the next four months.
Is that so bad?
No, but I did begin to feel guilty about taking so long on my dissertation.
Therefore, I started forcing myself to get up and start writing first thing each day.
But that didn’t work.
Why not?
Because I was staying up every other night drinking low-calorie hard seltzers and partying like it was 2099.
Thus, I gave up the hooch.
September 11 was the last day I had any that year. And I only had three seltzers that day.
Then I was like David Spade, and I said buh-bye.
And guess what happened?
I finished the 1st draft of my dissertation on February 11, 2021, exactly five months later.
It was hell, but it was done.
And I kept up my walking and pull-up workouts.
I even stayed on the wagon for another full month so that I could say I was off the sauce for six months.
That was enough.
So, why do I keep falling into the “you must do more” trap?
It really goes back to yesterday’s article.
I have a hard time saying NO to possibilities.
I used to think it was a decision-making issue.
Yes, it does impact things, but that’s not the issue. I make good decisions, usually.
Sure, I can get into overthinking and overanalyzing, but I typically run through that in a few days.
The real problem is a failure to prioritize.
And I fail to prioritize because I know that I can’t do everything I want to do.
That has to change this year.
Can I do it?
We will see.