⏳ Erebus Growing | 0028 - Designing your life from desires

Welcome to Erebus Growing, a weekly email where I share little snippets of life to help you change and grow into your highest life.

I’m heading to a conference tomorrow for a week for my 9-5 and I’m super psyched about it.

It’s in a topic area of compliance that I find incredibly interesting and love learning about.

The challenge I see is how to take that level of engagement I get for my 9-5 and translate it to my own projects and work.

Because if I could get this excited about my own projects and work?

I’d be buried under a mountain of enthusiasm and excitement!

That’s the secret I’m going to have to work on uncovering, eh?

👨🏻‍💻 Meditation

Change in your life comes not from seeing what you want but from seeing what you don’t want.

It’s difficult to conceive of what you want when you’ve never seen it before.

If you’ve never seen anyone living a plant-based life, you don’t see how you could.

If all you’ve ever known in your life is a 9-5 job, it’s hard to imagine making money without one.

If you’ve only been around overweight people, it’s hard for you to see yourself being thinner.

Our lives are informed by our environments.

What we surround ourselves in, that’s what we live and breathe and exist in.

It’s all that we know.

And that’s what makes it infinitely harder to change our lives.

Then the message came from a few different sides.

Why not flip the script?

Instead of trying to imagine everything you want, focus on what it is you don’t want.

By focusing on avoiding what I don’t want in my life, I inevitably move toward what I do want.

I know that I don’t want to be overweight and have a rash of health problems when I get older…so I naturally started to build healthier habits like working out every day, drinking primarily water, eating a plant-based diet, and getting in walks.

I know that I don’t want to work until I have a heart attack, get open heart surgery, recover, and go back to work because I have to like my grandfather did…so I’m working on building a business to separate my time from money.

I know that I don’t want to just eat hunks of meat as a primary source of my nutrition…so I’m working on cutting it out of my diet and building a healthier relationship with my food.

I know that I don’t want to fight with my life partner…so I’m not rushing into finding someone because that’s what society says I should do and where I should be by now.

The biggest change is the move from living life unconsciously to living life consciously.

To know that every decision, no matter how small, is under my control and compounds in some manner.

The best challenge to this that I learned about this past week from Sahil Bloom’s email is this:

Since I read this challenge, it has been top of mind virtually every day, multiple times a day.

It’s another, more quick way to determine if I should continue to do something; if it’s something I want in my life or something I don’t want.

Building your life with intention—stepping away from the life that others, whether family, friends, or society, have designed for you—is hard work.

It will challenge you like nothing else.

But, in the end, it’s up to you.

You have to determine, is this something that you want in your life? Or something that you don’t want?

📚 Inspiration and Resources
Every week we all consume content and I share my favorites here.

Watch.
I dabble on YouTube, as you know, and this week I happened across a great interview by Jon Stewart with Senator Cory Booker. It lays out, in various ways, that the absolute vast majority of people in the United States want to help others. They want others to succeed. And on some level, it’s a personal responsibility to improve your life and, by proximity, improve the lives of others while you do so. Give it a watch here.

Read.
I’m going away to a conference for the 9-5 this week and I have two flights plus four nights in a hotel. While I’ll be socializing a little, I’m excited to bring along Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman to read. I got it a couple of weeks ago and it’s been sitting, waiting for me to finish my current book Designing the Mind. But I decided enough is enough. So, it’s coming with me. And I’m recommending it early because I want to. The knowledge that our time is limited is such an abstract subject for so many of us (myself included). And there’s so much I want to do. Give it a read here (after purchasing).

📓 Journaling Prompt
Journaling is one of the most important things to do when exploring our own lives. A new prompt for you to use this week is below.

What don’t you want in life?

Until next time, I wish you enough and send you off with love and a sense of urgency in your life.