Motivation | ILLUMINATION | Editorial
What’s In The Chasm Between Risk & Stability?
Let me show you around.
I fall victim to this pattern aplenty: I work for some time with great enthusiasm, then get bored, and look for something more worthwhile to sink my teeth into. Entrapped in shiny object syndrome. My partner, otherwise coined as my leash (or rock), calls me out every time I sulk to him and want to try something new. I’m cursed with seeing the world as adventures and side-quests. It’s all there, wanting me to explore it!
What do you think of when you’re about to leap? Will you make it? What do you need to make it? What if you don’t? What will the unknown present to you?
Magnets form in your feet, trying to draw you to safety, rapids your breathing, gives you vertigo. Your head begins to spin with second thoughts. You scrap your plan and return to what you’ve always known.
For me, it didn’t matter anymore. I’ve taken that jump from a ‘stable’ job to ‘risky’ freelancing. And right now, I’m in the chasm between the two. Let me show you around.
You’re not actually at rock bottom here
Consider it a break. The best opportunity to strip away every invisible force of identity sticking to you. It’s your reset button and will set you up on the track you actually want to traverse. Many had a hard time accepting this when they lost jobs due to the pandemic, myself included.
How should I put this? Be curious about where everybody else fears to travel. Explore the unknown and irrational because nobody else will. That nugget of experience will form a story for you that no other dares to try.
It’s also sparse, dead quiet, and peaceful. The momentary break from noise and activity resets your internal compass. It reconnects you to the non-idealised world, purer than what society created.
It’s silencing the monkey mind. It’s no longer anticipating unpleasant conversations, whirring dialogue played on repeat. It’s no longer feeling unrest and uncontrol.
It’s detaching yourself from instant gratification. You’ll need to tinker with your default brain components a bit. Create minute, hardly noticeable changes in your processes, habits, and perspective. Read one word, take one step, remove one thing from your cluttered environment.
In the end, we’re all walking meat tubes with an instinct for survival and hardly wired for delayed gratification (what if I die tomorrow?). You can take a man out of the stone age, but you can’t take the stone age out of a man. It’s seeded in some to take risks more than others.
Don’t feel guilty that one night when you reach for that irresistible tub of Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough ice cream… Feel guilty when you do the same every day for a month.
To reframe that, you will feel great for not reaching for said ice cream. You’ll feel great for not even having it in your household at all. It might feel less effective because guilt likes to shove gratitude out of the way and get all the attention.
Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. — Bill Gates
The issue with staying ‘stuck’ in this canyon is how much we underestimate ourselves. Many give up when:
- Things don’t go their way
- They avoid uncomfortable situations
- They don’t get exactly where they wanted to in a certain way or time
These adversities are naturally viewed as discouraging. Perhaps you’ve made the wrong choice, all because you didn’t pick something up as quickly as others.
From James Clear in Atomic Habits: These experiences are stored for you to use later. They’re biding their time, waiting for a burst to propel you upwards and out of that canyon. You don’t know when it will be, and that’s the beauty of it.
Everything is relative
When you’re sitting in a seat on a train that’s traveling at 270km/h, are you still or moving? I’m far from a physics expert, so I won’t explain any more of Einstein’s theory of relativity. It’ll be completely butchered if it’s explained by me.
Because someone is achieving things in their own life, are you donned with hopelessness? Of course not. Applying these basic principles to yourself will humble you in what seems like a perpetual race of life. Even though you’re sitting in this canyon, you aren’t in the core of the earth burning up and melting. And you aren’t falling to your death from the sky either.
The same applies to social timelines. You are neither ahead nor lagging. Doing so requires comparison (sometimes inevitable). I still get robbed of my joy daily from this, but far less than before. Unlearn everything you’re told about success in the corporate world.
Struthless is one of my favourite YouTubers to watch, full of turbulent stories and general life advice. He doesn’t take shit too seriously and never forgets to enjoy himself. In the video below, he closes with a Tweet from Wesley Snipes with this quote:
Don’t let the internet rush you. Nobody is posting their failures. — Wesley Snipes
How do you get out of it?
Realise that failure isn’t real when it comes to progress. We make decisions every day that chart our course, but only for wherever and however long we want it. Enjoying the process is undoubtedly easier said than done for an anxious mind. But you don’t get anywhere solely by thinking. Just start, on anything that will make you happier. Read one word, take one step, take one breath.
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion. — Alan Watts
