Although I don’t think for a minute that the world conspires against you, it won’t ever go out of its way to help you either. At least not without reason.
In life, you have to by and large help yourself by putting energy out into the world. Be a positive part of the reality of others and you’ll be reciprocated, whether by gaining relationships with people you can count on, or by earning money or health to help you do what you want to do in better condition, physically and mentally.
In some ways, I compare this to what I believe about luck. The idea pictures luck as having a surface area - it is real, as probability and variables outside of your control exist, but if you’re more forward about searching for opportunity, you’re naturally going to find it more often, making you more ‘lucky’.
Reality tends towards chaos, and it takes energy on our part to stop this from happening. We don’t have a choice in this respect, but we do have a choice about which part of chaos we want to bring order to, whether a family, your own business or passion or something similarly meaningful.
If we don’t make this choice, we’re assigned work to be part of someone else’s plans with the choices that they’ve committed to making.
And sometimes this is not a choice - I’m looking to move to London when I graduate in a few months, which won’t be cheap. If this means I have to work part-time for somebody else’s company or business whilst I build my own on the side, so be it. But I’m not consigning the entirety of my life to building someone else’s dream - it’s a choice of my own to do this.
A lot of being able to make these choices comes down to agency - the ability to make think and decide based on what we believe internally, and then act. This is rather than getting told what to do or how to do something; it can also be about how we make our own decisions based upon what we think society might want, or how other unimportant people might perceive us.
This is not a way to live. Although I’ll happily say that I’ve been in a position of privilege from the start of life (think relatively affluent country of residence, free education and relative financial stability from parents), that can’t be said for a lot of other people on Earth.
Life for some will be harder than mine, life for some will be easier. Regardless, we can all still use agency to make our own decisions and seize opportunities but in differing contexts.
In the future, when I leave university to build my own future, my life will get harder. But again, I believe that if I flex this muscle of taking the initiative and using agency, I’ll make things work.
This ties into another idea that I had about getting things done - and this is that we waste so much time in the day just hedging against the decisions we make, agonising over them for way too long.
I’m the number one culprit for this - If I instead just committed to doing things and closing the time gap between having ideas, validating them and making them work, I’d get so much more done.
It’s almost like a habit. We’re all quite set in our ways, but once we see how fast we can make decisions and make things happen, we can begin to move at a speed way above the previous norm.
I hope that what I’ve shared in this issue has made sense. It was a lot to cover for one week, and perhaps I should write more about each one in the future.
But in short, make your own choices and try to bring value to the world. Then you’ll be more fulfilled and ‘luckier’.
Also try to break the habit of overthinking - shave off time between acting on decisions, learning and improving more as you move more quickly.
Talk soon,
— Theo
Last week’s issue (extended cut)…
Read the issue - 086 • Two low-effort productivity hacks
Talking about standing desks and app-blocking, two of the highest-leverage productivity hacks I’ve ever come across.
Other videos I published this week…
Talking about the story behind using Obsidian for notes, going through sixth form exams, all the way up to today, where I’m in my third year of university.