(And you are bold enough to listen.)
Being productive all the time is unproductive.
That is one of the most disturbing things that the voice of my soul told me when I started to listen to it.
It is a painful truth that metabolizing gives you heartburn because you discover that “you need to be unproductive so that the emptiness produced by doing nothing is filled by creativity.”
And that’s scary when you’re dedicated to art and have deadlines and bills to pay.
Here are five other cold, hard truths I discovered when I started listening to that voice inside me that I had been ignoring all my life.
Cold, hard truth #1: The world is not against you.
“The world is not against you. You are against the world. That’s the damn problem.” — The voice of my soul.
But at first, you’re so blinded by ego and rage that you can’t see it.
Life is like one of those metraquilato balls with a Swiss village in it. You shake it, and a storm of artificial snow comes up. (It would be best to wait for all that snow to settle before seeing the landscape.)
Lesson: you have to have patience and take distance from things to process things. Because when you are too involved, you are not objective and act without thinking.
Cold hard truth #2: No loss, no gain possible.
“You had to lose it all to become someone different.” — The voice of my soul.
Not many years ago, my life was a nightmare dressed as a daydream.
Money, power, fun.
But I ended up losing it all. And I suffered a lot for it.
Although in the end I realized that I needed to destroy myself to rebuild myself again.
TS Eliot wrote, “With the ruins, he built his kingdom, and from there, he went out to conquer the world.”
And I did, although the process was painful.
Lesson: Losing and winning are two sides of the same coin called life.
Cold hard truth #3: You must be excluded from your current narrative.
“You are not useless. You feel worthless because the people around you make you feel worthless.” — The voice of my soul.
After hearing that revelation from the voice of my soul, I found a book in a bus station.
The title was “Soji.”
In it, Shoukei Matsumoto wrote: “What do we consider garbage? Something dirty, old, useless, or no longer of value to us.
Whatever it is, no object is born garbage but becomes so because we consider it as such.”
The coincidence between what the voice of my soul told me and what I read by randomly opening a page of the book blew my mind.
According to Shoukei Matsumoto, everything is connected.
You cannot dissociate yourself from the environment (but you can change it).
Shoukei says, “The people and things around you make you who you are.”
But if you change those things and people (your environment), you change yourself 🙂
Lesson: If you change your environment, you change your identity.
Cold, hard truth #4: The reality of things.
“Not everything that exists goes through your mind. But only what passes through your mind exists for you.” — The voice of my soul
Confirmation biases can work in our favor by reinforcing the neural connections of the ideas we often repeat in our minds. Those ideas shape our view of reality.
We can also weaken the memory of limiting thoughts since the less you access a memory, the weaker the connections that lead you to it.
There is no point in worrying about things you can’t solve.
Lesson: It is better to ignore those things that weaken you mentally selectively. And shine the light of your awareness on those other things that favor you.
Cold hard truth #5: you are worth what your information is worth.
“Selling bottles of water next to a fountain is not the same as selling water in the middle of the desert.” — The voice of my soul
If you consume the content everyone consumes, you’ll sell water bottles next to a fountain. (Your value will go down.)
If you consume content almost nobody consumes, you will sell water bottles in the desert. (Your value will go up.)
To increase your market value, it is much better to specialize in things few people know about and stop parroting what you think works or is successful.
“You’ll never be able to compete with Stephen King,” the voice of my soul once chided me.
And it was right; who will read a writer who writes like Stephen King when you can read Stephen King himself?
Lesson: It is much better to be yourself (sell water bottles in the desert) and have the rest copy Stephen King or the fashionable writer (sell water bottles in front of a faucet) 😉
A virtual hug
AG
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