19 de Julio
[A Stream of Consciousness Essay.]
There are mornings when I feel centered, well-rested, and excited to take the day on. This is not one of those mornings. I feel absolutely exhausted, didn’t get a lot of sleep but was still up by 6 am. And when I’m up I might as well just stay up because the sleep I get after that is not restful and it takes up the rest of the day. On top of that, you know if read yesterday that I’m missing some of my masculine energy so I’m feeling generally sluggish. I asked for a shift at work today but don’t know if I’ll get it and so I don’t have that push to get some shit done and not waste the day. I checked the surf cam like I’ve been doing and the waves were very small again. But I still feel like I should be out there. I’ve been wanting to get out there since I got back to the east coast and there are plenty of people out there right now.
If you can tell, I haven’t meditated. I don’t know why that seemed so hard to do, but my mind has been so exhausted recently that I didn’t do it last night and I didn’t do it this morning. That worry’s me because I don’t want to start slipping on all of these good habits I’m building. I told my friend I’m supposed to be meeting in Prague that I need to pay rent and I’m not sure if I can get the plane ticket. She told me she was only going because I was going which frustrated me because of all the time I tried to call her and she was too busy. I told her that and I just don’t feel good about the whole situation because I know I probably could have had the money by now if I decided on it early on. But then again, I did pick up and move my whole life over here so maybe I should go easy on myself. I haven’t had a good workout in a while either and so that’s part of it.
And I’m listening to the way that I’m sounding right now and I know that my thoughts create my reality and so I need to really check all of this negativity right now. I need to realize that #1, whatever happens, I am going to be OK. #2 Everything is going to work out. Even if that CEO is right and “most things don’t work out” everything is going to work out. I am going to be fine.
I think recently I’ve been haunted by the ghost of fame. I think that I should be famous now for something or that I should work super hard to be famous right now because I think that’s going to solve some sort of problem for me. I need to learn the lesson of almost everyone who has become famous, that it doesn’t fix anything or give us anything we think we’re missing. That’s one part of my mind, and let’s be generous and call it the wise part. Then the other part of my mind says fuck that, let’s get famous! American Dream baby! Cash, money, hoes… and all of that. I think that I need to remember that as an introvert I would probably hate being famous. I can’t stand it when someone walks into my room uninvited, let alone all the shit the media, the paparazzi, and even my friends might do to me if I were to suddenly become famous.
I think the answer to all of this is Akham’s razor. The simplest most obvious solution must be the right one. And the truth is that despite the fact that I am an introvert I do walk alone into bars even though I don’t drink just for the thrill, just for the social training of realizing that I’ll be fine. That gives me the makings of a great salesman. That was something my uncle told me last night that I liked. “Not everybody is as brave as you, to just walk into a room full of people you don’t know and say, Hey everybody I’m Gio!” And I thought about him dropping me off at Palm Tree Island, or even the bar that first night I was here and how I had to drunkenly wander back through the wilderness home in this state I didn’t know. I swam out to palm Tree Island, knowing nobody, ended up on a boat and taking people home.
So my perception of myself is obviously a twisted version of the truth, informed by a lot of negativity and self-doubt. We’ve seen so many times what I’m actually capable of, and me telling myself things like “I’m an introvert, I’m shy, I’m not a hard worker, I’m lazy, or whatever is not very helpful.”
So I guess what’s going on with me right now is that I’m trying to find a balance between my health and my ambition. This is a good problem to have and I’m really grateful that I’m in the situation I’m in to learn from it. I think the benefit is part of the issue too. Because I read books and watch Youtube videos by the most highly productive people in their fields and I think “what is wrong with me?” And I don’t take into account all the failures and trials and mostly errors that it took them to get there. I forget that Van-Gogh tried almost everything before finally saying fuck it, I’m an artist, and picked up his first paintbrush at 28. I forget that Kacy Neistat had a kid at 17 after getting kicked out of his home and still moved to New York. I forget that Tim Ferris was thinking about killing himself for a very long time, and had even constructed a plan on how to do it.
That makes me think about when I had my palms read and granny saw all those wrinkles in my lifeline and said I must have had a crazy trauma in my youth and I told her about my own attempt and she looked at me hard in the eyes with a lot of love and a little disappointment and told me “well what a waste that would have been!” and when I get low and bummed out I have to remember that and keep pushing. But even sitting here and writing this is making me feel better and I think that’s a great sign to stick it out.
