Sunday Musings - Balance, Productivity and Control
November 13th 2022
Welcome to another Sunday Friends!
Here is your Sunday Musings, a quick dose of what I’m exploring and thinking about. Please feel free to forward this along to friends.
To Hustle or Relax?
I’m in a bit of a mental quandary and I’d love your help. It’s regarding the balance between multiple streams of hustle and taking the time to just relax a bit.
For the past two years I’ve focused on research and mentorship, both finding those more experienced than I, and ensuring I make time to give back to those who are treading similar waters that I’ve crossed. I’ve done this while holding down demanding professional positions, completing a graduate degree, and (now) starting some side-hustles in content creation and a startup venture.
I’m very proud of what I’m doing (past, present, and future) and don’t intend to stop, but I realized this weekend that I was looking at everything this past week from the content creator’s point of view, how do I capture this? What’s a lesson to learn here? What do I put aside to get moving on vlogging? Here’s the quandary… do I just show up (per the 31 October musing) and annotate the experiences anyway? Do I tell myself it’s okay to just be present in the moment and not worry about the Musings, introspection, and evaluations?
I have some thoughts, but I’d love to hear yours (comment here, send a tweet to @erichaupt on Twitter or eric@erichaupt.com and let me know what you think!).
My thoughts lie towards introspection and reevaluating our goals. Do you want to have that next key position? Then you’ll likely need to do a lot more hustle and less relaxing than the person who just wants to stay where they are.
For me, I want to be successful here on this newsletter, and on YouTube; but it’s not going to be my full-time job. My goal is to create content that I enjoy making, that resonates with and helps people, and to build my brand as a cyber & educational content creator. I think this is going to require an elevated level of ‘hustle’ to do in parallel with my career. However, I can possibly afford to take it easy every so often and enjoy the time spent with friends and family without blowing my goals.
I think that the consistency of presence (showing up) even when we don’t necessarily feel like it is important. But I also think we should be mindful of our feelings and ensure that they aren’t telling us that we are out of line with our overall goals and losing balance.
For me, I’ll be taking a look at balance and ensuring that I am making appropriate time for my goals and making sure I’m not sacrificing what I find important for an ephemeral interest.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, really! Have a great week!
-e
This Week’s Recommendation
The best reading skill no one ever taught you, by Elizabeth Filips
It’s OKAY and even Good to multiple books at the same time; as opposed to reading a single book start-to-finish before entertaining another. I read multiple books in parallel and also consume audio books when I’m not reading. I find that I make interesting and novel connections between them as I do.
Elizabeth isn’t my usual content, but she showed up on my feed and I found her take informative and refreshing. Also, her take agrees with mine, so there’s that bit of affirmation also.
Quote I’m Musing
(Two for One Today)
“It’s ruinous for the soul to be anxious about the future and miserable in advance of misery, engulfed by anxiety that the things it desires might remain it’s own until the very end. For such a soul will never be at rest— by longing for things to come it will lose the ability to enjoy present things.”
-Seneca
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself with are externals, not under my control, and which have to do with the choice I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own.” - Epictetus
Pairing these provides a solid perspective when I think on them.
I went back and reread Letters from a Stoic to find Seneca’s quote (because I didn’t fill out my Zettle Kasten the right way). It’s immensely applicable not only to my conundrum above, but I think it also shines a light on the current happenings in today’s society.
We have Crypto’s FTX plummeting, elections, stock market uncertainty, and a million other bespoke issues vying for our attentions. They are just things that happened, can we control them? No, could we have predicted it? Unlikely for most of us. So, then we again, own our choices, make the best choices we can make in our lives to live it best and let nature take its course.
I would love your feedback!
This week was especially helpful to get on paper for me! Which musing is your favorite? What else do you want to see or what should I eliminate? Any other suggestions? Please let me know. Just send a tweet to @erichaupt on Twitter and put #SundayMusings at the end so I can find it. Or, eric@erichaupt.com for long form email.
Have a wonderful week, I’ll see you Sunday.
-e
