Good idea or Good Practice?

Newsletter #35

Hello,

This week is all about decisions. Not the art of making decisions, but rather the outcome of the decisions that you make.

For me, a good idea is something that will energize the day. When there is some fodder for me to think about as I approach my daily tasks, it gives me a lift in outlook and enthusiasm.

But other than the lift I get on that day, what good is that idea? The issue with my love for a good idea is that sometimes you can get stuck in the idea and never let it help you make real change in your life.

The Ryan Holiday quote rings through my brain as I type this:

“Philosophy's true use: ‘An operating system for life's difficulties and hardships.’”

These ideas that inspire a wonderful day do not exist for that. They exist to inform decision-making on a day-to-day basis.

Which, if done over a long period of time, will reinvent you.

The first example I can think of is coming home for summer from college after your first year. You are talking to all of your friends who went off to different places or stayed home, and everything feels so different.

My favorite joke was to tell my friends, “College changed you,” in a worried tone.

In reality, the change isn’t just in your friends. The change was two people making daily decisions based on a new, unshared environment. Over the course of two semesters, you make new small decisions that, over time, spit you out a new person.

What about the other side?

For the people who stay in the same place, well, you are being affected by the same decisions. In the same way that you don’t lose weight from one healthy meal, but many healthy meals, every day that you make the same decision, you aren’t stagnating. You are becoming more of the person that makes those types of decisions.

Think of it like Karate, you start Karate as a white belt, and as you keep practicing Karate, you become a black belt. But that black belt isn’t the end of Karate, as you continue to practice you only continue to become more of a black belt.

We are never the same. We are only ever more of who we were, or more of something else.

Back to the idea thing, or, more appropriately, Ryan Holiday’s quote. If you have a new philosophy or idea, you will certainly turn more into that outcome the more you let it inform the decisions you make.

The question really becomes: how pervasive will you allow the philosophies you hold to be true in your life? If you want something fun to think about, great! If you want them to reinvent you, well, you have to be true to them even when it’s inconvenient.

I am hyped because I get to end this week’s newsletter with a JJ Reddick quote: “You’ve never arrived, you’re always becoming.”

Bye bye,
Kyle