Have you ever tried terribly hard to fall asleep?
You lie there calculating how many hours are left, staring at the ceiling, insisting to your own brain that this would be a wonderful time to SHUT UP AND GO TO SLEEP.
How’s that working for you?
The more urgently you demand sleep, the more awake you seem to become.
Some things seem to get stranger the harder we grasp them.
The philosopher Alan Watts explored an idea often called the backwards law: the pursuit of a particular inner state can itself reinforce the feeling that you lack it.
The person frantically trying to become relaxed is, at that moment, practicing the opposite.
The person trying to prove they’re enough keeps reopening the question of whether they are.
Which is inconvenient if you happen to be very good at pursuing self-improvement.
Ask me how I know.
Now, that doesn’t mean we stop caring. Or working. Or setting ambitious goals.
It means we can notice the odd difference between doing something because we love the process and doing it because we’re desperate for the process to deliver a verdict on our worth.
You can write because you enjoy making something. You can build a business because you want to bring an idea into the world. You can do good work because good work feels good.
And you can still enjoy the possibility of succeeding spectacularly.
I’m all for spectacular, personally.
I’m just increasingly suspicious of the idea that a spectacular outcome is required before I’m allowed to have an excellent ordinary Tuesday.
If that sounds almost too simple, good. Simple ideas are sometimes very good at making us uncomfortable.
Especially the ones that suggest we might not need to win an argument against ourselves before enjoying our lives.