I know that I have my best ideas when I’m in the water and so I wonder why I’m so afraid of going surfing again? I have no idea because I know I absolutely love it. I know that even on the days I go out there and there is basically no wave I never feel like I’ve wasted my time.
A Salesman just walked up to me and started a conversation about The Four Hour Workweek on my desk. We had a great conversation and he gave me his business card. I think Michael was right in some way and this is something I’ve been feeling since I don’t know when. Maybe since I first read rich dad poor dad, when I realized that I don’t want to be a starving artist, when I realized that I want to make some money and travel the world and collect my stories and life a good ass life.
That’s one of the many realizations I’ve had in the water. That la Vida es muy larga man. I’m not a Gemini, I’m not like all the Gemini's I admire who are manic and crazy in their creativity. I’m a Capricorn, I’m a mountain goat. It’s all about this slow and gradual improvement for me so I need to learn to just be chill with where I am at right now, realize that no matter what kind of privilege I came from, I was in a very very dark place ten years ago and even though that was ten years ago I still almost died and I’ve come so far from that and those memories are things that are going to be with me my entire life.
Something else happened… right after I started thinking positively. I got a shift at Bluewater. And even though I’m not excited about the fact that I have to go into work, I’m also really excited about it, if only for the fact that this is going to change the whole momentum of my day. That’s crazy. I’m actually going to get more done now that I have less time. In the entrepreneur life, I’m building I’m going to need to find non-negotiables like this, things I can’t skip out on. Because when I can’t, I don’t. And when I can, I do.
Sometimes, as I get all these whispers that I’m supposed to do sales, I’m afraid that that means I can’t be creative or artistic. When in reality I think that this is what’s going to make me a successful creative. Because what else am I creating art for if not other people, and you need other people to do sales. I think of learning about sales It will actually help me not to sell out. To actually define my audience and my goals and take it more seriously because there is money involved. As they say in The War of Art, Do it for a Paycheck.
Weirdly, with all these books I’m reading, I get insecure about them. I feel like I should just be out there “learning from experience” but then I need to remember that that’s what these books are all about. They’re giving me a jumping-off point and a way to skip the line. I still need to get out there more, fail more, iterate more cycles more, but coupling that with all of this book knowledge is what’s going to give me my edge.
A little something I should remember from “the secret” is that if everybody is following their dream life, living their best life and full of things they love to do, the world would never run out of good stuff because everybody wants different things. It’s that Fame-Plague that messes with people. This very narrow definition of success that we all are running towards when not only is there not enough for all of us there but not all of us want that or are built for that. I’m thinking of one of my dad’s favorite quotes from “The Social Network”: “If you were the inventors of Facebook, then you would have invented Facebook.” If these things aren’t happening for me, then maybe I don’t need to stress out about them.
That’s not to say give up, but if I’m not a super successful entrepreneur right now, then that just means I wasn’t meant to be right now, that’s not a life sentence. And as Allan Watts says, life is like music. The point of music is not to get to the end, otherwise, the best composers would be those that play fastest and concerts would be one crashing chord because that’s the end. It’s like dancing, too. The point of dancing isn’t to get to a location in the room. The point of dancing is the dance. Would I want to rob my life of all this glorious learning and failing by skipping to the successful part? Even right now, in the middle of the lost feeling, I know that I wouldn’t want to do that.
I know that I am here on this earth to make art, whatever that means in whatever time in my life, I know that that’s where I’m supposed to be at. I also know I’m meant to be rich. And by that, I take Jen Sincero’s definition which is being able to afford everything I need to live the life most true to me. Those costs include travel, Very nice, durable, and sustainable clothing, a lot of airplane tickets (and carbon offsets!), a lot of charity donations, sufficient money to take time off to go on explorations and writers and artists retreats. The most healthy food, a nice home, and healthy children (eventually). So all of this is really just one thing, it’s my craft and it’s complicated but also so simple.
I have to remember what Anna Akana reminded me in her most recent video. “A jack of all trades, master of none, oftentimes better than master of one.”
I think I’m doing fine.
